Preston Child - The Fountain of Youth

With all the breath she had left Nina screamed from the painful stab of the needle, her sick, slight body writhing in agony. Her tears came easily from the anguish of the slow sinking surgical steel that split her skin as it explored her flesh for that important vein. Clara stepped back as if Nina’s muffled wails could harm her.

“Get back here, you little coward. Hold down her leg, for Christ’s sake!” Christa growled at her daughter. “If she moves too much I could rupture the vein and then she’ll bleed out. Is that what you want? Do you want to get old, Clara?”

“No, Christa,” Clara replied softly and stepped closer to Nina. She couldn’t stand the way in which Dr. Gould’s big dark eyes beckoned through pools of tears, but she had to suck it up and deal with it. After all, she was the spawn of an SS officer from Nuremburg, not to mention the other side of her bloodline that was Dr. Christa Smith.

“Now watch closely. This is where we have to keep the femoral artery catheter in place. Are you paying attention?” Christa asked, making sure her assistant was watching. Clara nodded, trying with all her might not to look at the begging eyes of the frail historian and the streaks of tears that wet the temples of her tilted head. All Nina could do to remain calm was to look into the lights, the three huge round suns that would have blinded anyone who had decent eye sight.

With the needle deep enough, Nina’s blood began to show in the tubing as the catheter tapped her vein. “Now see, it has to run fast enough to maintain the consistency without bleeding her out too quickly, understand?” Christa lectured while Clara nodded. “Tape down the shaft here, please.”

“Isn’t she already a bit too pale?” Clara frowned as she caught sight of Nina after securing the draining device.

“Don’t fret about that. It’s just the shock of what’s happening. She’ll regain her color for a while and then, when her exsanguination reaches critical level, she will once again get pallid,” Christa explained. She looked at Nina with a sickening satisfaction, continuing to jog through the expected regression as if she were sharing it with Nina. “After that she’ll lose consciousness and her skin will begin to turn a bluish tint, but don’t worry about that. It’s just a sign that the oxygen has been depleted.”

“Then death,” Clara affirmed as her mother removed her surgical gloves.

“Remove the gag. We’re not monsters.” Christa smiled coldly at her victim as she gave the order to Clara.

Nina would have no reason or benefit in screaming for help. She was very deep and hidden behind enemy lines, probably being left for dead. Serves me right for cutting ties with Purdue. Serves me right for cutting communication with him and Sam while taking this contract, she chastised herself. The very same inner voice that had spitefully kept smoking after she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer now punished her for needing to distance herself from Sam and Purdue for a bit to process the illness.

“Why do you want my blood?” Nina muttered wearily.

“Because your blood is special, Dr. Gould,” Christa answered. “Since the well dried up here a few years ago we’ve been looking for something that was as potent as the subterranean water in the cave river under this town.”

“Potent? As what?” Nina frowned.

“The Fountain of Youth, my darling. You know that old font in the garden my mother-in-law so readily told you about? That used to be one of the arcane springs on this planet that yielded water that could slow aging — by decades,” Christa explained as Clara looked on.

“So…first of all, you believe that this water — which is probably just high in preservative minerals — can make you forever young,” Nina asked.

“Take a good look at my daughter and me, Dr. Gould,” Christa chipped in. “We look about the same age, don’t we? About, say, forty-five, maybe forty-eight?”

Clara smiled. “I’m fifty-two and my mum is sixty-eight! And why? Because we’ve been following the springs since the sixties. In 1962 I started drinking from the vials stored in the vaults by the SS during the 1943 Lebensborn project. My mother shared this wonderful secret with me.”

“Well, I had to. It would be silly to cover up why a daughter would look older than her mother by years, right?” Christa laughed. Clara chuckled with her, slapping her on the hand again as they did that first day in the main building’s kitchen.

“So when the vials ran dry, we naturally started eliminating the competition and keeping most of the containers for our own preservation,” Christa revealed. “But…then we found out about this fountain in the old Norman fortress occupied by Prof. Ebner, also former Waffen-SS and excellent scientist. He’d also been a part of the Lebensborn project, but not paternally. He was helping the program by adopting one of the children born from the project.

“Mrs. Patterson,” Nina said.

“Correct. I had to find a way to own this building and all its…benefits,” she smiled, “so I married the heir, my beloved hubby you so love to impress and wrap around that little Scottish finger of yours.”

“So we used the fountain in the courtyard,” Clara said. “Until our hold on it was threatened by a potential buyer for the property, one Mrs. Cotswald.”

“Oh my God!” Christa agreed with her daughter’s eye-rolling recollection. “Mrs. Cotswald! What a clingy, thick-skinned cow that was!” The two women flanked Nina’s suffering body as they chatted on like a bunch of scone-eating hens at a luncheon, having no regard for her pain or the reprehensible nature of the current circumstances.

“She would just not take ‘no’ for an answer, would she?” Clara said to Christa as they raved about the annoying woman they’d encountered. Nina could not believe how nonchalant they were about everything, but then again, such was the very essence of a psychopathic nature.

“We found out that she, too, was the result of a Lebensborn pact and that she was looking for her daughters. But we knew what she was looking for, because she was decades younger than her identity document said. So we obstructed the sale by intercepting the mail, among other things, until finally Daniel decided to keep the academy.” Christa sighed happily.

“What happened to her?” Nina asked.

“After she finally left Daniel alone, she went to some island somewhere reputed to have an underground river like the one we had here,” Clara said.

“While she was there, I was kind enough to invite her husband to teach here on retainer,” Christa grinned proudly. “Without him she would have no reason to try again. After she returned from her island getaway she found that she was a widow.”

“Pity. Pity,” Clara’s meanness seeped through, proving beyond a doubt what fabric she was cut from. “She came back without having found her fountain… or her daughters! Talk about shitty luck, eh?”

“This is fucking twisted,” Nina murmured, wiping the grins from their aging faces in an instant. “But how is my blood going to help you? I’ve never even been to a hot spa, let alone bathed in a fountain of youth!”

“Ha!” Christa exclaimed. “My sweetheart! You are the ultimate vial of youth, a human container of the most precious Nazi blood ever engineered for longevity, resilience, and regeneration!”

“Really?” Nina scowled, raising her voice. “Then how the fuck could I contract lung cancer, ladies? Maybe you should do a blood test before you decide to steal the merchandise next time.”

“You don’t have cancer,” Clara denied, looking shocked.

“Clara,” Christa seethed, her flaming eyes demanding an explanation very quickly.