Rachel Caine - Carpe Corpus

A loud bell clattered, and all up and down the hallway, doors banged open, releasing floods of young people Claire’s own age, or close to it. Myrnin grabbed Claire’s arm and yanked her onward, fast.

School. It was surreal how normal it all seemed—like nobody could handle the truth, so they just kept on with all the surface lies, and in that sense, Morganville High was just like the rest of the town. All the chatter seemed falsely bright, and kids walked in thick groups, seeking comfort and protection.

They all avoided Myrnin and Claire, although everybody looked at them. She heard people talking. Great. I’m famous in high school, finally.

Another quick left turn led through a set of double doors, and the noise of feet, talk, and locker doors slamming faded behind them into velvety silence. Myrnin prodded her onward. More classrooms, but these were dark and empty.

“They don’t use this part of the building?” Claire asked.

“No need for it,” Myrnin said. “It was built with a plan that the human population of Morganville would grow. It hasn’t.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Claire muttered. “Such a great place to live and all. You’d think there’d be people just dying to get in. Operative word, dying.”

He didn’t bother to debate it. There was another door at the end of the hall, and this one had a shiny silver dead-bolt lock on it.

Myrnin knocked.

After a long moment of silence, the dead bolt was pulled back with a metallic clank , and the door swung open.

“Dr. Mills?” Claire was surprised. She hadn’t heard much about Dr. Mills, ER doctor and their sometime lab assistant, for weeks. He’d dropped out of sight, along with his family. She’d tried to find out what had happened to him, but she’d been afraid it would be bad news. Sometimes, it was just better not to know.

“Claire,” he said, and stepped back to let her and Myrnin inside the room. He closed and locked the door before turning a tired smile in her direction. “How are you, kid?”

“Um, fine, I guess. I was worried—”

“I know.” Dr. Mills was middle-aged and kind of average in every way, except his mind, which was—even by Claire’s standards—pretty sharp. “Mr. Bishop got word that I was doing research on vampire blood. He wanted it stopped—it’s not in his best interest for anyone to get better right now, if you know what I mean. We had to move quickly. Myrnin relocated us.” He nodded warily to Myrnin, who gave him a courtly sort of wave of acknowledgment.

“Your family, too?”

“My wife and kids are in the next room,” he said. “It’s not what you might call comfortable, but it’s safe enough. We can use the gym showers at night. There’s food in the cafeteria, books in the library. It’s about the best safe haven we could have.” Dr. Mills looked at Claire closely, and frowned. “You look tired.”

“Probably,” she said. “So . . . this is the new lab?”

“Seems like we always have a new one, don’t we? At least this one has most of what we need.” He gestured around vaguely. The room had clearly been intended to be a science classroom; it had the big granite-topped tables, equipped with sinks and built-in gas taps. At the back of the room were rows and rows of neat shelves filled with glassware and all kinds of bottled and labeled ingredients. One thing about Morganville—the town really did invest in education. “I’ve made some unexpected progress.”

“Meaning?” Myrnin turned to look at him, suddenly not at all fey and weird.

“You know I’ve been trying to trace the origins of the disease?”

“The origins are not as important as developing an effective and consistent palliative treatment, not to mention mass producing the cure,” Myrnin said. “As I’ve told you before. Loudly.”

Dr. Mills looked at Claire for support, and she cleared her throat. “I think we can do both,” she said. “I mean, it’s important to know where something came from, too.”

“That’s the thing,” Dr. Mills said. “It didn’t seem to come from anywhere . There weren’t any other vampire diseases; everything I tested within the medium of their blood went down without a fight, from colds and flu to cancer. Granted, I can’t get my hands on some of the top-level contagious viruses, but I don’t see anything in common between this disease and any other, except one.”

Myrnin forgot his objections and came closer. “Which one?”

“Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a progressive degenerative disease of—”

Myrnin gestured sharply. “I know what it is. You said it had things in common.”

“The progress of the disease is similar, yes, but here’s the thing: Bishop’s blood contains antibodies. It’s the only blood that contains antibodies. That means that there is a cure, and Bishop took it, because he contracted the disease and recovered.”

Myrnin turned slowly and raised his eyebrows at Claire. It was a mild expression, but the look in his eyes was fierce. “Interpret, please.”

“Bishop might have done this on purpose,” she said. “Right, Dr. Mills? He might have developed this disease and deliberately spread it—used the cure only for himself. But why would he do that?”

“I have no idea.”

Myrnin stalked away, moving in jerky, agitated strides; when a lab stool got in his way, he picked it up and smashed it into junk against the wall without so much as pausing. “Because he wants control,” he said. “And revenge. It’s perfect. He can once again decide who lives, who dies—he had that power once, until we took it from him. We thought he was destroyed. We were sure. ”

“You and Amelie,” Claire said. There was a long, ugly history behind all this—she didn’t understand it and didn’t really want to, but she knew that at some point, maybe hundreds of years ago, Amelie had tried to kill Mr. Bishop once and for all. “But you failed. And this is his way of hitting you back. Hitting you all back at once.”

Myrnin stopped, facing a blank corner for a moment without replying. Then he slowly walked back toward them and took a seat on one of the lab stools that hadn’t been destroyed, flipping back the tails of his frock coat as he sat. “So it is deliberate, this bane.”

“Apparently,” Claire said. “And now he’s got you where he wants you.”

Myrnin smiled. “Not quite.” He gestured around the lab. “We do have weapons.”

Most of the granite-topped tables had metal pans spread with drying reddish crystals. Claire nodded toward them with a frown. “I thought we were going with the liquid version of that stuff?” That stuff being the maintenance drug that she and Myrnin had developed—or at least refined to the point of being useful—that acted to keep the vampire disease’s worst effects at bay. It wasn’t a cure; it helped, but it had diminishing returns, at best.

“We were,” Dr. Mills said. “But it takes longer to distill the liquid form than it does to manufacture the crystals, and we need to medicate more and more of the vampires—so here we are. Two prongs of attack.”

“What about the cure?” He didn’t look happy, and Claire’s heart shrank down to a small, tight knot in her chest. “What’s wrong?”

“Unfortunately, the sample of Bishop’s blood we had degraded quickly,” he said. “I was able to culture a small amount of serum out of it, but I’m going to need more of the base to really develop enough to matter.”

“How much more of his blood do you need?”

“Pints,” he said apologetically. “I know. Believe me, I know what you’re thinking.”

Claire was thinking of exactly how stupidly suicidal it would be to try to get drops of Bishop’s blood, never mind pints. Myrnin had managed it once, but she doubted even he could pull it off twice without being staked and sunbathed to death. But she wasn’t willing to give up, either. “We’d have to drug him,” she said.