First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (59 page)

"Lymphoid? What? No. There aren't. It's all myeloid." Jenny coughed. "Liz, you should come home and get some slee—"

"Then how did they get there?" Liz frowned at the cell culture slide.

"Liz, I don't know what you're talking about."

"I used the fluorescent flow cytometer to check out the cell content and there was a spike in the plasma cell count. The plasma cells—"

"Liz, come home, go to sleep. We'll talk about this tomorrow morning."

The line went dead. Jenny had hung up.

Liz plunked herself down on the lab stool and checked the results again.

It couldn't be right. Myeloid cell lines don't have any plasma cells. She must be doing it wrong. She ran the experiment with another, separate line, and waited anxiously as the machine churned the results. It took another twenty minutes before the line run came back.

Same results.

If the cultures were contaminated, it could ruin the entire experiment. But it could be the machine malfunctioning. Jenny had insisted that it was all myeloid cell lines, but it didn't make any sense. Unless the cytometer was broken. That was possible. She could run it on a different one, but there wasn't another cytometer in the lab.

"Shit!"

Liz slammed the slide down onto the lab table.

"Shit, shit, shit!"

If the cell lines were contaminated, that was it. They would have to start over.

Liz lay her head down on the cool surface of the lab table.

"Think, Liz. Think."

She breathed in and out slowly. Reaching over the table, she pulled her purse to her and dug through it for her wallet. Inside it was a picture that she'd nearly worn out by touch. A picture of a seven-year-old girl. Tears sprang to her eyes as she ran a finger down the girl's cheek.

Cori
.

She remembered her sister lying in the hospital bed, the week before it was over. Remembered the frustration of it all.

The doctor had proposed an experimental surgery as a last resort, but the insurance didn't cover it and her parents were broke after spending all of their savings on the first few rounds of chemotherapy treatments. Their church had held a fundraiser, but it didn't come close to covering the cost of the surgery. There was nothing else they could do, the doctor said.

"I'll figure it out," Liz said, holding her sister's hand in hers. Cori's fingers were so little and so thin. Liz was afraid that she would snap the bones if she squeezed. "I'll figure out how to fix you."

"I know you will," Cori said, with the calm certainty that only a seven year old could possess. "You're a genius."

Liz had gone to the city library then, at age ten, and pulled out all of the books about cancer. Hadn't she gotten all As in science class? If there was an answer, she would find it.

She marched to the library table and stacked the books up, going through them one by one. Nothing made sense to her, and the words slipped across her ten-year-old mind like spaghetti, tangling in her brain.
Malignant neoplasms, granulocytes, erythrocytes, thrombocytes, myeloproliferative diseases..
. She read as much as she could, and understood nothing.

It was then that she realized her sister would die. Liz couldn't save her.

In the library, sitting there with a medical textbook in her lap, she had cried and cried. Her tears fell on the page, blurring the words, and she sat there crying until a librarian came and told her that they were closing.

She didn't feel like a genius. She felt like a fraud.

They didn't do the surgery, and Liz watched her sister fade into a shadow of her previous self. She watched as the nurses came on the last day and whispered to her parents, and then turned up the morphine drip. They asked Liz if she wanted to leave, but Liz refused to go. She clutched her sister's hand as her parents held each other and wept.

Cori's breaths came shallow, her small chest barely moving the sheets up and down.

"I'm sorry," Liz whispered to her sister. "I'm sorry. I didn't do it. I couldn't do it. I'm sorry."

She couldn't speak, but Liz felt Cori squeeze her hand one more time. Then the frail chest stopped rising under the sheets and there were no more breaths. Her sister was gone.

***

From then on, Liz had decided that she would learn everything about science and about her sister's disease, and someday she would be able to read the books that had the answers in them. Someday she would figure it out, and nobody else would have to die because she didn't know the answer. It was this determination that had carried her through all of school.

Now, as she sat in the university lab, she felt the same pain rend its way through her chest. She didn't know what to do. Maybe she never would.

She blotted her eyes with her sweatshirt. As she was putting Cori's photo back into her wallet, a white card slipped out and fell onto the tile. She picked it up from the floor and realized what it was. The card to Robert Chatham's lab.

Tapping the card idly on the table, she remembered the cytometer he'd shown her. The one with ten lasers. Her eyes flicked over to the cell cultures, then back to the card. Then to the cell cultures.

She really ought to stay away. Really. After that date, Liz was terrified of running into Robb again, of what he would say and how he would act. The pitying look he would give her, the same look she'd always gotten from guys who rejected her. Poor delusional girl, thinking that she had a chance. Her anger flared along with her fear.

Liz stuffed the card back into her wallet, but her hand lingered over the photo of her sister. Cori. What did any amount of embarrassment matter? If she could save anyone else the pain that her family had been handed by fate...

Before she could change her mind, she strode across the lab and pulled out the extra cell culture she'd made up for additional testing. She could always make another one tomorrow, or have Jenny do it. Her stomach flipped but she stuffed the box of slides into her purse.

"I'll figure it out," she whispered under her breath, and

turned off the light to the laboratory.

Chapter Nine

Robb went out for a walk and ended up in a bar not too far from his apartment. He thought of Liz, of her emerald eyes, and when the waitress came over to serve him he blinked hard before realizing she was talking to him.

"Sir? Something to drink?" The cute redheaded waitress bent over him.

"Wine. Do you have a good Merlot?"

The waitress began to rattle off a list.

"Just bring me the most expensive bottle you have."

"Sir?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't think it would be that hard to understand. Your most. Expensive. Bottle." Robb rubbed his eyes in irritation.

"Yes, sir," the waitress said, pinching her lips together and walking away. An old man walked toward his booth.

Great. The last person he wanted to see. Thad slid into his booth next to him.

"You're following me. Wonderful," Robb said. "That's just what I need."

"I'm looking out for a friend."

"Oh? How kind."

"And I'm looking out for myself," the old vampire said.

"That's more like you."

"I don't want you to die before you can help me die," Thad said. "Pretend to die. Have you spoken with your doctor friend yet?"

The waitress came over and poured Robb's glass full of red wine. He gulped it without even checking the vintage. He desperately needed to get Liz out of his mind.

"Another glass for your friend?" the waitress asked.

"Yes," Thad said.

"No," Robb said at the same time. "He was just about to leave."

"I was just about to leave," Thad said. The waitress raised her eyebrows and went away, checking Thaddeus out as she went. She seemed like she wanted to call a security guard over to throw him out. He looked like a crazy man off the street.

"Couldn't you have combed your hair before coming here?" Robb said.

"Hair?
Hair!
We haven't seen each other for fifty years and he's talking about hair." Thad gestured toward the heavens. "Lord, can you believe this?"

"I don't think you have a direct access line to Him anymore," Robb said.

"What, like you're not a sinner?"

"Of course I am." Robb took a sip of his wine. "But I don't ask for favors."

Thaddeus reached for the wine bottle and Robb swatted his hand away, pulling the bottle to his side of the table.

"What, you're not going to share with your friend?"

"You're not a friend. You're a liability."

"Some thanks for saving you," Thad grumbled.

"You didn't say you need thanks. You said you needed a favor."

"The doctor. You called him?"

"I've been busy. I'll do it tomorrow."

"Busy chasing skirts. This is worse than what I've heard about you."

"What have you heard, Thaddeus?" Robb cupped his chin in his hand. "You haven't been paying attention to my research—"

"Every week another girl. The one tonight, you struck out with her?"

"I'd rather not talk about it," Robb said. He concentrated on pouring himself another glass of wine.

"You don't ever strike out. At least, you never used to. Are you losing your touch, Robb?"

"I lost that a long time ago," Robb said. It was true. He didn't feel a thing. Not a single damn thing. He gulped his wine without even tasting it.

"Blue balls, huh?"

"Not that," Robb said. "She makes me hungry." He poured another glass. The wine made him less hungry. Made him forget his hunger, at least.

"I'm always hungry," Thad said, leaning back in the booth. "That's my issue. They're never enough. And I've tried, Robb, I've tried to stop. Go cold turkey, you know, steal from blood banks. I worked in a morgue for a while, did I tell you that? Do you know how stale that blood is by the time they get those bodies? And that's a city morgue. Never even mind the private morgues, they're useless. There's nothing I can do but take out one or two every month."

He scratched at the side of his mouth. His lips were raw, bitten.

"I'm hungry, Robb."

Robb said nothing. He didn't want to spar with Thaddeus again. They'd parted ways a long time ago, and for good reason.

"So this girl, who is she?"

"I'd rather not talk about it." A flash of fear passed through Robb. He didn't want Liz to be in danger.

"I get it, I get it."

Robb drank another sip. Hungry. He was so hungry.

The room was getting dizzy, and Robb was beginning to forget why he wanted Liz so badly. She was just another girl, that's all. He could have any girl. He noticed two blond women in the corner of the room eying them, and smiled broadly.

"I haven't eaten in a long time, Robb. Months. I'm scared to." Thaddeus plucked at the gray-white hairs of his eyebrow.

"Why?" Robb's eyes traveled to the pulsing jugular vein of the closest blond woman. He could smell her blood, thick and tempting.

"I think there's someone on my tail," Thad said. "I think they're waiting for me to kill again."

"You don't have to kill." Robb watched the blond adjust her skirt, hiking the hem a little higher as she twisted on the stool. "If you just take a little of their blood—

"I can't do that right now. I tried. The last girl I tried, it ended up bad. Real bad."

Robb's eyes twisted back to Thad. The old vampire sat crooked and coarse on his seat. His bones poked at his skin like they were trying to escape. He continued, pausing only to lick his lips.

"I couldn't stop, the darkness took over. And by the time I got myself back under control, it was done. I opened my eyes and there she was, white as the damn hotel sheets, the bed was stained beyond salvage. Stupid, I know. That's not the worst part."

"Do I want to know?"

"I thought she was a whore, Robb. But the hunger, you know, it makes you not think straight. I didn't notice anything until I was trying to get rid of the body."

Robb tried to erase the image from his mind of Thad and a dead girl in a cheap hotel room. He drank another glass of wine. Normally the liquid warmed him enough, but tonight he could not get rid of the coldness in his stomach.

Thad leaned over and whispered across the table.

"She was a cop. Undercover. I found the wire in her bra. A damn cop. Can you believe my luck?"

Thad looked old, sounded old, but he still hadn't grown up yet. He didn't realize that there was no such thing as luck. There were chances, and you either took them or you didn't.

Robb didn't want Thad in London anymore, didn't want to see him even though he had known him forever and it had been a long time. The images in his mind were too disturbing even for Robb to stamp down into his subconscious.

He thought back to all of the people he'd killed before learning how to avoid it, in the first days when the hunger had wracked his body and made him a monster. The darkness. He thought of Eliza. He tilted his glass back but there was no more wine in it. He poured again.

"I think they might be tracking me," Thad said, wide-eyed.

"The cops?"

"Cops. National security. The motherfucking CIA, I don't know. All I know is that they sent two guys to my house to catch me before I left. I had to kill them too, and they weren't just cops. They were trained better than cops. One of them tried these crazy ninja moves on me and broke my arm before I realized he was a real threat."

"You're scared of that? They couldn't kill you."

"They could catch me. They could lock me up. Think about it, Robb. They'd stick me in a cell in a max security prison, do all kinds of tests on me. Leave me there until I waste away into nothing. Look how I am now."

His eyes bulged. His lips were bleeding from the cracks. His gray-white hair stuck out from his head. More white than gray, actually. Robb didn’t know if it had been like that the last time he’d seen Thad.

He looked like a wild man. Robb knew what would happen if he was deprived for a long time of blood. He'd turn into a living skeleton. He'd seen it before. He'd lived it before.

It wasn't long before the hunger took over, and then you turned into an animal. A wild thing. A monster. Monster...