“Local only, please,” the receptionist called loudly, and Trisk absently raised her hand. She was halfway through laboriously dialing Rick’s office when the familiar silhouette of Global Genetics flashed up on the TV turned to the late news. Slowly she let the receiver drop from her ear. There were fire trucks and an ambulance. Trisk took a breath to ask someone to turn it up, her voice catching when a photo of Rick flashed up on the screen.
“CEO Rick Rales was pronounced dead at the scene,” the woman was saying. “His body was found in one of Global Genetics’ underground isolation field labs, suffering massive burns over almost his entire body. That it was after-hours is thought to be to blame for the freak accident. Doctors Daniel Plank and Trisk Cambri are wanted for questioning.”
Rick is dead? They’re blaming us?
Setting the phone back in the cradle, she turned. More people had come in, all with rashes and blemishes, all tired and looking winded. A woman in a nurse’s uniform was sitting with the family in the corner. She seemed fine, but the faint scent of redwood told Trisk she was a witch. Distress crossed the nurse’s face when the teenager ran for the bathroom and the sound of vomiting spilled out into the waiting room. The mother got up, staggering slightly as she followed her daughter in. At the coffee table, a crayoned picture of ghosts trick-or-treating drifted to the floor, forgotten.
Shit. Not only was Daniel’s virus out, but it was spreading. Daniel was right. It had found a carrier. Not my tomato. It can’t be my tomato. I made it perfect.
Wiping her hand on her jeans, Trisk backed away from the phone. Head down to avoid eye contact, she walked quickly to where Quen waited with Daniel. The man was still slumped in his chair. In contrast, Quen stood over him at parade rest, his stiff jaw and firm stance making him look military despite his longish hair and stubbled cheeks. His three years as Kalamack security were showing. “We have to go. Now,” she said.
Quen’s eyes shot to hers, drawn by her obvious fear. Daniel was slower, his focus distant as he pushed his glasses back up his nose. “The lab is on fire,” she added.
Daniel’s eyes widened. “What?” he asked, suddenly paying attention.
Clutching her purse in a white-knuckled grip, she looked up and down the hall. “Rick is gone. Burned to death in the fire. They think we did it.”
“Us? Why?” Daniel said, bewildered, and then his expression became slack. “Before I left the party, I caught Rick in the hallway. He said the government was upset. That our calculations were wrong and their own people were being exposed. But how . . .” His eyes went past her to the sound of the kid vomiting. “Trisk . . .” he whispered, scared as he immediately made the same connection she had.
She drew him to his feet, and Daniel rose, obedient in shock. “We have to go.” Trisk gave Quen a meaningful look, and he nodded. Pace even and unhurried, he started for the main door. His steps were light with tension and his arms swung easily. Trisk pulled Daniel stumbling in his wake.
“I don’t understand,” Daniel said. “Where . . . I don’t have my car. I took a cab here.”
She took a tighter grip on his arm as they passed through the emergency waiting room. It was starting to fill up. “We’ll fit in my truck.”
“Back to the lab?” Daniel said. “We have to find out what went wrong.”
“What went wrong?” she said as they went out the door together. “Rick is dead,” she said, relishing the clean night air. “They must think we killed him to cover up that your virus has gone rogue. If it’s using my tomato as a carrier, it could be all over the world in a matter of days, springboarded by your trial in Vietnam.”
Daniel stared at her, his thoughts almost visibly aligning as he put two and two together and got plague. “My God,” he whispered, turning to look behind him at the emergency room, bright with light as they stood in the dark. “Your tomato is condensing the toxins to lethal levels. But how? They don’t mesh.”
“Tell me about it,” Trisk said. “We need to find out for sure and see if we can stop it. But the last place we’re going to go is Global Genetics. Not only is there nothing left of it, but even if there were, they’d throw us in jail.”
Daniel swallowed hard, his steps holding the first hints of decisiveness as they stepped off the curb. “Where, then?”
Trisk looked at Quen. Her impulse to go to Cincinnati, where her father lived, rose and fell. There was no facility there. “Detroit?” she suggested, thoughts turning to the hidden elven labs scattered all over the U.S. Most were east of the Mississippi due to the fractured ley lines.
“Detroit doesn’t have a biolab,” Daniel said as they headed for the truck as one.
Arm looped in Daniel’s, Trisk looked up at the moon as she paced forward. “As a matter of fact, it does.”
18
The hum of her truck had become hypnotic, and the headlights illuminating the smooth, two-lane road heading east seemed to push back the dark just enough for them to pass through before it swallowed the world again. Trisk was driving because it was her truck. Daniel sat between her and Quen on the long bench seat. Both men looked lost in their own thoughts, but neither was showing any signs of unusual fatigue, rash, or nausea. U.S. 50 had been busy up to Reno, but now, as they entered Nevada’s deserts in earnest, the towns were smaller and the traffic almost nonexistent. It made her uneasy, and she couldn’t exactly say why.
The radio hissed as Peter and Gordon’s playful “Lady Godiva” ended, and Quen’s hand shot out first, his careful fingers shifting the dial to bring the station’s announcer in again. Sporadic news was being announced between British pop singles, and both men were listening with a morbid fascination. Sunset was only a few hours behind them, and Trisk’s and Quen’s elven metabolism made them both alert.
“Did he say they shut the border?” Daniel asked, and Quen nodded, his eyes never leaving the radio as it faded in and out. So far, Vietnam’s sudden isolation was being blamed on the recent military action, not the likely thousands of dead who were being piled in mass graves or simply left where they fell. Closing the border wasn’t going to help. The virus already had a foothold both in the U.S. and abroad, running rampant among oblivious populations.
Sick at heart, Trisk clicked the radio off as they came into a small town. Both men sat back in protest, but she couldn’t take any more. “We need to fill up before we hit the desert,” she said as she slowed, the engine sounding loud. Trisk scanned the dark storefronts and lighted stoops to see who was still open. It was dark, but not that late, the October night warm and clear.
“I could stretch my legs,” Quen said, and Daniel nodded, rubbing his stubbled cheeks.
“Maybe grab something to eat,” Daniel added with a yawn, and Trisk angled toward a gas station across the street from a diner.
“We should call the enclave,” she said, and Quen’s head jerked up in warning. “Sa’han Ulbrine has the clout to get the tomato fields burned,” she continued, flushing for having mentioned the elves’ secret cabal in front of Daniel. “If we bring it up, they’ll slap us in jail and ignore it.”
“Who’s Saahan Ulbrine?” Daniel asked, and she winced.
“One of my instructors,” she said, glad he’d focused on that instead of the more difficult-to-explain term, enclave.
Daniel looked ill as she pulled up to the pump and put the truck in park. “Trisk, it can’t be your tomato. You know both organisms inside and out. It’s just coincidence.”
“What else would make the plants fall apart like that?” she said as Quen got out and made a beeline for the restroom sign leading behind the building.
Daniel followed him with his eyes. “It’s my virus. Your tomatoes are perfect.”
No one was coming to pump the gas, and she was feeling the need to use the restroom. “They were yesterday,” she muttered, and Daniel’s lips parted at the implied sabotage.
Impatient, Trisk grabbed her purse and got out, slamming her door to hopefully get some attention from the small garage. Her legs
ached, and she stretched. On the other side, Daniel slowly slipped from the cab, his expression empty as he thought her last words over. “Maybe they’re closed,” he said, turning at the loud bang of the restroom door as Quen returned.
Trisk shrugged as she tried to see past the ads on the windows and into the garage. “Someone is in there. I’ll go see.”
Daniel jiggled on his feet, his attention going from the restroom door back to her. “I’ll go with you,” he said, eyes pinched in worry as she came around the front of the truck and headed in.
“Ah . . .” Quen stood beside the truck, fingers pressed into his forehead as he looked at the pump. “Either of you know how to turn this thing on?”
Daniel jerked to a stop. “You don’t know how to pump gas?”
“I don’t, actually,” Quen said.
Trisk touched Daniel’s shoulder. “I’ll be fine. I’ll make sure the pump is on.”
Nodding, Daniel returned to the truck, and Trisk went inside. “Hello?” she called, smiling when a kid came out from the back. He was about fourteen, dressed in overalls and tatty sneakers. “Are you open?” she asked, and he nodded, seeming nervous as he looked past her to the two men managing the pump.
“I’m not allowed to pump gas,” he said, voice cracking. “I’m the only one here, though.”
“I think they have it,” she said, glancing at a bucket of melted ice and bottles of Coke. “I’ll take three,” she said.
“Sure.” The kid looked relieved to be doing something as he carefully rang up the bottles, waiting to total it out until he knew how much gas they took.
“Are you okay?” she finally asked, and his eyes darted nervously up at her.
“I was supposed to go home two hours ago,” he said, fidgeting. “But Amos went home sick, and Evan never came in. I don’t have a key to lock up.”
Her smile froze. How did it get here so fast? “Well, that’s good for us, then,” she said. “Otherwise, we’d have to wait until morning to fill up.”
He smelled faintly of redwood, and the wooden nickel he had on a cord around his neck was probably an amulet. He was a witch, and a knot of worry in her eased. He, at least, would be spared. “Do you need a ride somewhere?” she asked, and he shook his head, attention flicking behind her as Daniel came in.
“I can walk home, but if I leave the shop open, Amos will tan my hide.”
If he survives, she thought as Daniel looked at the wet bottles on the counter. “We filled both tanks. It came out to seven sixty,” he said. “You want to get some coffee at the diner?”
“And maybe something to eat,” she said as the kid punched it in.
“Nine dollars and three cents with the soda,” he said, and Daniel reached for his wallet.
“I’ve got this if you want to use the restroom.”
“I’ll wait for the diner’s,” she said. “You don’t happen to have a phone, do you?” she asked the kid, now carefully counting out the change.
“Next to the restroom,” he said, and Trisk gave Daniel a touch on his arm before going to find it. She didn’t want to look like the chicken crying, “The sky is falling!” but Sa’han Ulbrine needed to know. Warn people.
Her sneakers were eerily silent on the old cement as she looked around the side of the building for the public phone. The light was out above it, but she could see well enough, and after spotting Quen reclined against the side of the truck, she dropped in a dime.
She knew his number by heart, and she turned, looking up and down the quiet street as the phone rang. The neon hummed over the bowling alley, but the lot was empty. Two cars and a semi lingered at the diner, but apart from that, no one was around. Eerie, she thought.
“Hello?” a nasal woman’s voice said when the connection finally went through, and Trisk pressed the receiver tighter against her ear.
“I’d like to talk to Sa’han Ulbrine, please. It’s an emergency. I’m calling long-distance. It’s—Dr. Felecia Cambri,” she added, hating the name but not wanting any misconception that might get her brushed off.
“Just a moment, please. I’ll see if he’s available. He might have left for the weekend.”
“Please,” Trisk blurted out. “It’s an emergency, and I need to talk to him.”
“I’ll see if I can find him,” the woman said again, and then there was a sharp click as the receiver was put down. The phone dinged for her attention, and she dropped in another dime. Daniel came out with the dripping sodas, and she turned her back on him, hoping he’d go to the truck.
She caught herself before she chewed on a fingernail, making a fist instead as she waited. The town looked empty, but it was hard to know if this was normal for a Friday night or if sick people were becoming sicker.
As she watched, a family pulled into the diner. Three kids boiled out of the long station wagon, then the dad, followed by the mom with a toddler in hand and another on her hip, cajoling the kids to behave. It looked like a slice of Americana, but she was betting they were Weres by the way the kids ranged out and back, the father watching the near area for trouble and the mother doing the same on the horizon. Though belonging as much as anyone else on the continent, they stuck out in a way they never had before, the slight differences telling with no humans to blur the lines.
Trisk’s brow furrowed when the kids found the door to the diner locked. Her voice loud, the mother corralled them all back in the wagon while they decided what to do.
“Trisk?” came a low voice from the receiver, and she exhaled in relief.
“Thank God,” she whispered, and then louder, “Sa’han Ulbrine. I think someone tampered with Daniel’s virus. It’s latched onto my tomato and gone rogue. If you can get on the news and tell everyone to burn the Angel tomato fields, we might be able to stop this. From what little I can tell, the tomato is condensing the toxins to a lethal level in humans.”
Ulbrine swore. “Your tomato? Are you sure?”
Trisk nodded, not caring that he couldn’t see the motion. “My lab assistant went from not feeling well to dead in less than twenty-four hours.” A sudden lump filled her throat, and Trisk gasped, blinking fast as she walled the grief off. “She might have been exposed to a more massive dose than the general populace,” she whispered. “But I don’t—”
“Where are you?” Ulbrine interrupted, and Trisk looked at her truck under the garage’s flickering streetlight. Quen was keeping Daniel busy and away from the phone under the excuse of checking the oil. Across the street, the Were family still sat in the wagon. The wind blew in off the desert, warm as it lifted her hair with the scent of dust and undisturbed eons.
“A gas station outside of Carson City,” she said, eyes roving over the dark street. “Ah . . . Fallon, I think,” she added, seeing FALLON LANES over the bowling alley. “We’re trying to get to Detroit. If you can get us lab access, we can prove the tomato is the carrier.”
“You don’t know for sure?” Ulbrine asked, and she thought she could hear the scratching of a pen and the ripping of paper.
Trisk’s jaw clenched. “I made that tomato perfectly, and my seed field is a black decayed mess. The emergency room was filling up with symptoms of Daniel’s virus when we left. It’s hitting people with no lab access. Kids. Entire families.” Oh, God, that family. . . “I think Kal did it,” she whispered, and Ulbrine grunted in surprise.
“I know you dislike him, but you can’t blame Kal without proof. He’s there doing a job.”
“Yes, I can,” she said, hunched over the receiver. “And I do. He’s the only one who had access to both organisms.” Why the hell did I ever sleep with him?
“Rick has access,” Ulbrine said, and she pressed her fingers into her forehead.
“Rick is dead,” she said. “Someone set fire to my seed field. He was in it at the time.”
“That would explain the call I got a few hours ago from his camarilla,” he said. “Damn. I was hoping it was just a rumor. But dead isn’t always dead when it comes to vampires. His passi
ng could be a way to push the blame for this on you or the elves in general. Vampires say they want everything to stay the same, but if there’s an easy way to take out the humans and leave vampires as the apex predator, some uppity dead vamp might try in order to be king of the universe.”
Trisk said nothing, the same thought having occurred to her. But it was Kal. She knew it.
“This is what I want you to do,” Ulbrine said into the new silence. “Go to Detroit. I’ll hop a plane tomorrow and meet you there with Kal. We’ll look at it together, and if your tomato is the carrier, we’ll make the announcement then.”
“Kal? No.” Pulling her hair into a ponytail, she let it go. “And why do we need proof before we start warning people?” she asked, her thoughts on Sacramento’s emergency room.
“I will not start a panic that points fingers at the elves,” Ulbrine said, and she swallowed her next complaint. “If it’s the T4 Angel tomato, then of course we’ll tell people, but not until we know for sure.”
“Sa’han—” she said, unwilling to wait.
“Felecia, no,” Ulbrine said, cutting her off. “If we announce that your tomato is the carrier, and then find out it isn’t, the rest of Inderland will never believe it wasn’t us. I don’t want to go down as the species that exterminated the humans, do you?”
He thinks it might kill them all? “No,” she said. “But we have to say something. It’s fast, Sa’han. I don’t understand how it’s moving so quickly. Even a day is going to make a difference. I’m seeing evidence of it right now, in this little town, and we just got here!”
But her anger mutated to fear when a long black car pulled behind her truck, brakes squealing. Another boxed the truck in at the front. Big men started getting out as a third, smaller car slowly parked at the outskirts. “I have to go,” she said, interrupting Ulbrine’s demand that she keep her mouth shut until they knew for sure. “I’ll see you in Detroit,” she added as she hung up. Pace fast, she almost jogged back to the truck. “Quen!”