A Stone-Kissed Sea
Page 41

“We can’t save everyone,” she said. “We’ve all had to learn that.”
“True. But I wanted to save Rada. And then a man—a vampire—showed up and offered me a miracle. I didn’t think it would work, but it did. For a while. She had this unaccountable burst of health. The cancer disappeared. We…”
Makeda’s eyes grew wide. “You bit her, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “I thought I had lost her. But then she was back, and… I didn’t take more than a few drops. The bite wasn’t for feeding.”
Makeda allowed his confession to go unquestioned. “How are you alive?”
“Saba,” he said simply. “She drained my blood and gave me her own. I was not in good health when she brought me home four years ago. Saba healed me. Then she sent me out to find a cure for this poison.”
“You survived.” Her eyes turned inward. “Have you tested your blood?”
He followed her train of thought immediately. “Yes, that was my first thought. Unfortunately, because I received nearly a complete transfusion of my mother’s blood, my own immunity did not kill the virus. I simply had new blood.”
“What about human patients? A few have shown resistance.”
“Inconclusive.” He relaxed his head back on the pillow. “There are some humans who are naturally immune to certain viruses, and we do not understand why. Their immunity doesn’t seem to transfer to others.” It felt natural to talk with her this way. Head sharing a pillow and minds sharing ideas.
If you were sharing bodies, it would be even better.
He shifted away from her when he grew erect. He didn’t want to break the strange spell wrought by the rain and the dark night. He wanted to lay in bed and watch Makeda think. Watch the darting motions of her eyes and the slight movement of her lips when she formed an unspoken thought. She was fascinating.
And if he didn’t leave the bed soon, his predatory instincts weren’t going to be focused on anything as mundane as blood.
He leaned over and brushed a kiss over her lips before he could think too much about it. Then he rose and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “We should get to the lab. I want to show you around, and your notes should have been delivered during the day.”
He pulled on a shirt and stood, walking into the night before Makeda could get out a word.
“I thought you said there were solar generators,” Makeda said.
“Yes, but I don’t waste the electricity,” he said. Florescent lights glowed over each workstation, far better than the smelly kerosene or oil lamps he’d once been forced to use in the lab. “Stations are lit. Lighting the whole building wastes energy. There are lamps for the rainy season.”
She walked into the laboratory and slowly turned, taking everything in.
Perhaps it wasn’t what she was used to, but the basics were still there. Besides, what they were working on involved unlocking her mind. For the moment, they were dealing in the theoretical, and Lucien didn’t need a modern lab to think.
“And computers?” she asked.
“No computers.” He shrugged at her wide eyes. “We can’t use them anyway.”
She made a disgusted sound. “Haven’t you heard of Nocht?”
Lucien scowled. “Is that the voice-recognition system Patrick Murphy’s labs are working on?”
“Yes. Every lab in Katya’s territory is using a beta version of the program. Even our lab in California. Did you see Ruben using it?”
His chin lifted. “I don’t need a machine to record my thoughts for me.”
“It goes far beyond voice recognition and data collection. It’s a complete operating system designed for voice. There are proprietary devices designed for vampires that run Nocht software, and it’s significantly faster. Even some humans are starting to use it exclusively.”
Interesting. “Is it cloud based?”
“Are you kidding? Can you imagine any immortal trusting their information to a cloud?”
She had a point, but it didn’t make any difference.
“It doesn’t matter what is available in other places, Dr. Abel. You’ll have to make do with what we actually have. Anything more modern is going to be too close to human populations. Right now you are not to be trusted around humans, remember?”
She spun in circles, taking in the hanging wires and metal shelving. “I was expecting something basic, Lucien, not something from the nineteenth century.”
He crossed his arms. “That is an electron microscope in the corner, and I can assure you those didn’t exist in the nineteenth century. I know because I was alive then. You’d be amazed what real scientists could accomplish when they just used their minds.”
She put her hands on her hips and stepped closer. “Are you implying the hack-science boys’ club you were a part of a hundred and fifty years ago is somehow better or more thorough than a modern research lab? Weren’t you still using leeches?”
“At least we didn’t have to rely on machines to think for us.”
Makeda’s fangs dropped and a low snarl came from her throat.
His arousal was instant, and it made him angry. Lucien could admit he’d found Makeda attractive as a human, but he’d expected her appeal to lessen when she became vampire. The fact that it hadn’t irritated him, which made him perversely angry with her.
His voice was acid. “Supposedly you had some kind of brilliant breakthrough in your own home, so if you can’t think here—if you can’t sort through your ideas and theories in this lab from the twentieth century—then you’re a piss-poor scientist and your so-called breakthrough would have amounted to nothing.”