Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

I heard Jane clear her throat. “Hey, kids, I’m thrilled about this show of emotional maturity, but if I could have your attention for a moment?”

“Sorry,” I told Jane, wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand.

Despite the backhand to the face, Dr. Fortescue was just crazy enough to smile at the approaching vampires.

“Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale!” he cried, shaking her hand vigorously. “I’m so delighted to finally meet you! And young Mr. Overby, too. What a coup. I was so hoping we would meet. You will, of course, join Miss Keene in my collection of specimens.”

“Is he for real?” Ben asked.

“Oh, yeah, he waved bye-bye to rational thought a long time ago,” I muttered out of the side of my mouth.

“As you can see, Jane—may I call you Jane?—my formula, the formula I attempted to discuss with you several times, is a complete success. Mr. Overby and Miss Keene are perfect specimens, examples of what vampires could be with scientific intervention. I would think, after the appropriate trials, you would want to start introducing the inoculations to the populace within two years.”

“OK, you totally misinterpreted that dramatic bursting-into-the-room thing,” Jane said. “We’re here to arrest you. Also, you shot my dog. So I’m inclined to rip your head off when you least expect it and use it for bowling. But I’m going to do one worse. I’m going to let those two”—she paused to point at Ophelia and Georgie—“come up with your punishment.”

The Lambert sisters’ shared grin was so terrifying it was almost enough to keep me from walking across the warehouse and punching Dr. Fortescue in the gut. But not quite. So I did.

“You thought I didn’t have a family. I have the most screwed-up, dysfunctional, awesome family in the world. So suck it.”

“Was that necessary?” Jane asked.

“Yes, it was.”

“OK, take the lulus into custody.” Jane sighed. “Put them in the SUV, and I’ll drive them to the Council office.”

“Use these, and make them extra tight.” With a pair of tongs, I tossed two pairs of the silver-plastic cuffs at Jane. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and looped the plastic around Tina’s and Fortescue’s wrists. Cal and Nik dragged them toward the door.

“Glad you’re OK, beda,” Nik said, ruffling my hair as he passed.

“What did he call me?” I asked Gigi.

“?‘Trouble’ in Russian, so you know he meant it affectionately,” Gigi said, her lips twitching in an attempt to stifle her smile.

“It’s fitting,” Andrea said. “And probably going to be much nicer than any nickname Dick gives you.”

Dick shrugged. “True.”

Dr. Fortescue thrashed against Cal’s hold as he dragged him out. Tina just wailed.

“But my research! My contributions! My accolades! They belong to me!” the doctor screamed.

“Yeah, good luck with all that,” I muttered as Jane threw her arms around me in a bear hug.

“I know this is not your fault and you were the victim of misdirection and bad circumstances, but please don’t do that to me again,” she whispered into my hair.

“I will do my best not to get abducted by a mad scientist a third time,” I promised.

“See that you don’t,” she said, blinking away tears and pushing my hair back from my face.

“By the way, you couldn’t have told me you’d put an explosive device in my phone?” I asked Dick. “What if I’d been holding it near my head when it went off?”

“I told you to get ten feet away!” he exclaimed. “What did you think that meant?”

“A high-pitched alarm? A smoke bomb? Not a regular bomb!”

“Well, we didn’t know you were going to set it off as we jumped in!”

“Georgie was giving me a countdown!”

“Yes, the countdown to when they were jumping through the windows, not the countdown to set off the bomb I didn’t even know about!” Georgie cried.

“Oh, yeah, that makes more sense,” I agreed. “By the way, why did you all jump through the windows instead of the highly trained UERT guys?”

“Well, Dr. Fortescue killed a couple of them outside our house. Between that and the creepy concrete possums in front of the Possum’s Nest, they declined the honor of rescuing you.”

“Hurtful but understandable,” I said, nodding. “How did you find me?”

“After we found the ashy blood smear in the Possum’s Nest, I got your missed call, and we took the chopper home. I arrived to panic and chaos because you were missing, Fitz was bleeding out, and UERT members were dead. I felt this searing pain in my arms and in my head. I could see the warehouse, what you were seeing. And there aren’t that many abandoned warehouses in the Hollow. Between that and the tracker in your phone, plus the information you relayed through your intentional butt-dial, you made it pretty easy for us.”

“So that’s my vampire power? I can put pictures in other vampires’ heads if they’re mind-readers?”

“No, I was able to see it because I was near Ben, and he felt it and saw it. I think your talent is specific to each other, like walkie-talkies—which is limited but fun. We can run some nonpainful tests if you’d like.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask.” I sighed. “But Fitz?”

“Is in surgery. Iris got him to a great emergency vet who was willing to work late. He says Fitz has a really good chance. Now I just have to explain why I used a Council helicopter to medevac my dog to Lexington.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms around Jane. “Oh, thank God. I thought he’d died right in front of me.”

Jane stiffened at her first voluntary hug from me. She relaxed against me and patted my back. “This is nice,” she said.

“All this because they wanted the quick route to being undead,” Gabriel mused, sneering at the lab setup.

“Was it really so hard to find someone to turn them?” I asked Jane, breaking away from her.

Jane shrugged. “Sometimes vampires can sense the desperation in someone, and they don’t want to shackle themselves to such a needy, clingy childe. Or maybe the doctor just annoyed most of the vampires he came into contact with, which is just as likely. Maybe he just did it to satisfy his own twisted curiosity.

“The question is, what do we do with it? You two need to decide whether you want that research to be used. Dr. Oxmoor said she would be willing to trash all of her papers. And I believe her. Before she worked for us, she worked for the CDC’s committee on medical ethics. She’s seen what can happen when research goes wrong.”

“Is it really up to us?” Ben asked. “What sort of good could come from more neovamps?”

“An answer to our sensitivity to daylight,” Jane said. “Less traumatic transition periods. Stronger, faster, smarter vampires, which in the right hands would be great . . .”

“But with the wrong person,” I finished for her, “a vampire who can turn a bunch of people with just a nip and possibly walk around during the day, faster and stronger than other vampires, would be a disaster.”

“Exactly.”

“Burn it,” I said. “It ends with us. There are natural checks and balances that keep vampires in this spot on the food chain. We don’t need to mess with that.”