The kitchen was empty. Alaric and Becks were still off-site, and all the bulldogs were outside, probably harassing Maggie into playing catch with them. I guided Mahir to a seat at the table. “You have a tea-based preference? Maggie has something like five hundred kinds. I think they all taste like licking the lawnmower, so I really can’t make recommendations.”
“Anything that isn’t herbal will be fine.” Mahir collapsed into the chair, his chin dipping until it almost grazed his chest. “Soy milk, no sugar, please.”
“You got it.” I kept one eye on him as I filled the electric kettle and got down a mug.
He’s worn out.
“I got that,” I muttered. Mahir raised his head enough to blink at me. I offered an insincere smile. “Sorry. I was just—”
“I know what you were doing. Hello, Georgia. I hope your ongoing haunting hasn’t driven your brother too far past the edge of reason to justify this visit.”
There’s no such thing as ghosts, said George, sounding peevish.
The idea of getting into that particular argument was too ludicrous to consider, especially given my position. I got the soy milk from the fridge instead, answering, “George says hey. Your tea will be ready in just a minute. Want to tell me why you decided to be a surprise? We could’ve at least made up the couch for you, if we’d known that you were coming.”
“I didn’t want to broadcast it anywhere,” Mahir said, with a calm that was actually chilling. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I hadn’t really expected it would be, but still, the tone of his voice, combined with the exhaustion in his face, made me want to put away the tea and break out the booze. “I purchased a flight from Heathrow to New York via an actual travel agency, rather than online, and flew from there to Seattle, where I switched from my own passport to my father’s and caught a flight to Portland. From there, I took a private flight to Weed. The gentleman who owns the plane took payment in cash, and his manifest will show that I was a young woman of Canadian nationality visiting the state for a flower show.”
“How much did that cost?”
“Enough that you should be deeply grateful I’m paid in percentage of overall site income, rather than drawing a salary, or you’d owe me quite a bit of money.” Mahir removed his glasses in order to scrub at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I’m not going to be useful much longer, I’m afraid. I’ve been awake damned near a day and a half as it is.”
“I sort of figured.” The kettle began to whistle. I turned it off, dropping a teabag from Maggie’s disturbingly large collection into a mug and covering it with water before walking the mug and soy milk over to Mahir. “Give me the short form. How bad is it?”
“How bad is it?” Mahir took a moment to doctor his tea, not speaking again until he was settled with both hands wrapped firmly around the mug. Looking at me steadily, he said, “I took the data you gave me to three doctors I was reasonably sure were reputable. One laughed me out of his office. Said if anything of the sort were going on, he’d have heard about it, since the trending evidence would be virtually impossible to overlook. Further said that if anything of the sort were going on, the national census would reflect it. I challenged him to prove that it didn’t.”
“And?”
“He stopped taking my calls three days later. I’d wager because the national census reflected exactly what he said it wouldn’t.” Mahir sipped his tea, grimaced, and continued: “When I went to confront him about this in person, he was gone—and he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
Well, shit, said George.
“I had more luck with the second doctor I approached—largely, I think, because he was Australian and didn’t really give two tosses what the local government thought of his work. He said the research was sound, if a bit overly dramatic, and that he’d rather like a chance to test its applications in a live population.”
“It had applications?” I asked, mystified.
“In the sense that… Well, look, it’s sort of like the research they were doing on parasites at the turn of the century. They found quite a few immune disorders that could be controlled by the introduction of specialized parasites, because the parasites provided a sufficient distraction for the immune system as a whole. They kept the body from attacking itself. Part of what makes Kellis-Amberlee so effective is that it acts like a part of the body—it’s with us all the time, so our immune systems don’t th. There’d be no point; they’d rip us apart trying to kill it. The trouble is that when the virus changes states, the body still doesn’t think of it as an enemy. It still regards it as a friendly component.”
I frowned. “You lost me.”