Bloody Kisses (5 page)

“And the orgy, don’t forget that part.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

“So we engaged in a bit of fun, the four of us. What does that matter?” Polidori smiled, his teeth too white, too perfect. “I wanted to change them, you know. Bring them with me on the rest of this journey, but George wouldn’t hear of it and Percy was taken from us much too soon.” Polidori was silent for a long moment before casting a sly glance in her direction. “And Adam. He wouldn’t allow me near Mary with those thoughts in my head.”

Who was Adam? But she didn’t ask, because she could see how badly he wanted her to. He was so eager to share this information with her, to make her dig it out of him. She refused to indulge him.

She began gathering her papers. The subjects from the mainland would be there any moment.

“Don’t act as if I haven’t caught your interest. Come now, Elizabeth. Ask me. You’ve seen the scars on my biceps. You know you’re curious.”

“Of course I am, but you’ll tell me in your own time. Or you won’t. I’m not going to dance for you.”

“But you do it so prettily.”

“How does anyone not know you’re a vampire? You’re textbook.” She shook her head.

He laughed. “My apologies, my dear. It seems I can’t help myself from taking advantage of your good nature. You must forgive me.”

Elizabeth rather liked his old world manners, even if he could be a bit of a shit. “I guess. Tell me.” She sighed.

“Hmm.” He inspected her again. “Now that I revisit the subject, I don’t know that you’ll believe me.”

She narrowed her eyes, and he laughed again. “You’re too much fun.” He removed his lab coat and began unbuttoning his shirt.

She’d seen his scars, yes. Never up close, only in passing. She’d been curious as to what could’ve possibly made them, because it was obvious they’d been inflicted post transformation. All of their human ills were obliterated when they were turned. Their skin was like an infant’s, perfect. Unmarred.

As he revealed his flesh to her, she was able to see the scars under the harsh fluorescent lights of the lab. Twin marks showed on each side. It looked for all the world as if the giant hands of God had gripped him there, and it had been seared into his flesh for all eternity.

Burned and bruised, purple and raging. If he were human, she’d have guessed whatever happened to him had only occurred last night. They weren’t scars in the traditional sense.

“Do they pain you?” She reached out a hesitant hand to touch them, but dropped it to her side.

“Only if I think about things I shouldn’t,” he said cryptically.

“Like what kinds of things you shouldn’t?” She wondered just what exactly would register on John Polidori’s list of restricted things. It didn’t seem like he denied himself much.

“Things like you. What your blood would taste like.”

Before her eyes, the marks on his arms began to glow as if they were lit from a fire that burned beneath the skin.

“Why are you thinking about my blood, Dr. Polidori?” Had she mistakenly assumed she was safe with him?

“Just to prove a point.” The flares died down.

Her brain suddenly made the connection.
Adam wouldn’t let me… things I shouldn’t…
The only thing she had in common with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a name and a bloodline.

The pathway that lit inside her head was impossible, yet it seemed to be the only logical answer.

The silly little book was more than a book. The Modern Prometheus was real and tied to her through blood. It would explain why Bureau 7 had been so keen to get her. She was good at what she did, but there were those who were better. She wasn’t well-known, or a sought after name.

She couldn’t figure out exactly what she brought to the table that had caused them to agree to her salary requirements when they could’ve had someone just as good for less money. Someone with even looser ethics than her own.

That was what made it real, simple fiscal logic.

It was something she’d suspected when they first came knocking—that their recruitment fervor had something to do with Mary and the monster.

Only, right now, looking at Polidori, she wondered who the real monster was.

“Figured it out, have you?”

“Maybe.”

“They want him, you know. Bureau 7. You’ve always been bait. Beautiful and brilliant, but bait.” Polidori slid into his shirt and buttoned it.

“What’s your role to play, Doctor?”

“Only what I’ve been doing. To work with you on this project. To lure Adam. I told them they should simply tell you. That if they gave you project head, you’d get him here of your own volition.”

Elizabeth didn’t know how she felt about that and wasn’t sure she wanted to examine it. “What do you get out of it?”

“George, of course. Your work with Adam coupled with this project? Reanimation and immortality, my dear.” He advanced on her, but his touch was gentle when he squeezed her arm. “You’re going to give me back the love of my life. With these prions, you’ve unlocked something that’s defeated me for hundreds of years. I’m not sure if I’m jealous or in awe. Perhaps a bit of both.”

The comm buzzed. “Subjects inbound. Code Blue, Dock Five.”

Shit.
“Link us to onboard medical.”

Static buzzed over the comm, and the raging sound of the helicopter. “Middle-aged white male, unknown cardiac event. Unable to resuscitate.”

Elizabeth didn’t know what to do with him. They weren’t prepared for this. “Put him in Lab 2.”

“You’ll want him in a containment unit,” the voice over the comm said. “He’s already been dosed with PrPM3.”

PrPM was her synthesized refolded prion.

Just what the fuck was PrPM3?

Nothing good.

She looked at Polidori who shrugged. “Bring him to main lab.”

“ETA in five.”

T
rieste
, Italy

Miramare Castle

H
e’d spent
his days in the bowels of the castle, in secret passages that time, architectural plans, and modern man had forgotten.

But it wasn’t like it used to be. He wasn’t hiding, not really.

He hadn’t been chased into the pit of hell by an angry mob of villagers carrying pitchforks. No, he had a job looking after the castle, making repairs, and keeping everything in working order for the tourists that wandered the halls.

Adam enjoyed his work. It was simple, but fulfilling. These days, if someone caught sight of him, they didn’t scream or run. People smiled at him and told him he’d done a good job. If they saw the scars on his wrists or around his neck, or any of the other things that made people fear him in the past, they said nothing.

What Adam especially enjoyed about Miramare was the long evenings on his boat. Fishing for his dinner, preparing it. Eating it while the gentle waves rocked the boat and drinking one of the many bottles of wine people had given him in exchange for his masonry or other skills.

He didn’t have much use for money. Even this boat, he’d taken it in trade. He wasn’t a man, not anymore, and therefore had no use for most things in the world of man.

This new age made him wonder if perhaps he’d been mistaken. Until hunters for various groups found him, wanted to study him. If only they’d ask, and not try to take his freedom, he’d share the knowledge of his flesh.

Only they didn’t ask. They wanted to take. Just like his maker.

No, he’d stay in the dark until the world forgot about him again.

He both feared and yearned for the day the bloodline was extinct.

Adam knew they were the reason for his existence. Perhaps when they expired, so would he, but he didn’t fear death. He feared slavery, imprisonment. The theft of his free will.

He’d done horrible things in service to the Wollstonecraft bloodline, murder perhaps not even being the worst.

For the last month, the tingling at the back of his neck that always precipitated the loss of his freedom, the call to arms to defend, protect, and serve the Wollstonecrafts had become an ever more intensifying itch.

Adam hadn’t thought little Elizabeth would be a problem.

He’d been there the day her mother died. He’d sensed her distress, her need of him. He’d gone, only to find the small girl child sitting alone in the hospital waiting room, sobbing into her doll’s hair.

She’d been so small then, her blue eyes large and luminous. Corn silk hair in two ponytails. She could’ve been a doll herself. “My mama is gone,” she’d said.

He’d sat down beside her, unsure of what to say. For someone such as he, immortal, the ages passed. People changed. People died. He stayed the same.

She didn’t need him to speak. She’d clambered up his massive lap, and planted herself there, tugging on his arm—wanting him to embrace her. So he had. It was what she needed and what he was bound to provide.

He kept thinking someone was going to see him with this child and think all the wrong things. Someone was going to come and rip her away from him, but they didn’t. No one came.

Little Elizabeth Wollstonecraft was all alone in the world. The last of her line. He’d known a kind of relief then. He’d been heartsore for her, the little lost girl, but a kind of peace inside of himself that this was almost over.

He’d checked up on her a few times—whenever that tell-tale tingle on the back of his neck made itself known—and he’d always arrived just in time. When she was a student at Carnegie Mellon attending a mixer, he’d arrived just in time to see a young man add something to her drink.

Adam hadn’t seen Elizabeth as the grown woman she was, because in his eyes, she was still very much the small, helpless, big-eyed child with no one in the world but him.

That was a murder that he carried no guilt for and when he thought about it even now, it gave him a sense of satisfaction. A job well done.

His fingers curled into fists. No one would hurt Elizabeth. She was the last and he wouldn’t fail.

He thought about her again. She’d seemed so different than all of the others.

Flashes hit him hard and fast. If he’d been human, they’d have been called “migraines.” But he was just a monster who inflicted pain, he wasn’t supposed to feel it.

She was in a lab with
John Fucking Polidori
.

Adam snarled past the discomfort, the electricity crackling around his head like lightning. He forced himself to be calm. She was safe with Polidori, at least from his fucking leech teeth. The burns on his arms would make sure of that. Even with all the distance between them, the lightning would find him and turn him to ash if he tried to drain Elizabeth.

But that wasn’t the only danger.

He could see the paths unfolding before them, and perhaps that was his purview as a monster and not a man, but if she chose to continue what she was doing, Elizabeth Wollstonecraft could unleash an armageddon unlike anything this world had ever seen.

She and Polidori were meddling where mortals ought not to trespass.

Adam himself was evidence of such things.

For a moment, he considered sitting back in the bowels of the castle and letting the world spin as it would. After all, why did it fall to him to save the dumb, lumbering, cruel beasts from themselves? They’d never done anything for him.

The world would be a much more beautiful place, the planet so healthy and green, if the talking apes who liked to play God were obliterated. No more hunts, no more fear, no more war. No more starving children. No more torture. No more oil spills, or whole species of animals wiped from the face of the planet that was meant to nurture them.

None except one, the parasite known as man.

But he couldn’t get the memory of little Elizabeth out of his head. The way she’d turned to him for safety and comfort without hesitation. Without fear.

She wasn’t a child anymore; she was a woman grown who made her own choices. She didn’t need a champion or a defender.

Goddamn it.

It was the small things that did him in. The helpless things. The pitiful things.

He sighed. Adam could never turn away a stray—and that’s what she was, a stray trying to make her way in a world of those who belonged.

Alone.

He knew what it was be alone. To be lost and searching for something.

The human race was lucky he was bound to this particular human. For her, he would save them. For her, he would change the tide.

All because of the kindness she’d shown him once, a very long time ago, when in her moment of grief, a child could’ve forced his hand. A child could’ve forced him to give his gift and raise the dead.

Instead, she hadn’t asked him for anything but the comfort of his arms around her while she cried.

Yes, for that, he’d save the goddamn world.

Lightning flashed and crackled, tearing through his body and bringing with it images of exactly where she was.

The island was beautiful, but the signage on the impossibly high stone walls, the electrified razor wire behind it was not.

Bureau 7.

He’d be walking into the lion’s den. They were chief on the list of those who hunted him, who wanted the secrets of his flesh. Who thought nothing of taking what they wanted. He’d killed more than one of their bounty hunters.

That extra sense told him she was on the isle of Kythnos. If the wind was with him, he’d make it in less than a day. That would be cutting it close.

If the wind was against him, it would take two.

Perhaps he’d leave it up to the great mother, if she wanted to shake off the human parasites like fleas?

Part of him still wanted to give this choice over to a higher power. He wished he believed in that, but he didn’t. He’d seen no evidence of the divine in all his long years. Only the earth beneath his feet, the sky overhead, and man, a talking ape throwing his own shit at the wall in the dark.

Adam needed to gather his supplies, mostly making the boat ready for human occupation. He didn’t need the creature comforts, but Elizabeth might. She’d need a new identity as well, because if this went down like he feared, she’d be number one on Bureau 7’s shitlist. He wasn’t going to go to all this trouble to stop the apocalypse just so they could decide she was a liability and take her out.

Adam put in a call to his employer, leaving a message that he would be gone for several days for a family emergency and proceeded to outfit the boat. The sooner he could set sail, the better. He wouldn’t wait for the tide.

As soon as he’d gathered what he needed aboard the
No Stars
, he started the engine on the oceanvolt, an electric and solar powered generator that harnessed the energy he created sailing—just enough to propel him out into the open sea and then he’d be using wind power all the way.

He wondered if she’d remember him, because it seemed through all these long years, he’d never stopped thinking about her.

Adam was sure, if she remembered him at all, it would be gray and fuzzy. Perhaps she’d already dismissed it as a dream.

Or a nightmare.

Those had a way of coming true.

Because it occurred to him that this was a ploy, a plot to get him to Kythnos. Polidori knew what 7 wanted from him and he could’ve filled Elizabeth’s head with all kinds of nonsense.

The monster Polidori spoke of in his ever so reassuring tones might not have even registered as the same one who’d held her hand as a child.

Not that it mattered.

He was going.

Soon, Bureau 7 would have more on their plate than they were prepared to manage, he was sure.

A zombie apocalypse would put a strain on anyone’s resources.