Chaos and Moonlight (Order of the Nines Book 1) (2 page)

“You didn’t really think I was going to let you live after this, did you, you stupid old man? I brought you here to save my people, not to offer you a shot at redemption. You, you waste of humanity, are absolutely disgusting.” She twisted her heel in his shoulder. Her black patent leather pump was scraping against his bone, and the sound it made was the only thing he managed to hear over his own screams.

“Pathetic excuse for a being, you are. Willing to throw mankind under the bus—and for what? It’s men like you who make my purpose worthwhile.” Suddenly, she removed her heel. It made a horrid sucking sound as the spike came out of his flesh. She looked down at it in disgust.

“Lovely. Now I need new shoes.” Morrigan looked over at her colleague, ignoring the fact that Lab Rat was writhing around on the floor and bleeding all over her other shoe. She swiped a hypodermic needle and a tube of clear fluid from the table. With her teeth, she tore open the package and spat it out at his face. “I’m assuming this is it,” she said, glaring down at him. He nodded and winced, and she jammed the needle into the rubber top. She pulled back the syringe and filled the needle completely before handing it to Bane. “Would you care to do the honors?”

“With pleasure, love.” The giant transvestite stormed over to him, his monster truck-sized boots thudding. With one large hand, he snatched the small man off the floor and violently held him up against the wall. He took the needle from Morrigan with his free hand, and after pushing out the air bubble in the top, he plunged it into the poor man’s neck, his thick fingers pushing the serum into his veins. When it was empty, he tossed the syringe over his shoulder and immediately began massaging the injection site.

“Sorry, old boy. Nothing personal.” Bane opened his mouth, baring two elongated fangs where his canines should have been. A loud growl ripped from his throat as he jerked forward and sank his teeth into the slight man’s neck, just over his collarbone. He didn’t even bother to rip away the fabric that lay over his skin. He simply tore at the artery just below his clavicle.

The screams that came from the man underneath Bane slowly ebbed. The hands that were flailing behind Bane’s designer red leather trench eventually fell limp and almost lifeless. When there was barely a glimmer of life left in him, Bane released him, letting his body slide to the floor in a disgusting heap.

“Flip him over,” Morrigan murmured. Bane slid his boot underneath the body and chucked it over with a sickening
thud
. The doctor breathed faintly, his eyes glazed over with impending death. He barely noticed when Morrigan crouched down beside him. In her hand was the test-tube she had been playing with earlier, only now it was filled with a dark red liquid.

“Now, here’s the deal, Lab Rat,” she said, leaning down so close he could feel her breath hitting his face. “I am going to feed this to you. It’s mine, so it should snap you right back. I could have just let you feed from me, but seeing as how I don’t want your dirty dog mouth touching my skin, we’re going to do it this way. Bane, open his mouth.”

As Bane used his thick fingers to part the man’s lips, Morrigan tilted the test-tube and poured the contents over Lab Rat’s teeth and down his throat. When the tube was empty, she threw it across the room, sending it shattering into a million pieces as it hit the wall.

“Now we wait.” She stood up and stared at Bane, who was reapplying some shiny crimson lip gloss.

“I hope it works,” he said as he smacked his lips together. His voice was even and calm with the same aristocratic British accent. “With you running around through him, he’ll be strong. More fun to take down.”

“You are deliciously evil, Bane, truly.” She sent him a wink before looking back down at the floor.

Suddenly, the man’s body began to twitch. The movements started in his feet and then spread quickly up to his legs. His eyes shot open, and a guttural growl expelled from his throat as his body contorted, arching upward into the air. The shudders that racked him were growing more and more violent, and the noises escaping from his throat became more and more primitive. A steady stream of thick black blood began flowing from the corners of his mouth. It bubbled with every gasp he took and began to pool on either side of his head.

As quickly as the tremors started, they abruptly ended. Before his last breath left his body, he mumbled something. His eyes glossed over with the sheen of death. He was gone. The serum obviously hadn’t worked.

Morrigan stepped over him and peered into the eyepiece of the microscope. On the slide was nothing but red smears, the faint traces of what was once life-giving blood. Hemolysis had taken place. It’s what had killed him. It’s what was killing them all.

“Lying little waste!” The anger welled up in Morrigan’s chest, and it exploded as she hitched back her leg and kicked the lifeless body with all of her might. “What did that sad sack of bones say?”

“I think he said ‘God forgive me.’ At least, that’s what I heard. Can’t be too sure, though, seeing as how he had all that blood coming out of his pie hole.” Bane looked down at Lab Rat. “So I guess it’s back to the drawing board, then, aye?”

It was in fact time to regroup and come up with a new plan, which was a true and royal pain in the neck, considering all of the time, effort, and money she had poured into this one. What was she going to do now? She had one of the world’s most brilliant geneticists working on their problem, and he was now lying on the floor, covered in blood and contorted like an old rag doll. Perhaps she had been too hasty. Maybe, just maybe, she should have waited for other human trials before she insisted on letting her eager counterpart drain him almost dry. It might have actually proven beneficial if she had listened to the Lab Rat and allowed lab testing before she insisted on human testing.

But honestly, when had she ever listened to anyone? And besides, she hated the Lab Rat. He was a cowardly, pitiful excuse for a man. It was people like him who solidified her opinion that her kind should be ruling things, running the planet. As far as she was concerned, humans were at the bottom of the food chain.

Vampires were at the top.

It turned her stomach that she needed them, needed their medicine and their science to help increase their numbers. It disgusted her even more that, for the vampire race to survive, they needed to turn humans. It made the bile rise in her throat, but it was the only way. Gone were the good old days when vampires were born and raised to be the genetic superiors they truly were. Their race was now so diluted with human blood that it was impossible for them to procreate. And with the evolution of the human immune system over the last two hundred or so years, it was proving to be fatal even to attempt to turn one.

Hence the genetic race against the clock. Hence her brilliant plan to kidnap the one person she hoped would find an answer to their prayers.

That answer was a bloody, fucking mess strewn across the floor at her feet.

On impulse, she kicked the body again.

“I hate this.” Her voice was low. “I hate not knowing what to do. I hate not being in control of everything, and I hate, hate, motherfucking hate them.” She pointed a perfectly manicured finger at the body, her eyes boring holes into Bane as he watched her seethe.

“Darling, darling, my Morrigan,” he said as he stepped over the corpse and threw a large arm around her shoulder. “Muffin, you take entirely too much to heart. We will figure this out. Another answer will come up.” He swung her around and began to lead her out of the room. “You know, he’s not the only brilliant geneti-whatsis in the country. We’ll just find another one stupid enough to come with us and chain the poor sod to the floor until he gets it right. Right?”

“You clever little boy. You always know what to say to make me feel better.” She leaned into his shoulder, the smile spreading across her face.

The large vampire’s fingers stroked her shoulder, the black polish on his nails contrasting with her creamy flesh. “In the meantime, though, let’s not worry about how to get the numbers up, aye? We have plenty of time. It’s not like we’re gonna die holding our breath or anything, now is it?”

Their hysterical laughter floated through the room and followed them as they stepped out into the hall. Neither one of them bothered to turn off the light, nor did they look back.

The fluorescent lights continued to flicker and
pop
, and under their flooding glow, a body lay on the floor, breathless, lifeless.

Taris’ legs were crossed in front of him. His elbows rested on his knees, and his hands were buried deep into his hair. He had been sitting motionless on that one spot on the smooth tile floor for over an hour. The solitary position should have been uncomfortable, but at that moment, he had no feeling in any part of his body. From the top of his head to the tips of his toes, running the entire length of his six-foot-three frame, he was numb.

He drew in a shaky, difficult breath and finally lifted his face, threading his fingers together and pressing them to his mouth as he opened his eyes once more to stare at the body that sat mere inches away from him. It made his heart thud against his chest wall again, and the feeling of the blood that was rushing through his veins made him queasy. It coursed through him with its heat and its strength. The pulsing of it sent shivers down his spine, and the blissful feeling of warmth that was spreading through his body played havoc with his mind. He wanted to look away. He wanted to get rid of the body and start over, but there was no way he could disconnect from this.

Leaning over, he pushed a lock of matted hair away from the young woman’s face. Her eyes were frozen open and beginning to haze over. He tried to shut them, but they were stiff, and he muttered a silent curse to himself, wishing he had taken the time when she first passed to shut them. He’d spent too much time focusing on the immediate implications of what was happening to realize he would have to deal with her mossy green stare.

“Where did we go wrong, Hayley?”

There had to have been some glitch in their timing, something they missed. For the last year, he had been preparing her for the change, hoping all of their research would pay off and they would finally discover the secret to keeping their race from extinction. Hayley was a more than willing subject. She jumped into the testing feet first, smiling every time he bit her, eager for every single drop of life he fed her. The thought of her eagerness made his belly knot up again.

What did they miss?

Taris leaned back, covering his mouth with a large hand as he blankly stared at her. Assessing the situation was all he could afford to do right now. He couldn’t afford to mourn her. There was no time. What few available moments he had to himself after watching her die had already been spent in a state of devastated paralysis. There would be more time for grief later. Now he had to shift gears. He had to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

He ran his long fingers through his dark brown hair, tugging at the rubber band that was exhibiting a pathetic attempt at holding it back from his face. He managed to pull most of it loose while he was sitting there. He tilted his head to either side and sent a ricochet of
pops
echoing through the room before he forced himself to stand. He looked down at the body one more time before turning toward the bedroom door.

She had to be moved, but at that moment, the walls were confining him. Everything was restrictive, from his jeans to his long-sleeved, button-down dress shirt. He wanted to rip them off, strip himself of everything. Maybe then he would feel a little better about the situation.

He was stumped. No, that word was too plain, too common for how he felt. His brain and his heart, even his very being felt lost. The question kept running through his mind.
What went wrong?
It was almost callous for him to be focusing solely on the fact that they had failed, yet again, instead of the fact that he was now shutting the door to a bedroom in which there lay a dead woman.

But she wasn’t just any dead woman.

She was bright-eyed, warmhearted Hayley, who came up with the immunity theory in the first place. So convinced was she that it would work that she took it upon herself to begin testing her grand notion—without his knowledge. He remembered her brilliant stare and the way she all but tried to con her way into playing God with an entire race of people’s futures.

“This will work, Papa Bear. I promise you, this will work.”

She had smiled at him, even though he caught her lingering at the side of his bed, X-ACTO blade in hand, ready to knick him as he slept. He had been so furious that his first inclination had been to toss her back out onto the streets where he had found her ten years before. She was only thirteen years old the first time he had seen her, so giving her the boot would have been made easier by the fact that she was now a grown woman.

When she called him Papa Bear the first day he took her in, that really got to him. The older she got, the more it fell into obscurity, but when she needed it the most, she would pull it out like an old trick. And curse him if it didn’t work every time. She tried for years to get him to reciprocate an equally cheesy and completely irrelevant nickname, but Taris steadfastly refused.

Just as he’d initially refused to indulge in this wildly dangerous notion.

“It won’t work, Hayley, because we aren’t going to do it, and that is final.”

But it wasn’t final. Hayley spent months and months compiling data and outlining the reasons behind her theory. Once she presented it to him, Taris saw the merit in it, saw the possibility.

“Taris, think about it.” Her eyes were wide, focused on him, and for a moment, he remembered those same eyes staring at him from behind a dumpster several years earlier. “It’s the human immune system that is rejecting the change because it sees the new blood as a cancer or an illness. If we do it my way, it could completely cancel out the rejection.” She was so confident.

Her plan was relatively simple compared to the ones that had been previously proposed and tried. Slowly introduce the dominant blood into the system, gradually increasing the dosages over an extended period of time. It would allow the body to build up a tolerance to it and thereby allow the exchange to take place. It made perfect sense. At least, it seemed like the most logical plan they had at the time.