Cara MIA - By Book One of the Immortyl Revolution - By Denise Verrico Page 0,72
her strangely despondent again, sitting on the bed with her knees hugged up to her chest. “What’s wrong?”
“Get us the hell out of here.”
“Lee Brooks will be here in a week. When she comes, I’ll convince her.”
She laughed bitterly. “Do the words, when hell freezes over, have any meaning for you?”
He stared at her for a long time. She was too still, too deadpan. “Something has been eating the shit out of you.”
“Last week they went in and took inventory of the female plumbing. I was awake the whole time. They were afraid to use any drugs. The butcher who did it patted me on the fanny afterward, and told me I’d be better in no time. I put a lock on his balls, and he promptly apologized for the little familiarity— can’t seem to behave myself.” Suddenly she looked very weary. “They took eggs.”
Joe sat next to her. “This is why you’re so upset?”
She snarled at him, “If they jerked you off without your permission how would you feel?”
“I see your point.”
“What will they do with them?”
“Check for viability and mutation, I suppose.”
“They won’t try to clone me or something?”
“They can’t do that yet, besides cloning humans is an ethical minefield.”
“But I’m not human!”
“You’re a person. You have rights.”
“I’m entitled to rights?”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Snap out of it Mia!” She looked up surprised. “We won’t get anywhere this way.”
“They all think I’m a monster!”
“You feed on human beings. How else can they see you, from a purely biological point of view?”
She went to sit down in front of the mirror, staring. “I’m just a freak of nature, something to be poked and prodded and experimented upon… ”
“No Mia. You’re much more to me than that.”
She peered off somewhere in the distance. “Ethan taught me humanity was an unending banquet, to be devoured and cast aside, but I can’t see you that way. You burn— a star in the void.” Mia suddenly turned, looking on him with troubled eyes. “What if I told you, my one and only wish is to be human again, not necessarily mortal, but human?”
“You have a selfless reason to be here. No one would risk everything to do this if they didn’t. Not many human beings have your courage, or Kurt’s. Lee Brooks is coming here in less than seven days. I need to get finished with this profile before she gets here. I’m under the gun here, and someone out there is hunting you. I really want to help, Mia. I swear to you, I’m not backing down. You and Kurt deserve better treatment.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been so snappish. You’re the only one who’s stood up for us.”
“As long as you remain so in a figurative sense, I can deal.”
A small smile curled her mouth. “Those days are behind me forever— strictly bottled blood. I suppose you should know everything— but until Kurt and I are together, we won’t give them any hard data.”
“I understand. Tell me everything that’s happened up until this point.”
“For many years Brovik made no real headway. Ethan and I went back to relative seclusion in Virginia, but by the eighties, he’d made enough progress to send us to New York to woo drug companies with possibilities for treating immune disorders, like AIDS. Of course, all was still theoretical at this point, but, Ethan, with my assistance turned them on, and the money started to flow. He got a nice percentage of everything we raised and of course, now that he was really rich he started shopping for a new toy…
This wasn’t the New York I remembered. I’d seen movies and television, so I knew it wouldn’t be the same as in the fifties but nothing prepared me for the shock of seeing it thirty-six years after I’d left it a newborn vampire. It was filthy. The crumbling subway stations smelled of human waste. The streets were home to a host of lost humanity. Glittering glass boxes and granite walled fortresses entombed a corporate Netherworld, of dark suited men and women, who’d arise nightly from coffin-like cubicles. It was like a city of vampires, from the pale and elegant creatures dressed in black in Soho galleries, to the beautiful wraiths stalking runways.
December the twenty-fifth, nineteen-eighty six, was as usual marked by silence. The room in which I sat pondering my existence was a darkened, damask boudoir in Ethan’s Victorian townhouse. He moved around his own room across the hall. Nights went by without a