Toxic Game (GhostWalkers #15) - Christine Feehan Page 0,45

glanced up. “Come look at this, Shylah.” His eye went back to the scope.

She couldn’t help the smile welling up. She’d been outside thinking of him and daydreaming, acting like a lovesick idiot, and he was so far from her it wasn’t funny. She could tell his mind was consumed with whatever he was looking at.

“What is it?”

“Blood. There were samples in the freezer. All are clearly from the same donor. There’s no name on the vials, but there’s a number. P-001x1. The second is P-001x2. They’re numbered up to five.”

Shylah frowned at him. “Is there something special about the blood?”

“Each different species has different cell surface proteins in their red blood cells.”

She raised an eyebrow at him but came to stand beside him. He moved his head just enough to give her access to the microscope. She peered in. What she saw was cool, but she didn’t understand it. She looked up at him for a better explanation.

“Put simply, we can’t use animal blood on humans because our bodies would reject it. What you’re looking at is neither animal nor human, but some kind of combination of both. I’ve only seen this in GhostWalker blood.”

She went still. “One of us? Wait. They used us for some kind of base for a virus?”

“I can’t tell what they used to create the virus. It stands to reason, if they were creating viruses aimed specifically at each woman where you were, and I presume at Whitney’s other facilities, that they would start with specific blood. I’m hoping Trap or one of the other military virologists might figure it out.”

“That makes sense.” She really hated the idea, but it was a fact that Whitney paid the three scientists to construct viruses to kill them if they tried to escape.

“Have you ever seen what an actual filovirus looks like? Filo is thread. The virus presents in a few different ways. It can look like spaghetti or a snake, if you will. It can appear hooked, or spherical, even like the number six.” He frowned, clearly trying to describe it to her. “Like filigree. It’s distinctive.”

“Okay.” She got the picture but didn’t know how the blood he was looking at, which had none of what he described in it, was in any way related.

“Filoviruses cannot replicate themselves. They have to find another way, another cell in order to replicate and survive. They work by attaching themselves to the membrane of the cell. The cells have a receptor that allows the virus to attach itself. Once the virus attaches to the cell membrane it moves inside the cell to the cytoplasm and starts to replicate.”

Shylah shook her head but waved her hand to indicate he needed to keep going. She had no idea what he was talking about.

“Picture the receptor as a three-dimensional configuration that fits the virus perfectly. If the shape of that design is changed even slightly, the virus can’t attach itself to that cell.”

Shylah wasn’t certain she needed to know how the virus worked. She just needed to know it was out there, let loose on an unsuspecting mass of people. Those people had been innocently going about their daily lives and three men had decided they would, for money, unleash hell on the world. That was what she needed to know, and those three men needed to be hunted, found and exterminated.

Draden wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her closer. “Pay attention, sweetheart. I’m actually going somewhere with this. We can’t transfuse from one species to the other, which is a protection against the transfer of viruses. In other words, animals can get sick with illnesses specific to them, but they don’t pass those on to us. There are exceptions. You can give a pig a cold. There are some species of monkey that can transfer an illness to a human and vice versa. But generally, it doesn’t happen.”

Shylah looked at him and then at the smear of blood on the slide. She still didn’t see where he was going with it, but it was important to him and he was explaining it in a way she could understand and not want to pull her hair out.

“I’m listening, Draden, but you know, this isn’t my thing. I’m here for a very different reason than you are.”

He looked up at her, and her heart accelerated. His face was so perfectly masculine. A gorgeous man. Everything about him. Those eyes of his, darker blue than the deepest sea, his hair spilling across