suppressed a shiver. She was in control here. She was the one with the power. She wouldn’t be afraid.
Andrej tilted his head up so the light bounced off his clear eyes, and he said, “It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
He sighed softly, his face still eerily still. “Fine. I first met my girlfriend in the 1960s. This was before INHUP, before anything even like that existed. She was a monster hunter for hire, and she was damn good at it.”
Nita nodded. This was fitting perfectly with her mother’s story. Nita would have to question which version was right when they started to diverge, but the things they had in common, she thought it was safe to take as truth.
“What was her name?” Nita asked.
“Nadya.” He sighed softly. “But I suppose you’d know her as Nadezhda Novikova. The founder of INHUP.”
Twenty-Five
INHUP’S FOUNDER.
Nita tried to wrap her head around it. Not just that INHUP’s founder had been having a thing with a vampire for forty years and no one knew—no, actually, it wasn’t possible no one knew. How could INHUP not know?—but also the idea that Nita’s mother could have possibly been friends with INHUP’s founder. Nita’s mother hated INHUP. She was constantly deriding them, always wary of them. She despised them. Nita could never imagine her working with them.
But a dark, frightened part of her whispered that the most violent hate is born from the tightest love. And betrayal.
She cleared her throat. “Wait. Wait a minute. Nadezhda Novikova isn’t dead. She’s still head of INHUP.”
“Technically, she is.” Andrej agreed. “But she’s been a figurehead for the past, oh, twenty years or so, hasn’t she?”
“Yes . . .” Nita agreed slowly, dragging out the s. “But that’s just because she’s getting old. She’s got to be in her . . . eighties? By now.”
“But have you seen her at all, in any event, in the past twenty years? Surely an eighty-year-old could cut a ribbon at a ceremony, or give an interview.”
“I haven’t looked into it,” Nita admitted. Unsurprisingly, the head of INHUP hadn’t been someone she was interested in. She’d never really researched her.
Nita tried to think of any pictures of Nadezhda Novikova she’d seen, but all of them were too old. She seemed young, in her thirties, in most of the pictures Nita could recall. But most articles used pictures of people in their prime, so that was no surprise.
“If Nadezhda Novikova was dead, the world would have mourned. We’d all know. There’d have been a huge public funeral,” she pointed out.
Andrej sighed. “Well, she’s not . . . dead dead. She’s brain-dead. Her body has been in a coma for the last two decades, and for legal reasons, no one can unhook her. So everyone is just keeping it all under wraps for now, and hoping she passes away naturally soon.”
“Surely people would know, though.”
“You don’t think INHUP can hide one person in a coma? Have you seen how extensive some of their research and medical facilities are?”
This Nita did know. She’d researched INHUP’s research facilities extensively, because she’d researched everywhere with good unnatural science programs. There were a lot of internships at INHUP for an unnatural researcher. Not that Nita would ever work there.
Well, maybe. If the right research project came along.
“I have. It’s possible,” Nita admitted. “But why would they cover it up in the first place?”
“Because they don’t want people to ask questions.” His voice was bitter.
“Like how she ended up in a coma?”
“That they can lie about. Even tell the truth about, or a version of it. No, the issue becomes when people want to visit her body. Then things get tricky.”
“How so?”
“Nadya looked very young for being in her sixties. I imagine by now, age has caught up a bit, but she’ll probably still look in her mid-forties when she hits a century.”
Nita thought for a moment, then realized. “You’d been feeding her your blood. To slow down her aging.”
“Every day for forty-odd years. That empty body will easily live to two hundred.”
Nita’s mind whirled through the implications. “It would be obvious she’d been drinking vampire blood. Very regularly. There’s nothing else that has that effect on humans.”
He nodded. “And how would that look to the rest of the world? The head of INHUP, addicted to vampire blood.”
“Was she addicted? I didn’t think it was addictive.”
“It’s not.” His head jerked slightly, as though he’d gone to make a hand motion before realizing he was paralyzed. “But people are addicted to power and looking young,