quack. His potions are just snake oil.”
Vlad hoped that Roni was wrong, but he had been suspicious as well. Merlin had delivered a contraceptive potion less than an hour after Vlad had mentioned that he and Wendy needed protection. Since no one else in the village used birth control, Merlin had no reason to formulate it ahead of time. How had he done it so quickly?
Then again, Merlin used to treat humans, and he might have developed the potion for his patients a long time before contraceptives were invented.
Nevertheless, even if Merlin’s stuff worked, it tasted awful, and they should visit Bridget and get a prescription for proper birth-control medication.
36
Eleanor
“Thank you for lunch, Bella. It was very kind of you to invite me.”
“Nonsense, dear. It’s the least I can do for you after all the hard work you are putting in. It never occurred to me to scan all of Edgar’s handwritten notes onto digital files. In time, the paper would have faded and crumbled. This way, his work will be preserved.”
Eleanor nodded with a fake sad smile. “His life-project shouldn’t accumulate dust in the basement or a self-storage facility. It would be a shame if no one ever saw or appreciated his ground-breaking research.” She pushed to her feet and took her plate to the sink. “If I want to be done today, I’d better get back to work.”
“You can come back tomorrow. No need to rush it.”
So far, no one had shown up to arrest her or drag her away, so it was safe to assume that the house wasn’t being watched, but Eleanor didn’t want to push her luck.
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather finish everything tonight. Do you want me out of here by a certain time?”
The woman was so nice and accommodating that Eleanor didn’t need to use compulsion to get her to cooperate. So far, she hadn’t refused a single suggestion that Eleanor had made.
Bella waved a hand in dismissal. “Stay as long as you need. I’m going to bed around nine, but you are welcome to continue. If you get hungry or thirsty, just help yourself to whatever there is in the kitchen.”
“Thank you.”
After finding nothing interesting in the safe, and no journal lying around or hidden in one of the boxes, Eleanor had come up with the idea to scan everything and make a flash drive copy for herself. The information she was looking for was probably scattered between the boxes, but there was no way she could read everything even if she took a week to do so.
Simmons’s home office had a printer that was also a scanner, and she’d found a new flash drive in one of the desk drawers that was still in its original store packaging.
She had all she needed to walk away from there with all of Simmons’s years of research.
It was a treasure trove of information.
Despite what Simmons and Roberts had thought, her reason for joining the government program hadn’t been the money. That was only what she’d told them so they wouldn’t watch her too closely. She could have made millions on the stock market, or even billions by selling high-ticket items like enriched uranium to the Russians or technology to the Chinese. With her talent, she could easily get the supply and just as easily create the demand.
Hell, she could have become the next President if she wanted.
The sky was the limit.
But knowing where her talent came from was more important to her.
What made her different?
And the only way to find out was to have access to others like her. Regrettably, Simmons had been immune to her mind tricks and had kept her on a tight leash, and Roberts had gotten rid of her at his earliest convenience.
Damn. She should have anticipated his move.
Except, her talent didn’t make her any smarter, and both Simmons and Roberts had IQs much higher than hers.
Done with yet another box, Eleanor moved it to the stack of those she’d already scanned and brought one more to the desk. The scanner could take only fifty pages at the time, and it wasn’t fast, which left her with a lot of time to read things that caught her interest.
Luckily for her, Simmons’s handwriting had been neat, and she didn’t need to struggle too hard to understand it. The contents, though, were a different matter. She had a feeling that he was writing some of the stuff in code because it didn’t make sense to her.
No matter. She could decipher it