“But your technique needs work.” He turned back to me, bringing up my mediocre punches again. “I could give you a few pointers later on. I’ve got gloves and a big mat under my shop.”
My pulse rocketed off into space. Work up a sweat with Shade in his private basement? Yes, please.
I pretended to think about it, then casually said, “Sure. Sounds great.”
He nodded.
My heart pounded. Was that a date?
“I’m licensed in three different types of self-defense,” he added. “Maybe I can teach you something useful for all that not fighting you might be doing another day.”
I arched both brows. Clearly, I was as transparent as my punches. But I’d been pretty straight with Shade, and it didn’t take a genius to look at my torn-up ship and sense that I was in deep shit. His offer just meant he wanted to make sure I could take care of myself. But anything that made my heart flutter the way it did right now… I’d call that a date.
Shade got straight to work as soon as everything was set up and the door people had left, recruiting Jax’s help to hoist some of the heavier tiles into place. He was mostly grunts and grumbles after that and totally focused on the repairs. My usefulness ended at handing Shade a blowtorch once and tossing a water bottle up to Jax. I seemed pretty superfluous to the entire operation and was getting sunburned to boot, so I finally told them to just shout if they needed me and went back inside to check on Fiona’s progress with my blood.
I found her in her lab—nothing surprising there. She was humming, though, which had to have been a first.
“Good mood?” I asked.
“This stuff is fan-freaking-tastic,” she answered without looking up. “I need more as soon as possible. I was about to go find you and ask for it.”
“No problem,” I said with significantly more casualness than I felt. I was pretty conflicted about sticking myself again. “How many bags?”
“Five?” Fiona glanced at me over her shoulder. “You said there was more, right?”
I nodded, but wow, five was a lot. I wasn’t sure how to explain not bringing them all at once, though, so I would probably just need to drink a lot of water and then go buy myself a steak. I knew from experience that I had a higher tolerance than most people for how much blood I could lose, and luckily, bag size had diminished over the years. I could do five without going into shock. I wasn’t so sure about remaining conscious, though.
Moving farther into Fiona’s lab, I approached her workstation for a better look at what she was doing. I saw red-dotted microscope slides, test tubes full of blood, and a pile of scribbled notes that looked totally indecipherable to me. Science had never been my thing.
I leaned my hip against the metal table, feeling its coolness through my pants. “So, what’ve you found?” I asked.
“It’s definitely pure organic,” she said.
“Pure organic,” I echoed. Well, that sounded good. Not souped-up or anything. “And?”
“And the super soldier serum was mixed with a ton of chemical crap to boost strength and stamina. This is just blood. It’s got all the same ingredients as regular human blood.”
Could that be true? Could that be all? Then what the hell had my whole childhood been about?
“But…” she said, drawing out the word.
My stomach clenched, and words like freak and foreign and guinea pig shrieked through my head. “But what?” I cautiously asked.
“The proportions are all off.”
It was easy to act clueless. I was different; that was all I’d ever been told until the day my father decided he’d had enough of my oddities—and my defiance—and threw me out with the space trash.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“White blood cells usually only account for about one percent of our total blood volume. The percentage goes up a bit when you’re sick, to fight infection, but then it goes back to normal again. It’s just a small, albeit important, part of our blood. In this”—Fiona picked up a test tube and swirled the crimson liquid around—“the percentage is up to nearly eighteen. That’s huge. Like mega, massively huge.”
“Holy Sky Mother,” I breathed out. No wonder my father had called me a freak. And no wonder I never got sick. I was a walking immune system.
“Where do you think it comes from?” I asked. “You know, the origin of it?” I dreaded her