Dr. Lipton took her temperature and engaged in various and assorted poking and prodding.
She was pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way with brown hair, brown eyes, and a trim figure encased in jeans, a T-shirt, and a lab coat.
“I’m going to level with you, Jenna,” she said finally. “I think Richart’s right. I’ll run a blood test to be sure, but I already know what it’s going to tell me.”
Jenna broke out in a cold sweat as fear rippled through her. “I’m becoming a vampire?”
“Yes.”
She would suffer progressive brain damage and go insane.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Lipton offered with genuine remorse. “There really isn’t any sugarcoating this. I can’t even give you hope that you might be a gifted one. Nearly all gifted ones have black hair and brown eyes. A few, like me, have brown hair. But never red.”
“I’m a brunette. I dye my hair.”
Dr. Lipton studied her. “Have you noticed any special gifts or abilities? Know the phone is going to ring before it does?”
“No.”
“Know what someone else is feeling? Hear their thoughts?”
“No. I don’t have any special abilities, Dr. Lipton.”
“Melanie.”
“I’m screwed, aren’t I, Melanie?”
She sighed. “Yes. As I said, I’ll run some tests to be sure. See how far the infection has progressed. Take a look at your DNA and see if it bears the extra memo groups that would identify you as a gifted one and protect you from the brain damage. But I’m not very hopeful.”
“I can’t believe this.” Her mind raced as nightmare images unfolded before her. John having to watch his mother descend into madness. Jenna having to leave to ensure she wouldn’t harm him. Richart watching and waiting for her to reach the point of no return, then taking her life.
What would it do to him to watch her turn into one of the monsters he hunted? Would she have to leave him, too?
Richart paced back and forth in front of the door to the infirmary.
John stood nearby, looking up and down the hallway, taking in the multitude of guards armed with automatic weapons. Half a dozen stood sentinel near two doors a little farther down.
Dragging his eyes away, John turned to Richart. “What’s in there? What are they protecting?”
“They aren’t protecting what’s in there. They’re protecting everyone out here. Those doors lead to vampires’ apartments.”
John’s eyes widened. “Vampires live here?”
“A couple do, yes. They surrendered instead of following the example of their brethren and fighting to the death. They’ve been working with Dr. Lipton and the other doctors in hopes of finding a cure for the virus or some treatment that might prevent the brain damage it causes in humans.”
“How’s that going?”
Richart shook his head and lied. “I don’t know.” They had been searching for a cure for thousands of years with no success.
John swallowed. “If Mom becomes a vampire, is she going to go crazy and want to hurt people?”
Richart nodded, throat too thick to speak.
Face grim, John resumed his perusal of the hallway. “What is this place?”
“Network headquarters, the hub of the East Coast division of the human network that aids us.”
“Why are there no windows?”
“Because we’re five stories underground.”
Minutes passed.
“I don’t understand how Mom could be infected if you didn’t bite her.”
“I’ve been thinking on that.” Fulminating over it more like. “It has to be a member of your study group.”
John’s head whipped around. “What?”
“It can’t be anyone at her job. When bitten, she would’ve blacked out and not made it home. She would’ve woken up on the floor in the store’s back room or her car or somewhere she shouldn’t be and realized she’d lost time, that she couldn’t remember how she had gotten there.”
“Wouldn’t the same be true if one of my study partners had bitten her?”
“Not if he did it while she was sleeping. If he came over on a night I wasn’t there and she went to bed early or napped until I finished hunting, he could’ve asked to use your bathroom, snuck into her bedroom, and fed from her without her ever knowing she had been bitten.”
“Shit!”
“I’m guessing you had a study session right before she contracted food poisoning? She always bears your study partners’ scents from brushing shoulders with them and the like. The punctures heal swiftly and the effects of the GHB-like chemical she would’ve been exposed to don’t last long, so I wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss.”
“We thought it was the fast food the group ordered in. . . . Shit! This is my fault?”