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 Prologue
"Hey, Baker! You give her the seven o'clock meds yet?"
Don swung his legs from where they'd been propped on his desk, knocking the tower of
empty soda cans from the corner. "Yes. I did. At seven o'clock. Check the sheet."
Leave it to Sanjay to ask a stupid question
. Don shook his head and watched the new guy
retrieve the clipboard from the hook beside the door and frown at the words. How he'd
managed to live a hundred years was a mystery. Hell, Don had had close scrapes in his
own twenty years as a vampire, more in his thirty years previous. How someone with
double the lifespan could wander around in a state of constant confusion—
"Then this doesn't make any sense." Sanjay flipped the pages on the clipboard, but it was
clear from the rapidity of his movements that he couldn't possibly be reading the charts. "It
doesn't make any sense!"
"What doesn't make sense?" Always with the drama, these Movement scientists. "I gave
her the meds."
Sanjay's worried brown eyes flicked up to meet Don's gaze." I know you did. I see it on
the chart .But her brain activity
is
… too active. It's like she hasn't been sedated at all."
"Chill out, chill out. There's a reasonable explanation for this." The newly assigned guys
tended to flip out over every little thing, but he'd seen what had happened the last time the
Oracle had shrugged her meds. "I'll feed her another tranquilizer, keep her as down as I
can until morning report. Dr. Jacobson will take it from there."
The meds for the Oracle were fed to her hourly, through a tube that first dissolved the
sedative in warm blood, then injected the whole solution through intravenous lines. It was
so simple. And Don hated it.
It wasn't as if he wanted glory, like the big guys got Or danger, like the assassins. He just
wanted a job that a trained ape couldn't pull off.
Hell, at least he could watch TV between doses. And the faster he got things under
control, the faster he could get back to
Will and Grace
reruns.
Slipping the key to the tank room from his pocket, he slid it through the card reader. The
door popped open with a hiss, and he stepped inside. It was ten degrees colder than the
rest of the facility—the monitoring equipment and various pumps and containment
machinery would overheat if it wasn't—and the rest of the facility was damn cold. Don
rubbed his hands together and blew into them. It smelled like blood in this room, but it
always did.
"Honey, I'm home," he called to the slumped figure of the lab assistant asleep at his
workstation. Couldn't handle the day shift.
The blinding white of the room was interrupted on one side by the huge, dark wall of
glass. Inside, floating suspended in gallons and gallons of blood, was the Oracle. Sleeping,
if the tranquillizer had worked. He popped two tablets out of the meds cabinet and strolled
to the access tube, whistling while he did so, hoping to annoy the lab tech enough that he'd
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wake up. "I hope they check the security tape in the morning. Because you will be so
busted."
The meds pump was attached to the wall just below where the glass ended. He knelt down
and pulled the drawer open. The tablets would be inserted into a clear, glass chamber
inside and dissolved. The whole process was a pain in the ass, but she'd built up a
resistance to nearly all the sedatives that came in liquid form. Don didn't know why it
worked, but he was glad it did. The bitch could get downright nasty when she woke up.
He blinked in disbelief at what he saw in the drawer. The glass chamber, which should
have been empty to receive the next dose, was still filled with blood. Hands trembling, he
followed the intravenous line to where it disappeared into the wall. A chunk of a pill that
hadn't dissolved was stuck in the thin plastic tube, forcing the flow of the blood to a
trickle.
The Oracle had never gotten her sedative.
The rest happened too fast. He looked up, saw the face of the Oracle, pale and inquisitive,
touching the glass. Her eyes were open. He staggered back, screaming, tripped over his
own feet and landed at those of the sleeping lab assistant. Blood pooled around the guy's
sneakers. He wasn't just sleeping.
Don opened his mouth to scream, but the sound never made it out.
Chapter One: Inevitability
"Carrie, I think it's time you call Nathan."
I knew that statement would come, sooner or later. I'd just been hoping it would be much,
much later.
We were lounging in Max's bedroom, the only room in his spacious, opulently furnished
condo that had a television. For the past three weeks, all we'd done was lie around during
the days and prowl various blues clubs at night. It wasn't as though I hadn't had time to
talk to Nathan. I just hadn't wanted to.
When I didn't answer, Max sighed heavily. He folded his arms and leaned against the
carved headboard of his antique bed, the only piece of furniture in the room that wasn't
modern. He seemed strange and anachronistic on it. Having been turned in the late
seventies, Max was the youngest vampire I knew. Besides myself, of course. He'd adapted
to the changing times much more easily than some vampires did. Max kept his sandy-
blond hair cut short and spiky, and his uniform of T-shirts and jeans helped him blend so
perfectly with the twenty-something population of Chicago, I forgot at times that he was
really old enough to be my biological father.
Clearly, he was about to pull chronological rank. "It's been almost a month now. I don't
mind you crashing here. Hell, most nights you've been one mojito away from a rebound
fling, and being the only male here, I'm digging the odds. But Nathan is my friend. If
you're splitting up permanently, he deserves to know."
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I refused to argue that the only thing my sire and I had between us was the blood tie, our
weird psychological link that made us privy to each other's thoughts and emotions. Even
that didn't connect us so much, lately. Nathan seemed to be blocking me from his mind.
The few times I'd tried to communicate with him, I'd gotten only terse, vague answers. I
supposed it was better than begging me to come back, but it stung nonetheless.
Still, Max wouldn't take simple logic for an answer. The many, many times I'd tried to
explain my nonrelationship with Nathan, Max had refused to see reason. "He wouldn't
have asked you to stay if he didn't love you," he'd insisted. "Just because he doesn't admit
it doesn't mean it's not true."
"Oh, kind of like you and Bella?" I'd quipped, effectively ending the conversation. I should
have cut Max a little more slack. After all, he had just gone through a nasty breakup
himself, no matter how he denied it. Obviously, he had transferred the situation with Bella
onto Nathan and me to avoid dealing with his feelings.
"I don't think I can handle talking to him right now," I said, knowing full well how lame
that sounded.
"It'll only get worse the longer you wait." Max knew he had a perfectly valid point. I could
tell from the gleam of triumph in his blue eyes. "And if it's horrible, so what? We're going
down to Navy Pier tonight. You can drown your sorrows in cotton candy. No one can be
sad with cotton candy."
I raised one eyebrow, "Not even a vampire with a profoundly screwed up love life?"
"Cotton candy is to vampire suffering as kryptonite is to Superman." He reached for the
cordless phone on the nightstand and handed it to me. "Call him."
Helpless, I looked from the alarm clock to the phone. The days had gotten longer. Though
the sun wasn't down yet in Chicago, it was almost nine Michigan time. Nathan would be
getting ready to open the store. If I called now we wouldn't have long to talk. That was a
good thing, considering I had no clue what I would say to him.
I took the phone and punched in the number, a pang of homesickness assailing me as I
imagined Nathan navigating the cluttered living room to get to the phone in the kitchen.
An overwhelming desire to be home again gripped me, and my heart pounded in my chest
in anticipation of speaking to him. The line clicked and I wet my lips, preparing to answer
his "Hello?"
"Nathan Grant's residence," a sleepy, female voice purred over the line.
As quickly as my heart had warmed to the prospect of speaking to Nathan, it froze again
with the realization of who this was.
"Hello?" she asked, the word marked with a distinct Italian accent. "Is anyone there?"
Bella.
With shaking hands, I hung up the phone. I couldn't look at Max. How would I break it to
him that Bella, the only woman he'd ever had feelings for, no matter how he tried to deny
them, had apparently extended her stay at Nathan's apartment by a good three weeks?
I was having a hard enough time explaining it myself. My mind jumped from one
possibility—Bella's employers, the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, had
discovered she'd helped us find a cure for Nathan, leaving her with no job or residence—
to the next—she'd missed her plane and had to wait for a much, much later flight—but
none of them dislodged the sick feeling in my stomach.
"Carrie, what's wrong?" Max frowned at me as though he'd be able to discern my thoughts
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