henri dunn 01 - immortality cure Read Free Page B

are the windows to the soul, blood is an HDMI cable.
    But for that ability to linger in me now was both startling and wonderful. I’d thought all the vampirism was gone from my system, burned away by Neha’s Cure. And yet, if I could still connect to someone through their blood, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. A spark of hope ignited somewhere inside me that maybe the Cure hadn’t been as thorough or complete as I’d previously thought.
    The acid on my tongue burned like expired orange juice or really shitty lemon-flavored vodka. I suspected this was something my residual vampire could sense: something was wrong about the blood. Then it clicked. “Ray was high. I think he’d taken your drug, Lemondrop.”
    Neha’s frown deepened. “Ray liked pot, but he never did drugs in the lab. He definitely never took Lemondrop. We had a rule not to sample the product. Everyone in the drug business knows that never ends well.”
    “Can you test his blood to check?”
    Neha hesitated and then nodded sharply. She put on gloves, pulled a syringe out of the drawer and bent the body forward. She pulled his t-shirt up and stuck the syringe somewhere in his behind, where the remaining blood in his body had pooled. She came up with a syringe full of dark liquid and took it back to her work space, clearing away the broken glass.
    “What do we do with the body?” she asked.
    Back when I was a vampire, I’d only killed about once every two weeks. Most vampires don’t need more blood that that. And if they do, a lot of them prefer to get it from various sources. Blood banks work, but it doesn’t taste great. Mortal companions are common. But so is drinking from drunks who will write the mark off as a hickey the next day, or finding some other way to get small tastes of blood while leaving the victims alive and unaware of what happened. Disposing of bodies is a pain in the ass, even if you’re immortal. Most vampires try to avoid dealing with the hassle as much as possible.
    As a human being who couldn’t even carry the damn thing, the difficulty level went up a notch or two. I was going to have to MacGyver my way through body disposal.
    “Do you have large plastic trash bags?” I asked.
    Neha nodded and took off her gloves. She walked to the back of the lab and through the doorway to the “break room.” I followed. She pulled a box of black plastic bags from under the sink. There was a supply closet across from the break room’s fridge, next to a door to the server room, and after a moment of searching through bottles of cleaner and packages of sponges, I found a roll of duct tape.
    I duct-taped bags together and laid the sheet on the floor. Then, wearing latex gloves, I rolled Ray off his chair onto the plastic and wrapped him up. I’m making it sound easy, but it wasn’t. Ray was stiff and heavy, although he’d been dead long enough that rigor had started to let up and he wasn’t as stiff as he might have been. I got him wrapped in trash bags and tape, so at least he was covered, but he was still the obvious shape of a human body.
    Neha pulled out some industrial-strength cleaner that could get the blood out without leaving traces for black lights and other tools used to detect bodily fluids and then frowned at the scene. “There must be someone to call for this sort of cleanup,” she said.
    “There are services,” I said. “But I can’t help you there.”
    Some vampires disagree, but I’ve always believed that taking a life is a Big Deal, capital letters and all. I don’t regret more than one or two kills in my life, and after the first messy one, I never killed without purpose. I tried never to kill someone who hadn’t done things heinous enough that they should die for them. To me, part of taking it seriously and not making the decision to end a life lightly was being fully responsible for deposing of the corpses myself.
    I stared at Ray’s wrapped body and considered my options. I was loath to admit it, but