Wonderful friends!! I am so sorry I have been totally absent since last spring – things have been so crazy around here. I'm sure you're not surprised. This is the LONG awaited chapter 16, which I hope will both soothe your desires for more and excite you once again about our intrepid doctor, Lana, and all the trials she must go through. Quick refresher: Lana was a nanny who completed medical school, but never finished her internship because she was tired of the rat race, the distrust of patients, and something else, deeper, that nagged at her. She moved to the city, left her cheating fiancé, and worked as a nanny until one day she was drawn into the world of vampires. Prince Theo of New York asked her to be his vampire physician, and after working with both vampires and werewolves she is thoroughly embroiled in the controversy about a mysterious plague that is killing vampires, the involvement of the FBI Shadow Division, and the involvement of one honest agent, Julian, with whom she has traveled to DC. There she has begun to discover the involvement of certain Ancient Vampires and their vendettas. Please please let me know what you think, and leave me many comments, send me many messages, and vote!! Xxoo _bloom_
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It was hot. The air was full of the crooning of the crowd, the syllables and coughs and gasps all surging together into a single moan that grew louder and quieter as if conducted by a single invisible baton. They were my own clamorous orchestra, chanting along as I built up the nerve to follow Julian's instructions and break into the lab he had traced the plague back to. He had pulled a few strings and gotten me an access card to the building, but I'd be on my own once I got inside. I wiped sweat away from my eyes, unsure whether I was perspiring due to my anxiety or the fact that I hadn't actually been out in the sun in weeks. Julian and I had decided that it made the most sense to break in during the day when I could hide in plain sight. I thought back to all the spy movies I had ever seen, and tried to emulate those suave and collected spies. I started giggling, the absurdity of my situation showing itself in this small moment. Catching my reflection in the window of a shop I stopped for a moment, looking at my drabness, my long, limp hair, the basic khakis and button up I was wearing, the darkness under my eyes. When had this happened? Halfway between pretending I was a nanny before I even met Theo and pretending I was a superhero-spy-goddess? I shook my head and kept walking, feeling the stretch of my muscles and the rush of adrenaline surging up between my breasts, threading itself around my lungs and up into my throat. I took a deep breath and stretched out my lungs, pushing everything out of my chest. My watch read 2pm, and I walked up to the door of a non-descript office building. Nothing set it apart from any other downtown building on this street close to the center of DC, except for the fans and exhaust chimneys that scattered the roof. No one would have noticed that, though, unless they had been doing research on the building for the past few days like I had been.
After we discovered that the plague that had been killing vampires up and down the east coast was most likely started by Iskur, an ancient vampire sired by Anu (who himself was one of The Top, the most powerful vampires alive), Julian used his FBI contacts to follow the link to Ishkur and find the building where the bacterium was being crafted. So here I was, supposed to get in somehow and put an end to all of this with enough data to prove Ishkur's guilt, as well as all the info we needed to craft an antidote. Sure. And then I'd solve world hunger, while I was at it.
The door was heavy, and when I swung it back it rushed out to me in a wave of air conditioning. I flashed my card at the main desk and walked straight to the elevators. Okay. I stood anxiously, trying to push calmness into my body. The elevator carried me quickly to the seventh floor, which stretched out to my right and left as an empty marble hallway. The walls were a latticed pattern of steel and smoked glass, and each of my footsteps echoed terribly. I fingered a crumpled post-it note in my pocket—Julian had scratched onto it the number 7783. When I found door number 7783 I knocked twice, but there was no answer. I knocked a third time, but when no one answered, I let myself in.
Immediately I felt like I was in another building entirely. Maybe another world. Instead of the same marble, glass, and steel design of the hallway outside, this room was entirely paneled in an auburn mahogany. Hanging by copper wires were clear glass globes which in turn connected to long tubes and beakers bubbling with substances of all colors. A giant black table stood waist high in the middle of the room, covered in what seemed to be a menagerie of mechanical creatures. Vellum accordions wheezed air through brass canisters, strings of leather hung vials from the ceiling, twisting and untwisting to dip the vials repeatedly into pots of boiling water. One entire wall was covered in shelves crowded with bottles of strange powders and herbs.
My hip bumped a rickety side table, knocking off an oily notebook filled with brown ink scribbles. The author's pen had dripped and sprayed making it difficult to read, but I was able to make out one entry a few pages in.
'May 23rd. I was shown a photo of Elke today, hunched over her desk, writing with focused anger on her face. Today's paper sat on the table next to her, the date clearly visible so as to assure me it is a current photograph and they haven't killed her yet. But as much as it was meant to soothe, it was also meant to threaten, as the panes of the window the photo was taken through were clearly visible. Just remember, it seems to say, even though she's not dead yet, we could make it happen.' Here there was a section completely scratched out, but the entry continued on the next page. 'I've decided to think about Elke, though, instead of their threats. What is she working on there? A treaty with a nearby pack? An apology to another alpha for the foolish mistakes of a young wolf intent on proving himself? Not a single year goes by when one of the young males doesn't do some idiotic thing he thinks will make him daring and attractive to the others. It never works. I remember when—'
The next page was torn out. I ran my fingers down the fringes. Questions began to arc through my brain, building tiny bridges between my thoughts and memories and all this new information. I flipped forward to the next legible page.
'June 7th. Messrs. H------- and E------- visited me today to politely encourage my work. It's not enough, they imply, that I have already crafted a virulent virus that is flooding through the city as we speak. No, it seems it is not moving fast enough. They want more volume. I explained the'
...footsteps shook me from the stranger's craggy handwriting. I tucked the journal into my pocket and crouched down behind a towering pile of books. Two loafer-clad feet entered the room, padding toward the center before pausing. Immediately I tried to pull on my magic, my Khrusos, to make myself invisible, but the loafers crossed the room in two strides and the books in front of me flew against the wall with a smack, a giant hand hanging in the air where they had been. The man towering above me had a solid, broad face with three white, fleshy scars that ran from left his ear to his chin. His eyes were feral and he panted, virile and eager to destroy. I leapt back, knocking into a table and sending a stack of glasses hurtling to the floor. The shattering triggered a shift in the man's face, and he stepped backward, his hands suddenly awkward.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to break anything—" I started, my mind frozen.
"Who are you?" The man growled, the ferocity back in his eyes.
"I—I—" Something stuck in my throat. I could see nothing but this man's furious eyes, deep green and gold, a vein pulsing in his temple, his lips gently parted as he panted. His massive hand was still hovering in front of me, and I noticed a familiar brown ink smudged on his thumb and first two fingers. A part of me fell loose, deep within my chest, and I suddenly felt as if my soul was rushing out of that new hole, that chink in a wall I didn't realize existed. I gasped at the sensation—I had never felt so open, so full. The man's eyes darkened, and as his mouth opened to say something to me, but he snapped his head toward the door instead.
"There's someone coming," he growled, and pushed me toward a closet. "Get in there and stay quiet." I pulled the doors shut on myself and tried to calm my pounding heart. I pulled my Khrusos back out, struggling to control it as my world was unleashed, my body was new, and a deep desire I had never experienced before threatened to collapse me into myself. It sucked the oxygen into itself in between my breasts, pulling on me, my consciousness, my Khrusos, the closet around me. I had never desired, needed, yearned quite so fervently as I did now. I took another deep breath and focused on being quiet. I could deal with these emotions later. The door to the room swung open.
"Dr. Sterling, there's an intruder. You need to go straight away to the safe room on Sublevel 3."
"No." This was the voice of the man who had hidden me.
"Not an option, wolf," came a third voice. "Get down there now."
"No." The silence was full and heavy.
"I said, that's not an option, wo—" there was a shuffle, a thud, and a strangled cry. The voice of the man who hid me came back again.
"I have been holed up here in this godforsaken prison long enough, forced to do your bidding. First you tell me I'm not working hard enough, fast enough, and now you say I need to stop working and go sit underground where I'm surrounded by blood suckers? No."
"You'll be in danger," the first voice came back, hesitant and distant.
"I can handle myself."
There was a shuffle, and then the door slammed shut. The room was silent. I released my shield and collapsed to the floor of the closet. The door swung open and there was the man, Dr. Sterling, staring at me again. A familiar coil of attraction pulled tight in my core, surprising me. This was not the moment to be thinking about getting laid.
"Who are you?" he asked me again. His voice was so soothing I had to fight to focus—something was going on with me that I had never experienced.
"My name is Lana Crane. I'm here to help you."
"Who sent you?"
