Page 111 of The Turning of the Tables

“Anything,” she replied.

“Start up the donut pool again,” I told her. “And tell me the theories.”

“Okay,” she said, sniffling a little. “What’s yours?”

I thought about it. “He could be one of those religious fanatics who thinks that Arcana is a sign of the apocalypse and is trying to bring about the end of the world, but I feel like there’s not a lot of overlap between people who believe that and people with degrees in medicine.” And anesthesiology was an absolute bitch of a specialty. It required precision and intelligence. “Which means that there’s something else going on.”

“There are religious doctors,” Quincy said. “It’s not unheard-of.”

“True, but do you know any who think Arcana is a religious scourge?”

She was quiet for a moment. Then, “No, I don’t. I know doctors who think that people who get Arcana deserve it because they’ve taken too big of risks, but none who take the God angle.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So it has to be something else.”

“Olivia thinks he must have had a lover who got sick and died, and this is some sort of weird revenge thing,” Quincy said.

The idea that the killer was trying to get revenge onsomeonemade sense to me—it must have taken a lot of rage for someone to try so hard to repeatedly infect other people. To use other lives in order to do it—because if he had access to the virus, he could just as easily have chosen to make an explosive device that would simply aerosolize the virus itself.

But he usedpeopleto do it. People who had trusted their lives into his hands—or would have, if they’d gone through with their surgeries.

That was the part that confused me. If his anger had been aimed at specific people—cops or EMTs or even lab techs—he could just as easily have rigged bombs at our places of work. If the target had been individuals, Detective Maza, say, it would have been even easier to track him down at work or even at home.

But the way the bodies had been left, the way they’d been open and accessible to the general public, that was a completely different thing altogether. If it was revenge, it was revenge on the whole damn city of Richmond. And that’s probably why he’d kept going, even after successfully infecting an entire crime scene team.

And that was alotof rage.

Rage that might come as the result of the death of a loved one—so Olivia maybe wasn’t wrong.

But that felt too romantic to me. Maybe I’m a cynic, but none of this could have been born of love.

I wouldn’t wish this shit on my worst enemy. Not that I have any.

Not even Devin. I don’tlikeDevin, but I don’t think of him as anenemy.

What would make me wish Arcanavirus on other people? Not having it, that’s for damn sure. But I’d had a nasty case. Some people had much less severe illness, evenif they ended up transforming at the end of it. But someone who worked in medicine would know how bad it could get.

What would make me hate someone enough that I’d want to inflict Arcana on them?

Certainly, if they’d killed someone I loved—like Noah. So maybe Olivia was right, and it was a lover or spouse who had died. Or maybe a child.

Or maybe it wasn’t apersonhe’d lost.

“He’s not a shifter, is he?” I asked Quincy. If he was, he’d have to be registered, as I knew all too well.

“No,” she answered. “Not a vamp or a ghoul either.” Not something she had to say—neither could work in the human medical profession legally after their transformations. I knew an ex-surgeon—well, ex-human-surgeon—who had gone into veterinary medicine when his transformation into a vampire had pushed him out of human medicine.

“Human?”

“Looks human,” she replied. Which meant he could have been an Arc-human of some sort. The House of Delegates had tried to pass a law requiring all Arcanids and all Arc-humans to register, but that one had failed. Orcs, fauns, elves, vampires, and ghouls—or so the argument went—didn’t need to register because one look at them told you what they were. Only shifters didn’tlookinhuman, so clearly we were more dangerous because we could pass as human. And, for some reason, that was simply too upsetting a thought for the legislature to accept.

Arc-humans had just barely escaped the same fate, since genetically they stillwerehuman, and we weren’t.

Would becoming an Arc-human lead someone to the same kind of bitterness and resentment that I currently felt at being a shifter? Not that I’m saying I want to go out andkill people, because I definitely don’t. I don’t even want to wish Arcanavirus on people—even the stupid ones who think it’s a divine scourge or won’t infect them because they have money and blue blood.

But if your whole life was upended, if no one you knew or cared about understood what you were going through—I had Noah and Elliot and even Hart to a certain extent. They’d all had Arcana, and it had changed their lives as it had changed mine.

But what if Noah hadn’t been a shifter? What if I’d also never met Elliot? Or never gotten to know Hart?