Page 57 of Booked for Murder

“There’s only one podiatrist within three blocks of here, which is what I’ve roughly determined your walking distance to be. I had my doctor call your doctor already about the prescriptions. Your doctor is much happier with me than with you right now. I’m sure the photographs will make it to your doctor. I’ve decided I’ll be heavily involved with your treatment plan.”

Right. Nothing I said would change his mind, especially as he rightly understood I’d done as I had for his sake. Accepting what I couldn’t change would make the rest of my life a lot easier. “Fine. I can work with the blood while my foot is on ice. Right now, my treatment plan is non-existent because I have three weeks to remember how to shoot well enough to qualify.”

“You can’t even stand without your cane, Janette.”

“You’ll be absolutely surprised to learn how long I can stand on one foot.”

“Janette.”

“What? It’s true. I have to for work. I can’t rest weight on it all day. I’d have no foot at all. Even with the boot, my left foot takes the brunt of my weight all day when I can’t sit. That’s just how it is. I’m going to have to be on it a lot, so don’t try to make the situation fit your comfort zone. It just won’t. I don’t have the luxury of time right now.” I hopped to the couch with the help of my cane and eased onto it. Before I could go through the hassle of figuring out how to get my leg elevated without killing myself, Bradley set Ajani aside, took hold of my calf, and eased my leg up. “Cushion, Ren?”

The bodyguard piled two of my throw pillows under my foot and gathered up the ice packs. “How do you situate this mess?”

I pointed at the top of my foot. “I usually just put a tea towel over my foot and plunk the ice packs on. It generally works.”

After a few minutes of experimenting, Bradley and Ren situated the ice packs to cover as much of my foot as possible. After they had everything situated to their liking, Ren retrieved a small white cooler from near the door and set it on the arm of the couch beside me.

“It’s drug-contaminated human blood. My doctor acquired it. It’s a full pint, and it was taken from someone who died from an overdose. I was asked if you could isolate the drug in the blood because there has been trouble with it in the labs. It’s not something they’ve seen before. If you can isolate the toxin, then it can be studied.”

I reached for the cooler, opened it, and peeked inside. The plastic bag of blood had a warning label marking it as contaminated, and a collection of sterilized tubes and a pack of lab gloves also waited inside. I grabbed the box, snapped on a pair of gloves, and lifted out the vials. “Bradley, there are masks in my bedroom on the top drawer of my dresser, right-hand side. Please bring three.”

“You want us wearing masks?” he asked, his brow furrowing. While he hesitated, Ren went into my bedroom and returned with my box of masks.

Ajani took that as her cue to get the hell out of Dodge, and she bolted for my bedroom. While I appreciated that I’d convinced her the gloves and masks meant it was time to hide, I couldn’t help but feel guilty.

I hated yelling at my cat, especially when she didn’t understand it was for her safety.

“If this toxin killed somebody and they don’t know what it is, I have no idea what will happen when it’s exposed to oxygen. Let’s not contaminate the samples, and let’s safeguard ourselves a little. Wear gloves, too. Mostly, the masks keep us from contaminating the samples. Since he sent this many vials, he probably wants a full sample set, which is a good way to test if my ability is working properly.” I grabbed a mask and put it on, making sure to adjust it over my nose and beneath my chin properly before helping Bradley and Ren put theirs on. “Here are the rules. Do not touch your mask or face. Yes, it’s hard to breathe in these. Inhale through your nose and exhale slowly from your mouth. Point your breath down if you can manage. That’ll help a little. This shouldn’t take long, but I’d rather we don’t get exposed to whatever killed this guy. Since the doctor sent it in a cooler rather than with a hazmat team, they don’t think it’s that toxic, but why take any unnecessary risks?”

“Right,” Bradley agreed. “What do you want us to do?”

“Watch. If I pass out, that’s probably a good time to call your doctor for medical advice. Other than that, let me do my job.” I leaned forward, set the vial stand on my coffee table, and examined the blood bag, nodding my approval over the line installed that’d allow me to control how blood left the bag without magic. I held the tubing up so gravity would keep the blood where it belonged and opened the line.

Easing my hold on my magic took work, but as I didn’t want the contaminated blood to overwhelm me, I took my time. Much like with Bradley’s mother, I detected the abnormality in the blood right away, although I’d never sensed anything like it, as though someone had mixed oil or gasoline into the blood. Somehow slick, somehow hot, and somehow greasy, the sensation made my skin crawl. “There’s definitely something in here, and it is not what I’d call pleasant.”

To test my general control, I separated a single drop of blood from the bag and worked it through the tubing. In some ways, my magic shared parallels with a telekinetic’s, as I could force blood to freeze and hover in the air. Unlike a telekinetic, I couldn’t do much more than that. I figured my control over blood was so absolute I could defy the laws of gravity and physics.

I directed the sample to the first vial, lowered it in, and concentrated, seeking to isolate the slick, hot, and greasy elements out of the blood. As though the blood found the substance as vile as I did, it separated with startling ease, leaving a gray-green liquid to splash into the vial. The color puzzled me, as I hadn’t noticed any discoloration to the victim’s blood.

I repeated the process with a larger sample of blood, transferring the cleaned blood to a different vial.

By the time I’d purified the pint of blood, six of my vials contained the substance, which I capped as tightly as I could. I filled one vial with the pure blood before regarding the bag with narrowed eyes. I returned the rest of the blood to the bag and waited.

Within minutes, the slick, hot, and greasy sensation returned.

My eyes widened. “It’s replicating.”

At first, both men stared at me in silence. When I’d been in Bradley’s employ, he’d loved watching disaster films of all stripes, and as often as not, disaster began in a lab with contaminated samples of some sort.

Had it felt like a virus, I would’ve stopped working with it from the moment I’d detected the risk.

What sort of inorganic substances, like the one locked in the vials, replicated? What sort of vile magic fueled it? Was it magic at all?

“What do you mean by replicating?” Bradley asked.

“I mean I purified all the blood I removed from the bag, put it in the vials, and when I returned it to the contaminated bag, it infected the blood again. It doesn’t feel like a virus, but it’s definitely behaving like a virus. It’s replicating in the blood. Please tell me they’re handling these samples with a hazmat suit. I don’t know what this stuff is. I’ve never seen it before.” I’d worked with viruses and bacteria before, and the substance didn’t feel alive, not like viruses and bacteria did. “Maybe it’s replicating through some magical method? I can somewhat detect living organisms in the blood stream. I can pull white blood cells out of the red, and I can even isolate viruses and bacteria when I really want to. I used that same principle here, but this isn’t any type of virus or bacteria I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t feel like a living organism at all.”

“Magic?” Bradley asked, and he donned a pair of gloves and lifted one of the gray-green vials from the rack, holding it up for a better look. “Ah. It has a history.”