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You should set up a deadline for your vampire guest to depart your house. Vampires are creatures of habit. Unless you specifically order them off of your couch, they will not leave.
—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
“Must you torture the boy?” I asked, turning on Cal as we heard Ben’s car engine start.
“Yes, it’s a rite of passage,” he said, nodding emphatically while I flopped onto the couch. “Your threat to show up at the drive-in wearing your bathrobe was particularly inspired.”
He sat on the opposite end of the couch, relaxing into the cushions. It struck me as odd that we hadn’t shared this room since his first night in the house. It seemed so long ago that I was staring down at a pale, gaunt stranger whom I didn’t quite trust.
I wasn’t sure I trusted him entirely now.
I cleared my throat and slipped my feet into his lap, hoping that maybe treating him like furniture would make him less intimidating. “For a teenage girl, fear of embarrassment is far more powerful than fear of consequences. Gigi didn’t believe I would do it until last year, when I actually pulled into the Dairy Freeze parking lot twenty minutes after her curfew. I didn’t even have to get out of my car. My mere presence was enough to make her jump into Sammi Jo’s car and beg her to floor it.”
“Were you wearing the bathrobe?”
I nodded, grinning. “Over my T-shirt and jeans.”
“You’re going to make a fantastic mother someday,” he said, chuckling.
“I think taking care of one so early in life may have scared me off of having more. I have a child,” I said, nodding toward Gigi’s school bag, slung across the foyer table. “I’ve raised her, just as much as my parents raised me. I’ve loved her, lost sleep worrying about her, taken care of her when she was sick, suffered through embarrassing but informative anatomical conversations. If that doesn’t make her mine, I don’t know what would. And at least I got to skip the messy-diaper-and-two-A.M.-feeding phase.”
Cal seemed to be mulling that information carefully, so I added, “Now that we’ve hashed out my numerous issues, what are you doing tonight?”
Cal frowned. “More research. I’ve been trying to track Blue Moon and its various dummy fronts. Whoever set this up knows exactly how to put up as many paper shields as possible.”
“What about the employees at the synthetic-blood plant? Surely they didn’t just agree to put experimental additives in their product without so much as a meeting.”
“The arrangements were made by one employee, Margaret Rimes, Nocturne’s director of product development—not unusual considering it was a relatively minor change to the formula. Her notes show that she met with the Blue Moon representatives at their offices.”
“The abandoned office park?”
“Most likely dressed up with rented furnishings,” he agreed. “Ms. Rimes seemed pleased with the company’s work. Her supervisors stated nothing seemed amiss about her reports.”
“What does Ms. Rimes have to say about it?” I asked.
“Nothing. Ms. Rimes died in a car accident a month ago. She lost control of her car. It flipped and rolled one hundred yards down an embankment, then caught fire.”
“Let me guess, this took place late at night on a remote stretch of highway? Because it’s sounding less and less like an accident.”
“Convenient car accidents can solve a lot of problems.”
“Later, I’m going to Google how to check my brakes for tampering,” I muttered. “Give me the lab results. I had to take a lot of organic chemistry in college, so there’s a good chance I’ll understand some of it. It might help to have fresh eyes.”
“Please, take it.” He shoved the files in my direction unceremoniously. We sat there, sprawled on the couch, reading paperwork. I’d broken out several of my mother’s books to try to interpret the different lab reports. And then I broke out some Twizzlers, which Cal insisted I put away, because seeing me “orally toy with sucrose-based whips” was too distracting.
I told him he should be happy I didn’t go for the Blow Pops.
He made me face in the opposite direction.
Despite this refreshing change of perspective, I couldn’t make much sense of the lab reports. The analysis of the poisoned vampire’s blood showed compounds I’d never heard of and chemical traces that didn’t make sense. For instance, there were healthy amounts of silicic acid and saponins, consistent with extract of lungwort. But lungwort had astringent properties used to treat lung infections. Then there were traces of thymol, a natural antifungal that served as the active ingredient in most mouthwashes. Apparently, our culprit wanted the vampires disabled with healthy, minty-fresh breath.
I could not think of any possible reason for lungwort or balm plants to be used in a poison that was supposed to drive vampires crazy. The chemist who came up with this was either brilliant or brilliantly disturbed.
I flipped to the last page of the report and zoned in on one word. Aconitine. Huge amounts of aconitine. My first botany professor spent three days talking about the elegant “Queen of Poisons” derived from aconite, also known as wolfsbane or monkshood.
Dr. Bailey had been a big murder-mystery fan. He went on and on about the various people who had tried to bump off loved ones and not-so-loved ones with aconitine … Victims experienced numbness and tingling in the extremities, and if the dose was large enough, they felt burning pain followed by paralysis, then lung and heart failure. Dr. Bailey used aconite as an example of why we had to respect all plants, even the pretty ones, because they could be the deadliest.
Some ancient cultures used aconitine in battle to tip their spears and arrows, a sort of double whammy for those who survived wartime impalement. Cal should have found this interesting. But he seemed to be concentrating awfully hard on tax paperwork for Blue Moon, and if I interrupted, he might try to explain it to me.
