AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We will.” Sonja nodded grimly and looked at her fiancée. “Honey, you go get a Think-me and start calling everyone you can from the PR and Marketing department. Clear, you call the peeps from accounting.”
Clear nodded. “I will. What will you do? Are you going to call Melanie?” he asked hopefully.
Sonja shook her head.
“Not yet—we need to know what’s going on first. I’m going to go to the Sacred Grove and talk to the priestesses and see if the punch affected the Kindred women like it did us human women.”
“Good.” Strong nodded. “Send everyone you can to me at the med center for a blood test. Let’s go!”
17
“Now what did you say was going on again?” Liv, who was one of the human doctors working at the Med Center, asked Strong.
“We think the punch from the Christmas party for the Accounting, Marketing and PR, and Administration departments was spiked with some kind of drug,” Strong explained. He was watching the monitor of his chemical analyzer carefully as he spoke. The very first thing he had done when he got into the lab at the back of the Med Center was to draw a sample of his own blood and feed it into the machine.
“Has someone told Sylvan?” Liv asked, frowning.
“No one had to—I’ve been seeing patients all morning reporting strange symptoms.” Commander Sylvan, who was the head of the Kindred High Council and also a doctor, came into the lab as well. He looked at Strong. “Do you have anything yet?”
“Maybe…” Strong frowned at the readout of the analyzer. “There’s definitely something strange going on, but it’s hard to tell because my body has already broken down the chemicals we were given quite a bit.” He shook his head. “I need samples from some of the females who were affected. I don’t think they were able to process whatever it was in the punch as effectively as the males who drank it were.”
“It’s too bad you can’t just analyze the punch itself,” Liv pointed out. “But it’s probably all gone and the punchbowl cleaned out at this point.”
“No, it’s not!” Sonja pushed her way into the lab, holding an enormous crystal punchbowl. She put it down on a free space on the counter with a thunk and sighed. “Oof—that was heavy! Luckily, this hasn’t been rinsed out yet. But I have something even better for you.”
“You do?” Strong was already dipping a syringe into the sticky red residue at the bottom of the large bowl to draw up a sample, but he looked up to see what Sonja was talking about.
“Yes, I do—I have Patient Zero.” Sonja turned to the doorway where a figure dressed all in white was hovering hesitantly. “Come on in,” she said, beckoning with one hand. “Don’t be shy—nobody here is going to bite you.”
The person came out of the shadows and Strong saw that she was a priestess from the Sacred Grove. She was wearing a long, white robe belted with a pale green sash—the sign of a novice who had just entered the order.
Also, though there were emerald green streaks in her long blonde hair, the whites of her eyes were still white rather than green, which meant she hadn’t been a priestess very long. Priestesses who had been in the service of the Goddess for an extended period of time had the signature green-within-green eyes which were impossible to miss.
“Come on,” Sonja urged her again. She turned to Liv. “I think she’s the first one who drank the punch.” She took the shy priestess’s hand and brought her closer to the human doctor. “Tell her what you told me, Ellilah,” she said encouragingly, pronouncing the girl’s name “Ah-lee-lah.” “Don’t be afraid.”
“I…I came to the party last night with a few of the other novices, even though we were not supposed to leave the Sacred Grove.” The girl spoke in a soft, trembling voice, looking down at her hands as she talked. “I know this was wrong and I ask forgiveness.”
“Don’t worry, hon.” Liv put a hand on her arm gently. “Nobody is going to punish you.”
“The Priestess Superior will when she knows what I have done,” the girl whispered. “Although I feel I have already been punished.”
“Don’t worry about her. Just tell the nice doctor what happened,” Sonja urged gently.
“There was a male at the party,” Ellilah whispered. “He was tall and dark—at first I thought he was a Beast Kindred because of his black hair and beard—which was braided at the end. But his eyes were not golden. It was dark and I couldn’t tell what color they were, but they didn’t glow gold. They—” She shook her head. “I…I am getting away from the point, forgive me.”
“It’s all right,” Liv said gently. “Just tell it however you want to, hon.”
“The male, he…he had on a red hat trimmed in white fur. With a fur tassel on the end,” the priestess went on.
