AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His name was Jeremy Ewing, and he was currently sitting on a stool, his wrists in cuffs, sniffling and answering questions as Mays’s team went through the lab.
“Be careful with that!” he yelped suddenly, and everybody—including Quincy, who had just picked up a vial of something—froze.
“Me?” she asked, even though nobody else had their hands on anything that seemed likely. Shay and I were going through files, Mays was cataloging bottles of pills, and Ken Jamison was dusting for prints in a cabinet.
“Yes!”
Quincy looked at the vial. It had a cloudy liquid in it. “What is it?”
The scientist, who was a balding white guy probably in his mid-forties or so, swallowed convulsively. “It’s a hormonal mixture. It… produces a radically increased fight response.”
“Like adrenaline?” I asked. I had learned quite a bit more about adrenal responses and the drugs that could increase or decrease them in the past couple months, let me tell you.
“It—not really,” the guy replied. “It’s formulated to target… a specific demographic.”
The pieces clicked. “Vampires,” I said softly, but not so quietly that he didn’t hear me.
“Yes. It—also impacts ghouls. It can be…” He trailed off.
“Fucking deadly?” I suggested, angry now. “Because it makes a vampire want to rip your throat out?”
I hadn’t thought the man could get any more pale, but what little blood was left in his cheeks left them. “It—it was supposed to—”
Then he burst into sobs.
“Nice going, Hart,” Shay muttered next to me.
I wasn’t particularly sympathetic. I set down the file I’d been holding and walked over to Ewing. “Let me tell you something about what this chemical soup of yours does, shall I?” He looked up at me, his grey eyes leaking tears down his cheeks. “It has led to the murder by vampire of at least four shifters. The attempted murder of two more.”
“But—no—we tested it, but—”
“But what?”
He swallowed several times. “Nobody gothurt,” he whispered. “Almost, but the padding...”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I demanded.
And he proceeded to explain that while trying to come up with a formula to counteract the beta blockers, they’d created the stuff in the vial that Quincy had since—very carefully—put back down. But the chemical had killed several rats when they’d given it to them orally and via injection. But then someone had dropped some while prepping a new version for injection and noticed that the rats had become hyperactive.
So they tried using it as the modern chemical nightmare version of smelling salts.
It had increased adrenal responses in their test animals without any severe illness or deaths in that medium, so they’d then moved on to groups of test subjects.
I had a lot of questions about these test subjects, but when I asked where they’d come from, he’d looked confused.
“They volunteer.”
“How?”
“I—don’t know. That’s not our job. There’s another team that does the testing and they report the results. Record them, sometimes.”
“Whoisin charge of that?”
He swallowed. “Jill Fuller.”
“And she is…?”
“Mr. Armstrong’s secretary.”
