Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [34]
“That letter you included certainly implied as much. Speaking of which, where’s Cal? Is he lurking around here someplace, listening in?”
Translation: Does he sleep in here with you? Just curious.
“Cal is in his room next door.” Ah. So that’s why it took him so long to deliver the phone call.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to pry. I’m just—” I was going to say “paranoid” as a plausible excuse, but he cut me off by saying, “Careful.”
“Careful, sure. I like that word better.”
“You can hardly be blamed. It’s a dangerous line of work you’re in. I suppose it must be very exciting.”
I saw what he was trying to do, divert the subject from my line of questioning, but I wouldn’t have it. I said, “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s disgusting, and sometimes it’s boring. But sometimes, yes. Exciting. Now tell me, Ian, if you would please. You weren’t alone on this island, were you? There were other vampires there, according to what you gave me—or at the very least, there were other subjects present.”
“There were … other subjects, yes.”
I noted his failure to use the word vampires, and I hoped he’d take another drink or two to loosen himself up, or we’d never get anywhere.
I was about to ask in a more pointed fashion when he sensed my impatience and added, “I can’t tell you anything about them. I couldn’t see them. One of them was a vampire, yes, but the other two—I’m not sure. And there were new additions by the time I escaped—one more vampire, but I didn’t recognize anyone else’s scents. They could’ve been anything, or something altogether outside my experience.”
“Ooh,” I said, not for being impressed, but for being distressed. “Wow. The implications of that. Huh.” If the military knew about vampires, and it knew about a few of the other less conventional brands of humanity, too, then what was the big plot? They obviously weren’t trying to recruit us, which was sort of a shame. I imagined a full unit of vampire soldiers and I got a little giddy, and distracted.
Bad idea, maybe. But it’d be epic, wouldn’t it?
“Yes, the implications. They’re quite alarming, if you ask me.”
“But I am asking you, Ian. I’m asking you to tell me what you know, and what you learned about the project, and how you left it. I’m sorry if you feel like I’m prying, but I think it’s important that I know how you escaped.”
“I can’t imagine what that has to do with anything,” he said, but I could tell I’d worn him down. His words said “No, and go away.” But his tone said, “If it’ll get you off my back, fine.”
He sighed and folded his hands in his lap, though he twisted them together as the story began to unspool.
“It was summer and quite warm, I remember that much. And I could smell the ocean, but then again I always could. The island was scarcely three miles long and a mile wide; regardless of how deeply they kept us underground and isolated, the smell of salt and seabirds always wafted down. They opened doors, they closed doors. The breeze came and went, even in the filtered air down below. After a while it was something I lived for, small and sad as that may sound. I lived to hear the slide of the glass and the peep of the electronic lock, because when the doors opened, I could smell the night outside.
“In time, I could tell when the tide was high or low, just by the scent. I cannot explain how, not in a thousand years. But that awareness, for lack of a better way of putting it … that awareness was the first sign that something was changing.”
“In the laboratory?” I asked, not sure where he was headed with this.
“No. In me. And I’m sorry, but I can’t be more precise. I can’t give words to something like this. I can only describe what happened, I can’t tell you how it happened. And what happened was that, at first, I could sense the tides outside—just by the smell of the air the workers brought downstairs with them when the