Dead Waters - Anton Strout [107]
I stood there, shaking my head at her. “Don’t schools these days offer at least one course on ethics?” I asked.
“I’m afraid an ethical debate would be wasted on this young lady,” the Inspectre said, stepping over to the table. Elyse looked up at him. “Why? Why would you do this?”
None of us understood it, but I think it perplexed the Inspectre even more. He sounded as angry as he was confused.
“Have you seen how many of me there are at New York University?” she shouted. “Never mind the cost. All my little Stepford sister actresses are graduated and up to their implants in debt, and the best that any one of them could land was a tampon commercial!”
“So that’s how you justify all this?” I asked. “So you could do more than commercial work?”
“Think about what we’re talking about here,” she said. “Professor Redfield’s initial vision was revolutionary! Sure, he was using magic to try and bring it about, but it was only over time that he even hinted that there might be some darker purpose at work. And as far as my career, well. . . to be the first actress ever to appear in this type of film? We were taking reality to a whole new level.”
“Congratulations,” Connor said. “You’ve landed yourself on a hit TV show: America’s Most Wanted.”
“Quiet,” the Inspectre said. He leaned over the table. “I couldn’t care less for your vanity, young lady. I want to know why Mason Redfield—a man I considered my brother in arms at one time—why would he do all this?”
Elyse fell silent, letting her head drop. After a while, she looked up. “That, I don’t know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Me, either,” the Inspectre said. He stepped away from the table, disgusted.
Elyse looked up at me. “Sorry we tried to kill you,” she said, “with. . . well, you.”
“I bet,” I said. “I was the last me standing, but don’t worry—I’ll still have the nightmares for years to come to remember it by.”
Darryl had his arm around her. His toughness had left him and he looked to the Inspectre. “So, what happens now?” Darryl asked.
The Inspectre walked over to the couple, staring down at them. “Well, that depends on how cooperative you choose to be.”
Elyse started nodding, eagerness in her eyes. “We can be cooperative,” she said. “Like I mentioned, there are notes and film footage, computer files. . . You’ve seen what we can accomplish without a blood sacrifice . . .”
“And with a blood sacrifice, too,” Trent spat out at them, pointing to the spot on his side where Elyse had cut him and released Professor Redfield’s army of tiny office monsters.
“First things first,” the Inspectre said, stopping Trent with a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This process that Mason put himself through. . . can it be reversed?”
Elyse’s face sank. “I don’t think so,” she said. She turned to her partner in crime. “Darryl?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We hadn’t even got the process working in the first place. There wasn’t even a chance to figure out how to, umm, verse it let alone reverse it.”
“I’m confused,” Connor said.
“You’re not the only one,” I added.
Connor shot me a look that shut me up. “We’ve seen the professor in his current state. Young, agile, in shape. . . Why would he need you to kill anyone for him? Why not just do it himself? Why kill one of you, his loyal students?”
“I don’t know,” Elyse said, falling silent as she sat there, dejected.
“I think I do,” Trent said. “When you found me tied up on the floor, well. . . it wasn’t the first time we had tried to use blood that day.”
“Oh, really?” I asked.
“Ask Elyse,” Trent said.
I turned back to the young actress. The girl looked guilty. “After we were visited by the professor and. . . sent George off to him, I thought maybe we might be able to use blood for our own gain, too. I thought if we could harness the power of a blood sacrifice somehow, maybe we could use it to our advantage. So I told Trent we wanted a little. He even agreed to it.”
I looked