He awoke with a start.
There was nothing to immediately put him on guard. There was no one with him in the office. He pushed himself up and looked out through the window into the Zoo. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. He slowly stood up and stretched himself. He inhaled deeply and didn’t find a hint of smells outside of himself, Tony, and the wolves outside. He relaxed a little. He, like all vampires, never dreamed when they were returned to death every day. But the way he had awaked just now rang out echoes through his mind of when he was human and had been woken suddenly by an unremembered nightmare. That hadn’t happened since he had been turned.
He could tell that night had fallen on the city, which meant that Alessandro would be sending people for him in all likelihood. No one knew about this place, so he was safe for now. He didn’t dare call Natalia. She had proven herself to be compromised and vulnerable. He would have to get rid of her; a pity that, but she had let herself become a liability.
He looked out into the Zoo. He hadn’t fed since yesterday and it would still be too dangerous to try to Dominate another of the wolves. There was only one thing he could do, and that was stay here and wait for Mark to call him back and give him some kind of an update.
He probably wouldn’t find anything there. It was probably a mating ground that the wolves had vacated when they had been exterminated from California almost a hundred years ago. The only wolves anywhere near Mount Shasta were in Oregon in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, wolves from that pack had crossed into California briefly but now stayed mostly north. Still, a lead was a lead, and he would follow every one he had till something panned out.
He hated just sitting here though. His compound was too dangerous right now and probably being monitored. And he couldn’t go out into the city because Alessandro had eyes and ears everywhere, only a portion of which had he been able to identify and turn to his camp.
There was nothing to do but…
His phone rang.
He picked it out of his pocket and looked at the number. If his heart still beat it would have jumped into his throat. “Trevor?” he answered with expectation.
“Instructor,” came a very excited happy voice, “I think you’ll want to come down to the lab.” The man’s excitement was poorly masked. “We’ve found it! Instructor, we fucking did it!” Trevor’s voice rose triumphantly at the end of his sentence.
Kenneth’s knees were suddenly weak and he let himself sink back into the office chair. A smile spread across his face. “Trevor,” Kenneth began. “Well done. I’ll be there shortly.”
“We’ll have the champagne chilled and ready when you get here, Instructor.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Yes, there may be much to celebrate tonight,” Kenneth thumbed off the phone and stood up. He dialed Michael to pick him up outside.
Kenneth walked out to see his Jaguar gone and Michael standing next to a blue Honda Civic.
“What the hell is this piece of crap?” Kenneth asked.
“After last night I assumed that you might want to be less conspicuous if you needed to drive around the city tonight. So, I took the liberty of renting a car in my name for the next few weeks.”
Kenneth looked at the blue car and his driver. He nodded, “Yes of course, Michael you did well. We need to go to the lab tonight.”
“Yes, Instructor,” Michael replied as he closed the door after the vampire.
The car wasn’t all bad. At least it had leather seats and was comfortable. He missed the luxury of his Jag already, but Michael had been right. It would have been too easily spotted by one of Alessandro’s spies in the city. He was too close to the finish line now to be caught stupidly by someone catching a glimpse of his car going down the freeway.
They arrived at the lab and Kenneth walked into the building. He nodded to the gate guard behind the desk. It was the same man that he had Dominated on his last visit here. The man completely ignored his passing. Kenneth smiled and entered an elevator.
He rode it up to the research lab and stepped into the clean room. Waiting for him was Trevor and his team. They were all very proud of themselves with bright smiles on their faces. Kenneth greeted Trevor with a nod.
The woman grabbed a glass of champagne and handed it to Kenneth. He took it readily. Trevor held up his glass. “A toast to the best team of biochemists I have ever worked with. I have never met another person, much less two people, who had the same drive to succeed that I have. This accomplishment is just as much yours as it is mine. Cheers!” He drained his glass quickly and the other two followed suit.
Kenneth took a drink of the alcohol before putting the half empty glass aside on a counter.
“Before we get too out of hand with congratulations, maybe you should show me what exactly you’ve discovered, and how it works,” stated Kenneth coldly.
Trevor placed his glass down with a smile. “Of course, Instructor. Please, if you’d step into a clean suit, we can show you what we have.”
After a few moments, Kenneth was inside the laboratory proper with Trevor and his assistants standing next to a few Petri dishes and a micro scope.
Trevor motioned to the device and Kenneth looked down into the microscope as best he could with the unfamiliar bulky mask and suit.
“What you will see are a set of cells that matches you set parameters,” Trevor said.
Kenneth saw several of the cells and bacterial move and squish along inside the microscope. He even saw two that were conjoined together ready to split in the final stages of mitosis. “Yes, very interesting,” Kenneth replied dryly, trying not to sound bored.
Trevor moved something on the counter and shone it onto the microscope. The cells in the Petri dish quivered and began to shrivel in death. The cells darkened and slowly stopped moving. Then Trevor removed the strange light source and the cells immediately started to split and reproduce until the cell count in the Petri dish matched what it had been before the light was shone on them.
Trevor continued, “Under your parameters, the cells would start to die under harmful stimuli, once the stimuli was removed however, the cells would reproduce at an extreme rate to almost instantaneously cover whatever loss was suffered during the attack, keeping the colony in a perfect state of balance.”
“Yes, and I wanted that perfect state to be disrupted and stopped. I don’t care about you reproducing a biochemical process that I already knew existed.” Kenneth stood up from the microscope and looked at his student.