Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)

The gasp she let out was so loud, she slapped her hand over her mouth and looked around in case the checkout man had heard it.

When he didn’t come down the stairs, she refocused on the screen. As her eyes went from left to right, left to right, words stuck out like screams in the dark: “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” “Melanoma.” “Osteosarcoma.” “Glioblastoma.” She didn’t need her biology degree to know they were all cancers, and very bad ones.

And these vicious, deadly cells had been “introduced to the subject.” To test “the subject’s immune response to the diseases.”

And that was the end of the page.

With a shaking hand, she moved the mouse and closed the file to open another one. It was also a page from the middle of a report. A different page number. Same footer ID. And now she was noticing that the image was actually a photograph of an old-fashioned Xerox copy, the letters fuzzy, black dots speckling the margins randomly, everything tilted a little like the original hadn’t been put squarely on the copier’s bed.

This second page also picked up in mid-sentence, but now she got details. The subject was—female. A female who weighed a hundred and twenty-four pounds. Subject was considered healthy, with various scans and test results being listed: Chest X-ray. Internal ultrasound. EKG. Notations on blood pressure, heart rate—

Lydia read the next paragraph in a whisper. “CBC reveals abnormalities that are so extensive it is impossible to assess what is normal for the species.”

So they were working on an animal? she thought.

That made no sense. Why were they infecting an animal with human diseases?

She closed out and opened the next file.

And that was when she saw a word that made no sense at all. She was so sure she had it wrong, she had to read it twice. A third time.

Vampire.

WHEN LYDIA FINISHED skimming the fifteen files on the disk, she bent down to the tower, ejected the Memorex, and put the floppy back in her bag. Then she just sat there with her purse in her lap and her arms wrapped around the contents of Peter Wynne’s UPS package.

On so many levels, her brain rejected everything she had read, but the document fragments were what they were: Some company had created a program for testing human diseases on another species, a humanoid species that was so closely related to Homo sapiens that there were vast overlaps in anatomy—and vast differences, too.

“Oh, God.”

She passed her hand over her face, and considered throwing up in the black trash can next to the little wooden desk.

“I have to go,” she said into thin air.

Getting to her feet, she knocked over the chair, and when she went to right it, the other disks poured out of her bag. She was picking them up off the linoleum and stashing them as fast as she could when the checkout man with the galaxy bowtie came down the stairs.

“You okay there?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m fine.” She held her purse between both hands so he wouldn’t notice how badly she was shaking. “And I’m all done here.”

“Was it fun to read your old work?”

“What?”

“Your old book reports.”

Lydia released her breath. “Oh, yes, of course. Such a trip down memory lane.”

“We’re all getting so much older. Me more than you, obviously. But life is a terminal disease, you know. None of us get out of this alive.”

“True, true.” Well, wasn’t that a cheerful thought. “Ah—”

“So did you want a printer?”

“I’m sorry, what—oh, right. No, I think I’m going to wait. It was enough just to know I have the files.”

“Sounds good. You can always come back.”

Lydia followed in his wake back to the stairs and up to the first floor, making sure there was plenty of distance between their casual conversation and the roaring storm in her head.

The next thing she knew, she was out by the visitors’ office. The woman who had checked her in was turned away, the phone held to her ear by her shoulder as she typed on a computer. Not wanting to disturb her, not knowing if she even had to tell someone she was leaving, Lydia walked toward the front doors—

Bells rang, shrill and loud, all around her.

Students now. A rushing tidal wave of them, talking, walking, heading out to a lineup of cars that had formed in front of the school.

To avoid getting trampled, she moved over against the glass cases. To avoid making eye contact, she turned to the awards and the trophies. With her thoughts so scrambled, she could make sense of none of it: Not what was in front of her, both shiny and dusty, not what was behind her, so chaotic and frenzied—

At first, the photograph didn’t register outside of the fact that it was black and white, and had been taken out on the bleachers. The girls who were the subjects had been arranged on the rows in a triangular fashion, and their matching uniform shorts and muscle shirts were in what she guessed were the school’s red and blue colors. But it wasn’t a recent image. Their hairstyles had the trademark Farrah Fawcett wings of the seventies.