“I’m not sure. The powers that be could have shown him the photos and threatened him with the same fate, hoping to get him to do something they wanted. Or they could have shown him the photos and blamed your group, thinking he’d seek revenge. Or they could be pretending ignorance. They are very good at all three.”
I believed him. Justin could be the spy, out to avenge his sister and the part he thought Cole had played in her death.
“I see the wheels in your head spinning. However, my source is not getting his information from Justin’s reports. There is someone else spying on your group, Miss Bell, but I don’t know the male’s identity.”
Male, he’d said. Not a girl paying a boy.
Trusting myself, remember. It’s not Gavin. “What do you know about me?” I asked. “About my...condition. And how do you know? Or maybe a better question is, how does your source know?”
“At first, my source knew only that you had been bitten and begun to act strangely. I deduced the rest. Then you were seen producing a red fire rather than a white one.” His expression was sad as he flipped through another folder, showing me photo after photo of people trapped in cages. Human people, not zombies. Only the more photos he showed me, the more zombielike those people became. I was horrified.
“These people are nothing more than guinea pigs,” he said. “They were diagnosed with cancer, but without the medical insurance to pay for treatment. They were desperate enough to try anything. They’ve been experimented on—with my formula.” There at the end, shame dripped from his voice. “I first came to work for Anima with the hope of creating a medication to increase life expectancy. A fountain of youth, if you will. Then I learned I was supposed to do it through the zombies.”
“You can see them?”
He shook his head. “My staff and I weren’t able to see into that other realm like you slayers, and we can’t leave our bodies without help, so we can’t see or touch the creatures until they are ringed.”
Without help? What help? First, I concentrated on the most important thing he’d revealed. “Ringed?”
“Our version of your Blood Line.” He showed a picture of a large metal band. “It goes around their necks and sends out electrical pulses that make the creatures tangible, but the pulse does something to the zombies... Eventually works them into a frenzy, and that frenzy makes them stronger. I’ve had more coworkers have to be killed because they’d been bitten during a frenzy than for any other reason.”
“Are you planning to put me down?” I asked with a tremor.
“No. Of course not.” He frowned. “Tell me exactly what happened to you, Miss Bell.”
I was surprised he didn’t already know every stinking detail. “Justin was bitten by a zombie. He then bit me. We were both given the antidote. He recovered, but I got worse. And now I’m slowly turning into a zombie, which sucks more than you probably realize, because my spirit is toxic to zombies—and that means I’m toxic to myself.”
He sighed. “I knew you were becoming a zombie, but I hoped I was wrong.”
“How did you know?”
“I recognized the signs.”
“You also know I’m seeing things. Hearing whispers.”
“Yes. As the essence of the zombie takes over your body, you begin to see into both the spiritual and natural realm at the same time.”
“I could already see into both realms.”
“Not to this degree. One realm will always be more real than the other. Right now you’re in transition.”
I gulped. “Have you ever saved someone like me? Someone infected with the zombie toxin, after it’s too late to be cured by the antidote?”
He played with the wedding ring on his finger. Ignoring my question, he said, “I had no idea you were dealing with the other problem. The allergy. So, all right. Let’s break this down piece by piece.”
I took that as a no and swallowed my cry of distress.
“I have heard of a few other people having a spirit that is toxic to zombies.”
One of them was my great-great-great-grandfather, I would bet.
“Justin reacted as he did because he was bitten by zombies Anima had experimented on and released. Their toxin is stronger, works faster.”
“But Justin went back to normal and I didn’t.”
“Justin isn’t allergic to himself.” He lifted a small, dark case from the floor and popped open the lid, revealing stacks of prefilled, plastic syringes. “I created different types of the antidote for all the different reactions I had heard about.”
“How many different kinds are there?”
“Eight. I took the formulas with me when I left Anima, and I’ve made several batches of each. Let’s give you a dose of the antihistamine antidote now and see what happens.”
I should say no. I shouldn’t let a strange man inject me with a strange substance.
Common Sense Ali screamed it was foolish. And yet Survivalist Ali shouted it was currently my best chance of winning this.
“Okay,” I said and nodded.
He selected a vial from the case. I shrugged my coat off my shoulder and tugged my shirt collar out of the way. He pushed the needle into the upper part of my arm. There was a sting, and a cool river moved through the muscle and spread.
For the first time in weeks, the double heartbeat seemed to vanish. The pressure eased from my chest, and the darkness thinned from my mind.
A burst of relief had me grinning. Suck it, Common Sense!
I wasn’t out of the game. The new antidote bought me what I needed most. Time.
“I’ll send all I’ve got with you,” he said. “Whenever you start to feel zombielike urges, give yourself a dose. It’s not a cure, but it’s a start. You’ll also be safer to be around.”
“Thank you.”
He removed fifteen of the vials and handed them to me, and I stuffed them in my pack. “I’ll make more. But I should warn you... I’m sorry, Miss Bell, but there will come a point when your body will no longer respond to this antidote or any other. The more you use it, the faster you will develop an immunity to it.”
Yeah, I knew that. “I was told there actually is a cure, that the essence of the zombie is darkness, and that the light chases that darkness away.”
He frowned. “The light from a slayer’s hand?”
“Exactly.” I told him what I’d done, how my spirit had left my body, how I’d summoned the flames and touched my chest, but nothing had happened.