"I am not hurt," she assured him.
She didn't realize her hair was gone until he ran his hand over her exposed scalp. The ashes of her hair fell like black snow to the ground. He took the quilt away and looked all over her. He didn't believe her.
"Fire can't harm me." She turned her face up to the rain, allowing it to wash the soot from her face, and then looked at him, to show him. "I'm sorry you were burned."
"I couldn't get to you. The flames were too hot." He took off his own shirt, draping her naked body with it. "How did you stop it?"
"Fire is like pain." She heard a rapid thumping and looked up to see a helicopter battling the vicious wind. "Your friends are here."
The helicopter rocked as it descended out of the sky to make a bumpy landing in the clearing beyond the cabin.
Melanie crouched behind a tree, the wind tearing at her clothes as she took out her phone and dialed her American contact.
"Hightower."
"Wallace;" she said. "The target has been eliminated."
"What about the red swan?"
Melanie looked over at the couple in front of the cabin. "Still alive. Your little ugly duckling doesn't burn. She's with one of the maledicti, and his people just got here." She looked up at the sky above the helicopter, and smiled as a funnel cloud began to form over the aircraft. "I'll take care of them."
"No. You have to follow them and find the vampire's stronghold." Hightower said. "It's somewhere here in Chicago."
Melanie frowned. "That's not procedure—"
"The order comes directly from the Lightkeeper," he told her. "Track them to the nest and report back to me as soon as you have the location."
Melanie switched off the phone and sighed, then watched the lovely funnel cloud draw back up into the sky. Tossing the phone into the lake, she ran out of the woods and hurried toward the helicopter.
Alexandra walked into the waiting room. It smelled faintly of bubble gum and antiseptic, but there were no patients running around as usual. The sight of the small colorful chairs, unbreakable toys, well-read magazines, and a play area shaped like a boat made her smile a little as she went up and tapped on the small glass window.
The receptionist slid it open and frowned at her. "May I help you, ma'am?"
"Is the doctor in?" Alex switched her briefcase from one hand to the other. "I'd like to speak to him for a minute."
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but Dr. Haggerty isn't seeing patients today." The receptionist opened her appointment book. "I can fit you in next Friday afternoon. What's your child's name?"
"I don't have a kid. I just wanted to…" She knew why she'd come here, but she didn't know what she wanted. "Thanks anyway."
Alex walked out of the office and put on her shades. The center courtyard of the medical building had once been an empty rectangle of gravel, ash cans, and a couple of pathetic shrubs. Someone had transformed it into a tiny garden with flowers, ferns, small trees, and a reflecting pool.
The pool drew her like a magnet. Alex stood at the edge and looked down at the orange, red, and white koi swimming lazily just beneath the surface. Something fell from her face and dropped on the surface, creating a small circle that slowly expanded over the koi.
"Alexandra?" a man called, his voice tentative.
She turned and a moment later found a shabby lab coat in her face, and long, tight arms closing around her.
"It is you." Dr. Charles Haggerty set her at arm's length and then hugged her tightly again. "What are you doing here? Where have you been?"
"It's a long story." She smiled up at his shocked face. "How have you been, Charlie?"
"How have I been?" He turned his head away, laughed once, and stared at her, angry now. "Alex, you closed your practice, fanned out your patients, sold your house, wouldn't return my calls for weeks, and then vanished off the face of the earth for three years, and now you're back and you want to know how I've been?"
"Things happened. Some bad things, and I… I had to get away." That was a brilliant encapsulation of her life since growing fangs. Charlie Haggerty had been her lover, and she had abandoned him without a second thought. "I'm sorry. This was a big mistake."
"Shut up." He seized her hand and led her over to one of the wrought-iron benches, pushing her down on it. He didn't sit, but paced a short line in front of her. "When Grace called me that last time, I was done with you. I really was. I have a life, Alex."
"I should have called you myself." She ducked her head. "I got caught up in something, Charlie. It became this huge train wreck and I couldn't jump off, and I couldn't make it stop."
He glared at her. "They didn't have any phones on this train?"
She plucked a flower from the gardenia planted next to the bench and cradled the large white blossom in her hands. "It got better, but then I knew I couldn't come back or get anyone else involved. I only came here today to see if you would read over some old pediatric files for me. I'm missing something."
"You came here for a consult?" he asked, incredulous. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
She lifted her shoulders. "That, and to tell you I was okay and to see if you were."
"I'm fine. I'm married." Charlie said bluntly. "Very happily married. Her name is Kimberly. She's a special ed teacher. She's tall and stacked and the sweetest, most patient woman I've ever known." He watched her face intently. "She's also pregnant. Our baby is due in June. It's a little girl."
"She sounds wonderful. You'll be a great dad." Alex forced herself to her feet and held out her hand. "Congratulations."
"You bitch." Charlie slapped her. "That's for not calling me. For making me think you were dead." He grabbed her and pulled her into his arms and gave her a hard, passionless kiss. "And that's for walking away from what we had. You should have been the mother of my child. Alex. You should have."
She shook her head, unable to speak.
Charlie swore and pulled her close, stroking his hand over her hair. "Christ, that was supposed to make me feel better." He looked down at her stricken face. "I knew you weren't in love with me. Al, but I fell for you anyway. Hard. It took me a year and a couple dozen bottles of Jack just to get over you."
"I'm sorry I hurt you," she said tonelessly. "I'll go."
"Took a lot of nerve to come here and face me, didn't it?" He glanced down at her briefcase. "Come inside and I'll look at your files."
Alex silently followed him out of the garden, through the office waiting room, past the curious eyes of the receptionist, and into his office. Instead of certificates and awards, framed photos of smiling children, most with visible handicaps, covered the walls.
She took the medical files out of her briefcase and handed them over. "These are the records I found. They were put together about thirty years ago. They look like standard medical records, but there's something odd about them and I can't figure out what it is."
Charlie thumbed through the first one. "It's a pretty basic chart. Intake exam, height and weight, vitals, labs ordered, visual assessment." He read for a moment. "Sounds like a peds nurse prepared them; nothing wrong with the notations." He put the first one aside and opened the second. "Where did you get these?"
"I found them at an old Catholic orphanage."
He went to the third chart, and then flipped open the first. "Funny. The nurse had all three kids on a normal immunization schedule, but they were also given DNA tests. That was insanely expensive back then. Maybe they were looking for relatives. There's a weird notation here, too: 'V, microinjection."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing. That's got to be a mistake," he told her. "The nurse just wrote it wrong."
Alex saw more than puzzlement on his face. "What is it. Charlie?"
"It's ridiculous. Microinjections were used only back in the seventies and eighties." Charlie turned and took a manual from the bookcase behind his desk. "Yeah, here it is. They'd extract a one-cell embryo at the pronuclear stage, inject the male pronucleus with a genetically engineered plasmid. Then they'd implant the embryo, let the female give birth, and the offspring would express the foreign gene from the transplanted plasmid." He looked up at her and chuckled. "In mice. Alex. Not humans. Jesus."
He wasn't making her feel any better. "Why would you do something like that to mice?"
"Gene transfer. Geneticists don't use the procedure anymore; it's risky and inefficient. I remember my dad ranting about it when some articles about the research were published in the medical journals. He called them "Hitler vaccines." He glanced at the chart again. "A few hotheads were playing around with some ideas on using microinjections to create recombinant DNA. Scared the crap out of everyone who had a brain, until the government finally stepped in. It's illegal now, unless you're working with corn or sheep or something innocuous. Even then, it takes years and a truck-load of authorizations from the FDA."
"Okay," Alex agreed, "but what if they did it to these kids? What would have happened?"
Charlie laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. "God, I've missed you. Sweetheart, what you're talking about is genetically engineering human beings. We can't even get stem cell research approved."
"You said there were some hotheads back then who wanted to do it," she pointed out. "Maybe they tried this shit. Maybe they tried with these kids."
He stopped smiling. "No way. For God's sake, Alex, this was thirty years ago. Practical genetics was in its infancy back then. Even if they had tried, they wouldn't have known what they were doing."