everafter Read online

  I followed the link for erythropoietin and read about its use by people suffering from anemia and by patients recuperating from chemotherapy. With trepidation, I clicked a link for more information about adverse effects. My heart sank a bit as I read about the constriction of small arteries, blood clots, and increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and congestive heart failure. I sighed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was something.

  By the time the sun came pouring through our living room windows, I had compiled a short but hopeful list of solutions, adding homologous and autologous transfusions to the tally. Nothing was perfect, but I felt better knowing that there were medical possibilities out there. I bookmarked the relevant Web sites and made a note to myself to talk with Dr. Clavier. Surely he would help me arrive at a definitive answer.

  I was about to close down the Web browser and the computer when a three-dimensional image of a red blood cell caught my eye. I

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  had been staring at these concave little almost-donuts all morning and had never taken the time to really appreciate their simplistic beauty. Val once told me that the vampire parasite infiltrated the red blood cells and exploded their way out. Somehow, it was my blood that was barring the path of these parasites from consuming my lover’s soul. On a whim, I typed in “vampire” and hit Search.

  As I scrolled through pages and pages of folklore, fantasy, and gothic culture, it occurred to me that vampires and their like had managed to live in plain sight by hiding behind a mythology that stayed just a few steps ahead of what could be explained by science. As long as there was even a hint of doubt, they could shroud themselves in denial. The struggle must have become easier in modern times as science became a litmus test for truth. It was a miracle they survived the Middle Ages, when speculation and superstition alone could have blown their carefully constructed cover. I was grateful that Val could exist in relative safety in our world. My heart twinged briefly but painfully at the realization that I wouldn’t always be there to watch over her. Immediately, I pushed that thought aside. Val would always be taken care of. I had to believe that. I wondered, as I clicked through page after page of bogus vampire material on the Internet, if perhaps Helen or those of her Consortium had orchestrated this informational web of deceit. If it kept Val safe, I was glad for it. The most brilliant element of it all was that fragments of truth lay scattered in the piles of fiction. If you knew what to look for, the secret of the vampires was sitting just a keystroke and mouse click away. Infection, agelessness, blood drinking. Even information about the parasite that caused vampirism could be found if someone looked in the right place and believed the right things. As an insider privy to their secret, I was shocked that the rest of the world remained oblivious when the clues were all out in the open. Skepticism, I reminded myself, was a powerful thing. After all, how could one take vampires seriously if they could bewitch with a gaze, burst into flames when touched by the sun, or transform into a bat at will?

  Shaking my head, I closed the page on vampiric animorphism. Popular myth had almost gotten that part right. Wereshifters were alive and well in New York City. I shuddered as I remembered that night at the Consortium’s facility when Valentine’s secret was revealed to me. I hadn’t wanted to believe. How could I, when I had been programmed

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  by a lifetime of skepticism? If that guard hadn’t transformed into a wolf right before my eyes, I’d probably still be a disbeliever. It defied logic. It defied science. When he shifted back to human form, the cut on his forehead had already completely healed. Incredible. I stopped myself mid-click. My cursor hovered over the shutdown button. He healed. In the twenty minutes from when he sustained the injury until he settled back into human form, the cut had completely healed without even leaving a scar. He had even walked out of the room on his own two feet, with no evidence of any kind of trauma. Heart pounding, I reopened my Web browser and typed

  “werewolf” into the search bar. As expected, the page filled with entries on film, fiction, and the occult. Just like vampires, there were examples of werewolf myths in almost every culture. And just like vampires, most of the information was useless. I sifted through sites and blogs and message boards. I didn’t know nearly as much about shifters as I did about vampires, and I could kick myself for not asking more questions when we were at the Consortium facility. It was a lot harder to glean fact from fiction without having that base of knowledge to build from.

  All I really knew was what Helen had told us while we’d been trapped in the copy room: that shifters came in all sorts of animal flavors and that the condition was caused by a virus. I started stringing together all of the keywords that I could think of that I knew to be true. This produced a reasonable search result of twenty pages. Starting at the top of the list, I followed a link to a graduate student’s no-frills, academic-looking Web site. Interestingly enough, the site didn’t mention werewolves or shifters or lycanthropy directly. The more I read, the more I realized that the site’s author was either a shifter herself or knew one intimately. The fact that the page had popped to the top of my list even though it lacked some of the keywords I had supplied meant that lots of other searchers, looking for the same information I was after, gravitated to this page as well. That lent it an authenticity in my book.

  Unlike Wikipedia, the site was short on folklore and mythology but heavy on chemistry, biology, and physiology. The first section of the site covered the virus that caused the wereshifter condition. Colloquially referred to as the lycanthropy virus, I learned that it came from the genus Morphoviridae and that the different species names

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  determined the animal form of the transformation. Werewolves were the product of Morphoviridae lupus.

  I skipped ahead to the section on shifter physiology. Scrolling through pages of information about human and animal anatomy, I finally found a mention of metamorphosis and regeneration. Eagerly, I scanned the text and clicked through the affiliated links. According to the site, frenzied regeneration was the beneficial side effect of the transformation process. The act of changing back and forth from human to animal form was so violent on the system that an elevated healing ability was necessary to undo the damage from shifting: muscles, bones, and tissue stretching and pulling as the body poured between the vessels of its two forms.

  There it was in black and white pixels right before my eyes. Every time a Were shifted, it healed. Completely. If I became a shifter, I could produce all the blood Val needed and gain it all back when I transformed. And best of all, I could sustain this indefinitely. Shifters, like vampires, didn’t age.

  Roughly an hour later, I was standing in the doorway to our bedroom, looking down on Val’s sleeping form, debating whether to wake her. My body was vibrating with excitement. I had filled several pages of my notepad with my findings. I had even identified the author of the Web site—Karma Rao, a post-doctoral fellow in ancient art history at the Metropolitan Museum of Art right here in Manhattan. I had come into the bedroom with the intention of telling Val the great news. But seeing her sleeping so peacefully made me hesitate. A full and restful night of sleep had been hard to come by for both of us lately. While Val had been reluctant to share the details of her nightmares, I knew that her assault still haunted her. Even dreamless, she whimpered at the slightest touch and her body flinched and spasmed defensively throughout the night.

  Outside, a car horn blared and Val stirred. Slowly, two sleepy blue eyes blinked awake and stared first in confusion and then in panic at the pillow nestled in her arms. “Alexa?”

  I crossed the room and slipped into bed. She tossed the pillow aside and immediately took me into her embrace. I kissed her lightly on the neck. “Good morning, sweetheart. I’m right here.”

  “Where did you go? Is everything okay?” I heard the fear in Val’s voice and kissed her softly on the lips to quell it.
r />   • 159 •

  Nell Stark and Trinity Tam

  I propped myself up on one elbow so I could see her reaction as I told her. “I found an answer. The answer. To how I can feed you indefinitely.”

  Waves of sorrow washed over her face and settled in a grinding clench of her jaw. She started to pull away, but I wrapped my free arm around her waist and held her to me tightly. “No, Val. I’m not blaming you for last night. That’s my fault, too. But I’ve figured out a way so last night never happens again.”

  “How?”

  “I become a shifter. A werewolf…or a were-anything, actually.”

  It took several seconds for my words to sink in, but when they finally did, Val reacted explosively. She twisted backward out of my grip and stumbled to the floor, backing up until she hit the far wall.

  “God, no.”

  “It solves everything! I’ll be able to regenerate all the blood you need—”

  “No! I can’t let you!”

  “—and we can be together, forever.”

  Val slumped to the floor and buried her head in her hands. I crossed the room and sat next to her. Our shoulders touched, but she didn’t react. She didn’t run away either, which I took to be a good thing.

  “You don’t know what you are asking for.” There was a sadness in her voice that I didn’t expect. It tore right through my layers of stubborn insistence and wrenched at my heart.

  “Sweetheart, it makes so much sense. I’d be stronger. You wouldn’t have to be so careful around me. And I’d be immortal, too. You could keep your soul forever.” I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and leaned into her.

  “You wouldn’t be human.”

  “I’d be better.”

  Val looked up and I saw that she was crying. I reached to brush away the tears but she intercepted my hand and held it tenderly in her own. “I would give anything to be human again. For our lives to go back to normal.”

  “Val, what happened to you wasn’t your fault. You were a victim. I’m not a victim here. I am choosing this. For us. For me. I don’t care what you believe. You are still human. And I will be, too, after the procedure.”

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  “It’s not the same! There has to be another way. I could learn to live on less. You won’t need regeneration.”

  “Drugs and transfusions may help me keep up my blood levels, but they won’t change the fact that someday my body will stop being able to sustain you.” I reached for her face and tilted it until she met my gaze.

  “All couples go through changes and hardships in their relationships. So you have a funny diet and I’ll get a little hairy sometimes—we’ll be together, and that is the only thing that matters to me.”

  “Alexa, I—”

  I leaned in and kissed her softly on the lips. “Valentine Darrow, you are my always and forever.”

  She kissed me back, the last of her resistance scattering in the wake of our commitment. “I love you, Alexa.”

  “I love you back.”

  We spent the next hour going through the notes I had taken in the morning. I wanted to call Helen to ask some additional questions, but Val immediately dismissed that idea. She didn’t trust Helen when it came to my welfare. “Helen’s the one who encouraged me to feed off you in the first place.” She shuddered.

  “She did point out the risks. We knew this could happen.” I squeezed her hand to stave off the rush of guilt I knew was coming. She winced, but left it at that.

  “Let’s just talk to someone else first, okay? How about Kyle?”

  I shook my head. “He’s a sweet kid, but I don’t think he’d know enough to answer all of our questions.”

  Her eyes slid over the pages of my notepad, now scattered all over the floor. She picked up the top sheet. “How about this Karma Rao? She knows a lot and seems to want to help.”

  “I’m not sure.” I frowned. “I mean, it occurred to me before, but we don’t know anything about her. How do we know if we can trust her or not?”

  Val pulled me toward her and placed a kiss on the furrow in my brow. “We’re smart girls. I’m sure between the two of us, we’ll be able to tell if she’s genuine.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled, feeling the possibilities coalesce. “I’ll e-mail her and set something up as soon as possible.”

  After another kiss, Val left me to it, and I took my time typing out a cautious inquiry to Karma. By the time I sent the message, I could

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  smell waffles. Belgian waffles. I stood and went to the threshold of the kitchen, pausing to watch as she deftly sliced the strawberries that would crown my favorite breakfast. From her careful, elegant hands to her short, tousled hair, to the way her bottom lip jutted out slightly while she was concentrating…I loved her. And if this plan worked, there would never have to be an end to this warm, wonderful intimacy that we shared on so many levels. We’d have it all. Every day of forever.

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  Chapter FiFteeN

  Val and I met Karma on the steps of the Temple of Dendur. In 1963, the temple was gifted to the United States government and shipped, stone by stone, to be recreated in the Sackler Wing of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art where we were now standing. It was Sunday morning, minutes after the doors opened to patrons, and we were alone in the sun-filled atrium that housed the temple.

  Karma was slender and petite. When she approached to greet us, she stood a full foot shorter than Valentine. She had thick black hair that fell in waves to her shoulders and curled softly against the high arches of her cheekbones. Her large, almond-shaped eyes were wide-set and a striking golden brown in color. The morning light that streamed in through the large wall of windows reflected softly off her light caramel complexion, giving her skin an ethereal glow that far eclipsed the beauty and majesty of the temple behind her.

  She led us toward the windowed side of the room and we sat on the low wall that separated the temple from a shallow reflecting pool.

  “I’m Alexa Newland, and this is my partner, Valentine. Thank you for meeting with us on such short notice.”

  “Your e-mail was intriguing.” Karma’s handshake was firm and sure. “It’s not often that I get requests for meetings from a human who is so aware of and curious about our existence.”

  “You could tell I was human from my e-mail?”

  Karma smiled. “The newly transformed tend to have a desperation in their requests that I didn’t sense in yours. And I know all of the Weres in New York who want to be identified, so…”

  I tried to read Karma’s face for any sign of concern, but she just

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  continued to smile in her relaxed and curious way. “Is it a problem that I’m human? Will you get into trouble because you are talking to me?”

  “Well, you may be human but you aren’t exactly an outsider, are you?” Karma’s eyes flicked to Val before settling back on me. I felt a flutter of apprehension in my chest. “How did you know?”

  “The circumstances surrounding Valentine’s…initiation…into our community have been much gossiped about. And we’ve met once before.”

  “That night at Luna.” Valentine, who had been quietly holding my hand up to this point, spoke a split second before I could ask for clarification. “You were the one who came and got Sebastian.”

  Karma nodded. “I apologize for not introducing myself formally at that time, but there was an urgent business matter that required our attention.”

  “You work for Sebastian?” From the way Sebastian had been ogling Val, I had a hard time believing that he could employ attractive women and still be productive.

  Karma smiled wryly. “With him. No self-respecting woman would ever work for Sebastian Brenner.”

  I stroked Val’s hand idly with my thumb. The tension that had been coursing through her since we arrived at the
Met seemed to have dissipated a little. Unlike the other vampires and Weres we had met so far, Karma radiated warmth and openness. I had hoped, from studying her site, that she would be helpful. Friendliness was an unexpected plus. I had spent all morning practicing the request I was about to make, but something in Karma Rao’s golden eyes told me that she could be trusted with the unadorned truth.

  “You mentioned that you had some questions,” she said into the pause.

  I took a deep breath, hoping that I wasn’t making a mistake. “I want to know more about the regenerative powers of Weres. Is it true that transformation can repair almost all corporeal damage?”

  She nodded once. “If the physical damage done to you in human form doesn’t kill you, a Were’s regenerative abilities can mend any wound instantaneously at the point of transformation. It is the only way we can survive the shifting process.”

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  “How about in human form? Do Weres have heightened healing while human?”

  “Yes, depending on how old the Were is, I’d estimate that healing happens three to ten times faster than the average human.”

  “Everything heals? The skin, bones, tendons, muscles…”

  “And blood.” She finished for me, a flicker of comprehension sparking in her eyes. “Yes, everything regenerates to its original state before the trauma.”