My heart skipped a beat. “What?”
“You have to work fast to isolate the ingredient in the vaccines that’s causing this. Your grandfather was close to finding out something, but they got him before he could.”
“Why do we have to work fast?”
“Isn’t it obvious? They’re trying to kill you so you can’t. And they’ve just gotten a contract for the new bird flu vaccine for the whole nation, not just this area.”
I caught my breath and heard Iain do so as well. With the media hype about the new pandemic, that would be a very popular vaccine, even more so than the regular flu shots.
“Why create a problem without a cure?” asked Iain. “Or were they planning to cause an epidemic and then have the only way to treat it?”
Robert didn’t answer, but I knew it was true. He was stuck with them, but I wasn’t.
“Listen, Joanie, they’ve already killed Louise.”
I remembered the terrible night she died and the black wolf outside the kitchen window. “You brought her to the Manor. Why?”
“I found her by her car. She needed help but was so far off the road, there was no way I could get help to her in time. I thought you might be able to help her, so I changed and explained it to her, and I carried her most of the way there. I couldn’t let you see me because I knew it would frighten you. I didn’t mean to walk by the light near the kitchen.”
That explained the intense look on her face when she’d told me, “The black wolf knows.” It hadn’t been fear; she was trying to make me understand. Had he told her we’d been lovers?
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why are you warning us and telling us all of this now?”
“Because they’re on my heels waiting for me to lead them to the van Doren boy. And because…” He shook his head, his turn to be choked. He pulled his hand away. “Because I shouldn’t have. That is, we shouldn’t have.”
“No, it’s okay, I wanted it to happen. I was happy there, with you. I’ve missed you terribly.”
“You helped me feel like a young man again, Joanna Fisher. That’s why I kept you around long after you could have gone on to your own lab.”
“You kept me around after what?”
“I got a letter before I went to Atlanta. GeniTech was interested in you, but they didn’t want to seem like they were poaching you, so they approached me first and asked about you.”
I caught my breath. GeniTech was the big dog in the industry. Going to work there would have been the next step to the shining career I’d wanted.
“I told them that you wouldn’t be interested.” His eyes locked with mine. “I wanted your brain, your body, and your talents, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you having the opportunity I’d wanted for most of my professional career.”
“You sabotaged me.”
“I used you, and it’s something I’ll never forgive myself for, especially since I could have spared you from all this.”
I noticed then how the lines around his mouth had grown deeper, and I felt all of the eighteen years separating us. “But you didn’t. And now we’re here.”
“I won’t be for much longer. I made sure there’s no one at the house, only the sheriff’s man out front in his car.”
“Oh, so they’re in on it, too? I should’ve guessed when they took everything after Louise died.”
“Knowles is taking orders from someone, but I haven’t been able to find out who. Probably Hippocrates.” He reached over to brush my cheek again, but I flinched away.
“I can’t believe you did that, sabotaged my career for a little fun so you could use me.”
“Joanie, there’s no time to argue now. Go in there and don’t come out until you have something. I’ll lead them away.”
I felt my chest tighten with the shame of knowing I had to follow his orders, even now after I knew he’d betrayed me. I wanted to say more, to scream at him or claw his eyes out, or at least his throat so that we’d have matching pain. I’d forgotten how much I hated it when he ordered me around. The mist enveloped him, and the black wolf reappeared and bounded into the woods. I looked after it and bit my lip to keep from crying.
“Did he really mean it, Iain? That he used me? Did you know about GeniTech?”
Iain wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Let’s get to work.”
Armed with my grandfather’s notes and equipment, Iain’s background knowledge and theoretical research, and my experience, we set up in the underground laboratory. First I made sure that all the doors were locked, but we still avoided turning on any lights or giving any other indication that the house was occupied. I didn’t want Sheriff Knowles to turn up and insist that he urgently had to question me. I was surprised to find that Ron wasn’t in the house, but perhaps he’d decided to make himself scarce.
My grandfather had, through his own research and experience as well as reading my work, isolated a genetic component to the expression of CLS. The Landover Curse, it had been called in our family. In other families, it had been called other things, and some didn’t even have a name for it. I guess that sort of information tended to be swept under the rug when it could get you and your family burned. It was more common, I had found in my research, in families of Germanic and Scandinavian descent, which made sense considering that part of the world had spawned the best werewolf legends. Other cultures might have similar tales, for example, the dolphin-men of the Amazon, and they might carry through as well, but there was something about CLS that made it more common, at least in the U.S. This area, with its Dutch, German and Scandinavian heritages all intermixed, would be the perfect area to find subjects, which is likely why the local kids, and not the newcomers, were the targets.
“So what can make a genetic trait more likely to express?” I asked Iain after we’d hashed all this out. “This has to be complicated considering all the parts of the transformation, several genes at least.”
He steepled his fingers and sat back. “Whoever came up with this has to be a genius in the field. They took your heredity and epidemiology work as well as our work in the genes themselves and found a way to make the traits express in a temporary fashion.”
“Do we know anyone with that capability?”
He arched an eyebrow at me. “We know several, but the question is who would be unethical enough to do it and to ‘experiment’ on children as well as other victims of the tainted vaccines?”
“It depends on how much money is involved, I guess. To create a problem so you can monopolize the cure…” I shuddered. “It’s hard to say. Let’s get back to the question of how they tainted the vaccines. What could be in them?”
“Some sort of chemical? I’m just guessing what could be transmitted trough vaccinations.”
“Maybe, but what?”
We once again turned to my grandfather’s notes. He had been working with—surprise!—wolfsbane, also known as aconite, which could either be used as a topical anesthetic or a poison if taken internally or if too much is absorbed through the skin. He was in pursuit of the legendary use, which was to bring on a state of lycanthropy or to banish it. He hoped for the latter. His aim, according to his notes, was to use my research on the causes and spread of the disorder to figure out how wolfsbane may act on the nervous system of the CLS victims.
“So if he was looking at wolfsbane to prevent the expression of CLS, what could be the cause of it?” I mused.
“Let’s think of what one finds in vaccinations,” Iain suggested. “Perhaps it’s something that’s already in there or that could be tweaked rather than something that’s introduced that the FDA would be able to trace.”
“Good call. There’s the active ingredient, which is a dead virus, part of a live virus, a less problematic but similar one…”