Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
“Well, he can come into the kitchen with me while I clean up and make us something to eat,” Cassandra told him. Standing on tiptoes, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Good luck with your research. If you can make a cure for the Hunger Virus, this whole planet will thank you.”
“I’ll certainly try,” Severin said grimly. “Because if I can’t develop a cure, V Prime will probably have to be quarantined from the rest of the universe.” He sighed. “That’s one reason Ravik and I haven’t risked a run to the closest communications tower yet to call for help. I can’t risk bringing this infection to the Mother Ship unless I also have a cure for it.”
“What about your ship? Don’t Kindred usually travel in long-rang shuttles?” she asked. “I know that’s how I got out here, anyway—the Mother Ship folded space and a shuttle brought me and Sskarth out.”
“Unfortunately, our shuttle was ‘trashed’ as you humans put it, during the first wave of riots after the virus really started to spread,” Severin said grimly. “Which is why we need to place a call to the Mother Ship to come and get us.”
“But you can’t do that without a cure—I understand.” She nodded. “All right, I’ll let you get on with your work. I’d better go find Ravik.”
And with that, she left his lab. Severin watched her go and couldn’t stop thinking of what she’d told him. He wondered if her new hyper-sexuality was a symptom of her perimenopause, or of the Hunger Virus…or possibly a mixture of both.
Well, he was going to do his best to find out.
32
SEVERIN
Severin flexed his healing hand carefully and turned back to the lab table. The samples were waiting in neat rows, each one labeled in his own precise script. Ravik’s blood from before Cassandra had arrived. Ravik’s blood from after first exposure to her scent. Ravik’s blood from the morning regression. Ravik’s blood after Cassandra had kissed his burns. Ravik’s blood after she had taken his seed into her mouth.
Beside those were the new samples from Cassandra. He had her blood, saliva, breath condensate, skin oil, sweat, and last but certainly not least, a small amount of her honey collected by Cassandra herself at his request.
At present, the most interesting and useful sample in his collection was Cassandra’s blood taken after she had swallowed Ravik’s seed. He hoped to use it to make sense of her symptoms and to find out how the Hunger Virus was reacting to her fluctuating hormones.
Severin stared at that last vial for a long moment.
It was only blood. Red, warm, human blood suspended in sterile anticoagulant medium. Nothing about it should have made his fangs ache or his pulse quicken.
And yet, it did…because everything about Cassandra seemed to do that lately. Just looking at her blood made him think of what she’d said to him—that she wanted to ride him the way she’d been riding Ravik earlier. Gods, just the thought of her soft, wet pussy wrapped around his cock…
No.
He exhaled sharply and forced his mind back where it belonged.
Science—he needed to concentrate on science. Desire could wait…or preferably die quietly in a corner where it would stop interfering with his ability to think.
Unfortunately, desire had become deeply tangled with the science, which was precisely the kind of complication Severin had spent his entire professional life avoiding. He did not like messy variables. He didn’t like uncontrolled conditions. And he especially hated emotional responses contaminating his observations.
But Cassandra was a walking contamination of every clean line he had ever drawn.
She was fear and heat and fury and softness. She was a curvy, stubborn, beautiful Mature Elite who should have been dead several times over and somehow wasn’t. She was infected, but not turning. She was bitten, but not rotting. She was producing some kind of volatile compound that brought Ravik back from the fog and some kind of mucosal response that made the Hunger Virus recoil under the scope.
And now she might be reacting to Ravik’s seed.
Severin put the first slide under the scope. It was Ravik’s baseline infected blood, taken before Cassandra’s arrival. He had studied it so many times he could have drawn the cell structures from memory.
Under magnification, the Beast Kindred red cells were thick-walled and resilient, but the Hunger Virus had infiltrated the plasma and was clinging to the white cells like black burrs. The infected neural markers were even worse. Viral filaments had attached to the protein chains associated with higher cognition and mate recognition, twisting them into aggressive appetite triggers.
That was what the virus did—it took the body’s deepest instincts and corrupted them.
In the Visskous, it corrupted hunger. In Ravik, it had corrupted his normal Beast Kindred instincts. In both cases, the pattern was brutal but recognizable. The virus attacked one pathway, amplified it, and drowned out everything else so that the Infected were locked in a diabolical cycle—Eat. Hunt. Bite. Infect—that was their entire existence. So why hadn’t that cycle captured Cassandra?