23. Seeds of Doubt
Chapter twenty-three
Seeds of Doubt
Julian
I smiled as I stared out of my office window into the courtyard below.
Nicolette and Simone were having lunch at one of the picnic tables.
They were chatting animatedly, and Nicolette was laughing.
From this distance, only the faintest trace of her lyrical giggle reached me. I craved that sound. I craved her.
I let myself watch them a moment longer and feel the sun on my skin. After years in the dark, I still wasn’t accustomed to how much I needed the light.
“Hello, Cyrus,” I said before he even announced himself. He’d given up knocking years ago. There was little point when we always knew who stood on the other side of the door.
“Hello,” he returned, gruff as ever, joining me at the window. His shoulders tensed the moment he saw Nicolette.
“I suppose you asked Simone to befriend her?” I said casually.
Cyrus’s jaw ticked. “I asked Simone to keep an eye on her. There’s a difference.” He made no excuses or apologies.
“I figured,” I sighed. Simone’s new fascination with Nicolette seemed too forced. I didn’t mention it to Nicolette. I didn’t wish to hurt her feelings, and I saw no harm in it.
“You don’t trust my wife . . . or my judgment.” I turned and took a seat at my desk.
Cyrus leaned against it, arms folded, studying me far too closely, weighing his words as if choosing which blade to use. “This woman—she has a hold on you. I’ve never seen you like this before. This is no time to be letting your guard down.”
“I assure you my guard has never been higher.” Nicolette’s safety was my top priority.
Just this morning, I’d made a social call to her father to remind him his life depended on his silence.
He swore he hadn’t divulged anything to Delia about what I or my family truly were.
And that this newfound friendship with her was simply that—friendship.
I didn’t know whether to believe him. Especially after his comment about the laptop a few nights earlier at dinner.
“You call gazing out the window like a lovesick fool keeping your guard up?” Cyrus scoffed. “Hell, Julian, you don’t even look like yourself anymore. Your edge is gone. And you could very well be sleeping with your demise.”
“What do you mean I don’t look like myself?”
He waved a hand up and down in my direction.
“I don’t know. You look lighter. You reek of her.
How often do you make love to her?” He held up his hand before I could answer.
“Never mind. I don’t wish to know. But it’s no wonder you’re obsessed with her.
You knew the dangers of being intimate with her, and now it appears you’re paying the price. ”
Hmm. Interesting. Nicolette and I had not consummated our marriage, no matter how badly I wanted to.
But she had given me three doses of her blood—what she insisted on calling “immunotherapy.” Admittedly, I did feel lighter.
Better. More human. But I didn’t dare tell Cyrus that.
Best to let him think I was making love to Nicolette any chance I could. If only.
“There is no one I trust or respect more than you, Cyrus. But what I do with my wife is none of your bloody business,” I breathed out. “But I will say this. There is no obsession between us.”
Cyrus arched a brow, unimpressed. “You keep telling yourself that, brother. I looked into her mother and her friend, Delia, as you asked. There are more questions there than answers.”
I knew Nicolette wouldn’t be pleased that I’d involved him, but Cyrus had connections I didn’t, and—as I’d told him—there was no one I trusted more.
I even understood his misgivings about Nicolette.
She had me besotted and making decisions that went against my better judgment.
Yet there was something about her. Something I couldn’t explain.
All I knew was that I hadn’t felt this alive in years.
I no longer dreaded facing another day in my interminable supply of them.
She’d given me a new lease on being undead—and the hope of life.
And there was something about being at home with her every night and sharing a meal and conversation. Last night we’d even walked around town and gotten ice cream. There was something so providential about it. About her. It was the kind of life I’d longed for.
“What did you find out about them?”
Cyrus dragged a hand through his hair. “First of all, Delia paid off Dr. Sorenson. Asked him to lie about having done the autopsy. She said it was important she do it herself, even though she’d been asked to recuse herself given their close relationship.”
While not surprising, it was disconcerting. “Did she tell him why?”
“No. But he needed the money, so he agreed to let her do it—no questions asked. He even lied to make sure she kept her job.”
“She must have paid him handsomely,” I surmised, not liking this turn of events.
“No doubt.”
“I will say Nicolette seemed genuinely surprised when I told her about Dr. Sorenson’s termination. And she’s the one who pointed out the signature. Why do that if she was involved in this at all?”
Cyrus curled his lip. “How do you know she’s not an excellent actress?
Even her mother fooled us. We watched her carefully after we discovered the porphyria treatment, and not once did we question her.
Yet it’s obvious now she was hiding something.
Something someone was willing to kill her for.
Something Delia and Nicolette could know about.
And here you are, giving her your blood. You’ve handed her a weapon.”
He wasn’t wrong. The thought had crossed my mind—that her rush to make me human was a warning flag, especially when she’d tried to tempt me with sex as an incentive. But I’d let the thought slide. Nicolette was frightened, and she was fighting back the only way she knew how.
I would never forget the night I told her—showed her—what I truly was. Her fear and revulsion had been no act. The way she’d begged me not to make her go through with our marriage had been guttural, raw.
No. I had to believe Nicolette was good.
But . . . I felt the need to offer my brother something. “Cyrus, she’s discovered something about our kind. Proof of what we really are.”
Cyrus’s eyes widened—skeptical, but undeniably curious. “Enlighten me,” he dared. He, who had studied our kind more than anyone. He, who had chased the dream of humanity as fiercely as I had—though had never let it consume him the way it consumed me.
“She discovered a second band when she sequenced my DNA.”
“A second band,” he scoffed. “Impossible.”
“I thought so too, but I saw it with my own eyes. It wasn’t a duplicate—it was a concealed segment.
It mirrored the primary band closely enough that any automated reading would have dismissed it as background noise.
But she isolated it. It’s the proof we’ve been looking for.
That there is a part of us that is still very human.
We’re the product of a mutation—one she believes she can alter. ”
Cyrus launched himself off the desk and began to pace, flexing his hands as he went.
I hadn’t seen him this agitated since Copernicus took credit for the heliocentric theory when it was Cyrus who had discovered the earth moved around the sun.
“And how does she believe she can alter it?” Cyrus snarled.
“She’s working off her mother’s porphyria research, trying to isolate the right protein—or proteins,” I offered. It wasn’t a lie. It was only part of the truth. I would keep Nicolette’s secret. No one could ever know what her blood might be capable of. It was far too risky.
Cyrus shook his head. “This is dangerous. Father reports that during his watch, it appeared Wallace and Delia were searching for Grace Hart’s laptop. Do you know why that is? Do you have any idea what information it may have contained?”
“I don’t,” I said truthfully. At least not yet. Whatever was on it had to be significant. I’d never seen such encryption in my life.
Cyrus stopped pacing and faced me fully, jaw taut, eyes locked on mine.
“I don’t like it. Something is off. There are major discrepancies in Delia’s past. She supposedly graduated from Whitman, but they only have a record of her attending her first year.
After that, she simply disappears. No social security records, no employment, no schooling until she turns up in Savannah and starts working at the hospital.
And conveniently, she has no living relatives. Her parents died several years ago.”
“Well, damn. That isn’t good news.”
Cyrus walked back to the window and stared down into the courtyard below. “And here you are giving your blood to a woman surrounded by people who hold what I can only assume are deadly secrets. Secrets that killed her mother. Secrets that could kill you.”
I stood and joined him, watching my wife.
The way the sun caught her golden-red hair, the way she leaned in as Simone spoke—there was a goodness that radiated from her.
I had a hard time believing she had it in her to be a conspirator in some nefarious scheme.
She was the victim. Hell, in my own way, I’d victimized her by forcing her into this marriage.
“You know, she doesn’t trust you either. She thinks you could be sending her the threatening notes.”
Cyrus spat out a dark laugh. “You know me better than that. If I wanted to hurt her, I already would have. Has it ever crossed your mind that she’s sending them to herself?”
“No,” I answered quickly. That couldn’t be.
Cyrus sighed. “You don’t find it odd that an unknown vampire is sneaking past all of us?”
Of course I found it odd. Maddening, even. “What would be the point of her sending the notes to herself?”
“That’s a good question, brother. I would be careful if I were you.”
Nicolette looked up and caught us staring at her.
She smiled and waved at me, and I felt the sting of guilt—Cyrus had planted a tiny seed of doubt.
This woman had relied on me, even through her own fears and misgivings.
We’d made a pact to trust each other. But it would be a lie to say his words didn’t trouble me.
I waved back at her. At the woman whose blood ran through my veins. “Brother, get to know her,” I pleaded. “See what I see when I look at her.”
I needed him to tell me I wasn’t a besotted fool. A fool falling in love with his wife when he’d sworn he wouldn’t. Were my feelings blinding me?
“For you, I will,” he seethed. “But know this: If I think she’ll harm you or our family in any way, I will kill her myself.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed, though the thought of Nicolette dead left me cold and hollow. That had to mean something.
“Julian,” he said, low and gravely, “don’t let your guard down. We need answers, and we need them quickly. Don’t be so blinded by love that you lose sight of what’s most important.”
But what if she was what was most important?
“Your search for humanity will do you no good if you’re dead.”
I’d been dead for six hundred years. Death was easy.
Life was the risk.
And life with Nicolette was the greatest risk of all.