Chapter 31
Daxen
“Phones ringing!” Silas sing-songs, obnoxiously chipper this evening for someone whose only job is to follow me around like a puppy nipping at the heels of his master.
He strolls past the door where I’m posted up in my library at HQ. Vae sits across from me, coffee in one hand and a book in the other. Both of us have been stuck here for hours, reading and re-reading children’s fables that Riven insists are full of “vital” information.
Last I checked, both Calla and Daniella are still glowing and sparking, but haven’t had any more prophetic rants.
Calla was still at HQ in Chicago, trying to piece her memories together, which Ford says is slow going.
Riven moved Daniella to one of his safe houses, where he claims to be “monitoring her.”
Knowing him, that probably means he’s watching her from cameras in rooms that she isn’t even aware of. He’s the most paranoid asshole I’ve ever met.
“Bring it here, genius,” I shout before Silas has a chance to escape down the hall. He appears at the threshold and peeks around the edge of the door, looking around like he’s worried he’s going to be roped into doing work that doesn’t involve listening to himself complain.
“Why do you have my phone?” I ask when he hands it to me.
“Because it was buzzing in the den while I was trying to watch a movie, and it wouldn’t shut up. Was driving me insane.”
He smirks. “I was gonna throw it into the garbage disposal, but Ford reminded me on FaceTime last night that I should try ‘practicing self-restraint.’” He leans against the table, scooting notebooks out of the way with his ass.
“Turns out, I’m not a fan,” he muses. “Think I’ll go back to doing impulsive shit and see how that pans out.”
“Ford should charge by the hour,” Vae mutters, nose stuck in a book of Aztec illustrations.
“What are you guys even doing?” Silas asks, grabbing an old cloth-bound book of Scandinavian folklore and rifling through the pages.
“Riven has us going through all these ancient stories to see if there’s mention of anything that relates to the Omegas’ ramblings,” I reply, plucking the book from his hands and turning it right side up. “You’re holding it upside down, dumbass.”
“Well, jokes on you,” he drops it on the table. “Because I can’t read that language in any direction, soooo…”
My phone starts buzzing again, saving me from having to respond. Checking the ID, I curse.
“Son of a bitch,” I groan and accept the call.
“About damn time,” an irritated, feminine voice echoes through the speakers.
“Sorry. Left my phone somewhere else.” I don’t bother with a better explanation, and Whitetail doesn’t care if I have one.
Whitetail is a code name. Very few know what species she is. Hell, most people didn’t even know Whitetail is a she, but we’ve been working together for almost six decades. That affords me a few privileges, like phone calls without the voice scrambler.
Her mind works like mine, though Caelan says our friendship is nothing more than an ‘echo-chamber of recycled logic and stupid opinions.’ I try explaining to him that scientific facts aren’t opinions, but Caelan just shrugs and says that to him, we sound like two people seeking validation by kissing each other’s ass.
Fates, I miss my packmate so fucking much.
“You want to tell me what the fuck you’re doing with blood that shouldn’t exist?” Whitetail’s voice is sharper than my throwing knives.
Alright then, she’s actually pissed.
“I don’t know what kind of blood we have, Whitetail, so you’re going to need to give me some more information.” I sigh, rubbing my temples. “That’s the entire reason I dropped that sample with you. To find out who, or what, it belonged to.”
She lets out an aggrieved noise. “Well, Daxen, I don’t have an answer to that because, like I just said, it shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t follow designation or supernatural species markers, and it’s violating the rules of molecular stability.
Do you know how many Fates-damned times I had to run this shit before I finally accepted it wasn’t my equipment glitching? ”
Across from me, Vae perks up and sets aside his book, gaze focusing on the phone in my hand.
“Hey,” he cuts in. “You want to explain that using words Silas can understand?”
Silas mock gasps, hand to his chest. “ I understood plenty. Damn for one. Fucking for another.”
Whitetail huffs. “I don’t know how to explain this without sounding insane, so you’re just going to have to try and follow along.”
“I promise to try very hard not to be stupid,” Vae deadpans.
“This blood…” She takes a deep breath. “It’s almost like it came from a creature that evolved along an entirely different branch of existence.
Parallel, maybe? It has genetic markers that tell me it’s female and Omega, but that’s the best I can narrow it down.
” Whitetail hesitates, and I keep quiet, content to wait her out.
She wouldn’t have called just to tell me she came up empty.
There’s more she’s not saying.
I expected abnormality; I just hoped Whitetail could give me more than female and Omega. That only narrows it down to around seven hundred million individuals across all species on the globe.
“I thought it was possibly a synthetic hybrid. A species someone had tried to splice together,” she continues, and Silas nearly chokes on air. Eyes wide, he mouths ‘spliced together’ like he’s trying to picture someone sewing bones and blood into another living thing just to see if they can.
“Thought maybe you were dealing with some kind of mad scientist,” she goes on. “But the results are too perfect.”
“There’s no evidence of modification?” I ask.
“None. Normally, with splicing, you can see the seams—places where the genome was tampered with. You can tell what was added mainly because it’s unnatural.
Like trying to graft fur onto scales. It’ll look like it was forced in, because, well, it was.
” She exhales, full of tension. “But this was all woven together perfectly. No one fucked with this DNA. Whoever’s blood this belongs to, they were born this way. ”
“So it doesn’t belong to Frankenstein’s monster,” Vae hums, fingers tapping on the wood of the tabletop. “But it could belong to a fucking unicorn.”
“There’s more. Whoever’s DNA it is, it’s not just holding information.
It’s doing things it shouldn’t be doing.
It’s regenerating on a cellular level. You already knew it was resisting decay, but…
Dax.” Her voice sharpens with excitement, and her words start spilling out faster. “It’s adapting to external stimuli.”
“Explain.” I snap.
“I tried to light it on fire,” she says, like that’s a normal part of lab protocol. This fucking female.
“Go on,” I grit out, trying to sound encouraging when what I want to do is bang my head on this table. Repeatedly.
“Blood doesn’t burn like paper. It’s not flammable, per se. It coagulates, then dries up. This blood lit up like—Fates… it was glowing. Then it pulsed, spread out, and reformed.” She’s damn near squealing. She went from pissed off to kid-on-Christmas-morning in like two minutes flat.
“What the fuck?” Silas whispers, and for once, I can’t disagree.
“So I thought, alright, I’ll hit it with another element.”
“Sure,” I mutter, because at this point, I’m just along for the ride.
“It didn’t dilute in water. It started to, but then it clumped back together. Air didn’t dry it out—it made it glow again and release a smell like petrichor. But Earth… Dax,” she hesitates, sounding both excited and a little bit scared. “This part fucked me up.”
I swallow, my throat dry. ”It should have been absorbed.”
“Yes. I left it in a small mound of soil, stepped out to take a call, and by the time I got back,” she takes a large breath, “the soil was growing roots.”
My stomach flips. It isn’t a pleasant sensation. “How long were you gone?”
“Maybe four minutes.”
“Even I know that’s not normal.” Vae mumbles. Then louder, he asks, “What did the roots grow into?”
“They’re still growing. It’s only been like an hour. But they look like they’re developing into some kind of flora. The stalks are the darkest green I’ve ever seen.”
Blood that doesn’t react the way it should to outside elemental stimuli, doesn’t decay, and has no genetic markers related to any known species on the planet. Riven is right. We aren’t dealing with science anymore.
At least, not completely.
Which means the real question is: How the hell did Varenthrall get his hands on that blood? And more importantly—Why is he injecting it into Omegas?
I clear my throat. “Well, as fun as this conversation has been…”
“I’m not done.” Whitetail snaps.
Of course, she isn’t. I lean back in my chair, scrubbing my hands through my hair.
This call has gone so far off the rails that it isn’t even on the same continent anymore.
Every single experiment she ran defies natural law so thoroughly, it’s like science itself is personally flipping me the middle finger.
“I’m obsessive about my database queries,” she continues.
I can hear her pacing in her lab, faint thuds from her footfalls echoing through the speakers.
“I have part of my specialized programming constantly searching for any matches when I’m running my own.
I didn’t expect a hit from the blood you sent.
If you’d asked me two days ago, I’d have sworn no one’s ever sequenced this DNA before. ”
“You found a match?” I ask, straightening up in shock.
“Seven years ago, a geneticist out of Boston ran the exact same DNA and uploaded his findings to a private server. It was encrypted to hell and back. I worked for almost two days to get access to it, and I still couldn’t fully crack it.
But I did manage to backtrack some of the login metadata.
Found a license for a lab that doesn’t exist, and the name of the guy who ran it. ”
“Who?”