Katya didn’t say anything for a long time, and Makeda mentally updated her resume.

Finally the vampire spoke. “Dr. Abel, I appreciate your candor.”

Well, that’s a relief.

“But I still want you to take the project. Consider it a personal favor to me, because you’re right, Lucien will not be happy. But something also tells me this might work better than either of us could predict. To sweeten the deal, if you can put up with him for… let’s say two years—”

“Two years?”

“Work on this project for two years, and if you’re not making progress—if he’s impossible to work with—I’ll give you your old job back with a significant raise in salary and funding.”

Makeda knew how research facilities worked. “My position will have been taken over by then. I’ll have lost time and momentum on my current project. I’ll have to start an entirely new study group to—”

“Then I’ll give you your own lab. Your own funding,” Katya said. “But I want you to commit to two years. Full dedication, no side projects.”

A light appeared at the end of the tunnel. “Two years and then I’d have my own lab?”

“I want full attention on this, Dr. Abel. I need—the world needs—your mind on this project. Completely and utterly focused on it. If you can do that, focus like that, and you still want to leave after two years, then yes. I’ll give you your own lab and enough money to restart your thalassemia research with my full and complete backing. Also know that while you’re on the Elixir project, funding will not be an issue. Lucien has an open checkbook; so would you.”

Makeda took a few moments to think, but there was really no option. Katya was a benevolent monarch, but as her father had said, she was still a monarch. Unless Makeda wanted to leave her organization, she knew what she had to do.

She rose and held out her hand. “I’ll do my best.”

Saba

Plovdiv, Bulgaria

She watched the trucks move in and out of the warehouse, their drivers mostly headed toward the port in Istanbul. She stood in the shadows, her old friend hovering at her side.

“It hasn’t stopped,” he said. “Though things have slowed down. They are finding it harder and harder to offload without detection.”

“Is Elixir the only thing made here?”

“There is a perfume as well. And, of course, this is only one of the facilities, though it is the primary one.”

“And you’re sure this is Laskaris?”

“I’m positive.”

“If you say it’s true, it is.”

Ziri’s network of spies was unparalleled, though she did understand he’d suffered a rather hard loss with the death of one of his primary information merchants the year before.

“And the Russian?”

“Has taken care of his daughter. There was no sentiment involved.”

“Sentiment can be a distraction.”

“As we’re both aware.”

She looked back at the warehouse where vial after vial of poison was being shipped out, spread to the farthest corners of the immortal world.

For now.

Ziri asked, “Does our son make any progress?”

“Of a kind.”

Ziri had always claimed Lucien; he and Saba had been lovers when Lucien had been sired. A good portion of the blood in her son’s veins probably did belong to the old wind vampire, but the heart of him was Saba’s.

“He’s running out of time.”

“Leave that to me.” Saba’s patience with her children was growing thin. Her patience with the world was growing thin.

The elemental world hung in the balance.

Saba wondered if her son knew how much.

CHAPTER THREE

Lucien stared at the calendar hanging on his wall and listened to Katya on the speakerphone and tried to contain his anger. Anger with Katya. Anger at himself. Anger at his mother and her friends and medieval alchemists with god complexes and relentless curiosity. It didn’t matter that Geber was centuries dead. Lucien wanted to raise him just to kill him in a more satisfying manner.

But anger solved nothing.

“I’m close,” he said. “You know I need more time.”

“You can have all the time you need,” Katya said. “But I’m sending another scientist down there.”

“I have assistants. The lab is excellently staffed.”

“She’s not an assistant. She’s a hematology researcher with a focus on sickle cell diseases and thalassemia. She’s smart. She’s persistent. She’s—”

“She’s human.” Lucien tapped a pencil on his desk. Three years working on this damn thing and he was at an impasse. He’d identified it as a virus, but not like anything previously known. He’d been able to isolate and identify the protein surrounding it—he’d even developed a test that could be used in humans—but curing it?

“Yes, she’s human,” Katya continued, “but she’s not likely to be intimidated by you. She’s worked with our kind in the past and can keep up.”

Not with me. Lucien continued to stare at the calendar. Three years. Three years within centuries should not have been significant. But that was before everything he’d lost.

“You say this doctor can keep up with me,” Lucien said. “But Katya, you don’t know that. You don’t even know what I’m working on.”