“You know how your specialty is healing and Alaric’s is speed? What if mine is resisting suggestion?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Vlad wasn’t able to change my thoughts when he tried and Bennigan only managed once. Just try it on me.”
“Cara, I’ve never heard of someone who has a specialty in resisting suggestion. It’s typically just—”
“Try it,” she said. She got up and sat across from me. “Make me do something I don’t want to do.”
I stared at her. “Take off your shirt,” I said, smirking.
Cara didn’t flinch. She just flicked her eyebrow upward and titled her head. “We can do that in a few minutes. But I’m serious. Try your thing on me.”
I frowned. I had tried my “thing.” I tried to focus more, delving my concentration into her thoughts. “Stand up on one leg,” I commanded.
Cara didn’t move again.
She clapped her hands, smiling before rushing to hug me.
“See?” she said. “And I have an idea you’re not going to like.”
“Cara...” I said, not liking where she was going with this in the slightest.
44
Cara
Lucian only agreed to my plan with about fifty precautions put in place. That meant I was being constantly followed on rooftops by Lucian, Alaric, and Seraphina.
The riskiest part of my plan was relying on the information Parker had dug up and hoping Mooney, Zack, and Niles weren’t going to put themselves in too much danger.
I walked toward Anya’s just after sunset, knowing that the guys were currently on their way to the place Parker found Bennigan spent a sizable amount of money nearly every night. Lucian was fairly confident Bennigan and his harem were no threat to ordinary humans for the time being. That made my roommates the perfect bait to buy me time. They’d hopefully distract Bennigan into feeding on them, which would let Vlad get eyes on him and hopefully give me enough of a warning if he was coming for me.
And if Bennigan did come before I finished, we’d move to my Plan “B,” which was what had Lucian practically shaking with anger when I’d proposed it. But he eventually agreed to trust me and admitted it was the best idea we had.
Anya opened the door, looking surprised. She had a cat on her shoulder and her eyes were bleary. “Thought you quit.” It wasn’t a question, and it was all she offered before turning to head back to the basement.
I felt a brief rush of relief. I’d been afraid she might ask too many questions or try to pin me down for some task she’d been saving. Instead, I closed the door behind us and was able to get straight to the samples I’d been working on. As soon as Anya wasn’t looking, I pricked myself and took a look at my own blood under the microscope.
Sure enough, the spikey little Lucios were in my blood. The strange part was that my red blood cells were all engorged to three or four times normal size. There were normal sized blood cells floating around in the mixture, which were getting absorbed into the massive cells when they drifted too close.
I watched the tiny ecosystem with blind fascination for a minute before remembering I didn’t have time for curiosity.
I rushed over to my samples, pulling out the handful of diseases, chemicals, and materials I’d noticed had the most dramatic negative impact on the spikey Lucios.
I used the sample of blood I’d drawn from myself to set up several slides, injecting foreign agents into each and making as quick an observation as I dared. Most had almost no effect, except to excite the Lucios into a sort of cleansing frenzy—making them dart around the sample to eradicate the newly introduced material.
I put my head in my palms, trying to think quickly. I was painfully aware of how many people I cared about were currently putting themselves in danger to give me time to do this, and how little time I had.
Think, Cara.
I visualized the large, vampiric red blood cells absorbing the smaller cells. The larger cells seemed to produce enormous amounts of energy, which meant they needed a constant influx of fresh material to fuel the process.
On a hunch, I grabbed a few vials of dehydrating agents and started creating mixtures with binding agents that would make them cling to the red blood cells in my samples.
After I was nearly out of ideas, I put my eyes to the microscope and watched the latest sample. The red blood cells were carrying bits of the dehydrating chemicals, and the large vampiric cells sucked them up hungrily. I was about to look away when I saw small cracks start forming in the cells. Within seconds, they were breaking apart and flaking away.
My heart started to pound with excitement. I rushed over to mix up as much as I could manage and then discreetly flooded a syringe with the mixture, then capped it and shoved it in my jacket.