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“I didn’t say I thought it was haunted,” she said. “But wait until you get a load of the interior. If there was ever a place that deserved its own horror flick, this is it. Around here it’s a rite of passage for kids to sneak into the monastery and spend the night.” It was also a prime make-out spot, but she didn’t want to go there.
She tried a couple of keys, found the right one and got the front door unlocked. It opened with a theatrical creak that had a few of the volunteers shifting from foot to foot and looking at each other as if unsure this was such a good idea.
“Let’s get the electricity on first,” Luke ordered, taking charge of the situation. He gestured to one of his male teammates. “Thom, you can find the central panel, right? The mayor said we’d have juice if we hit the main breaker.”
Thom, a tall, lean biochemist with a crooked nose, nodded and clicked on his own heavy flashlight. “I’m on it.”
Within a few minutes, a scattering of lights came on, illuminating the entryway and glowing farther into the sprawling stone building.
Like the outside, the once grand inside of the stone monastery had fallen into disrepair, with splashes of graffiti painted on many of the walls, and the charred remains of a campfire sitting smack in the middle of the entranceway.
Luke looked around, his gaze lighting on the religious motifs carved into the lintels over each door, then picking out the three main archways leading from the entrance. He glanced at Rox and raised an eyebrow. “Suggestions?”
“Our best bet is to close off the east wing,” she said, pointing to their right. “That’s where the most vandalism has taken place, and according to local legend, it’s also where things tend to go ‘bump’ in the night.”
He nodded. “Not the best place to stick patients who are already mentally compromised. We do that and we’re just asking for problems.”
“Among other things.” Rox pointed straight ahead. “We’ll want to keep the kitchen wing open. Besides food, that’ll be our best bet for setting up lab space. We can put the patient and sleeping rooms in the west wing.” She jerked her thumb left, toward a locked door that had so far defied the vandals’ efforts to break in. “I was in there on a field trip once, and I’m pretty sure I remember there being decent-looking rooms with sturdy doors. No doubt Captain Swanson can hook us up if we need to change out the locks or anything.”
“This place is cool,” Thom said, emerging from the shadows of the east wing and making them all jump slightly. He had a smudge of dust on the shoulder of his drying CDC raincoat, but his eyes were lit with an adventurer’s curiosity that sent a faint pang through Rox. He continued, “Somebody should use it for a school or something.”
“They tried,” one of the off-duty cops said. “Since the seventies, it’s been used as a boarding school, a summer camp for smart kids, a corporate retreat and a wellness center. None of them lasted long.”
“That’s ’cause it’s haunted,” one of the fishermen said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
There was a general mutter of agreement and more shifting of feet, but before Rox could jump in with her “now let’s be rational” speech, Luke raised his voice and said, “I don’t know much about ghosts. What I do know is that you have a medical emergency here, and it’s my job to get it under control. So here’s the plan. Thom, you take half of the volunteers and see what needs to be done to get the north wing functional as both a kitchen and a field lab.” He gestured to his shorter, bearded teammate. “Bug here will take the rest of you into the west wing to get the rooms set up. Rox, I want you and May to head back to your clinic and prep the patients for transport. I’ll stay here and troubleshoot. We’ll have this place ready to go by dawn.”
If anyone else had said something like that, Roxanne would’ve laughed, but she’d seen Luke create a workable triage and quarantine area out of even less, so she had no doubt he could transform a falling-down monastery to suit their needs in under five hours.
She nodded to May, a pretty brunette who had introduced herself as the team’s clinical specialist. “We can take my car,” Rox said. “You need anything from the SUV?”
May shook her head. “I’m good to go.”
But before Rox could turn away, Luke called her back. “Wait.” He held out a .22 she hadn’t known he was carrying. “Take this. There could be more out there like your friend Aztec.”
The memory brought a shiver, and she reached out to accept the small gun without protest. As she did so, her fingertips grazed his palm.
The touch brought a spear of unexpected, unwanted heat that had her drawing away from him, had her voice going husky when she said, “Thanks.”
He nodded, eyes suddenly dark and hooded. “Be careful.”
She left before she said—or did—something she’d regret, like ask him why he’d left her two years earlier, or why he’d come back to her now. They both knew there were other teams that could’ve taken the Raven’s Cliff assignment.
The question was, why hadn’t he let them?
“RUMOR HAS IT you’ve got the CDC on your doorstep,” a mechanized voice said the moment Mayor Wells answered the ringing phone.
“Do you have any idea what time it is? And why the hell are you calling on this line?” Sitting on the edge of his king-size bed, Wells gripped the handset so hard the plastic creaked in protest. “Beatrice might’ve answered.”
In reality, it would’ve taken far more than a ringing phone to disturb his wife. She’d been using tranquilizers heavily ever since the previous month, when their daughter Camille had fallen from the rocky cliffs into the sea during her wedding—her wedding, for God’s sake.
Her body hadn’t been recovered yet, and both the mayor and his wife were stuck in a state of seesawing hope: they hoped that her body would wash up so they could bury her properly, while praying she didn’t, because as long as her body hadn’t been found they could pretend she might still be alive.
Wells envied Beatrice the oblivion she’d found in the tranqs, but he didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to grief because he had a town to run. Despite his best efforts, the whispers about the Captain’s Curse had been growing louder over the past few months, even before the outbreak.
And now this.
“The doctors won’t be an issue,” he assured the man on the other end of the phone, who he knew only as a string of numbers from a Swiss bank account that made regular deposits into his own. “They won’t be looking anywhere near your chemical purchases. You have my word on it.”
The mayor was sweating lightly, though.
“Make sure they don’t.” The line went dead.
Wells sat for a minute, holding the handset to his ear, staring out the window into the black, rainy night. Then he stood and went to the wall safe where he kept an unregistered gun locked and loaded. He pulled out the weapon, checked the safety and tucked the firearm into the inner pocket of his briefcase.
Just in case.
Chapter Three
By midmorning, Luke’s team and the volunteers had not only managed to clean and sanitize the kitchen and thirty small residential rooms in the west wing of the monastery, they’d also moved the patients from the clinic and police station into their new quarters.
The three Violents—Aztec Wheeler, boat mechanic Doug Allen and Jake Welstrom, a father of four whose symptoms had been identified during one of the house-to-house sweeps, thankfully before he hurt his family or himself—were locked in stone-walled rooms with barred windows, located at the back of the west wing.
The eight other patients—including Rox’s clinic assistants, Jeff and Wendy Durby, as well as all four members of the Prentiss family plus librarian Cheryl Proctor and gas station attendant Henry Wylde—were housed in the middle of the west wing, in well-ventilated rooms under lighter precautions.
The doctors had staked out rooms close to the entryway, giving them equal access to the patient rooms and the kitchen, which would serve as both mess and lab. There, the members of the CDC team were working on processing the first set of blood and urine samples for analysis.
The outbreak response was up and running, and Rox knew she should be incredibly grateful. Instead, as she stood in the middle of the entryway watching the organized chaos that would hopefully put her town on the road to recovery, she felt a pang of resentment.
She’d barely been keeping ahead of the symptomatic treatments on her own, never mind being able to investigate the sickness or its cause, but there was a part of her that didn’t want the others involved. She kept feeling as though she should’ve been able to handle this by herself, in her own clinic.
“Bug has the first set of blood samples spinning down,” Luke said, appearing in the archway leading to the kitchen wing. “We should have some preliminary results in fifteen minutes or so, and that’ll give us a starting point for figuring this thing out.”
He’d changed out of the dust-smeared clothes he’d been wearing the last time she’d seen him, into jeans and one of the long-sleeved button-down shirts they’d both favored on assignment. Made of a high-tech nylon composite, the garments looked like cotton, but wicked away sweat and heat, and were nearly indestructible.
The sight of the shirt—and the fact that she’d long ago donated hers to Goodwill because she would never need them again—sent a little jab beneath Rox’s heart.
Luke made a wide gesture to encompass the monastery, which was slightly less creepy in the light of day. “What do you think?”
“I think you made good on your promise to get this done by morning,” she said, and her thoughts of a moment before made her voice sharper than she’d intended, lending accusation to the words.
“As opposed to other promises I didn’t make good on, you mean?” Boots ringing on the stone floor, he moved to face her, expression resigned and maybe a bit impatient. “Go ahead. Ask me why I left you the way I did.”
In other words, he was willing to talk about it if she wanted to fight. He might even be willing to say he was sorry for the way he’d left, though not for the actual act of leaving. But she could tell from his expression that it was going to be the same sort of circular argument they’d excelled at during the last few weeks before she got sick, the ones that never ended with a winner or a loser, just the incompatibility of two people who had great sex but wanted different things out of life.
She’d been looking to slow down and scale back to something more intimate at a time when his career had been poised to take off. Part of her had known the end was coming for them even before he’d left, but she had never expected—and could never forgive—how he’d abandoned her in a field hospital, sick and alone.
“I don’t need to ask,” she said calmly. “You left because the CDC put out an emergency call. Fine, I get that. But if you’ve got a guilty conscience because you weren’t man enough to tell me goodbye to my face, you’re just going to have to live with it. You earned it.”
They locked eyes for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Fair enough,” she echoed. In a deliberate effort to shift the subject back to where it belonged she said, “Have you had a chance to check out my patient notes?”
He nodded, both to her question and, she suspected, to her change of topic. “They’re pretty good, given the circumstances.”
She didn’t bother to defend her scribblings because she figured “pretty good” was an accurate assessment. By the time she’d figured out she had a major problem on her hands, the patients had been coming in so quickly and their symptoms had been so severe that she’d been hard-pressed to do more than scrawl a few details on each chart.
“I was thinking I’d talk to the families and get a better idea of what the patients have been exposed to lately,” she said. “We still haven’t seen any evidence that it’s transmitting person-to-person so I’m betting on a toxin.”
“Of course it’s a toxin,” he said, as if that should’ve been obvious. But his eyes lit with the same adventurer’s interest she’d seen in Thom’s expression the night before, the same kind she used to live for. “Question is, which one, and where is it coming from?”
When she felt that same adventurer’s excitement stir sluggishly in her blood, she shoved it aside, telling herself that the mystery had mattered in a different lifetime, to a different woman. Not now, and not to the person she’d worked hard to become.
“I’ll ask around town, get a victim profile and get back to you.” She turned away, suddenly needing to get out of there, to get away from him and his teammates.
“Hey, Roxie?” he said, calling her back.
She turned, hoping he couldn’t read her emotions the way he once had. “Yeah?”
“You still have the twenty-two?”
She patted the pocket of her light windbreaker. “Right here. I hate to admit it, but I feel safer carrying it, especially after what happened last night with Aztec.”
“Good. You’ve got my number, right?”
She grimaced. “Don’t count too heavily on cell phones. The coverage is pretty spotty out here, and there are dead zones like you can’t believe.”
“Then watch yourself, and be back by dark.” He paused, and something moved in his expression. “You and I are on night shift together.”
He turned and disappeared into the kitchen wing before she could ask whether that had been his idea or someone else’s. She didn’t call him back, though, because she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know either way.
WHEN LUKE REACHED the utilitarian kitchen, he was relieved to find the large space deserted, save for a bank of portable auto-samplers doing their thing on the first set of patient blood samples. That gave him a moment alone to lean on the wide farmer’s sink and look out the window, seeing nothing but Rox’s face in his mind’s eye.
He saw the terror on it when she’d run from the Violent. He saw the defiant expression she’d worn just now as she stood up to him. Even more, he saw the woman he’d known back then, and how her face had been so much more open, her laugh so much easier than it was now.
Back then, she’d said she wanted to slow down, to do something smaller and more intimate than the relief work they’d both loved. I want to belong somewhere, she’d said, as though belonging to him hadn’t been enough.
Well, she was a part of Raven’s Cliff now, and the way she’d interacted with the police chief and the volunteers—even the blowhard mayor—suggested that she belonged.
So why did he get the feeling she still wasn’t happy?
“She’s living in the middle of an outbreak site, you idiot,” he said aloud.
These people were her responsibility, which made it personal for her in a way he’d never ever wanted to experience. But because it was personal for her, and dangerous for her, and hell, his damn job, he’d do his best to figure out what was making her people sick, and how to stop it. And then…
And then nothing. He’d leave, which was exactly what she wanted. She’d made it clear just now that she didn’t need an explanation or an excuse from him, didn’t need an apology. She wanted her town healed and him gone.
“I can do that.” Ignoring a faint sense of disquiet, he strode to one of the auto-samplers and hit a few buttons harder than necessary, making the machine beep in protest.
“That’s not going to get it to work any faster,” Bug said from the outer kitchen doorway, which led to a small courtyard. “Science takes the time it takes.”
“I know.” Luke turned away from the machine to glare at the stocky, bearded geneticist. “And don’t quote me to myself.”
“Sorry. Just thought you might need a dose of rational detachment and good old scientific perspective.” Bug crossed the flagstone kitchen to check how many minutes were remaining on the analytical program. Way too casually, he said, “You going to put me on bedpan duty for the rest of the year if I ask about her?”
Luke muttered a curse under his breath. He’d known his teammates would ask about him and Rox. He’d just been hoping it would be later rather than sooner.
The four members of the outbreak response team spent too much time in close quarters not to know each other well. May, their most intuitive member by far, had picked up on the vibes right away, and had asked him about it the night before. “Rox and I have a history,” he’d answered, and hoped she’d tell the others what he’d said, and they would leave it at that.
Apparently not.
“Maybe not bedpans,” Luke said, “but dishwashing at the very least.”
Bug pretended to think about it. “I can live with that. So what’s the deal? You two are giving off enough sparks to power a couple of sequencers and a cryofridge.”
Luke would’ve winced, but he couldn’t deny the observation. Things between him and Rox had never been subtle. Something that strong just couldn’t be hidden. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be controlled, either. Couldn’t be trusted to last.
“She and I used to have a thing.”
“No kidding.”
“I ended it.”
“And from the looks of it, not very well.”
This time it was Luke’s turn to say, “No kidding.” He didn’t bother trying to explain. Rox didn’t want to hear it, and it wasn’t anyone else’s business but theirs. So he said simply, “We’re here to do the job, end of story.”
Bug seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding. But as he turned away and busied himself removing small tubes from the centrifuge and placing them in a rack, he said, “If you want to talk about it sometime, you know, I wouldn’t mind. I used to be married.”
Luke couldn’t tell if Bug thought that made him an expert on relationships or exes. “Used to be?”
“She wanted to stay home and do the family thing, and she didn’t want to do it alone, so she found a guy who didn’t disappear for weeks at a time on zero notice.” The geneticist’s shrug conveyed a sense of inevitability. “I don’t blame her, and I don’t blame the job. I love the job. The two just weren’t compatible.”
“Sorry to hear it.” Sorry but not surprised. It was something of a theme in their line of work—the couples who made it were typically the ones who worked together, not the ones who struggled to keep things going long-distance. Then again, the couples who worked together also had a nasty habit of flaming out in public. It was a completely no-win situation as far as he could tell.
Just then, the auto-sampler beeped to announce that it had finished its first run. Relieved, Luke reached out and clapped Bug on the shoulder. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
He’d rather solve an unsolvable outbreak than try to figure out interpersonal relationships any day.
The two men peered at the computer screen, where the results of the preliminary blood and urine tests were displayed.
“What the hell?” Bug recoiled in surprise, then leaned back in for a second look. “Their hormone levels are off the charts!”
And it wasn’t just one or two of the levels that were elevated, Luke saw. The plasma levels of cortisol, aldosterone, testosterone, DHEA, estrogen and several others had spiked in every one of the sick people. More important, the levels were nearly double in Violents compared to the nonviolent patients.
“Not just any hormones,” Luke said grimly. “Steroid hormones.”
“The Violents are on a ’roid rage?” Bug said, surprised. But then he nodded. “It fits the symptoms, sort of.”
