Page 87 of Skin Trade

It wasn’t her father’s office she recalled playing in when she was a child, or her father being the one to be there when things in the world upset her. It wasn’t her father all those nights she was tucked in, read to. It was him, all him.

“I never left you,” Seth said, the rims of his eyes red. He swallowed. “Not once. I searched for you. They made me …” He shot a glance at her father, nothing but hate in those crystal blue eyes. “I would have never left you alone. No matter what.”

She stood still for a few moments, her heart doing somersaults in her chest and her mind ready to pack its bags and leave all of this. “I just--”

“Is it all coming together now, princess?” Alexander snatched the frame from her hand and tossed it like it was nothing across the room. “This is getting boring now.”

“But I don’t understand,” Payton said. “How did he … how do you and I--”

“Do you need me to spell it out for you? You really can’t fathom it?” He shook his head at Seth. “Are you sure you used my sample to make this? I mean, any protégé of mine would have a higher intelligence than this.

“Payton,” Seth said. He held out his hand as if he were ushering her to him. In her head she heard him. “This way. Come this way.” But her body was stuck, her legs made of lead. She wanted to be sick. It didn’t matter, though. Aamon moved in place of Alexander, came to stand beside her, Seth’s blade in his hand. The one she had left in the office with Riggs.

“His sample? You’re not. But my father …”

“Joseph?” Alexander said. He shook his head, shrugged at her. “He is not your father. He is not anything.” Alexander marched over to where Joseph Mathews was still chomping to get out of his restraints. “This is a man who would sell his own wife’s womb for the sake of power and control. That is what kind of man he is. Humans. They say we’re the savages.”

“What does my mother have to do with any of this?”

“Your mother was the donor,” Seth said.

“Let me explain it all to you. See if you can keep up.” He went to Joseph and grabbed him by his greasy hair. “This man wanted money and power. He wanted to, for God knows what reason, rule all those below him.” He let go of her father’s hair, wiped his hands down one of his guard’s top. “This man,” he pointed at Seth, “is one of the most brilliant molecular scientists going and was working on curing our slight affliction to the sun and other ghastly things that render our kind to a pile of ash. I.” He tapped at his own chest. “Was the vampire donor you were created from. Following so far?”

She didn’t dare move.

“So, Joe here, comes to me one day asking to be taken over. He has this grandiose idea in his head that if he becomes one of us, all his riches will come to him. Now I am a fair fellow, and such deals always come with prices. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. You get it, right?”

Seth inched closer to her. His mind was a calming presence beside hers. Without a word, Aamon lifted the knife and tapped it at her front, shaking his head as Alexander carried on talking.

“So, he wants power and I want help with my science. I need a donor so we can mix human genes with vampire genes. Seth here had hypothesized that if such a union were to happen, we could study the creation, test it and understand why we go crispy fried when we walk in the daylight. It would be a breakthrough. We could target what was doing it in our bodies and eliminate it. And that was what we did.”

“But; and this is where the story gets a little hazy for you, when you were born, you showed no signs of vampirism at all. Not a thing. I mean, you had no fangs, we put you outside, not even a sizzle. Nothing. Seth x-rayed you and in your jaw are fangs. Small welts, buried way down deep.”

She rubbed at her jaw as if she might actually feel them there. “I’m not one of you.”

“No, you are. Tell her, Seth.”

His dark hair had draped a little over his face when he had tried to fight. She hadn’t noticed before, but his shirt was a little torn. The buttons popped off. “Your vampirism is latent,” he said. “You age slower, heal faster than other humans. It’s all there, just something in you is slowing it down. We had to wait until you aged.”

“You see, I wanted to scrap the test subject, start again. That was my plan. What was the point in having something we couldn’t test for years when we could make another, but do it better? Seth wouldn’t hear of it. Outright refused. Even Joe over here was all for it. He even tried once, but then Seth went all Nosferatu on us, ripped anyone to pieces if they dared come near you and refused to work with any other specimen but you. I could have saved you all this bother just now.”

“You wanted to kill me?” Payton asked. “To just end me?”

“Oh, don’t take it personally. You’re just an experiment. We did find something interesting with you,” Alexander said. “Your cells aren’t destroyed by Allium Sativum. It didn’t matter how much we gave you, nothing. Not one single reaction. The problem with this, when we found out and I wanted to keep you after all and run further tests on you, Seth didn’t like that either. Not at all. I mean, we’d made a breakthrough for our kind and he wanted to keep it all to himself.”

“She was a child. Not your toy.”

Alexander shrugged. “This was your idea. Not mine.”

“And I changed my mind. Do you know he and your mother concocted a plan to take you away from us? He was going to hide you both, keep you away and let his own kind continue to die when he had the answer to our problems. What kind of man would do that? Would sacrifice all of us for you?”

“Your mother would have been here if it weren’t for that. Your father wouldn’t have had to pull the trigger and your mother would have been alive if Seth had kept his goddamn nose out and did his job.”

Payton gasped, put her hand to her mouth.

“Enough,” Seth said. “She has heard enough.”

“But she doesn’t know the whole story yet? Does she? Doesn’t know how she got here today.”

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