Page 39 of The Black Rider
“I still don’t remember what happened the day they took me. I just remembered something, but it was Christmas with Miss Mabel.”
Leif raised my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles.
“Cherish the wonderful memories when they come. Aeron told us about your nightmares. You haven’t had one since you got here.”
“I feel safe with you and Aeron. It feels like the nightmares can’t touch me with the two of you here.”
“Now that you’re here, no one is ever taking you from us again. Did you want to check the laptop? I need to do a few things to my samples first before I know if it worked.”
I stuck the flash drive in the laptop, but my eyes just kind of glazed over when I stared at the screen. I wasn’t in the mood to read Doctor X blaming me for his failure at killing the rest of the world. I wanted to know what was going on with those samples.
Whatever Leif was doing seemed to take forever, but what did I know about curing diseases? Now that I thought about it, I rarely got sick. If I got a headache, I just threw Aleve at it and took a nap. I think the worst I’ve ever felt was a hangover and the day I woke up from that coma. Miss Mabel had a personal hangover cure recipe she passed to me.
And now that I thought about it, even if I felt terrible, I could still stand and call for help, even if my throat was parched. I should have been weak and crawling on the floor. I shouldn’t have been able to pound on that door. I certainly shouldn’t have been ready to fight my way out that lab with the bat Aeron gave me. Why didn’t I ask those questions then?
“Ha! I have a vaccine against a Rage Head bite!” Leif yelled, startling the shit out of me.
“How did you manage that?”
“Do you want a simple explanation or the scientific one?”
“I want the art major explanation.”
“I took Jose’s blood and killed the demon part with mistletoe that isn’t poisonous to humans. Nephilim and angels have a certain immunity to demons. I isolated that part of my blood and added it to the vaccine. I took the parts of your blood that were added to the mutation and neutralized them so they won’t be passed in a bite. I needed all three components for a vaccine.”
“How do you know it works?”
“Come here and look.”
I peered into the microscope, and all I could see were red blood cells.
“A lot of people here have offered blood samples to help me. A lot of them are AB like you, but we have all the blood types here. I’ve tested all of them. This sample is O negative, and I’ve already treated it with the vaccine. Watch what happens when I introduce a sample of Jose’s blood.
“The Rage Head Mutation is different for a bite because it introduces it to the bloodstream. Normally, if I would put Rage Head blood in a healthy blood sample, you would see the blood cells multiply and split in half as they start getting surrounded by a black membrane with spikes. I’ve tried creating a vaccine with my blood and mistletoe, but it didn’t work until I had yours too. Watch.”
Aeron used a dropper to place a drop of black blood on the slide. Instead of the cells splitting and mutating, it was like they attacked the foreign blood. I could see Jose’s blood was almost entirely black, and the cells had spikes on them. A golden ring formed around the healthy cells and started attacking the black cells until they totally dissolved.
“That’s amazing, Leif,” I said, flinging myself in his arms.
I squeezed him as tight as I could. Honestly, I felt safe with them, but I couldn’t see a way out of this before. I thought it would take forever to make a vaccine and something to kill all those Rage Heads. I should have put my faith in Leif. He was the Horseman of Pestilence, and he’d been working on this the entire time I’d been in a coma.
“It’s not done yet, Ariel. I still have to synthesize it and get it over to a different lab for mass production.”
“Still, it’s pretty amazing.”
“If that impressed you, I haven’t even fiddled with my zombie killing samples yet.”
“Can I watch?”
“Why don’t you hop in my lap and be my assistant?”
“I’ll happily sit in your lap, but I barely passed biology and didn’t take chemistry at all because it wasn’t required for my major. The only reason I passed those in high school is that my father paid a lot of money for me to. He wanted me at an all girl’s school that was close to home, and they had a certain GPA requirement to stay. He greased a lot of palms so he could keep me close to home.”
“You’re a Harbinger, a kick-ass artist, and one of the best shortstops on the West Coast. You need not be good at science too. I’m excellent with diseases and stopping the Antichrist, but angels have sporting games in Heaven too, and I’m always picked last because I suck at all of them.”
“Let me guess, Aeron gets picked first.”
“Aeron is good, but he’s got a bad temper, and he’s a sore loser. He’s banned from most of our sports. Most people want Dice and Asher on their team, but Dice prefers drinking and watching, and Asher thinks sports shouldn’t exist because they distract us from our jobs.”
