"What's the status?"
Gidge didn't raise his head off his arms over the video link, just mumbled his words into them. "We got through Leung's personal e-mail account. I did some digging. Got some interesting finds."
"Do tell." Fox called from the kitchen as she fished a fresh ice pack out of the freezer and put it over her left eye. She'd come in at five in the morning, claimed to have lost the fight but won the war, dropped some pieces of plastic onto the kitchen table, and headed straight for their stash of painkillers. Since then, she'd had about three the size of the tip of Abby's pinkie, and she wobbled slightly when she walked.
Gidge waited for her to stop weaving in her chair, then gave up and buried his head back into his arms.
"Seems our little familiar's been a bad boy."
"Gidge, the essentials, please?" Not for the first time did Abby miss her old crew. Hedges explained everything in detail, Sommer had to be told to slow down, and Dex almost never exaggerated. Between Stone lone-wolfing, Fox tripping, Alyssa reminiscing, Caulder pondering, and Gidge play-acting, she didn't feel as though she'd learned more than one or two substantial things a day since joining up with them.
"Leung's got two kids."
"So? He's married, isn't he?"
"Yeah," Gidge tilted his head up, smiling shyly on the monitor; he had too good a secret to be drawn out quickly.
Fox came to the rescue. "Spit it out, Gidge, or I'll make you a peyote special." She winked her good eye at Abby as Gidge blanched. "Bad trip," she mouthed.
"Hey!" Gidge grumped, indignant, and grudgingly continued. "Leung's got two kids, both boys, aged seven and fifteen. But those aren't the only kids he and his wife have had."
Alyssa stopped circling choke points on the blueprints for the convention center. At the sink, Caulder surreptitiously turned the faucets off and slowly scrubbed dishes from that morning's breakfast. Fox lost color from everywhere but the red knot on her face. Abby stared at the screen, still unsure how to feel.
"I think I know why he's gotten to be Feliar's favorite familiar - woo-ee, try saying that three times…"
"Gidge!" Fox shrieked, slapping the table hard. Hundreds of miles away, Gidge jumped upright in his chair. Closer to them, Alyssa also started, swallowing heavily as Gidge, guiltily, told them in plain English that their worst, most awful suspicions were true.
"I think he's been feeding babies to his master."
"That's sick," Alyssa clapped a hand over her mouth as though she might be ill herself. Her complexion was the right color for it - a pale olive shade that rose up from her throat - and she was heaving slightly with each breath. Abby caught Caulder staring at her, intense concern underwriting his usual heavy concentration. Something there, perhaps? She filed it away for later.
"Where's your proof?" Fox's cold tone and hard logic settled her stomach. She banished memories of bodies trussed up, floor to ceiling, leaking blood like coolant from the underside of a car, and focused on Gidge's information.
"Mrs. Katherine Leung has had, wait for it, eight pregnancies besides those of her two boys since marrying our boy."
"So?" Fox tapped her lower lip. "Something like thirty percent of all women lose pregnancies they're not even aware of having. She might just have known."
"Fox, I'm not just talking she got knocked up that many times."
"You mean she delivered."
"Every time. All boys, too."
Graveyard humor tickled her, and, had she not caught herself, Abby might have laughed aloud. For some reason, she could imagine King's reaction to this news. Guy's got strong Y swimmers, good for him. God, if her inner monologue was starting to sound like him, she was obviously going nuts. Or missing him, but she didn't really think that was the case. He'd only been gone a few hours – she'd only just started to enjoy not having him around, so it was clearly too soon to regret the loss of his unique brand of company.
"What are the ages of death and order of births including Leung's living children?"
"There are two that preceded the oldest, both died less than a month after birth. After that, there's three between the older boy and the younger one, and three after."
"Fucking hell," Fox breathed, astounded. "She kept trying that long?" Abby did the math. Leung was forty-seven; if his wife was about the same age, she'd have been giving birth to her last three pregnancies all in her forties.
"Why would anyone put themselves through that?" Alyssa gulped between her fingers. Caulder appeared to have decided one way or another about his wife, nodded to himself in the kitchen, toweled off his hands, and moved to sit next to her. They didn't look at one another, only held hands and stared at Fox and the back of the laptop where Gidge waited to be prompted for more information.
"How old is his wife?"
"Turns forty-five this year. I guess she really wanted a girl." The joke fell flat, and even Gidge could appreciate the bad taste of it. "Sorry."
Fox was not appeased. Both her eyebrows dipped furiously, her one visible eye flashing darkly. She let the ice pack fall away, and the angry swell of her other eye made the hideous expression she wore that much more severe.
"Don't shoot the messenger, Fox," Gidge squeaked, digital distance not providing him the slightest sense of comfort under the power of her glare.
"What explanation does the hospital or the police give for the deaths?" Her voice was tight, controlled, and insistent, clinical and distant yet intense and dangerous. Eight was a lot for them just to ignore, unless the police were in on it - and, Abby thought, dejectedly, they might be. The cops in L.A. had been.
"The first two were so quick they attributed it to SIDS."
"SIDS?"
"Sudden Infant Death Syndrome," Fox snapped, though her rancor was not directed at Abby. This was her field of specialty, or was to have been if she had ever completed medical school. "It's bullshit."
"In this case, yeah, but--"
"It's bullshit, Gidge," Fox cut him off. "Nine times out of ten, the parents are to blame. They get away with murder or neglect because there's been a tragedy. No one's going to attack them if they've lost a child."
"It's a legitimate syndrome, Fox," Alyssa corrected her, whisper-quiet. Fox looked over the laptop at the other woman and appeared stricken, the force of her fury draining, horror and shame replacing it. It was a new look for Fox, embarrassment.
"Yeah, sure," Fox cooed, her tone light and reassuring, "but it's much rarer than figures would have you believe. The numbers are something like one in two thousand these days. They'd have to be extraordinarily ignorant about SIDS to have lost two kids to it." She cleared her throat, some of her deflated anger returning when she looked at Gidge. "What about the others?"
"The ones in between the two kids who're alive all made it for at least a little over a year."
"Which comfortably moves them out of the range of statistical probability for SIDS." Fox drummed her nails on the table, impatient and expectant. Gidge did not disappoint her or dare to keep her waiting.
"Two died from blood loss."
"You're shitting me." The vampires would let that be in a medical report? Better they'd been abducted and murdered than to confess that where someone could find it.
Fox pursed her lips and made an educated guess. "Hemophilia?"
"Hey, give the almost-doctor a prize." Gidge grinned without mirth, clicked through some screens on his end, and read off the analysis he'd found in a dull monotone. " 'Patient appears to have been homozygous recessive for hemophilia B.' They did one of those gene workups or something on both of the babies."
"Karyotypes," Fox supplied.
"Yeah, that."
"B's extremely rare. Only fifteen percent of all hemophiliacs have it."
"And there's no artificial clotting factors for type B."
"Not yet." Fox was understandably defensive of her profession, and again Gidge backed down. "That still only accounts for half of these babies. What about the last four?"
"The one born right before the kid who's still alive died two years after his brother was born. Hemophilia again. The last three were listed as having severe mutations incompatible with life. I gather that's all Mrs. Leung knew."
"She's older, she might believe that she or her husband became dangerously infertile, perhaps due to exposure."
"Right, so, open and shut."
"Except we don't know why the vampires were taking those babies."
"Sure we do," Abby looked for the speaker and found everyone staring at her. She'd been thinking of the men and women in the farm again, drifting in and out of Fox and Gidge's back and forth second-hand diagnosis, and she must have spoken aloud without realizing.
But they shouldn't have been surprised. With all the years of hunting accumulated between them, they had learned enough about vampire feeding habits to know why innocent, barely year-old baby was a rare delicacy. If not immortality, Leung could at least earn money from his vampire master by selling off his kids one at a time.
"Disgusting." Fox growled, lost in her own thoughts.
"Agreed. Gidge?"
"Yeah-huh?"
"What about the boys the vampires left behind?"
"They're both healthy as far as I can tell." He disappeared from view, audio feeding them his rapid clicking and typing until he returned. "I take it back. The older kid was treated three months ago for a fainting spell."
"Fainting spell?" Snapped out of her funk in a hurry, Fox slid to the edge of her chair, gripping it tight to keep from flying at the screen.
"This kid's got more medical coverage than the President, folks. I almost stopped reading before I got to this last visit to the emergency room. He's been in and out of hospitals for everything from bumps on the knee to a broken arm. Methinks Mom's a little protective."
"Not unreasonably," Alyssa sniffed, offended by Gidge's tone like the good den mother she was.
"But the fainting spell…hemophilia again?"
"Unknown at this point. Blood work was scheduled, tests run, no abnormalities as far as they could tell except for a slightly elevated percentage of misshaped er…ery…help, Fox?"
"Erythrocytes. Red blood cells," she explained and went on without a pause. "They think he's got anemia?"
"Something like. Which would explain why the vamps didn't want him. Not enough iron for their RDA."
"Christ," Fox slapped the ice pack over her eye and held it there, bracing her arm on the edge of the table. "They've got every fake disease in the book to explain the healthy dead kids, and the only ones Leung got to keep were the sick ones."
"They nothing," Abby chewed on her lower lip. They hadn't killed those kids, Leung had. His wife was either complicit in the scheme, which was hard to imagine; or she was a mess; or she was the most stupidly optimistic woman on the planet. Fucking vampires, inflicting that much damage, as always without care or concern. All that mattered was blood. "Cocksuckers," she said under her breath for good measure.
"Agreed," Fox moaned, wincing as she put a little more pressure on the pack against her eye. "So, what do we do about Leung?"
"Put him in a hole with his boss."
"I've got that bitch," Fox smiled, toothily. "I don't do humans."
"I'm flexible," Abby shrugged. Truthfully, she hated having to battle her own kind as well as the vampires, but she could do it. That was the good thing about killing familiars: they were never innocent and they always deserved it.
"So, what now?" Alyssa folded her arms over her breasts and tapped her index finger above her elbow. "How does this information help us? Do you think Leung knows where the plant in Marin County is?"
"Odds are," Abby nodded. Who better to know than the guy who ran Biomedica's public side? "We can't lay hands on him until the conference starts."
"Too risky with that much security. Fucking Arnie," Gidge chimed in sourly.
A door slammed two floors below, and a minute later Stone appeared, jogging tiredly up the interior staircase. Hair windblown and matted from salt water deposits, his entire posture speaking of exhaustion, Stone went first for a bottle of water and an energy bar before collapsing in one of the dining room chairs.
"Tell me something, Fox - hey, what happened to your eye?"
"Never mind. What's on your mind, Eli?"
"Do women have more blood than men?"
"Just the opposite, why?"
Eli sighed, sagging against the back of his chair, neck braced on the top, eyes pointed at the ceiling. "Because that's who the vampires are going for."
"Women?"
"Yeah."
"Specifically?"
"Yes, Fox, women especially." Stone pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyelids together. Red lines on his forehead and cheekbones still showed the impression from his diving mask. He'd been under a long time.
Gidge groaned. "That means they like babies and women. Who on earth likes babies and women? I mean, women I get, but sheesh, kids?"
"I like women," Caulder hugged Alyssa. "And babies, too."
All right, that was it. Abby opened her mouth to speak but Caulder was faster.
"Yes, we're pregnant."
With the news out in the open, even the unpleasantness of their earlier conversation couldn't dim Alyssa's smile.
"Say what? Alyssa! Alyssa! Damn it, turn the screen around so she can hug me!" Fox wore an ebullient grin of her own; of course, she knew - she was the closest thing to a doctor they had. Complying with Gidge's request, Fox tilted the laptop away, and Alyssa, obligingly, hugged the display.
"Congrats, folks," Eli cheered, wearily pumping one fist in the air.
"Timing could be better." Alyssa's false and transparent disappointment evaporated with that one comment. "Could be worse."
"Worse than being pregnant?" Fox mused to herself in an off-key lilt that made Abby shiver. "Tell yourself that when you deliver." The sarcasm didn't quite match either, but she dismissed it. Fox had her reasons to be weird about kids.
By unspoken consensus, the task at hand took a backseat to planning around this new contingency. They would wait to hear any news from King, track down names and addresses from the boats Stone had monitored in the bay and from the IDs Fox had pinched from the familiars who'd roughed her up.
With that much to do and with the big announcement just made, Abby conveniently forgot to mention they would be expecting a visitor in a day or two.