Disclaimer: I own none of the characters and/or situations from either Blade 2 or Shivers/They Came from Within and make no money from this.
Summary: Reinhardt and Carolyn find out that something weird's going on.
Parasitic
Chapter 2–Discovery
Carolyn lifted her head to look at the huge gold clock set into the wall and saw with surprise that an hour had passed. Corby had actually let her sit there in the lobby for an hour? Way to put me in my place, doctor, she thought. Guess those papers weren't so important after all. The more she thought about it, the surer she was that this had been some lame, twisted plot to get her trapped on the island for the night because he thought she'd have no choice but to sleep in his apartment and, presumably, with him. The things she had to put up with to get her doctorate. The only reason she tolerated this was because he really was a brilliant scholar in his field and she needed a recommendation letter from him for her post-grad job hunt. But if he'd decided to take more aggressive tactics with her, she might not have a choice other than to defend herself, one way or another. Did Corby know she had a black belt in karate? If he didn't, she had the feeling he'd know it before morning.
Dropping the glossy magazine onto the coffee table in front of her, she stood up and walked over to the information desk. The redhead working there wore a badge that said "Nicole" and wore the professional smile of someone in a service job. Still, Nicole almost certainly made more money directing people to the bathrooms in Peachbloom Towers than Carolyn did as a grad assistant. "I was wondering if you could tell me which apartment Dr. Kevin Corby lives in. I'm his assistant at the university and I've brought him some important papers."
Nicole tapped at the computer keyboard with perfectly manicured crimson nails. "Your name, please?"
"Carolyn Robideaux." She held up the Fedex package with Corby's name and university address on it. "He said it was important he have them tonight."
"Yes, your name is on the approved guests list. Dr. Corby's in 2503, one of our four penthouses. I'll ring him and tell him you're on your way up." She waited for almost a full minute with the phone to her ear, then replaced it with a puzzled look. "Dr. Corby doesn't answer. Are you sure he's at home?"
"He called me two hours ago from his apartment. I arrived on the last ferry, and if he'd left on it I would have noticed."
Nicole recovered her smile. "He's probably having dinner in one of our restaurants."
"If he isn't at his apartment, I'll start checking them." But Carolyn felt a little uneasy now. Why wouldn't he answer the phone? He knew she was bringing him his papers and must know when the last ferry arrived. Leaving her waiting for an hour in the lobby was out of character for him. Twenty minutes, yes, but not an hour. Maybe he'd just gotten absorbed in one of his experiments and lost track of time. He'd converted one of the penthouse's bedrooms into a home lab, so it seemed like a possibility. But could he ignore a minute's worth of a ringing phone? Maybe he'd turned the ringer off. So many maybes. Carolyn pushed aside her worries about Corby and made for the bank of elevators at the far end of the lobby, set in gleaming chrome and steel.
OOOOOOO
Cromwell and Reinhardt hit the security post together. Four of the rent-a-cops sat there, watching the huge bank of TV monitors fed by the numerous surveillance cameras in the complex. Peachbloom Towers actually had five separate security control rooms, but neither vampire concerned himself with any but this one. This room housed the monitors and camera controls for the residential section only. Its eyes watched the corridors, stairwells, and elevators the mega-rich walked in their daily life, the same route they'd have to use to reach their target. So these men, the ones who'd had the bad luck to draw the Friday two-to-midnight shift, would die in the next minute, their ears still ringing from the blast of the Semtex Reinhardt had used to blow the door.
The first guard sat numbly at his station, dazed as Cromwell seized him, jerked him to his feet, and ripped into his jugular with his fangs. Reinhardt hit the second guard with a solid right hard enough to knock him cold. The two remaining guards had time to begin regaining their wits, assisted by the fact that the first guard's back was toward them and thus they couldn't see him becoming a vampire's dinner.
Reinhardt embraced the iciness battle evoked in him, the movements of fighting transforming into something akin to dance. An isolated part of his mind registered contempt for his half-blood partner, who elected to feed before the battle was even decided, leaving him to deal with the rest of their opposition. He grabbed the third guard and hurled him into the wall, exploding the bank of monitor screens he struck into a shower of glass and sparks. The smell of burning human meat filled the room, along with screams that diminished in intensity by the second. When the last guard saw this, he drew his sidearm and managed to fire one shot at Reinhardt before the big vampire reached out and snapped his forearm. The bullet had fired true; lodged in Reinhardt's chest just below his left nipple, it would have killed any human attacker. Just the guard's bad luck that he wasn't one. Anger, along with a growing hunger, pierced his inner chill, and he hissed, baring his elongated canines. The guard screamed and tried to struggle free, but he was no match for a hungry vampire.
The hot blood, sharp with adrenalin, filled his mouth when he bit into the jugular. Sweet, sweet, the burn of life...Even though he'd fed on a homeless crack addict before meeting Cromwell and the buzz still lingered in his veins, he needed to feed again to heal the injury he'd sustained. But what was Cromwell's excuse? No way had he been so hungry he couldn't wait until after the control room had been secured. He might not have gotten shot if the other man had been tending to his business instead of having dinner. When Reinhardt raised his face from the now-dead guard's neck, the other vampire had dropped the corpse he'd finished draining and moved to the guard who'd been knocked unconscious earlier, his bloodlust still not sated. Now that was gluttony in Reinhardt's book. Nobody really needed two in less than ten minutes unless they were badly injured. For a moment their eyes locked. "You want this one?" Cromwell asked.
He shook his head. "Seems like you're a lot hungrier than I am." Too hungry to take care of business, he added in his mind.
"What can I say? Fighting makes me thirsty."
"Watching sounds more like it. I didn't see you doing any actual fighting."
"I don't like your tone." But his voice held no heat, all his attention focused on the downed human.
"As if I care what you like. I'd like to do this job and get back to New York in the next couple of days." The guard moaned, beginning to awaken, and Reinhardt motioned at him. "Eat up. I'll take out their communications." Moving toward the phone line room, he heard the slurping sounds as Cromwell indulged his thirst.
OOOOOOO
Carolyn stepped into an almost-empty car and pushed the button for the top floor. The button for 19 was also lit. When the doors closed and the elevator ascended, she felt only the slightest jolt. Life among the rich folk, she observed.
The elevator's only other passenger was an elegant woman who looked to be in her early fifties, although with the plastic surgery she could afford, there was no way to be sure. She wore a navy suit Carolyn felt sure had to be Chanel and black lizard pumps. Her entire outfit cost more than a year's worth of her student loans. When the woman noticed Carolyn watching her, she smiled. "First visit to Peachbloom?"
She nodded. "I have to deliver some papers to one of my professors." No chance of being a resident, of course. Her shoes were too cheap and her purse wasn't designer. The most expensive piece was the red silk blouse, and Carolyn had found that on sale at a department store for $30. Among other students she never felt her own poverty because everyone shared the same boat, eating ramen noodles and microwave burritos and living with roommates in spaces designed only for one. She doubted if this rich lady had ever even heard of ramen noodles.
"That's Dr. Corby, then?" The woman's face darkened. "Do you know you're stranded on the island for tonight?"
A cynical smile crossed her lips. "Yes. He didn't mention any accommodations, so I imagine I'll be sleeping on a loveseat in the lobby."
"No need for that. I've heard quite a lot about Dr. Corby." The woman held out her hand. "I'm Sara Porteous. I live in 1911. If you have any difficulties with your professor, just come downstairs to my apartment and you can sleep on the sofa. I've seen too many crying girls in the elevator on too many mornings."
"Thank you, ma'am." Carolyn revised her opinion of the older woman upwards and smiled. "I might just do that."
Mrs. Porteous got out on the nineteenth floor and she rode up to the penthouse floor alone. She really hoped Dr. Corby didn't have anything aggressive planned, like, say, answering his front door naked with a hard-on, but she believed in planning for everything.
The thick beige carpeting muffled her footsteps as she walked down the hallway, the white walls suggesting the sheen of metal. Funny; the place seemed pretty empty for a building that was rented to full capacity. But she shrugged off the worries and rang the doorbell. A few moments passed, and he did not open the door. She rang again, and again nothing happened. The third time she kept her finger on the bell. Inside the apartment it jingled in a steady, annoying melody guaranteed to ache like a bad tooth if it continued. After two full minutes she gave it up as useless. What kind of game was he playing? On an impulse she tested the knob and it gave easily under her hand. Jesus, the naked hard-on scenario seemed more likely by the second.
The door swung open and she stuck her head in for a quick, cautious look. Nothing. The living room was starkly decorated in white and black with lots of chrome and sharp edges, a perfect frame for the view from the terrace of the hillside rolling away into the Atlantic Ocean. It still looked impressive even in the darkness as she stood there. Carolyn could only imagine its magnificence in daylight. Moving further into the apartment, she put the Fedex package down by the door and closed it quietly behind her. The lights had been on when she entered. What did that mean?
She checked the kitchen to her right and turned up nothing. Alarm bells had been going off in her head for quite a while. Carolyn wasn't sure where the danger was–maybe Corby intended to pull some unsavory sexual shit with her, maybe even get violent–but she knew something bad was going down. A hallway led off the living room and she saw three doors. One of them was definitely the bathroom and two were bedrooms. Corby had told her he used one of the bedrooms as a home lab. But maybe nothing was going on, maybe he'd just gotten caught up in an experiment. Enough to ignore two minutes' worth of a ringing doorbell? It didn't sound right. "Dr. Corby?" she called out. "It's Carolyn Robideaux. I have those papers you wanted."
Only silence answered.
"Dr. Corby? Are you all right?" Without conscious awareness of it, she had assumed a fighting stance as she made her way toward the first door. If the naked scenario played out, he would get the ass-kicking of his life, that was for sure. Her hand itched for a sword, a gun, any weapon she could use. But her body would have to suffice. She moved into the hallway.
OOOOOOO
When Reinhardt returned, Cromwell had taken one of the guard's guns and was tucking it into the waistband of his pants. Good idea, even if he had been the one who came up with it. In case some threat existed that he'd need the silver for, he wanted to save that ammo. The guards all carried .38 Chief's Specials, not spectacular like his custom pistol, but serviceable. He snagged one off the last guard he'd killed and asked, "So when do we move?"
"Right now. No one should discover any of these humans until someone comes to relieve them, which would be at eleven-thirty at the earliest. By then we'll be long gone."
Reinhardt nodded and the two vampires left the guard post. "How are you planning on getting into the jeweler's apartment?" Golden and Cromwell saw no need to fill him in on things like that. He was just muscle, even if an air of danger still clung to him. Not a vampire alive was unfamiliar with his status as his father's murderer, something that had not happened in pureblood circles in undead memory. He rather enjoyed that notoriety because it kept others at arm's length. But it would still be nice to be something other than a thug. Even though he hadn't really wanted to be the overlord of Vienna, he would have liked telling people what to do better than being told.
"He's expecting us. I'm posing as a potential buyer from England, and you're my bodyguard."
"Seems a little careless, with all those diamonds at his place."
Cromwell shrugged. "He probably trusts too much to his weapons."
"His mistake." The elevator opened, and they rode up to the nineteenth floor. Something about the emptiness of Peachbloom Towers nagged at Reinhardt. All his internal danger bells were ringing, but he couldn't pinpoint the problem. Perhaps there was something else that his vampire senses picked up, but just barely? And that input triggered his worry? He almost mentioned his concern to Cromwell, but then he remembered who he was dealing with.
Lutz, the jeweler, took quite a while to open the door. Cromwell had been ringing the doorbell, then pounding with his fist. Danger, danger, whispered in Reinhardt's brain, the same song he'd heard when he found his father in the ballroom with that bloodied sword, sipping blood from a snifter as if he didn't have a care in the world. Then it had saved him. His hand found the butt of the .38 Special in the pocket of his jacket. Had that really been almost seventy years ago? The loss of his mother still ached. But memory fell away when the jeweler opened the door.
For one thing, he was naked. For another, a girl who looked young enough to be his granddaughter was equally naked and draped all over him. And for yet another, her hand had a firm grip on the man's privates, caressing the rampant hard-on that pointed up at the ceiling. The girl's dark brown eyes stared at both of them as she toyed with the old man's dick. "Is this how you normally begin a business meeting?" Cromwell snapped as he shouldered past the naked pair.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. This situation was fucking weird. The last thing they needed to do was walk into that apartment without the faintest idea what was waiting. Reinhardt wondered again why the half-blood was in charge. Lutz, other than his state of undress and the little Siamese twin whose hand was fused to his hard-on, looked normal. Just a sixtyish guy with a paunch and thinning hair, nervous eyes and a greed that spelled the end for him, if he only knew it. He'd seen pictures of the target before they left New York, but his eyes weren't nervous now. Instead they were filled with a kind of hunger he'd seen only in other vampires. As he moved closer to the jeweler, he reached out with his senses. Something off in their scents–lust, but to a degree he'd never encountered before, and something else, an alien smell he couldn't identify, but not human or vampire. Dangerous, though. He kept his hand on the gun. Whatever was wrong would reveal itself soon.
"What's your girlfriend's name?" he asked Lutz.
The man giggled, drool dripping out of one corner of his mouth, while the girl kept her hand moving on him. Jesus, she was jerking the guy off right in front of two total strangers. And she didn't seem concerned with them seeing her naked. She wasn't a bad-looking chick, with a short cap of blonde hair that matched the patch below and the eyes that looked like chocolate. Nice tits, too. But those eyes were just too damn weird. His cock resolved to stay limp. "That was a simple question, Mr. Lutz. Why won't you answer it?"
He giggled again, but the girl replied in a voice that sounded rusty, as if she hadn't spoken in years. "Come in. Please, come in." She released her grip on Lutz and began moving toward him. "You'll like it, I promise." Her eyes bored into his. "Freedom...you need that. We all need that."
He registered the moment she stepped too close and put his hand in the middle of her chest, shoving her hard toward the naked man, who made no move to catch her. Both of them tumbled through the door of his apartment, which Cromwell had already begun searching for the diamonds. Reinhardt kicked the door closed and drew the revolver from his pocket. "You need these weirdos any more? 'Cause I'd like to kill them right now. They're creeping me out."
But the couple wasn't listening. When they'd fallen to the floor, instead of trying to get back up or reacting to what he'd just said, the man had rolled onto his back and the girl had climbed on top of him, sliding herself down onto his hard dick and riding him like a pony. They paid no attention to Reinhardt or to Cromwell, who made a noise of satisfaction from the other room. "Got the diamonds. You can kill them anytime you want." Then he stepped back into the living room and got a good look at the show. "Jesus, Reinhardt, what's going on here?"
"You a virgin, man? I guess they decided to fuck. Nothing I could do about it."
The half-blood stood there, staring, in shock. Reinhardt hid a smile. This was so unexpected Cromwell had no idea what to do. The joined pair on the floor seemed to be having quite a good time, unconcerned with the fact that two strange men had forced their way into his apartment and were in the process of robbing him. All that mattered to them was the burning in their flesh. In their present condition they were no threat, but somehow Reinhardt sensed danger even more intense than before. "Are you both crazy? We're going to kill you," Cromwell shouted at them.
Lutz's only response was to grab the girl by the hips and come with a wail before sagging back to the carpet. The girl cried out, disappointed, and climbed off her lover. At least it gave Reinhardt a clear line of fire. He shot the jeweler directly in the heart, the slug from the .38 punching an adequate hole in his chest. When he turned toward the girl, Cromwell held up his hand. His fangs had elongated, and the older vampire sighed. Thinking with your thirst will get you killed, he thought. "We don't need to be hasty. Maybe this one doesn't have to die."
"Whatever. I'll be outside while you take care of things." Personally, he wouldn't have shaken hands with that crazy-ass bitch, much less put his mouth on her to drain her, but half-bloods were different, greedier. And stupider. What was going on?
"Give me some time." The half-blood smiled as he took the nameless blonde into the bedroom and closed the door.
"Your funeral," said Reinhardt before he left the apartment, the lock clicking as the door closed. He never saw the movement in the dead jeweler's mouth, a motion that could almost be the tip of his tongue moving to lick his lips. Almost, that is, if one didn't look too closely.
OOOOOOO
Carolyn twisted the knob of the first door on her right and opened the door. Corby's bedroom, and what a room it was. He was into bondage, judging from the suspension gear hanging over the bed and the sturdy black-leather-covered board secured to the wall with two chrome loops suitable for securing chain or handcuffs. On further inspection, the bed had been custom-designed with leather restraints at the head and footboards and was made up in black rubber sheets. "And you sleep here?" she whispered to herself in amazement. "Looks more like a rec room." Numerous gadgets and devices that she didn't recognize littered the dresser and the floor; a rack of whips was mounted on one wall, and the ceiling was mirrored. A sheaf of photographs rested on the vanity. She flipped through them quickly, recognizing students and a couple of the female professors. Damn. Corby was a busy kind of guy.
Next she checked the room across the hall, which proved to be the bathroom. She found the first signs of trouble there. Several scalpels had been hurled carelessly into the sink, chipping the porcelain, and trails of blood decorated the white. Carolyn turned to examine the shower and found it had been used recently. His towels were still wet. Smears of blood marred them, while a partial handprint stained the glass door. What had gone on? Some extracurricular activities got out of hand? God, had he actually killed somebody? Adrenalin sent tingles throughout her as she prepared to check the last room.
Nothing she had imagined could have prepared her for what she saw. The spare bedroom served as an improvised operating room, it seemed. A naked woman lay on top of a table, cut open, her insides a mass of blood and organs spilling out. Her hair seemed to have been blonde, but blood had dyed it red. One arm hung off the side of the table, fingers curled in toward the palm. The nails were long and painted green. She had to fight the urge to vomit as she moved toward the bloody tableau. Murder–God, how had this happened? Who was this woman? When had Corby snapped? Carolyn felt as though she'd stepped sideways into some alternate reality, but the smell of blood choked her and brought her back to her senses. She had to get out of here. Her professor had gone insane and she could be his next victim. Tabloids printed stories about girls just like her every day. Trying to control her breathing, she moved backwards into the hallway, only to be brought up short by a body behind her. A man's hands clamped onto her upper arms.
"So you're finally here," said Dr. Corby.