Chapter 16: Unearthed
"I've been looking for you. When I heard about the Company's founders being murdered and the symbol that was left at the crime scenes, I knew it had to be you and I started searching, although it took me longer to find you than I expected. How did you end up buried alive in Tokyo?"
"Kaito's son stuck me here after I killed him - guess he thought it was poetic justice or some such," Adam replied, before stopping to peer inquiringly at the person who'd unearthed him. The waning moon gave off very little light, but her pale features still stood out clearly in the darkness. Her expression, however, told him nothing. "Right now I'm less curious about what went on in his head when he buried me than why you've gone to the trouble of digging me up. We didn't exactly part on the best of terms all those years ago, and Kaito was always a good friend of yours...Dr. Pratt."
"Doctor?" The woman repeated the word as if it felt strange in her mouth. "I haven't done any bioengineering in a long time." She tossed her vibrant red curls behind one shoulder, her equally red eyes flashing at the reminder of her former life. "It's just Victoria now."
Adam eyed her with cautious curiosity, weighing his next words carefully before speaking. "I see. Angela told me that the same rogue vampire that took her sister, the one who'd made a sport of hunting our kind, set his sights on you after I was mothballed, but I thought your ability would've protected you. You always had that unique talent for avoiding danger..."
Next thing he knew, his back was slammed against the dirt wall of his open grave, her arm pressing painfully on his collarbone as she pinned him there. "James wasn't a danger to me," she growled, her crimson eyes alight with fury - or maybe the color was simply more noticeable with her face only inches away. "He admitted that at first he only intended to hunt me like all the others, but my gift helped me stay one step ahead of him long enough that it caught his interest, and he fell in love with me. By the time he approached me, hurting me was the last thing he wanted to do."
Reading between the lines of her story, Adam thought he had a pretty good idea of what had happened; he didn't doubt that Victoria Pratt's ability to elude him had indeed piqued the tracker vampire's interest, though he wasn't sure whether that interest was due to any personal qualities she possessed. It seemed equally likely to him that it had more to do with her potential usefulness as a partner in the dangerous games the tracker liked to play.
Regardless of what his true motives had been, Adam could easily picture Victoria being swayed by his professions of love, because as brilliant as she was in the lab, she was also a hopeless romantic with absolutely tragic taste in men. In fact, he'd suspected more than once that her ability was the only thing keeping her from ending up in a truly abusive relationship, though evidently it didn't help her detect or avoid psychological abuse - assuming that was what had gone on between her and her tracker. Never having met the man himself, Adam couldn't be certain he hadn't truly loved her.
"So you two became involved," he surmised, "and I'm guessing you let him bite you. Where is he now, then? Did he have you dig me up so I can be his next target?" Though he tried to hide it, he felt a shiver crawl down his spine at the prospect of being hunted by a deadly predator who specifically sought out his kind - he might be able to recover from anything James did to him (unless the vampire got it into his head to rip Adam's off), but he still didn't fancy being the bloodsucker's plaything.
Mercifully, Victoria shook her head, her face crumpling in a way that gave Adam the impression she would cry if she could. "He's gone," she said with a catch in her voice. "Almost three years ago now, he decided to hunt a girl who turned out to be Bob's daughter, only she wasn't alone. Somehow she'd attached herself to the largest coven I've ever seen, outside of the Volturi - my guess is that she was sent to investigate their more talented members' abilities before anyone realized what they were. In any event, one of them chose her as his mate, and they all came to her defense when James set his sights on her. I had a bad feeling about his plan to trap her, I begged him not to go, but he wouldn't listen... Once his mind was made up about anything to do with a hunt, he never listened, but he always came back to me...until that day."
"I'm sorry," Adam said, which seemed like the best response even though nothing could be further from the truth. Personally, he wasn't the least bit sorry to see such a dangerous creature removed from the world, particularly one who had hunted people like him for pleasure. He allowed a moment to pass in solemn silence before asking what he really wanted to know: "So, why look me up if not for him?"
Her demeanor shifted so suddenly as to be positively alarming, all traces of sorrow vanishing as she bared her teeth in a furious snarl. "I want revenge on the people who took James from me - Bob's little princess, her boyfriend, his whole family! There are too many of them for me to take on by myself, though, and their abilities make it even more challenging. You always had such grand ideas, Adam; you even came up with a plan to uproot and reshape the entire world once, so I knew if anyone could help me figure out how to beat the Cullens, it would be you."
The mention of the Cullens caught Adam's attention; he remembered that name from one of his many conversations with Peter, when the empath had said something in passing about Bella's strange friends. Odds were that she and Peter were with them now, which meant that attacking them might be just the distraction Adam needed to ensure that Peter wouldn't interfere with his plans again.
"Well, Victoria, you're in luck, since it seems our goals align for the moment. Now, do you mind if we get out of here? I've spent enough time in this wretched hole that I don't fancy standing around in it any longer."
She smiled, her teeth gleaming in the moonlight, and grabbed him by the shirt. Adam felt a powerful upward pull, and the next thing he knew they were standing on the carefully manicured grass beside his erstwhile prison. He glanced around at the silent cemetery, reveling in the sight of so much open space all around him; he wanted to jump for joy, maybe run a few laps around the perimeter to work out the kinks he imagined he could still feel even though his healing power had instantly done away with every trace of soreness and stiffness, but he was acutely aware of the scarlet eyes boring into him.
"Well?" Victoria asked impatiently when he turned back to her. "Where to now?"
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
The street was deathly silent as Adam and Victoria traversed its length, at least to human ears; she could still detect certain signs of the humans' presence where they cowered in their homes, but they were unusually quiet, almost as if they had somehow sensed the predator that had come among them and were holding their collective breath, willing their hearts to beat as softly as possible and hoping against hope to escape her attention, or putting their faith in flimsy barriers of wood and drywall to protect them. Part of her wouldn't be surprised if that were true - people in more developed parts of the world tended to think those in places like Haiti were superstitious, still clinging to outdated beliefs in things like voodoo, zombies, and demons, never stopping to consider that maybe such people were simply more aware of what inhabited the darkest corners of their world.
Of course, if the people hiding from the night inside those dark, almost silent houses did have any inkling of what was currently walking their street, they were sadly mistaken if they thought walls would keep her out...but they were in luck. There was only one dwelling she had any intention of entering tonight, and she wasn't after a meal.
When she and Adam reached their destination, she ripped the door off its hinges with an effortless tug and followed her companion inside, her nose wrinkling at the smell that assaulted it. The scent of evolved humans in and of itself wasn't unpleasant - besides, she'd had plenty of time to get used to it while traveling with Adam - but this particular evolved human's scent was tainted with the stench of disease.
"Well, well," Adam said after she had located a light switch, allowing him to see better, "when I got wind of a Shanti outbreak in this neck of the woods, I didn't expect the source to be you of all people!" On the surface his voice sounded cheery, but beneath that veneer there was a dark undercurrent of vindictive satisfaction. After all, this was the man who had pursued him and Peter as they made their escape from Primatech, forcing Adam to give up what could have been his most useful ally if only Peter hadn't been removed from his influence.
For his part, the man who was known to most only as 'the Haitian' returned Adam's gloating smirk with a defiant glare, though a hint of alarm showed in his eyes when Victoria stepped into view. He didn't know if this vampire would threaten to bite him like Elle had, but he was certain her presence couldn't possibly bode well for him.
She gave him a cursory once-over, taking in the sheen of cold sweat on his dark skin and the tremors that wracked his body as he lay huddled in bed, wrapped in a blanket even though it was a warm night, then turned to Adam with a look of exasperation. "The Shanti virus again? This is why you brought me to this rat-infested shithole?"
"You said you wanted to take down the Cullens," he replied with a shrug, "but you said yourself that they were formidable adversaries. Well, I'm telling you that with Peter Petrelli on their side, they're invincible. It would take an army to mount an offensive against them-"
"I could make one," she interrupted.
Adam rolled his eyes. "Yes, a vampire army - bravo, jolly good idea. Except with the numbers you'd need, you wouldn't have a hope of controlling them and keeping them hidden, and then you'd have the Volturi on your trail; but you already know this, or you wouldn't have come to me. A biological attack, though... That's something they can't fight. Not even Peter can stop a virus."
"There's just one tiny flaw in your brilliant plan: vampires are impervious to disease," the redhead snapped. "No pathogen, viral, bacterial, or fungal, can penetrate or corrupt our cells!"
"This is no ordinary pathogen. You've studied it - you know its versatility, its lethality, the way it evolved to specifically target the genes that give people like me our abilities - which, as you know, share several commonalities with the vampires' genetic structure. With a little tweaking, I'm confident we can produce a strain that will obliterate your enemies." And if it happened to spread beyond the single coven she wanted to eliminate, that was fine with Adam; vampires were a troublesome species, their bloodlust, animalistic instincts, and near-invulnerability making them unpredictable and practically impossible to control. As such, he had decided that the new world he intended to build from the ashes of the old would be better off without them, though of course he wasn't stupid enough to tell Victoria that.
Seeing that she still looked doubtful, he added, "If anyone's capable of such a feat, it's you; I know you've been out of the lab awhile, but you were the best. You just need to start thinking like a scientist again."
She thought it over for a second, but could find no holes in Adam's logic; if he was telling the truth about this empath who had joined the Cullens, the number of newborns it would take to challenge them was simply untenable, and she couldn't afford to attract the Volturi's attention and risk them stopping her before she completed her mission. She had to see this through, had to avenge James' murder, preferably in the most painful way possible. Nothing else mattered.
"Very well," she said at last, "we'll try it your way."
"Excellent." Adam rubbed his hands together as he prepared to get down to business. "Unfortunately, all previously collected samples of the Shanti virus are in the Company's hands, unless they destroyed them after my ill-fated attempt at reclaiming my work, which means we need to harvest new ones. That's where our infected friend comes in." He gestured at the Haitian, who finally made a feeble effort to rise from his bed, only to fall back on the mattress, shivering uncontrollably.
Victoria moved forward in a flash, pinning him down with one hand while reaching behind her with the other to take the syringe Adam offered her. "Sorry," she told the Haitian with a vicious grin that belied her words, "but I'm afraid this is going to hurt more than a little."
Burlington, North Carolina - 3 weeks later
Thinking like a scientist again, Victoria discovered, wasn't as easy as it sounded. Having grown used to the freedom of going wherever she wanted whenever she pleased, of not needing shelter from the elements, it was surprisingly difficult to re-accustom herself to having walls around her. It didn't help that Adam's lab was located in a well-populated city with an average amount of sunlight, which forced her to stay inside all day, every day, and the humans... To be surrounded by so many potential meals yet unable to indulge her appetite for fear of drawing unwanted attention was extremely frustrating.
When she complained, Adam told her that he'd chosen this place because it was home to one of the world's largest clinical laboratory networks, which he had bought into when it was a mere start-up (under a carefully crafted false identity, so that his partners in Primatech never knew of his stake in it). Nobody else was aware of his involvement either, yet his influence was sufficient to secure him a lab for his own personal use, with no oversight from the rest of the company. Indeed, no one had bothered them since they set up shop there, so Victoria swallowed her objections and got to work.
Luckily, there were other ways in which her new state of being actually made her task easier; the fact that she never needed to sleep and could spend hours standing perfectly still while gazing into a microscope allowed her to work more efficiently than her old self ever could have. She discovered that Adam was right - the Shanti virus had a seemingly infinite capacity to mutate and adapt without losing an iota of its deadly efficacy, and after introducing a number of alterations to the genetic structure of the samples she'd taken from the Haitian to increase their virulence even more, she finally succeeded in creating a strain that managed to eat its way through the hitherto impenetrable membranes in her vampire cell culture.
"Remarkable," Adam declared when she shared her results with him. "To have produced an entirely new strain in a mere three weeks, and one capable of doing what no other pathogen in history has ever managed before - absolutely incredible. Now, let's get to killing those pesky Cullens, shall we? I don't suppose you have any idea where they're hiding out?"
Victoria gave him a scornful look. "Vampires don't exactly keep address books. I know where they will be, though," she added a second later. Before setting off on her search for Adam, she had gone to see Laurent, to seek his help in her quest for revenge. He had refused, saying that even though he sometimes found the Denali coven's 'vegetarian' diet too restrictive for his liking, he was happy with them - especially with his newfound mate, Irina. He'd told her that they planned to get married (a silly human custom she and James had never bothered with) in six weeks, assuming they were able to track down everyone they wanted to invite in that time, and personally delivered her invitation then and there.
She hadn't planned on attending, knowing that witnessing the celebration of someone else finding eternal love would only remind her of what she had lost, but now it occurred to her that the Cullens would certainly be there. Even as she thought it, part of her felt a pang of guilt at the idea of disrupting what should be the happiest day in the life of someone she had considered a friend, but she swiftly dismissed it.
James had suspected once or twice that Laurent only stayed with them for the safety that could be found in numbers, and because he believed James was the most dangerous vampire he'd ever met, but the minute they found themselves in a situation where he thought James might be outmatched, he'd deserted them, leaving them to face the Cullens alone. She had no way of knowing whether his presence would have made any difference in the end, if James might still be alive if he'd stayed, but it was possible. Then he'd declined to aid her in avenging her lover's murder, preferring to simply go on with his life - in fact, he even seemed to enjoy the banal, domesticated existence he'd settled into more than he had liked traveling with them - and forget all about James. It wasn't fair, she decided. Why should he get to move on just like that when her world had been shattered?
This entire thought process took place within a couple of seconds, and then her mind was made up. "An old friend of mine is getting married soon," she told Adam, "and his bride-to-be is a close friend of the Cullens. I think we should give them a very special wedding present."
Peter Petrelli - New York City?
As he surveyed the empty streets all around him, Peter felt a strong sense of déjà-vu. He had only seen the city like this once before, in the dream that had warned him he was going to explode. He was fairly certain he was dreaming now, but just like that other time, it felt too real to be a mere hodgepodge of images churned out by his subconscious. So if this is another vision, what's it trying to tell me?
Looking around, he noticed a few differences from his last dream vision; in it, the city had been much the same as it always was apart from the fact that all the people were gone, their cars abandoned in the middle of the road, but this time the cars were gone too and the streets were full of trash, giving the impression that things had really gone to hell before everyone finally gave up and left for good.
A sudden gust of wind blew a piece of said trash toward him - a piece of paper, which he caught. It was crumpled and stained so badly that he couldn't read most of what was printed on it, but he made out enough to understand that it was a mandatory evacuation notice from the CDC. Then the scene shifted and he found himself in a warehouse, which was filled from floor to ceiling with plastic-shrouded forms that were unmistakably human bodies, all tagged with the biohazard symbol.
He wanted to get a closer look, but before he could take a single step he felt a strange prickling sensation on the back of his neck, accompanied by an unnerving certainty that there was someone right behind him. Whirling around, he was initially relieved to see that it was Bella...until he noticed that her skin was mottled with black streaks, as if some kind of rot had spread through her veins. Worst of all, her eyes were also completely black, irises and sclerae swallowed up by whatever corruption had taken hold of her.
"Bella?" He wanted to reach out to her, help her somehow, but, as so often happened in dreams, he couldn't move.
She just stared at him for a moment - at least he thought she was staring at him, though it was hard to tell exactly where those black voids were aimed or how much they were taking in, and there was no sign of recognition on her face - then lunged forward, her mouth opening wide. He cried out in shock and pain as he felt her teeth shred through his skin, her powerful jaws crushing his windpipe...
...And was still yelling as he woke up right where he had gone to sleep, in his bed in the master bedroom of the guest house he shared with Bella. She was crouched over him, using the tangle of sweat-soaked sheets to pin him down in an effort to contain his thrashing.
"Peter?! Peter, wake up!"
Seeing his eyes open, she reached out to touch his face, and he automatically flinched away before realizing that her skin was untainted by any trace of decay and her eyes were the same scarlet he'd grown accustomed to during the weeks they had spent together, though they were starting to take on an orange tint as she consumed more animal blood. At the moment, however, he wouldn't have cared if they were still blood-red; anything was better than the empty black holes from his dream.
With his mind now firmly reoriented in the real world, he made use of his superhuman strength to nudge her aside so he could finally free himself from the twisted covers and sit up - not that she put up much resistance, having frozen when he cringed away from her - then pulled her into his arms, holding her so tightly that it was a good thing she didn't need to breathe.
"That must've been one heck of a nightmare," she murmured from where her face was hidden against his shoulder. "You were tossing and turning like crazy and I couldn't wake you up..." She reluctantly lifted her head and craned her neck to look into his eyes, her own clearly showing that she was still very worried. "Are you okay?"
"Of course I am," Peter reassured her, though he was still breathing hard and was pretty sure she could feel his heart pounding right through his ribcage. He paused to take a deep breath and start getting his respiration under control before adding, "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
He just wished he could be a little more certain which of them he was trying to convince.
Yes, another Twilight/Heroes composite character. I figured the idea worked pretty well with Alice, and when it hit me that both series had a redhead named Victoria, I just couldn't resist.
Now, on to a more important topic: as I'm sure you've realized by now based on the summary and developments in this chapter, part two of this story will deal with a viral outbreak. Obviously this was all planned long before the novel coronavirus came into being, but seeing as we're still in the midst of a global pandemic, I've found myself questioning if anyone wants to read about another outbreak, even involving a fictional virus, or if it would be insensitive to continue with the story as planned...so if anyone feels like sharing any thoughts on whether I should consider pausing updates until the situation improves, I'm open to your input. Personally, I'd like to keep going and finish this story, but I don't want to cause anyone pain or distress. Whatever happens, I'll update at least once more in November to let you know.