For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
She didn't seem to get it. And Castle could't figure a way to make her.
She was a vampire. And she had never, not once, had a malicious bone in her body. Even the ruthless way she'd gone after Bracken and then the CIA conspiracy, sunk her teeth into it, one might say, she hadn't been vicious.
Kate Beckett, his wife, was a vampire of mercy. An angel of justice, not death.
So no, he didn't have the same aversion to vampires she did.
But still he hunted through the once-locked laboratory in his usual haphazard, attention-deficit style that had always worked with them, while she went at it methodically, specific, one drawer after another, one row of hanging files after another.
Which meant she was the one who found the cache of health records in the filing cabinet and he was the one who discovered the age-appropriate So You Want to be a VL Carrier! brochures geared towards children.
The patient records were a range of ages, the youngest being three years old at the beginning of the labwork, the oldest being one hundred and thirty-three with the last recorded trial, she told him, just a couple months ago. Castle flipped through the brochures: while the cartoon depictions of children eating their liver and onions for the sake of the lichen balance, or biting into watermelon and sucking out the pulp as an exercise in fang deployment were kinda cute—well, side by side with the medical records, it was chilling.
He was feeling less chivalrous towards Dr Harris the more he investigated. While Kate pored over the medical records, putting together details about diet and nutrition, heme levels and VL phases, Castle poked his nose into storage lockers and lab work, petri dishes and serologic machines.
"Hey, so this?" Kate held up a thick file folder, many tattered pages, a spot of what was likely blood. "This makes me think there aren't a set number of phases. Every family is different."
"Ah. Very interesting," he said, nodding. "Which explains why she's rather ambiguous about where I am in the phase."
"There are blood markers," she said, flipping through a notebook. "I think that's what this means. It's difficult because part of this is written in her own note-taking crib. Deciphering it is a matter of guesswork."
"Like your mom, with her case notes," he grinned.
Kate was not smiling.
"Ah, so," he hurried on. "You're saying it's difficult to know how many phases I'll experience. Could be finished for all she knows."
"Your, um, fangs seem to work already?" she said. "Which is one good indicator, I think, based on these notes. Or at least, she thinks that."
"Dr Harris does have about seventy years on you, Kate."
"Or more," she muttered.
"You see all those degrees after her name? Some of those programs are five-year residencies. She has legit credentials. I wouldn't disdain whatever she says happens during phase."
Kate scowled. "Hey, have you found our stuff? My gun. We can't leave my service weapon here, Castle."
"No, still looking," he said, returned to his primary job. She didn't want to talk about Harris's credentials, or how accurate the woman might be, fine. "Oh, hey, want some water? There's a mini fridge with an unopened case."
"Yes, please. Toss me one?"
Castle decided not to toss it, considering she was all the way across the room sitting at what was evidently Dr Harris's working space, a flat plastic table with a couple of filing cabinets as legs. When he approached, Kate startled and looked up at him from her perch on the swivel stool, a flush in her cheeks he knew even if he didn't understand it.
She was aroused.
By him. Interesting.
He sank to the edge of the desktop, twisted open the water bottle for her, handed it over. He twisted the cap off his own and thunked his bottle against hers in cheers, smirking at how flustered she was by his nearness.
She hesitated, the bottle almost to her lips, didn't drink.
He grinned, tried to hide it. "In one of those kiddie pamphlets, there's a whole paragraph about drinking plenty of water because a vampire needs healthy fluids."
Kate scowled, but that seemed to put to rest her hesitation. She drank deeply of the water bottle, and yes he was watching her throat move and the vein pulse blue just there under her jaw, but it wasn't that he was blood thirsty. It was that he knew now what the experience was like, how it felt, the heady and powerful lust that blood-letting entailed.
Powerful aphrodisiac.
"Don't," she rasped.
"I wouldn't," he murmured. "Without consent."
She snorted, but her lips twitched as she pulled her eyes away from him.
She was thinking about it anyway. Not that he wanted to drink her dry like Royce had done, but just, you know, there were things now. She had expanded his sexual horizons, and it wasn't just because of how flexible her body was.
Yeah, he was enjoying this, the exploration of the vampire scene; he wanted to think on that a bit longer.
He straightened up, kept exploring, tossing the empty water bottle into a trash can.
Kate continued to decipher the medical records, and Castle kept randomly pulling out drawers and searching for hidden spaces. He was certain a vampire doctor would have some kind of cool feature in her lair. The former ICU fishbowl had been walled off from the rest of the clinic, so it only stood to reason that there were further secrets to be had.
From the other side of the room, Kate gasped.
He turned. "What?"
She was slow to lift her head, but when she did, she had flattened her lips. "Nothing. Caught up in these people's lives." She waved a hand over the records, straightened a sheaf. "Families, blood families. Family stories."
Right, the VL-specific antigens that became functional in vampires but not in normal folks. Made sense that Dr Harris would keep records by family.
He rapped his knuckles on a large centrifuge, imagining the blood spinning out in the middle, the different test tubes all neatly labeled in Dr Harris's spider script. (He'd seen her notes in the medical records; she had the hand-writing of a doctor who had been forced to do all her own transcribing).
It was interesting because the centrifuge was the only machine here he could recognize; it kinda looked like a breadmaker. There was something that looked like a flat cash register but instead of keys it had a digital screen with a readout and an indicator light, plus some kind of hand scanner on a phone cord. Seemed a weird combination of old tech and new, but he had the impression their blood samples were currently inside this machine.
Next to it was a clear flat surface and two more machines he couldn't identify, one which looked more like a wireless phone: this was the base with the digital screen for messages, here was the empty place where the handset normally rested. Beside that was a thing that looked like a portable defibrillator, except it was a squat blue box (and he'd seen the AED inside the room where she'd done surgery on Kate).
He glanced to the oversized centrifuge, narrowed his eyes. He rapped on it again, realized the hollow sound wasn't because that was where the test tubes went. "Hot damn," he muttered, pressing his thumbs into the seam around the bottom edge of the metal dome.
"Shit," he heard Kate breathe, but he'd already gotten his fingers into the lid and was prying it open, lifting it back towards the wall.
He gave a sharp shout of triumph and fished out her service weapon, taking care to check the safety was on despite the fact the magazine had been ejected. "Look what I found, Kate, plus my keys." He scooped up his fob and dangled it from his finger, clasped it in his hand with the first bit of luck they'd had.
"My weapon," she said. Hand out.
"You need clothes first," he snorted. "A pair of pants at least."
"I bet she has scrubs somewhere in here," Kate said, gathering medical records against her chest.
"Wait, what are you doing with those?"
"I want to study them."
"Why would you need to do that?" he said carefully.
"We're not staying here, Castle."
"No, okay, I get that. But those are other people's medical records. Which, you know, vampire or not, there are rules and stuff about that."
She glared at him, pressing a bundle of old manilla folders against her chest. "You think she got these playing by the rules?"
"Maybe she did. They could have all been voluntary."
"I doubt it."
"You've never been one to use some else's villainy as an excuse." He set the magazine for her weapon down on the table, then the gun beside it. "So don't start now."
She scowled at him. "You need these. I need them. This is how we survive the Horde."
"Table that, for a second?" Castle shifted towards her, saw the wariness on her face as he approached. He had the key fob to the Porsche in hand—Harris must have had someone move the car, thus needing to grab it from the center console—and he held it up before her. "We can still ride in style, I hope? No need to ditch the car."
She was still clutching the folders. "It might be a bit too conspicuous—"
"We're not hiding from the police, are we? Just other vampires. And other vampires don't seem to follow cars, but smells."
She winced.
"Are we hiding from the police?" he squeaked.
"No. I don't know. We need time. To let you go through the phases, fully transition, get a handle on it before we go back and pretend to be normal. I don't want anyone finding us. Not the team, but not any vampires either."
"Isn't that what the lake is for?" he joked. "The algae in the lake confuses the scent, throws 'em off."
"The lake." Her face cleared. "The Salt Lake, the Great Salt Lake. That's what… I don't know why I forgot… that's where we can go. Where we need to go."
"Rough estimate, about twenty hours from here, Kate, and that last session does seem to have helped but—"
"We can do it. I can do it." She pressed the files flat to her thighs. "Find clothes, grab our stuff, some information so we know what we're doing. I don't want us going at this blind, and we do know the Great Salt Lake will hide us, so really, everything is settled."
Everything was not settled. But her desperation was cute, not to mention a bit catching, and he was more than willing to compromise.
"I think most of this is contingent on two things: one, that we get you some pants, sexy as those legs are, and two—" She flashed him a bit of inner thigh and he grinned. "And two, we need a copy machine for those records you want to take with us. Then, and only then, can we can consider making our escape."
She nodded, hands flat on the records. "Okay. Deal. Find me some clothes, pretty sure I saw a flatbed scanner hooked up to that computer in the fishbowl."
Damn. He hadn't noticed.
He wondered if she would wait a couple hours until Dr Harris came back through and pronounced her fit? Or at least on the road to recovery?
Yeah, he doubted that.
—-xxx—-