Chapter 6
The first kiss they shared left them both breathless – Bo panting with the effort of holding back her powers, Lauren stunned into the realization that she couldn't keep any longer from emerging into the conscious part of her brain.
'You have to help me, Lauren," Bo begged, tears falling from her chocolate eyes, her fingers shy of brushing the other woman's skin, "I don't want to kill any more, never again."
And Lauren took this new assignment no less seriously than the Ash's orders, studying and learning, experimenting and eventually coming up with a stop-gap chemical measure. "It's like an inverted birth-control pill," she explained to Bo, showing her a small box with tablets, "Won't strip you of the ability, but will help to significantly reduce the probability. At least, that's the theory."
"So, we need the practice," the succubus grinned sweetly, "Who could I test it with?"
The possibilities flashed through the doctor's mind – asking the Ash to procure a human prisoner she knew he had been keeping in his dungeon, putting an innocent human at risk, offering herself up? The decision was not an easy one, not when she made her daily visit to the sealed room where Nadia had been lying, perched precariously between sleeping and dead. The decision was not an easy one but it was taken immediately after she conducted a regular check-up on a wolf shifter, working as a cop, one of the team who had captured the fugitive succubus.
Dyson, the wolf, was buttoning up his shirt, while Lauren was scribbling the data into his chart, and couldn't resist a little put-down.
"You're wasting your precious short human time, doctor," he sniped, "I haven't had a sick day since before you were born."
"And yet you look exhausted," Lauren remarked, a bit absent-mindedly, but was jerked from her professionalism when the man in front of her smirked smugly, "Not exhausted, just a bit drained, sex with a hot succubus would do it to you, not that you would know."
"A succubus? Bo?" the blonde woman stuttered, feeling stupid for not having thought of who her patient had been feeding on all this time.
"There are precious few succubi in the whole world, just about one this side of the border," Dyson finished straightening his vest and got up to his full 6'3 height, towering over the human with deliberate superiority, "She needs to feed, I have no objection. A win-win."
For a second Lauren considered driving her small but bony fist into his self-satisfied furry face but weighed her chances and kept that urge in check. Later that day, however, she offered herself up for the succubus-control pill test and was happy to see not a shadow of second thoughts on Bo's delicate face.
After a week of fruitful and vigorous testing Lauren was called to the Ash's audience room and accused of working on an unauthorized assignment. The doctor cringed with stupefying horror, thinking he was talking about Bo's blood research but as he boomed on she slightly relaxed.
"It is all part of the comprehensive study," she bleated humbly, doing her best inferior stoop for further effect, "studying the possibility of mitigating the succubus powers, providing you with the means of chemically restraining her. It never occurred to me there could be an objection."
The Ash seemed to like the idea of restraining Bo as much as he liked the general humility of the human's tone and pose and visibly mellowed.
"You always have a good explanation, doctor, and though any unauthorized testing, let alone, your intimate involvement in it, is a severely reprehensible thing, I am willing to show mercy and not to shut down your research," he declared self-importantly and motioned her to leave, "Your punishment shall come in a less drastic form."
Once out of the door Lauren bumped into the wolf-shifter wearing his usual supercilious look and a satisfied smirk. "Got rapped over the knuckles for touching what was not yours to touch, doctor?" he asked looking down at her.
"And you went running to snitch to the Ash out of petty jealousy?" Lauren's servility was running out for the day, "Bo taking a preference to a pathetic human over you must've rankled."
The man's face was genuinely surprised as her meaning sank in. "I am no snitch, it's the prerogative of the weak and the cowardly," he replied haughtily, "And don't flatter yourself, doctor, it's no preference, just having fun, temporarily."
Burning with hurt and humiliation, Lauren returned to the lab, comforting herself with at the very least saving both her experiment and her connection to Bo. She learnt of her less drastic punishment later that night when she came to visit Nadia and found the room with the cryogenic pod open and disactivated. Then and there, holding her now truly dead lover in her arms, Lauren swore that she would shake off her shackles and run, that she would be free again. Having positioned Nadia back into what was now her coffin and leaving the room she amended her vow and vouched that one day she would take revenge.
Another couple of days filled with hard work and rigorous research passed and Lauren learned to blunt the pain into an ignorable throbbing in her heart that let her function on and kept her resolve alive. Until the night the doctor crossed path with someone she thought she would never see again, not until she made good on her promise and was free.
Lauren heard the infirmary door slamming and turned to see a handsome tall dark-skinned man enter with an unconscious girl in his arms.
"Save her, doctor," he pleaded, laying down the tiny body onto a bed, the deathly pallor, the closed eyes, the ragged breathing and the blooded clothes all screaming 'brink of death' and Lauren dropped the clip-board she was clutching at. At first glance she recognized the dear little face, at second her professional eye latched onto a soft swell of a belly under the loose top.
Containing her own rising panic, Lauren yelled for an assistant, started stripping the view-obscuring garments, hooked the girl up to a monitor and an IV. She knew her own life was draining out of her with every drop of blood the girl was losing and she fought for both of them. That night she saved one life but failed to rescue the other.
After her patient was stabilized and out of the woods, Lauren went out into the corridor and looked into the anxious brown eyes of the fae who had brought the girl. He was twisting a soft fedora hat in his hands, his dark face almost grey with grief.
"She'll live," she said curtly, failing to scrape up a shred of sympathy for him.
"And the baby?" the man asked and allowed his full relief show when she shook her head slowly.
"The girl's human but don't you worry, doctor, I'll square it with the Ash," he said politely, "My family have some standing, lots of it, actually." It was clearly meant as an explanation not bragging and he managed to look more ashamed of it than proud.
"You brought a human here because the baby was half-fae, because it was yours?" the doctor asked and the man nodded, his gaze dropping to the tops of his expensive leather shoes.
"I love her, but the baby had no chance in my world," he whispered.
"You let them hurt her," Lauren stated what was not an accusation, just the last straw.
"I didn't know they'd go this far, I couldn't, they are my family …" the fae stumbled and backed towards the exit, "I'll come check on her later."
As he beat a hurried retreat, Lauren returned to her sister's bedside, "I let you down too, Kenzi," she said caressing the sweat-slicked forehead, "I wanted to protect you from them and I failed. But I'll set it right, I promise."
She left the infirmary to go back to her lab, to resume the work she knew now would build a safe world for her sister, would be her perfect revenge, her payback, her justice.
Soon enough she tested the serum she created from Bo's blood on some of her fae patients, then on Bo herself who from flirty and affectionate turned into doting and loyal. Then an inexplicable rapidly-spreading epidemics of fae flu, who nobody would have believed had been manufactured by a human genius, hit the fae population, Light and Dark alike. As luck would have it, the Ash's enslaved physician came through with a cure that was generously offered to everyone regardless of their allegiance. Lines of fae started flowing through doctor Lewis's lab getting their curing shots or their inoculation shots until one day Lauren walked into the stony hall to face the Ash surrounded by her little enthralled army. The only thing Lauren regretted as she saw her former owner being chained to the wall and locked for eternity was that Kenzi, still weak and convalescing couldn't see it.
Of course, there was some collateral damage, as Lauren was fully aware of the fact there might've been good, decent fae among her enthralled. And there were unpredictable hiccups, like some of the fae, too wary and experienced, like the arrogant wolf or the mutinous valkyrie slipping away and joining their forces in the attempt to bring down or at the very least to thwart the human tyrant. And there was the mysterious Blood King, mentions of whose unique powers Lauren found in the Ash's super secret archives, the one whose blood in Bo's veins made her so much more than a succubus.