"Cilla and I met at WishLife. Her daughter, Aurora, had leukemia when she was ten, and that was one of our areas of specialty. She was in remission, but Cilla wanted to help our research. She was involved in some of our philanthropy efforts, raising money. Researchers always need more money. We met, and we clicked. And then Aurora's cancer came back. Aggressively. There was nothing we could do. Cilla was beside herself, naturally. Desperate to find a way to save her. And somehow, she got fixated on the idea that Aurora could be turned. That she would live on."
It wasn't such a crazy idea. It was, after all, exactly what Jase had done in the face of a similar diagnosis. But he'd been an adult.
"How old was Aurora then?" I asked.
"Seventeen."
"That's too young." Too young to be dying. That was unfair. But also too young to be turned. The courts had been clear on that, even in cases of terminal illness. The vampires insisted.
"Yes," Smith agreed. "And she was vaccinated."
"What? How?" In America, like in most countries with larger vampire populations, the punishment for vaccinating anyone underage was life in prison. The penalties were always enforced, and as a consequence, it was rare for anyone to attempt it these days.
"Cilla took her to South America at one point, for an experimental treatment. She never told me exactly where. The doctors she went to were working on ways to make the immune system fight any potential recurrences of cancers. And they thought the vamp vaccine might help. It does make the immune system more aggressive, when the body accepts the vaccine. The theory was that by ramping up the immune response, you might be able to get the body to fight the cancer more effectively."
That was true. Immune systems needed to be revved up to fight off the Stoker Variation or lycanthropy. Dad once told me the boost caused by the vaccine was only a small one, but maybe even a small improvement might seem worth trying for when your child was dying.
"What sort of doctors were they?" I asked.
It was a hell of a risk giving someone younger the vaccine. And once someone was vaccinated, it increased their risk of death if they decided to chance being turned. These days it was generally only people who, like Jase, were dying who gambled with the probabilities. Or a small number of outliers who somehow became obsessed with vampires.
As far as I knew, the werewolves didn't add many people to their ranks by infecting them deliberately. I'd have to ask Dan. Most people got accidentally turned through exposure to blood or saliva of a werewolf in wolf form. Lycanthropy was contagious. Even with the vaccines, it was a risk. It was why people who became infected tended to stop living with other humans on a permanent basis. There was a risk of transmission. It was why I'd broken up with Dan when he’d been turned. Back then, I couldn't handle the thought of becoming a supernatural.
"Renegade would be the best term for them," Smith said. "But they managed to immunize her without any side effects. Which was very lucky. It could have gone very badly. They would lose their licenses if they worked here." He shrugged, as though he wasn't particularly concerned with the ethics. That didn't wholly surprise me. At this point, he had to be somewhat beyond ethics.
"Who knows, maybe they did her a favor? Maybe it took so long for her cancer to come back because she was immunized," he continued.
"I can't imagine losing a child," I said. Cilla had been crazy when I met her, but I could sympathize with the mother she'd been before she'd made bad choices.
Smith nodded, raised his glass, and drank as though chasing away a painful memory. "Yes. I tried to help Cilla, got her to counseling, etc., but she was spiraling. And Aurora was running out of time."
I could see it. A man in love. Crazy in love, maybe. Trying to help the person—people—he loved. I'd felt helpless when Dan had turned, my life thrown out of control, careening in a direction I didn't want and, at the time, couldn't handle.
"What happened next?" I asked gently.
"Cilla asked me to find a way to make it easier for Aurora to be turned. She knew I knew Robert. They'd met a few times. She became obsessed with the idea of his work. She said if you could make a vaccine more effective, you should be able to use the same ideas to come up with a way to turn it off as well. That they were just opposites.
“She wasn't a scientist, of course, so she didn't understand the technicalities. But she couldn't give up on the idea. So I spoke to Robert. Just about whether it was possible. We'd had a conversation once, after a few too many beers, about fertility in vampires. About why they couldn't reproduce like shifters can. In medical school, I did a rotation in a women's hospital. I worked for the fertility program for a time. I knew a bit about how we intervene for humans. But in vampires, everything is turned off. Their hormones are essentially nonexistent. So we can't use the same techniques. It was just speculation, but Robert said he thought maybe hormone pathways would be interesting to look at. But we left it at that. It was just speculation. But this time I asked him whether he thought you could reverse someone's immunization. I didn't tell him why. And he…reacted badly."
I winced. I could just imagine my dad's reaction to the idea of someone trying to do something that would effectively undo everything he’d strived for. He had a hot temper sometimes—one I'd inherited.
Smith didn't seem to notice my reaction. Lost in his memories again. He wasn't really focused on me as he kept talking.
"Robert told me it would be unethical and dangerous. Even buzzed, he was so angry at the idea, I thought he was going to hit me. Which made me wonder if he'd done some research in that direction."
I didn't know why he would have. Unless he thought there was some way to understand how to make a vaccine better by understanding how to counteract it. Maybe he thought he could build in additional layers to prevent that from happening. "If he had, clearly the results alarmed him," I said. "So why would you pursue it?"
"If you could go back in time and intervene to stop your parents dying—even if it meant doing something risky and stupid—would you do it? You confronted Tate to save Agent Gibson. Love makes us do strange things. As does grief. Aurora was dying. I had to try something. I made friends with some other immunologists at Synotech. And I hacked into their research. I mean, I just needed some direction to follow. You can find the basic makeup of the vaccines online. I just needed to figure out if I could suppress it somehow. Treat the immune response from the vaccine as something that could be switched off again. After all, the immunity does diminish over time. That's why people get boosters."
"What happened?"
"The process was too slow. Cilla had plenty of money. Her family was rich, and her parents died young. She set me up in a lab, but Aurora didn't have a lot of time. Eventually I had something I thought might work, and we had to take a risk. I couldn't convince Cilla to change her mind. By that time, she'd found Tate. He was willing to turn Aurora for money."
That should have been the first clue Tate wasn't entirely all there. The other vampires would kill a vampire caught turning children.
"So, Cilla paid Tate to turn Aurora?"
Smith nodded. "Aurora and her. She wasn't going to leave her daughter alone as a vampire."
That wasn't unheard of either. People choosing to turn together. Though usually it was a couple. Or siblings. I wondered if that was what Niko and Leah had done.
"Did she turn first?"
"No. She didn't want to scare Aurora. She told her I had a new treatment. That it was a trial. That it would make it safer for her to try."
I winced, trying not to imagine a teenager trusting her mother to save her.
"But Aurora died when Tate tried to turn her?"
"Yes. Cilla nearly went insane. But Tate insisted a deal was a deal. He bit her the first time the same day Aurora died. He must have thralled her. Or Cilla didn't care, thought she would die, too, and join her daughter. Tate turned her after a few weeks. Let her stay human long enough to bury Aurora. Cilla survived, and once she was a vampire, it seemed to ease her grief at first." He sighed. "But it didn't. It just changed her obsession. She wanted me to keep working. I couldn't say no. She and Tate might have killed me if I'd tried. And I wanted to try to give her back some happiness."
"You didn't want to turn, too? Once Cilla was turned, I would have thought she'd want you to join her."
He shook his head. "Tate convinced her that I needed to remain human so I could access research more easily. Move about during the day. That sort of thing. He was her sire, so he had influence over her. And, well, I knew he would quite possibly kill me without a second thought if he thought I was going against him. He used to tell me he'd do it. Then he'd promise if I was good, he'd turn me one day." He shuddered a moment. "My list of regrets is long, Ms. Keenan. Failing Aurora, not stopping Cilla. But my biggest regret is that I didn't kill Tate—or try to—as soon as I realized what he was."
After he'd committed mass murder.
It was hard to feel sorry for Smith. Tate was one of the scariest people I'd ever met, even when he was trying to be polite. He couldn't hide the monster inside, even though he tried. Smith was either stupid or had been willfully deluded if he hadn't realized sooner how dangerous the man was. The fact that Tate been willing to try to turn a child should have been a massive red flag.
"But you continued the research?"
"Yes. Tate delighted in the idea of vampires having the upper hand again. Being able to turn people at will. He wanted me to break the vaccine. And Cilla, well, once she began to recover from her grief, she became obsessed with having another child. Siring wasn't enough for her. Though she did that, too, from time to time. She wanted me to pursue that path, too. I told her I wasn't sure it was possible. That I'd try, but it would take more time. And money. Tate had money. Cilla had money, but it wasn't going to last forever. She said she'd find more. And so we continued. I worked on breaking the vaccine mostly while Tate was in charge. Not making much progress, which Tate didn't like, but Cilla managed to convince him these things take time. He knew he had to lie low after…."
"After Caldwell?"
"Yes. He knew the Old Ones would have a death sentence on him. He ventured out occasionally, disappeared for a week or two. But he always came back."
And Smith hadn't run because of Cilla.
"And then he came after me again? Because you wanted Dad's research?"
"Because we suspected he might have left you something, yes. And we were running out of money."
His casual tone was chilling. He'd been willing to destroy my life, turn me into a vampire, all to get his hands on what my father had left behind. I hadn't even known he’d left anything back then.
Smith could blame it on Tate and Cilla, but he was just as ruthless as they were. Colder even. And I wasn't going to let him touch anything of my father's until he was in jail where he belonged.
The money part was interesting. The FBI had realized Tate was active again when he'd tapped a bank account he'd left untouched for over a decade. Did Smith know that? I guess there was a limit to how much they could hope to get out of Esteban's businesses without him noticing, and maybe Tate decided the risk was worth it.
But I'd worry about the money side later. What mattered now was making sure I knew the truth before I let Dan take Smith.
"But Tate died." Worth the reminder that I'd killed him. That there were consequences to messing with me. "What happened then?" It felt like such a long time ago when in reality it had only been a few months.
"Cilla wanted to keep the research going. She was convinced there would be something in Robert's research that would help us. I couldn't convince her otherwise. And she was…persuasive. I had tried some different approaches to the pathway that led to the infectious vampires. She and Lancaster offered to try the treatment. I think back then, Lancaster hoped I might have a cure."
"But you didn't."
"No. It didn't cure him. Or make either of them fertile. It did enhance their psychic powers."
Well, that explained Cilla coming after me. And how she could knock me out as she had at the Retreat. Thank God my shields had withstood her the second time we'd met, when she'd kidnapped me and Rhi.
"Cilla had a grip on all the other vampires. I couldn't have just walked away. They would have come after me."
That was the problem with teaming up with crazy people. You never knew when they might turn on you. Part of me should have felt sorry for Smith. What happened with Aurora and Cilla was a tragedy, if you ignored how Cilla had handled it. I could almost understand her being driven crazy by grief. I knew how dark that emotion could be.
Smith had made a bad choice, fallen in love, and his life had careened out of control. But there had to come a point where he could no longer blame that first decision. Or say he was scared. He'd kept doing the wrong thing, over and over.
I was tempted to press the panic button, call Dan in.
But I wasn't quite done.
"So, am I to assume that you and Lancaster disagreed about how to proceed after Cilla died?"
"Yes. He loved her, too. And he resented me. Once she was gone, he wanted to be in charge. And now I think he’s run out of patience altogether."
"What does that mean?"
"He led a small mutiny against me. Said I was being too slow, too cautious. That I wasn't going to find a cure if I didn't get my hands on the research." He shook his head. "I'm not entirely sure he wants me to find a cure now. He likes being powerful. Likes to be in charge."
"Are you saying he's unstable? That he has some delusions of vampires ruling the world?"
"I'm saying he's dangerous. He needs to be stopped."
He wasn't the only one.
"I gather some of the others joined him when he left?" If not, he'd managed to convince more vampires to help him very quickly.
Smith nodded. "About half went with him."
"How many is that?"
"Seven."
Fourteen. Was he telling me the truth? Fourteen plague vamps to spread like wildfire if left unchecked. But not too big a number to control if we could find them. And three of them were already dead. So, eleven. Plus Lancaster himself. Unless he'd added to his number since leaving Smith and the three vamps we'd killed earlier hadn't been part of Smith's original fourteen.
"And where are the ones who stayed with you?"
"Safe, for now," Smith said. "I have them contained." He smiled at me then. "But if I don't return by a certain time, my precautions will be overridden. Then you may have seven more plague vampires looking for some entertainment in your city."
Ah, so that was his backup plan. If we took him, he'd loose the other vampires on the city. As leverage went, it was good. But one of the Taskforce vamps would be able to get a location out of him if it came to that. He could be lying, after all. But I wasn't counting on it. Smith was too smart not to have made some contingency plans.
"All right. So, we need to make a deal. We both want to stop Lancaster."
He nodded at that, hands flexing.
"And you want Dad's research."
This was the part where things got tricky. How to convince him I was willing to hand something over?