Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) by J.R. Ward

There was a set of stairs by an elevator, and the man took the former, traveling down the shallow, rubber-treaded steps at a good clip and whipping around a single landing. Down below, in the basement, there were more stacks, as well as an old-fashioned micro-fiche machine and—

“Here she is.” He patted a smudged, cream-bodied monitor that was the size of a small stove. “She still works. Of course, it’ll depend on what kind of program your files require.”

Lydia inspected the tower that was under the wooden desk. “I, ah … I don’t really know a lot about computers. I just have these old floppies and I’d like to see if I can still print out my fifth-grade book reports.”

“So you think it’s Word files?”

“Is this hooked up to the Internet?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Remember dial-up? Well, this thing used cable even back then. It was state of the art when it was gifted by one of our alums—so you can hop on the web if you need to. Here, I’ll get you started.”

He leaned over and hit a button and there was a whirring sound. “We’re open access, so you don’t need a password to sign on or access the Internet. There are age-restricted sites, though.”

“You don’t need to worry about that with me.”

“I didn’t think so.” He smiled again. “I’m upstairs if you need help. I’m no Bill Gates, but I know my way around this machine a little. Just holler up and I’ll hear you.”

Lydia smiled back at him and sat down. And then she waited until he was gone before she got one of the floppies out of her purse.

Her heart skipped a beat as she leaned down to the tower and put the disk into the slot. Before she pushed it home, she reached around and found the cable wire that was plugged into the back, the one that, just as the man had said, connected the computer to the Internet. After she unclipped and pulled it out, she finished the job with the floppy, the insertion smooth, a little click locking it in place.

The monitor was ancient, the graphics rudimentary. But the rounded screen delivered information to her eyes just fine: The disk was not password protected. And the file directory was … full.

The listings were just numbers and letters, no words that made any sense. And the dates were from twenty-five years ago, assuming she was reading them correctly.

She opened the first in the list—

Lydia jerked her head back. Then she leaned forward, so far forward, she knocked into the keyboard.

It was … a page from a document. Not the first page, but something in the middle, going by the number in the lower corner, and the footnote that had some kind of code on it. Plus the paragraphs were referring to a “subject” which was not defined. And the “subject’s” response to …

The gasp she let out was so loud, she slapped her hand over her mouth and looked around in case the checkout man had heard it.

When he didn’t come down the stairs, she refocused on the screen. As her eyes went from left to right, left to right, words stuck out like screams in the dark: “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” “Melanoma.” “Osteosarcoma.” “Glioblastoma.” She didn’t need her biology degree to know they were all cancers, and very bad ones.

And these vicious, deadly cells had been “introduced to the subject.” To test “the subject’s immune response to the diseases.”

And that was the end of the page.

With a shaking hand, she moved the mouse and closed the file to open another one. It was also a page from the middle of a report. A different page number. Same footer ID. And now she was noticing that the image was actually a photograph of an old-fashioned Xerox copy, the letters fuzzy, black dots speckling the margins randomly, everything tilted a little like the original hadn’t been put squarely on the copier’s bed.

This second page also picked up in mid-sentence, but now she got details. The subject was—female. A female who weighed a hundred and twenty-four pounds. Subject was considered healthy, with various scans and test results being listed: Chest X-ray. Internal ultrasound. EKG. Notations on blood pressure, heart rate—

Lydia read the next paragraph in a whisper. “CBC reveals abnormalities that are so extensive it is impossible to assess what is normal for the species.”

So they were working on an animal? she thought.

That made no sense. Why were they infecting an animal with human diseases?

She closed out and opened the next file.

And that was when she saw a word that made no sense at all. She was so sure she had it wrong, she had to read it twice. A third time.

Vampire.





WHEN LYDIA FINISHED skimming the fifteen files on the disk, she bent down to the tower, ejected the Memorex, and put the floppy back in her bag. Then she just sat there with her purse in her lap and her arms wrapped around the contents of Peter Wynne’s UPS package.

On so many levels, her brain rejected everything she had read, but the document fragments were what they were: Some company had created a program for testing human diseases on another species, a humanoid species that was so closely related to Homo sapiens that there were vast overlaps in anatomy—and vast differences, too.

“Oh, God.”

She passed her hand over her face, and considered throwing up in the black trash can next to the little wooden desk.