Twilight Fall

"I love you." She looked up at him, her mouth soft, her eyes damp. "I think I always have. I just needed to see the real you."

"As I needed to know you." He smiled, a warm and beautiful smile, as if she had offered him a miracle. "Now we have found each other, Geliebte."

* * *

Chapter 21

"And that's all I know," Fort Lauderdale homicide detective Samantha Brown, the sygkenis of Lucan, the suzerain of South Florida, said. "Sorry I couldn't be more help, Alex."

"No problem, Sam. I knew you were just a baby when they sent you south." Alex tapped the end of her pencil like a drumstick against her notepad. "One more thing: Did they ever tell you why they sent you all the way down to Florida for foster care placement?"

"Not that I remember. Wait, yeah, there was this one weird notation somewhere in my DCF jacket. Let me look." There was a shuffle of papers as Sam checked her personal records. "Here it is. It just a scribbled note by the CW caseworker in Chicago. Says I had allergies when I was a kid. They had to give me a bunch of injections."

Alex thought of what Charlie had told her. "What are you allergic to?"

"That's the weird part. Nothing. Not even penicillin." A wry note entered her voice. "Maybe I was allergic to Chicago."

After Alex hung up the phone, she carried her notes from the sitting room into the bedroom. "Any luck with rooting through the laptop?"

"I have not found any records on it that relate to the orphanage or the Brethren." He closed the device and turned to her. "Did Samantha offer any insight?"

"No. She knew she was born in Illinois and sent down south when she was a baby, but that's all. Nothing in her records to speak of, except a note about allergies she doesn't have." She flipped a page. "The very tough phone call today was Nick, once I tracked down her and Gabriel. They're over in Paris, looking for some missing Kyn and generally fucking with the Brethren."

Cyprien nodded. "Nicola is still not comfortable talking to us."

"Richard's wife killed her parents. She's entitled. But she likes me. Thing is, she didn't know she was adopted. Shocked the hell out of her, too." Alex made a face. "She said she has her mom's papers stashed at her farm, and she's going to go through them as soon as they get back to England."

Michael regarded her with a patient expression. "If you confirm that Nicola was also adopted, what will you conclude from that?"

Alex started counting off points with her fingers. "One: None of us remembers being in an orphanage in Chicago. Two: All of us are female. Three: We each had some strange ability before we made the change from human to Darkyn."

"Samantha has an ability?"

"Yeah, and it's worse than mine."

"How bad could it be?"

She looked at him. "If she touches the blood of murder victims, she has a vision of how they were killed. Front row seat to murder."

Michael grimaced. "That is worse than yours."

"What it boils down to is that we were all different before the Kyn ever messed with us," Alex said. "I'm superfast with my hands. Nick can find pretty much anything, and Sam never has to rent slasher flicks. Not what you'd call standard human operating systems."

"There is only one problem with your theory," Michael said. "Jema did not have a talent before she changed, and she was not adopted."

"Bitch just ruins everything, doesn't she?" Alex shook her head. "I still think there's a connection between us; I'm just not seeing it. But it could explain why the four of us survived the change from human to Darkyn when no one else has since the Dark Ages."

"Five."

She frowned. "I missed someone?"

"I spoke to Jaus," Michael said. "Liling Harper was human when she got on his plane."

"Well, hell." She tossed her notepad on the desk. "That blows my theory." She glanced at the calendar. "Hang on; they were only out there a couple of days. It took the rest of us weeks to make the change. How did she do it so fast?"

Michael moved his shoulders.

"You're a lot of help." She helped herself to a stack of the medical records they'd stolen from St. Benedict's. "I'm going to take these over to the lab and let John go through them."

"Is that wise, considering his condition?"

"There's nothing in them that would send him tearing off across the country, and I think I can stall him from trying to do anything else." She felt grim. "If all else fails, I'll need to borrow some manacles and chains."

Her brother was out of bed and fully dressed when Alex walked into the lab.

"I'm sorry, sir, but you can't discharge yourself without filling out the proper paperwork." She saw blood dripping from the dangling IV needle. "You did a nice job ripping out your line. What are you going to do now? Go and play with a chain saw in a bathtub filled with oil?"

He gazed at her steadily. "Cyprien told me you found another dormitory and medical files at Saint Benedict's. I was right."

"I was coming to talk to you about it." She didn't like his color. "Will you get back in bed before you pass out again?"

"I'm fine." He sat down on the bed. "What were they doing to us?"

"They gave us standard pediatric physicals," she told him. "The kind you give kids before you place them in a new environment, like foster care or with adoptive parents. Height, weight. BP, that's it."

"There has to be more." He grabbed the medical files from her and started flipping through them.

Alex leaned back against a table and decided it was time to sell him her phony theory. "Speaking as a physician, here's what I think. We were probably being used as part of some sort of clinical control group. Fifty to sixty kids would be about the right number."

He jumped right on that. "A group for what?"

"Different types of testing," she said. "Control groups of that size were very popular back in the seventies and eighties. Researchers would begin by testing fifty to a hundred random individuals who were healthy and disease-free. They graphed the results of each test, charting them by number of subjects and test values. It's how they determined the curve of normal frequency distribution. The largest number of identical test values was the norm by which all subsequent values were measured. It didn't hurt the kids. They were just randomly tested."

"That can't be right." John said as Michael came in and joined them. "Why would they test kids all from one place?"

"They didn't know any better," Alex said. "It was probably easier for them to use kids from one region. Their test results would have been flawed by certain factors the researchers didn't consider, like environmental contaminants and even geographical location." She gestured toward the window. "People who live in the mountains, for example, have higher levels of hemoglobin than people who live in the city at sea level. The body produces more red blood cells at higher elevations to compensate for the oxygen deficiency in the atmosphere. That sort of thing."

"Why use only orphans?" John said.

"The doctors wouldn't need parental consent, for one thing," she told him. "They might have taken kids from the same region for another reason, like compiling ratios of sentinel phenotypes among the poor." She saw the look John gave her. "Sentinel phenotypes are individual traits researchers use to track things like newly emerging diseases and recessive mutations. The traits manifest physically, either in the patient's outward appearance or in their lab results. Hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, and cancer are all sentinel phenotypes. They're statistically evaluated, so they would need a control group." And if he didn't start buying her lie soon, she was going to run out of fake theory.

John folded his arms. "That proves they were looking for something specific. Something abnormal."

Alexandra sighed. The problem with her brother was that he was no dummy. "All it proves is that they could have been simply testing us and using our results as a baseline for the really sick kids."

"Then why not test normal children? Why lock up the kids and have them sleeping next to a lab?"

"We don't even know for certain that they were locked up, John," she reminded him. "Hell, Charlie and I did a study a few years back on phenylketonuric mothers who gave birth to mentally retarded heterozygous children. I was able to prove that, thanks to too many cousins marrying each other, eleven percent of the population in a small town in Idaho carries the defect. I had two hundred people, including fifty-odd kids, staying at a study clinic for two weeks while we profiled their DNA and mapped out familial connections. It's a very specific type of study." She paused, caught up in her own lie for a moment. "The orphanage doctors wouldn't study a control group for something like that. Sentinel phenotypes can't be predicted among random groups of children unless…"

John imitated one of her favorite gestures by rolling his hand.

Everything Charlie said came rushing back to her. "Unless they knew the parents were carriers."

"I need some water." John walked into the bathroom.

"What does this mean. Alexandra?"

She gave Michael a blank look. "It means I'm a great liar, and my brother may be right."

He thought that over. "You do realize how dangerous ii will be to proceed from here?"

Alex felt as if he had wrenched her out of a smothering cloud. At the same time, she wanted to hit him. "I don't think I have a choice now."

"The truth about what happened to you and John when you were children may also reveal how you, Samantha, Nicola, Jema, and Liling survived the change," he pointed out.

"Which will then give me some idea of how I can change us back," she snapped.