A Perfect Blood

this wild horse, but it was running away with me and I couldn’t get the bit out from between its teeth.
    The machine whined harshly and spit out another curling bit of paper. Jennifer grabbed for it, taking a step back out of Chris’s reach. Her eyes widened, and an awestruck “Dudes!” slipped past her lips.
    “Give it to me,” Chris snapped, lurching to her feet to take it. Frowning, she dropped back into her chair, sitting sideways so that she only had to turn her head to see me. I could tell it was bad news for me by the way Jennifer was shifting from foot to foot.
    “Look at her Rosewood levels,” the younger woman said, pointing down over Chris’s shoulder. “My God! She should be dead!”
    Exhaling, Chris handed the strip to Jennifer. “I’ve never seen such a narrow spike. Hold off on pasting it in the data book. I’m going to run it again.”
    But Jennifer had already pulled a worn theme book from a cardboard box and was leafing through it. I recognized it as one of the books Chris had saved from the industrial park, and I was wondering about their backgrounds when Jennifer taped the strip in, then signed and dated it.
    Her brow furrowed, Jennifer studied the page. I could see about eight strips pasted in. Eight people, six of whom were probably dead. Her careful data taking was going to land her in jail for murder. “You should be dead,” Jennifer said when she looked up.
    “That makes two of us,” I snarled, and Chris chuckled as she popped in a new vial and hit the go button.
    “A Rosewood spike doesn’t mean she is a demon.” Chris stood and stretched, going to stir the soup with a glass rod. “It means she’s a freak of nature.”
    “But it’s the increased level of the Rosewood enzyme that’s killing them,” Jennifer said, her finger on my printout. “Not necessarily the transformations themselves. She should be dead with what she has. Clearly she’s got something, maybe another antigen, that’s counteracting the first, allowing her to survive. If we can find out what it is, then we can keep them all alive—”
    “Why?” Chris interrupted her. “We’re not a hotel.”
    “No, you’re a butcher,” I said, ignored, and Winona trembled in the corner. “Oh, crap, I’m sorry,” I whispered, and she drew back from me.
    “Keeping them alive isn’t the goal,” Chris said, making me angrier yet. “Getting closer to the ideal is. As far as I’m concerned, the shortened life expectancy is a boon. What would we do with them otherwise? Stack them up like wood?”
    My God, this woman was unbelievable.
    Jennifer dropped her eyes, looking uneasy as she leaned against the counter and hugged herself. Clearly she had some smarts if she was spouting off about antigens. Maybe I could work on her guilt and convince her to let us go.
    The machine spit out another strip of paper, and after Chris read it, she set it on fire using the Bunsen burner. “I have a better way to find out if she’s a demon or not,” she said, watching the paper go up with a weird green flame from the ink.
    “What?”
    Jennifer’s voice sounded scared. Hell, I knew I was, and I scooted forward to the front of the cage, getting into the light. “Yeah, what?” I said boldly, but I wasn’t. They had at least three drops of my blood left in that syringe.
    Chris sauntered to me, crouching until the hem of her lab coat brushed the dirty floor. It was demeaning, being looked at like that, and I stiffly got to my feet, trying to hide where I hurt.
    “The coven put charmed silver on her,” Chris said as she rose as well, her eyes going to my wrist. “She can’t do ley-line magic, but her blood is still good. I’m going to try one of those curses again—using her blood to invoke it.”
    Oh. Shit.
    I looked at Winona, my thoughts zinging back to that monstrosity of a broken body found in the basement of the Underground Railroad Museum. That had been done with witch blood. Using mine might have even worse consequences. “Don’t do this,” I said, retreating from the wire mesh. “Please.”
    Seeing my fear, Chris smiled. “If it works properly, then Morgan is a demon and we have a good source of blood to pattern the synthetic stuff on.”
    “Don’t do this!” I said, then jumped when Chris smacked the cage and Winona cried out.
    “And if it doesn’t work,” the woman continued as she held the syringe with my blood in it up to the light to estimate how much was left, “we can use Morgan to shift