THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

tip her head up so his gaze could bore into hers. “Have you heard nothing I said? I killed him. Me . You’ve known it all along. I don’t know how, but that night as you lay in the hospital bed in my house, you knew I went in search of your attacker. And later, I confirmed that he’d been eliminated. Remember?”
    “You think I could forget that?”
    “You managed to find peace with that fact once, and you can find it again. Because I — not you — am solely responsible for his death.”
    “But my blood—”
    “May or may not have killed him.”
    She blinked. “But you said—”
    “Edward Webber died that night, but unfortunately, he fed again, several hours after he bit you. It’s entirely possible — perhaps even probable — that your blood merely caused a reversal of the genetic mutation. If that’s the case, the second feeding might be the one that killed him.”
    She tore her hand away from his to press both hands to a head that felt like it might explode if she had to absorb one more piece of information.
    “I don’t understand. How could the second victim kill him?”
    “I ran blood work, Ainsley. He died of an acute hemolytic transfusion reaction. It’s possible that reaction may have been caused directly from infusing your blood. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that the Merzetti agent merely reversed the vampiric mutation. If the reversal had already begun before the second feeding, he may have lost his ability to infuse blood regardless of type.”
    “Are you saying he might have died from a simple ABO incompatibility between himself and his second victim?”
    He nodded. “Simple but catastrophic.”
    She blinked rapidly. “So you really don’t know how this anti-vampire blood thing works?”
    “No.”
    “Can’t we test it?”
    His eyebrows soared. “I’m sure you know there’s a limit to what we can do in a test tube. It needs to be field-tested. Ethically, the only candidates I’m prepared to try it on are serial killers who happen to share your A-positive blood type, pre-mutation.”
    Geez, did he think she was nuts? “I wasn’t suggesting you try it on our clinic patrons, for goodness sake. Of course it would have to be a predator.”
    He loosened his collar. “I’m glad we agree.”
    Agree? Panic made her stomach clench. “No! No agreement. I’m not agreeing to anything until I’ve had a chance to process everything you’ve told me. Am I making myself clear?”
    “Of course.”
    Thank God. Some breathing space to think about this stuff. The tension coiled in her muscles slackened ever so slightly.
    Of course, “processing” this new information was a lot easier said than done. Right now, a lifetime didn’t feel long enough. On the other hand, she’d gone from thinking of vampires as mythical creatures to performing venipunctures on them, practically overnight. Amazing how quickly one could normalize the freakishly abnormal.
    She wet her lips. “Okay, hypothetically speaking — because I haven’t agreed to anything, you understand — I have a technical question. Why would the predator have to be my blood type?”
    Immediately, she sensed his relief to be fielding a question that wasn’t rife with emotional landmines. Dammit, it was maddening how she could read him like a large print book on something as inconsequential as this, yet he could conceal the fact that he’d been playing God with her life for weeks now. What was that about?
    “Ainsley? “
    Belatedly, she realized that he’d been speaking, and she hadn’t absorbed a word. “Sorry. My brain went AWOL for a sec. Can you give that to me again, from the top?”
    “Of course. The mutation renders us — all vampires — universal receivers. We are not hampered by ABO compatibility issues, antibodies, or any kind of blood-borne pathogens. But if your blood — the Merzetti blood — does indeed reverse the mutation, we need to make sure it’s compatible with the attacker’s original blood type. Ideally, I’d like to see what happens to such a candidate — one who is prevented from feeding again — after being infused with your blood. If your blood is compatible with their pre-mutation blood type, and we still see massive hemolytic reaction, we can assume your blood itself is the lethal agent. However, if we see only a progressive reversal of the mutation with no hemolytic crisis, we’ll know it operates only to counter the mutation.”
    “But what about non-compatible…”