Free Serpent's Kiss by Thea Harrison Page B

methods for the Ebola virus be if it were not studied? This is no different and, believe me, I take precautions. Thankfully the need to consult those resources is rare, which is why they sometimes get restless. Things that are made with black magic are hungry and they are never satisfied.”
    “You talk about them as though they’re sentient.” He glared at the cabinet, the hackles raised at the back of his neck.
    “I think they are, at least semi-sentient. Something lingers of their creators, along with something of the souls of the victims that were sacrificed in their creation.” She sat at the desk and opened the lowest drawer, which was unlocked. He could see it contained files labeled in a neat hand. She pulled out a few notebooks and closed the drawer. “This is the distillation of the last few centuries of work I’ve done on trying to find a way to halt the progression of Vampyrism.”
    He regarded her with a keen gaze. “And halting the progression of the disease is more preferable than finding a cure, because a cure would make you human again?”
    “Theoretically. Unfortunately too much of this is still theoretical, because there really is no known cure. And there are serious issues and questions should a ‘cure’ ever be found.” She handed the notebooks to him.
    He opened the top notebook to look at the first page. It was written in the same neat hand that had created the file labels. “I would want to know how a cure would be tested,” he remarked. “And where, and on whom.”
    She shrugged. “Perhaps a big medical facility with a focus on research might take it on, like Johns Hopkins University. There might be enough Vampyres who are unhappy enough that they would be willing to take some risks, but there has been no code of ethics developed for clinical trials because there’s nothing that has been successfully developed enough to test.”
    “What are the other issues that need considering?” he asked.
    She regarded him for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. Then she said, “What are the consequences of a potential cure? Could a ‘cured’ Vampyre be turned again, and if so, what would be the results? Or would it be irreversible for a Vampyre, like Vampyrism is now for humans? Would a Vampyre simply revert back to being human? What would be the state of their health when they reverted? Would they become as they were before? Some Vampyres were terminally ill from other diseases before they were turned. Or would there be other complications such as, for example, advanced or accelerated aging, or a compromised immune system? And would those complications increase in severity according to the age of the Vampyre involved?”
    He shook his head. “In those scenarios, the cure would quite literally kill you.”
    “Yes.” Carling gathered her long dark hair together and twisted it into a long rope that she wound into a knot. She pinned the knot into place with two pencils from the desk, her movements fast and economical.
    Rune’s gaze lingered on the heavy sable-colored twist of hair lying on Carling’s elegant neck. He wanted to see her pin her hair up again, and he fought a sudden puerile urge to pluck out the pencils. Her hair would spill down that hourglass back, the silken ends splashing like midnight water against the womanly swell of her trim, shapely ass. She would give him that quick annoyed look of hers, or maybe she would be angrier. Maybe she would try to slap him again, and he would catch her wrist and yank her to him . . .
    Arousal sank sharpened claws into him and dug in deep. His body hardened and he turned away to hide it.
    Walking over to the French doors, he opened the top notebook and flipped through it then took a quick look at the others. There were perhaps two hundred and fifty pages, all told, which was concise, given the amount of time and effort she had put into the research. She had called it a “distillation,” which would have meant at some point she had gone