Free Haulcon's Revenge by Yvette Hines Page A

yellow-gold complexion to her darker skin.
    “ Nice to meet you. I’ll get an escort out here to take you back.” The woman picked up the phone and made a call.
    “ Thank you.” Moving to the line of chairs against the wall, she took a seat. Grabbing a magazine from the small square table she flipped through it. It was filled with a lot of medical and scientific mumbo jumbo that she didn’t even begin to try and comprehend.
    “ Ms. Ellis.” She glanced up to find a Hispanic man sporting thick wire-framed glasses with long wavy brown hair that curled against the collar of his white lab coat. He stood holding open the security door.
    “ Yes.” She dropped the magazine back onto the tabletop as she rose and crossed to him.
    “ Nice to meet you.” He held his hand out for a shake. “I’m Chris Rodriguez. I work with your father. I’ll show you where he is.”
    “ I appreciate it.” This was only the second or third time in the last five years she’d been to her father’s work place. It was so sterile and colorless, every hallway looked the same. She always felt like a rat in a maze with no hint to where the cheese was located. “How long have you been working here?”
    “ Almost a year now. I heard about the cancer studies and research your father was doing and I just had to be a part of it. The man is brilliant.” The young man’s eyes lit up and Adair could almost swear she saw him take a few dance steps.
    “ He is smart.” That was something she could not argue with. Jameson Franklin Ellis had published so many articles in the scientific field on cancer that she knew one day he’d be granted the Nobel Peace Prize for the countless lives he was bound to save. He just sucked as a dad. Father of the Year was one award she wouldn’t see presented to him.
    Chris continued to talk about all the different studies he and her father were doing. Adair listened half-heartedly.
    “ He’s just down this hall through the last door.”
    Remaining silent, she walked beside him until they arrived at their destination.
    When they entered the lab, Adair was overwhelmed by all the tubes, beakers, glass slides and various other instruments and computers her father used to conduct experiments. None of it did she understand the use of. She saw him, sitting in the corner before a computer talking to the other people milling about in the room or to himself. She wasn’t sure.
    “ Dr. Ellis,” Chris called out several times before her father even glanced in his direction, his mouth still moving as he recited something to himself.
    Adair wasn’t even sure if he noticed she was standing beside one of his workers.
    “ Chris, I need the final result from Margie Mouse’s blood work.”
    Nope, he had no clue.
    “ I’ll get right on that. Dr. Ellis your daughter has come to see you.”
    She watched her father blink once then again as if he were attempting to understand the word daughter.
    A smile started to break along his mouth as he glanced past Chris to her. Then she saw it. Like it always happened, the moment he took in all of her appearance and the image of his dead wife came to his mind. The smile faded.
    It had been like that since she turned sixteen and her looks and build became like a mirrored reflection of her mother. It was hard for her father to look at her the couple times a year that she met up with him.
    “ Hello, father.”
    He nodded as if to himself as he glanced back to his computer. “Hello, Adair. I’m just on the cusp of the final stages of my research of gene regeneration. You see I have isolated a blood donor from the wild beings. If I can discover how their regeneration happens I can then take good cells from cancer victims and infuse…”
    Her flats tapped against the white tile floor as she went closer to him. Most fathers would have greeted their children with open arms. Not James Ellis.
    Adair could sadly count the number of hugs he had given her throughout her life on one hand.
    When she