"We don't know what's causing this. So promise me you'll be careful. Just in case."
Ava sighed. "I promise. I'll wear a mask during the autopsy, and I'll make sure I don't get any blood on my skin."
"There is one other way it might be transmitted... if it is a disease."
There was? Ava looked up.
"Something that might, ah, control the spread of the disease. It depends how they caught it, after all." Kincaid's face grew curiously flat. "Similar to the French pox."
Oh. She understood what he was trying to say. "All of the victims have been male."
"Women were never allowed to be infected with the craving virus, so that doesn't mean it applies only to men."
"Nor were any men who didn't have aristocratic blood flowing through their veins, but accidents happen," she said dryly, gesturing to herself. "And there are more female blue bloods out there than you'd think. A few cases have come out of the woodwork now it's no longer so strictly controlled. But I see your point. It could be only men who've been stricken down because there are more male blue bloods by a factor of a thousand, or it could be... because they're more prone to sharing certain bodily fluids. But where is the index patient? Something like syphilis is easily spread. We'd see more cases among the blue blood population if this disease was spread by sexual contact." She thought about it. "Unless we're catching this early. Maybe there was a... a lady in common. Or they've all visited the same brothel? Maybe it kills them before they've had a chance to spread this? Or perhaps humans don't develop the disease, but only carry it?"
Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Zero and the dhampir? Her shoulders slumped a little. It wasn't as though she wanted to come face-to-face with the terrorists, but this case.... She'd thought it might be her break. Her first chance to really prove herself for the Company of Rogues.
Anyone could do the lab work.
Kincaid knelt and picked up her discarded gloves, tucking them behind his belt so she wouldn't have to touch them. "Might not even be a disease."
"Then they're ingesting something, but poison doesn't affect a blue blood. Not permanently. There's no mark upon him, nothing to suggest a needle, or a cut. Not even under his lips."
"Could've healed. And you haven't checked everywhere yet."
Ava growled. "Maybe, maybe, could have, and possibly.... This is utterly perplexing. I'd hoped we'd have more to go on."
"Wait for the autopsy," he said, with a shrug. "You'll know more then."
Including what-precisely-had killed David Thomas.
* * *
"Internal bleeding," Dr. Gibson confirmed the following afternoon, pushing his goggles up on top of his head, and removing his gloves with the kind of pristine care a cat used to groom itself. "Myocardial rupture. Ruptured spleen. Bleeding in the liver, the kidneys, and the gallbladder."
Exactly as suspected. Ava frowned. "What caused it? He's a blue blood, after all."
She hadn't been able to isolate the agent.
Gibson sighed and tossed his gloves toward the medical waste bin. "Your guess is as good as mine, lass. Something caused the late Mr. Thomas to bleed out internally, and destroyed his organs. Something stopped his body from healing the ruptured veins and capillaries. No sign of poison in his blood work, but then the craving virus is rabid at detecting threats and removing them, so that's no guarantee. Only those odd-shaped blood cells that keep popping up here and there, but then is that a response to whatever happened to him? Or the cause?"
Ava peered through the microscope, and those odd-shaped cells came into sharp view. She'd been staring at them for nearly an hour, and neither she nor Gibson had any sort of clue where they'd come from. Except.... "Do you have the autopsy results on the dhampir I brought in two months ago?" Gibson didn't know precisely where she was working these days, nor what she was working upon, but she'd insisted upon him performing the autopsy. Gibson was an expert. "I examined them afterward, but I seem to recall fairly inconclusive results. As in, something killed her, and we don't know what."
Malloryn suspected Zero had been assassinated by her brethren, and the safe house breached. There'd been such a mad flurry as they were transferred elsewhere and locked down, and she'd been busy dealing with Byrnes, who'd been forcibly given the elixir vitae that transformed a blue blood into a dhampir.
They hadn't thought he'd survive, and Ava had pored over the diary of Dr. Erasmus Cremorne, the man who'd first created the elixir many years ago. Zero's results had been a minor note in her life, and by the time she had a chance to review them, it had been over a month later.