The Mech Who Loved Me(51)

She felt almost breathless. He'd picked a flower for her. No, he'd gone out of his way to find an orchid, because he knew she adored them, and had a fascination with plants. Ava looked up, a smile spreading across her face, and that's when the tickling knot at the back of her mind suddenly unraveled, almost as if she'd pulled a thread. Suddenly her mind made one of those leaps of intuition it sometimes did, and Ava's gaze drifted past Kincaid and settled on the bookshelf.



       
         
       
        

A bookshelf groaning beneath the weight of over a dozen books on rare plants from various parts of the worlds, some with healing properties, some poisonous....

"That's it," she whispered, and hurried toward the bookshelf, still cupping the orchid. Excitement bloomed. Where the devil was it?

"What's it?" Kincaid followed her, but Ava paid him no mind.

She let her fingers run over the leather-bound spines of the books, pulling them out and then discarding them on her desk until she had a pile. She was going to crush the orchid, so she tucked it back behind her ear, flipping through a book.

"I kept thinking it's not a disease that killed Mr. Thomas. There's no viral or bacterial interference, and no other agent can cause such destruction within a blue blood's body. It has to be a toxin or a poison, and I remember... there was something I read once...."

A poison, herb, or toxin that affected blue bloods and their evolved cousins the dhampir in a different way than it did humans?

Maybe her interest in obscure plants could be the make-or-break lead this case needed? Ava tossed the book aside, and pulled down another.  "Rare Plants from the Himalayas." Kincaid picked up a book and read the spine as she flicked through the pages of hers, before his words penetrated.

Ava stole the book from his grasp and turned to her reading desk in the window, rifling through the careworn pages. Himalayas... that rang a bell. "We're searching for a toxin," she told him, "one that strikes down blue bloods."

"Hemlock-"

"Paralyzes them. It does something to a blue blood's blood pressure and their muscles. I've looked into it, but I'm not quite certain what it does on a cellular level. Unfortunately, there aren't many blue bloods that will allow me to paralyze them momentarily while I take samples. And I clearly cannot use myself as a test subject. I tried once, but by the time the paralysis wore off my blood cells had returned to normal, though my CV levels were exacerbated. No,"-she traced her finger over the page, ticking off plant names mentally-"hemlock has nothing to do with this. But I do recall something.... A plant that came from the Himalaya region I was warned never to use against a blue blood. I was researching a toxin, or a weapon, something to take down the dhampir with. It was just a throwaway line in a book I flagged as interesting, but didn't get time to pursue. Everything with Zero happened so quickly."

"A plant that could destroy one of the dhampir?"

"Maybe." Ava's finger paused on a pair of words, excitement flooding through her. "Caterpillar mushroom. That's it! It's grown above an elevation of three or four thousand feet in the Himalayas, and I always thought it an unusual plant, as the lower part is a caterpillar, and the upper part is a fungus. Basically, the fungus spores land on the caterpillar and as it grows the caterpillar dies. 

"It has tonic properties, I believe. Or the Chinese certainly believe so. I read transcripts of a Tibetan medical text by Zurkhar Nyamnyi Dorje about its aphrodisiac properties. They call it Yartsa gunbu. And that," she said, snapping the book closed, "is the limit of my knowledge. Beyond, do not touch if one is a blue blood."

"Interesting."

Ava couldn't quite read the tone of that one word. "What do you mean? You keep looking at me with that strange expression on your face."

"I'm just... you're frightfully intelligent, did you know?"

Her heart thudded in her chest. "Frightfully?"

He looked at her, his eyes narrowing as if he saw right through her. "Poor choice of words. You're astoundingly intelligent."

It still made her feel a little discomforted. Her ex-fiancé, Paul, had been wary of her thought processes, until she'd learned to censor herself and not delve into such topics that interested her.

Kincaid leaned toward her, bringing his lips close to her ear, "Your great, big intellect makes me want to do naughty things to you, Miss McLaren."

This man was clearly not a small-minded man like Paul. Ava caught her breath.

He continued, "Maybe one day you can spout all of these big words at me while I run my hands beneath your skirts, and-"