Blood Hunt (Blue Blood Babies sequel!)

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

 

Over the next few days, the tests continued.  They had us walking then running attached to wires and monitors, measuring our heart rate, our sweat, the chemicals we exhaled when we breathed.  Then I spent one whole afternoon sitting in a dark room, being blinded at maddeningly irregular intervals by strobe lights, ultraviolet lights, red lights, blue lights.  Day light.  Again, little machines monitored my every reaction. 

And then, of course, at the end of every session, there was the bloodletting.

I was beginning to resemble a pin cushion, the crux of my elbow a multi-coloured canvass of bruises.  The veins in my arm began to stop cooperating so they started to jab me with the needle in more awkward, more uncomfortable places.  The back of my hand.  My ankle.  My upper arm.  I joked to Connor one day that they should just stick a tap in my jugular and be done with it.  He didn’t laugh – it seemed to too close to becoming a reality to be funny. 

At the end of the day, two or three pints lighter, we were good for nothing more than lazing on the sofas and chairs in the social building, blindly staring at televisions while we waited for the light-headedness and nausea to go away.  It took a good few hours of gazing into nothingness for my brain to suggest that maybe there was a good reason for them to keep us zoned out.  The room was filled with a hundred teenagers, yet the noise, the energy, was subdued.  Like we were in a library with teachers prowling around us.  We were much easier to control this way.

Feeling like I’d had a light bulb moment, I shared my theory with Connor and Maggie, though I tried to keep my voice down so the words wouldn’t float over to Melissa, at the other side of the couch and avidly watching a movie on the flat screen dangling above our heads.

“You reckon?” Connor said, looking at me with bleary eyes. 

Maggie’s gaze was more alert as she looked at me, a frown of concentration causing a little wrinkle between her eyebrows, but her head was slumped against Connor’s shoulder. 

“You know,” she said slowly, “Every other girl in my dorm has had at least one day off.  Some of them have only had their initial assessment.  What about yours?”

Connor and I exchanged a quick look, then I shrugged my shoulders at Maggie.  We hadn’t been keeping tabs on the rest of the boys in our corridor. 

“Dunno,” I finally said.  But then... “The minibus hasn’t been packed since our first day, so they can’t all be going all the time.”

“But we are,” Connor added.

Yeah, we were. 

“Funny that,” I drawled slowly.  Another amazing coincidence.  “Anyone would think they didn’t want us wide awake.  Or snooping around.”

Suddenly Connor looked much more alert, like an electric current had come jolting up through the cushion he was sitting on.  He smiled at me.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Yes, I was.

“Connor,” Maggie said warningly.  “Don’t.”

She’d raised her voice, knowing anything lower than a near-shout wasn’t going to penetrate through the devious plans already forming in her brother’s head.  It worked – he twitched his nose in annoyance and turned his face even more towards me, away from her – but it also pulled Melissa away from the television screen.

“Don’t what?” she asked. 

I caught Maggie’s eye and shook my head; just a tiny wobble from side to side.  Melissa seemed perfectly nice, and Christ knows she was just as stuck in this mess as the rest of us, but I wasn’t ready to totally trust her just yet.  In fact it was even possible that she’d been paired up with Maggie so she’d be able to keep an eye on us.  I didn’t think that was likely, but it seemed foolish to rule anything out at this point.