Chaos Lives in Everything - 26. Chapter 26

“So let me get this straight,” Rebecca said. “You and this Bane used to know each other a long time ago?”

Skold and Rebecca crossed the street, heading towards the Roc City Police Department.

“Yes,” Skold said patiently.

“And you guys used to have some sort of fling?”

Skold raised an eyebrow, holding the door open for her. “Is that what you humans call it? A fling?”

She blinked. “Maybe that’s the wrong term. Okay what about Faust? Does that hit a little closer to home? I guess in many ways you’re a lot like Faust.”

Skold frowned thoughtfully. “I am well aware of the tale of Faust. It’s a German legend, is it not? He was a mortal scholar who seeked all of the knowlege of the world and was unhappy with his mundane, mortal existence. So he made a pact with the being that you call the devil. In return for the knowlege and power he must give the devil his soul. But he breaks the deal.” He smiled. “I rather like the comparison. I suppose in that way we are very similar. We have both made deals to get us where we are at today, and now the devil is knocking on our door. Tell me, did you stay somewhere safe last night?”

“Yes, I stayed at Melanie’s.”

“And you are safe there?”

“Very much so. Melanie is the safest person in the world to be with.”

“And you have feelings for this Melanie?”

Rebecca shrugged. “I think so. I really don’t want to say for sure. I mean I do but I don’t want to say it with certainty, you know. Usually just when I become certain that something is going to work out-that’s when the rug gets pulled out from underneath my feet and I wish that thing never happened.”

Skold nodded. “I think I understand. I suppose I feel the same way about Dominyc...and all things if I am to be perfectly honest. Let’s continue this conversation later. Whatever Reynolds wanted to speak with me about, it must be important.”

Skold rapped lightly on Reynold’s door patiently and waited. Reynolds poked his head out the door and glanced suspiciously at Rebecca. “Who is this?”

“This is Rebecca Hall,” Skold said. “She is assisting me with the investigation.”

Rebecca smiled and offered him her hand. “Pleased to meet ya.”

Reynolds continued to frown at her and did not make any move to shake her hand. “You must be the hacker. I have heard of you.”

Rebecca shifted nervously. “Really?”

He nodded and smiled, shaking her hand. “I love your work. Finally I meet a hacker who puts their skills to good use.”

Rebecca chuckled, cleary relieved. “Thank you.”

To Skold, Reynolds said, “I have someone in here that I think you will be very interested in meeting. Someone who might be able to tell us a little more about what is going on around here.” He held the door open for them and beckoned them in quickly. “Come in quickly! I don’t want anyone to have an idea of what we’re discussing.” Reynolds closed the door behind him, the blinds shaking slightly. He pulled them down so that no one could look inside.

A man was sitting in front of Reynold’s desk. Tall and dark-skinned, clearly of Indian heritage, the man stood up with a business-like with the clinical air of a doctor and shook hands with Skold and Rebecca. “My name is Dr. Ali Gihanni. I am a virologist. Studying plagues and viruses are my speciaty.” His accent was strong, his handshake firm and business-like. He appeared to be in his early thirties and human.

“Dr. Ali Gihanni has helped me with several cases,” Reynolds explained. “He is quite the expert and has dealt with numerous outbreaks around the world.”

“Black pox, cholera, and Yersinia Pestis being just some of them,” Gihanni explained. “But I didn’t think that the Black Death would show up again. If the world were to find out about this the world would already erupt into chaos.”

“It already has,” Rebecca said. She glanced at Skold and added, “Unless we do something about it.”

“Well it would be even worse now that someone has developed a new, more powerful strain of it,” said Gihanni. “Meaning that no one knows what it is capable of. Which is why I am here, to shed some light on it. I have my research lab here in town. It is well secure and no one would know anything about it, except you of course.”

“No one?” Skold asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Except you and Sergeant Reynolds of course. Reynolds has done an excellent job explaining the severity of the situation to me. And working in secrecy is what I do best.”

“And who do you work for?” Skold asked.

“Myself,” Gihanni said, grinning with pride. “I like working independly, without anyone telling me what to do. I am my own boss.”

Skold frowned. He liked the human doctor or at least wanted to; but he certainly did not trust him. “If I am going to let you test this new strain of plague and see what you can find on it I would like to see your base. Just to be sure. You have to understand what you are doing is very dangerous. There are many eyes watching. You could be putting your life and the life of everyone on this planet in danger. We cannot just trust anyone.”

Gihanni nodded, his smile never waning. “I would be happy to. We can go right now if you want to follow me in your car. Reynolds why don’t you join us.”

Gihanni’s Sedan came to a stop behind a rusty gate with a faded NO TRESPASSING sign; another said PRIVATE PROPERTY. The gate was chained shut. Skold watched him get out of the car and jog over to the gate. Within seconds Gihanni had the gate pulled open. He gestured for Skold to drive through the gate; Reynolds followed in his cruiser.

Gihanni’s parked in front of a brick building. Glancing at the building as he got out, Skold was not impressed. “Your lab doesn’t look very secure or well hidden to me.”

“At first glance it doesn’t,” Gihanni said. “That’s because my lab is two stories underground.”

The inside of the building looked as though it was under construction. Buckets of paint and and paint rollers sat by the walls. The floor was grimy with dust. Several windows had been shattered.

Gihanni led them over to an elevator. “My father owned this building right before he died. This used to be a small magazine called The Raz. He left it to me. I decided this would be the perfect place for my lab. It looks this way so that if anyone were to come here would just assume that the building is under reconstruction.”

“Smart,” Rebecca said.

The elevator doors open and florescent lights blinked on as they stepped inside. Gihanni pressed the pad of his thumb against a black pad. A red light scanned his thumb before letting off a small beep and turning green. “I programmed the scanner so that it can recognize DNA so that only certain people can have access to the lab,” Gihanni said. “In this case that only person would be me.”

The elevator shifted slightly as it began to make its descent underground. The doors slid open and they stepped out onto a metal catwalk, coming to a metal door. Gihanni typed in a four digit access code and the door slid open. The room they were in was large with white walls. Rebecca looked around fascinated, unable to believe her eyes. Most of the machinery and gadgets in the room looked like something out of a science fiction movie. A bank of screens attached to the wall to their right showed the perimeter around the outside of the building. To their left was a holding cell with glass walls. Rebecca knocked on the glass with her fist.

“That is the strongest glass in the world today,” Gihanni said. “It is microalloy made of palladium. It is actually quite dense. I use that room for my test subjects.”

Test subjects? Rebecca did not like the sound of that but decided that she didn’t want to know the details. She turned. In the far corner was a bed, the sheets and pillows as white as the rest of the room and a dining table. There was a small alcove with cabinets, a sink, stove microwave, and refrigerator.

“You live down here?” Rebecca asked.

“On some days, yes. Especially when I am working on something crucial.”

Rebecca could not understand how anyone would want to live down here, even if it was just for a few days at a time. Already she found herself yearning to be on the surface, breathing in the fresh air, not the antiseptic-hospital smell blowing through the metal vents in the ceiling.

“How are you getting power and air?” she asked.

“A computer regulates everything.”

No, I don’t like this one bit, she thought. Too claustrophobic.

“So where is the sample of the plague?” Skold asked.

“I keep it locked away.” Gihanni gestured to a circular wall safe. The door was made out of a thick steel. Typing in another four digit access code he opened the safe. The door was two inches of steel. Gihanni, glowing with pride and a certainty that bordered on arrogance, that there was nothing that could get through the safe without the access code. Not acid, not C4. Nothing.

Sitting safely in the vault was the little glass vial that Skold had given to Reynolds; and inside of the glass vial was the small shard of black crystal. Gihanni stared dreamily at the glass vial with fascination. “It’s hard to believe that that little piece of crystal is a part of the plague that almost wiped out the entire human species. Oh how I wished I could have lived in those days, seen how it worked with my own eyes. I never dreamed that I would get this chance.” He glanced at Skold. “You do me a great honor.”

“I will be bluntly honest with you,” Skold said. “I do not fully trust you Dr. Gihanni. It is nothing personal but I do not trust anyone. It is safer that right. But for reasons that Sergeant Reynolds has not yet explained he does, and so for now I suppose that will have to do for me. You are not studying this plague for profit or for increase in reputation. You are studying this to see how the plague has been altered, what it doing and when you have gathered all of the research that there is to gather, you will make a cure. You must do this in a fairly short amount of time for time is something that we do not have much time on. You cannot tell anyone, under any circumstances, what you are doing. For your trouble I will pay you more than you could ever dream of having. Understood?”

Gihanni nodded. “Perfectly. I will not fail you.”

Skold shook his hand firmly. “Let us hope not.”

An hour later Skold, Rebecca, and Reynolds went back to Reynold’s office.

“Do you truly trust Gihanni?”

“The guy’s a freak in that insane scientist kind of way but yeah,” Reynolds replied with a shrug. “And I know that he will get the job done that you need him to get done-in the time that you need him to get it done in The guy is completely dedicated to his work, albeit in that obessessive kind of way.”

“I take it you work with him?”

“He’s consulted with me on a few cases.”

Rebecca said; she was sitting on the edge of Reynold’s desk, her arms crossed. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Wow. You let a guy like that consult with you? I doubt anything he does is strictly legal. Or else he wouldn’t work in a hidden labratory two stories underground.”

“Gihanni is no different from Skold,” Reynolds replied. “Both scare the shit out of me to be honest. But my job is to keep the town safe. I’m just a man, just a human man, and some of my ways of doing my job is very unorthodox. Immoral. But in this world we humans have always been at the bottom of the totem pole and we always will be. We don’t have magic to aid us. We only have our brains. I have no regrets with how I do my job.”

“I couldn’t do this job,” Rebecca said. “Too much responsibility for such little pay.”

“Not everyone can,” Reynolds said. “But someone has to do it.”

The sun was setting when Skold stopped in front of Rebecca’s apartment. He turned to her, studying her face thoughtfully. “Gihanni’s lab bothers you doesn’t it? And so does Reynold’s approach to his job?”

Rebecca nodded, troubled. “It just makes me wonder if there’s any truly decent souls in this city-except Melanie of course.”

“I’m sure Melanie isn’t completely innocent. I’m sure she’s done a few things that would shock you beyond belief if you were to know of them. I am sure that the same is true with you.”

“I know. Sometimes you have to do bad really bad things to save people in the long run. I mean look at the cluster fuck I’m in. But I promised myself that when I became a private investigator that I would never kill anyone. And not even a week ago I put a bullet in the back of Sinclaire’s head.”

“He would have died even if you hadn’t all of the same.”

Rebecca snorted in frustration. “I know you’ve been traumatized because your father castrated you and you’re pissed off because your memories were erased. But I would think that after so many centuries of living on this earth you would understand emotion a little better. Humans and fae aren’t that different, although fae like to think so. You weren’t always a killer. There was a time when you were a child. Didn’t you ever want to be anything else other than what you are now? Don’t you ever wish that things could be different? Didn’t it sicken you the first time you killed a person whether it was out of self defense or in cold blood?”

“I can’t remember,” Skold said.

“Well, I wish I could forget too,” Rebecca said. “Sometimes I wish that I could go back before all of this shit ever happened. I wish that things could be different, that I was born with different parents, with parents that loved me. But you want to know the fucked up thing? I’m really starting to look foward to the danger. I’m starting to enjoy myself. There’s no going back after this, is there? I will never know life as I knew it before, will I?”

“I imagine not.”

In that moment Rebecca looked incredibly sad. “I thought so.”

With tears shining in her eyes, Rebecca got of the car and wished him a good night.