Code Name: EVE

A/N: Sorry if any of you are going to feel like I glossed over some interesting bits. If I let myself get bogged down in the details of one part for too long, I usually don’t finish. I try to work a chapter ahead of updates to compensate for inspiration lag, so this chapter had been in progress since about the time I posted 2-2 (I posted 2-3 early because a lot of time had passed already). If there is a summarized part you want to see as an actual scene, let me know and I’ll consider revising it later. Right now my primary concern is not winding up with another abandoned fanfic floating around the internet.

Things didn’t get strange again until the twentieth, eight days before the season technically began. Ashley felt the first twinge of a cramp when she woke up, but she’d gotten used to waking up sore. It should be gone by the end of breakfast…

Jack couldn’t find his mate at lunch time, so he went upstairs to look for her. What he found was a small, whimpering lump under a blanket. “Princess?” The blankets parted and a tear dampened face peaked out. “What happened?”

“Don’t feel well.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “How so?”

“Just cramps. I think my period finally started…” She’d started bleeding too, at any rate. It better be her period, because she didn’t want to think about any alternatives.

Oh… “Do you need anything?”

The look she gave him was truly pitiable. “Stay with me for a bit?”

A small smile quirked one corner of his mouth. He settled in next to her, leaning back against the wall. She shifted her upper body across his torso and put her head on his chest. Jack rubbed her back until she drifted off, and then quietly slipped out to let her sleep. A few hours later, she came down for dinner, looking groggy but saying she felt much better.

XXX

Heather felt awful, dizzy and nauseous, but she had to drag herself to her feet anyway. Ari was sick, too, barely conscious beside her, and she had to get them help, reach either a phone or Frank or Cassie. However, as soon as she stood upright, the room dipped and she fell to her knees. Gritting her teeth and closing her eyes, she decided she’d crawl out the door if she had to, as long as she found somebody…

Ashley found waking up alone in the room disappointing, but didn’t think anything of it. As she wandered out into the hall, she half listened for her plaga to give her a vague impression of his location. A new mutation that had just popped up in the last couple days. Hopefully they would stop at some point. She paused and tilted her head. Jack was upstairs somewhere—in the attic?—but she there was something else on this floor. She turned away from the stairs and went around the corner toward Ari and Heather’s room… And found Heather crumpled against the wall in the hallway. “Oh my god…” The blonde ran over and dropped to her knees beside her. When she noted that Heather was still conscious—if barely—she asked, “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“Stomach… feels like something’s chewing my guts…” She mumbled without looking up. “Ari’s sick too…”

Ashley took hold of her upper arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll just get you back to bed and…” The girl trailed off as she locked eyes with Heather. She could sense something from her, hear or smell or something… Oh, shit... shit, shit, shit… Schooling her expression into something resembling calm, she continued, “And I’ll call somebody.” As she helped Heather limp back to bed, she couldn’t help but notice that Ari was entirely unconscious. Stay calm, Ash, just find Jack and he’ll help you figure out what to do. Fortunately, she didn’t have to stop herself from running out of the room. She did, however, resist the urge to start screaming until she was thundering up the attic stairs. “Jack! Jack!” She threw open the door and glanced around the dimly lit room. He was turned sideways to her, kneeling next to a stack of boxes, but he stood up and turned toward her at the sound of the door. Ashley ran to him and clutched his upper arms. “It’s… I don’t know how but… but Heather and Ari are…”

“Infected?”

No surprise, really, that he didn’t seem particularly rattled. “How did you…?” It was then that she realized his hands were cupped around something. He hesitated, and then lifted the top one back to show her what was in his palm. At first she thought it was a dead scorpion, but then she realized it was the tiny, dried out husk of a deceased baby plaga. Words failed her, but she realized her mouth was open and shut it.

“There must have been a couple more behind the boxes, but they were already dust when I got here. I followed this one up here, but…” There hadn’t been anything he could do when he found it, and it had died in his hands. His plaga was… not sad exactly, but there was a sense of intense disappointment.

“More?!” Ashley felt the disappointment, too, but she was more worried by the implications of dozens of baby plagas crawling around. Especially since their host pool wasn’t evidently limited by species. There could be plaga infested animals in the surrounding forest right now…

Jack paused, letting his plaga sniff around or listen, or whatever it was it did. “I’m fairly certain only the two survived.” He shook his head slowly, watching the dead thing in his hand crumble away. “I just have no idea how something like this could have happened…”

The girl gave him a flat look. “All that hounding after me for sex, and you have no idea how this happened?”

He breathed a short laugh. “I mean, the eggs were all genetically engineered and handed out… well, by hand. They were all supposed to be male. One of the problems we ran into trying to get samples.”

Ashley scowled. “One of us has to be female. And considering how sick I was yesterday…”

He crossed his arms. “Why the fuck are you getting mad at me? I had no reason to believe this would happen.”

“Because you’re never careful about anything, and now we have to tell Heather and Ari the truth, and they’re going to hate us!”

“Which truth would that be?”

“What do you mean ‘which truth?’ We have to tell them…” An awkward silence fell over the room as Ashley locked eyes with him. She realized his point. She’d made herself forget about everything before the boat, to help along the process of syncing up with her plaga. “Um… That you were… paid to kidnap me, but the guy who did it turned on you and you… you changed your mind and decided to help me?” She realized she didn’t entirely understand his whole thought process behind everything, but she was fairly certain it wasn’t any more complicated than wanting sex, so she didn’t think about that, either. It didn’t matter anymore because he seemed to have at least gotten used to her now.

There was more silence as he tapped his fingers on his elbow, eying her contemplatively. “Sounds accurate enough.”

“What if they throw us out?”

“Come on, princess, you know they won’t.”

Yeah, she did, because even if they wanted to, their plagas wouldn’t let them. “This is horrible,” Ashley hugged herself. “Do you know how mad I was having a brain controlling parasite forced on me?”

“That is blowing it out of proportion. We don’t have a Saddler holding everything together.”

“I still feel bad manipulating them.” Ashley looked at the floor.

Sometimes he forgot how soft she was. Jack took her by the upper arms and tilted his head in an attempt to catch her eye. “We didn’t do it on purpose, okay? Only way to go is forward.”

“I know, I just…” But there wasn’t any point in protesting further. Ashley snorted and looked up at him. “You know what this means, right? I’m going to have to cut you off.”

“Cut me- Heh, whatever you say, princess.” He kissed her forehead, put an arm around her, and headed toward the door.

“I’m serious, you know,” she scowled at him. “We are going to be more careful until we figure out how this happened.”

XXX

Ashley was glad to see Heather more clearheaded when she returned to their room. Ari was awake, at least, but he looked dazed. The girl had insisted that Jack allow her to speak, because of his tendency toward insensitivity. “How are you feeling?”

Ari was hearing voices. No, not quite voices, and not quite hearing, really. He was sensing… feelings. Feelings of belonging, feelings of comfort. Things he hadn’t really felt since his grandmother died. He’d always been different, particularly sensitive to the people around him, and it was difficult to fit in.

“I feel like something’s crawling around my stomach.” Heather saw the concern in the blonde girl’s eyes and decided to add, “But it doesn’t really hurt anymore. Just, kinda weird.”

Ari’s father hadn’t really believed him, about his peculiar sixth sense, but he was certain he’d gotten whatever gift he had from his grandmother. She’d always been there to listen to him, keep him company, and this inn was all he had left of that feeling of family. The afterimages of those memories filled the place.

“Look,” Ashley began, sitting on the foot of the bed. Jack stayed leaning against the wall. “We have something to tell you, and it’s going to be hard, to believe and accept, so if you could promise you’ll just listen for a while and let me finish…”

“But what about Ari? Did you call-”

“This is about that. Um…” Ashley glanced briefly at her mate. “I’m just going to start at the beginning. We weren’t… I mean, his real name is Jack, and my real name is Ashley, and that village we told Ari about wasn’t really abandoned.”

Confusion. That was what Heather felt the most of at first, but as the story went on it evolved into disbelief. The kidnapping part she followed along with, giving Frank—No, no, his name was actually Jack—a suspicious and rather dirty look. Sure, when Ashley said she was the American president’s daughter, Heather felt the shift toward skeptical, but that was quickly forgotten at the first mention of a brain controlling parasite. That sounded like a bad horror movie. Things like that didn’t happen in real life, they just didn’t. When ‘Ashley’ got to the part about her and Ari being infested… No. Just no. “Wait, stop, so did you call a hospital or not?”

“It doesn’t matter, once the plaga-”

Heather shook her head and got up. “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

They couldn’t go dragging humans into this. No more poking and prodding by humans. And they’d split up his colony. Hurt his colony. Jack jerked sideways to cover the door. “You can’t do that.”

Whether or not these ‘plagas’ were real, there was a problem and she had to find a solution. She wouldn’t let herself be intimidated. Heather clenched her fists and straightened up to her full height. “Let me through.”

“No,” Jack growled.

“I’m not scared of you! Let me through, now!”

The large man took a half step toward Heather, glaring, inches from her face. “I said no.”

Oh, no… This was going in a bad direction. “Jack, stop it!” Ashley commanded.

He didn’t take his eyes off the other woman, even as he addressed Ashley. “It wouldn’t be good for anybody to get humans involved. If they didn’t turn us into lab rats, they might try to remove the plagas anyway and kill all four of us.”

“Quit saying that word! You’re both crazy!”

“That may be,” Ashley countered, still addressing Jack, “but you’re not helping anyone by being a dick about it, so calm down.”

“I’ll calm down when she calms down.”

Ari still sat there, absorbing the events as they unfolded. Concentration was difficult, though. The room smelled distinctly of rose and sandlewood, a scent that seemed to make the voice within him purr. Heather was frightened and in defense mode, which was perfectly reasonable considering there was an apparent criminal in the house, who got them infected with… something. Even so, though Jack looked ready to forcefully keep her from calling anyone of authority, Ari could tell it wasn’t out of a sense of self-preservation, but because he really believed he was protecting them all. At that moment, Ari realized he wanted to protect them all, too. Or was that just the voice? “Heather? Maybe we should listen to-”

“This is not the time for your pacifist shpeel.”

“But I hear-”

“Dammit, you’re always ‘hearing’ things, Ari!” Heather threw up her hands, finally turning away from Jack. “Don’t help if you don’t want to, but don’t tell me about…” Ari locked eyes with her, his expression patient, and she trailed off. It wasn’t like she really wanted to fight with Jack, anyway, on some level. That made her angrier, because if it really was some parasite dictating her actions now…

“Calm down, sweetheart, they don’t want to hurt us and you don’t really want-”

Heather clenched her fists and whipped around, aiming a punch at Jack’s face. It was mostly to prove to her self that she still could. He caught her fist so she swung the other one. When he still managed to block the second one, she tried to head-butt him in the throat, but he had her at arms’ distance by that point so she couldn’t get close enough. Then she felt arms around her waist from behind, pulling her back, and Ashley appeared in front of her pushing on Jack’s shoulders. Heather leaned into Ari and took a couple of breaths. “It’s okay, I’m okay.”

Ashley felt Jack’s muscles relax under her hands, but he didn’t budge from his position by the door. With one eye on him, she turned back to Heather. “I was really upset at first, too, but now that Saddler’s gone, it’s really not so bad.”

“I can’t believe any of this. I just can’t. I need- I need proof.”

“What?” Ashley said.

“I need solid, visible proof.” She was still in denial. It was easier to deny it than figure out how to deal with it.

Jack raised an eyebrow at Ashley, suppressing a grin. The young blonde’s eyes widened and she shook her head in a subtle no. The high died. “What would you have me do, huh?”

There wasn’t any reason to freak Heather out any more at this point, and whipping out that claw thing was too likely to do just that. He’d kill a fly with a shotgun, wouldn’t he? “Jack…”

Buzz kill. Jack rolled his eyes, but settled for darting to one end of the room and then returning to his original position. Heather just stared for a moment.

“I want it out,” she finally said.

“That’s not pos-” Ashley began.

Heather grabbed her this time, by the shirt, and she wasn’t fast enough to dodge. “I want it out!”

“It won’t come out!” Ashley shouted back, mostly so Jack wouldn’t feel compelled to intervene again. “If there was any way to get it out, it was destroyed with the island.” The other woman’s grip loosened and she took a few steps back. When she ran into the edge of the bed, she flopped down, staring at the floor. “I’m sorry, we really didn’t know this-”

“Just-” Heather put her hands to her temples. “No. Go. Leave me alone! I want to be…”

Jack seemed hesitant to leave, probably still worried that Heather would go tell someone. Ashley gave him a look, turned him around, and nudged him out into the hall. After a quiet exchange with Heather, Ari followed them, carrying a cloud of awkward silence.

“So,” Ari finally spoke up as they descended to the first floor. “Explain to me again how this works?”

Jack took it upon himself to answer this time. He’d gotten a look at more of the research than Ashley had. “They grow in and around organs to make room. There’s no way to cut it out without doing serious damage, and any that gets left behind could turn into another plaga. The bigger they get, the more impossible it is.”

“You make it sound like a tumor,” Ari smiled weakly. He felt off-center, distracted by the soft whisper drawing him to Jack, like a paternal figure. It just felt so good to have that feeling again. Of course he loved Heather, but it wasn’t the same thing.

“The first twenty-four hours are rough,” Jack grinned, “but it makes you practically invincible.”

Walking beside him, with one slender arm linked through a thick, muscular one, Ashley said, “It is more good than bad, I guess.”

“You guess?” Ari looked across Jack at her.

“I mean,” she blushed sheepishly, “before this happened.” Heather’s reaction wasn’t helping her guilty conscience. Actually, Ari’s apparent acceptance of his fate wasn’t sitting too well with her, either. He was so psychically open that the plaga seemed to be merging with him rather quickly. The calm reaction could easily be the work of the plaga. Then again, Ashley herself didn’t actually feel all that different from her old self. She’d been so scared, but… But that was because of that noisy stick Saddler carried. The girl mentally shook off the developing train of thought. Some things were too unpleasant to think about.

When they entered the kitchen, Ari collapsed into a chair. He was starving, but couldn’t find the motivation to sort out what he wanted to eat. Fortunately, Ashley was already getting out the eggs and pulling out a pan. He didn’t like not being able to tell her that he was okay, because it wasn’t her fault, but he didn’t know if he really was okay. Still too many unknowns… So, while Ashley cooked, Jack answered Ari’s occasional questions. About thirty minutes later Heather joined them, but she didn’t say a word, eating in sullen silence.

XXX

The ordeal was at its most terrifying when they both started coughing up blood. Heather freaked and started arguing about calling a doctor again, but Jack talked her out of it. As the days passed and nothing awful happened, she began to settle down. Hell, if she was going to be a freak, being one with Ari, Ashley, and Jack wasn’t the worst she could do.

Unfortunately, it was shaping up to be the worst season yet. At the end of the first month, there were five people there, and three of them had simply gotten lost and taken the wrong trail. The smaller groups of people were better for socializing, but it didn’t bode well for the place’s future. They always tried to be as entertaining as possible, though, hoping the guests would leave and tell their friends. Word of mouth was all they had.

Jack’s scar was, of course, a great point of interest. One night while they were sitting up by the fire with some beers, Jack regaled them with a story about being attacked by a mountain lion while hiking in Colorado. He explained how as it was dragging him into the bushes, he grabbed a rock and hit it until it let go. During their second fight over the plagas, Heather had gotten him to confess that the bar story never happened, so why not mix it up a little?

XXX

A few days after the last guests checked out, Heather sat at the front desk staring at a piece of paper in her hand. It was in Spanish, but she’d seen enough of them to memorize each word. Late on the mortgage. Comply or get out. A developer had been making them offers for a while, but Ari refused to sell the place his grandmother had left him. Especially not to ‘people like that.’ But if they didn’t sell it, it was going to get repossessed, as was threatened by the letter she now held in her hand. Sighing, and preparing herself for the age-old argument, she stood and went outside to find Ari. He was sitting on the stairs out front, staring at the trees. Heather sat beside him and kissed him on the cheek. “Penny for your thoughts, babe?”

“Enjoying how clear everything is. I never thought there was so much to see.”

The improvements in her physical abilities were pretty awesome. She couldn’t deny that. “So you’re happy with this?”

“I’m adjusting to it.” He looked at her. “You and Jack haven’t fought in a while.”

Heather laughed. “Not in a hostile way, no.” Strangely, she thought she’d hate Jack after digging down through all the lies, but they had too much in common. Of course she loved Ari, and she would never love anyone else the same way, but it was nice to have someone to discuss things like hunting. Jack had even started to teach her a couple of knife fighting basics before the shit had hit the fan. “God… I don’t know if it’s the plaga or… something else, but,” she snorted. “It sounds so lame, but something about him makes me think of my dad. If Jack was less of an asshole, they probably would have gotten along great.”

“A sense of belonging? I know what you mean. It’s nice isn’t it?”

“So… how are you feeling about this place now?”

He scowled at the folded paper in her hand. Another one. “Not much different than I did last month.”

She sighed, tired of being patient. “I was hoping that feeling tied to other people would help you break away from here. We can’t-”

“We can’t keep it forever,” Ari chimed in, annoyed. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do.” Too gentle for too long. Bless his heart, but he could never seem to think past his emotions. Sometimes that was good, but with things like this it was bad. The tough love had to come out eventually. “We can’t keep it. Someone is going to take it away. We can sell it and walk away with something to start over, or we can lose it anyway and have nothing.”

“It’s not that simple,” he protested, getting up and walking away.

She followed. “So you’re telling me that if you had nothing but this building for the rest of your life, you would be perfectly happy?”

“No,” Ari grumbled. “I’d rather have people around me.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“It’s…” He put a hand to his forehead. “I probably could move on now, but I don’t like it. How do I know it’s my decision?”

“Even if it’s not, a lot of the changes have been for the better, right?” She put a hand on his shoulder. “You have a sentimental attachment to this place. I realize that, but I’m tired of sitting around waiting for some… some miracle to save it.”

“I thought that they were…” Ari put a hand on his stomach. “Unless this is what was supposed to happen…”

Heather grabbed his line of logic and went with it. “Exactly. Maybe we were just waiting for them.”

“But where would we go?”

“We’ll have to talk it over with Jack and Ashley.”

XXX

“We can’t go back to the states.”

Ashley pouted at Jack. “And why not?”

Heather had presented the information to them over dinner, and Ashley immediately lit up at the prospect of at least visiting her home for a while. In her excitement, however, she forgot one critical thing. “We can’t just stroll in through customs, Ashley. They know who you are, and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out who I am.”

“My dad probably thinks I’m dead! I can’t let him worry for the rest of his life!”

“I kind of prefer it when people think I’m dead,” Jack smirked. “Helps weed out the ones I never want to see again.”

“There are enough that you have to pretend you’re dead?” Ari laughed.

Now that he really thought about it, it was kind of true, and that made him grin. “Pretty much.”

“Can we get back to the subject, please?” Heather asked. “Unless Ari wants to go, I don’t think it would be fair to drag him away from his home and his country in the same week.”

“If we could get in, I wouldn’t mind taking a vacation. I might need a distraction.”

“If we had a place to go, we could get a boat and sneak in,” Jack shrugged. “But we’d have to keep a really low profile, which would mean,” he looked at Ashley, “no contact with friends or family anyway.”

“If my mother hasn’t gotten rid of it, my family has a cabin in North Carolina. It’s quiet, and she hasn’t gone up there since my dad got sick. Even if we did get a boat, though, wouldn’t we still have to get past some kind of coast guard?” Heather pointed out.

“We could take the boat as far as possible and swim the rest after dark,” Jack shrugged.

Heather gaped at him. “Are you insane?”

“Big body, not one drop of sanity in it.” Ashley affectionately patted Jack’s shoulder.

“We could wait until some bad weather hits and hope most of them stay in,” Jack suggested.

“What if we sink?” Heather asked.

“Then we swim.”

He’d said it as though it were the perfectly obvious solution. “Jack,” Ashley cut in. “I know you feel invincible most of the time, but that doesn’t mean you are, okay? Even if the plagas could keep us from drowning, can they stop us from being eaten?”

“I still think a boat is our best bet,” Jack insisted.

“Fine,” Heather ceded. “We’ll look into the boat idea, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have other options on the table.”