“Have what?” she asked.
He held up a tube of gold liquid and stared at it with a look in his eyes said that he’d just changed the world. What was to come next would raze to the ground everything they’d ever known. A cataclysmic event beyond which mere mortals could hardly comprehend.
“Golden Blood,” Washington whispered.
“Come again?” Gabe said.
“What exactly is Golden Blood?” Jodie chimed in. “It looks like something I would not want to drink.”
“The more I thought about it. The more I knew. The more you told me,” he said to Reyna and Beckham, “the more I thought, how could two perfectly matched people possess such talents? How could the mixing of vampire and human blood like this heal? Or sense? Or produce such evocative shared emotions?”
Reyna shrugged. She had no answer to that. She’d just been rolling with it.
“How could he makeyoua little more vampire?” Washington mused, lost to his own epiphany. “How could she makeyoua little more human?”
Reyna’s hand went to her mouth as she thought back to their time in the bathroom. How for just a moment Beckhamwasmore human.
The stunned silence in the room only echoed her belief.
“I think I’ve done it…”
He passed Reyna the gold liquid, his newly deemed Golden Blood.
“A cure for vampirism.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“A cure?” Beckham asked skeptically.
“That’s not possible,” Meghan whispered.
Everyone else stared at the golden liquid, stunned. Even Gabe didn’t have a witty remark. The room was silent and shocked.
“I assure you it’s quite possible,” Washington said.
“And you discovered this in the last month?” Reyna asked. “I mean don’t you need more time than that to make sure it works?”
“The last month?” Washington stared at her in confusion. “Oh heavens, no. I’ve been working on this for the better part of the last two centuries. But it all clicked when I saw how a blood match and the healing properties found in your blood reacted. It was a next logical conclusion to assume that you could heal more than just each other.”
“But testing?” she pressed.
“Ah. Well, I’ve tested it on every kind of vampire blood I had on file here. When combined in perfect conditions, the virus that causes the disease was forced into paralysis and eventually killed. Essentially Golden Blood works as white blood cells attacking the foreign properties in the body. In this instance: vampirism.”
Washington hastily took back the small tube from Reyna. “Though, it hasn’t been tested on a vampire yet.”
Reyna’s eyes darted around the room. It was only Beckham who didn’t shrink back from the prospect of having Golden Blood tested on him.
“Well, let’s not all jump up at once,” Gabe said sarcastically.
“It’s untested,” Katarina said. “Who knows what it could do to us? I’ll take my chances as a vampire before that.”
“We have to test it,” Beckham insisted. “Think of the possibilities.”
Washington’s eyes lit up. “Imagine the number of people we could save. The number of lives we could change.”
Beckham shot him an incredulous look. “Think of the weapon it could be.”
Washington’s face fell. “This isn’t biological warfare.”
