Dreamveil by Lynn Viehl Read Free Book Online

before he spoke to his geneticist. “Your assistant is a very ambitious woman, Elliot. She wants your job, I suspect, so she can have complete access to the project materials.”
    “You think she’s a spy?”
    Genaro shrugged. “Has she offered you anything out of the ordinary?”
    “Sex, a month after I hired her. I thought I had dealt with it.” Kirchner rubbed his forehead. “I apologize, Mr. Genaro. It won’t happen again.”
    “Don’t have her terminated.” When Kirchner gave him a surprised look, he added, “She did solve the problem with the transerum. I think that in itself deserves some reward.”
    Kirchner frowned. “What exactly did you have in mind, sir?”
    “Once we recover the female Kyndred with the dominant DNA and use it to stabilize the transerum, we will need a fresh cadaver brain.” Genaro eyed the simulation loop still playing on the screen. “Dr. Hoff’s should serve adequately.”

Chapter 3

    T aire took one last peek through the hole she’d wiped in the ice- covered windowpane, and watched Dansant lead Rowan toward the stairwell by the back storage room. She relaxed the fingers she’d knotted into tight fists, and rested her forehead against the glass. Her breath melted some of the thin frost, which slid down the window like the tears on her face.
    Rowan was banged up from the accident, but not too badly. Taire had overheard everything else. She was taking the job Dansant had offered. She was staying.
    It had worked.
    Taire wiped her face and nose on her sleeve before she moved away, taking care to stay in the shadows. No one was on the streets now, and she was only three blocks from her place, but she wouldn’t risk being seen. Not now, when she was so close to getting some real answers.
    She’s older, and she’s on her own. She lifted her cold, curled fingers to her mouth and blew on them. She has the marks. She has to know something.
    An hour ago Taire had been idly watching some kids tagging a building when Rowan had stopped her bike at the traffic light. The first thing she’d spotted was the jacket tied around Rowan’s waist, which in the freezing cold made no sense. Then one of the homeboys had gone over to sweet-talk her and then tried to grab her keys, and she’d grabbed him back. When the edge of Rowan’s sleeve slid down, and the edge of a black tattoo appeared, Taire had straightened.
    Then something strange had happened.
    Taire couldn’t see Rowan’s face, but she got a good look at the weird blue glow that had appeared under both of her sleeves. She’d heard the tone of the boy’s voice when he’d called her some Spanish name. Cold as it was, Taire had also picked up the faintest scent of something tart and fruity and—for want of a better word—ticklish. Complex and alien, it was coming from Rowan.
    She had breathed in deeply to break down the other girl’s scent into its components. It smelled of grapefruit, oak, apple, pears, and mint. Then it came back to her, that New Year’s Eve, when one young nanny had smuggled a bottle of champagne out of the wine cellar and up to the nursery to have her own private celebration. She’d let little Taire take a sip from the clear, flat-bottomed cuvée.
    Rowan—a biker chick—smelled like that. Like Cristal.
    Taire stopped across the street from her place and waited, turning her head to watch both sides of the street. The old hotel had been closed for several years, but the owner had hung onto the property until his death last year. Taire had found the place after reading about the owner’s heirs suing each other over rights to and disposition of the property, as the land the hotel was built on was worth millions to the city’s space-hungry real estate developers. Until the case was settled, and ownership established—something that would take years, according to the paper—the hotel would continue to stand, empty and useless, slowly decaying behind the graffiti-covered plywood nailed over its doors and