Chapter 149 The Rector's New Passion
POV: Professor Cornelius Fell | Hermetic Order Secondary Facility, Undisclosed Location
The embryo was the most perfect thing Fell had ever made.
He stood at the incubation chamber and looked at it through the crystal viewing panel the way other people looked at sunsets or newborns, with the specific quality of attention that meant he had stopped cataloguing and started simply seeing. Five viable hybrids had come out of the Rookeries battle. Four were developing on predictable curves, useful data points, exactly what the program needed. The fifth was something else entirely.
He had named her Lucia in his private notes. Not in the official documentation, where she was Specimen 5-H, but in the leather notebook he kept separate from Order records, the one that was purely his thinking. Lucia. It suited the quality of light the chamber gave off when the bioluminescent markers in her cellular structure activated, which happened every eighteen hours with a regularity that suggested the hybrid biology was not random but organized, following a developmental logic that his existing frameworks didn't fully account for.
She was six weeks along in magical incubation. A human embryo at six weeks was barely formed. Lucia at six weeks had already shown three separate biological markers that his instruments had no prior classification for.
He turned from the chamber and went to his desk.
The problem was containment. Magical incubation could sustain her to approximately twelve weeks, which his calculations put at a developmental stage equivalent to human second trimester. Beyond that point, the embryo would require a biological environment. A surrogate. Specifically, a dhampir surrogate, because the hybrid biology needed the particular cellular chemistry that dhampir physiology carried, the combination of vampire and human genetic expression that would interact correctly with Lucia's dual nature rather than rejecting it.
There were very few dhampirs in London.
There was one who was now a full vampire, which was not ideal but was workable given that the conversion had been recent enough that the cellular transition was still active at a residual level. His samples from Valentina Corvino's pre-conversion bloodwork, collected during her captivity three months ago, confirmed that the residual dhampir chemistry persisted at measurable levels for up to eight months post-conversion.
He had four months.
He pulled the notepad toward him and uncapped his pen.
Valentina Corvino was currently operating in vampire society, registered, attending Parliament social functions. She was also clearly feeding information to Callum Brennan's Rookeries crew, which anyone who was paying attention could observe from her behavior at gatherings. She was not subtle about her divided loyalties so much as she was careful, and careful and subtle were not the same thing.
The Order needed her alive and cooperative. Not captured, not coerced, because coercion produced compliance and compliance was not the same as the sustained biological cooperation that successful surrogacy required. Stress hormones alone could compromise the process. He needed her willing, which meant he needed her to understand what Lucia was and to believe that her participation was the right choice.
He was good at making people believe things were the right choice. It was one of his more reliable skills.
He pressed the call button on the desk.
His assistant appeared in the doorway within thirty seconds. Young, efficient, three years into Order membership and still at the stage where he found everything interesting rather than routine.
"Valentina Corvino," Fell said. "She attends Parliament social functions. She has contacts in vampire society. I need to know her schedule, her movements, the routes she uses between the blood club and the Rookeries." He capped his pen. "And I need someone to make an introduction. Scholarly interest in hybrid biology, researcher seeking to understand the conversion process. Something that gives me a reason to be in the same room."
His assistant was already writing.
"Find the dhampir," Fell said. "I need her alive and cooperative. Whatever it takes."