Blood of Eden by Tami Dane

off the couch at seven-thirty. I put the side table back where it belonged and hauled Mom’s invention to the coat closet—it weighed a freaking ton. I shoved it as far back as I could so she’d be less likely to mess with it. I rubbed my eyes as I padded barefoot into the kitchen, rummaged in the back of the cabinet for the instant coffee, and lit the gas stove to boil some water.
    Mom joined me just as I was guzzling my second cup. I set a clean mug on the counter and motioned to the hot kettle. “Water’s hot. Help yourself. I need to get going.” Over my shoulder, I motioned to the cupboard. “For lunch, you can cook some noodles. Add boiling water, let them sit for three minutes, and you’re good to go. I’ll call the office a little later and find out how long we’ll be living like Neanderthals.”
    â€œThanks, honey. Again, I’m sorry about the accident.”
    Twisting, I gave my mother a wilted semismile over my shoulder. I swear, if I didn’t love that woman as much as I did, I’d have gone ballistic on her ages ago. But I did love her, and I couldn’t be cruel to her. No matter how much trouble she caused. “Promise me, you’ll keep your word from now on. No powering up your inventions until I’ve tested them.”
    Mom smacked her right hand over her heart. “I swear I won’t get anywhere near a wall outlet until you tell me it’s safe.”
    I headed into the shower, wondering how long she’d keep her word this time.
    Â 
    Â 
    The big red numbers on the digital clock hanging on the conference room wall read twenty-five hours, fifty-nine minutes, and thirty-three seconds, and it was counting backward. To what deadline, I had no clue yet. But it was safe to assume it wasn’t counting down the hours till the season finale of The Bachelor or the premiere of the next Twilight movie.
    I wasn’t the last to hurry into the conference room for our morning meeting. That made me feel a little better. Chief Peyton, the only member of the team who wasn’t waiting in the conference room, was in her office, on her phone. But I knew I had to have been the last to arrive at the unit, thanks to a side trip to my apartment complex’s office.
    Good news: the official “cause” was faulty wiring—I wasn’t about to argue, especially with my bank account balance approaching zero.
    The bad news: no power for another day or two.
    JT gave me a half grin as I settled into a chair. His dark, come-hither eyes said something I didn’t want to try to interpret right now. So, to avoid thinking too much about how charming he looked this morning, I busied myself, setting up my Netbook, gathering a pen and notebook to jot notes, and sneaking bits of a stale granola bar into my mouth. I’d forgotten about putting that in my purse a couple of months ago, thank goodness.
    The chief rushed in just as I swallowed the last mouthful of chocolate and granola. She pointed at the clock and announced, “This is how much time we have until the next victim dies.”
    It was all very Hollywood.
    Absolutely, I was extremely skeptical about this whole thing. Who wouldn’t be?
    Granted, because I’d dragged in much later than everyone else, I had to assume I didn’t know everything the other members of the team did. In my book, the deaths were strange, perhaps a little fishy, but hardly clear-cut murders.
    â€œThis is what we have so far.” Chief Peyton clicked her laptop’s mouse and an image displayed on the white wall behind her.
    Nifty. PowerPoint.
    The chief pointed at the picture of the Baltimore victim. “Jane Doe Two. Approximate age, thirty-five. She collapsed a few minutes before ten yesterday morning in Baltimore, within walking distance of a hospital. Cause of death, complications of malaria.” She clicked the mouse again, and this time, an image of the woman from the morgue we’d