“You’re talking about a man’s life here,” Luc said.

“Damn right I am!” Kent shouted, reddening as he leaned forward. “Mine! And if I have to choose between my skin and some disloyal nosy bastard’s, guess who gets my vote!”

“Listen to us,” Brad said softly as he pressed the heels of his palms over his eyes. “Voting on killing a man like we’re voting on some minor corporate policy change.”

“You know something?” Kent said. “It’s not so hard the second time. We’ve done it once already. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.” He raised his hand. “I vote yes.”

Brad lifted his hand. “Me too, I guess. I don’t see any other way.” He shifted his watery gaze between Luc and Kent. “You know what we’ve become? We’ve all become Dragovics.”

Luc’s inability to deny the awful truth of those words sickened him. “I wish I’d never heard of Loki.”

“You wish?” Kent said, jabbing his finger at Luc’s face. “How about us? This is all your fault! If you hadn’t started fucking around with that goddamn thing’s blood, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

Luc’s thoughts flashed back to the strange phone call he’d received last fall. Someone calling himself Salvatore Roma, saying he was a professor of anthropology and telling Luc he should pay a visit to a traveling “oddity emporium” that was stopped for the weekend in the village of Monroe on Long Island. Professor Roma had said there was an odd creature there with extremely interesting components in its blood. “Look into them, Doctor,” the soft, cultured voice had said. “I guarantee you will find them most interesting.”

Luc had made a few calls and had learned that indeed there was a tent show in Monroe for the weekend. Suspecting he was being hoaxed, but curious nonetheless, he’d made the trip and bought a ticket. When he saw the strange creature he assumed it was a fake, but it was an awfully good fake. So he introduced himself to Prather who seemed almost desperate to identify the creature. Because of this, he allowed Luc to take—for a fee—a sample of its blood.

And in that sample Luc found what he would later dub the Loki molecule. He isolated it, synthesized it, and began testing the blue powder on mice and rats. The results were disturbing. The mice, who usually clustered together in friendly piles for mutual warmth, began running around in bursts of frenzied activity and attacking one another. Their cages became miniature slaughterhouses. The rats, who were caged singly, would chew at the wire mesh of their cages until their mouths were bloody ruins, and leap to attack whenever one of the techs opened a cage door.

Luc had tried to reach this Professor Roma but could find no trace of him at any New York college. He cursed himself for not finding out how to contact the man.

Unknown to Luc, one of his research techs had a cocaine habit. To curry favor or perhaps to work a deal on a buy, the tech pilfered samples of the Loki powder and gave them to his supplier. These somehow found their way to Milos Dragovic.