“Why’s the screen turned off?” Sebastian said.

“I’ll show you in a minute.” She picked up a computer tablet.

In addition to overseeing the new Celebrity Center, Dr. Maya Dawson was responsible for the health of all of Sebastian’s carriers. When she discovered Jolie Simone’s pregnancy, Maya had immediately removed Jolie from the donation roster. Donating blood while pregnant depleted a woman’s iron, made her susceptible to anemia and other health risks.

During the time when no one except Simone and her baby daddy knew she was pregnant, Jolie had donated only two pints—not enough to perform a whole-body transfusion but certainly enough to test out Paul’s theory about the power of a pregnant carrier’s blood.

Which was why Sebastian had Sixto Ferreria, the second person Paul had texted, handed over for testing. But not before breaking the kid’s bones, he thought. Sebastian had ordered Frank to do that first, before taking Sixto here for testing. Sebastian wanted to see how pregnant carrier blood would affect healing, among other things.

“Mr. Ferreria,” Maya said, “is up and walking.”

Sebastian chuckled. “Bullshit.”

Maya’s expression remained stern.

Sebastian felt a quickening in the pit of his stomach. That can’t be true, he thought. Pandora could heal broken bones and fractures, but it would take way longer than seventy-two hours to be up and walking.

“He’s still a bit stiff,” Maya said, “and he’s not going to run any marathons, but the bones are healing quickly—much, much quicker than with Pandora.”

“Did you mix Jolie’s blood with our drug combo?”

“I did. If Paul knows the medications we use—”

“He doesn’t.”

“Did you ever find out what he’s using with his transfusions?”

“Viramab.”

Maya sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Those people . . . they’re as good as dead.”

Sebastian nodded with his chin to Ferreria. “Side effects?”

“None.”

That, too, surprised him. Almost every client complained of dizziness and nausea, experienced fever and chills during and after a Pandora transfusion. People who had an allergic reaction broke out in hives. There were more serious problems, things like a hemolytic reaction in which a patient’s immune system attacked the red blood cells of the donor.

“Actually,” Maya said, “there is one major side effect.”

“What?”

“He masturbates. Frequently.”

“On camera?”

“Anywhere. He’s totally uninhibited.”

Sebastian recalled the story Frank had shared with him about Sophia Vargas and the policeman in her backyard. Sophia had been on Jolie’s blood.

Maya unlocked the tablet using a series of complicated passwords, all of which changed on a weekly basis. “I gave him only half a pint of Jolie’s blood. I wanted to use it as a baseline. Take a look at these before pictures.”

Maya handed him the tablet. She always took pictures of clients before a transfusion—close-up shots of clients stripped down to their underwear. They were used for comparison purposes, to show the clients how their skin and body compositions reacted and changed.

Only Sixto Ferreria hadn’t come into the Wellness Center looking like the typical client. Like Link, Ferreria had been tortured, starved, and deprived of sleep over several months.