His finest bequeathment, an AB blood type, served him exquisitely. Having both key antigens and neither constraining antibody made him a universal recipient. Anyone could give to him. Few could receive from him. He was a taker. He hadn’t merely resigned himself to this fact; he embraced it as divine right.

Sure of foot, his back ramrod-straight and unaching, he threaded through the youthful bodies lying prone and unconscious on their gurneys. Through the dim light, he moved erect and proud, an ageless sovereign lording over his minions.

All was right in the Great Chain of Being.

He swore he could already feel the pyrotechnics exploding through him. His aging tissue rejuvenating. Tired muscles mending. New neural connections sprouting in his hippocampus. His heart, his brain, even his cartilage reviving. His memory fortifying. Liver cells generating. He felt swollen with vitality, with youth, with timelessness.

Even his sense of smell grew more keen. This was no trick of the mind. From across the basement lab, he picked up a trace of dewy perfume on the slender neck of David’s girl.

Kendall was an AB type, too, unlucky dove. She would receive from him tonight, and that would cost her. Each of the guests had to be replenished, and there was no use wasting valuable O neg from the freezer when she could take what had to be drawn out of René to make room for the new.

From time immemorial man had searched for the fountain of youth. From Herodotus’s recitations to Ponce de León’s hapless wanderings, it had cast a mythological shadow across the ages. Silver chalices and bubbling springs.

Who would have thought it had been right in front of everyone all along?

Someone just required the audacity to take it.

If you considered it, really considered it, this was a move befitting a Cassaroy. Rather than forging through enemy fire to claim some godforsaken battle-torn hill, René had fought his way through social mores and human limitations to stake his flag in the virgin terrain of an age-old fantasy.

Passing among his unsuspecting acolytes now, he brushed against dangling bags of blood, as bright and cheerful as Christmas decorations.

That was when he heard a groan behind him. He halted. Turned. There was movement in the bed where there was supposed to be none.

And then Joshua sat up.

The kid was not supposed to come to for another few hours. Dr. Franklin rarely got the dosing wrong, but the bigger the fellow, the more unpredictable the anesthesia. All that mass, it seemed, gave the boy the tolerance of a water buffalo.

It was awful when they woke up in the middle.

They got so confused.