Dark War Read Online Free PDF Page B

"When I saw you use your weapons, I guessed that he'd enlisted the help of another Bennie to try to stop me." She nodded at the weapons in our hands. "Those are just the sort of thing I'd design – especially the VD darts!" She grinned nastily. "But I didn't recognize you at first, Matt. Nor you, Devona. You both look quite a bit different than your counterparts in this world." 
    Â Â She raised her hand and snapped her fingers. At her command a pair of Hydes rose from behind the bar, each of them lifting a prisoner into view, a man and a woman, both bound in coils of red velvet rope. The rope was no doubt normally used for bondage games around here, but no one was playing right now. 
    Â Â The two prisoners were familiar, so much so that looking at them was like looking into a mirror, albeit a funhouse mirror. The male was dressed in gray suit and tie similar to mine, but his skin was ivory white, and he had overlong incisors which protruded down over his lower lip. The woman wore a scuffed and torn black leather outfit, and her flaking skin was greenish-gray.
    Â Â "It's us!" Devona said. Then she frowned. "Sort of." I looked closely at our other selves. "We're reversed. You're a zombie, while I… I don't look half-vampire, do I?"
    Â Â "That's because you're not," the other me said. "You're the whole undead enchilada." 
    Â Â "Interesting. Do you like it?"
    Â Â He gave me a sour look. "Do you like being a zombie?"
  "Good point."
    Â Â "Took you long enough to get here," Vampire Matt said. He looked at Darius. "I was beginning to think you didn't get my message."
    Â Â "I got it," the Sideways Man said, "and I did as you asked."
    Â Â "For all the good it did," Zombie Devona muttered. "Our Bennie is still a Hyde, and you three are in just as much trouble as Matt and I are." 
    Â Â "Speaking of Hydes," my Devona said, "I understand why you haven't changed, but from what we've seen, the Hyde plague affects vampires. Why didn't your Matt change?"
    Â Â Bennie was a woman again, and she answered before Zombie Devona could. "Because your Bennie isn't the only one who was able to whip up an antidote to the plague. I gave my Matt a dose – one a good deal stronger than what your guns can deliver – so he'd remain unchanged. He and his Devona tried to stop me, and I wanted them both to witness the results of their failure."
    Â Â "Stop you from doing what?" I asked. "I'm not exactly sure what your master plan is." I wanted to keep Bennie talking as long as I could. I'd been watching him/her closely, observing the gender change and trying to mark the exact moment when he/she was perfectly poised between male and female. I thought I had a good feel for it, but I needed to be absolutely sure.
    Â Â Bennie Hyde looked at me as if I'd just asked the stupidest question imaginable. "Why, having fun, of course! I had a client who asked for a very special potion: one that would split him into two separate beings, one male, one female, so that he – or rather they – could…" Bennie trailed off and grinned. "I'm sure your imaginations can fill in the rest. No one on my staff had the skill necessary to create such an elixir, so I decided to give it a go. Since I already used a variation of my ancestor's original formula to shift gender, I figured all I'd have to do was tinker with the recipe a bit. Initial tests on lab animals were encouraging, and so I decided to try it on myself." Bennie – male again – smiled. "What can I say? I was curious to see what it would be like to truly become two genders instead of simply switching back and forth between them. But instead of splitting me into two separate beings, the formula turned me into a Hyde. But not just any Hyde – a super Hyde who could spread the transformation to others. Inside me, the formula mutated into an extremely contagious airborne virus, and all I had to do in order to make more