Beautifully Dead - Chapter 42
An Immortal Affections serialized novel
May 7, 2025
Merriweather Medical Research Foundation, Fredericksburg’s outskirts, Virginia
Dr. Thanakit’s email pinged in his inbox at 6:52 AM, which was fine as Elijah had been awake since four.
He had the kind of relationship with sleep that most people had with difficult relatives — civil, intermittent, not something he counted on. The office suited him at this hour: monitors on, everything else dark, the building overhead just beginning to stir.
He’d had iterations of this office for a long time. Different centuries, different cities, always the same basic arrangement — the current research on the desk, older journals locked in cabinets behind him, a door that answered only to him.
The subject line said URGENT.
She’d flagged it twice — once standard, once a handwritten note outside the template fields at the bottom saying: I had to run the sequencing panel three times. First two returns were anomalous and I assumed instrument error. Third run confirmed both profiles. Please call me if you see this before work.
He read it twice. Then opened the attached report.
Dr. Thanakit had been at it most of the night, judging by the annotations — careful, methodical, and no room for error.
She’d run the antigen profiles through three alignment tools and come up with the same answer each time, flagged in red at the top of page two: Profile A — current pandemic strain, European cluster, confirmed match. Profile B — same pathogen family, divergence too significant for recent evolution from Profile A. Not a variant. Possible separate transmission chain, or secondary strain circulating independently.
And below that, underlined: If Profile B is uncharacterized and circulating, mandatory reporting applies. Awaiting your guidance before any external notification.
He looked at that for a moment.
Thanakit was good at her job, which was exactly the problem. She’d found the right question and drawn the reasonable wrong conclusion, because she didn’t have the one piece of information that would make Profile B immediately explicable — namely, that amongst the many results the lab had recently produced those from Eleanor Caldwell’s archived hair samples were also present.
He pulled them up and ran the comparison. Unsurprisingly, profile B matched Eleanor’s archive, exactly as he’d suspected the moment he saw Thanakit’s note.
He closed the window.
He scrolled down to look at Amelia’s inflammation markers, at the same time eager and anxious about seeing his suspicions confirmed.
And there they were, IL-6, TNF-alpha, C-reactive protein — every measure climbing well past the acute threshold, the kind of numbers that explained why Amelia had looked the way she’d looked at breakfast two days ago, holding her coffee with both hands because the warmth helped and not mentioning it. He’d seen this pattern before, in a less acute form, centuries ago and never again since — some form of constitutional resistance working overtime, the body too stubborn to yield and not strong enough to clear the infection. Slow, grinding, and ultimately fatal.
At the time, it had been only the one strain though, Amelia carrying two would change things substantially.
Both antigens active simultaneously, the immune response calibrated to fight at full intensity with no mechanism to prioritize between them. Nothing telling it which battle to win first. The inflammatory load compounding, neither strain resolved, the damage shifting from the pathogens to the body’s own escalating response.
He’d suspected the Everett resistance since he had heard about Thomas’ father’s protracted illness. Longer than that, truthfully — working from intuition and accumulated knowledge, the nagging sense that something in that bloodline was different, which was why he’d positioned Eleanor near the Everett household in the first place.
Thomas’s father had been a data point without a mechanism for years. Here was the mechanism. He’d been right all along.
The realization felt gratifying for about a minute, until he realised: Amelia was going to die.
Something in him fully rebelled to the idea. She couldn’t.
The pandemic strain was fast. On its own, the Civil War strain and her resistance markers might have reached a kind of equilibrium — a low-grade chronic infection she carried for years without knowing, her immune system holding the line without declaring victory. Together, they’d push the inflammatory cascade past resolution, and he knew how it ended better than anyone. He’d watched it end the same way before, in people whose names he’d never cared about remembering. She was different.
I should inoculate her.
Not quite a decision, more like a reflex, it wouldn’t be the first time he had to employ drastic measures to save someone, to preserve a worthwhile life.
His own strain was older than either pathogen active in her system, more refined. He’d used it before in desperate cases, forcing transformation ahead of an immune crisis. It had worked. Not reliably, but more reliably than nothing.
He’d not done it without disclosure since Eleanor.
Eleanor, who had taken the better part of a century to forgive him, and only because forgiveness was something she needed, for her own peace of mind.
But he had been certain, or as certain he could be, that his offer would be accepted when made. He had no particular confidence that Amelia would choose the same. More to the point — and this surprised him slightly — he found he wasn’t quite certain of what he would do, if she said no.
He needed more data. His own strain in a dual-exposure host with this specific immune profile was an untested configuration. He needed more samples. And time to test them.
His phone sat on the desk. A notification from Dr. Caulfield, timestamped an hour ago — the preview cut off after the first few words. Did the results—
He turned the phone face-down.
She would know, she would disagree, and she’d be gentle about it, which somehow would make it so much worse.
Sometimes he regretted bringing her back, it was like having a hovering conscience nearby.
He opened his texts and typed: Your results are in. Come in this morning — I need to show you in person. We’ll talk next steps.
Sent it. Sat back.
Thanakit’s note was still open on the second monitor. If Profile B is uncharacterized and circulating, mandatory reporting applies. She’d be in by eight. After a night sleep she would remember the hair sample. She’d run the comparison herself — she was too thorough not to — and the moment she matched Profile B to Eleanor’s archive, the question answered itself. Profile B wasn’t circulating. It was a 160-year-old pathogen preserved in a sealed room that hadn’t been opened since 1862, and Amelia Everett had spent hours in the house breathing its air without knowing.
An isolated exposure event. Perfectly explicable, as long as nobody asked to see his results as well.
The fresh notebook sat on the left side of the desk — the one he’d started the day he had met Amelia, the last of the Everett.
He wrote the date, and below it: Two confirmed strains. Hyperactive inflammatory response, resistance markers isolated.
He thought about what he’d need to write at the bottom of the page, if nothing was done.
He closed the notebook.
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to be continued…
© 2025-26 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake & Joe Gillis. All rights reserved.