He helped me into a compact wheelchair with remarkable ease, as if I weighed no more than the cast I still wore on my left leg. After, of course, he untangled the tubes connected to the IVs in my hands and elbows so they didn’t get ripped out when he wheeled me toward the door. I held my breath, though I couldn’t pinpoint why I was so nervous about leaving the small white room — maybe it was because I didn’t know what to expect on the other side of the door, since I’d never glimpsed anything but darkness behind him when he entered and exited.
Dragomir didn’t say anything as he opened the door and slid me through, and I was grateful for the opportunity to collect my thoughts. The wide room opened in front of us with beautiful slate floors and wallpaper textured with natural grasses and reeds, and even though I knew it had to be underground, it felt like outside. It felt like a meadow. Some kind of water feature trickled in the background as a soothing soundtrack. Some of the tension eased out of my shoulders.
“The lab is this way,” he said without inflection. I nodded, even though it didn’t really matter what I said or thought, since he wheeled me wherever he wanted regardless. But at least he’d let me acclimate to the new room before immediately barreling into the next.
I just couldn’t figure him out. He was a complete cypher, and while I enjoyed some mysteries, I definitely wanted to know who the hell saved my life. How did he move so smoothly, like his joints were made with ball-bearings? Why did his pupils appear vertical in some rooms? Why did his skin feel like shed snakeskin?
I catalogued every odd or uncanny feature I’d noticed about him, like he was evidence left in front of me. The logical conclusion was he suffered a mental illness and had sufficient wealth to indulge it, but in the off chance the creepy feeling I fought whenever he looked at me heralded real trouble, I wanted to know what I faced. I couldn’t shake the sense he was unnatural. An other. Despite the cuff links and groomed hair and pleasant but vacant smiles.
He opened what looked like a steel door, almost like a bank vault with a rotating wheel lock, and swung it open just enough to push the wheelchair through. Luckily for my sanity, he left it cracked open instead of closing us in. Despite my best efforts at reasoning my way through it, I still suffered a completely illogical fear of small, enclosed spaces. And being locked in a bank vault in the middle of a mountain definitely hit that button.
I cleared my throat and sorted through my thoughts for a socially acceptable comment on the incongruous security for what looked like a run-of-the-mill lab, albeit one with pretty fucking amazing equipment. “So, uh, this is an interesting setup. You must be worried about, uh, bears getting after this stuff?”
He made a huffing sound I’d identified as a chuckle as he moved around and turned on lights and some of the equipment to warm up. “Precisely.”
“Bears. Right.” I frowned as I studied a nearby bench and racks of clean beakers, tubes, and dishes. “It looks like you had this professionally set up. Is that a — mass spectrometer? Seriously?”
My mouth watered as I sat up and started the tally in my head of all the cool doodads and advanced shit he had in there. Excitement started to crowd out suspicion and unease. Maybe after I told him I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with him he’d still let me use some of his equipment to test Sasquatch hairs and other samples. He had an entire forensic lab right there in the middle of the mountains. It would beat having to preserve samples to get all the way back to my cabin, and hiking all of the right equipment and preservation material in and out every time I went on a search.
I stroked the side of the autoclave and reflected on how much money Dragomir must have had to afford that kind of stuff and the setup supporting all the fancy shit. The glassware alone must have cost a fortune. Electricity to run all of it, water, detergent for cleansing, disinfectant… I shook my head. The dude had to be a billionaire. Some weird-ass, eccentric, Howard Hughes kind of billionaire. If I helped him, there would be room for negotiation. The more resources he had, the more I could benefit from them for his sake and my own.
“It is indeed a mass spectrometer,” Dragomir said. He watched me with a curious detachment, like I’d reminded him of someone else, though the corners of his mouth softened in amusement. Maybe I was the experiment and I’d done something unexpected. “Over here, if you don’t mind? You can ogle the machines a little later.”
‘Ogle’ wasn’t exactly the right word for what I wanted to do to that mass spectrometer. I wanted to hug it when he wasn’t looking, maybe rub myself all over it to claim it. Take it to a drive-in movie and make out under the lights. Have its babies. “Right. The mysterious blood disorder.”
I winced as I maneuvered the wheelchair, rolling slowly until I reached his side at a long lab bench. His blood disorder sure as hell sounded like a more legitimate mystery than whether the Snarly Yow still haunted the mountains, although there were plenty from the online community who’d agreed that tracking down Snarly should have taken precedence. Dragomir gestured at a few prepared dishes with blood samples, then created a slide from one of the samples. “This is what I collected earlier today. In this light, there is no problem. But now, when we introduce UV rays, this occurs.”
He flicked on a lamp and directed the beam onto the sample, which promptly disappeared in a puff of smoke. Nothing remained on the glass except a scorch mark and some ash.
I leaned forward, mouth hanging open. I’d never seen anything like it. “Holy crap.”
“Precisely,” he said, and once again I got the sense he laughed at me. “You can see the challenge.”
“Challenge is an understatement,” I muttered. I kept my attention on the samples and a nearby microscope so I wouldn’t get distracted by the way the dark hair fell across his forehead and his indecently long lashes brushed his cheeks when he smiled. “What happens when there’s only UV-A or UV-B? Is there a different reaction or intensity based on the type of light?”
“I experimented with that for a while, even though it would not truly help me,” he said. He fiddled with the lamp and showed me the dial that switched between the different types of UV rays. He put another sample under the lamp and turned it on. “The process is slower, but ultimately the same.”
The sample smoked and emitted a slight sizzle before it combusted, but still ended up with nothing more than black ash on the slide. I frowned as he repeated the process after switching the dial, with the same results. I’d never seen or heard of anything like it, even with all of my research and time spent among the cryptozoologist community, who were a pretty out-there group. Some serious science originated within the community, but the quacks and conspiracy theorists outnumbered the measured, logical voices. And after a run-in with a spontaneous combustion conspiracy theorist, I hadn’t braved that tangled web in years. Although maybe I owed that dude an apology after seeing Dragomir’s blood go poof.
Still, with a little effort and presenting the right evidence, I could potentially get the real scientific community on my side by demonstrating legitimate research methodologies. I’d considered starting my own consortium in the region to inject some intellectual rigor in what cryptozoologists searched for and how they documented the results. It didn’t matter what they found if no one believed them because they were a bunch of kooks in Mossy Oak camo and tinfoil hats. But if I could lead them into a bit more reflection and documentation… We could make real, undisputable progress.
Dragomir didn’t comment on my silence, though I wondered what he thought I was thinking. Even my experimental side could only come up with “huh” as a response to such a phenomenon. Spontaneous combustion was one of the out-there phenomena I’d never put much thought to, but perhaps it wasn’t entirely spontaneous.
He gestured at a pipette in a tray, beyond the UV lamp. “That is garlic, distilled to its most powerful. If you would add a few drops to the sample, you will see what occurs.”
“Is it going to blow up in my face?” I eyed the pipette dubiously, more so because he didn’t want to touch it. Any good scientist always asked if something was going to blow up in their face, especially when someone else made up the slides and designed the experiment. It was the first hard-learned lesson in grad school.
“It will not blow up, you have my word.” He folded his hands at his waist and waited patiently for me to maneuver my mangled arms and IV tubing to shakily pick up the pipette.
My grip wobbled as I held it over the sample, holding my breath as I added a single drop to the blood. And then I braced for something spectacular.
Instead, the blood coagulated into an ugly black clot, hissing slightly and deforming as I watched. My heart sank as I stared at it. What the fuck was going on? How could one blood abnormality respond so differently to two different stimuli? The UV ray thing was weird enough but having a clotting reaction to garlic, of all things... I shook my head as my mouth went dry and every word I knew disappeared from my brain. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. There was no way that reaction was a natural occurrence.
It almost sounded like… An allergy to garlic and sunlight? Surely it was some kind of joke or prank, some television show gone out of control. Maybe that was the real purpose of the reality show the producers pitched me. They set me up, he was part of it, and they filmed the crazy Bigfoot-hunter trying to reason through whether vampires existed. I shook it off and tried to return to the realm of logic and reality.
And as my thoughts raced in circles, trying to reason through the unreasonable, Dragomir watched me without any reaction at all. He just waited, patient and eternal, and studied me as his blood coagulated and began to decay at an accelerated rate in the Petri dish in front of me.
I cleared my throat a few times, hoping I’d sound more like a post doc than a hysterical Bigfoot hunter. “Is that — is that everything?”
“As we discussed, there is the issue of dental malocclusions, but I can live with those.” When he smiled, he did so widely enough to display a pair of fangs instead of canines on the top row, and something deep inside me went cold and still. He’d had slightly elongated eye teeth before, but those looked like…
Fangs.
I shook my head and rolled the wheelchair back a touch as my lizard brain reacted and shrieked to flee and hide. I cleared my throat some more and gripped the arms of my wheelchair as a primitive voice in the back of my head said to fucking run. Immediately. On wheels or dragging myself by my broken hands didn’t matter. He was a predator and I needed to get away. “That’s, uh, interesting. I think I —”
“Take a breath, Ada,” he murmured, and the words boomed through my head in an echoing command. My lungs inflated because he said so, but the shaking in my hands increased violently as I stared at him. What the fuck was that? He was inside my thoughts. Inside my brain.
Dragomir leaned his hip against the bench, though he avoided the pipette I’d dropped that spilled some of the garlic essence next to the rest of the blood samples. “You can see why I need assistance uncovering a remedy for these conditions. The extreme sensitivity to sunlight is the most critical, of course, with the garlic allergy of secondary importance. I can survive without eating Italian food again.”
He tried another smile, even though it made my blood pressure crank up to see the fangs had somehow shrunk in the few moments I’d been denying the evidence in front of my face. It didn’t make me feel better that they’d gotten smaller; instead, it confirmed I had to be losing my mind. Teeth didn’t just grow and shrink randomly or at the command of the head they occupied.
I blinked rapidly, like that would help, and pushed the wheelchair away from the bench and all the fancy equipment. Any thought of returning to use the lab later evaporated immediately. “I don’t know what this is. You’d be better off going to Mayo or something like that.”
“I can’t go to Mayo, and I think you can see why.” He gestured airily at the charred remains of the blood samples. “Which means your help is all the more important.”
“It would help if I knew, ah, any other diagnoses doctors had ruled out,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to be in that room another second. I didn’t want to be trapped in any enclosed spaces with him. Bunking with a fucking lion would have been more relaxing. “So I don’t — duplicate the tests.”
He didn’t move, though I got the feeling he coiled up and prepared to strike. “The diagnosis is not important, Ada. Managing the symptoms is what matters.”
I didn’t meet his even gaze. He could have interpreted it as a challenge, and I didn’t need that. My voice crept out, too small and weak and scared, before I could swallow the words. “It’s important to me.”
“You know what this is, Ada,” he said. “You just have to accept it.”
“I don’t know what this is,” I said, trying to sound firm. Just because whatever opioids he’d given me made me highly suggestible and prone to delusions didn’t mean I believed he was... What he implied. It was impossible. Simply, utterly impossible.
Dragomir sighed, at the end of his patience for my shenanigans, and folded his arms over his chest. “I’m a vampire.”
And there it was, like a grenade in the middle of the room, the pin pulled and just waiting to detonate and take away whatever faith I still had that the world was rational and reasonable and understandable.
I started shaking my head before I fully comprehended what he said and all the implications flowing down from it. A vampire. A fucking vampire. Bloodsucker and night-stalker and the thing of nightmares. Dracula. Nosferatu. Shapeshifting bat, no reflection, super strength… My knowledge of vampiric legends failed me, or maybe he weaseled into my thoughts again and shut it down.
He stood there in front of me waiting for some kind of response other than denial, and I waited for some brilliant response to occur to me.
Finally, as the silence stretched so tense it felt like the air itself would shatter with the strain, I sucked in a deep breath and held on to the wheelchair so I wouldn’t fly apart myself. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
He smiled, the fangs much longer and sharper and pressing against his lower lip, and leaned toward me. The blood rushed out of my head and all of me went cold and clammy with adrenaline, the room fading in and out of focus, and even though I’d never been Catholic or even much of a believer, I whispered what I hoped was pretty close to a Hail Mary before darkness slid over me and I sank into the safety of nothingness.