I woke up back in the white room, safely in bed, but no longer tethered to the IVs and other machines. Even the cast had disappeared from my left leg, replaced with a simple brace. Dragomir sat on the other side of the room in a comfortable chair, typing on a laptop, and didn’t look over as I opened my eyes. “There is water on the table next to you.”
My hand shook as I reached for the small cup and straw, not wanting to know how he knew I was awake and thirsty, and I sipped even though I wanted to gulp. There was no telling what might have been added to the water.
“It does me no good to drug you, Ada. Be reasonable.”
My skin crawled and I shuddered. The cup almost missed the tray when I tried to replace it. “Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Guessing what I’m thinking,” I said.
Dragomir glanced up, one aristocratic eyebrow arched as his lip curled just slightly. “Guessing? My dear, please. I don’t need to guess. I can read your thoughts.”
I covered my face and tried to find an anchor to calm myself in the swirling chaos of his delusions. It wasn’t possible. Reading minds was just a trick like telling the future — reading body language and facial expressions, asking leading questions, sometimes just flat-out making an educated guess.
“This is not a trick,” he said. He was back to sounding completely exasperated. “You’re a scientist, Ada, for God’s sake. Use that brilliant mind of yours to reach the accurate conclusion based on the evidence I’ve already presented, and then we can get to work. We’re wasting time with this ridiculous denial.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose despite the remaining bruises and focused on breathing. “It’s not possible. It’s not. You’re suffering from some sort of personality disorder or psychosis so you believe you’re a vampire, and you’ve somehow set up experiments to notionally prove that. It’s just a — a — an elementary school science fair project. Make the blood burn. I’ll figure out how you did it; it’s just a matter of time.”
Dragomir’s eyes narrowed and began to fade to a pale blue, closer to silver. “Should I bite you to convince you? Is that what it would take?”
“Don’t you dare,” I said. Instead of threatening, I sounded desperate. Afraid. Paralyzed, like a little bunny waiting for the snake to swallow it whole. “There is a way to help you, regardless of what... afflicts you. It’s just beyond my experience and expertise, but I can certainly refer you to a specialist who...”
“My blood is destroyed by sunlight, correct?”
I didn’t want to look at him, not with the sudden thin-lipped determination that reminded me of a tiger stalking prey. But I couldn’t deny what I’d observed with my own eyes, no matter how impossible. “From a single lab experiment, it appears that way.”
Dragomir huffed an irritated noise at my hedging, then put away the laptop so he could face me fully. He wore pressed slacks and polished shoes, directly at odds what I expected a vampire in its lair to wear. Not that I had an opinion on vampiric couture regardless of the venue. “And my cells reacted negatively to garlic, correct?”
“The cells in the Petri dish reacted negatively to the substance in the pipette, that is correct.”
His eyes gleamed. “And I have fangs when I want to have them, correct?”
“I don’t —”
Dragomir’s mouth yawned and displayed zero hint of fangs, and as I watched and he watched me, they slowly grew in over the regular canines, long and sharp and dangerous. The bile rose in my throat. It wasn’t possible. It had to be some kind of stage makeup trick, something with mirrors and projected video footage. Something. He wasn’t a vampire. He couldn’t be a vampire.
“I have fangs when I want them, correct, Ada?” he repeated, eyes narrowed. The fangs remained, giving him just the faintest lisp, though it did nothing to dispel the danger lurking around him. It just made him more absurdly terrifying.
“It appears —” I started, then jumped as he suddenly leaned over me, his fists at my shoulders. I blinked. His nose bumped mine and his voice growled around and through me, vibrating in my skull. I gulped and scrambled to get away, but it was like trying to flee an avalanche. He hadn’t actually moved. I’d just blinked and then he was there, pinning me to the bed. It wasn’t possible. I’d probably had a seizure and lost time. That was all it was.
His voice whispered in my brain, between my ears, through my thoughts and every cell in my being. “I have fangs when I want them, don’t I?”
“Yes,” I whispered, hardly able to squeak the syllable.
“Yes,” he repeated. Then I blinked and he stood at the foot of the bed, unruffled and unconcerned. “All those being true, what does Occam’s Razor tell you?”
“The simplest answer is most likely correct,” I said automatically, like Pavlov’s grad student. When he started to continue, no doubt to reinforce his point, I barreled on as I tried to rationalize everything in my existence up until that point. “But that does not mean we can discount additional possibilities, since the simplest answer is vampires do not exist and you’re suffering under some elaborate delusion with psychosomatic effects visible when —”
“Ada,” he said, shaking his head, and his disapproval grew palpable. “I expected more from someone with your background. This is disappointing.”
I recoiled, some of the fear retreating into anger. “I beg your pardon? My background doesn’t make me any more —”
“You believe in Sasquatch,” he said, his words once more taking over my thoughts until I huddled in the bed and waited for the ceiling to cave in. “Bigfoot. Snarly Yow. Mothman. Ozark Howler. Loch Ness monster. How many more impossible, illogical beasts populate the earth, unseen and uncaptured through all of human history? How is Bigfoot more believable than vampires?”
“Bigfoot could have evolved from early hominids,” I said. I’d be damned if I let him disparage my research on his way to dragging me into his delusions and making me a passenger on a world-class crazy train. I held on to my convictions doggedly, shaking my head even though I wanted to tear my hair out. “It’s simple evolution. We see evidence in some of the fossils uncovered in Siberia, and others in Canada appear to —”
“Ada,” he said, and I flinched. Dragomir gentled his tone, though his expression didn’t soften. “Why would Sasquatch evolve from early hominids but Homo sapiens could not evolve into a more cunning, efficient predator?”
“Because...” I stumbled to a halt, shaking my head, and wondered if eventually my head would fall clean off, like Dad used to warn me when I was little when I got too contrary. I choked on the denial and a knot in my throat that felt suspiciously like tears. There wasn’t any reason to cry, and yet my sinuses burned and my throat ached and I wanted to curl up and hide my face all the same. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and wished I could wake up, broken and bloody, in the ravine where I’d fallen. I would have taken my chances in the wilderness rather than face the reality that the billionaire in front of me turned into a bat and drank blood and burned into nothingness in daylight. Maybe Dragomir and his lab were all part of a death hallucination. I’d read some compelling research...
“Ada,” he repeated, snapping his fingers in front of my nose. “Could one particular branch of Homo sapiens, or even an earlier hominid, have evolved into something with the characteristics society assigns to vampires?”
“It’s possible,” I said finally. It felt like defeat to admit it, although I couldn’t quite comprehend why. Any good scientist could admit to the possibility of almost anything, given a testable hypothesis and the opportunity to research.
“There,” Dragomir said. The lines around his eyes crinkled just a touch as he smiled. “Was that so hard?”
He managed to sound exactly like my mother. That added a little tinder to the fire of my anger, rather than the fear, so I felt a little stronger as I sat up and braced my hands on my knees. I felt no pain from the wounds, even without the IV medication, and once more my thoughts drifted over the miraculous healing I’d undergone in what felt like just a few days. Which only raised very uncomfortable questions. “How did — “
“I gave you some of my blood,” he said. “To save your life, yes. You were dying when I found you, mostly from that fall but some from the madman who attacked you.”
I stared at him, a roaring noise filling my ears, and tried to process what he’d just admitted. Giving me blood — his contaminated blood — to somehow save my life from catastrophic injuries. If he was a vampire. Which a logical scientist would not believe until more evidence had been collected. Thousands of questions crowded my brain, battling to escape.
The burn of tears grew in my nose once more, so I focused on where my toes made a little tent under the sheet. “Will it — Will I end up — contaminated? A-allergic to the sun?”
He shook his head, then jerked his chin at a small chart on the table next to the bed. “No. So long as the vampiric blood percentage remains under twenty percent at any given time, you will not change. The... peculiarities of our blood accumulates over time, however, so if you consistently have more than ten percent of our blood in you for months at a time, it will either kill you or turn you. But I kept you below twenty percent for the duration of time you needed life support. I’ve been reducing the ratio gradually to prevent your system from going into shock.”
I shuddered as the image of his blood smoking and coagulating violently in the lab rushed into my mind. The urge to vomit almost overwhelmed me, and I even leaned over the side of the bed in preparation. Dragomir didn’t budge from where he observed me, remaining silent until the dry heaves passed and I succeeded in keeping my guts in place.
“I didn’t think you’d be so reticent to acknowledge what I am,” he said conversationally, as if it was perfectly normal to talk about such things. “I thought you’d be excited to learn people like me exist.”
“Excited?” I coughed and gagged again, then wiped my streaming eyes with the edge of the sheet. “Why the fuck would I be excited to be dragged into this kind of psychotic maladaptive pathology?”
“Because if I exist, then it is possible — even probable — all those creatures you’ve spent your life hunting exist as well.” Dragomir’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Isn’t that wonderful?’
“That’s not exactly the word I’d use for it.” I drank more water, then collapsed against the pillows as the room swam around me. “They exist because they exist, not because you’re here. You’re — worse. You’re a delusional predator, hunting humans or what-whatever you want to drain. If you even are what you said. Because vampires don’t exist. You might drink blood, but that doesn’t make you a vampire. It’s impossible.”
Dragomir studied his fingernails with a practiced air of nonchalance. “Except you said it was possible. And I am a vampire. What makes you think Sasquatch and Bigfoot and the rest of those cryptids you’re so interested in finding are not also predators? There’s no reason to suggest those beasts would be friendly or even tolerant of a human encroaching in their territory, and you cannot have a conversation with them even in the most optimistic scenarios. You’re far better off here with me. Even if you don’t believe I exist.”
“I know you exist, I just don’t believe you’re actually a vampire.” My thoughts gelled into pudding and exhaustion dragged at my eyelids. “Besides, if the cryptids I’ve been hunting are predators, they don’t seem to leave behind any evidence of it. What kind of predator cleans up after itself?”
“My kind of predator,” he said. Dragomir smiled, one fang peeping out in a glimmer of white, and he sank once more into the comfortable chair in the corner. “There is more in heaven and earth, Ada, than you’ve dreamed of.”
I wanted to make a snide comment about his misquoting the Bard but yawned instead and then sighed. Dragomir’s eyes glowed and his thoughts nudged against mine. I stared at him as every iota of energy melted away. A deep gray darkness rose up slowly once more and I sank into it.