I’d thought myself in circles multiple times by the time he next woke, and I didn’t sleep much in the process. I found paper in the lab and started making pros and cons lists, decision trees, process diagrams... Anything to try and untangle the mass of confusion that prevented me from seeing the real problem clearly. At the heart of it was a simple question: could vampires exist?
Every bit of science told me the same thing: whatever looked like a vampire could be explained by other phenomena, whether that was porphyria or the release of gases during decomposition or any number of other things. Except… every bit of pop culture – and something deep in my own heart – insisted that magic was possible, regardless of what my brain and education told me. The unexplained and unknown could be known and explained. I knew that sasquatches and black dogs and other cryptids existed; they’d just not been documented.
What if vampires walked among us and had always done so, but they’d stayed out of sight long enough that humans turned them into legends? Clearly, if they’d started as human, they retained sufficient intelligence to hide their nature and remain nighttime boogeymen. Deliberately obscuring their existence served them well as a survival mechanism. Surely if humans truly understood the threat, they would have eradicated vampires within a generation. Just look at what humanity did to suspected witches.
Dragomir thought he was a vampire. The possibility existed that he actually was a vampire. The possibility also existed that he was crazy or delusional or merely eccentric, having lived alone for too long. But his blood combusted in UV light, it coagulated when exposed to garlic, and he could apparently make fangs appear at will. He’d demonstrated enough weird shit that my Occam’s razor tilted in the direction of him really being a vampire.
What sealed it was creeping into the lab, though I almost blew an O-ring trying to haul that massive steel door open enough to slide inside, and borrowing the UV lamp he’d used on his own blood samples. He said he’d given me some of his blood, and that it persisted in my system for long enough that he had to be careful about how much more I got. Fine. I found a slide and a sterile scalpel, and even though my hands shook so bad I almost gave myself a massive incision, I cut the inside of my arm near my elbow and let the blood pool onto the clean glass.
When in doubt, experiment.
Dad would have rolled his eyes and thrown his hands in the air for the sloppy preparation and complete lack of control group and any sort of hypothesis, but Mom would have goaded me on to figure out what the hell was happening. Unless it had something to do with cryptids, then she probably would have frowned in disapproval and muttered something about a tenure-track position in an acceptable scientific field near her at Princeton.
I pressed gauze to the wound in my arm, irrationally afraid that Dragomir would burst out of his sleepy-time lair to attack me. Waving fresh blood around in front of him probably wasn’t the best guest etiquette. How much control did he actually have? When did that control fail? I needed to identify the limits within which he existed. I made another note on my running list of questions to address the moment he stirred.
I sat at the bench, staring at the prepared slide and the lamp, and tried to make myself turn on the damn thing. I needed to change my name to Schrodinger. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to live in a world where both things were possible, that Dragomir could be telling the truth and lying at the same time. I didn’t want to know that he’d saved my life and I had vampire’s blood in me, but I very much wanted confirmation that my belief in cryptids and all the research and struggling I’d been doing since Jamie disappeared was actually on the right track. Vampires weren’t technically cryptids, but they were close enough for me.
I wanted to live in a world where what he said was possible but I sure as hell didn’t want them living in close proximity. There was no telling what he was capable of or what danger he posed to Chilhowee and everyone I knew. What legends were actually true? He claimed he didn’t need to be invited inside a house in order to enter. Did he have a reflection? Could he fly or turn into a bat? Could he use mind control or telekinesis or control wolves with his thoughts?
I barely remembered the plot of Dracula, much less vampire attributes in any detail, and made another note to research when I had reliable wifi. Unless Dragomir had a library in his fancy caves. A ‘Vampires for Dummies’ reference would have been perfect.
For fifteen minutes, I sat in the lab and debated whether to turn the lamp on and confirm my fears. I even touched the ‘on’ switch a couple of times, almost turned it, then hesitated and eventually retreated. I walked away to the kitchen, gnawing on more beef jerky and brewing tea, then walked back before I’d even swallowed.
I wasn’t a coward. I was many things — stubborn, too much in my own head, overconfident, maybe crazy — but I wasn’t a coward. I strode up to that lab bench and the lamp and flipped the switch like a confident, slightly crazy bitch who didn’t give a shit whether vampire blood flowed in her veins.
And then I fell to my knees as my blood, too, flared up and turned to ash.