Adrenaline surged the moment it hit my stomach, and I nudged the bottle aside with my pencil. I would cross that boundary when forced to, and no sooner. “I’m fine. Before we start with the MRI and ultrasounds, how did you die?”
Dragomir didn’t react with more than an arched eyebrow. His fingertips rested on the surface of the table, making his hands into two large arachnids poised to strike, and glided over some of my pros and cons lists like he meant to shuffle them into an unruly deck. “What a rude question.”
But he answered with dry words, running unemotionally through a gruesome scenario that turned my stomach against food I hadn’t even eaten. Apparently riding to defend a pope or a king during the Crusades resulted in many terrible deaths – bloody, violent, cursed deaths. His was just one of many, unremarkable compared to what others suffered. His eyes flickered silver only once as he described the morning he died, laying inside a half-destroyed church on a pile of bodies and watching the sun rise over the hills of Jerusalem.
Silence wrapped around us both.
I tried to process the enormity of his calm recitation. Centuries. He’d been alive centuries and centuries. My heart thumped against my ribs faster and faster. What he’d seen, what he’d learned… Energy zinged through me and I blinked, my right eye twitching. The mystery started then, on that morning in Jerusalem.
Collecting the details took precedence, and I began deconstructing the process through which he’d been made: the weather, the injuries he’d sustained, the presence of holy ground or not, the one who’d infected him, everything. Every last detail I could wring out of him might have held the key to fixing his little problem.
Three hours later, I uncorked the bottle and drained it without a word. Every word he spoke, every story he told, just fueled the hunger to know more. I took notes as fast as I could, then gave up entirely and focused with all my being on memorizing what he said.
Dragomir offered his personal history without hesitation and few pauses, though I knew better than to believe he shared everything. It was too practiced a story to be true.
Not that I could tell what he lied about. The parts I would have expected him to dissemble over – when he hunted down and murdered innocents, when he perverted justice, when he enjoyed the torment he caused – he admitted without hesitation. Without even a tinge in his voice or the need to look away or compose himself, he unraveled centuries of deplorable acts. Dragomir recounted it like a movie storyboard: stiff and flat, rough sketches in pen and ink, little movement and only the vaguest hints of dialogue.
I wondered if I would end up another cell in the storyboard, another interlude to be recounted when someone else interrogated him. Maybe after he’d walked in the sun and become the daytime boogeyman that endangered humanity. Became its fanged overlord after eradicating all the other vampires. Then he’d have the herd of gazelles to himself.
The one time Dragomir’s hand moved to cut me off, before he managed to still it and compose himself, came when I asked about his family. I needed to isolate, as much as possible, the mechanism by which the change happened and any pre-existing conditions that could have contributed. Perhaps a genetic abnormality made him more susceptible. Maybe it was entirely viral and anyone could be turned. Those I could investigate. But if vampirism stemmed from a curse or magic or religious hoodoo, that presented a different challenge entirely.
The moment I asked whether his family ended up similarly turned or demonstrated any blood abnormalities like hemophilia, his head tilted and the words evaporated as if he hadn’t been speaking for the preceding three hours. He didn’t move after cutting me off.
The silence stretched until I said, “So the bite transmitted the virus, and that caused the change, is what you’re saying? Was anyone else bitten and killed at the same time you were? By the same vampire, I mean. Any, uh, blood brothers and sisters?” I tried to smile, to make it a joke, but my chest ached with the effort of not running from that look in his eyes.
I hated that my reactions were driven by a primordial brain immune to logic and reason; just when I thought I’d gotten myself under control and wouldn’t startle when his words hissed or the fangs flashed or a certain tilt of the head showed me a predator instead of a co-conspirator, nature proved me wrong. I’d flinch and his pupils would dilate, preparing to hunt, which only set my heart racing faster.
After I drank his blood, though, the panic didn’t spike. Whatever part of my brain insisted he was a threat silenced after I gulped down the whiskey and blood.
Dragomir didn’t laugh at my weak attempt at being clever. “No. My maker was very selective.”
“What happened to him? Your – maker?”
“He was killed.”
I leaned my elbows on the table and willed him to be more informative. “When? Was it sunlight or a stake or what?”
His eye twitched just slightly; it took me a moment to realize I asked rather cavalierly about his undead dad’s gruesome fate. Dragomir remained as emotive as a fence post, though, and he folded his hands deliberately on the table. “All of the ways one can imagine a vampire being killed were done to him. He was hunted and eventually destroyed by self-styled vampire hunters.”
“Vampire hunters?” I bit the inside of my cheek to prevent hysterical laughter from escaping as I imagined a team of blonde teenage cheerleaders stalking a gray-haired Dragomir as he lurked in dark alleys. Maybe there had been a bit too much whiskey with that blood. “Those – those exist?”
“Yes,” he said, and gave me a narrow look that made it clear he knew the drift of my thoughts. “And they are dangerous, Ada. Not just to my kind, but to anyone they believe is in league with my kind. Which certainly includes humans who sit at my kitchen table.”
“Right, I’m colluding.” I gnawed on the end of the pencil I’d retrieved from the lab, then pointed the eraser at him. “I’ll keep that in mind. Are these vampire hunters why you want to walk in the daylight? Avoid your only predator?”
“If you’re going to ask stupid questions, we will need longer than two days to get to any useful information.”
“It’s not stupid if it informs my moral calculus.”
“I’m given to understand your moral calculus only balances when it comes to finding your brother.” His eyebrows arched in challenge and I had to bite my tongue. He was right, after all. Dragomir waited as I stewed in my irritation, then went on as if the question about his motives hadn’t been asked. “They are not only vampire hunters; they seek to uncover and kill anything they deem unnatural or a threat to humans. They are very dangerous; should you see or hear of them in the vicinity, inform me immediately and be very careful. They will think nothing of staking you to a crossroads under the moon and letting you bleed to death after they rip out your heart.”
It sounded like a pretty shitty way to die, all things considered. “How am I supposed to recognize these … monster hunters?”
“You’re one of them. You tell me.”
I snorted and tossed the pencil down. “I’m no monster hunter. I’m a scientist. I’m researching and documenting for a community of like-minded enthusiasts. I conduct research. I don’t hunt.”
“They conduct research,” he said. “They track strange footprints and collect hair samples and follow rumor. They stop at nothing until they’ve uncovered every secret that attempts to stay unknown. How is that not you?”
A shiver ran through me and I folded my arms over my chest. “I don’t want the cryptids to die. I don’t view them as dangerous and I certainly don’t want to kill them.”
His head tilted just slightly. “Really?”
“Of course not.” I shoved my chair back so I could pace. My nerves jangled with having my back to him, but I needed room to move. “I want to preserve rare species before incursions into their habitat drive them to extinction.”
And maybe use their existence to find my brother first.
Dragomir’s mouth twitched like I’d just told an unexpected joke. “What do you expect to happen if you confirm these creatures exist and make them known to the world?”
“Well, there will be laws to protect them and the habitat, and –”
“And is that before or after the trophy hunters appear to claim their kills?”
I frowned as I backed up a step. “That’s not what will happen.”
“How can you be certain?” His words slid in my ears and ricocheted around my brain as he eased to his feet. Dragomir’s eyes glowed, stark and silver, as his chin dropped and he stalked closer. “You know enough of human nature to understand some have the urge to dominate, to destroy. They will fill these mountains and take away what you’ve been looking for – and more besides. How much can tourists and hunters destroy, Ada, when they search for the impossible? How many endangered species could be eradicated by careless, thoughtless tourists? And not just your darling cryptids, but other endangered species. Perfectly normal species, starving to death as tourists overrun their habitat.”
I couldn’t think with his focus on me and his voice turning into disorienting fog around me. Of course I’d considered the implication that my discoveries would draw unsavory individuals to the mountains, but the benefits outweighed the potential threat. Or so I’d thought. “This isn’t about me, Dragomir. The odds of anyone listening to me are infinitesimal, even when I do publish what I’ve found. I’m just another mountain yokel trying to convince the rest of the kooks to believe some shitty video and a few cast footprints.”
Although my pride rankled at describing my own carefully structured experiments in such a light.
His mouth stretched into a death’s head smile. “We shall see, won’t we?”
I shivered but pretended I didn’t and that he didn’t see me do it, and managed to edge around him toward the lab. “We sure as hell will. Now let’s get you hooked up to that MRI so I can see what’s going on inside that little noggin of yours.”
Dragomir sighed with the exhaustion of centuries and followed me in perfect silence. My troubling thoughts were loud enough on their own, and it didn’t help to know he heard them, too.