“You have a remarkable propensity for poor decision-making,” someone said from above me, and I forced my eyes open.
Dragomir. He stood over me with his arms folded, that dark eyebrow quirked, and night cloaked him in more shadows than usual. I blinked a few times and lifted my head to look around. “How’s that?”
“I’m given to understand your kind are vulnerable to the elements.”
Like he hadn’t once been human. I hesitated before I made a smart-ass remark. How long had I been outside? And had I passed out or just fallen asleep? I frowned and tried to wiggle my nose, then poked my cheek to confirm it remained numb. Huh.
I settled for giving him a dirty look. “On occasion. I don’t suppose you brought firewood with you, did you?”
He looked down at his bespoke suit and empty arms, then back at me without expression. “No.”
“Great,” I said under my breath. It took a second to unfreeze my legs and hobble inside to roll the dice on whether the furnace would explode as I fired it up. I’d meant to get a new one for years, but somehow my lottery tickets never paid out enough to make it happen.
Dragomir remained on the porch as I passed through the doorway, and I turned to peer at him. “I guess I don’t have to invite you in, even if my manners tell me different?”
His head tilted as he studied me. “Would it make you feel better to invite me?”
I hesitated. “Can I revoke the invitation later?”
“Yes.”
“Would it make a difference?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “No.”
“Would you tell me if it did?”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Probably.”
I snorted and gestured at the cabin. “Great. Get your ass inside.”
“That sounds more like an order than an invitation,” he said under his breath, though he slid through the door behind me and began his survey of the humble vacation cabin I’d turned into home.
It took me ages to crank up the furnace and longer still for it to rattle and groan to life. I found Dragomir standing over the bench where I stored my microscope; he brushed his fingers across the pitted, burned wood and held them up so I could see the red-black against his skin. “You were bleeding.”
I didn’t want to touch my arm where a bandage covered some of the cuts but my free hand went there unbidden. I definitely should have cleaned better, probably bleached everything again so the scent of blood wouldn’t get him fired up. Maybe I could add ‘intern’ to the list of things to get. There’d be a lot of glassware for some poor schmuck to clean. “Checking my blood cells for... abnormalities.”
“Ah.” He nodded and absently licked his fingers before returning to his self-guided tour of the cabin. “I assume you found what you were looking for?”
“Yes.” I winced as I went into the kitchen to make hot cocoa. Did one offer a vampire something to drink? Did it work like the invitation to enter a house — if I asked if he wanted something to drink, did he get to use my throat as a soda fountain? Although… did they bite anywhere else? Did it have to be arterial blood that fed them, something… fresh from the source?
“I do not require a beverage, I will not use your throat as… a soda fountain, we bite wherever we wish, and arterial blood is preferred based on oxygenation, though any blood consumed fresh from the source is acceptable. Blood of the dead is not consumed, even the freshly-dead.” He didn’t even look at me as he spoke, wandering through the cabin as if observing a museum with no object labels on the exhibits.
I leaned against the counter so I wouldn’t wobble, since I’d lost my crutches and couldn’t see them nearby. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
“I wished only to verify your health, now that you’ve returned to your world,” he said, and waved at the cabin as his nose wrinkled.
I bit the inside of my cheek but rolled my eyes as I stirred the cocoa in the pan. “Thanks for your concern. I’m still kicking.”
“Have you made progress on your task?”
My eyebrows climbed toward my hairline as I looked at him. “I’ve been out of the hospital a day and a half, friend. I’ve barely gotten started.” I went on before he could vent his irritation at me. “Did you realize that only thirty-six or so hours had passed since I was released? How does your sense of time work, if you’ve been around for a few thousand years? Do you even recognize that a year has passed or a decade or just a minute?”
Dragomir made a thoughtful noise and studied me with unreadable black eyes. “Much like money and power, time only matters to those with a finite amount.”
The truth hit like a slap in the face, particularly since he delivered it so calmly. I couldn’t look away from him. Staring at him and knowing that his life had a beginning but no conceivable end left me dizzy and nauseated. Standing in the presence of an immortal and trying to imagine what he’d seen, what he lived through and survived… A knot tied my throat. I didn’t know what to say or how to react to such a calm dismissal of a normal life span and place in the world. The only thing that surfaced was an old bit of Latin a chemistry professor liked. “Finis coronat opus.”
The end crowns the work. You didn’t judge an experiment in the middle of it. You waited for results. How could he evaluate his place in the world without knowing that eventually the journey ended?
He shrugged, barely registering the comment. “Natura non constristatur.”
I wracked my brain and only came up with “Nature is not” before my Latin faded away. Dragomir weighed in mentally and supplied the translation, not once looking at me. Nature is not saddened.
He was right. Nature didn’t give a shit about a human lifespan. The universe didn’t care about his immortality. Everything continued moving toward entropy whether we were there or not. I swayed with the dislocation of it, the humility of being such a speck of dust on the face of such a wide, inconceivable world. Dragomir represented everything I hadn’t learned, everything I didn’t know. Everything I needed to know, maybe.
The vampire studied one of Dad’s old sketches that I’d framed and put on the wall. “Have you made progress, Ada?”
I shook myself out of the daze and dragged my attention back to the present. “Uh… I’ve identified areas of research and the necessary equipment and supplies. I need to brush up on a few fields in biomedical science before I commit to a line of inquiry. I’ll have a plan soon.”
I hated babbling and being off-balance, especially when that brain failed me and left me flailing. “Have you made progress on your task?”
“Show me your brother’s last known location.”
I tilted my head at the spare room in the back of the cabin but kept my attention on the cocoa. “There’s a map of the park on the wall. The green lines are his planned route; purple lines are previous routes he took looking for this particular critter; and the red X is his last good GPS signal. There are five black circles where we found possible boot prints or traces over the years, though those aren’t confirmed as his.”
Dragomir disappeared without more than a whisper of air. I took a deep breath and concentrated on the swirl and eddy of the spoon through the dark cocoa. My heart thumped in trepidation and a little hope. Maybe he remembered off-hand something useful, a place to look or explore with a drone. No more than a few heartbeats passed before he returned and lurked in the kitchen behind me. “Very well. I know the area.”
“Great.” I retrieved a mug and poured the cocoa, shaking cinnamon over it, and inhaled the warm vapor to find at least a hint of comfort in the cold night. “If I’m going to make progress as fast as you want, I could use some help.”
Dragomir waited, which I took as a green light to keep talking. I leaned back against the counter and leeched warmth through the ceramic mug. “Expend some of that money and power you’ve got, big guy, and find me some updated lab equipment. Unless you want me to set up shop at one of the university labs, I won’t be able to do any testing until I’m back in your lair.”
“It is not a lair,” he said without inflection. “I will consider it.”
Maybe his sense of humor died with him that first time. “Blood. I’ll need a couple bags of your blood so I don’t have to cut myself open or chase you down. It’s the only way to verify whether I’m going in the right direction.”
Dragomir’s eyes narrowed. “You will have it tomorrow night.”
Two down, one to go. I hesitated and didn’t quite meet his eyes. “It’s hard for me to get around and work for any length of time. I tried to work earlier and didn’t get far.”
His eyebrow rose. Even though I damn well knew he heard what I wanted in my thoughts, the vampire waited for me to say it. Some other kind of power play, no doubt.
I sipped the cocoa. “It would help if you healed me more. Not all the way; that would be suspicious. But just enough that at least one leg works,” and I tapped the brace on my right knee.
Dragomir looked as close to rolling his eyes as a vampire got. “That was your own fault,” he said. “The other was my doing.”
“End result is the same. You want magic, I need at least one leg and the ability to stay awake more than an hour at a time.”
The air rippled and then he stood flush against me, gazing down at me as his cool hand slid into my hair at the back of my neck. He leaned and then my back was to the wall, the strange cool presence of his body more like a block of wood than a person. His thumb stroked my throat. I stared up at him as every thought disappeared. It echoed like the first day in that white room in his lair. Maybe it was mind control. Maybe that telepathy meant…
A vague sense of irritation at how crowded my mind was brushed into my thoughts and swept them aside.
What the hell had I done?
I didn’t know if he spoke aloud or in my mind as he murmured, “You wish to drink from me, Ada?”
My toes curled in alarm. “N-no, that’s not what I –”
Dragomir’s mouth descended to hover over mine and his fang scratched my lower lip. “There are many ways to share blood, Ada; perhaps…”
I sucked in a breath. His eyes flashed a deep blue, then silver, and the pupils elongated into dark pits surrounded by mercury. My heart pounded as his arms tightened around me and he lifted me up against the wall for a better angle, better access, more comfortable for him when he decided to… His lips brushed mine and then it was like he inhaled all the air from my lungs and left me starving. My muscles went limp and I sagged in his arms, nearly spilling my cocoa, as the front door whipped open and let in a freezing wind.
I stared at the door, still dangling in Dragomir’s embrace and no doubt with a stupid look on my face, as Betsy stormed in with a duffel bag and casserole dish. “Now, I told you to stay home, didn’t I, and then I get some crazy text from you about…”
She spotted Dragomir pinning me to the wall and spluttered to a halt, her jaw slack. She looked from me to him and back a couple of times, then shook herself and reared back. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Uh…” I looked at Dragomir, back at her, then down at my mug. I held it out to her. “Cocoa?”
Betsy’s eyes narrowed as Dragomir straightened and stood me upright, and I braced myself for a Southern shitstorm.