Except Archer stayed relaxed and nonchalant as he sipped his soda and checked his phone.
I wanted to walk away. I did. But with the threat of my legs giving out on me, I didn’t budge. Maybe when I got home I could have a sip of Dragomir’s blood for energy. Just a little tiny drop. I could consider it an experiment to determine the smallest possible dose required to create the near-manic drive. If one didn’t work, I could make it two, maybe three.
Archer scratched his beard and studied me with a shrew gaze. “Don’t you remember what we talked about last night?”
“Mostly.” I took a deep breath, running my finger through the condensation on the side of my glass. “But I know I expected you to not share whatever it was I said with the rest of the world. I didn’t think any of that was on the record.”
The corner of his mouth without scars tightened. “I said upfront it was for background and to plan ahead what the story would look like. This is all background. Besides, I didn’t share that much.”
“It was enough. Now your crew thinks I’m lying or crazy. Well, crazier than they first thought me.”
“They don’t think you’re crazy,” he said slowly. His blue eyes flickered up at me and then down to where I drew shapes on the side of my water glass. “But I think we all know you’re hiding something.”
My chest tightened and heat flushed through me. God help me, I didn’t think I could survive another interrogation, not from him. Even knowing he’d been disingenuous, that husky voice gave me shivers and knocked away my good sense. “I’m not.”
“You are,” he said. And he sounded regretful, like he hated to tell me the Earth was flat and I’d been fundamentally wrong about the world my entire life. “Ada, your story doesn’t match up. The details don’t, I mean. You were hiking, you changed course for some reason, you felt like you were being stalked or chased, and a man attacked you. At first he just made noise, then he yelled, then he possibly said something. Maybe he bit you, maybe he didn’t. He tried to steal your rifle or just knocked it aside or used it to throw you off the trail. Or you fell off the trail. Maybe jumped?”
“This isn’t…”
He went on, implacable. “You ended up at the bottom of a ravine – I’ve seen the pictures the rangers took of where they think it happened – with broken bones, a punctured lung, and none of your gear. There is no way at all that you could have pulled yourself out of there. At all, Ada.”
His gaze hardened. My heart pounded against my ribs. I should have stood up and walked out, maybe torn the contract up right in his face. But I couldn’t move, caught in the spell he wove with words and a relentless voice.
“But somehow you got back onto a trail. Somehow. Then you managed to crawl or walk – on a broken leg and a badly-dislocated knee, with broken ribs and only one functioning lung – miles of rocky, uneven trails, in below freezing air, for days. Five days, by my calculations. Without food or clean water. Up and down hills.”
I stared at the wall, swallowing hard. Yeah, I knew it didn’t make the most sense. I shouldn’t have let Dragomir pick the spot where the rescuers found me. Obviously he remembered nothing about being a human and the limits of human endurance. “I don’t remember much of it. I don’t know how I did it.”
“Ada,” he said quietly, and reached across the table to capture my hand. He squeezed my fingers, but it didn’t stir butterflies quite the same way as before. “I’m trying to help you, believe it or not.”
I shook my head. Tears burned my sinuses and I fought for composure. Why the hell did that make me want to cry? He wasn’t there to help me, he was there to make a documentary or reality show or whatever, and he wanted good TV. Maybe they left hidden cameras around to capture this conversation while Archer tried to wheedle more out of me. Get an admission that Giselle could pounce on later.
I leaned back, but I couldn’t quite drag my hand out of his hold. “It happened like I told you. He yelled at me, pushed me down, and…”
Archer shook his head. “You don’t understand what’s going to happen, Ada. I’ve seen this before. Your story is all over the news. It’s an uplifting tale of survival and overcoming nature. People love it. Add in the … quirkier parts of your background and a lot of people are interested in what happened. With that kind of attention, other people are going to dig in and scrutinize every part of your story. They’ll pull it apart and pounce on every word choice, every change, every time you glance away. You’ll get shredded if there’s a single misstep.”
I brushed under my eyes with my free hand. It sounded possible. I hadn’t watched the news at all in the hospital or at home. I’d been too busy surviving and then recovering and researching. “I don’t care, that isn’t my problem.”
Even if it was, and could damage my reputation even more than being a cryptozoologist did. Granted, my tale of survival would only help my standing among the weirdos, particularly if I claimed that Bigfoot dragged me out of the ravine and saved my life, but with the rest of the world… probably not the best idea.
“Ada.”
“What would I lie about, Archer?” My cheeks heated with frustration and embarrassment at saying his name. It suddenly felt too intimate and familiar, like I should have called him Mr. Someone. I didn’t even know his last name. “What would I possibly stand to gain from keeping my mouth shut about any of this? I was attacked in the woods. I want the rangers to find the guy and make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else. It wasn’t a bear and it wasn’t a hallucination. It happened, for fuck’s sake.”
Archer watched me closely, his tone still quiet and almost… understanding. Gentle. Like he just wanted to help. Like the psychiatric nurses who visited in the hospital to evaluate whether I suffered delusions or psychosis or PTSD. So very helpful and so very ready to commit me to the secure ward on the ninth floor. I didn’t know what Archer could do, but I didn’t want to find out.
“I don’t know why you’d lie, Ada,” he said. “I think you could be embarrassed by being caught out in the woods without the right gear. Maybe you’re embarrassed for getting all turned around and losing your gear and getting seriously hurt. Maybe you wanted attention, I don’t know. The wild man story could cover up the mistakes and justify everything else. You’re a genius, after all, and rookie mistakes aren’t a good look, right?”
I shook my head. “None of that is —”
“Or maybe you have no idea what attacked you, but it definitely wasn’t a man and you don’t want to admit you have no idea what it was.”
The walls started closing in around me. The breath wheezed in my still-gimpy lung. “You’re crazy.”
“Or maybe you know exactly what attacked you and you’re keeping that little secret for yourself,” he said. The intensity of his gaze cut right through me. “Maybe you recognized it as a sasquatch or werewolf or something like that, and either you don’t believe it yourself or you do and you don’t want to admit that they’re not the friendly neighborhood cryptids you thought they were. Does any of that sound possible?”
“It was a wild man,” I said as firmly as I could manage without shouting it in his face. “And werewolves don’t exist. I’ve never believed they existed. That wasn’t what attacked me. And you’re not going to convince me otherwise.”
“I’m not trying to convince you,” he said. “I’m trying to understand whether you’d tell the truth if one of your cryptids attacked you. I can see it would make sense to cover it up if you didn’t want the rangers going out to kill it and take your discovery from you. But if you’ve spent your life looking for them and one of them found you first, would you be ready to tell the world?”
“Look,” I said. “If that happened, I’d be singing it from the rooftops, and don’t think that I wouldn’t. It would bring more people out here to search the woods and I would find Jamie that much faster. There wouldn’t be any reason to lie.”
Archer absently touched the scars on the back of his hand. “Except maybe the hospital wouldn’t release you if you talked about being attacked by a sasquatch, and maybe the cops wouldn’t go looking if they thought you just hallucinated something out of a bear attack.”
“None of that is true.” Even if at least part of it was. If I’d breathed a word of sasquatches or Snallygasters or Jersey Devils, I would have ended up on the psych ward. Those pleasant nurses would have fit me for a straightjacket right away. We both knew it.
“I get it, Ada,” he murmured. “You have to balance between what you believe to be true and what the world expects to see and hear. You didn’t have evidence of what really happened, and the easiest explanation was a wild man attack. A deranged man living rough in the woods makes more sense than a sasquatch, even if the evidence tells us otherwise. Like how you flew out of that ravine by yourself. Did something help you? Is that what you won’t admit? Did the wild man attack you and something else saved you?”
I hesitated on the denial, lips parted, and hovered on the edge of just blurting it out. If I could just tell someone, I wouldn’t have the secret weighing me down and distracting me from the real issues at hand. Not that he’d proven himself a trustworthy confidante by any means, but at least he’d believe me.
His attention sharpened considerably as I hesitated. He sat forward. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s how you got to where they found you. Something else picked you up and carried you.”
I couldn’t deny it. My thoughts tangled up and I stammered, struggling to find an answer. Just as “a vampire” almost snuck out, a brick wall slammed into my head and made me twitch. The overwhelming darkness of Dragomir’s disapproval left me spinning and disoriented. I coughed and held on to the table, choking on air, and my ribs protested the convulsions.
Do not say a word or his life, and yours, is forfeit.
It was the first clear sentence the vampire dropped in my brain. Every other time had just been a feeling, a vague sense of foreboding, but this… He might as well have stood by my shoulder and shouted in my ear.
I held my head and leaned my elbows on my knees. “No. That’s not what happened. How many times do I have to say it? A wild man attacked me. He tried to take the rifle. We struggled and he either pushed me or I fell. That’s the end of it.”
But he didn’t blink, hardly breathing himself. “No, it isn’t. I saw the maps, I traced your route, I saw the pictures the rangers took. It was miles of terrain that’s difficult enough to traverse on two helathy legs, much less crawl with broken bones. How did you know where to go? How did you pick the right path? Your phone didn’t work, you didn’t have your GPS, no one found any maps you might have dropped.”
“Survival is a powerful motivator,” I said, choking on the words. Dragomir remained close in the back of my head, and I shoved down terror at having a different presence literally in my mind. Was this what schizophrenics felt? Was this a dissociative episode and I’d somehow manifested split personalities? Shallow breaths didn’t help, I couldn’t get enough air to feel like I wasn’t drowning.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Other people can hand-wave this as a miracle, Ada, but I know better. I know better. All those special military units I trained with required serious survival training. Survival, evasion, resistance, escape. I had the best training the U.S. military could provide on all of those things – things you did over five days – and I could not have done what you did. I would be dead in the woods. And somehow you, not nearly as strong as I am and with no training or skills or gear, did the impossible. How? How?”
My stomach churned. But I kept shaking my head, feeling like a puppet as Dragomir hissed warnings and told me to deflect, to run. “I don’t remember how, I can’t tell you, it just…”
“What was it you said earlier? Nature doesn’t give a shit?” He sat back, disappointment crossing his expression like a shadow. “Ada, you should have died after that fall, based on the injuries you had. And if you survived the first hour after the fall, you should have died of blood loss or exposure in the first day. Dehydration would have done it in the first day or so. Maybe shock or hypothermia. And if you somehow survived that, wild animals would have smelled the blood and showed up for an easy lunch. And it goes on and on. At every step, something could and should have killed you. Yet here you sit, insisting that nothing special happened.” He held his hands up, apparently at a loss.
So I told him the truth. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what you want to hear.”
“It’s not about what I want to hear.” Archer sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I’m trying to help you, Ada, even if you don’t think so. The people who will watch this… They’re a little more fanatical than the rest of the population. Particularly if your account differs too much from their accepted wisdom on the subject. I’d hate to see your reputation and safety jeopardized by something we can easily work through before we start really filming.”
Safety? Was that a threat? I frowned, searching for an anchor in the middle of the emotional tempest. All I found was him: focusing on the silver chain around his neck, so thin it almost disappeared when I looked away. I hadn’t expected him to wear jewelry. Maybe a set of brass knuckles, but not a necklace. I shook myself and fished for the last thing he’d said. “What do you mean by ‘working through’ this? You mean we come up with a story before we get further into filming?”
“Not coming up with a story,” he said. “Just — you and I go through what actually happened and agree on the particulars and the way we present it on camera. Before we do another interview, you tell me everything, backward and forward and in gritty detail, so I can test and challenge the encounter like Giselle and the fans are likely to.”
I didn’t dare look at him fully. Those shoulders and cheekbones could convince me of almost anything. Some genius I was. Even with him badgering me to admit the truth when it made me uncomfortable, I could almost believe he meant it about helping me. “How altruistic of you.”
His smile reappeared, if a little tired and exasperated, and damn me if the dimple didn’t peek out. “I try to be generous like that.”
Smiling back wasn’t an option, since I didn’t want to encourage that kind of behavior. “What I’ve told you is exactly what happened.”
“Except your account has changed,” he said gently. “A lot. And you get flustered when challenged on the details, which makes it look like you’re hiding something. Because you are hiding something.”
Dogged determination got me through my second PhD defense, and it would get me through this bullshit, too. I just had to seize on my certainty and self-confidence and not let go until he gave up instead. It worked on professors, and it would work on Archer.
Although the more he questioned me, the more I doubted myself. Despite having the encounter burned into my memory, everything blurred around the edges. It could have been time passing or the pain meds or just the suggestions of everyone around me that shaped my recollection. Would his constant questioning make me doubt myself even more about what happened before Dragomir found me? What could I even say to defend the details after the vampire carried me out of the ravine, when Archer was exactly right and the whole story was impossible from soup to nuts?
I braced my hands on the table and met his eyes directly. “What I told you is exactly what happened.”
He sighed, disappointment evident in every line of his body. “Well, if you remember anything else or want to talk about how you really survived, call me. I’ll listen. I can help you sort through this. We can protect whatever’s out there that you’re not telling me about, or we can find a solution for it.”
A solution for it? I didn’t think there was a solution to vampires. Not yet, anyway.
Dragomir did not like that train of thought.
When I didn’t speak, Archer took a deep breath and fished a folded terrain map out of a messenger bag on the seat next to him. “All right. We’ll pretend everything happened like you said. For now. We’ve scouted a few locations but you know the area better. Can you suggest a location or two for filming? Next to trees, places where you can find hair samples or footprints, maybe where you’ve spent a lot of time. Somewhere with sentimental value. Like that.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, struggling against the conversational whiplash. “Uh, let me think about it. I can look for a couple of places. Do you need one or two, or more?”
“Three to start.” Archer tapped the map. “You can text me the coordinates, if you’ve got them, or a description, and we’ll check them out. If you can send them tonight, we can be prepped for another interview tomorrow afternoon. Sound like a plan?”
It sounded like his plan, but no telling whether Mother Nature would cooperate. “Sure.”
I pushed back from the table and got my bag, wishing I’d gotten something to-go, and didn’t wait for him to gather his stuff. “I’ll see you then.”
I’d almost made it to the door when he said, “You’re not limping much anymore. Is your knee better already?”
I froze, staring at the frosted glass in the door, and tried not to look down at my leg. “It’s feeling better, yeah.”
“Seems pretty fast for how bad it looked. Right?”
“What can I say?” I pulled the door open and glanced back. “I’m good at everything.”
The corner of his mouth turned up but that was it. He knew. Something in his eyes said he knew what was going on and just hadn’t decided when to confront me. “See you later, Ada.”
My skin prickled as I walked away. Just an hour or so earlier, I would have loved knowing he watched me walk away. After that miserable conversation… it felt more like a threat.