I spent the rest of the morning creating a new silicone mask and gloves for Dragomir based on his actual face and hands. Since I didn’t have any dolls around the place, I plucked some fur off Jamie’s old Dan’l Boone racoon-skin hat and tried needling that into place as eyebrows. The effect was… underwhelming.
It led me down a rabbit hole of online videos for special effects artists and monster creators for films, listening to that in the background as I reevaluated the evidence on where Jamie might have roamed. The coordinates Dragomir provided didn’t make any sense. No record of hiking trails or animal tracks in that area existed, no matter how far back I went or what resolution of maps I checked. Unless Jamie bushwhacked his way through dense brush and virgin forest, he couldn’t have gotten to that part of the park. Frankly, it looked like nothing could have gotten there but a damn Mothman or something else with wings.
My hands stilled over the last report the police took from a couple camping at the edge of safe territory four years ago. Nothing could have gotten to the location where Dragomir found the bear bag and necklace and boot except something that could fly and land in dense foliage. I hadn’t found evidence of winged cryptids in the area, only terrestrial ones, but recently I’d come to realize that vampires did something equivalent to flying. Dragomir found and retrieved it, after all.
I took a long, slow breath and leaned against the table where the maps displayed ten years of work. My thoughts scattered and reformed as I struggled with the new data. Jamie couldn’t have gotten to that part of the park without some kind of help, even with all of his motivation and skills. Unless he had a constant resupply and more machetes than the hardware store, it wasn’t feasible. Possible, sure. Probable? No.
It was there in front of me in black squiggly lines and grids. Maybe it was the vampire blood clarity that finally pushed me over the edge. I couldn’t make the logical leap between facts and hope anymore.
My heart cracked. I couldn’t plug my ears and stick my head in the sand, no matter how much I wanted to believe Jamie lived out in the park as a hermit or began a new life somewhere else. Like Archer said, this was serious business. Everything about Dragomir was life and death. He found evidence of my brother where it appeared impossible for Jamie to have actually been. Which meant Dragomir either found the missing items somewhere else and misdirected me, or he’d already had Jamie’s things and didn’t disclose it.
There weren’t many heartwarming reasons for a vampire to have my missing brother’s things.
And what had those predation models showed? A margin of error in unexplained disappearances and deaths. Archer said they knew a vampire lurked in the area based on their own algorithms or gut instinct, and even though I didn’t want to believe they’d predicted it from afar, I’d spent ten years staring at the biggest indicator in the recent past.
Breathing grew difficult and my heart pounded unsteadily. I shoved to my feet to pace, almost tripping over Hopper. Jamie specialized in quantum entanglement and nonlocality, and quantum probability. He looked for matter and energy in different states, identified connections and reactions across time and space where the observation of one object fundamentally changed the state of the entangled object. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
What looked more like magic than that? If one pursued it to a logical albeit absurd conclusion, perhaps vampirism was actually a state in which the individual existed simultaneously as living and nonliving even when being observed.
I couldn’t breathe. They had no reflection. Dragomir looked at a metal spoon and reflected nothing back. Maybe the problem was if he observed himself, the measurement was made and he collapsed into a single state: living or dead.
I clutched my head and looked around wildly. My thoughts moved too fast. Too many theories spilled out of half-remembered lectures and papers, from jokes we’d made when Jamie wrote his dissertation. From puzzles Dad and Mom posed, from long-distance arguments with Professor Anders about parallel universes. It was absurd. Vampires didn’t exist in two states at once. It was a virus. It had to be an explainable, curable virus.
I tried to lock most of it away for later evaluation, because the immediate problem already collapsed into a single state: Dragomir knew where Jamie was. He knew what happened. He had to.
Maybe Dragomir found Jamie and offered him the same deal he offered me: fix the daylight problem and go home unscathed. Or maybe just partially scathed. What if Jamie refused? We weren’t believers, not really, but he had gone to Mass occasionally. What if it stuck and he didn’t want to bargain with the devil for his life?
I sucked in air as my vision darkened around the edges.
What if Dragomir killed him? Used Jamie’s disappearance to draw me in so I might use quantum chemistry to tackle the same problem?
My stomach churned. I searched for my phone and managed to send a text to Archer with shaking fingers. Where are you? I think I’ll join.
Then I stared at the maps as my heart raced and the entire universe re-ordered itself.