by J B Stilwell
“What?” I ask.
“The guy that dare like you enough to find your phone number to try to talk to you just got his, didn’t he? You probably see this as a sort of justice for bothering you. I try to get to know you and a stranger pummels me.” Wiping the blood from his face he continues, “I hope you’re happy, bitch.”
I take a few steps back, mouth slightly open in shock. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised considering how he had acted before.
Raising my head, I close my mouth then look down at him. He sits up, staring at me. “Thank you.”
He snarls, “For what? The entertainment?”
“For proving that I was right in not wanting to get close to you. I just wish I hadn’t wasted my time trying to be nice.”
He laughs before spitting blood everywhere. “And I wish I hadn’t wasted my time thinking that a fat-ass like you would actually be grateful that a guy would be interested. I guess food really is the only thing you care about.”
I smile at him, willing myself not to tear up. “How very original of you. I haven’t heard that before, so I give you points for creativity. Too bad you lose them all in being completely socially and romantically inept with the emotional quotient of a dishrag.”
He starts to get up and I quickly back away toward my car. I refuse to take my eyes off of him, not trusting that he won’t attack me in broad daylight. He starts walking slowly toward me, but I make it to my car, get in and lock the doors. I frantically dig in my pocket for my keys. Finding them, I turn the ignition while watching him to see what he will do. I quickly back out of my parking space and drive away. The good news is that I will arrive at the research facility early and can go ahead and start working. The bad news is that Tucker will be there, and every night after tonight. I will never know when I’ll run into him again or what he’ll do when that happens.
I work with creatures of the night but am most threatened by a man walking in the sun. Makes it hard to know who the real monsters are because people like Tucker are capable of anything. At least with a vampire, you know what to expect. Well, for the most part. Like Rick said, you know they are predators. Humans? You can’t tell the difference between predators and good Samaritans. And to make it even more interesting, the good Samaritan who helps you when your car breaks down…is the predator that beats his wife.
I stop the car in front of the research facility and rest my head against the steering wheel. I keep my eyes closed and just listen to the silence. Charity and compassion are circumstantial. People have a different face depending on who is around. And just like the guy running in the park, people will save you without meaning to, not really caring how it could have been different. I look up, shaking my head. When did I become so jaded? Or am I finally accepting that my fantasies of a life where people genuinely care about one another are just that, fantasies?
And it’s not just humans. Vampires are not immune to the charade we play with one another. At times Rick seems flirtatious, almost expressing an attraction to me. Other times he’s like an over-protective older brother. And still other times he’s an angry force of nature, like the high winds close to the eye of a tornado - not yet destructive but the possibility is always there, always close. Which face is the real one?
I guess it’s time to go in and show my professional, confident and determined face. You know, the one that got me this job. When in actuality I’m scared as hell. Of Tucker. Of the tingling feeling that I get around Rick. Of being completely out of my league with these other researchers. Especially after last night and Bree’s failed demonstration of ideas that were similar to what I have been working on with our project. Can’t show any of that. Professionally they would eat me alive and I would be out of a job. Nope. I’m an adult with serious bills to pay, which means I have to pretend to be whatever it is they want me to be and call it “success.” So I’ll go inside, smile prettily and pretend that Tucker hadn’t just shown me his real face.
I walk to the front door, then down the hall to our research suite. I hear voices inside and assume that Ms. Montgomery is joining us this evening. I’m surprised to find that it will be more awkward, yet entertaining, than that.
“Well, Emma Jean, there you are!” my mom exclaims.
My mom and Rick are sitting at the table having coffee. “Mom, what are you doing here? How did you get through security?”
She slaps the idea away with her hand, “Ah, hell, Emma Jean. Like they were goin’ to keep me from seein’ my daughter. Where’ve you been?”
I look at Rick then back at my mom. “I was at my apartment, now I’m here. Why did you come all the way from Huntington? Is something wrong?” While talking I say a silent prayer that Rick hasn’t told her about Tucker and my plans to meet him. The last thing I need is to get anti-stalker advice from my mom.
“I thought there was somethin’ wrong with you!” she fumes. “You hadn’t called, nothin’. What am I supposed to think?”
I sigh in relief, “I’m sorry.” I motion to Rick, “We’ve just been really busy with the project. I guess I forgot.”
“Forgot?” she replies indignantly. “I forget to put my teeth in. I don’t forget that I have a mother.”
“Mom, grandma is dead.”
“And I might as well be, too, hadn’t I? You’ve already forgot me.” She looks at Rick. “Don’t let her fool you. She doesn’t have the sense God gave her.”
“MOM!”
“What, Emma Jean? It’s the truth. Educated idiot. That’s what you are. All that book learnin’ and don’t have sense enough to come in outta the rain. Forgot your mother. I’m surprised you can remember where this place out in the boonies is. What do y’all do here, anyway?”
I glance at Rick who was doing his best to suppress the bubbling laughter that is no doubt rising in the back of his throat. I lay my purse and coat down and smile at mom. “Mom, here. Take my apartment key. It’s all yours. You’re here now, it will be completely dark soon, so no use in you driving back to Huntington now.”
She looks at the key, “What good is that gonna do me? I don’t know where the hell you’re livin’ these days.”
I glance again at Rick as he quickly turns his head away, his neck reddening at the restraint he is showing. I smile at my mom again. “I put a GPS application on your phone. I’ll put the address in and it will tell you how to get to my apartment.”
“I didn’t bring my phone,” she responds.
“You drove all of this way and didn’t bring your phone? What if you had broken down on the side of the road?”
She huffs, “I woulda walked to the closest fillin’ station and got help. You know, folks did used to have break-downs before cellular phones, and we got by just fine.”
I take a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll drive back to my apartment and you can follow me.”
I pick up my purse and coat. Mom follows me to the door. I turn back to Rick who is still sitting at the table. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
He smiles, “Take your time...Emma Jean.”
Scowling I say, “If you breathe a word, I swear...”.
He laughs, “I guess it’s a good thing I don’t breathe.”
I clench my teeth and lead my mom out of the facility.
When I return, Rick is still in our suite. He’s busy going through his notes, standing against the center island when I walk through the door.
He looks up at me and smiles, “Hello, Emma Jean.”
I momentarily close my eyes. Shaking my head I continue to the closet to hang up my coat and purse. I walk to the center island and begin going through my own notes, successfully ignoring him and his blatant attempt to goad me.
He says, “I enjoyed meeting your mom.”
Keeping my head down. “I’m sure you did. And how did you get to the facility so early with the sun still shining?” I ask
“Oh, I sometimes sleep at the facility in one of the rooms set up for the vampires working here.” He continues, “Your mom, she
’s an interesting story-teller.”
I slowly raise my head, my lips part as I look at him. He gazes at me, a mischievous grin broadening his face.
I grimace. “Yes, yes she is. And for the record, I don’t want to know anything she told you. Please save me from the embarrassment and allow me to embrace my ignorance.” I motion to his notes. “Have you made any progress on recovering from our complete failure?”
He drops everything he is holding and leans toward me. “It was not a complete failure. And it wasn’t even ours. We weren’t the ones behind the podium.”
I lift one shoulder. “It might as well have been. Our projects were going in the same direction. All that time wasted. Now we have to start all over again.”
“Well, that’s how research goes. When your experiment doesn’t give the expected results, you either just accept it or try something else. I suggest that we try something else.”
I rustle my papers and tilt my head up toward the ceiling, looking at nothing in particular. “Should we?”
“Should we what?” he asks.
“Should we try something else? I mean we know that vampires die in direct sunlight. So dehydration is not the effect that is fatal. It’s something else, another effect of the sun that’s the source of vampire mortality.”
Rick crosses his arms and slowly rubs his chin with one hand. “True, but what if it’s something that we can’t synthesize? Dehydration was a relatively easy approach that could be replicated. That may not be the case with the other elements of the sun’s impact.”
“And that’s a good reason not to try because....” I say as I look at him.
“Oh, I didn’t say that we shouldn’t try. I just think that with this slight break in the project, maybe we should take a step back and reconsider all possibilities instead of chasing down the same rabbit hole to nowhere.”
“So what other ideas do you have?” I ask as I settle my papers on the countertop and put my hands in my pockets. I really don’t like the implication that I was getting ahead of myself and jumping in without looking where I am going.
Rick rubs his chin some more, then walks around the island to stand beside me. “Well, we know that cutting off a vampire’s head works just as well as it does with a human. What if we urged Congress to pass a law to make it mandatory for everyone to be trained in handling a samurai sword?”
I give him a blank stare. He leans toward me, “Relax, Emma. I’m not questioning your direction. I just don’t think that taking Bree’s slip-up so personally will allow you to think clearly about all possibilities. I want to win this thing as much as you do, but I don’t want to force the sun issue just so we can say that all of the work we’ve done so far hasn’t been a waste of time. Because even if it is the wrong direction, well, knowing it’s wrong is a success in and of itself. Especially since it wasn’t us behind the podium.” And with that last comment he winks at me.
The side of my mouth lifts in a slow smirk as I nudge him with my shoulder, allowing myself to relax, a little bit. I run a hand through my hair, “Actually, that’s not even it. Like you said, I want to win this competition, but more importantly I want to find the right solution. And something tells me, my gut tells me, the answer is with the sun.”
He nods as he turns me to face him and runs his hands up and down my arms. “Okay,” he begins. “So the success here is that we know it’s not dehydration. What were the other possibilities that we came up with?”
I bite my lower lip as I try to think back to everything we had talked about before deciding to focus on dehydration. Rick leans his elbow against the countertop, smiling. “That is,” he starts, “unless you want to talk about your date with Tucker.”
I jerk back, startled and indignant. “I did NOT have a date with Tucker.”
Amused he inquires, “Oh, so you didn’t meet with him before coming here?”
I push at him. “I met specifically to tell him that I’m not interested. And I’m proud of myself, if you must know, because I stuck to my guns. Then he kind of flipped out.”
Rick stands up straight, laying his hand on my shoulder, “What do you mean? Are you okay?”
I let my shoulders sink. “Yeah, I’m okay. He got viciously angry, which is just another example of why he’s not ‘the one.’ As I was telling him that I don’t feel a connection with him, a park walker bumped into Tucker and he completely flew off the handle. They actually got into a fist fight right there in the middle of the park.”
“You’re kidding me!” Rick exclaims.
“I wish I were,” I respond. “Tucker got his ego bruised, then his face bruised. A romping good time it was not.”
“But you’re okay?”
I nod as I take a deep breath. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m not looking forward to running into Tucker any time soon. If he got so crazy over someone bumping into him, I could only imagine what he would like to do to me. And believe me, they’re not pleasant imaginings.”
Taking me by surprise, Rick wraps his arms around my shoulders and pulls me into a close embrace. I’m too stunned to realize just how good his arms feel around me. Still I lean in and bury my face in his chest. I repeat “I will not cry” like a mantra in my head as the corners of my eyes get wet. I cover my face with my hands and just lean into him. For a cold man, he sure feels good. Before thinking about that too much, I pull back and smile at him. “Thanks, I needed that.”
He just stands there. I glance at him then turn back to the counter and the pile of papers. No need to let any awkwardness build. I clear my throat. “Um, have you ever heard of any stories of vampires becoming ill after um, feeding?”
Rick leans against the counter and makes a sound as if he were taking a deep breath, “Very few. Two or three over the years. Why?”
I look down at the papers for a moment then shake my head a bit, “I just can’t seem to quit thinking about the possibility of an allergy.”
“Huh. Like there’s something in some people’s blood that vampires are allergic to? But I’ve never heard of a vampire dying after feeding on a human unless there was a stake involved.”
“Why did they get sick?” I ask.
He shrugs, “Honestly, I don’t know. But we’re not looking to make vampires sick. That is, unless you’re wanting to use it like a creature of the night version of birth control.”
Giggling I say, “That’s brilliant. I can see the marketing strategy - ‘No feeding, no breeding: think before you fang because one moment of sustenance could ruin your un-life.’”
“Really,” he smiles, “where are you going with this?”
Shrugging I admit, “I don’t know. If we can pin-point what caused the sickness, well, maybe a stronger dose will be fatal.”
“Well,” he says as he straightens his notes into some orderly fashion, “it’s highly unlikely that we’ll know more than that it’s highly rare. I don’t personally know of any vampires that it has happened to, and of the cases that I’ve heard of, the humans died a long time ago.”
I push away from the counter and look at him. “I want to look at vitamin D.”
Raising his eyebrows he asks, “Vitamin D?”
“I know it sounds like a huge leap, but I had originally thought about the possibility of a sun allergy and maybe there was an accelerant that caused combustion. What if it is an allergy related to the sun, but not specifically a sun allergy? What if it’s an allergy to vitamin D?”
“A vitamin D allergy? I’m not sure I follow.”
Turning, I walk toward the whiteboard as I start my “pace of deep thought.” I move my hands around as I try to think of how to best explain the random thoughts going through my mind. “Vampires are different from humans.”
“Of course, in many ways.”
“But there are some similarities. Humans need the sun to produce vitamin D. The average human cannot get all the vitamin D that is necessary for a healthy body by food alone. And if they cannot go in the sun, then they have to take supplements.”
“And...?”
I turn and look at him, “Well, vampires can’t go into the sun and they don’t need food. They have no way of taking in any large amounts of vitamin D. What if in the vampire transformation, the body makes an adjustment to not being able to get vitamin D?”
Rick tilts his head toward me, a strained look on his face. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that we have developed some type of allergy.”
I smile at him. “It also doesn’t mean you didn’t. We don’t know. Fact is, vampires have no method of ingesting or making vitamin D. If the body has adjusted to function without it, introducing it back into the system will either cause a change or do nothing.”
Rick crosses his arms as he lightly runs his forefinger over his lips. He leans back against the counter as his face creases from the strength of his concentration. “It seems to me that it might not be an issue of allergy but of toxicity.”
I look into space, my thoughts swirling. “You don’t need it, so too much of it is poisonous.”
He looks up at me. “Or maybe a combination of both? I don’t know. Like you said, we just know that vampires don’t need it. And actually, vampires have no way of preventing toxic levels of vitamin D from a source such as the sun.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” he explains, “If a human stays out in the sun for too long, even to the point of sun burn, does that raise the levels of vitamin D in the body to a dangerous level?”
My eyes open wide as I look at him. “The warmth of human skin causes excessive vitamin D3 to photodegrade.”
“And vampires have no warmth. We also do not ingest fat which is what is used by the body to break vitamin D down,” Rick states with an edge of foreboding bordering on fatalistic hopefulness. Did we solve the puzzle or sign his death warrant?
“But wait,” I ask, “what about drinking blood? There are levels of vitamin D in blood serum.”
“Maybe normal human levels are safe for vampires and anything more is toxic to vampires.”
I walk toward him, feeling the buzz of discovery inching up my spine. “Which might explain the very rare occasions that a vampire has gotten sick after feeding. Maybe the food source had abnormally increased levels of vitamin D in their system.”
