by Jade Farhill
He met her eyes and Abby snapped her gaze away. She had to focus!
The pathologist was in the blood bank, poring over a computer and muttering to himself.
She approached him and said boldly, “Tell me why you contaminated the blood you emptied this afternoon.”
The pathologist blinked. “I didn’t contaminate it.”
Why was he so compliant? Surely, he would have questioned her or told her off for asking something like this.
“Then was it expired blood?”
He blinked again, seemingly calm. “No.”
Abby pulled herself up. Was she compelling him? “Show me the bags.”
He stood up and retrieved the unexpired bags from the bin. “See, look—they expire next week.”
Abby fidgeted. “Give me a fresh bag.”
He gave her one that had been collected that afternoon. Abby sucked the blood out.
Then spat it on the ground. “Exactly the same,” she muttered, staring at the offending liquid. “Can I not drink human blood? Clearly I can, but not nearly as much as Sharon.”
The cranky pathologist had come out of his compulsion. He frowned at her. “What are you talking about? And you can’t just make a mess like that! And why are you even drinking from a blood bag? What’s wrong with you?”
Abby glared at him and he took a step back, paling, his heart beating rapidly.
“Forget what just happened,” she compelled, hoping it would work.
He blinked calmly. Then glared at her. “Why are you holding that?” He snatched the bag from her and shoved it back into the fridge. “Look, I get that you’re attracted to me—”
In a way, if being attracted to the scent of his blood counted.
“—but I’m very busy and don’t have time to flirt.” He pointed to the door. “Now leave.”
Arrogant git, Abby thought and moved towards the door. Then she stopped. “Tell me where they store old equipment. The stuff that’s still operational.”
He was calm once more. “On the first floor. Room 118B.”
Abby smirked—compulsion was deeply satisfying. “One more thing—forget I was here.”
***
Abby found the old equipment and asked a worker in room 118B what was being sold. She was in luck: one piece being sold was a blood analysis machine. “Get me a platform trolley,” she compelled.
The worker did as she was told. “I think that’s too heavy for even both of us to get onto the trolley.”
“For you, maybe.” Abby bent over and found handholds on the machine. “Time to test my strength.”
The machine lifted easily off the floor.
Well, this would come in handy. Abby put the machine on the trolley before compelling the astonished worker to forget all about this incident.
She got the machine back to the basement just as the sun was about to rise. She drew some of her own blood and started analysing it.
The results were … odd. There were still virophages in her blood, actively consuming a virus. But the virus was fighting back, turning almost half the cells into something else.
If that virus was for vampirism—which she’d be able to confirm if she hadn’t destroyed all of her research—then that meant that she had truly created a partial vaccine using those virophages.
She sat on the gurney. If this was accurate, it would explain why she couldn’t drink human blood—why her human cells demanded something else—and why she was so controlled around humans only hours after Turning.
Did this mean she wasn’t a full vampire? How was that possible?
She needed to test how far this partial vampirism went. She wrote a list of things to test. Mirrors, silver … sunlight.
Shuddering at the last thing on the list, Abby started with the easiest.
She found a bathroom in the basement and stared into the mirror.
All she saw were her clothes hugging her form and her glasses on her face. “Just like Sharon and the crazy lady,” Abby whispered.
And did she even need glasses anymore? Sharon’s glasses had shattered when she’d Turned, and she said she’d had perfect vision as a vampire.
Abby slipped her glasses off. Sure enough, everything was in sharp focus.
Sharon hadn’t slept as a vampire either. Did that also mean Abby wouldn’t need to?
She waited until nightfall, then went to the old equipment storage room and found a staff member wearing a silver necklace. “Give that to me,” Abby compelled, and the lady obeyed.
Abby couldn’t just pick the necklace up, just in case she reacted to it like Sharon had. There was a desk to her left. “Put it on that desk, then leave this area. Forget about me and come retrieve your necklace in ten minutes.”
The staff member followed Abby’s orders, but didn’t go far. She was still within earshot.
It didn’t matter. As long as Abby was quick, everything would be fine. She didn’t want her privacy to be invaded by other staff members, just in case she lost control and attacked them.
She sniffed the necklace, then cringed, her body going taut with anticipation for a flight. Maybe testing this wasn’t such a good idea.
But she had to know. All of this experimenting was building a picture of who—what—she was now, and how to keep herself safe.
She placed the pad of her index finger on the silver.
Pain seared up her arm like lightning and she gasped, snapping her hand back. Her knees collapsed beneath her and she fell to the floor.
Hunger roared in her throat.
Blood.
She needed blood.
Her eyes travelled to where the staff member had gone. This place was isolated. No one would know if Abby took a sip—
She leapt up and shot out of the room, running to the siphon in the basement and turning it on. Blood trickled through the tube and Abby had to restrain herself from ripping the siphon out and drinking straight from the pipe.
Instead, she went into her room and drank the blood from the tube.
But again, after three sips, the blood became too intense. Abby’s thirst was sated.
So silver was the enemy. It burnt her like acid and caused her to thirst for blood.
And she’d almost attacked someone!
Testing this was becoming too risky. She leaned against the wall, shivering. “I need to find a better way to experiment.”
Perhaps she could carry a blood bag around with her, just in case she got hungry.
The cranky pathologist would help with that.
***
Despite her new plan, Abby avoided humans for the next few days—just in case.
Until she could no longer handle the boredom of being in the same room with nothing to do other than contemplate her undead life and all the mistakes she’d made since that night at the beach.
Deciding to continue testing herself, she found a petri dish and put some hair into it. She went up to the roof and placed the dish in the moonlight.
The next night, with a bag of blood at the ready, she returned to the roof, uneasy at the thought of what she might find.
Her hair was intact.
“Huh,” she said, inspecting the dish. Not a speck of ash in sight.
She had dreaded seeing a part of her turned to ash, but now she wasn’t sure what was better. She might be able to walk during the day, but she’d be interacting with people whose blood made her hungry. She could become the worst vampire in existence, if she was so inclined.
But she wasn’t inclined.
Now she just had to deal with the weird taste of human blood.
The quick heartbeat of a fruit bat flying overhead caught her attention. “Human blood tastes strange, but what about animal blood?” she whispered, staring up at the bat.
On a whim, she leapt up and caught it, then sunk her teeth into it.
The blood that spilled into her mouth tasted perfect. Just the right consistency! Just the right flavour!
Finally, she had her answer: a food source tha
t wouldn’t harm humans.
Abby grinned at the dead bat in her hands, her hunger feeling truly satisfied for the first time since she’d Turned. She went back to the basement, dropping the blood bag off on the way, and considered what to do next.
With the probable ability to walk in the sun—she’d still need to test if her skin reacted—this meant she was more mobile than she’d been before. Which meant she could take her operations base somewhere else.
But where?
“I need ready access to food,” she muttered. Surely, she couldn’t just hunt down all the local animals. Killing someone’s dog or cat just so she could get a satisfying meal just didn’t sound right.
But if the animal was already dead … could she get her meals from the local abattoir?
She needed to test her skin in the sun first. The next morning, when the sunlight wasn’t as harsh, she left the basement and headed up to the ground floor.
Hesitating in the stairwell, Abby steeled herself for what was about to happen. She had a blood bag with her, just in case a part of her burst into flames and she wanted to attack someone for their blood.
Abby closed her eyes and took in a calming breath. “You can do this,” she whispered. “You need to know. It will be safer for all—especially the patients—if you can get out of here.” With that, she opened the door a crack, revealing a sliver of sunlight.
She steeled herself, then put her right pointer finger into the sun.
And her finger didn’t burn.
In fact, the sun felt just as it had when she was human: warm and pleasant on her skin.
She pushed the door wide open and stepped into the beam of light. No burning.
Abby smiled. She made her way to the local abattoir, wondering if she could get a job there so she could have a constant food source.
But the receptionist turned her away. “We don’t have any jobs going right now. And besides, if we did, you’d need to apply via the internet instead of just rocking up here whenever you like.”
Abby narrowed her eyes. “Then I’d like to speak to the director.”
“Were you even listening to what I just said?” The receptionist pursed her lips. “You can’t rock up here, expecting us to bend over backwards for you. And besides, you don’t have an appointment and you need one to see her.”
“You will let me see the director now,” she compelled.
The receptionist blinked. “This way,” she said calmly.
Compulsion was certainly a convenient trick.
The receptionist barged in on the director. “Here we are.”
The director frowned at them both. “What’s going on here, Rhiannon?”
Abby stepped inside the office and dismissed Rhiannon, then turned to the director. “I need a job here that gives me access to animal blood,” she compelled. “You will give me such a job.”
The director blinked. “You can be a cleaner. Three six-hour shifts a week. I’ll let Rhiannon know you’re hired.”
The day of her first shift, Rhiannon showed Abby to the changing room, where rubber clothes and chainmail aprons hung from hooks on the wall. “You need to wear these for your shift,” Rhiannon said, shoving the rubber clothes at Abby. Clearly, she wasn’t happy about this new arrangement.
Abby opened her mouth to reply, but Rhiannon was already gone. So she put on the rubber clothes and walked into the first room she’d been assigned to clean.
Blood was everywhere. Her body began to shake with the want, the need, to feed.
Rhiannon appeared beside her. “You need some basic training—”
Abby snapped her eyes to the receptionist and the person beside her—probably the one who was going to train Abby. “Get out, now!” she compelled, trying to keep control of herself and not leap onto them, to sink her teeth into their nec—
But thankfully, they left quickly and calmly.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Abby grabbed a bucket and placed it under one of the carcases currently dripping blood. It would drain blood for a few days, so that when it was time to send it to the butchers, blood wouldn’t go everywhere.
She waited for the bucket to fill slightly and then tipped it back and drank.
It was delicious.
As she refilled the bucket, she realised that she’d been foolish to work at an abattoir while she was still new to being a vampire. What if she went into a blood rage and killed everyone here?
Abby finished drinking her fill and started cleaning. She did a six-hour job in less than half an hour. Her superior speed and strength was useful at work.
But despite this, Abby knew that all her new abilities were designed to help her track, catch and kill humans.
And the truth about herself—that she was truly a monster—was never far from her mind.
Back at the hospital, she glanced at her new logbook, with giant words on the front cover. ‘The cure’. If she was to be a monster, let her be a monster on a mission. If she was to live forever, let her forever be searching for a cure. That was the only thing to get her through the next few months of her undead life.
CHAPTER 11
Now that Abby had a stable supply of blood and knew how to control herself around humans, using the human blood bag as an emergency food, she returned to investigating herself.
Only working three days a week at the abattoir meant that Abby had ample time to work on the cure and the vaccine.
She went to the Department of Births, Deaths and Marriages and compelled the staff to create a few aliases for her. She wanted to know that if someone like James came into her life again and told the hunters about her, then she could escape and make a fresh start elsewhere.
Abby also compelled her way into the hospital pathology unit, which gave her ready access to all the equipment she needed.
During this time, with the abattoir paying her in cash and her pathology job doing the same, she analysed her DNA.
And discovered that her telomeres were intact. She was immortal, just like Sharon.
So she’d have eternity to work on the cure. But she needed a subject to experiment on first.
She hunched. “Yeah, like I can walk up to a vampire and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come back with me to my makeshift lab under a hospital—which is full of sick people unable to run from you—and be experimented on by me?’ That’ll go down well.”
Abby reasoned that the only way to do this was to capture a vampire and experiment on them against their will—which was not only unethical, but illegal, and put her on the same level as the hunters.
The hunters … Perhaps she could work with the—
She pushed that thought away before she could even finish it. Nope, hunters treated vampires very poorly, torturing them as a form of ‘discipline’.
Hmm … perhaps she should just go out and see if there were any unhappy vampires who were open to change?
***
Abby left, fully sated on blood. The sun had just set and the moon was rising over the ocean.
But where would she find vampires?
Where the people are, she decided, and headed into the city. She lurked in dark alleyways, waiting, watching for predators on the hunt.
It took her a few days to find any, and they weren’t what she expected. It was a Friday night and people were out drinking and clubbing. Men, drunk and sober, gave women predatory glances. But they didn’t seem like vampires.
Just to be sure, Abby followed a group of men. They were stalking a drunk girl.
The girl stumbled into an alleyway and vomited. The men gathered behind her.
“Aw, you not feeling well, sweetie?” one asked.
The girl looked up and peered blearily at them. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it,” another said, blocking off her access back to the main street.
“Why don’t you let us help you?”
“We can really help you.”
Fear flashed in the girl’s eyes.
Abby curled her lip and stepped i
nto the alleyway. “Leave her alone,” she barked.
The men looked at Abby, their eyes taking in her body, and grinned.
“Do you want to join the party?” one asked, stepping closer.
“No, I want you to leave her and I alone,” Abby said, clenching her fists.
The men chuckled. “Sure you do, sweetheart. Sure you do.”
They spread out and enclosed the space around Abby and the drunk girl.
Abby licked her lips. Even though she had just eaten, the scents of their blood and the sound of their increased heart rates made her hunger for them.
She stepped back—this wasn’t good. She could lose control. She shouldn’t have come into this alley. It was too dangerous—for them and the drunk girl! Abby looked at her, guilt making her shoulders heavy. “I just made things worse for you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
The girl looked at her uncertainly.
The men chuckled and gathered closer.
One reached out and took hold of Abby’s arm.
She growled and rammed her shoulder into his stomach. He went flying across the alleyway and into the wall.
The others jumped on her, but she threw them off easily. One pinned her against the wall and Abby focused on the tender flesh at his neck. She parted her lips and leaned in to take a bite.
Then she froze—what the hell was she doing?
The guy backed away from her, eyes on her teeth. “Jesus, she’s got fangs!”
Now that Abby had some personal space again, she stood protectively over the drunk girl and gnashed her teeth at the men. “Leave now, if you value your pathetic lives.”
They didn’t hesitate before they stumbled out of the alley.
Abby heard the girl whimpering behind her. “Where’s your bus stop?” she asked her gently.
“Um—I—uh.” She couldn’t even form words, she was so scared.
Abby sighed and took the girl’s arm, pulling her to standing. Then she strode out to the main street and hailed a cab.
“Take this girl safely home,” Abby compelled the driver.
***
The next night, Abby went back into the city, to the spot she’d been the previous night.
