1

 

 

Forgive me for sounding this obvious, but getting to know a vampire marks a before and after point in your mortal life.

​

He sneaks in like a shadow and charms his way into your days and nights with a pearly smile and a youthful face, even if his eyes speak of ancient times and memories better left untouched.

​

He’s both the question and the answer to a problem I didn’t even know I had. He brings world-changing possibilities wrapped inside secrets and survival, and warns me without a word that the price of getting to know him might just be too high.

​

Ours is an uneasy story, one with an ending that eludes us both at this time. It’s not surprising then that even the beginning of our partnership was anything but usual.

 

 

​

​

Chapter 1

Pieces

​​

​

“…and you have a meeting at 4:00 p.m. with Dr. Karsen,” Linda said with a big smile as she finished reading out loud Alec Whitmore’s agenda for the next day. A busy schedule for Helix Biotech’s CEO meant little time at the labs, but having Karsen around also meant things wouldn’t be boring. A bit frustrating, a bit grandiose, but definitely not boring.

​

“Thank you, Linda. Send over the latest reports from finance and I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, gathering all the papers on his desk, his thoughts already on the pending tasks for tomorrow.

​

“Certainly. Oh, this arrived an hour ago,” she said before leaving, handing him a letter-sized yellow envelope addressed to Dr. Alec Whitmore. HemaCore’s logo was neatly printed at the top. It was one of the best biolabs Alec’s company had business with. Modern equipment, always on time.

​

In the middle of the envelope, below his name, it simply read: Would you like a puzzle?

​

Absently, he opened the envelope while trying to remember who HemaCore’s contact was, and came up blank. It’d been almost a decade since they had started working with the smallish company, one among many subcontractors, though he knew Linda would have the number for sure.

​

A dozen pages or so fell into his hand as he emptied the contents, along with a red and black business card: Dr. Daniel Montclair.

​

“Of course, Montclair,” Alec murmured, as the HemaCore CEO’s name finally jogged his memory. He’d never met the guy, but several medical journals had run articles by him, and as a fellow hematologist, Alec had dutifully read them. Nothing revolutionary in the world of blood disorders, but certainly interesting. Montclair seemed to have a knack for filling in the gaps of other people’s research.

​

As Alec picked up the papers to see what they were about, a neon-yellow post-it met his eyes on the first page. Call me when you can’t find the answer, it read in elegant cursive handwriting.

​

Someone went to private school, Alec thought fleetingly as he took the post-it out and finally read the first page: they were labs. He thumbed through the next few pages, and they all looked like a standard hematology panel with a few other tests thrown in at the end.

​

They lacked both the patient’s name and the date of the tests, though every page had HemaCore Labs stamped by the corner, which implied this was Montclair’s work.

​

After a few seconds, standard was slowly replaced with abnormal when it came to the results. Both the blood count and metabolic panels read all within range, nothing to get too puzzled about. At least, not until he paused on the ferritin panel: iron was extremely high, bordering on toxic.

​

“Maybe the patient has been over-supplementing iron…” he murmured as he kept reading down.

That was the last plausible explanation he’d come up with that night.

 

​

* * *

 

​

It was 2:18 a.m. when Alec looked at his phone, and seriously thought about calling Montclair’s number. Between the perfectly calibrated immune response and the unusually efficient platelets, there was a world of research that could lead to hundreds of treatments there.

​

This person, if the labs were telling the story right, was never sick thanks to an extremely aggressive immune system.

​

For Alec, the puzzle wasn’t how these labs came to be, but who was the owner of this blood. If anyone, anywhere could understand the mechanisms behind all these results, then it was just a matter of time for them to replicate the effects. Were there proteins, enzymes, or signaling pathways unique to this blood that Alec could isolate?

​

And what kind of team would I even assemble? Helix Biotech was more than up to the challenge. He had the experts, the labs, the equipment. Anything medical this patient could ever want could be either found here or bought in without a problem.

​

His mind was swimming in possibilities and dream teams until he got up to refill his expensive coffee.

​

Why was Montclair sending him this? The man had a gold mine in his hands, and the infrastructure to exploit it. He didn’t need Helix Biotech to find his way around. The money would come in truckloads to his door. Everyone and their mother would invest in his company once he explained what he’d found: a shield against sickness, a healing so smooth that it would stop aging. And that was only the tip of the iceberg.

​

This was not a joke, Alec could feel it in his bones.

​

“What am I missing?” He wondered out loud, sipping his black coffee without taking his eyes from the page in front of him. “What do I have that you don’t have? Why come to me?”

​

That was the real puzzle.

​​

* * *

​​

The alarm on his phone went off at 5:00 a.m. and Alec deftly turned it off. In his hand, the yellow post-it mocked him with its cursive invitation to call when he couldn’t find the answer. By this point, Alec was just waiting for it to be a polite enough hour to make that darn call.

​

The sun had yet to rise, yet he wasn’t sleepy. Not only was he supercharged with so much caffeine running in his veins, but the adrenaline of a thousand what ifs was more than enough to keep him wide awake.

​

It occurred to him that Montclair might be as eager to receive that call as Alec was to make it. After all, Montclair had sent the puzzle. He was counting on Alec’s curiosity and failure to put the pieces together so he would end up making that call.

​

Karsen would know how to hook him, Alec thought as he looked at the black and red business card. His cousin was a genius both at the ICU and at the negotiating table. Whatever this “puzzle” invitation was, if that blood was real, everyone in the industry would kill to have it, including Karsen, and certainly himself.

​

And Daniel Montclair has already made the first move. He wants us to deal with this, whatever this is.

​

He made the call.

​

 

​​

2

 

 

FROM A SELF-PRESERVATION POINT OF VIEW, you never want humans to know what you are. Whatever romantic notions or antihero stories you’ve heard, we’re never looking forward to having our lives interrupted because we feel like sharing. And once your secret is out there, well… let’s just say that humans are so notoriously chatty.

​

In short, I’m not eagerly wanting to share my identity, but… I have to face the reality that, one, I’m dying, and two, my only chance at finding treatment is with human help. Help that comes with all kinds of red flags and the very real possibility of captivity.

​

I don’t want their help. I also don’t want to die. That leaves me with a very uncomfortable set of options, as you can imagine… No matter what I decide, there’s no safe answer to my dilemma.

​

And so, as uncharacteristically of me as this might seem, I made a bet with myself. I sent a puzzle hoping Alec Whitmore wouldn’t get the package. Wouldn’t open it on time. Wouldn’t find it interesting at all.

​

I left it to chance if I really wanted to do this… A flip of the proverbial coin to see if I live or die. So, when the phone rings at 5:02 a.m., I close my eyes in resignation. It seems that, against all odds, and however high the price, fate wants me to live. 

 

 

​

​

Chapter 2

Gamble

 

​

Daniel Montclair had been expecting the call, though a perverse inner sense was hoping that Whitmore wouldn’t have taken the bait. It would mean that Daniel’s blood results would never see the light of day. On the other hand, if things kept progressing as they had by this point, Daniel was going to starve to death in about three weeks.

​

For someone who’d lived a few centuries, the idea that he was running out of time was depressingly ironic.

​

“Daniel speaking,” he answered on the third ring, his voice sounding deceptively youthful and suspiciously awake for five in the morning.

​

“Dr. Montclair, this is Alec Whitmore. I’m so sorry about the hour—”

​

“I did say you could call me when you couldn’t solve the puzzle,” Daniel said, a slight laugh in his voice. 5:02 a.m. meant that Whitmore here had read the results, taken the bait, and was now drowning in a lake of unanswered questions and impossible numbers.

​

Everything Daniel wanted—and dreaded.

​

“I wouldn’t presume that was a 24/7 invitation, but… I think I figured it out.”

​

 Every single thought in Daniel’s mind froze. Every single doubt, outlandish scenario, or bizarre question died a sudden death at the idea that this was over before it had even begun for real. “What?” he asked, sincerely taken aback.

​

“Your patient. He’s sick.”

​

Yes. Yes, very much so. And I’ve been trying to find the answer for ten months now, and you just randomly figured it out in one night—

​

“The iron concentration,” Whitmore went on, “it has to be toxic.”

​

Daniel laughed. A short, heartfelt laugh that came from the bottom of his soul. He did consume blood to live. Blood rich in iron. Yeah, that would be weird in a sea of weirdness, he guessed.

​

“I’m—sorry, what’s so funny?” Alec asked.

​

“That you are both right and wrong at the same time. The iron is just fine. I am, however, quite impressed that you did figure out what kind of puzzle I sent you. That the patient is sick, I mean. I thought you would center on everything else that’s going on with those labs.”

​

“It’s not like I don’t see the potential in the results. Or like I haven’t spent the last…ten hours imagining the rest of the labs I would kill to run through that blood. But you don’t need me for that. You don’t need anyone to tell you that you have the Holy Grail in future medical treatments at your fingertips. That’s what truly threw me off. You need me for something else. I just don’t know what, so it has to be more than what is there. It must be about something that isn’t right.”

​

Daniel smiled at himself. If he was going to gamble his life, freedom, and bodily autonomy, at least he’d chosen well. Then Alec Whitmore it is.

​

“I take it you’re interested in solving this puzzle with me?”

​

“Does your patient agree?”

​

“He does. Reluctantly, but we’ve run out of options by this point. I will warn you, though. The secrets of that blood are not meant to be public.”

​

There was a pause, one filled with too many unsaid questions.

​

“I understand,” Whitmore said. “When can we start? Solving the puzzle, I mean. What exactly is wrong with your patient?”

​

“I’ll send you the clinical history in a few minutes. Try to get some sleep, Dr. Whitmore, before we meet tonight at 7 o’clock in your office. Be alone.”

​

* * *

​

He imagined Whitmore had slept at least a couple of hours. Daniel hadn’t. In his long life as a creature of the night, he’d never felt daylight go as slowly as he did that sunny, cloudless Tuesday. He couldn’t leave his home, but he’d paced it from bottom to top a few hundred times already.

​

Of all the vampire myths that had surrounded him for centuries, the one he wished was nonsense was real: sunlight would kill him. Not in a poof of his combustible self, nor would it ignite him like a torch in a medieval castle. But it would blister his skin raw and rob him of consciousness in a matter of minutes. Death would swiftly come within the hour, in the form of an anaphylactic shock. For all intents and purposes, he was lethally allergic to the sun.

​

He did have plenty of contingency plans and means to escape if anything happened, but that was for extreme emergencies. Meeting his potential doctor was not one of them.

​

Though one could argue I’m walking into an extreme emergency of my own making.

​

The clinical history he’d sent Whitmore was incomplete. Although it covered a few years back to get a baseline for comparison, along with the more evident decline of the last few months, it just wouldn’t make sense until Whitmore knew what he was really dealing with. If anything, Daniel had sent him a few more pieces of the same puzzle.

​

The last piece was himself.

​

* * *

​

Helix Biotech was big enough to have a well-crafted place in the industry, but small enough that it was still a semi-niche company. One of their main objectives was to treat rare diseases and neurological disorders, but most significantly above those, they also studied blood-related illnesses. They had other partnerships and research projects regarding environmental effects on the human body, and it was precisely that combination of his food source and what his food source ate, that had made Helix Biotech the ideal candidate to approach.

​

In fact, Daniel thought that human blood was making him sick. He suspected it had to do with what humans were eating these days, though that was irrelevant. Even if he did drink water as part of his diet on a daily basis, if he couldn’t drink blood, he would be as good as dead.

​

As luck would have it, being a hematologist himself gave him plenty of access to study his own blood. He’d been playing with it under the microscope for the better part of twenty years. Having a smallish company dedicated to running medical labs meant he had a never-ending blood supply. He hadn’t hunted a human in over two decades, not out of empathy, but rather out of convenience.

​

In this day and age, having a body count was most definitely inconvenient.

​

Granted, he didn’t need to kill anybody to get his fill, but accidents did happen and cameras were literally in everybody’s hands. Feeding alone would become a problem if it was recorded, no matter how unaware or willing his prey was.

​

He wondered how Dr. Alec Whitmore would take to all of this. Daniel had spent most of the day framing and reframing his approach: how direct, how polite, how truthful he needed to be. What was the right balance when the subject was a vampire? A man of science like Whitmore was bound to have a million questions, indeed, but Daniel wasn’t sure how many answers he wanted to give. Some he wouldn’t have an answer to at all, to be honest.

​

On his website pictures, Alec Whitmore wore tuxedos or suits, his blond hair still going strong despite Whitmore being in his late thirties. He had the thin frame of the archetypical bookworm, glasses included, even if he was aiming for the air of businessman. And yet, it was in the photos where he wore lab coats that he looked excited, his bright eyes looking as dazzled as a golden retriever after their ball.

​

To say he’d researched Alec Whitmore and his company extensively in the last month would be an understatement, but when it came down to it, Daniel didn’t know the man. He hardly knew anyone, to be honest. If Dr. Whitmore got greedy or—worse—got scared out of his mind, this partnership would be over before Daniel could even properly show his fangs.

​

And Daniel really, really couldn’t start all over again. He had no plan B.

​

It was with a rather heavy heart that, at 6:34 p.m., Daniel Montclair left the safety of his car and walked into the large four-story building. With a little luck, he would walk out of that place in one piece before the sun came out tomorrow.