Bitter Blood

“It’s late.”

“Doughnuts?”

“No.”

“What good are you, then?” He finally looked up from the microscope, made another note or two on the board, and stepped back to consider the chaos of chalk marks. “Oh dear. That’s not very—is this where I started? Claire?” He pointed at a number somewhere near the top right corner.

“I wasn’t here,” Claire said, and buttoned up her lab coat. “Do you want me to keep working on the machine?”

“The what? Oh, yes, that thing. Do, please.” He crossed his arms and stared at the board, frowning now. It was not a personal-grooming highlight day for him, either. His long, dark hair was in tangles and needed a wash; she was sure the oversized somewhat-white shirt he was wearing had been used as a rag to wipe up chemical spills at sometime in its long life. He’d had the presence of mind to put on some kind of pants, though she wasn’t sure the baggy walking shorts were what she’d have chosen. At least the flip-flops kind of matched. “How was school?”

“Bad,” she said.

“Good,” he said absently, “very good…Ah, I think this is where I started…. Fibonacci sequence—I see what I did….” He began drawing a spiral through the numbers, starting somewhere at the center. Of course, he’d be noting down results in a spiral. Why not?

Claire felt a headache coming on. The place was dirty again, grit on the floor that was a combination of sand blown in from the desert winds, and whatever Myrnin had been working with that he’d spilled liberally all over the place. She only hoped it wasn’t too toxic. She’d have to schedule a day to get him out of here so she could get reorganized, sweep up the debris, stack the books back in some kind of order, shelve the lab equipment…. No, that wouldn’t be a day. More like a week.

She gave up thinking about it, then went to the lab table on the right side of the room, which was covered by a dusty sheet. She pulled the cover off, coughed at the billows of grit that flew up, and looked at the machine she was building. It was definitely her own creation, this thing: it lacked most of the eccentric design elements that Myrnin would have put into it, though he’d sneaked in a few flywheels and glowing liquids along the way. It was oblong, practical, bell-shaped, and had oscillation controls along the sides. She thought it looked a bit like an old- fashioned science fiction ray gun, but it had a very different use…if it had ever worked.

Claire hooked up the device to the plug-in analyzing programs, and began to run simulations. It was a project Myrnin had proposed months ago, and it had taken her this long to get even close to a solution…. The vampires had an ability, so far mysterious and decidedly unscientific, to influence the minds and emotions of others—humans, mostly, but sometimes other vampires. Every vampire had a different set of strengths and weaknesses, but most shared some kind of emotional-control mechanism; it helped them calm their prey, or convince them to surrender their blood voluntarily.

What she was working on was a way to cancel that ability. To give humans—and even other vampires—a way to defend themselves against the manipulation.

Claire had gone from building a machine that could pinpoint and map emotions to one that could build feedback loops, heightening what was already there. It was a necessary step to get to the control stage—you had to be able to replicate the ability to negate it. If you thought of emotion as a wavelength, you could either amplify or cancel it with the flick of a switch.

“Myrnin?” She didn’t look up from the analysis running on the laptop computer screen. “Did you mess with my project?”

“A little,” he said. “Isn’t it better?”

It was. She had no idea what he’d done to it, but adjusting the controls showed precise calibrations that she couldn’t have done herself. “Did you maybe write down how you did it?”

“Probably,” Myrnin said cheerfully. “But I don’t think it will help. It’s just hearing the cycles and tuning to them. I don’t think you’re capable, with your limited human senses. If you’d become a vampire, you’d have so much more potential, you know.”

She didn’t answer that. She’d found it was really best not to engage in that particular debate with him, and besides, in the next second he’d forgotten all about it, focused on his enthusiasm for black coral.

On paper, the device they’d developed—well, she’d developed, and Myrnin had tweaked—seemed to work. Now she’d have to figure out how to test it, make sure it exactly replicated the way the vampire ability worked…and then make sure she could cancel that ability, reliably.

It might even have other applications. If you could make an attacking vampire afraid, make him back off, you could end a fight without violence. That alone made the work worthwhile.

And what happens when someone uses it the other way? she wondered. What happens if an attacker gets hold of it, then uses it to make you more afraid, as a victim? She didn’t have an answer for that. It was one of the things that made her feel, sometimes, that this was a bad idea—and that she ought to simply destroy the thing before it caused more trouble.

But maybe not quite yet.

Claire unhooked the machine—she didn’t have any kind of cool name for it yet, or even a project designation—and tested the weight of it. Heavy. She’d built it from solid components, and it generated considerable waste heat, but it was a prototype; it’d improve, if it was worthwhile.

She tried aiming it at the wall. It was a little awkward, but if she added a grip up front, that would help stabilize it—

“Claire?”

Myrnin’s voice came from right behind her, way too close. She whirled, and her finger accidentally hit the switch on top as she fumbled her hold on the machine, and suddenly there was a live trial in action…on him.

She saw it work.

Myrnin’s eyes widened, turned very dark, and then began to shimmer with liquid hints of red. He took a step back from her. A large one. “Oh,” he said. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”

She shut it off, fast, because she wasn’t sure what exactly had just happened. Something, for sure, but as live trials went, it was…inconclusive. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, and put the device down with a clunk on the marble top of the lab table. “I didn’t mean to do that. Um…what did you feel?”

“More of what I already felt,” he said, which was uninformative. He took another step backward, and the red didn’t seem to be fading from his eyes. “I was going to ask you if you’d send over some type AB from the blood bank; I seem to be running low. And also, I wanted to ask if you’d seen my bag of gummi worms.”

“You’re hungry,” Claire guessed. He nodded cautiously. “And it…made it stronger?”

“In a way,” he said. Not helpful. “Never mind the delivery from the blood bank. I believe I shall…take a walk. Good night, Claire.”

He was being awfully polite, she thought; with him, that was usually a cover for severe internal issues. Before she could try to figure out exactly what was going on in his head, though, he’d headed at vampire-speed for the stairs and was gone.

She shook her head and looked at the switched-off device in irritation. “Well, that was helpful,” she told it, and then rolled her eyes. “And now I’m talking to equipment, like him. Great.”

Claire threw a sheet over the machine, made notes in the logbook, turned off the lab’s lights, and headed home.

Arriving home—on Lot Street—didn’t do much for her mood, either, because as she stomped past the rusty, leaning mailbox on the outside of the picket fence, she saw that the door was open and mail was sticking out. It threatened to blow away in the ever-present desert wind. Perfect. She had three housemates, and all of them had somehow failed to pick up the mail. And that was not her job. At least today.

She glared up at the big, faded Victorian house, and wondered when Shane was going to get around to painting it as he’d promised he would. Never, most likely. Just like the mail.