She nodded. “I know. If it wasn’t safe, you wouldn’t let me do it.”
I smiled at her but felt a pang of immense sadness in my chest. She trusted me completely and utterly. She already knew I would do anything to keep her safe, but I wondered if she knew that meant I still needed to leave when I could.
“I will meet you at Anya’s after the sun sets.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sounds like a date.”
I was on the couch that smelled of cats in Anya’s basement. Cara had her eyes in a machine while the Anya woman muttered nonsense to herself and sorted through small glass vials of blood.
I usually felt completely drained by the time we reached Cara’s internship because I had endured a full day of the sunlight by this point. Now I was uncharacteristically alert, and I decided to get up and go see what Cara was doing.
“What do you see through those eyepieces?” I asked.
“You want to look?” Cara asked, eyes bright and excited.
I bit back a smile. She was cute when she talked about blood. I figured there was some amusing irony in that. I drank blood out of necessity and resented it. She willingly chose to devote her life to blood. I took blood to prolong my own existence, she hoped to use it to help others live better, longer lives.
She really was a good person. It only reminded me that I needed to do everything I could to protect her from my world. From me.
“Sure,” I said.
She scooted her rolling chair to the side and let me bend down to look in the little eye-pieces.
“See those little puffy balls? Those are red blood cells. That’s what blood looks like in a microscopic level. And see those little black spikey things?”
I nodded.
“Those are not supposed to be there. But ever since…” She lowered her voice, sneaking a glance toward Anya. “Ever since I drank your blood, they have been absolutely loaded in my blood. They repair damage, fight off invasive diseases and viruses. They are absolutely incredible. It’s basically like having tiny little super-smart medical machines crawling through my blood at all times. I’ve been calling them Lucio’s,” she added a little guiltily.
I glared. “Really?”
“Just to myself,” she said quickly. “But they are incredible, aren’t they?”
“Yes. It’s very interesting,” I said, and I wasn’t just patronizing her. It really was. I wondered how many of my kind knew this. I hardly knew of any vampires who so much as attempted to lead normal lives and masquerade as humans, even a hundred years ago. I imagined it would be much more difficult now. Maybe nobody had seen this or understood it for what it was. “This was why you wanted to look at my blood, I assume?”
“Mhm,” Cara said. “See how some of the Lucio’s start shaking and then dissolve? The ones in my blood are dying. When I looked at this the first time, there were ten times as many. I guess that’s how we know the bond is almost done, right? Once there are no more Lucio’s, I won’t feel so pulled towards you.”
“Yes,” I said. “That does make sense.”
“Have you made any progress finding a way to distill these and use them to treat other humans?”
Cara’s instant smile told me she’d been waiting for me to ask. “Watch this.” She scooted her chair over to a container of blood vials and a clear plastic container with a transparent fluid in it. She set both down, then put on gloves, a face shield, and a white suit. “I’d tell you to suit up, but I’m assuming you can’t get sick, right?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, so this is healthy human blood.” She applied a drop of the clear fluid to it. “And this is a sample of a pretty new blood disease called Palto-2. It’s mostly harmless, but it’s extremely aggressive and it fools red blood cells into taking itself on like little hitchhikers.”
I put my eyes to the lenses and watched little globules of fuzzy material approach the red blobs. Within seconds, it clung to the sides of them and seemed to stay put.
“Okay,” I said. “So it sticks to the cells?”
Cara nodded. “Yep. But watch what happens if I add a modified sample of my blood to this. I spun it down and found out I could extract just plasma and the Lucio’s. And when I add that…” She took the top off the slide, dropped the new liquid on, and covered it before sliding it under the microscope again.
“I watched as the same, black spikey balls rushed through the sample and converged anywhere there was one of the viral hitchhikers. They’d shake against it and turn it to dust, then move on to the next.
I looked up at her. She was beaming, but all I felt was dread. “This is dangerous,” I said.