Chapter 12 #2
She could barely see the shape of Bella’s face in the dim light of the janitor’s closet, but what she could see was completely full of herself. This asshole.
“Maybe I should suspect that you were the one who had my funding pulled,” Yasmine scoffed.
It was a joke, but also, it wasn’t. Yasmine was paying the best accountants, financial advisors, international lawyers and professional hackers on Planet Earth to obfuscate her paper trail.
The idea that a random Princeton grad from Boston, Massachusetts could figure any of this out was completely insane.
At first, Yasmine had written off all her little outbursts as Bella making educated guesses, but combined with what she had said earlier about Yasmine conning her way into Columbia, she clearly knew way more than she let on.
“How did you figure it out?” Yasmine whispered. “I know you said you’ve been wanting to work with me for years, but so have thousands of hungry post-docs. I don’t think any of them know anything close to what you do about me. I don’t think the U.S. government even does.”
Bella bit down on her lip. Yasmine was starting to see a pattern in her little micro-expressions. This one meant: Bella didn’t want to tell her.
That just wouldn’t do.
Deciding to make use of their predicament, Yasmine leaned in, taking Bella by surprise with a searing kiss. Startled at first, Bella leaned into it after a fraction of a second, whimpering, clearly pleased. It took everything inside Yasmine to immediately pull back.
Bella frowned when their lips roughly disconnected.
“Come back here,” she mumbled.
“No. Tell me first.”
Bella’s brows creased in a way that told Yasmine she could see the game she was playing. But apparently Yasmine was playing it well, because for the first time, Yasmine saw a crack in the facade.
Bella let out a small sigh, and tucked a strand of hair behind Yasmine’s ear.
“If I tell you now, you have to promise to finish having sex with me first before you run out of this room to scream at her.”
Yasmine blinked. “Scream at whom?”
Bella dragged a hand across her face, shaking her head.
“Your friend, uh, Sylvia, I think her name was,” Bella began, narrowing her eyes in memory.
“She’s been using your shell company credit cards to pay for streaming services.
But she doesn’t use the correct fake names on the cards when she signs up.
She just bills everything to Yasmine Sokolov.
So all of your previously hidden offshore bank accounts have been paying for Netflix and Hulu under your name for the past six months.
It’s… pretty easy to track, so… You’ll probably get a call from the IRS soon. ”
Bella finished this confession with a shrug, and Yasmine stared off into space. The bare lightbulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling reflected her gaping mouth back at her.
“I’m actually going to get her assassinated.”
Bella frowned. “After, though, right?”
Yasmine was going to protest—she really wasn’t in the frame of mind to do anything except beat Sylvia right now, preferably with one of those bats that had nails in it—but then Bella made the insane decision of climbing up onto the table, straddling her, and whispering, “I think my honesty should be rewarded, don’t you? ”
***
Bella sighed as she stretched across the empty couch, watching through Yasmine’s stupidly large windows as the street collected with mobs of drunk university students.
This was so sad. The people of Manhattan were out there having fun, and she was alone in the house. Again.
And it was all her fault, too. She just had to let that thing slip about Sylvia.
They’d at least gotten to finish what they’d started, but Yasmine was so… vacant during it.
What does it matter? It’s just sex. She’s into it. You’re into it. That’s it. You should count your lucky stars that the prettiest vampire on Planet Earth wants to sleep with you.
Whatever. It wasn’t her fault Yasmine kept looking at her like that after Bella kissed her, so soft and delicate, as if Bella was some kind of sexual revelation in this thousand-year-old woman’s life.
Of course Bella enjoyed that, and of course she noticed when it abruptly stopped.
She just wanted Yasmine to feel good. That was all. Bella was charitable, a giver!
Yeah right.
Groaning, Bella grabbed one of Yasmine’s ungraded exams, flipped it over, and scrawled with a black ink pen, in large block letters:
REMEMBER. WHAT. YOU’RE. HERE. FOR.
She underlined it twice, then added another line underneath:
FIND. A. CURE.
That was all that mattered. Bella would have formal access to Yasmine’s lab starting tomorrow, when they’d do their onboarding.
She would observe the research progress Yasmine had made so far, combine it with her own, and work toward a solution.
That’s what she liked about science. It was straightforward. It had correct answers. They weren’t always obvious at first, but they were there. Human beings were more like multiple choice. Or, worse, open response questions.
Sighing, she crumpled the test and threw it in the fireplace. Then, she reached for the remote and turned on the tv.
The news caught her eye. A reporter was standing in front of a burnt carcass of a house in Brooklyn. Two fire trucks and five ambulances were parked on the street. It looked like a typical house fire, a bad one, sure, but nothing special.
But then the camera panned to the right, exposing the rest of the street.
Each and every house on the block had been turned into a husk.
Between the houses, the grass was dry and brittle. The trees and the plants in the yards weren’t burnt, just shriveled, like they hadn’t seen sun or water in years.
The camera man turned again, towards the middle of the street. A strong computer-generated blur immediately coated the screen, the kind they used to protect viewers from seeing anything too grotesque.
But even through the imposed fog, Bella could see the fuzzy shape of what they were trying to cover up—bodies upon bodies were strewn across the pavement.
Her heart lurched. Her hand flew to her chest, nails digging into her skin.
No. It’s just a coincidence. Don’t be silly.
Maybe they’re not bodies. You can only see the outlines anyway.
But even as she rationalized it in her head, she didn’t click away. She stayed glued to the screen as the camera shifted again, and in the cameraman’s haste, one of the bodies lingered just outside the blur box, completely exposed for a fraction of a second.
A single tear streaked down Bella’s cheek as she saw the corpse.
There were no burn marks. The victim’s body was completely dehydrated, squeezed out like a sponge. No blood left, not even a speck on the pavement.
Only one kind of vampire left a body like that.
For the first time in many, many years, Bella had visitors.