Chapter 20
If Yasmine was anyone else, having her house set on fire probably would have distracted her from her work, at least for a few days. But, after she ensured that Wallace was safe, she barely even registered that it had happened at all.
It might seem strange—and perhaps deeply psychologically unsettling—that she was so unbothered, but it was helpful to remember that she had been threatened by vampires her entire life.
Even Evanorah Maroven had tried, and failed, to have her assassinated.
And if Evanorah couldn’t kill you, who could?
That was how she and Sylvia met, actually.
It was a few years before Evanorah’s death, at the ripe beginning of the millenium. Yasmine was still just scraping by back then, offering her services as a fortune teller to various barons.
A nobleman named Harrald Weiss had been keeping her particularly employed at the time. He was the paranoid type (always the most lucrative) which meant he would consult with Yasmine on a daily basis to figure out which of his men was planning on betraying him.
In reality, it was none of them, but Yasmine made a lot of money pointing fingers and sending heads to the guillotine. It weighed on her conscience every time, but this was before she had enough money to afford developing a moral backbone.
But consequences did eventually catch up to her, as they tended to do.
One of the men she accused of being a backstabber turned out to be a vampire who was seeking to enthrall Weiss.
A Maroven Clan member—not that she knew that then.
Besides the vampires who’d turned her and killed her family, she was acquainted with none, and that was by design.
She naturally despised them. But she wasn’t exactly trying to invoke their wrath, either.
Wrath came anyway, in the form of Sylvia Maroven.
Sylvia had been even sloppier back then than she was now.
She’d snuck into Yasmine’s room in the night, only snuck was not the right word—it was more like slammed, or crashed, or rummaged.
Her hip bumped into Yasmine’s desk, her elbow knocked over her candlestick, and her feet tripped over a stack of books.
Naturally, Yasmine’s eyes flew open a second later, and Sylvia cursed.
She came at Yasmine with a stake, but halted midway.
Her shoulders went limp, then her knees, then her eyes hollowed.
The usual procedure. To her credit, she fought off the nightmare three times, each time getting closer to Yasmine before falling into it again, as if they were playing a game of Red Light, Green Light.
At some point it became so ridiculous that Yasmine started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Sylvia had groaned, sounding more annoyed than furious.
After a few more failed attempts, she gave up and sat on the floor by Yasmine’s bed, completely depleted.
She took a ten minute nap, then asked Yasmine if she had anything to drink, preferably wine.
Yasmine should have tried to kill her in retaliation, but she found something about the woman’s audaciousness weirdly charming.
So, they struck up a conversation instead.
They ended up having more in common than they anticipated.
They both hated vampires, had strong opinions about politics, and were looking forward to the day where women had more rights than horses. They agreed that Sylvia would go back to her mother with the news that Yasmine had begged for forgiveness and pledged allegiance to the Maroven Clan.
That plan failed. Evanorah deemed her daughter useless—what a surprise—and sent three more mercenaries after Yasmine.
All their murder attempts were equally fruitless.
If anything, they helped Yasmine’s career.
She rounded them up, convinced Weiss that they were assassins there to kill him, and he got to execute more people.
Eventually, Evanorah gave up, then she died.
Thank you Aster.
So, she was quite used to a little violence from the immortal riff-raff.
Still, she made sure to assign Rebecca on the task of figuring out who was responsible, and if that didn’t pan out, she also preemptively sent out an invitation to all the vampire families in the Northeast to come to her Albany compound for a dinner party.
She figured that, if nothing else, she could discern who was trying to kill her over a nice dinner of steak and potatoes.
This was all to say, her research finally had her undivided attention. It might as well have been a miracle. For the first time since Yasmine had agreed to let Bella into her lab, they were actually–finally–getting somewhere.
It all came together fairly quickly after their chat by the lake.
Since Yasmine’s lab was full of sea creatures, she was able to secure a temporary hold on Waldorf’s lab to conduct the fungus research.
There had been quite a few vacant lab spaces available, but his was outfitted with the exact instruments Yasmine would need to test Bella’s theory—high-resolution microscopes, centrifuges, live-cell imaging equipment—and besides that, sending him that e-mail was so satisfying.
It took two days before he finally gave up the fight, and another two to move his research materials elsewhere. That meant, by the time they had finally gotten their coats on the hanger, Bella had twenty-six days left to effectively solve immortality.
Not that she was acting like it.
“You’re late,” Yasmine said when she heard the door to the lab shutter. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. Nine forty-three A.M. “Three minutes worse than yesterday.”
Bella strolled in, shucked on her lab coat, and bent down so she was eye level with Yasmine, who was already an hour deep into analyzing slides.
“New personal best,” she said, her tone exuding zero guilt. “But I promise I have a good explanation this time. I was walking to work when…”
“Please spare me the details.”
“...I saw a poster outside of Kwala Coffee advertising their new birthday cake latte. Apparently the owner’s daughter came up with the recipe. She’s, like, nine years old. A coffee prodigy. What was I going to do? Not try it? But there was a long line.”
The sheer ludicrousness of this excuse forced Yasmine to look up from her slides.
“Your emergency is that you were emotionally manipulated by a poster?”
Bella huffed, kicking her shoes off before hopping on the examination table to Yasmine’s right. Yasmine had prepped it already, a roll of waxy paper crumpling underneath Bella’s fingers.
“I wasn’t manipulated. I acted in accordance with my values.” Bella rolled up her sleeve so her arm was exposed. “It’s my moral imperative to support female entrepreneurs.”
That forced a laugh out of Yasmine. She rose from her chair, snapped on a new pair of nitrile gloves, and picked out a clean collection tube.
“I think your real moral imperative is spending at least ten dollars before nine A.M,” Yasmine said, laying her hand on Bella’s arm. “All while you still owe me rent.”
Bella just smiled at her, dropping their sham of an argument with a clipped laugh. Despite Yasmine’s efforts to keep their discussion light and stupid—and that it very much was—her voice fell frustratingly quiet once she was touching Bella’s skin.
It was such a clinical thing, taking someone’s blood. Yasmine had done it a hundred times over during her temporary stint as a phlebotomist, and it had never once felt sexy, even for someone who belonged to a species of blood worshippers.
People’s veins were finicky, and you had to pay attention to get the needle in right. It was an exacting task that required focus.
And yet, all Yasmine could focus on was keeping her heart rate down.
Because despite a somewhat successful first day in the lab yesterday—and Yasmine’s commitment to using the word friends to describe their tenuous relationship—shifting their dynamic towards something professional was not without its growing pains.
They had—at least in Yasmine’s head—made an implicit agreement that they would start focusing on the work, and put whatever sexual chemistry they had to the side. But somehow trying to not think about it made it so much worse.
“You put the needle in the vein, darling,” Bella said, cutting into Yasmine’s internal monologue. She had the audacity to look at Yasmine like she was an amnesia patient. “And then blood comes out.”
“Shut up,” Yasmine muttered, inserting the needle without warning. Unforgivably, Bella didn’t flinch; she just looked Yasmine straight in the eyes, like a psychopath.
“I’m your patient, Yasmine. Have some decorum.”
Yasmine watched the tube fill up with blood, averting her gaze from Bella. “I don’t have decorum. Why do you think I got fired from the hospital I worked at?”
“You worked at a hospital?” Bella dropped the scandalized act as quickly as she adopted it. She would have made a phenomenal actress. “Why would you ever need to work anywhere?”
“I wanted the experience of working with human biology. I thought it’d be useful in case I ever needed to patch up Wallace—”
Yasmine froze, staring at the collection tube as her mouth went slack. She saw Bella’s reflection in the glass; she was narrowing her eyes curiously.
“Wallace,” Bella repeated. “Who is Wallace?”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Even though she’d started to trust Bella more since their last conversation—whether that was because she had actually divulged something personal, or simply because Yasmine was exhausted by her own paranoia, she wasn’t sure—but still she didn’t feel like she could just tell Bella about her son.
It was like handing her a gun and a silver bullet.
“My nephew,” she settled on.
“Ah. Right.” She saw Bella’s eyes dip to something on the floor a few feet away. She got off the examination table, and reached for her tote bag. “Speaking of.”
Bella extracted something from the bag, then held it up; it was a photoframe. Specifically, the photo of Yasmine and Wallace that had been sitting on Yasmine’s display table back at home. She’d assumed it’d been lost in the fire.