Chapter 21
Yasmine blinked, stupefied by what she’d just heard.
“Life force,” she repeated. It felt like such an unusually grand way to say it. “Do you mean their blood? You removed their blood… and gave it to your mother?”
In all of Yasmine’s many years of vampiric research, she’d very rarely encountered a story about a vampire stealing blood to give to someone else.
Mostly because it was impractical.
Feeding was the vampire’s natural instinct, and for most of history there were no good alternatives.
Unless Bella had been draining victims with a syringe?
But they didn’t have the same cooling and storing technology back then that they did now.
The blood would be clotted and rancid by the time she could give it to her mother.
Bella shook her head.
“No, no. Not blood.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Their life force.”
Yasmine leaned back in her chair, cocking her head to the side. “Like, their organs?”
Bella laughed. “God, no. Ew. I have no use for a man’s liver.”
“Then what?” Yasmine said with exasperation. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“That’s fair. You’re too young to understand.”
Yasmine pinned her with a searing glare, and Bella responded with that easy, innocent grin of hers. It was so frustrating just how disarming she was. Like she could lead Yasmine straight to hell and somehow convince her it was paradise.
“I’m a thousand years old, Bella,” she muttered. “I’m sure I have the faculties.”
Bella laughed again. “Not like that. I just mean, you’re literally too young. Or should I say, too evolved.” She paused. “Where do you keep your library?”
Yasmine let out a baffled shock of laughter. “My library?”
“You’re a total hoarder. Don’t tell me you don’t have the entirety of the vampire canon assembled in a basement somewhere.”
Yasmine grimaced, and Bella laughed.
She did, indeed—although it wasn’t in a basement. All the most important primary and secondary sources she’d found throughout the years were stored in a highly-protected underground facility in Pennsylvania.
Reading her face, Bella shook her head, delighted. “I knew it. Can you have some things shipped here?”
“Shipping won’t be necessary,” Yasmine said, then turned towards her computer monitor. She started typing in the password to her online database. “I have everything digitized.”
A hand lay over Yasmine’s on the keyboard, stopping her before she could hit enter.
“It’ll be easier to see with the real copy,” Bella said. “Trust me.”
Yasmine studied her for a long moment, but Bella’s tight smile revealed nothing.
“Fine,” Yasmine said with a shrug, extracting her fingers from underneath Bella’s hands before she started enjoying it too much. “I can have anything you want overnighted.”
“Overnighted.” Bella fanned her face. “You make that sound sexy somehow.”
“Bella.”
“Yasmine.”
Bella’s eyes lingered on Yasmine’s lips. Yasmine wanted nothing more than to climb on top of that examination table and kiss her stupid, overly secretive face senseless.
“I wish you were uglier,” Yasmine muttered, and Bella’s eyebrows flew up. It was nice to finally startle her, for once. “Come on. I want to show you my new toys.”
***
To Bella’s great dismay, toys did not mean what she was hoping they would. But million-dollar science equipment was a nice second best.
As they continued their work, the rest of the day swam by, five hours passing right under Bella’s nose.
Despite the lingering dread that had settled in since she learned her family had arrived in New York early, Bella was having the most fun she’d ever had—not that there was much fun to compete with in the life she’d had, but still.
Working with Yasmine was just so addicting.
She was like a meat grinder. She talked a mile a minute, developing novel theories then abandoning them in the span of thirty seconds.
Then, just as you thought you’d caught up to her line of thinking, she’d freeze, lift her goggles up—so you could see the adorable red rims they’d left around her eyes—then she’d nod to herself, and slide them back on.
Sometimes she got so wrapped up in the work that she’d forget the boundaries she’d just begged Bella for, and she’d lean her forehead on Bella’s shoulder, muttering equations to herself.
At one point, she stayed there so long that Bella decided to wrap her hands around her, just to see what she could get away with.
To Bella’s great surprise, Yasmine didn’t jump away.
She did twitch slightly, but after a moment of hesitance, she wrapped her arms back around Bella, sending a jolt up Bella’s spine; then Yasmine sighed into her lab coat, and mumbled, “I think better when I’m next to something warm. Don’t think about it too hard.”
Don’t think about it too hard—if anything was descriptive of their relationship right now, it was that.
Bella tried not to. She was afraid if she dwelled on it too long, she’d find something very deep and very lonely crawling out of her.
Thankfully, the research was a worthy distraction. Five hours. That’s how long it took for them to make more progress than Bella assumed many scientists made in their entire career. Half of that she chalked up to Yasmine’s genius, and the other half to the sheer amount of money at their disposal.
All of Bella’s research in the past had been conducted in poor man’s labs with poor man’s instruments, and now she was throwing her DNA into a $1.5 million dollar sequencer like it was pumpkin pie going in the oven.
And that was actually the cheapest hunk of metal they had. The electron microscope was $7 million apiece—and they had two. Thank you, Urchin Research Foundation.
The microscopes hooked up to massive overhead screens, where the fungus was magnified a million times, transformed from a simple blood-stain into a terrifying, 3D landscape of crystalline spikes and interlocking proteins.
It was a view of an infection that only a handful of people on the planet would ever be privileged to see. Bella considered herself lucky.
Of course, she would have been even luckier if it wasn’t hers.
As the day crested into the afternoon, the dawning sun peeking in through Waldorf’s lab windows, Yasmine and she stood side by side in front of the screens.
“Is that… is the hypha going inside the cell?”
Bella bit the end of her pencil as she followed Yasmine’s finger.
It was pointed at the mitochondria. Bubbling black fibrous strands had wrapped around it like a noose.
Yasmine’s face darkened, her fingers flexing into the belt of her pants. Eventually, her eyes drifted over to Bella.
For once, they had both arrived at the same theory at the same time.
“So.” Bella drummed her fingers on her arm to distract from the dread growing in her stomach. “It’s like a hostage situation.”
Yasmine opened her mouth to correct her, but then faltered.
They had assumed—without ever really stating it out loud—that the fungus would behave like a conventional pathogen. Something introduced and removed like a treatment without tearing the host apart in the process.
But this looked a lot more like…hmm, how to put this optimistically… It looked like the fungus had shot her cells to death, and taken over the corpses.
“Well,” Yasmine said. “Fuck.”
Bella took a harried breath in. She tightened her hands into fists, trying to claw onto the remaining shreds of hope that were rapidly slipping through her fingers.
“I think I need a minute.”
***
Bella got on her tiptoes, dragging a wet cloth across the top shelf of the cupboard. She let out a sigh of relief when it came back dusty. Something still left to clean.
The Nightingale’s sink had been completely emptied of dishes, the floors were mopped to the point where they were showing signs of water damage, and Bella was still not ready to go back to the apartment.
About an hour after they’d looked at the fungal scans, Bella had to take off for her late night cafe shift. It was the first time since they’d started working together that she’d been grateful to get away from Yasmine.
It was stupid. It wasn’t like this revelation was a complete dead end for them. In fact it was a significant first step at figuring out how the infection worked. With the speed of their research, they’d probably have a working theory of immortality within a week.
But also, tragically, Bella wasn’t an idiot.
She’d seen what the interior of her cell looked like.
It was dead, and the fungus was essentially keeping all its functions on life support.
Even if Yasmine was able to create a viable mimic of the infection that didn’t kill the cell, it would only be useful to other people.
Some stupid tech CEO would get to live an extra seven hundred years, and Bella would be stuck with her powers.
At least Yasmine will get what she wants, she told herself. And I’ll get enough money to keep my family off my back for a little while.
She ran the cloth under the tap again, then wrung it out. It snapped in two as she twisted, startling her. She tried not to cry at the timing of it.
But it was her fault for cleaning without gloves.
Sometimes she forgot what she was.
The water had run the cream off her hands, and without her cream, everything she touched—she looked at the brittle, corpse-like state of her Yankees dish towel—ended up rather drained.
Which brought her to the real reason she didn’t want to go back to the apartment. She was running very low on her cream. She’d been so busy recently between work and her shifts and the stress of knowing her family was somewhere in Manhattan that she hadn’t had the time to synthesize any more.
Which meant her symptoms were getting worse again. She’d turned the bedsheets Yasmine loaned her into dusty rags, even her nice satin pillowcases. She’d mistakenly brushed her hand against the dresser and now it was cracking.
She didn’t want to ruin any more of Yasmine’s things. She was trying to leave as small a blemish as possible in Yasmine’s life, but it was already turning into a bruise.