Chapter 1
Chapter One
FLORENCE
‘It’s your lucky day,’ Cam says, popping his head around the staffroom door with such vigour that his greying curls bounce around on his head like springs. ‘I come bearing gifts. Two gifts, in fact.’
I peer up at him from the cocoon I’ve fashioned on the sofa from clinic-issued fleece jackets – one bundled up into a pillow, and another tucked around me like a swaddle. It’s not much of a bed but it’s good enough for a breaktime power nap. God knows I need it.
I’m not normally in the habit of sleeping while I’m at work, but these last few weeks have been, well, they’ve been kind of a lot.
Far too much to cope with on an empty stomach.
Cam plops down on the chair to the right of me and slaps a full blood bag onto the low coffee table I’m resting my feet on. ‘Firstly, I was hoping you’d dispose of that for me.’
I snap upright, the mere suggestion of it perking me up in an instant.
‘Rejected?’ I ask, hope flooding through me. I could swear my belly growls in anticipation.
He nods. ‘Hepatitis B.’
I’m not generally a person who squeals, but I definitely squeal a yesssss at that, swiping the blood bag off the table and clutching it close to my chest for a few moments before I reach for my rucksack and slip my prize safely into the inside pocket. When I look back at Cam, he’s still grinning.
‘There were two gifts,’ I say, and his smile grows even wider.
‘This one’s just a freebie,’ he chirps, fishing a full blood-test vial out of his pocket and presenting it to me with a flourish. ‘To perk you up before I ask you to come and help me with something.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘How did you get that?’
He chuckles and adjusts his wire-framed glasses on his nose. ‘From an arse of a patient who came in for her thyroid check just now. Told her we needed to do an extra test to check the opacity of her red blood cells.’
‘That’s not even a thing.’
He shrugs, unrepentant. ‘Oh, no,’ he deadpans. ‘Maybe you should dispose of that one, too.’
I flash him a grateful smile before twisting off the cap of the vial and downing it in one, like it’s a shot.
Right, I should probably explain. You see, the thing is that I, Florence Gwendolyn Everett, am a vampire.
It seems improbable, I know, but I promise it’s the truth. I’m also a phlebotomist, which makes the whole thing both a little easier and infinitely harder. I’m a professional drainer of human blood; I just don’t get to actually consume any of it.
Well, I’m not supposed to actually consume any of it, anyway. But sometimes it happens that blood fails our stringent safety checks, and if it’s going to be disposed of anyway, I’m not going to say no. Waste not, want not and all that. That’s where my good friend Cameron comes in.
Cam – also a vampire if that’s not obvious by now – is my oldest friend.
Not literally, of course, because he’s only 169, and in our circles that’s relatively young.
My friend Elias is over 400, if you can believe that.
But actually, I’ve known Cam his whole life.
Literally since the moment he was born, since I helped my mother deliver him.
I was eight years old at the time, so I didn’t do a great deal other than boil water and wash towels, but I still count it.
She was a trained nurse, my mother. She’d worked abroad before I was born, but when she found out she was expecting me, she’d been forced to return home to Whitby.
The love of helping people never left her, though.
She even named me after a fellow nurse she’d worked with in the Crimea of whom she was very fond.
Yes, that Florence.
So perhaps it was inevitable that her love of medicine was passed down to me. Even after I was turned, all I really wanted to do was help people.
It was easier to evade suspicion back then. These days the checks are almost watertight and records are centralised – advances we couldn’t even have dreamed of in the 1800s. The only way it’s even possible for me to work in healthcare these days is by knowing people at the very top.
That’s when having a friend who’s four centuries old comes in handy.
I didn’t realise it before I met Elias in the 1920s, but there’s a whole network of vampires in high places all over the world.
In every branch of society, there’s one of us right at the top, pulling strings, destroying evidence, and generally doing whatever it takes to allow us to live our lives undetected.
Because that’s all we want, really. To live a normal life. Or as normal as possible, anyway. Ok, there are some of us who are really bad news, some who are quite literally out for blood, but that’s true of any group of society, isn’t it?
Most of us, me included, are just getting on with our lives, drinking our ethically sourced blood, and trying our best to do no harm. I’ve even heard that there are some that don’t drink human blood at all. Cam calls them vegetarians. I’ve given up trying to correct him.
Anyway, yes, Cam. He worked as a doctor before he was turned.
He was a medic in the First World War, and he got to know some of those aforementioned vampires in high places.
Not that he realised it when he was human of course, but working in those circumstances turned them into brothers and formed a lifelong bond even when that life turned out to be a lot longer than anticipated.
It was one of those brothers that got him the job heading up the clinic here.
When suspicions about my identity arose in the town where I had been living and I needed to move in a hurry, Cam was the first person I called.
He offered me a position here as soon as one became available, and it’s actually kind of perfect.
Part blood donation centre, part outpatient blood test service – plenty of opportunities for a pair of vampires to feed without harming any humans.
Beyond a sharp scratch, that is. But we can’t do much about that.
‘So,’ Cam says, taking the empty vial from my hands, ‘we could really use your skills in bay six.’
‘Say no more.’ I nod and I follow him out of the door.
For the record, my skills are numerous, but I’d hazard a guess that what’s waiting for me in bay six is a patient with particularly tricky veins.
Probably a patient who’s telling us we need to find a doctor because their veins are so hard to find, which makes all of us laugh because most phlebotomists, or nurses, are far better at taking blood than most doctors, but even better than them?
A 177-year-old vampire with a vast array of medical training and over a century of experience.
I’ve got something of a reputation for being the vein whisperer now.
I’ll find that vein, don’t you worry. I’m relatively sure that at this stage I could fling the needle in from the far side of the bay, like a dart, but I can’t imagine patients being comfortable with that. The last thing I need is to draw attention to myself.
‘Mr Rowley,’ I say, pulling the curtain back and smiling at the pale, shrivelled husk of a man in the blue pleather chair. He actually looks like he hasn’t got a great deal of blood circulating, if I’m being honest, but if there’s some in there, I’ll find it.
Mr Rowley considers me for a moment before he huffs a disgruntled breath. ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘Florence is one of our most experienced phlebotomists,’ Cam says, in the calm, authoritative voice he uses when patients are being awkward.
The old man eyes me with suspicion. ‘Experienced? She doesn’t look old enough to have finished school!’
I try my best to keep my smile pleasant. My forever age – the age at which I was turned – is twenty-six, so Mr Rowley is not the first person to make a comment like that. If only he knew that I actually pre-date blood testing.
‘Well, Mr Rowley, appearances can be deceptive,’ I say, scooting my chair over to him and snapping on a pair of gloves. ‘But I’ll tell you what. If I can’t get this placed on the first try, I will personally fetch a doctor to do it for you. Does that sound fair?’
He nods once, and by the time he’s finished mumbling his reluctant reply, the needle is in.
‘Mic drop,’ Cam mutters over the old man’s head, so quietly that only my bat-like hearing picks it up. I stifle a smile and try not to make eye contact with either of them.
‘I’ve missed you,’ I whisper back to Cam once we’re done with Mr Rowley’s test, and it’s true. It’s the first time we’ve worked together in decades.
One of the inevitable challenges of being immortal is the suspicions you raise when you stay in the same place too long and don’t visibly age.
You get used to it: uprooting your life, changing the way you look, your home, even your name sometimes.
But things move on in your absence. It’s a strange feeling – like being homesick for a place that doesn’t exist anymore.
It helps to have a friend who knows how it feels. And Cam, he’s more than a friend. He’s family. He might look like he could be my dad, but I’ve always thought of him as a brother.
‘You ok?’ he asks, as we both whip off our gloves and bin them.
I try to smile, but the action falls a little short. ‘Just getting used to being back here.’ I straighten my uniform, unable to meet his eyes as I add, quietly, ‘You know how it is.’
He hums his understanding. ‘You’ll get there,’ he says, nudging my shoulder with his. It helps, a little. As much as anything can.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’m going out tonight. You should come with me.’
‘Can’t tonight,’ I reply. ‘I’ve got a date.’
He raises a single eyebrow in a question.
‘That bottle of red is not going to drink itself.’
I see the second he realises that I’m talking about the full bag of O positive in my backpack. His eyebrow hitches even higher. ‘That’ll take about ten minutes,’ he chides. ‘I’m not going until eight.’
I open my mouth to argue, but he cuts me off before I can. ‘You’ll love it. It’s a vampire-themed bar Elias introduced me to.’
That makes sense. I’m half convinced Elias knows every person and place in the world. But…
‘Vampire-themed?’ I say, unable to keep the scepticism out of my voice, but Cam just chuckles.
‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘It’ll be good for you to meet new people, you know? Get out a bit more. After—’
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to. He’s the only person in the world who knows what the last few weeks have been like for me.
‘Fine.’ I relent, and his face breaks into that huge, stupid smile that always takes me back to when we were kids.
‘I’ll call past yours just before eight.’
* * *
The rest of the shift passes in a blur, that comforting repetition of ‘Confirm your date of birth … sharp scratch … all done,’ which seems so familiar whichever year or town or clinic I’m saying it in. It’s almost enough to make me forget everything.
That, and the frankly magnificent veins of my last patient of the day. She’s young, barely into her twenties, with perfect light-brown skin and the kind of body that looks meticulously trained.
I try not to stare as I track the swoop of the cephalic vein along her bicep, the way it takes on a green tinge as it travels under the thin skin in the ditch of her elbow.
I know even before I touch it how bouncy it’s going to be, and I can’t stop the small sigh of satisfaction when I’m proven right.
‘This vein is a work of art,’ I mean to say in my head, but actually say out loud. As soon as I do, I hear a soft chuckle beside my ear, a familiar brush of cold sweeping past it.
‘That was an inside thought, Florence,’ his voice says, in that same easy way that it always did.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I mutter in response, making awkward eye contact with my patient.
I don’t even know if I was apologising to her, but from the way her smile seems shallow, stretched thin over a layer of terror, it’s probably preferable to the alternative: that I was saying sorry to a person who isn’t there.
I should probably explain.
I was in love once, the breathless, giddy kind. The kind that feels like your chest is swelling with so much warmth that there’s a risk it’s going to burst at any moment. I gave Josiah Quinn my whole heart, and then, before we’d even married, he had the audacity to go and die.
It was decades before I heard him again, faint whispers of his voice in my ear that I passed off as my imagination for more than a hundred years. But four weeks ago I moved back to Whitby – the place where I found and lost him – and the whispers got stronger.
Is it all in my head? I don’t actually know. But what I do know is that I hear him speak sometimes, somehow, and all I feel is gratitude that I still can.
Now let me be clear: I don’t believe in ghosts.
I believe in science and in medicine and in double-blind trials and in universal constants.
I believe in hard evidence and in observable facts, but the fact is that, a century and a half after his death, I still hear him speak, as clear and as close as if he were standing next to me.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can’t deny that there’s a chance I’m being haunted by one anyway.
After all, I didn’t believe in vampires until the night I became one.
I feel the echo of Josiah’s voice in my head long after I’ve forgotten the actual words he said, as I finish up with the patient with the beautiful veins, hand over to the next shift staff and gather my things.
And maybe I really am losing the plot because, as I head for the door, who do I see but my dead fiancé, sitting in waiting area B.