“A prostitute?” Rose guessed.
He glanced at her, relief softening his black eyes. “Yes, thank you. I didn’t want to call her a whore,” he explained, cringing, as if the impoliteness of the word disgusted him. “Yes, she was a prostitute, which was…looked down upon.”
“That’s an understatement,” Rose muttered.
“And Emma was the product of that…career choice,” Geoffrey added uncomfortably. “Illegitimate children, especially the children of whores…eh…I mean, prostitutes…were not accepted in general society. They were viewed as the lowest of classes, not only poor, but immoral as well.” He sighed, pain creasing at his forehead. “These are not my opinions, I assure you. They were theirs.”
Rose smiled reassuringly. “Yeah, I can tell you don’t feel that way.”
Geoffrey continued, “Emma never knew who her father was, but apparently, he must have been wealthy, and most likely, a prominent member of society. When Emma’s mother realized that she had contracted tuberculosis, which, at the time, was a death sentence, she blackmailed the father so that her daughter wouldn’t wind up in an orphanage, because the orphanages were…”
“Inhumane,” she finished for him, nodding in understanding.
Geoffrey frowned. “You know quite a bit about Victorian society.”
“I study history,” she explained.
“That’s a strange subject to study,” he said. “It seems impractical.”
She laughed at his disapproving tone. “Not anymore. We have jobs in the history field now. Besides, history is important. We can learn a lot from the past. We can learn how to not repeat our mistakes and how to keep progressing.”
“I suppose so,” he admitted. “Well, rather than have his dark secret revealed, the father paid a boarding school to house Emma and put her to work. Girls didn’t attend school back then. Although it was certainly better than living in an orphanage, it was still unpleasant for her. She was ridiculed for her peculiar behavior, and she didn’t care, which infuriated the workers of the school. The boys at the school were cruel to her as well. They thought she didn’t understand her place. She started out working as a server in the cafeteria, but they soon moved her to cleaning duties because people complained about her…er…mouth.”
Rose frowned sympathetically. “Is that where she met you? The school?”
Geoffrey nodded, a smile curving at his lips. “I stayed up late sometimes, and I would sneak into the lab to study. I loved science, and I had this dream at the time of finding a cure to a prominent disease and saving lives. One night, Emma came in to clean the lab, and she found me. She promised to keep my secret, and eventually, we began meeting there each night to spend time together.”
“Awww,” Rose said, smiling. “That’s so cute, it makes me want to gag.”
He frowned. “What does that mean? Is that a compliment or insult?”
“Compliment,” she laughed, “kind of.”
“Oh,” he said, still frowning. “And then, I married her after I graduated.”
“Then, you two were married before you became vampires,” she realized.
He leaned over, peering again into the microscope. “Yes. Why?”
“How did you both become vampires?” she asked curiously.
Geoffrey leaned back to look at her, his black eyes flashing with anxiety.
She noticed his nervousness. “Oh, I’m sorry. I asked something insensitive, didn’t I? I get so curious, and I ask so many questions. And…”
“No, it’s fine,” he interrupted. “It’s just…a difficult story to tell.”
“Don’t worry about it, then,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s all right,” he assured her. “It happened a long time ago. I’m fine. I told you that I worked as a scientist? Specifically, that I worked with blood?” When she nodded, he continued, “Baby vampires, and by that, I mean newly changed vampires, have minimal control over their hunger. They are starving, much like Kallias and Erik, except they have no idea what they are feeling or how to control it. They smell blood, and they find it. And I worked with a lot of blood. I was working late at the lab one night, and a vampire broke in, crazed by the scent of the blood. When he was inside, however, he realized that the rest of the blood didn’t smell right because it was not running through a body. It wasn’t fresh. But I was there, and I was just…staring. I had no idea why he was there. No one broke into labs. We had nothing valuable. Just blood. When he smelled my blood, the blood of a living being, he attacked me. I never even realized what was happening. It didn’t hurt when he killed me.” He grimaced at the memory, and a blush crept up his neck. “Actually, it felt…er…great, which was disturbing.”
Rose nodded in understanding. “So, you died?”
“Yes,” Geoffrey confirmed. “But you see, baby vampires are still very human, and some of them still feel guilt when they kill. This vampire apparently felt guilty and tried to heal me. Unfortunately, although vampire blood will heal and restore a living human, it cannot heal a dead human, not without changing the human into a vampire. Or perhaps it can. Perhaps it is not the blood that changes us. Perhaps it is death that changes us. Either way, his blood turned me.”
“What happened when you awoke as a vampire?” she asked curiously.
“The vampire that killed me had fled already. The only evidence that he had ever been there was the broken window and the blood on my clothes,” he explained. “When you first awake as a vampire, everything feels like a blur until you feed. You cannot really think about anything other than the hunger, and your body is not healed well enough yet. For a couple of nights, you just feed and sleep as your body repairs itself and transforms into the body of an immortal creature.”
Geoffrey seemed to have forgotten the microscope. Now, he just stared blankly at the wall, his posture rigid and formal. He seemed to grow increasingly upset as he continued the story. “It never crossed my mind that a vampire had killed me and turned me into a monster like him. I couldn’t even remember what had happened to me, and the tiny details that I did recall seemed too improbable to believe. I felt so painfully hungry, but I had yet to realize that I hungered for blood, not normal food. So, in a daze, I gathered my things and headed home.”
Rose inhaled sharply as she realized where this story was going.
His jaw clenched. “I was not thinking clearly yet. I just wanted to feed and sleep. But when I arrived home, Emma, who was thinking clearly, wanted to know why I had gotten home so late and why I had so much blood on my clothes. I felt so hungry and then…so angry. I had never experienced anger like that before, especially not at Emma, and I had no idea how to control it. For the first time in my life, I actually felt the urge to hurt someone, maybe even kill them.”
Her stomach lurched with dread. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
Geoffrey glanced at her and sighed, “In the end, it was the hunger that caused me to bite her. I couldn’t control it. She asked me to come to bed with her, to sleep off whatever was wrong with me…because, according to her, I clearly wasn’t myself. She kissed me on the lips, just barely, and I lost control. I couldn’t stop. I drained her, just like that vampire in the lab had drained me. I killed her.”
Rose’s throat felt so tight with sympathy that she could barely breathe.
“It was the worst moment of my entire life. Not only had I killed someone, but I had killed her, the one person I couldn’t handle losing,” he said, his once formal voice cracking with pain. “You know that Erik feels the emotions of others when he is in close proximity to them, but what you may not know is that particularly powerful emotions can reach out to him across greater distances. They draw him in like a beacon. And Erik and Kallias lived in London at the time. So, as I held her lifeless body, completely broken over what I’d done, Erik kicked down the door and found me like that. And Kallias was not far behind.”
“What did they think?” Rose asked. “That you had killed her purposely?”
“No,” he assured her. “Erik felt my pain and suspected that it had been an accident. And Kallias saw my thoughts, so he knew what had happened. They tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t care. I just wanted my wife back. I begged them to save her. Kallias tried to explain that it might not work, and that even if it did, she might hate me for turning her into a monster, but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t thinking rationally. I needed her back, and that is all I cared about because…that’s how it feels when you lose the one you love.”
Rose swallowed. “So, you turned her into a vampire?”
“Erik turned her,” Geoffrey answered. “Erik is not a rational person anyway. If one were to make the mistake of placing Erik near enough grieving people, we would probably have hundreds of vampires being made every single night.” He rolled his eyes. “Empathy makes him unreasonable. Erik will always act on the behalf of a hurting person with no regard for the consequences.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t such a bad thing in your case, was it?” Rose argued.
Geoffrey looked at her. “I guess not. I remember begging them to save her, and Kallias trying to explain what that would do to her. Then, before Kallias was even finished speaking, Erik bit into his own wrist and fed her his blood.”
“And I guess Emma forgave you for killing her?” she assumed.
“Yes,” Geoffrey confirmed. “Emma understood, especially since she could feel the same uncontrollable hunger when she awoke as a vampire. I only sustained a few bruises and broken bones while I was apologizing to her.”
Rose blinked. He had said that last part so nonchalantly that she almost thought she’d imagined it. “I’m sorry, but did you just say…broken bones?”
“It was nothing. I healed quickly,” he laughed. “I did kill her, after all.”
“Uh…” she stammered, at a complete loss for words.
Geoffrey leaned forward and peered into the microscope again.
“She’s so small,” Rose managed to stammer, her eyes wide.
For the first time since she’d met him, Geoffrey smirked. It was not a smile, but a smirk, a mischievous smirk. “And feisty,” he said under his breath.
Rose blinked at him, stunned by the uncharacteristic comment.
He frowned again as he examined the blood, blowing out a shaky breath.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he muttered, but he didn’t elaborate on what was wrong. He leaned over and reached into his briefcase. He pulled out a small bag of thick, crimson liquid. The blood stained the bag as it swished from one side to the other.
Rose recognized the blood donor bag. “Where did you get that?”
He ripped the bag open with his fangs and grabbed another empty vial. “I didn’t kill anyone for it, if that is what you are thinking. I just…borrowed it.”
“So, you stole it?” she asked, raising her eyebrow.
Geoffrey filled the new vial with the donated blood. He glanced at her and smiled. “I am using it to learn. It’s not wrong if you’re learning from it, right?”
“Uh…oh, wow…I’m really torn here,” she mumbled.
He studied one drop of blood, then the other, and then the other, quickly switching between the three slides. His frown deepened. “This is so strange.”
Rose continued to ponder the question that he’d asked. “I mean, really, entire philosophies could be founded on that question. Law versus Learning.”
Geoffrey looked at her, his eyes wide. “You are human? You’re sure?”
“I think I’m a dragon, actually,” she told him, “or an alien dinosaur.”
His brows furrowed. “I’m sorry, but…what?”
“Sarcasm. Again,” she explained. “Sorry. It’s a bad habit.”
“Oh,” he said, still frowning at her.
Geoffrey returned to examining the blood under the microscope, his lips drawing downward into a disapproving scowl. He sighed in frustration and set two more small pieces of glass on the table. He applied a drop of his own blood to each slide. Then, he added a drop of human blood to his blood on one slide, and he added a drop of Rose’s blood to his blood on the other slide, allowing each type of blood to mix with his. He placed each slide under the microscope.
“What are you doing?” she asked curiously.
“Checking something,” he said in a clipped tone as he examined the slides. First, he examined the mixture of human and vampire blood and nodded in approval. Then, he looked at the slide with Rose’s blood. “What the hell?!”
Rose raised an eyebrow because even the mild profanity sounded strange coming from someone so polite. “What? Is something wrong with my blood?”
“I’d say so,” he scoffed, pulling back to stare at the microscope, as if he thought it was crazy. When he looked at her, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Your blood might seem human, but it certainly doesn’t act like human blood.”
She frowned. “No one has ever noticed anything off about it before.”
“Has anyone ever seen it mixed with vampire blood?” he asked.
“Oh, sure, loads of times,” she muttered. Then, remembering his track record of misunderstanding her sarcasm, she clarified, “No, obviously not.”
Geoffrey pushed the microscope toward her. He adjusted the scope for her, and then, he placed a slide of crimson liquid under the scope. “This is what human blood looks like when it is mixed with vampire blood. Take a look at it.”
Her long, red hair fell over her shoulder as she leaned forward and peered into the microscope. At first, she thought it looked similar to blood cells she’d studied before, but when she adjusted the scope, she gasped, “What is this?”
“You are seeing the enzymes in the vampire blood reacting with the human blood, possibly attempting to heal anything amiss, bond with it, create…er…other reactions, pleasant reactions,” he explained. He removed the slide and replaced it with another slide. “Okay, now, take a look at your blood.”
Rose hesitantly leaned forward and peered into the microscope. Her face paled in horror. She’d been prepared to see something different about her blood, but she could never have prepared herself to see this. “Why is it doing that?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen anything like this,” he said. “Never.”
Rose’s blood did not just react with the vampire blood like normal human blood did. It changed with the vampire blood. Strange sparks of light and hazes of darkness swirled around in the crimson blood as it mixed with vampire blood.
“I don’t even understand what I’m seeing,” she breathed.
“Me either,” he admitted. “But I doubt it means anything good.”
Rose’s heart raced against her chest as she watched the strange, unsettling sight. “It’s not even possible for blood to do this, is it? I’ve never heard of flashes of light and darkness in blood. What is happening to my blood? What am I?”
“I don’t know,” Geoffrey admitted.
—
As soon as Rose shut off the water in the shower, she noticed a loud, incessant buzzing noise. She stepped out of the shower and grabbed the fuzzy white towel she’d draped over the wooden towel bar. She wrapped it around her body as she attempted to find the source of the relentless buzzing. She almost slipped on the white tiles as she walked, her hair and body dripping water onto the floor. The buzzing seemed to grow louder as she approached the door.
She eased the bathroom door open and stepped into the guest room. She immediately saw the source of the buzzing. A phone lay in the middle of the floor, repeatedly lighting up and buzzing. At first, she wondered how the phone had gotten into her room, but then, she remembered that Kallias had slept in her room the night before and had undressed before crawling into bed. He’d apparently forgotten his phone. She walked over to the phone and picked it up.
Her stomach lurched with dread as she recognized the phone number that flashed on the screen. It was Audrey’s number. Her mind immediately jumped to the
worst possible conclusion: that Theron had found Audrey and that when she answered, it wouldn’t be Audrey’s voice on the line. It would be Theron’s. Her hands shook as she lifted the phone to her ear and answered it.
“Hello?” Rose said hesitantly.
“Rose? Thank God it’s you. I need to talk to you,” Audrey breathed.
Rose almost sank to the floor with relief. “You’re okay,” she sighed.
“I’m not okay! I’m an emotional wreck!” Audrey shrieked into the phone.
Rose winced. “Sorry. My mistake,” she mumbled. “What I should have said was: I’m relieved that you are physically well enough to make this phone call.”
“Yeah, well, you might want to wait until you hear why I called before you decide that you’re relieved,” Audrey said hesitantly. “I had another dream.”
Rose returned to the bathroom to find another towel. “I kind of figured.”
“I promise that I would’ve called sooner if I’d known how to get in touch with you. I knew you lost your phone,” Audrey explained in a rush. “Then, I remembered that you called me from Mr. Tall-Hunky-Scary-Guy’s phone, so…”
Rose squeezed the ends of her drenched hair with the second towel. “Whoa, slow down. Your mouth is breaking the speed limit. What’s wrong?”
Audrey hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know if I should tell you.”
Rose stopped drying her hair. “Why do you say that?”
“Promise me that you won’t do anything dangerous,” Audrey insisted.
“I’m not promising anything until you tell me what’s wrong,” Rose said.
Audrey sighed, “It’s Kallias. I think something has happened to him.”
Rose gripped the counter as her pulse skyrocketed. “What happened?”
“There was blood,” Audrey said shakily. “So much blood.”
“I need more information,” Rose said. “Please, Audrey.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Audrey said worriedly. “You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you? Rose, you can’t go after him. You’ll die, too.”
The Stone of the Eklektos Page 64