Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth

by Cara Coe

“You try figuring out how to mature a fetus without a womb and I’m sure I can drop the fail rate.”

  “I said it was promising. And you should keep working at it. But in the meantime, Alex, we have a womb.”

  My blood turned to ice at his words. I had to clasp my hands behind my back to keep them steady. “She’s more useful in blood donation,” I replied. The response turned my stomach. Nausea washed over me.

  “She can be useful in both.”

  “You can’t drain a pregnant woman of blood. It defeats the purpose.”

  “No, but you can balance it.” His look was one of careful measure. “It’s odd you neglected to entertain this solution.”

  My jaw clenched. There was no way to finesse this. “I grew up with humans. I’m not like you. I can’t blur their faces and use their bodies as I see fit. They’re people.”

  “People who tried to wipe us out,” Vince reminded me.

  “My mother didn’t try to wipe us out. My sister didn’t hunt us down. That woman in there didn’t try to kill us. You can’t push aside an entire species, Vince.”

  “Hey, your ideals are noble but we live in a world of vamps. No matter how you try to hold hands and sing for unity, humans are our food supply and we’re pretty fucking low. If we don’t do something, we all die. Humans and vamps.”

  “And I’m trying to do something about it! That’s all I’ve been working on for years!”

  “Then don’t let your soft notions interfere with a solution that’s right in front of your face!”

  A throat cleared in the heated silence between the two of us and we swiveled our heads towards the doorway where Ike loomed. His gray eyes were stoic as he studied us. We didn’t know how long he’d been standing there or how much he heard. His face gave nothing away.

  “What?” Vince snapped. His anger at me eroded some of his collectedness and he had to take a deep breath before he asked again in a calmer voice, “What is it?”

  “The others need you,” he answered coolly.

  Vince glanced at me but I quickly gathered my paperwork under my arm. “Go ahead. We’re done here. I have work to do,” I said, brushing by Ike.

  Chapter 32

  Him

  Tasha was still under the effects of the drug I gave her when I came back, unaware of my ex girlfriend rifling through her pack of things. Jade squinted at an iPod as she scrolled through the playlist. The brown knapsack was open in front of her, items strewn carelessly about. The whole scene was unnerving. I had to get Tasha out of here.

  I busied myself in my office until Jade grew bored examining the items and sauntered over to where I was working. Working was a loose term, actually. I appeared to be working while every muscle in my body was tight, every nerve on edge. I had to keep portraying my interest in Tasha as a medical one alone or else these vamps would use her to pull my strings.

  Except Jade. Jade would just end her.

  “What are you doing?” she purred in my ear, resting her chin on my shoulder.

  Yes, purred. Jade embodied a dramatic flair that as a teenager captivated me. Now her voice tickled me uncomfortably.

  “Looking over my fails for today,” I answered. “Sometimes I learn a lot more from them than the ones that go according to plan.”

  She poked a painted pink finger at my notebook. “I never liked this research stuff.”

  I used to fuck Jade. After she was spent and sleeping, I would crawl over to my desk with a single light and work. Sex made my mind sharp. Luckily it knocked her out. I’d get in a good couple of hours before she would rouse, come sit in my lap and compete with my research. She always had to win. It made her feel good. I didn’t want her to think she was in competition against Tasha.

  “This research stuff is the reason you’re alive,” I said, chuckling to make my voice light. “Without it, that girl in the next room would be your last supper.”

  Jade scrunched her nose. “I haven’t resorted to eating people.”

  “I know. Because you don’t need to. Because of research. Still don’t like it?”

  “I like the researcher,” she answered slyly, slipping closer. She hoisted her bottom onto my desk, letting her leg brush my arm in the process. She was stunning to look at. A foot shorter than me, dark brunette hair that brought out the vividness in her blue eyes. She found me when I had just turned eighteen, in the height of my self loathing. When I wanted to rip out the genes that made me a vamp.

  “We’re better than them,” she used to say. “We’re better than them because they hate us and we still don’t touch them. When we have every right to.”

  Jade had been my first love. She taught me how to embrace my vampire half without losing my humanity. She gave me something my family never could. Little did I know then, she wasn’t interested in long term relationships. I professed my love to her one night in my car. It was outside Rice University where I was attending. The passenger seat was pulled back as far as it could go, my pants were slipped down just below my ass and she was on top of me, grinding in hard with her hands pushing against the roof of the car.

  “I love you, Jade.” It was declared between gasps of pleasure and it was so raw, the truth of it scraped my heart. She paused in her grinding and smiled down at me.

  “You really mean that,” she said, trailing a finger down my shirt and I looked at her puzzled.

  “Of course I do.”

  “I love that about you. You always say what you mean.”

  Not I love you just I love that about you.

  I didn’t have time to think about it much because then she started going back at it rougher than before and I came hard and my head swam and it didn’t matter that I vomited my feelings all over the place because I was high – physically, emotionally, floating-out-of-my-body high.

  Then she kissed me lightly on the lips and murmured against my fangs, “I don’t do love, sweetheart. But you and I will always be a thing.”

  High over.

  She pulled up her underwear, jumped into her car, and I didn’t see her for six months. I got texts from her. Emails that danced the line between catching up and suggestive. But I spent those six months getting over her and she must have felt the final tugs of her influence waning because just as I felt whole again, she popped back up. And despite my best efforts at playing the nonchalant vamp, she had my pants down again behind a Rudy’s Barbeque at a platonic-dinner-turned-not.

  And this is the game we played for the next five years. From time to time, from city to city, when Jade and I crossed paths we’d rekindle that fiery, intense summer I spent with her before I professed my love. Before The Sweep came down on us. Only I grew more mature and our reunion romps were just that: no-strings-attached-sex and they soon became fun for me instead of soul crushing.

  But there was no fun in it now. I had loved Jade. I know I did. As much as a naïve eighteen year old desperate to mold to something can love someone.

  But it was nothing like what I feel for Tasha. Soul crushing had reached new heights that night on the phone when I thought I might lose her. And that was only based on her voice. Now that I’ve experienced her in all her excruciatingly detailed, hilarious, excitable, frustratingly annoying, beautiful, weirdly sexy, combative, intelligent, unique glory…I was so fucking gone.

  Jade smiled at me now from her perch on the desk. She leaned forward and met my eyes. She was going to kiss me. I haven’t seen her in a year, the longest stretch so far, but she wasn’t aware of the shift that took place in my heart over the last three months. She had no reason to think my lips wouldn’t meet hers. That my tongue wouldn’t taste her. That I wouldn’t push her panties aside and slide in. It’s what we did.

  But as she leaned further in, I broke eye contact and looked down.

  Jade quickly sat back up and narrowed her eyes at me. “Didn’t your mother teach you never to play with your food?” she asked grumpily.

  “Jade-” I started, but she cut me off.

  “You think I didn’t know
you were sleeping with her?” she demanded, nodding a head towards where Tasha slept. “She’s naked under there. Her hair smells like fresh strawberries, her toes are perfectly manicured, and little Miss Priss is pruning down there for something.”

  “Don’t you have any boundaries?” I growled, anger flaring in my chest.

  I only drove her point home and she smiled knowingly. “Clearly you don’t untie her for her daily shampoo and shave. You don’t want Vince to know. And if you’re hiding it from Vince, she’s more than a test subject. Hell, she’s more than a decent fuck. She’s…well, she’s something.”

  “I’m not hiding it from Vince,” I lied but she simply cocked her head. I had nothing more to offer. She had always been perceptive.

  “Vince will figure it out, too,” she smirked. “Like it or not, he knows you almost as well as I do.”

  Vince and I used to be best friends. He was my roommate at UCLA after I graduated from Rice University. Vince and Jade had a history I didn’t know about for a long time after first meeting him. When Jade and I were still going strong, I’d gotten my acceptance letter and scholarship to UCLA. She mentioned she had a friend in the program out there living in LA and that I should call him when I was ready to move. (I’ve since learned that most people Jade refers to as friends were probably past lovers. Male or female.)

  Even though Jade and I were finished by the time I was moving to LA, I still called him. I didn’t know anyone there and I figured it was worth a shot. He was a year ahead of me in med school and happened to have a vacant room.

  Because of my research project involving platelet studies in that first year, I had easy access to donated blood and I kept us supplied for the most part. I figured it was one of those batches we consumed that held the blood of an immune human. Jade towards the end of the second semester was dropping by to sleep with me right before summer break so I narrowed down the possible batch to one I swiped in early May. She, Vince, and I all survived the virus. All the research I’ve done so far has shown that we don’t carry the immunity naturally. I’m almost positive it was ingested somehow.

  As the vamp population dwindled, we had to go deeper into hiding. I was scared to even call my mother. Vince and Jade became my family. We traveled together, getting jobs at hospitals to get access to their blood so that I could use their equipment to make more serum. If anyone got suspicious, we simply vanished and moved onto the next.

  When the humans started dying of from the mutated strain, no one was suspicious anymore. No one cared anymore. Anyone willing to work was given a job. And then staffing got so thin, I had whole labs to myself for days at a time. I started making large amounts of serum, more and more. I started dwindling down the amount of blood I needed for a batch. I started thinking about a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now – how we could feed ourselves after the dust of all this mess settled.

  I think she was hurt when I broke off to go my own way. Jade may not like saddling herself to one person but she was the type who wasn’t satisfied unless she had every man in her life under her thumb. She thrived on it.

  “She’s just a research project. Yes, she has freedom here because she chooses to stay here. Where else would she go? I went to these extremes because that’s what Vince would have done and I wanted him to think they’re already in place. I don’t want to really tie her up and keep her dosed.”

  “What difference does it make?” Jade snapped and sighed when she saw me raise my eyebrows in disbelief.

  “Oh, you with your human family. You were always such a softie. You wanted to be just like them.”

  Jade came from an alcoholic mother who had a one night stand with a vampire. Family life for her was not the warm, safe place to return home after enduring a day hiding out amongst vamp-haters in public. She didn’t have home cooked meals like I had or a teary-eyed mother who hugged her tightly if she let any of the fear slip into her eyes about the vampire hunting as it grew more intense. She didn’t have a twin sister who pretended not to notice if she crawled into her room to sleep next to her bed to ward off the cold panic of Containment finding out her secret identity. I had those things and Jade never understood why they meant so much to me.

  “I am just like them. In the ways that matter,” I said fiercely. I hated it when she set in on my mom and sister. I hated it then and I hated it even more now.

  Jade shook her head slowly. “No, Alex. There’s more. I know that look on your face. You used to look at me with those eyes.”

  “That was a long time ago. Are you sure your memory’s correct?”

  Jade waved her hand as if she couldn’t be bothered with these troublesome feelings. “Whatever, Alex. At the end of the day, I’m still your friend. You must have some serum to wake her or something. I’m outta here, but I’m only giving you a half hour. So wake her up and say what you need to or let her sleep and drool over her, I don’t care. Seriously, I don’t care.”

  The second proclamation told me she did but I pretended not to pick up on it and just nodded. As soon as she left, I ran down the hall to where I kept my supplies. As a matter of fact, I did have something to wake her up. I only had a thirty minute window to convince Tasha not to hate me and even harder, trust me enough to come with me.

  Knocking out a tooth with an ice skate blade a la Tom Hanks in Castaway would’ve been easier.

  I found what I was looking for and loaded a clean syringe.

  Here goes nothing.

  Chapter 33

  Her

  This time when I came to, I felt a painful burn in my arm.

  I went rub the crook of my elbow where the heat was the sharpest but a thick leather restraint jerked my wrist back and the reminder of Alex strapping me to the bed and canoodling with vamps before knocking me out filled my head and I cried out with rage.

  My cry was cut off promptly by a hand and I craned my neck up to see Alex pressing down on my mouth and pleading at me with his eyes.

  “Don’t yell or they’ll come,” he instructed softly.

  I glared at him. He lifted his eyebrows in question and after a moment of defiance I relented and nodded. His hand came away slowly.

  “What the hell, Alex?” I spit, only I kept my voice down. I was pissed at him but I believed him when he said that the troop of vamps would be back if they knew I was awake and kicking.

  “A valid question and I will answer every single one you have but only after we’re gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “I need to get you out of here. I need to do it quietly. I need you to come with me.”

  “I am not going anywhere with you ever. Every time I turn around, you have more lies-”

  “I never lied.”

  I huffed impatiently. “Stop playing loose with words. You lie by omission.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  His blunt acknowledgement took some of the air out of my rant. Still, I was bristled. “I don’t trust you.”

  He got up, paced in a short circle, and sat back down again. I could read on his face desperate impatience but his brows creased in determination. “Okay. Here’s the short version, Tasha. You wondered why you survived and no one else? Well, other humans did survive. Something in their genetic make up made them immune to The Sweep and one of my research projects was trying to figure out what that was. What I have determined is that vamps don’t have this immune gene naturally in their body.”

  I wrinkled my forehead in confusion. “Then how did you survive? How did your vampy friends?”

  “Blood I ate at some point in my past was the blood of someone immune. It granted me the same immunity. There aren’t a lot of people like you so The Sweep still killed almost every vampire and vamp. And almost every human.”

  “So there are others?” My voice was tinged with hope. “Other humans?”

  Alex’s eyes looked sad. “You’re the first I’ve ever seen in two years. There were human survivors of The Sweep but many didn’t survive the vamps. Some vampires
wanted the immunity. Others that didn’t know of or didn’t have the serum blood simply got hungry. It’s now illegal to eat humans but it’s almost a pointless law because none of us ever see any humans. Until you.”

  “So…those vamps out there? They won’t eat me?”

  Alex’s face turned grim. “No. Vince won’t. He and I go way back and he understands our survival means we focus on the research. Most of that group I know and they feel the same way. I don’t know one of them, though. He’s new. And that makes me nervous. But Tasha, that’s not all I’m worried about. There aren’t a lot of genetic scientists alive. I’ve been free to do as I please because they can’t touch me. They can’t kill me. They need me to continue my work. I’m given a lot of leeway. If they find out you mean something to me, they’ll use it against me. I’ll finally be at their mercy, something they’ve wanted for a long time.”

  “But they can’t kill me. They need me.”

  “There are ways to torture someone without spilling a drop of blood.”

  His words twisted my gut. My face grew dark with renewed anger. “You should have told me all this.”

  His laugh was bitter. “I have been trying to earn your trust since the day you called me. I’m pretty sure if I led with ‘I’m a vamp and you’re the last human in a world now only populated with other vamps, please come hang out with me and let’s be together,’ then us-” he gestured between the two of us with his hand “-none of this would have happened.”

  “Well, now I’m tied to a bed.”

  Alex looked pained. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. They weren’t supposed to come back here.”

  “I was perfectly safe in Tucson.”

  Alex sighed, the one that means he’s annoyed with me. “You were perfectly lucky in Tucson. There are some vamps whose job it is to clear a city and make sure they haven’t missed a human. When they got to you, you would have been defenseless. Houston had already been cleared. It’s one of the reasons I came here. The medical center is one of the best in the nation so it holds the equipment I need and I could work in peace without having any other vamps breathing down my neck.”