“We need to get him stabilized. Can you carry him without jostling his leg?” the first medic, an earnest brown-haired man with blue eyes, asked the vampires. He looked too young to be serving on a military mission, but we had started young in the Bureau too.
“Definitely,” the vampire medic replied. With the help of Neo, he carried Castral, darting across the yard to the trailer. The human medics rushed behind them. The door shut with a slam.
I stared at the medical station, unsure what to do. My body felt sore in all the wrong places, but adrenaline rushed through me. I wanted to do something, anything. Two weeks ago, I would have had to do everything myself along with our ragtag team of survivors, but now… it was out of my hands.
Kane stood a little way off, his face for a moment displaying how equally helpless he felt. I couldn’t help with medicine, but I could help Kane clean up the spilled blood marking the tarmac and grass around him.
“Want a hand cleaning up?” I asked. “The redbills might calm faster without the smell of vampire blood surrounding them.”
I almost expected a snide question about when I’d become such an expert on redbills, but instead he just nodded. Harlowe gave me a worried frown. Some blood was smeared across her cheekbone, and the edges of her cloak were singed.
A shiver of worry passed down my spine as I headed back to the stable to gather buckets, water, and mops.
What had they run into over in the Immortal Plane?
Chapter Two
Vampire blood had a distinctly more metallic scent than human blood, I discovered. I scrubbed myself in the women’s communal showers for a half hour after helping Kane, watching the swirling red disappear down the drain. On my way to the mess hall for dinner, I smelled my hands. The pine soap had replaced the grisly aroma of Castral’s blood. Good.
A strange habit had developed among our group. My human teammates and our vampire friends had taken to gathering around the TV in the mess hall before dinner. I could smell some delicious, hearty Scottish food being made in the kitchen, but I focused my attention on my crew.
Last night’s gathering in the mess hall had been light and airy. Tonight, I felt like I could swim through the lingering questions in the air. We had already lost so much; how would we keep moving forward? My limbs felt heavy as I moved toward the table. Each new loss hit us harder than the last. Could we afford another?
Zach, Gina, and Louise sat on one side of a mess hall table. Louise braided her shoulder-length, strawberry-blonde hair absentmindedly as Sike watched, amused at her instinctive habit, his dark brown eyes following every movement of her fingers. Louise suddenly flinched, losing her hold on the braid. Zach said something to Gina, and she nodded in response. Her birthday had been a few days earlier, and the number twenty-four was still faintly visible on her forehead where Zach had written it in marker as a prank. In retaliation, she’d wrestled him to the ground and drawn a mustache on him.
The barrack’s dining area was like most military buildings, something akin to a high school cafeteria. Everything was in plain, muted colors like beige and faded greens and blues. Most of the color in the room was provided by its inhabitants and the large TV playing on the far wall. Roxy and Bravi sat on the other side of the table. Roxy had let her red hair down from its usual tight French braid, so the soft waves draped across her shoulders. The female vampire was the closest to the TV, her bright green eyes narrowed in concentration. She furrowed her brow.
“Why do humans constantly advertise food?” she wondered aloud. “Don’t you have enough of it in your bright warehouses?”
“You mean the grocery store?” Zach asked. He jerked his thumb at the TV. “That’s different. This is an ad for some fast food place. They advertise it because humans love to look at delicious pictures of food, and it makes us want to buy some. We’re easily manipulated.”
Dorian was nowhere in sight. Arlonne sat with Gavril at another nearby table—this one slightly farther from the TV—puzzling over a game of checkers. Roxy gnawed her thumbnail, her eyes looking past the TV. A tense cloud hung over the group. Gina gave a halfhearted wave as I walked up. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s worried.
“Any news from the scouting trip?” I asked, breaking through their small talk.
“Not yet,” Roxy replied. “Med bay is too busy to give updates.”
They were still holed up in the medical trailer with Castral? His rust-colored leather jacket sprang to mind. The color seemed plain in comparison to the vampire blood and how it danced with shadows.
I sank into a seat beside Roxy, who said nothing but scooted over an inch to give me more room. Louise had nearly finished her second attempt at a braid, her nervous hands looking for something to occupy their time.
“Back to our report on VampCon,” the TV announcer recounted cheerfully. “Although the event’s official title is the World Summit for Vampire-Human Relations, social media users have decried this title as too long and gave it a cheeky nickname. Tonight, we go to our panel of psychological experts to discuss the possible impact the integration of vampires could have on the human psyche.”
I blocked out the sound of the TV. The organizers had invited our group to this summit, but we’d put off the decision. Some, like Bravi, thought it would help, or at least it couldn’t hurt. But most of the vampires had no desire to undergo another round of invasive questions and abuse from the media and general population. More media scrutiny wouldn’t help our cause—we could barely navigate it as it was. Truthfully, I’d been a little naïve about how the public would react to the supernatural. While Louise’s livestream of the Bureau’s admission of guilt had been excellent in the moment to gain us support, it might not have been the best way to break such news to the international public. But we’d been desperate and exhausted, and the Bureau had forced our hand. All we could do now was find a way to move the situation forward.
While we recovered here at the VAMPS camp, the outside world continued to churn with anxiety and speculation. It felt like a new expert or pundit came out of the shadows every hour to give their (almost always incorrect) opinion.
The Bureau had been slightly wrong in their prediction that the public would respond to the idea of the supernatural with nothing but hostility and chaos. The chaos was there, but the hostility was… complicated. Older generations generally polled at higher levels of fear and distrust of vampires, while younger generations had started fan clubs and pledged their support to vampires, sometimes in uncomfortably… ardent ways.
Others firmly clung to denial and decried it as a giant hoax or an elaborate art project. Fanatics claimed this officially signaled the apocalypse. Vampire hunting groups reportedly began organizing all over the globe, though not all of them meant to kill vampires. Some wanted to find a vampire and request to be “turned,” which was impossible.
On the screen, the news now showed a group of people gathered outside the summit, waiting to go inside. One teenage boy divebombed the camera with a poster. In all caps, it read: READY FOR MY VAMPIRE LOVE.
Bravi shook her head with a snort of laughter.
I was so glad I’d left hormone-fueled puberty behind. But then again, who was I to talk when I had my own vampire romance going on? That kid had no idea what he was asking for.