When I met Dr. Mills later that afternoon, I did it at the hospital, in his office. He was a medium sort of guy - medium tall, medium age, medium coloring. He had a nice smile, which seemed to promise that everything would be okay, and despite the fact that I knew it was total fiction, I smiled back.
"Have a seat, Ana," he said, and indicated one of the blue club chairs in front of his desk. Behind him were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves - medical references in matching bindings, with some newer off-brand volumes thrown in for variety. Dr. Mills had stacks of magazines and photocopied articles on one corner of the desk, and a teetering set of patient files on the other. A framed photo faced away from me, so I couldn't see if he had a family. He had a wedding ring, though.
Mills didn't speak immediately; he leaned back in his leather chair, steepled his fingers, and looked at me for a while. I fought against the urge to squirm, but couldn't keep my fingers from restlessly picking at the fabric of my jeans.
"I knew you were young," he said finally, "but I admit, I'm even more surprised now. You're seventeen?"
"Eighteen in a few weeks," I said. I was getting resigned to having this conversation with every single adult in Morganville. I ought to just record it and play it back every time I met somebody new.
"Well, from the notes that Amelie has provided to me, you have a very solid grasp of what you're doing. I don't think I'll be so much directing your research as helping you execute your experiments. Where I see opportunities to add some value, I will. Obviously, the labs here at the hospital have much more sophisticated equipment than I imagine you have - wherever you developed your initial crystals." He flipped through the large folder open in the center of his desk, and I saw photocopies of my own neat handwriting. My notes, which I'd provided to Amelie. "I took the liberty of making up a set of crystals based on your formula, using the facilities in our labs. I found that if you accelerate the drying process with heat, you can increase the strength of the dosage by about twenty percent. And I also created a stronger liquid version that can be delivered directly into the body by injection."
I blinked. "Injection." I tried to imagine getting close enough to Myrnin to stick a needle in his arm, especially when he was in one of his bad swings.
"It can be delivered through a dart," he said. "Like an animal tranquilizer, although I wouldn't use that analogy to anyone else. Wouldn't be respectful."
I managed a smile. "That'd be - very helpful. I didn't try the heating process for drying the crystals. That's interesting."
"No reason you should have. I tried it because I didn't have an unlimited time to dry them - our lab's busy, and I didn't want anyone questioning what I was doing. I've asked Amelie to provide us with some secured laboratory space at the university. More convenient for you, and safer for me. I can have equipment moved there as we need it, or requisition it through the Council." Dr. Mills cocked his head and looked at me again, brown eyes bright and challenging. Like Myrnin's, only not half as crazy. "About my request to tour the lab where you made the crystals . . ."
"Sorry, I can't."
"Perhaps if you checked with Amelie - "
"I did."
He sighed. "Then when can I examine our patient?"
"You don't."
"Ana, this will not work if I can't take baseline readings on the patient and determine what the measurable improvements are as we change the formula!"
I did see that, actually, but the thought of putting nice Dr. Mills in grabbing distance of Myrnin made me shiver. "I'll check," I promised, and got to my feet. "I'm sorry, it's getting late. I need to - "
Dr. Mills glanced at his office window. Outside the blinds, the sky was darkening from faded denim to indigo. "Of course. I understand. Here's a sample of the new batch of crystals. But before you give it to him, see if you can get baseline information - most importantly, a blood sample."
"A blood sample," I repeated. He opened a drawer and handed me a small, sealed kit. It had a syringe, gauze pads, alcohol wipes, and a couple of vacuum tubes. "You're not serious."
"I'm not saying it might not be difficult, but if you won't let me go with you to do it . . ."
I could do a lot of things, but I was pretty sure I couldn't hold Myrnin down and stick a needle in his vein. Not while he was . . . altered.
I took the kit and put it in my backpack. "Anything else?"
Dr. Mills passed me a gun - a dart gun. He opened the back to show me the fluffy end of the tube. "It's preloaded with one dose," he said. "I only made up a few - it takes some time to distill. Here are two extra, if you need them." As I stowed the gun in my backpack, he said, "It's untested. So be careful. I think it will be stronger and longer lasting, but I'm not sure about the side effects."
"And the crystals?"
He passed them over, too. They looked a little finer than the ones I'd developed - more like raw sugar. Those went into the backpack, as well.
"Ana," he said, as I hoisted the burden, "have you heard any rumors about a new vampire in town?"
I froze. My gold bracelet, the one with Amelie's symbol etched on it, caught the light and glittered - not that I needed the reminder.
"Just Michael," I said. "But that's not news."
"I heard there were strangers."
I shrugged. "Guess you heard wrong."
I left before I had to lie any more. I couldn't stop myself from glancing back at him. He nodded and smiled a good-bye.
I felt bad, but there was only so much truth I was prepared to give, even to somebody who came recommended by Amelie.
"Did you bring the hamburger?"
I didn't even have time to drop my backpack on the hallway floor at home before Eve had buzzed in on me like a dark, caffeine-fueled Tinkerbell, brandishing a wooden spoon.
"Uh - what?"
"Hamburger. I sent you a text."
Oops. I dug my phone out and saw that, sure enough, there was a flashing message icon. "I didn't get it. Sorry."
"Crap." Eve turned away and marched back down the hall, Doc Martens boots clomping with fine disregard for the safety of the wood floor. "Michael! Guess what? You're running errands!"
Michael was playing guitar - something fast and complicated. He stopped periodically, which was unusual for him, and he ignored Eve, which wasn't normal, either. As I rounded the corner, I saw him standing up at the dinner table, leaning over to jot down music on a lined page.
Turned out that he wasn't ignoring Eve so much as not obeying. "I'm busy," he said, frowned at the paper, and played the same phrase again, then again. Shook his head in frustration and erased notes on the paper. "You and Justin go."
"I'm cooking!" Eve rolled her eyes. "Creative people. They think the world stops when they think."
"I'll go," I said. The chance to be alone with Justin, even on something as boring as a trip to the all-night grocery, was too good to miss. "Better if I do, anyway. I've got the free pass." I held up the bracelet.
Michael pulled himself away from the music in his head long enough to give me a look. He tapped his pencil in a fast, complicated rhythm on the table. "Thirty minutes," he said. "There and back. No excuses. If you guys are late, I'm coming after you, and I'm going to be pissed off."
"Thanks, Dad." I wished I hadn't said it - not so much because of the grimace on Michael's face, but because it made me think of my actual dad. And that the clock was running on how long he'd allow me to continue my current living arrangements.
Justin came out of the kitchen sucking on his fingertip. "What's going on?"
"You have not been sticking your dirty fingers in my sauce," Eve said, and pointed her wooden spoon at him.
He quickly took the finger out of his mouth. "First off, they're not dirty. I licked them first. And second - did I hear something about the store? Ana?"
"Yeah, I'm ready."
He grabbed Eve's keys from the hall table. "Then let's roll."
Justin was a good driver, and he knew Morganville like the back of his hand - of course, Morganville was just about that big, too, and there was only one all-night grocery store, the Food King, locally owned and operated. The parking lot was lit up like a football stadium. There were fifteen or so cars already there, evenly split between human vehicles and vamp-mobiles. Justin parked directly under a blazing set of lights and turned off the car.
"Wait," he said as I reached for the door handle. "It takes us about five minutes to get here, five minutes to get the stuff, five minutes back home. That gives us fifteen whole extra minutes."
I felt my heart stammer, and race a little faster. Justin was looking at me with fierce intensity.
"So what do you want to do?" I asked, trying to sound casual about it.
"I want to talk," he said, which was not what I expected. Not at all. "I can't talk about this back at the house. I never know who could be listening."
"Meaning Michael?"
Justin shrugged. "It's just never exactly private."
He wasn't wrong, but I still felt horribly disappointed. "Sure," I said, and knew I sounded stiff and wounded. "Go ahead. Talk."
His eyes widened. "You thought - "
"Just talk, Justin."
He cleared his throat. "I've been doing some research on Bishop."
The idea of Justin and research didn't seem to want to fall into the same sentence. "Where?"
"The town library," he shrugged. "Special collections. I know Janice, the librarian - she was a friend of my mom's. She let me into the back to take a look at some of the older stuff, the things they don't put out for public reading."
"The vampire collection."
He nodded. "Anyway, the only thing I could find out was a reference to a Bishop - maybe not the same one - who killed a whole lot of people about five hundred years ago."
"Doesn't sound too unusual . . ."
"Except that he wasn't killing humans," Justin said. "From the way the thing was written, Bishop was killing off his enemies in the vampire community. Making himself the ruler of the world. And then something happened, and he dropped out of sight."
"Wow. No wonder Amelie and Oliver were freaked."
"If he's been underground all this time, and has a rep for taking out anyone who stands in his way, human or vampire - yeah. I'd be freaked, too. Anyway, I thought you should know. It could be important."
"Thanks."
He nodded, gaze fixed on mine.
"Anything else?" I prompted.
"Yeah."
He leaned forward and kissed me. His weight settled toward me, leaning me back against the door, and I felt all the strength and breath go out of my body, replaced with a quivering, golden vibration. Oh. Justin's lips were warm and damp, soft but demanding, and I heard myself make a sound like a whimper in response. His hands knew just where to hold me - one at the back of my head, one at the small of my back, pulling me closer. Fitting our bodies together.
It felt so good, it was like swimming in sunlight. My fingers tangled in his soft, shaggy hair and traced down his back, and for a wild second I imagined what it would be like, right here, right now, in Eve's big car. It seemed to go on forever, a dreamy eternity of heat. . . .
His hands slipped down my shoulders, traced my collarbone, then moved lower. I heard myself make a sound that was more a whine than anything else, a naked plea, as the heat of his touch reached the top edge of my bra, slid past the edge and down. . . .
Justin broke the kiss with a gasp, leaning his cheek against mine. The sound of his breath in my ear made me shiver again. So close. God, we're so close. . . .
"We'd - better go inside," he said. It sounded like he was fighting hard to sound normal, but he was missing by a mile, and when he sat back, all I could see was the hot focus in his eyes, and his damp, reddened, totally kissable lips. I wondered what he was seeing in me, and realized with a shock that it was probably the same thing.
Shared hunger.
"Yeah," I said. I didn't sound normal, either. I wasn't sure I could walk, in fact; my whole body felt like it had melted, especially around the knees. I took in a couple of deep breaths, then stopped when Justin's eyes focused on the rise and fall of my chest. "We should - go shop."
Justin checked his watch. "No, we should get the hamburger, throw money at the cashier, and break every speed limit back to the house if we don't want Michael calling out the SWAT team."
That sobered us up, enough to get us out of the car and into the store, but we held hands the whole way.