J. Ward - Dark Lover

Just the kind of whore he would have bought for himself if he'd still had an operational phallus.

He was going to enjoy this, Mr. X thought as he hit the brakes. Killing what he couldn't have anymore carried its own special satisfaction.

"Hey, sugar," she said, coming over. She put her forearms on the door and leaned in through the window. She smelled like cinnamon gum and sweaty perfume. "How you doin' tonight?"

"I could be better. What's it going to cost me to buy a smile?"

She eyed the inside of the car, his clothes. "Fifty will get you off good. Any way you like."

"That's too much." But he was just playing. She was the one he wanted.

"Forty?"

"Let me see your tits."

She flashed him.

He smiled, unlocking the doors. "What's your name?"

"Cherry Pie. But you can call me anything you like."

Mr. X drove them around the corner to a secluded spot under the bridge.

He tossed the money down on the floor at her feet, and when she bent over to pick it up, he drove the needle into the back of her neck and pushed the plunger home. Moments later she slumped like a rag doll.

Mr. X smiled and moved her back against the seat so she was sitting up. Then he tossed the needle out the window, where it joined about a dozen others, and put the van in drive.

In his underground clinic, Havers looked up from his microscope, startled out of his concentration. The grandfather clock was chiming in the corner of his lab, telling him it was time for the evening repast, but he didn't want to stop working. He put his eye back to the scope, wondering if he'd imagined what he saw. After all, desperation could be affecting his objectivity.

But no, the blood cells were living.

Breath left his lungs on a shudder.

His race was almost free.

He was almost free.

Finally, stored blood that was still viable.

As a physician, his hands had always been tied when it came to treating patients surgically and addressing certain labor and delivery complications. Real-time transfusions from vampire to vampire were possible, but as their race was scattered and their numbers small, it could be hard to find donors in a timely manner.

For centuries he'd wanted to establish a blood bank. The trouble was, vampire blood was highly unstable, and storage of it outside the body had always been impossible. Air, that life-sustaining, invisible curtain blanketing the earth, was one cause of the problem, and it didn't take a lot of those molecules to contaminate a sample. Just one or two and the plasma disintegrated, leaving the red and white blood cells to fend for themselves. Which, of course, they couldn't do.

At first it didn't make sense to him. There was oxygen in blood. That was why it was red after leaving the lungs. The discrepancy had led him to some fascinating discoveries about vampire pulmonary function, but had ultimately gotten him no closer to his objective.

He'd tried drawing the blood and channeling it immediately into an airtight container. This most obvious solution didn't work. The disintegration occurred anyway, just at a decelerated pace. This had suggested there was another factor at work, something inherent in the corporal environment that was missing when the blood was removed from the body. He'd tried isolating samples in warmth, in cold. In suspensions of saline or human plasma.

Frustration had kept his mind burning through the permutations of his experiments. He ran more tests and tried different approaches. Retried. Walked away from the project. Came back to it.

Decades passed. And more decades.

And then personal tragedy gave him a very intimate reason to solve the problem. Following the deaths in childbirth of his shellan and infant son a little over two years ago, he'd become obsessed and had started from scratch.

His own need to feed was the driver.

He usually needed to drink only every six months, because his bloodline was strong. After his beautiful Evangaline's death, he'd waited as long as he could, until he had taken to his bed with the pain of the hunger. When he'd finally asked for help, he'd hated the fact that he wanted to live badly enough to drink from another female. And he'd allowed himself to consider the feeding only because he'd been convinced that it wouldn't be as it had been with Evangaline. Surely he wouldn't betray her memory by taking pleasure in someone else's blood.

There were so many whom he had helped that it wasn't hard to find a female willing to offer herself. He'd chosen a friend who was unmated and had hoped he'd be able to keep his sadness and humiliation to himself.

It had turned out to be a nightmare. He'd held back for so long that as soon as he'd smelled blood, the predator in him had come out. He'd attacked his friend and drunk so hard, he'd had to stitch up her wrist afterward.

He'd nearly bitten her hand off.

His actions flew in the face of his notions of himself. He'd always been a gentleman, a scholar, a healer. A male not subject to the base desires of his race.

But then, he'd always been well fed.

And the terrible truth was, he'd relished the taste of that blood. The smooth, warm flow down his throat, the roaring strength that came afterward.

He'd felt pleasure. And he'd only wanted more.

The shame had made him retch. And he'd vowed never to drink of another's vein again.

It was a promise he'd kept, though as a result he'd grown weak, so weak that focusing his mind was like herding a fog bank. His starvation was a constant ache in his belly. And his body, craving sustenance that food couldn't give it, had cannibalized itself to keep him alive. He'd lost so much weight his clothes hung off of him like bags, his face turning haggard and gray.

But the state he was in had shown him the way.

The solution was obvious.

You had to feed that which was hungry.

An airtight process coupled with a sufficient quantity of human blood and he had his living cells.

Under the microscope, he watched as the vampire cells, larger and more irregularly shaped compared to the human ones, slowly consumed what he had given them. The human count was decreasing in the sample, and when it was extinguished he was willing to bet the viability of the vampire component would dwindle down to nothing.

All he had to do was conduct a clinical trial. He would extract a pint from a female, mix with it an appropriate proportion of human blood, and then transfuse himself.

If everything went well, he would set up a donor and storage program. Patients would be saved. And those who chose to forgo the intimacy of drinking could live their lives in peace.

Havers looked up from the microscope, suddenly aware that he'd been staring at the cells for twenty minutes. The salad course for luncheon would be waiting on the table upstairs for him.

He removed his white coat and walked through the clinic, pausing to talk to some of his nursing staff and a couple of patients. The facility took up about six thousand square feet and was hidden deep in the earth beneath his mansion. There were three ORs, a fleet of recovery and examination rooms, the lab, his office, and a waiting area with a separate access to the street. He saw about a thousand patients a year, and made house calls for birthing and other emergencies as needed.

Although as the population had dwindled, so had his practice.

Compared to humans, vampires had tremendous advantages when it came to health. Their bodies healed fast. They were not subject to diseases such as cancer, diabetes, or HIV. But lord help you if you had an accident at high noon. No one could get to you. Vampires also died during their transitions or right afterward. And fertility was another tremendous problem. Even if conception was successful, females frequently did not survive childbirth, either from blood loss or soaring preeclampsia. Stillborns were common, and infant mortality was through the roof.