Page 50 of Hunted

It had been three days since River had been discharged from the hospital with strict instructions not to do any mind reading or rewriting until he was medically cleared for full duty by the Tracer’s neurologist. For now, Fallon Gray was leading the hunt for Rossi while River was restricted to analyzing field reports.

“You ready for us?” Jori said brightly, already sliding off her burnt orange UT hoodie so I could take a fresh blood sample. Rowan slid onto the stool next to her.

“Thanks, y’all. I really appreciate you doing this.” I got my equipment ready, swabbed Jori’s arm with alcohol, and carefully felt around for a good vein while the two vampires pretended not to watch. Heat flooded my cheeks. I should probably have let Jori or Rowan do this part. For vampires, finding veins was instinctual, something they did from birth. Every vampire I’d stuck in my lab had no doubt been privately cringing while watching me fumble with bad sticks.

“No problem.” Rowan gently pointed me towards a better vein in Jori’s arm. Today, her mahogany brown hair was twisted back and clipped on the sides with cute dark red barrettes, her long fringy bangs doing this sweepy thing that made her blue eyes look huge.

“Thanks.” I drew the sample. “I just feel like we’re missing something about varewolf blood that can inform us on how vampire-wolf hybrids are able to have vampire genetics but also safely carry the lycan virus in their bloodstream without consequences.” Glancing up at Rowan, I tried to think of how to delicately phrase what I wanted to ask next. “Do you know if your blood was ever studied with regards to ALDD research?”

She laughed sharply, then quickly lowered her voice when Wiley and several other lab workers turned to stare. “Sorry. Um, obviously I wasn’t privy to the details of how my blood was being used since I was in the dark that I was being exploited at the time. But considering how often my blood was drawn and what a unique specimen I was as the only varewolf they had, I would be absolutely shocked if it wasn’t.”

She extended her arm, smiling gently when I hesitated.

“Go ahead, Ellie. This is my choice. I won’t pretend that every time someone draws my blood, it doesn’t bring up past trauma, but I’m strong enough to know that what you’re doing could save countless lives. This is about something so much bigger than me. And my mother, for all of her flaws, for all of the harm she did to me and others with her deception, raised me to always think beyond myself.”

I found a vein in her arm on the first try. Jori gave me a silent thumbs up, a dimple forming in her cheek. Okay, I had totally sucked at this all along, and my vampire besties had just been too polite to tell me.

“Do you miss her?” I asked carefully as the first vial of blood filled.

Rowan blew her bangs out of her eyes. “That’s such a loaded question. The short answer is yes. Of course I miss her. She’s my mother. I love her. We’ve… started communicating recently, which is something Vlad isn’t really on board with, but he would never try to stop me. He wants to keep me safe, not keep me in a box or tell me how to live my life. In the end, it’s my decision what contact I have with her, or with Cris.”

“Do you think you could ever trust them again?”

Rowan chewed her lip for a moment while I finished securing the last of the blood samples and Jori put a pressure wrap on her arm. “Do you remember the podcast series Kristin Chen did last spring? I don’t know if you would have caught mine specifically.”

“You talked about mental health issues within the vampire community. Specifically, what it was like being trapped in eternal night. That was such a powerful episode. I’ve lived with anxiety and depression my entire life, and still it wasn’t until I listened to your episode that it really hit home for me the full impact of what it would be like for vampires to never be able to go out into the sun.”

“There’s also a need for more vampire health care providers, and mental health specialists in general, especially access for the lower caste,” Jori added. “Someone like Rowan might be more likely to get the care she needs because of her status. But if you grow up as a servant in one of the covens, you may never see a doctor, much less a mental health professional. Too many vampires need counseling because of depression, especially after a diagnosis of acute lycanthropic degenerative disease. We see a lot of self-harm or people who report they’re contemplating walking out into the sun. That’s really something we need more specialized, trained vampire therapists to handle.”

“That makes sense,” I said softly.

“I had an older brother, but he was killed fighting for the Vampire Nation. He suffered from depression, especially as his ALDD symptoms got worse in the final months. Access to health care should be a basic right.”

Rowan reached over to silently squeeze her hand.

“Stories like mine aren’t uncommon amongst the lower caste. Intact families are a rarity.” She smiled. “But I have you guys and London and Ursula, who wants the recipe to your butternut squash soup, by the way.”

I laughed. “I’ll text it to her.”

Jori’s girlfriend was a total foodie. Lacey Blair had trained Ursula and another vampire to bake just about everything Blair’s Bakery sold, which worked out well since all the baking needed to be done at night to be fresh for the next day’s customers.

“You get it,” Jori said quietly. “You lost both your parents to addiction. It was just you and your sister. You go on. Friends become your family. You learn to be happy in what small ways you can. The world can still hold joy, even in the face of great loss.”

Rowan leaned against the lab table. “There’s so much fear and anger within the shifter community at the moment, too. It’s always been the feral wolf population that was ostracized, blamed for the public’s perception of werewolves as monsters out biting people every full moon, which the vast majority of shifters aren’t, especially now that the Eclipse trials are underway. If the lycan virus vaccine were to be effective, that could be an important breakthrough.”

“We’d still have to get the general public to agree to take it,” I pointed out. “There’s misunderstanding and fear about vaccines that have been proven safe for decades. How do you think people will react when they find out it’s a vaccine with deactivated lycan virus in it? We’ll be lucky if anyone will agree to take it.”

“I’m not minimizing the uphill battle it would be to get public buy in on something like that, but we still owe it to people to tell them the truth. Being a Bitten wolf should be a thing that ceases to exist. No one should be changed by force.”

I looked down. “There’s something else, and I need your help on this. I want to test the vaccine on vampires.”

They exchanged a look.

“Why?” Jori was frowning. Shit.

“If it works like I think it does, there’s a chance it may train the immune response that right now is causing vampires to develop ALDD. We know ALDD results after the virus triggers an autoimmune reaction in vampires that eats away at the myelin sheath. The general public, the human general public, is balking at the idea of supplying vampires with blood. But if shifters could donate blood—”

“Okay, let’s back up a step.” Rowan rubbed her temples. “Shifters might actually be the only group that hates vampires more than humans. There’s centuries of history of blood slavery and exploitation we have to answer for. And much as I wish we could all just be okay tomorrow and live in peace, I get that sort of harm takes time to answer for. Trust has to be rebuilt. I can’t see werewolves ever agreeing to this, even if you could get the science to work.”