“To expand the boundaries of knowledge. Why embark on any scientific endeavor?”
“The quest for truth.”
“It’s what we’re all trying to accomplish, isn’t it?”
“In my experience, this particular subject evokes a lot of strong emotion. People vehemently believe in the existence of vampires, or they don’t. If they do, they firmly believe vampires are evil, or they’re simply victims of a rare disease. Where does this emotion, these strong beliefs, fit into your investigations?”
“We approach this subject only from the standpoint of fact. What can be measured.”
“So if I asked what you believe—”
“I think you know what I believe: I’m studying diseases that can be quantified.”
This was starting to sound circular. And dull. I should have known that Flemming wouldn’t be an ideal interviewee. Every time I’d ever talked to him, he’d been evasive. I’d really have to work to draw him out.
“Tell me how you felt the first time you looked a werewolf in the eyes.”
Until that moment, he hadn’t looked at me. That was pretty normal; there was a lot in a studio booth to distract a newcomer: dials, lights, and buttons. It was natural to look at what you spoke to. People tended to look at the foam head of the microphone.
But now he looked at me, and I looked back, brows raised, urging him on. His gaze was narrow, inquiring, studying me. Like he’d just seen me for the first time, or seen me in a new light. Like I was suddenly one of the subjects in his study, and he was holding me up against the statistics he’d collected.
It was a challenging stare. He smelled totally human, a little bit of sweat, a little bit of wool from his jacket, not a touch of supernatural about him. But I had a sudden urge to growl a warning.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” he said.
“Of course it isn’t relevant, but this show is supposed to be entertaining. I’m curious. How about a cold hard fact: when was the first time you looked a werewolf in the eyes?”
“I suppose it would have been about fifteen years ago.”
“This was before you started working with the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology?”
“Yes. I was in the middle of a pathology residency in New York. We’d gotten an anomalous blood sample from a victim of a car accident. The report from the emergency room was horrendous—crushed rib cage, collapsed lungs, ruptured organs. The man shouldn’t have survived, but he did. Somehow they patched him up. I was supposed to be looking for drug intoxication, blood alcohol levels. I didn’t find anything like that, but the white blood cell count was abnormal for a sample with no other sign of disease or infection. I went to see this patient in the ICU the next day, to draw another sample and check for any conditions that might have accounted for the anomaly. He wasn’t there. He’d been moved out of the ICU, because two days after this terrible accident, he was sitting up, off the ventilator, off oxygen, like he’d just had a concussion or something. I remember looking at his chart, then looking up at him, my mouth open with shock. And he smiled. Almost like he wanted to burst out laughing. He seemed to be daring me to figure out what had happened. I didn’t know what he was at the time, but I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. He was the only one who wasn’t shocked that he was still alive. I never forgot that look. It made me realize that for all my knowledge, for all my studies and abilities, there was a whole world out there that I knew nothing about.”
“And the next time you saw that look”—the challenge, the call to prove one’s dominance, like the one I’d just given him—“you recognized it.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you ever find out more about him? Did he ever tell you what he was?”
“No. He checked himself out of the hospital the next day. He didn’t have health insurance, so I couldn’t track him. He probably didn’t think he needed it.”
I’d seen werewolves die. It took ripping their hearts out, tearing their heads off, or poisoning them with silver.
“You wanted to find out how he’d survived. How his wounds had healed so quickly.”
“Of course.”
“Is that as far as your research goes? You mentioned once the possibility of a cure.”
“Every scientist who studies a disease wants to find the cure for it. But we don’t even understand these diseases yet. Finding a cure may be some time off, and I don’t want to raise any hopes.”
“How close are you to understanding them? I’ve heard every kind of theory about what causes them, from viral DNA to unbalanced humors.”
“That’s just it, the most interesting feature of these diseases is that they don’t act like diseases. Yes, they’re infectious, they alter the body from its natural form. But far from causing damage or sickness, they actually make their victims stronger. In the case of vampirism, the disease grants near immortality, with relatively innocuous side effects.”
He called the need to drink human blood an innocuous side effect?
He continued. “To learn the secret of how that happens would be a fantastic discovery.”<