ChapterOne
FLORENCE
‘It’s your lucky day,’ Cam says, popping his head around the staffroom door with such vigour that his greying curls bounce around on his head like springs. ‘I come bearing gifts. Two gifts, in fact.’
I peer up at him from the cocoon I’ve fashioned on the sofa from clinic-issued fleece jackets– one bundled up into a pillow, and another tucked around me like a swaddle. It’s not much of a bed but it’s good enough for a breaktime power nap. God knows I need it.
I’m not normally in the habit of sleeping while I’m at work, but these last few weeks have been, well, they’ve been kind of a lot.
Far too much to cope with on an empty stomach.
Cam plops down on the chair to the right of me and slaps a full blood bag onto the low coffee table I’m resting my feet on. ‘Firstly, I was hoping you’d dispose of that for me.’
I snap upright, the mere suggestion of it perking me up in an instant.
‘Rejected?’ I ask, hope flooding through me. I could swear my belly growls in anticipation.
He nods. ‘Hepatitis B.’
I’m not generally a person who squeals, but I definitely squeal ayesssssat that, swiping the blood bag off the table and clutching it close to my chest for a few moments before I reach for my rucksack and slip my prize safely into the inside pocket. When I look back at Cam, he’s still grinning.
‘There were two gifts,’ I say, and his smile grows even wider.
‘This one’s just a freebie,’ he chirps, fishing a full blood-test vial out of his pocket and presenting it to me with a flourish. ‘To perk you up before I ask you to come and help me with something.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘How did you get that?’
He chuckles and adjusts his wire-framed glasses on his nose. ‘From an arse of a patient who came in for her thyroid check just now. Told her we needed to do an extra test to check the opacity of her red blood cells.’
‘That’s not even a thing.’
He shrugs, unrepentant. ‘Oh, no,’ he deadpans. ‘Maybe you should dispose of that one, too.’
I flash him a grateful smile before twisting off the cap of the vial and downing it in one, like it’s a shot.
Right, I should probably explain. You see, the thing is that I, Florence Gwendolyn Everett, am a vampire.
It seems improbable, I know, but I promise it’s the truth. I’m also a phlebotomist, which makes the whole thing both a little easier and infinitely harder. I’m a professional drainer of human blood; I just don’t get to actually consume any of it.
Well, I’m not supposed to actually consume any of it, anyway. But sometimes it happens that blood fails our stringent safety checks, and if it’s going to be disposed of anyway, I’m not going to say no. Waste not, want not and all that. That’s where my good friend Cameron comes in.
Cam– also a vampire if that’s not obvious by now– is my oldest friend. Not literally, of course, because he’s only 169, and in our circles that’s relatively young. My friend Elias is over 400, if you can believe that. But actually, I’ve known Cam his whole life. Literally since the moment he was born, since I helped my mother deliver him. I was eight years old at the time, so I didn’t do a great deal other than boil water and wash towels, but I still count it.
She was a trained nurse, my mother. She’d worked abroad before I was born, but when she found out she was expecting me, she’d been forced to return home to Whitby. The love of helping people never left her, though. She even named me after a fellow nurse she’d worked with in the Crimea of whom she was very fond.
Yes,thatFlorence.
So perhaps it was inevitable that her love of medicine was passed down to me. Even after I was turned, all I really wanted to do was help people.
It was easier to evade suspicion back then. These days the checks are almost watertight and records are centralised– advances we couldn’t even have dreamed of in the 1800s. The only way it’s even possible for me to work in healthcare these days is by knowing people at the very top.
That’s when having a friend who’s four centuries old comes in handy. I didn’t realise it before I met Elias in the 1920s, but there’s a whole network of vampires in high places all over the world. In every branch of society, there’s one of us right at the top, pulling strings, destroying evidence, and generally doing whatever it takes to allow us to live our lives undetected.
Because that’s all we want, really. To live a normal life. Or as normal as possible, anyway. Ok, there are some of us who are really bad news, some who are quite literally out for blood, but that’s true of any group of society, isn’t it?
Most of us, me included, are just getting on with our lives, drinking our ethically sourced blood, and trying our best to do no harm. I’ve even heard that there are some that don’t drink human blood at all. Cam calls them vegetarians. I’ve given up trying to correct him.
Anyway, yes, Cam. He worked as a doctor before he was turned. He was a medic in the First World War, and he got to know some of those aforementioned vampires in high places. Not that he realised it when he was human of course, but working in those circumstances turned them into brothers and formed a lifelong bond even when that life turned out to be a lot longer than anticipated. It was one of those brothers that got him the job heading up the clinic here.