It’s only now, staring at my best friends in the world, that I realise how stupid that was.
‘Ok,’ I say, gesturing to the sofa and to the extra chair someone’s dragged in. ‘You might want to sit down for this.’
* * *
‘So what are you?’ Sammi asks, her perfectly groomed brows pulling together. I’ve just finished explaining what’s going on, with Florence’s help for the medical bits, and everyone’s looking at me like I haven’t cleared anything up at all. ‘Human or vampire?’
‘Kind of neither, but also kind of both.’
She screws her face up. ‘I’m confused.’
‘He’s human,’ Florence says definitively. ‘But there are vampire contaminants in his blood that are causing these symptoms.’
‘So how do you fix it?’ Bram asks, concern grating at his voice.
I try to smile, but I’m not sure the movement translates to my face. ‘We don’t know.’
‘We’re working on it,’ Florence offers. ‘Cam and I are working with a specialist lab to try and get some answers. But it hasn’t been easy.’ She sighs, smoothing her skirt over her thighs. ‘No one’s familiar with this scenario so it’s been kind of hard knowing where to start.’
Bram runs a thumb across his jawline, his tell for when he’s pondering something. ‘Elias,’ he says, after a beat. ‘You must have seen something like this before– you’ve been around since the dawn of time.’
Elias shrugs. ‘Nope, sorry. It’s always been a binary, in my experience. You are, or you aren’t. No in-betweens.’
The tiny spark of hope that Bram had lit in me burns out immediately. ‘I guess I’m a mystery,’ I say, trying to swallow past the lump that’s starting to form in my throat. ‘I don’t even know how the vampire cells could have got into me.’
‘Abby, I assume,’ Elias says, raking a hand through his dark curls. ‘She’s the only vampire you’ve had close contact with.’
My brain stutters to a stop as I struggle to process the words that just came out of Elias’s mouth.
Abby?
‘I’m sorry, what?’
I always knew Abby had a bad vibe about her, but I thought that was just her personality. She’s avampire?
Elias blinks over at me lazily, like he hasn’t just casually lobbed a grenade into everything I thought my life was. ‘Isn’t she? Unless you’ve been with others we didn’t know about.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m not judging, man. Not my place.’
‘Abby’s a vampire?’ I’m trying to process this new information, but my brain is giving me nothing.
Bram snorts softly. ‘Er, yeah.’
I whip round to look at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I was trying to keep the emotion out of my voice but it sneaks in anyway. Bram throws his hands up defensively.
‘I thought you knew!’ he counters. ‘We had that whole conversation about her bleeding you dry.’
I actually do remember that conversation, but I absolutely did not realise that’s what he was trying to tell me. ‘I thought you meant, like, my time and energy. I thought you were just looking out for me.’
Bram winces. ‘I mean, I was. I was trying to be subtle ’cause there were humans about. I was literally trying to tell you she’d suck your blood until you had none left.’
Elias snorts a laugh next to him. ‘Looks like you were half right,’ he quips, before a hand comes from nowhere and pushes him off the end of the sofa.
‘Not the time, Elias,’ Sammi says, staring him down unapologetically as he clambers up off the floor. He grumbles something at her under his breath and moves to the other side of the room, out of arm’s reach. It never fails to entertain me that a centuries-old immortal being is a little scared of a five-foot-tall human, but Sammi tends to have that effect on people.
‘This is actually useful,’ Florence says, slipping her phone out of her bag and furiously typing a message. ‘I’mgoing to let Cam know. You don’t still have her phone number, do you?’
I shake my head. I remember the day I deleted it. Emmy and I did celebratory shots after we closed up the bar. I was hungover for two days.
‘I do.’