We were lying again, but this time under the covers, as the night was getting cooler.

"Your clan, your former clan, how did you actually get in touch with them?" I asked.

"They contacted me themselves, first in fifty-six. I wasn't interested. I realized I might need them about nine years later when..." I felt her searching for the right words as she placed her palm on my hand.

"...when I was starting to realize I was too different to continue the life I was leading."

I waited to see if she would continue.

"Twenty years went by, and I didn't age. My husband became suspicious, sensed that something was off about me. I tried to hint at something, tried to initiate him into what I had become, but... it just couldn't happen; he wouldn't accept it. In fact, he refused to even hear what I had to say. I left him three years later, and by then, he was almost afraid of me. I think he felt relieved. I loved him before it all went wrong. I loved the life I had. I taught at school, danced. Unfortunately, it lasted too briefly."

She shifted, and her hair tickled my chin. I moved my hands to touch her along the length of her arm.

"I needed help. A new identity, money. The clan provided that for me. I also needed people around me, companionship. But the vast majority of vampires are very different from humans. Many of them lose anything human in them, real life; they only desire advancement in the clan hierarchy, the benefits that come with it, power."

"That's not so different from humans."

"You don't seek power, benefits."

That was true.

"I tried to fit in, but it didn't quite work out."

Then she fell silent for a while.

"You didn't have children?" I asked.

"No. I think it's because I'm a vampire. I've never heard of a female vampire having children."

"The leader of the trio I killed told me he couldn't die, that he was born in eighteen thirty-six. He was fast, endured a lot, but," I pondered how to describe it, "he wasn't that hard to defeat."

I replayed the fight in my mind. I used what I knew about them and performed at the limit, or slightly beyond the limits of my abilities. Apparently, the awareness of who I was up against motivated me.

"Many of us are complacent," Agnieszka reflected aloud. "We rely on being stronger and faster than humans. Most of the time, it's enough. But sometimes, one of us vampires pays the price for encountering an ordinary person."

I noticed that when she talked about vampires, she used the term 'us,' and when referring to the clan she belonged to, it was 'they.'

"However, I have never heard of an older vampire perishing in a duel with a human. Vampires over half a century old are highly resilient from a human perspective. They survive typical mortal injuries – gunshot wounds, stabbings... as long as they have time and peace to recover."

"I'm not exactly a normal human," I reminded her. "I outperform humans. I thought that was clear to you by now!" I stroked her thigh and let my hand rest in her lap.

"You're confusing quantity with quality," she retorted, smirking.

"What about the one we encountered under the Red Rock?"

"You mean the gang from the van?" she asked.

"Yes."

"That was an old vampire. Three hundred, four hundred years, maybe more. The influence of the parasitic structure on the human body varies more with age. Some are faster, others more resistant, someone may have significantly better regenerative abilities than others. I tried to trace a pattern in it, but I couldn't. I had too little information. I was just standing too low."

"And how did you serve in the clan?"

I was asking personal questions, but I wasn't forcing her to answer. It seemed more like she enjoyed it.

"I facilitated connections with the outside world. Older vampires often have trouble understanding the rules of our time, so they delegate this task to the younger ones. I never had a problem with it, and I was in charge of handling matters that needed to be resolved strictly legally to avoid suspicion."

I pondered what this meant for the clan organization and for me. How to use this in the fight.

"And you? What about your shared past with Evelyn?" she brought me back from my thoughts.

I didn't feel like talking about it, but she had revealed so much herself that I didn't want to stay silent.

"We were lovers, and the pack really liked our relationship because it's rare for two werewolves to get together. Then we broke up, and I set out into the world."

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"Why?"

I wanted to talk even less about that, I was about to grumble unwillingly, but it turned into a genuine growl.

She turned and raised herself to look into my eyes.

"A real werewolf, I want to see the transformation too!"

I just shook my head at her.

"In everyday life, you seemed so rational and calm, but in bed..."

She bit my ear.

"Okay, okay, I didn't say anything," I retreated.

She laughed, but didn't turn back, waiting for an answer.

"Let's say that Evelyn's and my approaches to our sexual life turned out to be incompatible."

"That sounds quite stern and scholarly, but it's enough for me," she nodded.

Fine, this was behind me. I just don't like talking about some things.

"What reliably kills you? What is certain death?" I changed the topic.

If it bothered her, she didn't show it with the slightest movement. She simply lay on me as if I were a pillow and a blanket at the same time. I half-expected her to fall asleep.

"Beheading, beheading is always reliable," she spoke surprisingly after a longer pause. "Also, spinal cord separation, but the easiest is at the cervical vertebrae, so beheading."

"I don't have much experience with a sword," I pointed out.

"Then massive injuries. Severed arm, leg, a cut from hip to shoulder that opens the abdominal and thoracic cavities. Simply a large extensive injury, whose impact on the organism is too much for the parasite to neutralize and gradually eliminate."

"You seem to know your stuff," I noted.

"I studied biology, and later I was sent to university."

"By the clan?"

"Yes, they wanted a loyal doctor out of me. I tried, but unfortunately, it didn't work out. I was just too curious."

I waited to see if she wanted to reminisce further, but she fell silent.

"And what else did you find out?"

"I've seen vampires who survived a clean heart shot with a small-caliber bullet. And they hadn't even reached two centuries. They fell into some kind of trance protecting the brain from damage until the parasite in the heart repaired it again."

That sounded unbelievable.

"Do you think that parasite has its own intelligence?" I suggested.

"No. You can teach a neural network with thirty-six nodes a lot of things," she argued confidently. "It's just the survival instinct of the parasite."

I found it hard to believe.

"There are parasites that influence the host's nervous system to aid their own survival. The fluke Dicrocoelium Dendriticum needs to move from an ant's body to the digestive tract of ruminants as part of its life cycle."

"Well, cows don't usually eat ants," I reacted.

It caught my interest.

"Exactly, but it's more about sheep," she clarified. "The fluke probably knows that too. That's why it clones itself, a few of those clones infect the ant's nerve nodes; ants don't have a very large brain," she looked at me to see if I was following.

"Sure," I nodded.

"And then somehow it arranges for the ant to climb the tallest blade of grass nearby, bite into it, and hang there until the sun dries it out, or a sheep eats it."

"Or a cow," I didn't let myself be misled.

"Or a cow," she looked at me and bit me.

At first, I thought she just hinted at it as before, but then I realized that it really stung.

"You actually bit me!" I protested.

"I'm a vampire, did you forget?"

"Oh my God!"

"A werewolf shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain!" she laughed until she shook.

I couldn't help but smile with her.

"But a human is not an ant, a human doesn't have a couple of nerve nodes, but a brain with billions of nerve cells," I said when we calmed down.

"Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan. To survive, it needs to move from the nervous system of rodents, such as mice, to the organism of a feline predator. There, it creates another stage, cysts in the brain, in the muscles. To be able to move, it influences the brains of mice in a way that makes them take more risks. They take risks, and then cats eat them. But just the same way, this silly protozoan can influence our own psyche. People infected with toxoplasmosis take more risks and have measurably slower reflexes."

"So could big cats eat them more easily?" I asked.

"Well, maybe in the past," she shook her head. "Today, cars would probably run them over instead."

I didn't expect a car to be my final problem.

"And this creature, this parasite, is much more complex than some protozoan. It can have behavior correspondingly more complex."

"Whose goal is what?" I tried to encourage her to think further.

It seemed she had thought about the whole thing quite a bit.

"To survive."

"What does survival mean for the parasite?"

It wasn't entirely clear to me.

"Start a new life cycle, return in a larger number of individuals of the initial stage to the beginning of the host chain."

"And what could that mean for you, for vampires?"

"In the final stage, spores, seeds, eggs could be released from the oldest ones... but I've never observed anything like that, nor have I read or heard about it. Maybe it's all nonsense," I could hear her falling asleep as she spoke.

She slid aside, snuggled, and then there was only a quiet, regular breathing. I counted twelve breaths per minute. Well-trained athletes have fourteen in a resting state. I lightly felt the pulse on her neck. She didn't even move, just mumbled something in her sleep.

Thirty-eight. Significantly lower than normal. And she was about a century old. I put one hand on her hip, the other under my head, and closed my eyes. What's my resting pulse?

With that thought, I descended into dreams.