During the morning report in the conference hall of the clinic, we discussed the cases of last night, the therapy of the more complex ones, drank bland coffee, and handed over the shifts in the sectors to our day colleagues.
I decided to walk straight to my house, although with the official flying carpet it would take me no more than a minute. Usually, after such a night I am dead-tired, I throw myself on the carpet and it leaves me in front of my front door in a half-asleep state, in where I can barely hit open the lock, I undress in the hall with the mechanical movements of a sleepwalker and drop my body in the bedroom next to my wife who is a singer in a nightclub and so comes home just before me.
Today, however, I felt unusually energetic, maybe the wonderful summer outside was the reason for that. Like most of the inhabitants of the Crossroads, I am a child of darkness, the regime of the whole city is subject to the rule of "sleep during the day, party at night," and now it was strange to hear the lone noise of footsteps on the stone pavement. The creatures - humans, and non-humans - slept in their cool homes, there were no human-cars or flying carpets going about, I felt like I was alone in the neighbourhood but I liked it.
I stopped at a fountain to soak my lips in water, then took a ‘Black Oger’ package from my shirt pocket and lit it.
I smoked the cigarette on the lawn in front of my house, extinguished the butt, and tossed it into the metal trash can with a playful gesture. I unlocked the door and walked in, the summer heat of the early morning giving way to the cool caress of the air-conditioned room. I took off my shirt and linen pants, left only in boxer shorts, went to the bathroom to run some water and brush my teeth, then stepped into the reddish darkness of the bedroom.
The heavy curtains that cover the windows and that my wife Lucy is in love with are the colour of fresh blood, and on particularly sunny days like today, the feeling is fantastic. It's like entering through the entrance of a magical cave.
Lucy lay on one side, her golden hair, now copper, scattered around her body like a carpet of autumn leaves. I stared at her exotic traits, which hinted at the genetic material of her forest ancestors.
In the Community, like most places in the modern world, there are not many forest areas left, but the beauty of the fairies has been inherited in their urban cousins. Perhaps in years to come, this strange and foreign beauty in itself will dissolve into the ordinary, slightly impersonal features of the human majority, but I would like to believe that despite the uncaring logic of genetics, it will still be preserved.
I fell in love with Lucy the moment I saw her on stage at the nightclub. Several professors, luminaries in medicine from the Burg Central, had come to our clinic for an exchange of experience, and after a whole week of hard work, we took them out to relax on Saturday night. I admit that we did in our heads quite decently, we did exactly what the locals call alcohol tourism, we drove into the heart of the city on the street, which has is slang for the name "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and began to alternate restaurants on the left and right, in each we tried to consume maximum amounts of alcohol. It is a well-known fact that doctors know how to drink enormously, and although my colleagues and I did not have titles, we did not yield in ‘amount of Alcohol consumed’ to the persons from Burg Central in our drunken adventures.
By the time we got to Shelley's club, I was about to pass out and my throat felt like it was on fire, but one of the professors had just fallen asleep and was hanging on the backs of his two colleagues like a rag.
We drank beer in frost-covered mugs and garnished them with shots with exotic names, when the lighting, already dim, disappeared completely. I remember swearing because I couldn't aim the drink at my mouth correctly, I ended up spilling some all over myself and even chocked myself and started coughing.
A few coughs later, golden light flooded the stage, young women in top hats, white shirts fastened with red belts, and black trousers came out on either side of her, clutching torches with fiery embers coming out of them, and began to dance all around her and the fire which had appeared in the middle of the stage in a brief moment of darkness. I admit it was quite impressive and enchanting. The fires spread with a soft crack, and sparks danced in the air like fireflies. Girls with white hair, white shirts, and red bow-ties on their white skirts came out to join the others. The air smelled of love or it was the alcohol speaking. Then it was dark again, not as dark due the smouldering torches and fire on the stage, and then she appeared, Lucy, my beautiful Veela with an angelic voice, and the spotlight enveloped her in a cloud of light. A melody pulled from a flute sounded. Her perfect voice sounded throughout the room, her white hands moved in front of her body, and the most amazing dance I had ever seen began. I watched her perform dozens of times after that, but it never managed to feel quite like the first time. I felt the whole barrel of alcohol evaporate from my veins in seconds, and at that moment I achieved absolute sobriety and I realized that I wanted to share my life with her.
The memory invaded my head so vividly that I felt a frantic urge to kiss her. I leaned over her, touched her marble-white cheek with my lips, Lucy muttered something in her sleep, and tried to turn to the other side. I pulled away from her so as not to wake her up completely.
And right then, I was hit with a heavy object on the back of my head, after which I lost consciousness ...
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I don't know how long I spent unconscious, probably a few minutes, but when I struggled to open my eyes and focus, I saw that I was still in the bedroom, but Lucy was gone. My sensations resembled waking up after heavy drinking, and the surgeon inside me unmistakably recognized the symptoms of a concussion. I ran the fingers of my right hand along the back of my skull, but apart from the egg-sized lump, I didn't feel the blood sticking, which was good news. My head turned out to be hardy enough, a good thing to know if I decide to get hit again.
"Dr. Alistair Chambers. For friends, just ‘Alistair’. Specialties - General Surgery, Comparative Anatomy of Mythological Creatures. Knight of the Human Oath. The latter, of course, is a little joke of mine with which I'm trying to lighten the dreary atmosphere in here…”
The figure who leaned over me as he spoke these words was wrapped in a suit of gleaming reflective foil, and the voice behind the square sun-protecting helmet came out muffled and hoarse like a man with a sore larynx.
I swore in my head. Only one creature could walk in the greatest summer heat, decorated in this absurd way because daylight was detrimental to their skin. A vampire.
The enmity between the human race and vampires dates back to antiquity, but over time, the peaceful members of their race, who preferred to meet their needs only with animal blood, had learned to coexist with humans. By the way, this was the situation as well with other strange creatures, which appeared as a result of various evolutionary branches over the centuries or a product of mutations after the Last War. Information about the settlement of vampires in the Crossroads was found in documents from about five centuries ago, but our knowledge of their physiology began to accumulate only in the last fifty years when scientists from the Burg Parallel Institute were able to isolate the cause of their special condition - a virus. Similar to the Rabies virus responsible for madness in animals.
Vampire populations everywhere were extremely conservative and closed off, I can safely say that in this feature they competed with the most radical religious sects known in the Multi-boreal Community. Before that period, doctors did not even have their permission and, consequently, the right to perform autopsies on their bodies for scientific purposes, so many details about the virus, which they obviously called the V-virus, were still unclear.
I myself am not well acquainted with the subject, in my time at the Faculty of Medicine vampiriology was a new and avant-garde specialty, which was studied for half a semester without even taking an exam in it. I have the most general knowledge, sufficient for my work as a surgeon, the V-virus is neurotropic, localized in the cells of the brain and spinal cord, manipulating the nervous system of the infected and turning him into an aggressive creature with a developing attraction to blood, hematophilia.
It is found mostly in the salivary glands, saliva, and, of course, in the blood, but is also found in some organs such as the kidneys and spleen. The mechanisms are not known, but it leads to extreme degradation of the skin pigment melanin and causes extremely severe secondary albinism, which is the cause of intolerance to sunlight and painful burns of the skin in direct contact with it.
In conclusion, I will mention the most unique property of the V-virus, it somehow slows down the metabolism of the infected organism to an extent that stretches the aging process over time, and life expectancy can reach three hundred years. Compared to the average life expectancy of about seventy years, this was near outright immortality. End of the lecture.
With a heavy sigh, I ask "Where is my wife?"
"Patience, Dr. Chambers! Or just Alistair? Can't I call you that in the hope that in the short time of our cooperation we will be able to become friends?”
I don't bother to respond to this sarcastic demonstration of superiority. As he has a tight grip over my figurative ‘balls’. Still there’s a reason humans and non-humans don’t usually hunt doctors.
"My name is Jay, excuse me for the synthetic appearance I present to you, but as you probably guessed it was the only way possible to move during the day. However, the inconvenience of the fridge-suit cannot be avoided because time is pressuring me, Alistair. Now, I will give you a brief run-down of instructions and I promise you that if you follow them strictly, you will forget about your new friend by tomorrow.”
The name didn't mean anything to me. As I have already mentioned, I knew the bandit leaders around, not their entire gangs.
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"One, Fuck you. Two, I want to know where my wife is! I want to make sure she's safe and then I'll think about it.”
I understood that I am not the one in a favourable position to set conditions at all, but on the other hand, it could hardly get worse if I showed a little backbone.
“Alistair, don't think of yourself as special, you were just our first choice and we can easily replace you! For now, you will have to be satisfied with my honest words that your wife Lucy is fine. And so, in essence, we needed an employee from the clinic for mythological creatures, if possible a doctor…”
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Lying in the bedroom, still soaked with the discreet, slightly sweet scent of Lucy's perfume, I smoked another cigarette while thinking. I repeated the conversation Jay and I had over and over again, trying to find some meaning. The complex combination of all the resources involved in it, the rather unusual movement of the vampires during the day, the kidnapping of my wife and what they made me do tomorrow night, led me to the conclusion that something big was going on in The Crossroads.
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"Do you know what this is, Archie?" A glass cylinder appeared in the vampire's palm, and he held it up to my eyes.
A standard five-milligram vial with the "Ag" symbol engraved on it.
"Of course I know," I said, trying to sound more cheerful than I felt. “My pharmacology exam was a long time ago, but I did take it with honours. The suspension of microscopic silver particles in a liquid medium called silver water has many applications it is used in the treatment of certain skin diseases, conjunctivitis in newborns, and, of course, in burns, with which a vampire should be well acquainted with, right Jay?”
“Again you try to be witty, but behind those efforts, I can sense your fear!”
“You should probably fear the guy who saves lives, including probably yours, for dinner.” I muttered under my breath but I knew he was right and he knew I knew it.
Lucy was everything to me and the fear I was experiencing right now was driving me crazy! Not afraid that I would lose my own life, I know doubtful cause I truly do like you know, being alive and all, but in the past, my life has often hung in the balance. I was afraid of the insidiousness of the vampire, I did not believe in his honesty, I did not believe that after doing everything he wanted to, he would have left my wife alive. I, of course, do not believe I would let him go either after trying to drag me into a mess. Again, don’t mess with doctors, we can be particularly creative to people we don’t like.
But at the moment someone else was playing the music, and I, clenching my teeth in frustration, had to dance to their tune for now…
"All right, all right," I groaned amicably, "I admit that I’m a bit nervous and when I am nervous I usually rant a bit, so please proceed.”
"That's what I want, Alistair! We clarified that you are familiar with the contents of the vial, which I did not doubt for a moment and now comes the second question: Do you know who I work for?”
And this was also not a challenge for my intellectual abilities.
Every vampire in Crossroads was, in one way or another, associated with Ghamborz, officially the owner of the largest chain of hematological stores, ‘HematOpolis’, which offers a variety of animal blood in the city, and unofficially a major player in the illegal market of human blood, a business that had given him a pretty decent fortune.
I blinked and remembered a face. One that now appeared before my eyes, weak and ascetic, yellowish like paraffin on a candle, surrounded by straight shiny and black hair descending to my back; eyes, black as a raven's wing irises; deep furrows, starting on both sides of the humped nose and ending in the corners of the thin raspberry-colored lips; the dazzling white teeth that revealed when he smiled, and he was almost always smiling on his nightly visits to our clinic.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Jay's finger appeared in front of his sunscreen mask.
"Sh-sh-sh-! You don't have to say it out loud, you know the name, I'm sure. My master is very saddened by the fact that last night you managed to save the person who arrived at your clinic with a gunshot wound from a silver bullet. My master knows that you are on duty at the clinic again tomorrow night and wants this vial to get inside your patient's hydration solution system…”