Page 101 of Fangs with Benefits

The sticky note is affixed to a Manilla envelope, which I slide from beneath the two books atop it. Inside are more handwritten notes scrawled on graph paper, things I’m not knowledgeable enough to decipher–equations and lists of ingredients, each with a note describing their properties. I don’t know what I’m looking at really until I flip to a yellowed page torn from a book. It’s a story written in Old Hungarian about an immortal being who meets a witch’s apprentice. The young apprentice poisons him, turning him mortal. A simple enough story, but Evangeline has underlined sentences, particularly about the concoction given to the immortal.

I squint at the story, putting it aside to puzzle over the rest of the folder’s contents.

‘I thought I’d find you here.’ Evangeline’s voice startles me from my reading as she sweeps into the lab. She pauses when she sees what I’m reading, eyes wide between me and the folder in my hands.

‘Sister,’ I begin, unable to formulate a coherent question or even a reasonable thought. I hold the story up. ‘What is this?’

‘Nothing,’ she says too quickly. Her voice has a forced casualty I recognise instantly.

‘Evangeline.’

She mimics my tone. ‘Elijah.’

‘Your research–you’ve been attempting to—’

She rushes towards me and cuts me off before I can speak it aloud. ‘Forget about this.’

Evangeline makes a grab for the folder, but I hold it out of her reach above her head.

‘Elijah, I mean it—’

‘Tell me!’ I slide away from her, folder still clutched in my hand. ‘What you’re researching, it’s—’

‘Dangerous, untested, not to mention illegal. We can’t speak of this.’

‘Don’t keep this from me,’ I plead.

‘You are exactly who it ought to be kept from,’ she says, all but confirming my suspicions about the nature of the work. The silence sits heavily between us.

‘Jellie, what have you done?’

My sister exhales a long breath and lets her shoulders slump.

‘Samara first approached me because she thought she’d found a key to unlocking the curse.’

I freeze, not breathing. The folder in my hand feels now like it might combust at any moment with the study she’s done. ‘What curse?’

Jellie’s face contorts, as if begging for me not to make her say it, but she must. What she’s implying is impossible, there’s never been—

‘Our curse, E,’ she says. ‘Vampirism.’

I have a fleeting memory of the feeling of having my breath knocked from me, the tight pain of contracted lungs after a fall off a horse’s back. It’s almost as if I can feel it again now.

‘There’s no breaking that curse,’ I say, the same thing I’ve always known, that everyone’s known. No matter how many witches have tried, none has been able to undo what was originally done–death comes for vampires only by removing the still hearts in our chests. Nothing short of that will do, and there’s certainly no going backwards. No making the sensitive organ beat again. No reversion.

‘I didn’t say breaking,’ she insists. ‘I said unlocking.’

I pace away down the length of the roof, then pace back to her side immediately. ‘Explain.’

‘We’ve always thought that the first vampire was made by a spell–an incantation–and that part may well be true, but Samara believes that it was transferred not by energy magic, but by a potion.’

I recoil at this concept. Potions are the lowest form of magic, usually seen as, if anything, the work of toxicologists or herbalists. Not real, true magic.

The thought of one of them having created all vampire-kind is unfathomable.

‘Samara and I have been working on it for years. We’ve created a potion, and I haven’t been able to test it, but I swear it will work, it’s just…’

Evangeline closes her mouth in a tight line.