Page 102 of Fangs with Benefits

‘You would be killed for discovering this,’ I say and she nods. ‘And you leave your research out for anyone to discover? Do you have a death wish?’

I throw the folder back on her desk, as if even holding it might be my own end. There are council members on property now, ones who would burn this lab to the ground with the pair of us strapped to tables inside if they knew she’d been working on this.

‘They suspect nothing. And it doesn’t matter because it’s fruitless. The potion is untestable. I know there are vampires who would like to be human, few though they may be, but it’s not safe. The potion is just as likely to kill them as it is to turn them human.’ Jellie shakes her head. ‘It’s just a hypothesis.’

‘How does the potion work?’ I ask. Her head snaps in my direction, concern written all over her face.

‘You can’t take it,’ she breathes.

‘I’m just curious,’ I assure her, a half-truth.

Jellie eyes me warily for a full minute before nodding.

‘Most potions are consumed orally, or olfactorily, but Samara found a tradition of injecting potions like you might a poison.’

‘How?’

‘You know–blade, needle, dipped dart, the usual suspects. But her belief is that everything revolves around the heart.’ Evangeline presses a finger against the left side of her chest where the organ sits unbeating. ‘We haven’t had the opportunity to test it–I don’t want to take it, and I wouldn’t risk anyone else. Plus, if the council found out we’d probably be killed in short order, so we’ll likely never know.’

We spend two minutes in the silent lab, me staring at her piles of papers representing hours and hours of research for something I’ve never let myself dream of.

I shouldn’t ask it of her, I know it will only hurt her, but now that the possibility exists in my brain, I know I’ll never be able to quiet it. I whisper into the silence, as if speaking my greatest wish too loudly will burn us both: ‘Let me be the one to test it.’

‘Elijah, no,’ Evangeline says, her voice breaking.

I rise from her desk and grip her hand with new urgency. ‘Please, Evangeline, you know I’ve longed for nothing else so much as I’ve longed for this.’

‘For her?’ she asks.

Molly’s bright eyes flash in my mind, making my chest ache.

‘For me,’ I tell her truthfully. ‘I want to taste food again, to bask in sunlight instead of retreat from it, to swim in the sparkling lake I used to watch Ada in from the shadows–I want to fear and revel in the inevitability of my mortality, I want to hold her like we might die in the morning, because we might! And then I want to grow old, as old as I can, wrinkles covering sallow skin, cataracts on my eyes, joints weakening.’

‘I can’t do it,’ she says. ‘Don’t make me try.’ Evangeline has tears in her eyes to match my own blurring my vision, both tinged red with blood.

‘I want to live, Evangeline. I want sunburn, and a cold, an ache in my back after moving boxes into a creaky old house that we’ll get splinters in our fingers trying to fix up. I want to teach a child about the world and how it can be both frightening and blessedly beautiful.’

Evangeline’s chest jumps with a sob, and she holds onto me as tightly as I hold onto her, like we both might dissolve otherwise. Over four hundred years as my sister, my closest confidant, the only person I could ask this of, the only person smart enough to have figured out the impossible.

‘I want to live,’ I tell her again. ‘I want to live.’

‘I can’t watch you grow old, brother. Can’t watch you die. I don’t want a world you’re not in.’

‘Jellie…’

‘Not to mention the potion could kill you!’ Her every emotion is spread across her skin–the fear, the urgency, the distress at this request, the biggest thing I could ask of her. ‘It’s not tested, it might not even work.’

‘Isn’t that just the thing, though? The risk? The thing that makes mortality so tangible? I could take your cure and die tonight or become human and die tomorrow, or die of old age, disease, a car crash–and that’s just it, isn’t it? Humans know they could die at any time and yet what choice do they have but to live?’

‘It would kill me, Elijah. Don’t ask this of me.’

‘You’re tough,’ I tell her. She always has been. More than Gregory, more than me, more than anyone I’ve known.

‘You would give it up?’ she asks.

Would I give up my unending eternity for a chance to feel something real? Real stakes. Great pain, fear, heavy grief, and the unknown? Isn’t it the bitter that makes living more sweet? Aren’t the lows the keys to greater joy?

‘I’ve had a good run,’ I say. ‘Not as good as yours, but fine enough.’