Chapter 2

Reyna walked through the door.

The admin escorted her down the long white corridor studded with white doors and past starkly dressed administrators standing like ducks in a row.

“He’s plainly unfit. We’ll have to turn him aside,” a male admin murmured to another as they passed.

“Agreed. Let’s speak with the doctor…” the woman responded.

Whatever she said after that was lost to Reyna. She craned her neck in their direction. “Are some people not picked to work for Visage?”

The admin didn’t even turn around or acknowledge her question.

She knew it was possible that people were turned away. Everyone had heard horror stories about blood diseases and worse. The blood donors at Visage were supposed to help control vampiric urges, or so they said, not make them worse.

Reyna bit her lip and tried to slow her breathing. She couldn’t have a blood disease. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t even fathom it. She needed the money too bad for anything to go wrong. She was determined to pass and get an assignment working for a vampire. She didn’t care how many times she had to master her fear of needles and blood. In the end, it would all be worth it.

“This way,” the administrator said.

Reyna followed her around the next corner. Her arm itched all over again and she had to resist the urge to scratch. She steeled herself, pushing her shoulders back, and refused to let her dark gaze stray from the direction she was being led.

They took a right and the admin stopped in front of one of the plain white doors. She removed an identification card from her pocket with her name and picture on it and swiped it over a glass screen by the handle.

“Patient identity?” the machine chirped.

“Number four hundred and ninety-two. Miss Reyna Carpenter,” the woman said.

“Identity cleared.”

Reyna watched in awe. The Warehouse District didn’t have technology this advanced. Hell, machines everyone had taken for granted before the collapse—cellphones, laptops, cars—weren’t even available to most people. Voice-activated locks were practically from another world.

The lock clicked, and the woman pushed the door open unceremoniously. The interior of the room looked like any hospital room. Though she didn’t remember the last time she had been able to afford a real hospital visit. A patient bed sat in the corner, covered with white sanitation paper. High-tech equipment lined the walls. Reyna had no clue of their purpose and hoped that she wouldn’t find out today.

The administrator stepped inside and fiddled with a few tools on a wheeled cart. She glanced up at Reyna, realizing that she hadn’t moved from her position in the doorway.

“Take a seat.” She gestured to the bed.

Reyna took a deep breath, reminding herself of all the reasons she had decided to do this, then walked inside and sank down onto the bed. The paper crinkled underneath her, and she cringed at the harsh lights. Everything smelled like plastic and disinfectant. Reyna had thought the waiting room was the most unwelcoming room she had ever been in. She was wrong.

The woman strapped a band around Reyna’s arm, clipped her finger in a large plastic clothespin-type device, and stuck a giant thermometer in her mouth. She stuck a stethoscope under the band and squeezed a bag that inflated the band and constricted Reyna’s arm. Reyna tried to relax, but she wasn’t successful.

“Good,” the administrator said. She nodded her head as the bag deflated. “Vitals all look good.”

Reyna breathed a sigh of relief.

The woman spoke to herself as she entered information into the computer system. “Temperature—97.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Acceptable. Pulse—72 beats per minute. Acceptable. Blood Pressure—102 over 65. Acceptable/Low.”

She turned away from her computer to face Reyna. “Family history?”

Reyna stilled her shaking hands. She needed to keep it together. She could talk about her parents. This was possible.

“My parents are, um…dead.” The words sounded hollow.

It had been thirteen years since they died in the car accident. Since she and her brothers had moved in with their uncle in the city. Since the world had gone to utter shit.

“Yes, but any diseases or chronic illnesses?” the woman asked. Her voice was flat. No compassion in the Visage hospital ward.

“Breast cancer on my mother’s side. That’s all I know,” she whispered.

“Are you often ill?”

“No.”

“When was the last time you were admitted to the hospital?”

Reyna wracked her brain. She couldn’t even remember. “Probably when I was a baby.”

The woman gave her a searching look. “Any other treatments?”

“Nothing life-threatening. Just a cold. Local medical practitioners helped when we could afford it.” She stared the woman straight in the eye when she said it. No one could afford a hospital stay. This woman had to know it. She wasn’t going to act ashamed of her life.

The admin tapped out a few more notes and then withdrew a needle and a few small vials from a drawer. Reyna’s stomach dropped out, and the color drained from her body.

Reyna held her breath as the woman placed a tourniquet around her right arm, swabbed the crook of her elbow, and then without warning pricked the vein in her arm. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to calm her rapidly accelerating heartbeat. She suddenly felt nauseated, weak, and clammy. Fear pricked at the back of her neck.

She glanced down at her arm and gagged. Bright red blood flowed out of the vein and into the little tube. Pain throbbed in her elbow, but she couldn’t look past the blood. It made her stomach turn, and she had to physically look away until the administrator was finished.

After she removed the needle, the woman placed a Band-Aid over the hole and then gave her a cup to pee in.

“The doctor will be in with you shortly. Just leave the cup in the compartment in the restroom.” The woman pointed to a nearly invisible doorway to her right. “Come right back here once you’re through. The doctor will be with you soon.”

“Thank you,” Reyna said hollowly.

At least the worst was over.

Reyna tried not to think about the blood loss or needles. She needed to think about eating right, sending money to her brothers, and finally living a real life again. It wasn’t as if this was permanent. She could get out at any time. She could work for a couple months as a blood donor and then quit if she wanted. Just enough to get her back on her feet…for her to find something else.

She left her sample in the restroom and then returned to wait for the doctor. At least the bed was more comfortable than the chairs in the waiting room. Honestly, it was more comfortable than everything else they had at home too.

When she had been younger—before the economic collapse and her parents’ deaths—she’d had a two-story house with a white picket fence, a green lawn, the whole nine yards. Then the accident happened, and she and her brothers had to say goodbye to their home and move in with their uncle in the city. All he was good for was drinking and gambling away their inheritance. He had been that way ever since their aunt had left him. Three years later, the economy crashed. He lost everything, and no one thought twice about him abandoning them when everything else fell to shit.

A knock at the door pulled her from her dark thoughts. The doctor strode inside with a clipboard. She was a tall wiry woman with black groomed hair held back in a ponytail and dark emotionless eyes. Like everyone else who worked there, she clearly didn’t think smiling was part of bedside manners.

There was something about this woman that was…other.

Vampire.

The word slithered up in Reyna’s conscious and she recoiled away from the thought. It made no sense considering her current predicament, but she couldn’t help it. Deeply ingrained fear seemed to stick with her no matter her decision to work with them.

“Four hundred and ninety-two. Miss Reyna Carpenter. Five foot four inches. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Caucasian. O negative. Correct?”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“Good. I have to make sure that you fit all the parameters.” She looked up at Reyna over the rim of her thick black-rimmed glasses. “You’re not pregnant?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is there any way you could be pregnant?” she repeated.

“I don’t think so.”

“There is either a chance or there isn’t.”

She thought back to the last month and cringed. “It’s possible, but not probable.”

The doctor sighed as if Reyna was inconveniencing her. “When you enrolled with Visage, you claimed not to be pregnant. We won’t take the risk of endangering a young life. I will order a pregnancy test since you’re not certain.”

“Um…yes,” she said softly.

This shouldn’t have even been a problem. When she had applied for the position at Visage, she had been in the off-again stage with her boyfriend, Steven, who worked with her brothers. There was no reason for her to believe that anything would happen between when she had turned in her application and when she had received the information that she could come into Visage.

The problem was that Steven was charismatic as hell. He was cute and funny and charming. He always said the right things. Every time she walked away somehow he would come right back in and sweep her off her feet. A couple weeks ago, he had convinced her to meet him at the end of his shift, after the warehouses closed down for the night. And she had fallen for it all over again. Two weeks of a whirlwind of passion and then a big “fuck you” at the end of it. She had just been a good time while he waited out another girl. He was seeing someone else now. The end.

Steven had made her feel like a used-up whore. No better than the run-down trash that they lived in. When Visage had approved her for testing shortly afterward, she had felt like it made sense. At least she would get paid for selling her body.

The door opened unexpectedly once again. “Excuse me. Dr. Trainer, you’ve been called to the east corridor. I was reassigned to number four hundred and ninety-two.”

The doctor faced the open door in shock. “What?”

“East corridor,” the man said.

The door opened wider, and Reyna got her first glimpse of the man. He was tall with a slightly more disheveled appearance than the doctor she had been dealing with. Though what he lacked in proper grooming, he made up for with the severity of his features. He seemed excessively stern and the haphazard state of his attire only gave off the impression of a mad scientist.

“Right. Of course, Dr. Washington,” Dr. Trainer said once she realized who it was. “Here is her file.”

They swapped information, and then Dr. Trainer left her alone with the new doctor.

“Welcome, Miss Carpenter. I’m Dr. Roger Washington.”

He extended his hand. Reyna looked down at it skeptically. No one had addressed her or acknowledged her as anything more than a subject to be tested and questioned. What was this, bad cop, good cop?

“Hi,” she said softly. She shook his hand once. It was chilling and made her shiver.

“After reviewing your profile, we’ve elected you to be a trial subject in our new program. Your blood type and specific history, build, and biology make you a great candidate for this new venture. I’m the head of the team, and we’re looking for interested participants. You understand that anything we speak about here is completely classified, yes?”

“Sure.”

A new program? Classified information? She didn’t know what any of that meant, but she was willing to hear more about this. It sounded like they wanted her, and if they wanted her badly enough, then maybe she could get more money out of them.

“For some time, Visage has been considering going to a more streamlined system of employment for our human subjects,” Dr. Washington explained.

“Streamlined…how?”

The man smiled, and her skin turned ashen. Sharp canines gleamed in the high contrast lighting. She tried to swallow but felt like her mouth was stuffed with cotton balls. She knew he was a vampire. She had known that both doctors were, but suddenly it felt different. This wasn’t some person in the papers or on billboards, but a real live vampire that could reach out and touch her.

He seemed to assess her discomfort and closed his mouth so that the stern expression was back in place. “You do realize, Miss Carpenter, that the company you wish to be employed by is run by vampires, and that if you are selected for this, you will live with vampires?”

“Yes, I’m well aware,” she said, regaining her composure.

“Good.” He nodded. “Now back to what I was saying. We’re working toward a more streamlined system. The current one places a subject with a Sponsor for one month. After that month, you are granted a week off to recuperate, and then you rotate to another blood match Sponsor. As an O negative subject, you would meet with a group of O negative Sponsors in your assigned region. The system then perpetually rotates. Everything is carefully monitored by Visage so that it is safe and orderly.”

Reyna had read all about this on the pamphlet when she had originally applied. Vampires needed to drink the blood of their individual blood type human match to continue functioning at high cognitive levels. Before when they drank from just anyone, the blood fed them only on a completely basic and primal level. However, it didn’t provide anything more than that. It contaminated their systems and made them corrupt, lethal, and animalistic. For generations, vampires had plagued the darkness, feeding on whatever or whomever they could get ahold of. Reyna couldn’t even fathom a world without vampires—lurking in the dark or out in the open as they were now.

When Visage came forward in the midst of the economic collapse, they promised a new horizon for humans and vampires alike. Visage wanted humans and vampires to coexist in a mutually beneficial atmosphere. Thus came the blood type cure. They registered all the known vampires and offered humans money to become their blood donors.

“How is the new system different?” she asked.

The doctor smiled once more, and her fingers dug into the paper on the bed. “Now the Sponsor requests a blood type match and a certain profile, and the subject stays with the Sponsor…permanently.”