Chapter 21 - Veronica

"This is so exciting !" Rosa says, bustling around the lab. I've only been here for an hour, and so far, Maisie and Rosa have run every sort of test on me I can imagine. They've drawn my blood, tested my reflexes, made me run on a treadmill, seen how much I could lift—it was astonishing to them both—and Maisie quietly commented on how the scar on my palm had healed surprisingly quickly.

"Here," Maisie says, handing me something, and when I glance down at it, I shake my head, tears coming to my eyes with how hard I'm laughing.

"No," I say, and when Rosa looks back, she starts laughing, too.

"What?" Maisie says, "It's routine!"

"Oh my god," I say, "you're really going to make me pee in a cup right now?"

"It's routine!" she cries again, which sends Rosa and me into another fit of giggles.

"What can you find with the pee test you can't get from a blood draw?" Rosa wheezes, but Maisie has crossed her arms and is pouting, so I hop off the cot, promising to return quickly with their sample.

Peeing in a cup has always been difficult for me. As a traveling nurse, I had to complete on-the-spot drug tests for a lot of different hospitals. There's just something inherently gross and humiliating about it. No matter how much water I drank, I would always find myself trying to relax, stuck between feeling like I was going to pee my pants and feeling like I would never be able to go again.

But now, for some reason, it comes easily, and I seal it up, setting it in the little alcove so I don't have to carry it out. When I return to the lab, Maisie and Rosa are nowhere to be seen, so I sit back down on the cot, grabbing Rosa's magazine from her station and flipping through it to pass the time.

More and more over the past few days, I've found myself picturing a life here in Rosecreek, almost against my will. In all the places I've visited, I've never fantasized about moving to one of them, and it always sparks a little bit of anxiety inside me. While driving through town this morning in Percy's Bronco, I saw a little blue house for sale, and thought to myself casually that maybe we could take a look at it.

Except I'm not staying. I'm leaving as soon as Percy doesn't need me here anymore. Even though he wasn't feeling symptoms, we did a blood transfusion after we woke up this morning and before we took off in our own separate directions. Percy will go on some mission with Ado, and I will come to the lab and let Maisie and Rosa poke and prod at me until they have all the data their little hearts desire.

We'd woken up tangled up in one another, my legs between his, him behind me, his breath on my neck, my hips pressing back into his. After another round of mind-blowing sex, he'd tugged me into his chest and held me like that until I insisted we had to get up. Then, I insisted we do a blood transfusion. It had already been several days since the last one, and I didn't want something happening to him while he was out in the field, away from me.

While I was setting up the line from my arm to his, I caught him watching me closely, his teeth working on his lower lip.

What? I'd sent, which made him smile.

Nothing , he sent back.

Now, Maisie and Rosa come hurrying back into the room, laughing together at something. When they see me sitting there, they break out into laughter again.

"What?" I ask over the sound of it.

"Nothing," Rosa wheezes, "Maisie just said she bet you were an expert pee-er, since you did all that travel nursing."

"I've thought about doing that," Maisie says, on a sigh. "I just don't think there's that kind of need for a paranormal nurse, and I forget about human stuff so easily."

I stare at her, remembering the entire situation. What she just said is the kind of sentence I can expect to hear for the rest of my life if I stay in Rosecreek.

When I think about it again, I shake my head—I am not staying in Rosecreek. No matter how much I love the people here, no matter how the lake makes my heart flutter in the mornings, just as the sun is coming up, sparkling on the waves. It doesn't matter.

This is not my life.

"Well," Rosa says, pulling out a chair at her station. "I cannot wait to poke around in your blood work and take a look at what's going on there. I think the analysis should be done—"

She looks up at the screen, its light shining over her face, and stops midsentence at whatever she sees there. Maisie, curious, walks over as well, leaning down to take a look. Whatever she sees has her standing up and putting her hands to her mouth, glancing at me.

"Do you know?" she breathes, and my heart starts to race.

"Know what?" I ask, already feeling lightheaded.

"Veronica," Rosa says, her voice a whisper. "It's just—"

Unable to take it any longer, I walk over to the screen, turning it so I can look at it. My eyes scan over the figures hungrily—everything looks good. I'm healthy—cholesterol within the recommended zones—"

I stop when I see it, my eyes zooming in on the number, my heart absolutely hammering in my chest. I let go of the screen and take a zombie-like step backward, hands up, palms out, shaking my head.

"Veronica—" Maisie says, but I turn on my heel and sprint out of the room, shaking my head all the way. It can't be true. It can't.

I'm so pre-occupied walking out of the compound that I slam into someone, hard, and when I look up, I see it's Rafael, holding his head and wincing. The sight of him still sets off alarm bells in my head, but I've grown somewhat used to his face, so a mixture of panic and familiarity takes over me when I look at him.

"Oh, hey," he says, "sorry, Aris asked me to meet him at the compound, said it was this way? Is this the right way?"

"Yes," I say, gesturing to the building. "You can go through the door right inside, if he's with you or given you clearance.'

"Hey," Rafael says, dipping his head down to meet my eyes. Despite my experience with him, being so afraid that he was my stalker for so long, I can't deny the feeling I get that we're the same, like he said. "Is something wrong? What were you doing in there?"

"I was—Maisie and Rosa have been poking around, doing some tests on me," I breathe, trying to seem normal. I need to go somewhere, be alone to process my thoughts, but the entire town is buzzing with tourists right now. Even the street outside Percy's apartment is full, and humans are wandering in and out to buy baked goods.

Did I just refer to people as humans .

"Well," Rafael says, taking my arm and guiding us away from the sidewalk so a throng of tourists can push past us. "I'm glad I caught you, actually."

I blink at him, waiting for the shoe to drop, for this to be the moment he puts a bag over my head and drags me out of there, like an actual stalker would.

"There's more to this…situation, but I didn't tell you everything the other night, in front of Percy, because I didn't know how much you wanted him to know."

"That's rich, coming from you," I say, referencing the fact that I thought he was my stalker for so long.

"Not because you don't trust him, or that you trust him less than me," Rafael says, glancing around us furtively, "but because he's a shifter."

"So are you."

"Yes, but I'm a shifter with a little bit of vampire in me," he says, "and that means I can understand your situation better."

"The situation of being immune?"

"Veronica," Rafael says, sighing again as though he's come to his wit's end. "If Maisie and Rosa keep poking around, looking too closely at your blood samples, collecting data on you—they're eventually going to find out the truth."

"Do you always have to beat around the bush, or can you ever just get to the point."

"Veronica, if they do any gene mapping, see the way your exposure to the venom has started to alter your genetic code, they're going to realize that you're a vampire."

I let out a snort loud enough that a woman pushing a stroller moved away from us. My eyes track the stroller, my stomach churning, hard.

"I know it seems hard to believe," he says, "but I've met with every single person whose mother was attacked during that same time period. Yours was the earliest one in the pregnancy. It seems the sooner it happens, the more time you have to develop with the venom present. You developed with the tools to whip up a vampire's genetic code, but without the actual need to. That meant that, when you were born, it was as a human, but as soon as you were introduced to the venom, those latent proteins with the map for the vampire genome got to work, and have been updating you ever since."

I glance at my palm, and think of the strength, how Percy and I were able to be together, and I was fine.

"It's impossible," I breathe. Just like everything in this fucking town. It is impossible, yet, somehow, all of it is happening to me.

"Veronica, I need you to listen to me," he says, voice low. "What I said about you being a unique threat is true. You will be very valuable to them, if they can get you to join up. You are, essentially, an example of what the perfect vampire would be. All the benefits, none of the drawbacks. Super strength, immunity to disease, ability to tell when someone is telling the truth, all without having to drink the blood of humans to get those things."

"So?" I ask, dumbly, my brain feeling like total mush with all the information I've had to absorb in the past ten minutes.

"So, you need to be careful," he says, "watch your back."

Just then, Aris comes walking down the street.

"You made it!" he says, clapping Rafael on the back and leading him inside. "Veronica," he says, smiling at me, before ducking into the building.

I can't breathe, I can't think. Rafael just told me that the vampires are going to be looking for me, trying to get me to "join up," and I can't even focus on that. Because there is something much bigger, something much more important happening. Because my entire world is about to change.

Because in the lab, leaning down and looking at the screen, my blood lab reports showed, clear as day, that I was pregnant.