Chapter 3

Vivienne's POV:

The sound dragged me from sleep like nails on glass—human voices, too many of them, shrieking and laughing with the kind of drunken abandon that made my jaw clench even before I opened my eyes. Music thudded through the forest, bass notes carrying through the still night air with a persistence that would have been merely annoying to a human but was outright painful to someone with hearing as acute as mine. I pressed my palms against my temples and sat up slowly, the silk of my gray-and-black striped pajamas whispering against my skin as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.

The bedroom was dark, illuminated only by the faint moonlight filtering through the heavy curtains I'd drawn hours ago, but I could see perfectly well—another gift of my condition, though right now it felt more like a curse as I caught sight of the antique clock on my nightstand. Nearly eleven at night. I'd gone to bed this morning around four, exhausted from a full night of failed experiments, and the oppressive heat of summer had kept me in a drowsy, restless state for most of the day. The long daylight hours and stifling humidity had been wearing on me lately, making it harder to get proper rest even when I did manage to sleep, and I'd finally succumbed to the exhaustion and slept for nearly nineteen hours straight. Now these idiots had woken me with their party somewhere out in the forest beyond my grounds.

I stood and padded barefoot across the cold stone floor toward the window, pulling back the curtain just enough to peer out into the darkness. I couldn't see the party from here—it was too far away, probably at that abandoned campground near the forest's edge—but I could hear it clearly enough, the sounds carrying through the quiet night like an unwelcome invasion. My fingers tightened on the curtain fabric as another burst of laughter echoed through the trees, and I had to resist the urge to march out there and remind them exactly why people avoided this part of the forest.

But that would require interaction, and interaction with humans inevitably led to complications I had no interest in dealing with. They'd see my face, fall all over themselves trying to get my attention, follow me back here like stray dogs begging for scraps, and then I'd have to either feed on them or compel them to forget, and both options sounded exhausting. Better to stay inside, wait for them to drink themselves into unconsciousness or wander back to whatever lives they'd temporarily escaped, and try to salvage what remained of my night.

I let the curtain fall and turned back toward the bed, but my stomach chose that moment to remind me it had been almost a full day since I'd last fed. The hunger wasn't urgent yet, just a persistent hollow ache that came from sleeping through an entire day without eating, but now that I was awake and annoyed, it demanded attention. I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, which was probably a disaster after sleeping on it for so long, and decided that if I was going to be awake anyway, I might as well eat something.

The journey from my bedroom to the laboratory—which was really just the castle's original kitchen, repurposed and modernized with equipment that would have made Victor Frankenstein weep with envy—took less than a minute even at human walking speed. I didn't bother turning on the overhead lights, just flicked on the small desk lamp that sat on my main work counter, casting everything in a warm golden glow that was easier on my sensitive eyes than the harsh fluorescents I'd installed for precision work.

The temperature-controlled wine cabinet stood against the far wall, its glass door revealing rows of dark bottles that contained not wine but my own carefully crafted artificial blood, organized by batch number and formula variation. I opened the door and reached into the shadowy depths at the back, where I kept my most successful attempts, and pulled out a bottle labeled "Batch 47-C." The glass was cold against my palm, cold enough to make me shiver slightly despite the fact that I didn't feel temperature the way humans did, and I carried it back to the counter with something approaching enthusiasm.

Batch 47-C had been my best work so far—a combination of synthesized hemoglobin, carefully balanced electrolytes, and a proprietary blend of enzymes that mimicked the complex flavor profile of fresh human blood without any of the complications that came with actually hunting and feeding. It didn't taste exactly like the real thing, but it was close enough that I could drink it without gagging, which was more than I could say for my earlier attempts.

I poured a generous measure into a glass beaker and set it on the heating plate to warm, watching the dark liquid shimmer as it slowly came up to body temperature. While I waited, I turned to the stainless steel refrigerator that occupied the opposite wall and pulled open the top drawer, revealing neat rows of blood bags labeled with dates and blood types. My own blood, drawn and stored for exactly this kind of situation—I'd learned years ago that adding a small amount of vampire blood to my artificial mixture gave it a richness and complexity that pure synthetic blood could never achieve.

I selected a bag labeled "O- Autologous" from last week and carried it back to the counter, where I used surgical scissors to snip open the top and pour the contents into a centrifuge tube. The machine hummed to life when I pressed the start button, spinning the blood at high speed until it separated into its component parts—pale yellow plasma on top, dark red cell mass on the bottom. I carefully pipetted off the plasma and discarded it, then used a glass stirring rod to loosen the packed red cells at the bottom of the tube, watching them slide into the beaker of warming artificial blood like a crimson ribbon dissolving in wine.

The two liquids merged and swirled together, creating a deeper, richer color that was almost purple in the lamplight, and I reached for the dropper bottle of PLP solution—my own creation, a carefully balanced mixture of proteins and lipids that helped stabilize the cell membranes and prevent the blood from separating again. Three drops, no more, no less, added to the beaker as I set it on the magnetic stirrer and watched it begin to spin, creating a tiny whirlpool that pulled the ingredients together into something that was almost, almost like the real thing.

I leaned against the counter and waited for the mixture to homogenize, my mind already drifting back to the modifications I wanted to make to tomorrow's batch, when a soft thump drew my attention to the counter beside me. Jinx, my black cat and sole companion for the past hundred years, had materialized out of the shadows the way she always did, silent and sudden as a ghost.

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