Lucien woke up happier than he could ever recall in all his life. He and Jean had stayed up far too late wrapped up in each other, reveling in their discovery of being soulmates. Every kiss, every touch, every climax brought them closer together. He accepted and celebrated their connection. He believed in it. Jean was his soulmate, and they'd never need to be alone and lonely anymore.

They woke up late, and Jean was immediately worried over waking up in his bed long after when she usually got up. Mattie would be awake. She would see Jean leaving Lucien's room, would obviously know what had happened. Lucien worried as well for a moment; he himself didn't care much about the propriety of it, particularly because Mattie was as far from a judgmental conservative traditionalist as anyone, but Jean did not like to be thought of as anything less than good and upstanding. But Jean slumped over and grumbled about taking care of it. Lucien had forgotten, momentarily, that Jean could just change Mattie's memories. He grinned at that. Being able to guarantee that no one caught them together meant that they could have many, many more nights like this together. Jean playfully smacked his bare chest when he told her so. They laughed together and kissed and then finally got out of bed.

Once they were both bathed and dressed and ready for the day, Lucien sat down for breakfast with Jean. Mattie had already left on her nursing rounds, out until lunch. And other than the silly smiles on their faces, Jean and Lucien were able to carry on their morning just as normally as before.

"Jean, I'd like to go by the morgue today, do you happen to know when my patient appointments are?" he asked over his newspaper.

"Agnes Clasby is coming by for that new prescription, but if you write it out, I can make sure she gets it in case you're not here when she arrives."

"That would be wonderful, thank you."

Jean nodded. "Do you have any new ideas about that poor girl?" she asked gravely.

Lucien sighed sadly. He had not forgotten about the autopsy from yesterday. He would probably never be able to forget the autopsy on a young woman completely drained of blood. "I don't have anything new, no, but considering yesterday I thought Alice was just a pathologist doing an autopsy with me and now I know that she's a vampire and might have more to say on the subject, I'd like to have a chat about it. See if we can come up with anything."

"Good," Jean answered. "I'd like to talk to her again, too, but this is more important for the time being."

He hummed in agreement. It would be good for Jean to have a friend who was like her, someone who could share in her struggles and gifts, help her learn more about the world she had inhabited alone for more than a century. "We should have Alice for dinner one of the nights that Mattie is out. Actually, I wonder if Alice eats."

Jean smiled softly. "I think we can invite her over even if she doesn't eat. You can eat more than enough for two grown people anyway."

Her teasing caught him by surprise. "Do I?"

She laughed, "Lucien, the grocery bill doubled when you moved in!"

He replied only with a sheepish grin. "Well I can't help it if I enjoy your cooking so much."

Jean grinned proudly at that.

Lucien folded his newspaper and stood up from the table. "I'll write out that prescription for Agnes and leave it out on my desk for you. I'd like to go see Alice sooner rather than later."

"Alright."

He turned toward her and nearly leaned down but stopped himself, frowning.

"What's the matter?" Jean asked him.

Lucien felt himself blush slightly. "I…well, I wasn't sure if I…Jean, can I kiss you goodbye?"

Her entire face lit up in the most beautiful way he could have ever possibly imagined. "Oh yes, please."

The fact that it had been in his mind to kiss her as a habit when he had never before done such a thing felt like another one of those little signs about her. About them. Soulmates.

He leaned down and gently put his fingers on her jaw to tilt her head towards him as he kissed her sweetly. They pulled apart with silly smiles. Yes, this was certainly a habit he would like to have for a long time.

With that, he took care of his few tasks and headed to the hospital to see Alice. He found the vampire pathologist in the darkened morgue, looking through her microscope. Lucien did not want to interrupt, but he found he didn't need to bother being inconspicuous.

"You think extremely loudly. Jean is lucky she can't hear you. I only see you for a few hours each week. I think I'd get a headache if I lived with you like she does."

Lucien was taken aback by her abrupt statement, but found himself chuckling. "I'll try to think quieter."

"I don't think you can. Some people are just louder thinkers than others. You've got a very busy mind. It's fascinating, actually. Just makes you very hard to ignore when I'm studying blood samples," she said. But she looked up from the microscope and turned to him. "You can get the light."

Lucien flipped the switch by the door and came over to her. "I suppose this means you already know why I'm here."

Alice nodded. "I don't know what I can tell you. The only time I ever saw a vampire drain someone was a long, long time ago. I didn't understand what was happening. It was horrible, though. Just as horrible as this."

He frowned. "Can I ask…"

"What happened?" Alice supplied. "I know you'll be annoyingly curious about it otherwise, so I suppose I will tell you. If I regret saying anything, I can make you forget."

Lucien suddenly wasn't sure he liked the idea of knowing the powers a vampire had, knowing they could be used on him.

Alice scoffed, "I was only joking. But I will tell you. You know about my kind from what Jean's told you, though obviously she only knows so much, so both of you are missing quite a lot."

"Yes, Jean will want to talk to you about that."

She nodded. "I'll tell her everything I'm telling you. I'd be happy to come to dinner, by the way. I don't eat very often, but you seem to think very highly of Jean's cooking."

There she went again, reading his mind. Alice might be annoyed with how loud his thoughts were, but it was quite annoying with her poking around in his head like that.

Of course Alice read that thought from his mind as well and glared slightly at him. "Anyway, I was turned sometime just after the turn of the century. I was twelve years old, and I was celebrating the new year with my family in Adelaide. I had a mother and a father and three brothers, and all six of us were born in Australia. It was my grandparents who settled the land from England as free colonists. We were happy in our home. I never knew anything other than Adelaide. On the night of the new year, we were all playing with fireworks, and my brothers were running about. I got tired and hung back behind them. And that was when I was kidnapped."

Lucien was shocked by the matter-of-fact way she said those awful words. "You were kidnapped?" he asked in disbelief.

She nodded. "I hardly knew what was happening. I was a child, I was naïve and very sheltered. I had no reason to be on guard. I learned that later." A darkness entered her tone at that, but she continued. "The men who took me were a group of vampires. A band of awful, reckless villains. They took turns feeding off me, hypnotizing me and paralyzing me so I couldn't move and couldn't feel the pain, but they delighted in tormenting me, scaring me and shocking me with things. Other than biting me and drinking my blood, they never did anything else to me physically, and I know I can be grateful for that. I was a toy to them. A pet they could use for their amusement, but like a pet, I think they got sort of attached to me. They liked to have me around. I would be forced to stay with them and watch as they hunted others. They never hurt me, but they hurt others. And that was when I saw them drain a young man of blood. Four vampires fed on a boy only a few years older than me until he went as pale and empty as the girl on our table. He died long before his blood was gone. But they were so crazed, so drunk on the blood they'd gorged on, they lost control. They moved on to me after that. I passed out; they took too much blood. When I woke up, I had been turned."

Her story was the most harrowing thing Lucien had ever heard. He had seen his share of terrible things, had experienced the worst of the worst. But he had been an adult. A soldier. Alice was only a child. A child turned into a pet for a group of monsters. They could have killed her. They nearly had. Why had they bothered to turn her into a vampire? "They turned you to save your life," Lucien realized aloud.

She nodded. "I don't know which of them actually turned me, they never said. But they were upset about it. I wasn't as fun as a vampire, I suppose. They did teach me. I wasn't their pet anymore after that. I learned about my powers and how to hunt. They introduced me to the vampire world. That was their mistake, because once I was around other vampires, they could read my mind and learn what they'd done to me. And they saw in my memories the boy they drained. And that was grounds for punishment. They were punished and I was set free."

"How old were you then?"

She shrugged. "I lost track of how old I was. I don't really know how long I was with them before I was turned or after. But by the time I was free and able to go to school, I had grown up. I could pass as an adult most of the time. Unlike Jean, I have aged. I can't change my appearance like she can, but vampires grow up and mature and then stop aging at the equivalent of about age thirty-five for humans."

"When did you become a doctor?" he asked. If she was twelve in 1900, she would have been eligible to go to medical school by around 1908 or so, though that was assuming she had the proper education before that.

A small smirk appeared on her face. "I graduated top of my class from Sydney Medical School in 1912. One of three medical schools in all of Australia back then. But I didn't want to go back to Adelaide and risk having my family see me, and Victoria seemed boring from what I'd seen of it. And that's why I came back here, actually. I like boring nowadays," she explained.

"Less boring now that we have a killer vampire on the loose," Lucien reminded her.

"Yes," she agreed. "We should talk about that with Jean. She and I might be able to figure some things out. But you'll need to work with the police to keep the truth hidden."

"Can't you just…fix it? I mean, if someone finds out something they shouldn't? You could just alter their memories."

"It's extremely complex and difficult to manipulate memories. I could do it, but it's easier to just avoid detection," Alice chided.

That was news to Lucien. Jean seemed to change memories without any trouble at all. Just this morning, she'd caused Mattie to forget seeing Jean walking out of Lucien's bedroom wearing the pajamas he'd taken off her before they'd fallen into bed. Her slippers and dressing gown had been left out in the garden the night before.

Alice's eyebrows shot up her forehead. "Jean can manipulate memories that easily?"

Mind-reading again. Bloody hell. "Yes, I think so. She didn't seem too bothered by it."

But then Alice's eyes got a sparkle of mirth in them. "She left your bedroom this morning?" she teased.

Lucien felt himself blush again, and he averted his eyes to the floor. "You were the one who told her we're soulmates."

"Yes, you are. And I'm sorry it took you both so long. At least you've gotten to it at last." Alice's no-nonsense tone was back. He like that better than her teasing.

With an awkward clearing of his throat, Lucien turned his attention away from their personal discussions. "Why don't we take a look at the body again and see if there's anything external that we missed? Something that might give a clue to the vampire who did this?"

Alice gave a curt nod, getting right back to work.