Blood Bonds
by Sage Darkwoods
Disclaimer: The characters in this story that were created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy belong to them and them alone. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
Chapter 3: Trust
"Hey Cassie? You awake yet? Helloooo?"
Cassie opened her eyes slowly. Harmony was standing over her, smiling that bright smile of hers. Cassie had a feeling that was the brightest part about the blonde. She sat up, and realized that was a bad idea. She said something intelligent like "ugghh mmph," and slumped back against the pillows.
"You've had a really rough night," Harmony continued, looking concerned. "You want some water?"
Cassie gave a minute nod and sat up slowly. She took in her surroundings. She was in what appeared to be a hospital bed, in a room with mint green walls and paintings of sunflowers and fruit. She looked down at her clothes. Wait, not her clothes. She was wearing a light pink frilly babydoll nightgown. Light pink. Frilly. "I'm in hell," she groaned.
"No you're not, silly," Harmony assured her. "You're at Wolfram & Hart, Attorneys at Law."
"Might as well be hell," Cassie mumbled, taking the proffered glass.
"You don't know how right you are, luv," said a voice from the corner. A blond man with striking cheekbones blew a stream of smoke from his cigarette.
"Spike!" Harmony yelled. "This is the med centre! You can't smoke in here!" She made a big show of fanning the air.
"Right then, just put it out." He threw the cigarette down on the tiles and stomped it out with his boot. Harmony made a face, and turned back to Cassie. "That's Spike," she explained. "He's kinda rude like that."
"No ruder than your loverboy, Harm," he countered. "Imagine, having to drug an innocent bird like her just to get a little neck!"
"Alright, I get it!" Harmony shouted. "Peter was a bit of a mistake, alright? I mean, he was pretty stupid."
"That, coming from you?" Spike scoffed. "He must have been a right idiot!"
"If you two are going to fight," Cassie interjected, "could you please do it quietly?" She held the cool water glass to her forehead. Her first thought was right: she was in hell.
A nurse came in the room, and ushered her two visitors out. As she administered and generally fussed over her, it left Cassie to her thoughts. She had gotten in a bit over her head. She had a tendency to be too trusting, and more than a little headstrong. She was reminded of a line from a movie she watched recently. It was an espionage movie – The Italian Job. Donald Sutherland's character had a favourite phrase: "I trust everyone. It's the devil inside them I don't trust." This time, Cassie had forgotten that last part. This was especially dangerous, since for vampires there was a literal demon inside them. She sighed audibly, and the nurse looked concerned. She gave her a small smile. "Long day."
"Long night," corrected the nurse, writing down Cassie's temperature on her clipboard. "It's nearly noon. You slept a bit fitfully, but that's to be expected after your ordeal. I expect you'll be right as rain in no time. For now, take these." She handed her a small paper cup with two pills in them. Cassie looked at it warily. "It's aspirin. Sometimes the oldest and most trusted methods are still the best." She put the clipboard down and walked out, shutting the door behind her.
Trust. There's that word again, Cassie thought. Her thoughts turned to Aunt Natalie's softly admonishing voice: "You trust too much, Cass." Thinking of Natalie made her smile.
Dr. Natalie Lambert was a coroner for Toronto. She often worked very closely with the homicide division, and had developed interesting relationships in that department. One of these relationships was with Detective Nick Knight, a sandy-haired, often scruffy-looking man who only worked the night shift.
Cassie's mother was an old university friend of Natalie's. While in their first year, Laura Haynes became pregnant, and quickly got married to James Harvey. They divorced a year later. The two women chose different scientific paths: Natalie chose medicine, and Laura chose psychiatry. Natalie took an interest in forensics, and eventually got appointed to the position of coroner. Laura got her doctorate, and became a well-respected psychiatrist. The women stayed close, and Natalie came around to visit often. Cassie got into the habit of calling her Aunt Nat.
One day a case crossed the desk of Nick Knight: the suspected suicide of a well-known psychiatrist. They found Laura in a tub, wrists slit. Natalie had a difficult time believing it was a suicide, even though the suicide note was addressed to her. She searched for clues in her diary. She came up with no explanation. Cassie went and visited Natalie at her place a few nights after her mother died, wanting some sort of explanation, or comfort, or even an excuse. What she found was nothing like she expected.
Natalie was sprawled on the ground, with Detective Knight crouching over her. He bared his teeth at a white-haired man who was seething in the corner, cursing in French. A broken cane was tossed on the ground between them. The white-haired man then jumped out the window. Cassie was unable to say anything more than a high-pitched squeak, and fainted.
When she awoke in the hospital, Nick found he had a lot of explaining to do. Natalie was rushed to Sunnybrook Hospital in the quickest way possible: by flight. She wasn't airlifted by helicopter; Nick picked her up and flew. They managed to save her, barely. She flatlined once. Luckily, the surgeons pumped some blood into her system before her veins collapsed, and jumpstarted her heart. She was in intensive care, but the doctors had no doubt she would make a full recovery. Nick told Cassie everything: he was an 800-year old vampire, and the white-haired man was his sire, Lacroix, who was easily pushing 2000. He drank blood, but only cattle from the butcher. He was looking to redeem his humanity. Then, he had Cassie look into his eyes, and he told her to Forget.
"What the hell are you talking about?" was her reply. Nick repeated himself in a far-away echoey voice. She blinked, and squinted at him. "Are you trying to hypnotize me?"
"Dammit, another resistor," he muttered. At seventeen, Cassie was a lot smarter than people gave her credit for. She knew there was something odd about Detective Knight. His permanent night shift status, his "allergy" to sunlight, his aversion to food of any sort… When Cassie was staying at Natalie's one night, he had turned down her lemon meringue pie. NOBODY turned down Cassie's lemon meringue pie. The crust was buttery and perfectly melt-in-your-mouth flaky, and the meringue was like biting into a cloud. She knew something had to be wrong.
Nicholas Knight was a vampire. Natalie was trying, unsuccessfully, to "cure" him. This simple realization helped shape Cassie's future, and gave her the extra shove she needed to enrol in McMaster's Biology program. If vampirism was a disease, as Aunt Nat hypothesized, then there had to be a cure. Cassie just needed to figure out the hows and whys of vampires.
After completing her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry, she continued with her Master's. She kept working on her theories and lab experiments, using Nick as her own personal guinea pig. She obtained the blood of two other vampires (Nick wouldn't say who they were), and compared DNA strands and chemical compositions. Her colleagues and mentor thought she was crazy, and her mentor threatened to quit every other day. Vampires don't exist, they said. You're wasting your time and our grant money. Eventually the grant was revoked, but Cassie continued her research on a smaller scale in the coroner's office.
In order to broaden her research, she had to contact a professor out in California, who was doing similar work in blood analysis. When Nick heard this, he practically forbade her to leave.
"The vampires out there are different than me," he said. "They're… baser. They are closer to animals, to demons than you know. They don't have souls."
Cassie nodded, but mentally dismissed it. Nick, once a knight in the Crusades, was predisposed to religious hyperbole, and used it at least once a week. Everything was a battle between Good and Evil, Angels and Demons, a fight for the Divine, to Redeem his Immortal Soul. Cassie tended to gloss over when he started. He sometimes said the same speech about his "clients" at the station. He was, after all, in the homicide division. The pressure of the job gets to all of them after a while, even 800-year-old vampires.
He did, however, warn her about the physical differences between his line of vampires and the ones that seemed to be predominant in Southern California. "Sewer vampires" was his term for describing them, as it was rumoured that an ancient Master lived in the sewers below a town. They had ridges on their foreheads when they showed their vampiric nature. "Like Klingons?" Cassie asked. Nick nodded, fairly familiar with Star Trek. Afternoons tended to get boring when one was wide awake and couldn't venture outside in the burning sun.
Natalie was beside herself when she found out about Cassie's plan. She begged and pleaded with her not to go. She tried bribing her with a big-screen TV, a new car, anything she could think of. She knew she was grasping at straws, because she knew the determination Cassie had. It was the same determination that got her through medical school and gave her the courage to do her job as a coroner every night. She kissed Aunt Nat on the cheek and assured her she would be careful. "I trust you," Natalie said as Cassie stepped through the departure gates.
Cassie lied. She wasn't careful. Instead, she had gone against every bit of advice Nick and Aunt Nat had given her, and instead wound up in the med centre of a law firm of all places, because she went for a ride with a vampire she knew for only a few hours.
Nat trusted her to do the right thing. From now on, she was going to try.