For the Dead Travel Fast
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Dr Harris smelled good.
Not bloody good, but she had a musk of cedar and pine, as if a long winter in the woods, and Castle enjoyed standing beside her at the lightboard to see his x-rays and the results of the bone marrow aspirate. The aspiration hadn't felt good by any means, and the ache in his hip hadn't quite left him—though Kate and Dr Harris and Tessa had all assured him that was a phantom pain, and his body had healed over the spot almost immediately, and he was being a baby (no, only Kate had made mention of his immaturity, and only briefly, with a smile, as she'd gotten hers done). Still.
It was cool to see the bone marrow aspirate in bright and colorful shades of purple on the lightboard. "So what am I looking at?"
Harris brushed her braids back over her shoulder; the resemblance to her sister in Chicago was uncanny, even though she wasn't actually a twin. "This is the cross section of your marrow, and we're quite excited by the progress the lichen has made." She tapped the circles of purple with the end of a stylus. "You see these?"
"The white things?"
"Oh, no, those are vacuoles. The purple bits."
Castle blinked, shared a look of confusion with Kate. "Yes, all of it is purple?"
Dr Harris laughed lightly. "Yes, you're right, because of the stain. Okay, so, let me circle them for you."
She leaned in and used the stylus to create a kind of phosphene on the lightboard, an area of darkness which circled a cluster of purple bodies within the marrow.
Kate and Castle leaned in, inspecting the cross-section. It was unremarkable.
"That's the lichen in your bone marrow."
"Oh." It was a yellow-white sea with purple grapes clustered at the bottom and within that were a scattershot of darker purple seeds, with some white vacuoles. Honestly, it didn't look like anything to write home about.
"This is the fungal-algae symbiosis which gives your marrow the regenerative properties you need to heal so quickly." Harris beamed at them. "I've never seen it advance so quickly or so adeptly, without creating cancers or triggering an immune response."
"Cancer?" Kate pushed forward, peering at the little purple seeds. "He doesn't have cancer though. That's not cancer."
"No, precisely, it is not cancer. We wanted to get a good picture of how well his body was adapting to the lichen, considering his first set of phases have gone through so fast, but I'm very reassured by this."
Castle culled Kate's hand, twined their fingers together. "And so this looks like it's supposed to."
"It looks better than it's supposed to. And yours, Kate, want to see your marrow?"
"Yes," Kate said. "Please." She had taken the aspiration with that same stoicism which had allowed her to sew up a bullet graze inside of a laundromat or suck the marrow dry from a conspiracist in their kitchen. No flinching.
Dr Harris looked positively giddy when she put up the next cross section. It looked pretty much the same, except the film was grey-white instead of yellow-white, and the purple things weren't so fat as his.
"Looks… the same?" Castle tried.
"Very close," Harris nodded, clasping her hands together. "In fact, something we don't see often, your VL is shaped a bit peculiarly, and it tends to clump in the same ways." She nodded her head to the films. "Can you tell?"
He and Kate were entirely out of their depth on this one, but they both inspected the two side by side for a moment. Kate ventured a guess. "They clump together in threes, kinda star-shaped?"
"Yes!" Dr Harris was practically on her toes. "We're doing some probing on our cultures, to see maybe why this is happening, especially the protection built into that star-shape, but it's clearly something you are doing to each other, one affecting the other, back and forth. We don't know why, but it's such an interesting—"
Castle flinched. "Yeah, so we're not looking to be lab rats."
"Oh no, of course not you," Dr Harris said. "We have some blood samples and we'll try a few things, and see what we see. But it's clear that this is a very special, unique blood family—perhaps harkening to an original antigen group, maybe even how we should have been formed all along—well the options are endless."
Castle gave Kate a sidelong look, but she wasn't radiating suspicion. He thought that was a good sign. "Original or not," she said carefully. "How is it that we're so different from the rest?"
"A few theories. One is that when you, Kate, transitioned your husband, since your own transition wasn't at full maturity, and obviously neither is his, this formed a new species of VL, spontaneously. A second idea, which the tribal elders here are very invested in: Kate, your transition finally kicked in as a result of your having made another—which created what it was always supposed to have created, the original VL strain, different from all of our own—ours, which you could say are deviant strains, or mutations. Exciting stuff."
Castle scratched the back of his neck; he still felt a bruise in his hip. "Exciting stuff, yeah. You seem pretty worked up about it." Uncomfortably, she seemed as worked up as her sister in Chicago who had trapped them.
"Yes, very much so. However it happened, your strain of VL? This is a cause for celebration."
And to their entire bewilderment, Tessa and Walt came out of the exam area and inside the little dark room carrying glasses of champagne—the bottle in Tessa's hand and a wide grin on her face. "Cheers to you both."
"Oh. Actual celebration," Kate said, staring at them.
"We're so excited to have the opportunity to learn from you," Dr Harris said. "These samples—this could be a new method of transfer, one which doesn't rely on massive blood transfusions or the traditional Blood Letting on the scale that so many... it means an end to barbarism, if I can speak frankly. Which reduces the stigma."
Kate still didn't look persuaded, and Castle didn't feel this was that monumental himself. He looked at those purple dots and shook his head. "We swapped back and forth though. I mean, your sister suggested it as a way to keep me weak enough so that Kate could take me on if I tried something."
"Did you try something?"
"Uh." He flushed hotly.
"He tried twice or perhaps three times to go for my neck," Kate offered.
"Did he try for that on other people? Did he ever express interest in stopping the car to eat outside of normal times, or suggest going to a crowded shopping mall or escape the car as you drove to—"
"No!" Kate squeezed his hand violently. "Never. He never—"
"That is quite unheard of," Dr Harris murmured, smiling gently at them. "In fact, in the story as reported to Tessa, of your own transition, you escaped your—well, the individual who attempted to transition you—and sought a cabin on your parent's property?"
"Y-yes."
"A summer place, where people often went? And where you had fished and hunted before? Surrounded by both family, friends, other vacationers?"
He saw Kate gape at Dr Harris.
"She didn't hunt anyone," Castle insisted. "She was alone!"
"No, this police officer, Royce, prevented that. But her instincts, her vampire instincts, which were awake if not fully developed, went for others, for both solitary environs where she couldn't be stopped or easily caught, and also well-known hunting grounds, animal and human. It's not her that's at fault, it's the instincts of the vampire lichen for heme iron, and lots of iron, which cause that uncontrollable thirst. But you, Rick, have transitioned swiftly with far less blood supply than most of us could have ever gotten away with in only the first few hours of our awakening."
"Awakening." Kate pressed in against his shoulder, the two of them a solid wall. "But I didn't feed like that. I didn't drink blood in my transition. In fact, Royce drank from me constantly."
Castle growled, but Tessa interrupted, offering up a glass of champagne to him. He took it out of self defense, so it wouldn't spill.
Harris took a glass and tried to explain. "Yes, his attempt wasn't our usual methods, but it's possible—"
"We won't be doing that to our people." Tessa put a staying hand out to Dr Harris. "Look, Royce's botched attempt might be part of why we're here, like this. You didn't get fed and you were depleted, so you never got across the finish line, so to speak, and then you tried to transition another full adult—and naturally you fell on each other, as mated vampires do, and mixed your strains together. But here's the extraordinary thing about you two—which I don't think you get—no vampire, during transition, could have gotten away with that. They'd have eaten each other alive, or at best, sucked each other dry."
Kate's jaw dropped.
Tessa shrugged. "They're very careful about it now, and have clinics like this, to ration out the supply and be sure that they don't get cross-infected, manned by people like me who aren't and won't be vampires, as a kind of canary in the coal mine, if you will. And that's merely skimming the top when you're talking about problems. But you two—"
"We did it all wrong," Castle realized. "And we drank from each other, and not nearly enough blood for most to keep transitioning, and yet here we are."
"Exactly," Dr Harris said with relish, holding aloft her champagne glass. "To doing it all wrong, and yet still being here."
Well, Castle could drink to that. It was kind of the story of his whole life.
—-xxx—-