Oh yeah, I remembered that all too well. That unquenchable thirst.
“I stayed at the zoo for an hour before my eyes and head started to hurt. I was dizzy and knew my lack of nutrition over the past week was starting to catch up with me. I tried to make it back to the bus stop, but must have collapsed before reaching it.”
Sam suddenly appeared. His deep voice washed across the room: “She fell at my feet, literally on top of them. It was almost like fate directed her to me, to make sure I could keep her safe.”
The dark-haired enforcer stood propped against the doorframe. I had no idea how long he’d been there, I’d been so focused on Rebecca and her story.
Sam continued: “I don’t even know why I went to the zoo that day. I was in England fleeing some trouble in the States. This was about fifteen years before I joined the Portland Hive, and for some reason the zoo drew me.”
“Which was lucky for me. Probably saved my life,” Rebecca said, a sweet smile lighting up her face. “Sam recognized what was happening to me, and for some reason decided to help me rather than turn me over to the authorities. This was the 80s. England didn’t take in ash. They just…”
He growled, low and slightly scary-like. “I couldn’t stand by and see them execute a female, or worse, experiment on her. If I brought her to the States, then they would have thrown her in the culling. I could tell right away that Becca wasn’t a fighter like Charlie. She’s an academic.” His eyes blazed. “They would have torn her apart.”
Hmmm, I might not have a PHD, but pretty sure Sam just called me stupid. Meh, whatever.
“Okay, so Rebecca’s just gone all ash, Sam happened to save her and ferret her off to his secret lair or something…” Jared’s Australian accent was mild as he summed up the story so far. “Then what happened? How did you end up in the ass-end of the icy wilderness?”
Rebecca and Sam exchanged a look, before the blond female started talking in her factual way again. “It was rough for a while there. Sam had to steal us blood, and I was stuck in hiding. My eyes would have immediately given me away, and contacts back then were not designed to hide the silver of our eyes. So even when I learned to control my hunger, I could never go back to my job. But I was determined to continue my research, and I now had the perfect candidate to test on. Myself.”
She let out a gust of air, sucking in another deep breath. “I knew of this abandoned research center out here in Alaska. It was used initially to study climate change, but then funding ran out and it got forgotten. So I applied for a permit to use it and was granted twenty years. No one cares what I do here, and no one checks up on me. My parents died several years ago, and basically I was forgotten.”
I leaned closer to her, our faces inches apart. “Have you figured out how there are only two female ash?”
Her eyes flicked up for a second to Sam, before they came back to me. “Yes, I figured that out quite early on. Helped in part by my family history.”
I nodded at her, waving my hand in a hope that it would hurry her up. I had been waiting for this information for months and she was the first person who seemed to have any answers.
“Well, the truth is there are no female ash. And there never will be. The facts are irrefutable. The X-carrying sperm do not survive the change.”
Well, then what the hell were we? This was the third option I kept trying to figure out.
I held my breath as she continued.
“You and I are not ash, we’re something different altogether.”
Pretty much what Lucas had told me when they first tested my blood. “So … if we aren’t ash and we aren’t vampires, then what are we?”
Tell me the damned third option!
“You’re what I like to refer to as an ashpire,” Sam said with a little twinkle in his eye.
The room got very silent then, and I knew more than one of us was confused.
Rebecca quickly started talking: “Basically, my mother was attacked when she was seven months pregnant with me. Vampires got her and would have torn her to pieces if a crowd of humans hadn’t jumped in and managed to pull them off her. It saved my mother’s life, but not before the vampires’ blood splashed all over her body. Over all the open wounds from the attack.”
We all winced then, an open wound around a bleeding vampire was a death sentence. Becca continued: “It was feared that the virus had entered her system. She remained in the hospital under lockdown until they could figure out what this meant for her. Would she turn or die? They were the only two options. But then nothing happened. She had a fever for a day but didn’t turn. They tested her blood, and tested it again, over and over almost right up until I was born. She never had any of the virus in her.”
“How is that possible?” Markus asked.
Rebecca shook her head. “It isn’t possible and yet it happened. They were saying it was a miracle, or that maybe none of her attackers’ blood landed on her wounds.”
Okay, this story was going to get all weird and sciency now. I just knew it.
“I have studied this virus now for many decades, and I’m starting to see the pattern. It’s smart; it develops and learns. It seeks out the strongest and wants to form bonds with that genetic pattern. Shape those cells. So when a pregnant woman receives the virus, it goes to the life it can shape the most, the fetus. But because a fetus is such a fast growing being, I was shaping and changing and fighting the virus every minute, every second. I was pumping out the cure to my mother, which is why she only had a fever for a day. Even being seven months developed in utero, the virus still managed to bond to my genome, and basically start the process of making me a born vampire, which in a way is like a cross of ash and vampire.”
Okay then. Ashpire was making much more sense now.
“It still takes a long time for the change to kick into effect, which is where we mimic the ash males, but we’re not ash. Our blood is different. Because the virus matures within our body and bloodstream during our early development, we create these antibodies to the virus as a natural part of our system. In a way, it’s almost as if we have cured the virus, and what was left was the best version of a vampire, something which mimics the ash.”
