Dark Lover - Bung.co.nz

"That's too much." But he was just playing. She was the one he wanted.
"Forty?"
"Let me see your tits."
She flashed him.
He smiled, unlocking the doors. "What's your name?"
"Cherry Pie. But you can call me anything you like."
Mr. X drove them around the corner to a secluded spot under the bridge.
He tossed the money down on the floor at her feet, and when she bent over to pick it up, he drove the needle into the back of her
neck and pushed the plunger home. Moments later she slumped like a rag doll.
Mr. X smiled and moved her back against the seat so she was sitting up. Then he tossed the needle out the window, where it
joined about a dozen others, and put the van in drive.
In his underground clinic, Havers looked up from his microscope, startled out of his concentration. The grandfather clock was
chiming in the corner of his lab, telling him it was time for the evening repast, but he didn't want to stop working. He put his eye
back to the scope, wondering if he'd imagined what he saw. After all, desperation could be affecting his objectivity.
But no, the blood cells were living.
Breath left his lungs on a shudder.
His race was almost free.
He was almost free.
Finally, stored blood that was still viable.
As a physician, his hands had always been tied when it came to treating patients surgically and addressing certain labor and
delivery complications. Real-time transfusions from vampire to vampire were possible, but as their race was scattered and their
numbers small, it could be hard to find donors in a timely manner.
For centuries he'd wanted to establish a blood bank. The trouble was, vampire blood was highly unstable, and storage of it outside
the body had always been impossible. Air, that life-sustaining, invisible curtain blanketing the earth, was one cause of the problem,
and it didn't take a lot of those molecules to contaminate a sample. Just one or two and the plasma disintegrated, leaving the red
and white blood cells to fend for themselves. Which, of course, they couldn't do.
At first it didn't make sense to him. There was oxygen in blood. That was why it was red after leaving the lungs. The discrepancy
had led him to some fascinating discoveries about vampire pulmonary function, but had ultimately gotten him no closer to his
objective.
He'd tried drawing the blood and channeling it immediately into an airtight container. This most obvious solution didn't work. The
disintegration occurred anyway, just at a decelerated pace. This had suggested there was another factor at work, something
inherent in the corporal environment that was missing when the blood was removed from the body. He'd tried isolating samples in
warmth, in cold. In suspensions of saline or human plasma.
Frustration had kept his mind burning through the permutations of his experiments. He ran more tests and tried different
approaches. Retried. Walked away from the project. Came back to it.