The Biotechnology Board of Canada and Other Bloodsuckers (1.8)

How do you catch a vampire?

Assuming this is a person, they’ve got some kind of memory-altering ability. It’s not unheard of; lots of chemicals prevent people from forming memories of what happens to them. It could be something simple. They could just be drugging people. Or it could be parabiology. Either way, nobody’s seen them do what they’re doing.

Sylvia and Shay point out what I don’t want to: nobody cares about Maddy. This couldn’t have been some other student attacking her over some dumb beef. Honestly, I thought that meant it had to be a teacher until Jimin pointed out that nobody else has been attacked at the school and there are no new teachers this year.

It’s obvious. Whoever it is only attacked a student because they got desperate. They’ve been attacking other people, homeless people probably, here in the city. Nope. Jimin’s got access to these archives from the university because of a journalism enrichment course he’s taking with them, and nothing like this has happened in Montreal… ever.

Nothing reported. I smile and say what a relief it is and Shay calls me a dumbass and says obviously the vampire has been killing people and dissolving them in acid or something. They listen to too many true crime podcasts, and I say so, but the rest of them spend the whole day investigating old Mr. Maggetti for the crime of being an introverted, autistic chemistry teacher.

I’m so tired I check out and go to sleep hours before Jimin finds out about the summer camps. The next morning, my phone is blowing up so hard I forget to so much as brush my teeth. It’s not a teacher. It’s worse. It’s a kid.

Apparently, Jimin was up until 1 AM doing anything except homework, and in between stockpiling mouth silk—I really don’t want to know what he’s planning to do with it—and knocking back osmanthus milk tea he found this independent paper from some small town north of the city. There’s a summer camp out there that threatened to close because kids kept getting hurt every month of summer like clockwork for two years straight. They’d lose a half liter of blood, get hospitalized, and every single one would recover and not remember what happened.

We have our vampire. Nobody at the school worked at one of these places; it takes Shay a couple of days, but they sweet-talk all the administrative staff into spilling the beans on their previous jobs. Old people get lonely, I guess. That leaves students. These camps hired some pretty young counselors because it was all they could get—Jet talked to a girl on the cross-country team, she was there, said it was the wild west—but we’re still looking for someone mature enough to get the job. We’re thinking seniors. Probably someone outdoorsy.

It’s insane, being this close to someone like that. They didn’t kill anyone, sure, but they hurt a lot of kids, and how did they know they wouldn’t accidentally sever an artery or something? For a moment, one night, watching Jet and Shay argue over what we should do to catch them, I almost want to let O’Hagan find them. Keep ourselves out of this mess. What’s the harm?

It lasts about ten seconds before I feel like shit about it. Yeah, it was vicious, but if they’re anything like the vampires in the stories, they must’ve been so… hungry. I’ve never been hungry before. Not really. Not starving, knowing I can’t have what I need, hating how unfair it is. They couldn’t even ask someone to help them. They’d get outed. Their whole life could turn upside down.

One of these late nights in the group chat, Shay said that’s what it felt like before they came out. Like they were trapped. Taped to a wall. Like some force was keeping them from going to that place they wanted to be, keeping them from being themself. Or… like they could do it, open the door, take a step, but if they did, the bomb on the back of their neck would explode.

I know what they’d say, if I asked. No, it’s not the same for the vampire, they’d say, like it was obvious. It can’t be. The vampire actually has something to be scared of. For me, it was all in my head.

They’d say we have to help this poor, shadow-dwelling, blood-drinking outcast who doesn’t know what else to do. Who’s got a bomb strapped to their neck. An outlier in a society that doesn’t think about outliers unless they’re photogenic enough, clean enough, to wear Spandex and meet the Prime Minister at galas. You’re a hero or you’re a resource or you’re nobody.

I never thought about it. Why would I have to? I was normal.

Maybe normal’s what they need. Maybe if we sit them down and talk to them, like normal people do, people like me with charmed lives who can accept anything, we’ll find out that there’s no bomb around their neck after all. Maybe we’ll find out that they’re like Shay, and that demon hiding in their head is all that’s standing between them and fearlessness. Maybe all they need is some multivitamins and a friend.

We’ll never know if O’Hagan murders them.

I tell my plan to the others as soon as we’ve worked it all out and I’ve had some time to get the privileged asshole knee-jerks out of my system. It’s simple. Maddy lost less blood than those kids at camp. The vampire’s probably still hungry.

We be the bait. We be the low-hanging fruit. Who else but us?