The same heaviness had blanketed the dig site after everyone was dead, except that it had been even weightier, even more palpable. But just as peaceful, just as silent, as she’d hidden in the dunes, afraid to come out. She’d tried to trust that feeling that no one remained in the camp. That none of the keening gunmen were there. There was no feeling of consciousness. It had fled, just as it did when one slept. Everyone who remained, she’d told herself, was sleeping. Permanently, peacefully, sleeping.
And yet, she’d been unable to move. Maybe she’d known it would be too much to see her parents’ bullet-riddled bodies. That was one memory she was glad she didn’t have.
Sighing, she tugged her mind out of the past and focused on the task at hand: learning as much as she could about her captors. Not so that she could defeat them or even try. Just to satisfy her ever-curious mind, to educate her knowledge-ravenous brain, and to give her an edge in staying alive.
She moved carefully, trying not to make a sound, and got her cell phone and glasses from her satchel, which she’d hung on the bedpost. Then, sitting silently for a moment and listening, hearing no movement and sensing no consciousness from elsewhere in the house, she pulled the covers up over her head and turned the phone on, quickly hitting the Mute button as it powered up. She’d been sneaking in a page of Mr. Folsom’s book here and there whenever possible during the night—any time she could think of an excuse to get away from them for a few minutes. And what she had read so far fascinated her. The last time she’d had to stop, he’d been talking about the Belladonna Antigen—the rare element in her blood that was going to ensure that she died young. Before her time. It had honestly never bothered her much, knowing that. She’d always felt she had been meant to die on that dig with her family.
But she was curious to know what her blood type had to do with all of this. With vampires and government agencies and crazy old men who wrote tell-all books that got them shot.
She opened the file, found the spot where she’d left off after her last bathroom break, and began reading voraciously.
The Belladonna Antigen is a rarely occurring one, found in exceedingly few human subjects. Exact numbers are hard to come by, as a great many carriers may go undiagnosed. The antigen doesn’t show up in typical type and cross-matching but requires more in-depth screening to detect. Belladonna sufferers do develop symptoms, but they mimic many other conditions. Carriers lack sufficient clotting factor and therefore bleed excessively, much as hemophiliacs do. Until adulthood, that’s the main and only known common symptom. Upon reaching their mid-to-late-thirties, however, other symptoms occur. A decrease in energy levels, and a general feeling of malaise and lethargy, set in. A tendency to sleep more by day and suffer from insomnia by night is an often reported but far from universal occurrence. The weakness increases, and the health of the individual continues to wane, until death ensues. Individuals with the antigen rarely live into their forties.
However, there are a few rare exceptions.
You may be wondering by now why information about a rare human condition is being included in this book about the undead. There is, in fact, a very good reason. Only those humans with the Belladonna Antigen can become vampires. Every vampire in existence today possessed this antigen as a human being.
“What?” she whispered, stunned. “My God.” She blinked in shock, before her eyes resumed speeding over the lines.
Moreover, vampires know this and have always known, even before they had a name for the condition. They sense the humans who possess the antigen with an animalistic sixth sense that allows them to recognize their own kind, or at least their own kin. They refer to these humans as the Chosen. DPI research has shown that vampires are unwilling—perhaps even unable—to harm members of this rare human caste and in fact tend to act as guardians, stepping in to offer aid when such humans face trouble or danger.
Many of the Chosen, those who have been told none of this, have revealed, under hypnosis, suppressed memories of dark strangers intervening in times of peril and vanishing again when the individual is safe. Some have encountered the same stranger at multiple times throughout their lives. The similarities in these reports are