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She looked luscious in her white flannel shirt, with high firm breasts and long well-shaped legs. She was marking something in her book with a pen.

"You may couple with her, in which case I shall take the sample from her," Fareed explained. "Or you may take the sample for me yourself as you desire in the old solitary way." He made a gesture with his right hand opening his five fingers.

I didn't ponder for long. When I'd slipped into a human body thanks to the machinations of the Body Thief, I'd enjoyed the company of two beautiful women, but that had not been in this body, my body, my vampiric body.

"The woman is well paid, respected, at home here," said Seth. "She is a doctor herself. You will neither surprise her nor horrify her. She has never been a part of such an experiment before, but she is prepared for it. And she will be well rewarded when it's over."

Well, if no harm comes to her, I thought. How clean and pretty she was, with that well-scrubbed American look to her, and those s

hiny blue eyes, and her hair the color of fields of grain. I could almost smell her hair. In fact, I could smell it, a lovely fragrance of soapsuds or shampoo and sunshine. She looked delectable, and irresistible. I wanted every single drop of her blood. Could erotic feeling override that?

"All right, I'll do it."

But just how exactly could these gentlemen make a dead body like mine actually produce seed as if it were living?

The answer came swiftly with a series of injections and indeed an intravenous line that would continue throughout the experiment to deliver a powerful elixir of human hormones into my blood, overriding the vampiric body's natural tendency to resist senescence long enough for the desire to develop, the sperm to be produced, and then ejaculated.

I thought it was hilariously funny.

Now I could write an essay of five hundred pages on how this experience unfolded, because I did feel biological erotic desire again, and I fell on the young woman about as mercilessly as any greedy aristocrat of my time ever fell on a milkmaid in his village. But it was precisely as my beloved Louis had said a long time ago, "the pale shadow of killing," that is, the pale shadow of drinking blood, and it was over almost at once, it seemed, and then the passion was gone, back into the depths of memory once more as if it had never been aroused, the pinnacle, the ejaculation forgotten.

I'd felt strangely awkward afterwards. I was sitting on the bed beside this blond-haired fair-skinned human female, my back to a nest of sweet-smelling linen-covered pillows, and I felt I ought to talk to her, ask her how she came to be here, and why she was here.

And then quite suddenly, as I sat there, wondering if this was proper or even wise, she told me.

Her name was Flannery Gilman, she said. In a clear fresh West Coast American voice, she explained that she'd been studying "us" since the night I'd appeared on the stage as a rock star outside San Francisco, and so many of our kind had died as the result of my great scheme to be a mortal performer. She'd seen vampires that night with her own eyes, and had no doubt of their existence. She'd seen them immolated in the parking lot afterwards. Indeed, she'd scraped up samples of their burnt and oozing remains from the asphalt. She'd gathered burnt vampiric bones in plastic sacks, and she'd developed hundreds of photographs later of what she'd witnessed and captured on film. She'd spent five years studying and writing up her various specimens, preparing a thousand-page document to prove our existence and counter every objection she could anticipate from her medical colleagues. She'd gone broke because of her obsession.

What had it all come to? Utter ruin.

Even though she'd connected with at least two dozen other doctors who claimed to have seen and experimented upon vampires--perusing their samples, reviewing their material, and referencing it--she had found the doors of every reputable medical association in the world slammed in her face.

She was laughed at, ridiculed, denied grant money, and ultimately denied admission to conventions and conferences, and pointed out publicly as a laughingstock by those who ostracized her and advised her to "get psychological help."

"They destroyed me," she said calmly. "They ruined me. They did it to all of us. They cast us out along with the believers in ancient astronauts, pyramid power, ectoplasm, and the lost city of Atlantis. They sent me into the wilderness of crackpot websites and New Age conventions and fringe gatherings where we were welcomed only by enthusiasts who believed in everything from Ouija boards to Bigfoot. My license to practice medicine was revoked in California. My family turned against me. I was for all practical purposes dead."

"I see," I said dismally.

"I wonder if you do," she said. "There's abundant evidence in the hands of science all over the planet that you exist, you know, but nobody's ever going to do a damned thing about it. At least not as things are now."

I was speechless. I should have known.

"I used to think that once a vampire fell into the hands of doctors, it would be over."

She laughed.

"It's happened many times," she said. "And I can tell you exactly what takes place. The vampire, having been taken captive in some sheltered place by day, wakes up at sundown to destroy his captors and lay waste their jail or their laboratory or their morgue. If he or she is too weak to do that, then the captors are generally spellbound and befuddled into releasing the victim, and retribution soon follows with all photographic or medical evidence immolated along with the witnesses. Sometimes other blood drinkers come to help free the captive. Sometimes an entire lab facility goes up in flames and almost everyone on the premises is killed. I documented at least two dozen accounts that fit this pattern. Every single one had a series of official 'rational' explanations of what happened attached to it, with marginalized survivors ridiculed and ultimately ignored. Some survivors have wound up in mental hospitals. You don't have to worry about a thing."

"And so you work now with Fareed."

"I have a place here," she said with a gentle smile. "I'm respected here for what I know. You could say I've been reborn. Oh, you cannot imagine the little fool I was that night when I saw you on the stage, so certain I was going to take the medical world by storm with all those pictures."

"What did you want to happen? I mean what did you want to happen to us?"

"I wanted to be believed, first and foremost, and then I wanted you to be studied! The very thing that Fareed's doing here. There is no rhyme or reason to what is actually studied 'out there.' " She gestured as if the mortal world were on the other side of the wall. "Doesn't matter anymore to me," she added. "I work for Fareed."

I laughed under my breath.

The warm natural erotic feeling was long gone. What I wanted to do now again, of course, was drain every drop of blood out of her precious, adorable, curvaceous, hot little body. But I settled for kissing her, snuggling up to her, and pressing my lips against her warm throat, listening to that thunder of blood in the artery.