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“Who? Doug and Elijah?”
“A pathologist and a botanist?” Mia asked. “Scientists tend not to be very open minded about the occult.”
“Ah, sure,” Saber said. “Totally.”
Mia stopped.
“Hawthorn,” she said reaching up to touch the low hanging branches of a tree with small red berries. She broke off two long branches heavy with foliage.
“Thank you, sister,” she said to the tree.
Lozen watched her, and Saber saw her mouth the words “thank you sister,” too.
17
They met at Doug’s house, where he had tea and a little tray of cookies and fruit set out on his small, accommodating, farmhouse table. Saber arrived first, with Lozen, and Elijah arrived not long after, carrying a little orange notepad. He was as withdrawn as he’d been before, but he’d left behind the guarded cynicism and seemed more open. Nobody wasreallytalking except for Doug, who asked urbane questions, like what grade Lozen was in or how Elijah’s week had gone.
When Doug opened the door for Mia, Saber noticed Elijah startle at the sight of her. She turned and saw the same woman that she’d met a few days before, the cloud of silver-blond hair, the owl-like glasses and steely blue eyes. She looked back at Elijah, who stared, and realized he was surprised by her looks.
Mia, it occurred to her, was a very beautiful woman.
Doug seemed not to notice and led her to the table where everyone else waited.
“So,” Doug said. “Mia, how is it that you came to be involved in our little… problem.”
“Well, the girls, that is to say Saber and Lozen, came to buy some herbs at Thistletree where I work, and I recognized the application of what they were buying.”
“Which was?”
“To ward off and fight vampires.”
Elijah made a chuckling sound that turned into a long sigh.
“What?” Saber said to him. “Why are you laughing at that?”
“Are we really talking aboutvampires? Really? I mean,come on.”
Doug leaned back in his chair a little bit.
“I think we are, Elijah,” he said. “I’ll say that I’m with you, still on the side of skepticism, but no other satisfactory explanation has been given.”
Elijah laughed softly again, leaning over the table, and put his face in his hands.
“Ok, vampires,” he said. “So now what?”
“First,” Mia said, “I want to hear everyone’s stories. I want to know how we five people came to be in this room. I think we owe that to one another.”
Doug nodded and, as the natural leader, began.
“I found the first exsanguinate body on one of my walks in the forest around my house about three years ago…”
He spoke for about five minutes like a scientist discussing his findings, economically and without emotion. Everyone was silent, and Elijah, Saber noticed, jotted a few words in his small, spiral-bound notebook.
“Elijah?” Saber said when he finished. “Can you tell us why you’re here?”
He leaned back in his chair and sighed a little, then began to speak.
“The first time I was asked to examine a body without blood, I wasn’t especially shocked. Bodies bleed out all the time after massive trauma, it wasn’t anything new. What was new was the lack of an obvious wound…”
