Page 105 of Heathens

“Now?”

“Dom, I saw you slip it into your pocket before you left. If you want me to do this for you, I have to be able to trust that you’re not just doing this to fuck me over and keep me as your own personal sex toy. I need to know this thing is real.”

He’s reluctant to give me even an ounce of freedom, no matter how reasonable the request. Even this little trip to the Boardwalk was his plan, completely under his supervision. This isn’t a man who’d be willing to cede any significant amount of power on his own. It has to be negotiated step by step.

He digs into his pocket and hands me the formula. I barely got to look at this thing the other night, but it only takes a couple more minutes to confirm he’s right about the mix. There’s some sort of barbiturate, impossible to miss once you know it’s there. The issue is in the measurements. There’s not enough data for me to fully understand how the blood itself was synthesized, but the barbiturate? There’s a real chance it’d just kill the subject instead of hooking them. The worst part is extremely clear one half of the formula could never work without the other, at least not the way they’ve been laid out here. They’re bound together at the base level, one likely activating the other in some important way. That means no blood without the drug, no drug without the blood.

“Well, your friend… Theo, was it?”

“Yeah.”

“I think he’s right. It may not be literally a weapon, but it’ll certainly cause some serious damage to our brain chemistry. Problem is even if we could use it ourselves, it would take multiple trials to get this thing to actually work. I’m not even sure how practical it is in its current form, even for the fucked up shit Rene wants to use it for.”

“Trials? Plural?”

“Yeah, see, that’s the thing people don’t really understand about drugs. They’re delicate. One wrong measurement and suddenly they either don’t work right anymore, or you’ve got a real fucking monster on your hands.”

I pause, a little issue that’s been nagging at me for a while finally digging its way to the surface.

“Theo must be pretty smart. That whole speech of yours, it was all just what he told you, huh?”

Dominic’s eyes shift to the side, clearly a little annoyed I saw through him so easily.

“Look, don’t worry, you convinced me. I just want to know how your friend knew all of this. There’s a lot going on here and your crew doesn’t strike me as the scientific type.”

“You’re not the only one who went to school. He’s got a degree in chemistry.”

I raise a brow. He can’t be this dense.

“And… what year did he get that degree? I’m assuming he wasn’t in night school.”

Dominic’s eyes narrow.

“What are you implying?”

“That figuring out what’s on this page is complicated enough for me. I think I can assume my own studies are based on a significantly more modern set of textbooks. I’m surprised he can even read some of this shit.”

“Isn’t math just… math?” Dominic scoffs.

I let out a frustrated sigh.

“Mathisa universal language, sure. But these chemical formulas are a lot more complicated. They’re modern. Half of this shorthand wouldn’t even have made sense 20 years ago, let alone when you two were young enough to getting an education.”

“Couldn’t he have just looked it up?”

“It’s possible,” I reply. “Or maybe he talked to one of Rene’s men and tortured it out of him, I’m not sure. All I know is this is pretty hard to parse, even for me.”

I hand him back the formula and he stuffs it into his pocket. I can’t get what I want without giving him the thing he needs the most in the world, and that’s my loyalty. Right now, what that looks like is sitting in a lab and cooking up a drug that has the potential to blow up in my face in more ways than one.

Once again, he’s given me the wonderful choice of not having any choice at all.

Back at his apartment, I realized there may not be a way out of this dynamic, that I would always be inferior to him. While he had me up against that wall; while he was threatening to rip me apart, I had an epiphany. I need the power that he has.

And then suddenly it wasn’t about beating him at his own game, it was about doing what he wanted, but onmyfucking terms. Dominic isn’t willing to give up complete control, but he’s willing to move goalposts so long as I string him along a little. I got him to beg in the feeding rooms, and I’ll get him to turn me. Soon.

Over the years, I’ve thought about what it would be like to be one of them, to live for hundreds of years, to have their strength and their cruelty. I could walk the streets at night and I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore. Humans have rearranged our entire lives — our sleep schedules, our jobs, our friendships — all for survival. It’s not living, not really.

“I’ll make your formula, but you have to follow through with your end of the bargain when this is all over. Make me a vampire, and I want half of Rene’s territory–”

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