Matt leaned back against the vending machine, looking at the elevators. Soon she’d be here. His heart fluttered in his chest at the thought that any minute now, those elevator doors would open and he’d see Jasmine.
His phone vibrated, and he took it out to see a text from Jasmine:
Come up to room 413. There’s something I want to show you.
Matt rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, found room 413, and tapped lightly on the closed door. It immediately jerked open, and Jasmine smiled up at him, almost bouncing with excitement.
“Come on in,” she urged, tugging him by the arm. She yanked him inside and closed the door behind them, then leaned against it, grinning.
“What’s going on?” Matt asked, looking around. This was obviously some sort of lab, full of shiny white-and-chrome equipment, none of which gave him the faintest clue to its purpose.
“Look at this,” Jasmine said. Leading the way across the room, she hopped up on a stool in front of one of the machines. She turned on a screen and began adjusting dials, her fingers moving competently over the controls. Two complicated-looking graphs showed up on the screen, one above the other.
“I have no idea what you’re showing me,” Matt said, staring at the screen.
“I ran an analysis of the two samples of blood I took,” Jasmine told him. “This is basically a genetic breakdown of Damon’s blood—” she pointed at the upper graph “—and this is the manmade vampire’s blood.” She indicated the lower graph. “They’re ridiculously similar. Much more similar than either is to normal human blood.”
“I still don’t know what that means,” Matt said apologetically.
“Long story short?” Jasmine arched an eyebrow, a pleased little smile on her lips. “Jack may have made his vampires in a lab, but he didn’t do it without help. There are all kinds of chemical and genetic modifications going on here,” she said, pointing to one edge of the lower graph. “But the basic structure of the blood shows that Jack didn’t start with just ordinary human blood. He used real vampire blood. That’s not in the lab notes Damon stole from him, but it’s definitely true. There was a first step he didn’t document in that notebook.”
“Wow.” Matt ran his eyes across the screen as Jasmine explained her conclusions in more detail. They still meant nothing to him, but he believed she knew what she was talking about. “It’s amazing that you figured this out.” He hesitated. “Is it going to help us kill them?”
Jasmine’s face fell. “I don’t know,” she said. “The mutated strands must be what keep them from being vulnerable to the things vampires usually die from. But I can’t—I’m not a geneticist.”
Seeing the disappointment in her eyes, Matt felt like a jerk. “This is great, though,” he said hastily. “The more we know about what Jack’s doing, the better.”
He was glad to see Jasmine’s lips tilt up again into a smile. And it was true. He had to believe that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his vampires would bring them closer to killing him.
Raccoon, Damon thought, scraping his tongue against his teeth, is even more disgusting than rabbit. That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing. He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up through branches at the stars, so clear and distant. The night forest was quiet around him.
He should just discreetly find a girl who would let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but somehow he couldn’t with Elena around. Even though he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seem right to find another companion. Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées.
How had Stefan managed it, decade after decade, resigning himself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Damon bit his lip and then consciously relaxed, lounging against the tree, pushing the thought away. He wasn’t going to think about Stefan.
Instead, he reached for his connection with Elena. It was better to think of her, of her soft skin and shining eyes, of her proud spirit and sharp, fierce mind, than to poke again and again at the painful scars left by Stefan’s loss.
Her grief was still there, haunting the bond between them. It would never leave her, he supposed, never leave either of them completely. But there was something else there, he thought, something gentler and warmer creeping into her emotions. He thought—hoped—that perhaps it was the way she felt about him.
Licking his lips, Damon let the blood flowing inside him—disgusting, but full of the energy of life—warm him and quicken his Power. Elena thought Siobhan might be in one of the hunting cabins up here in the hills. So Damon was looking.