She Hired Me For Her Blood Bank, But It's My Blood She Craves

The silence was the first thing that struck you. It wasn’t the quiet of an empty library or a late-night chapel; it was a pressurized, clinical silence that seemed to absorb all sound, a stark contrast to the frantic symphony of beeping monitors and shouted orders that had been the soundtrack to your life for the past five years. In the ER, chaos had been a constant companion. Here, at Aeterna, the stillness felt absolute, almost unnatural. The air smelled of antiseptic and cold steel, clean to the point of sterility. This was what you’d wanted, wasn’t it? A retreat from the life-and-death scramble, a quiet night job where the only thing you had to worry about was proper labeling and temperature control.

“The cryo-freezers are maintained at a constant negative one hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. They are monitored digitally, but you will be required to log the temperature manually at the start and end of each shift.”

The voice came from beside you, low and melodic, yet it carried a chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. You turned to face your supervisor, Elara. She moved with a liquid grace that seemed at odds with the rigid environment, her lab coat pristine, her steps making no sound on the polished concrete floor. She was precisely as you remembered from the brief, formal interview: impossibly elegant, with dark hair pulled back into a severe twist that left the long, pale column of her throat exposed.

She guided you from one station to the next, her instructions clear and concise. “Each unit is barcoded upon arrival. You scan it here, confirm the blood type and Rh factor against the manifest, and then log it into the digital inventory before storage.”

Her hands were long and slender, her movements economical and precise as she handled a demonstration vial. You found yourself watching the way her fingers moved over the scanner, instead of the glowing monitor she was pointing to. Her beauty was arresting, not in a warm or inviting way, but with the severe perfection of a classical statue. High cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth that seemed carved from alabaster, rarely curving into a smile. Her eyes, the color of dark, stormy water, met yours only when necessary, and when they did, you felt an unnerving sense of being assessed and cataloged, just like the units of plasma she was explaining.

“Any questions, Casey?” she asked, her gaze fixed on the digital interface of the main inventory system.

You shook your head, your own voice feeling clumsy and loud in the quiet of the lab. “No. It all seems straightforward.”

She made a small sound of acknowledgement, a soft hum deep in her chest. As she turned back to the console to finalize the initial setup for your shift, the sterile overhead light caught the delicate skin just below her ear. You watched the elegant line of her jaw sweep down the length of her throat to where it disappeared into the starched collar of her coat. A sudden, inexplicable urge to trace that line with your fingertip shot through you, so potent it made your breath catch. You couldn’t explain the pull she exerted, a silent gravity in the sterile quiet of the night. It was only your first shift, but you already knew the stillness of Aeterna was far more complicated than it seemed.

The quiet rhythm you were beginning to find was shattered by a soft, insistent chime from the receiving bay. It was a different tone from the standard courier alert, higher and more urgent. Elara froze mid-sentence, her body going unnaturally still. The change was instantaneous and absolute. One moment she was your calm, detached supervisor; the next, she was a predator that had caught a scent on the wind.

“Stay here,” she commanded, her voice losing all its melodic warmth. It was flat and sharp.

She moved toward the bay door, her long strides silent and swift. A moment later, she returned, pulling a small, black cooler on a wheeled dolly. It was unlike the standard-issue blue medical coolers stacked against the far wall. This one was matte black, sleek, and bore a silver symbol you didn’t recognize etched into its lid—a serpent coiled into a figure eight, its fangs biting into its own tail.

The air in the lab seemed to thin, charged with a new, sharp-edged tension.

“Go to the main supply closet,” Elara said, not looking at you. Her focus was entirely on the black cooler. “I need you to inventory the vials and cross-reference the stock with last week’s order form.”

It was a dismissal, plain and simple. You nodded, turning to walk toward the closet at the far end of the lab. The task was busywork, and you both knew it. From the doorway of the supply room, you could see a distorted reflection of the main lab in the polished chrome of a shelving unit. You began counting boxes of collection vials, but your attention was on the distorted image of Elara.

She produced a small, ornate key from a chain you hadn't noticed before, worn under her lab coat. With a click, she unlocked the cooler. Her movements were urgent, almost frantic, as she lifted out several blood bags. They were not the standard transparent units; the bags themselves were opaque and black, marked with the same silver serpent. She held one in her hands for a moment, her knuckles white where she gripped the plastic, her head bowed slightly. It was an attitude of desperate reverence, like a starving person praying over a crust of bread.

Then, she moved. Swift and silent, she crossed to a section of the back wall that had appeared to be a seamless panel of stainless steel. A small, dark screen flickered to life at her touch. She entered a code and pressed her thumb to the screen. With a quiet hiss of compressed air, the panel slid aside, revealing a small, dark chamber from which a visible cloud of intense cold billowed out. She placed the bags inside with a care that bordered on worship before the door slid shut, once again becoming an anonymous part of the wall.

An hour later, the strange intensity had dissipated, though a residual chill remained. You found your courage while restocking a cart beside her.

“That symbol on the cooler,” you began, trying to sound casual. “I’ve never seen it before. What is it for?”

Elara stopped her work, placing a rack of test tubes down with deliberate slowness. She turned her head, and her dark, unreadable eyes met yours. Then, for a fraction of a second, her gaze dropped. It flickered to the side of your neck, to the place where your pulse beat a steady, living rhythm against your skin. The look was so quick you might have imagined it, but you felt it anyway—a phantom touch that made the spot tingle.

“A private philanthropic research initiative,” she said, her voice clipped and cold, a wall of ice dropping between you. “It does not concern your duties here.”

The wall was back up, higher and colder than before. You spent the final hour of your shift in silence, performing the mundane closing tasks. The hum of the freezers was the only sound as you gathered the last of the used glassware onto a stainless-steel tray to take to the decontamination sink. The night had been unsettling, leaving a strange thrum of energy under your skin you couldn't shake. You just wanted to get through the last ten minutes, go home, and try to forget the look in Elara’s eyes when she’d glanced at your throat.

You turned from the counter, tray in hand, and your foot caught on the edge of a rubber floor mat that had curled up at the corner. Your balance was gone in an instant. The tray tilted, and you lurched forward to save it, a futile effort. It slipped from your grasp, and the world became a cacophony of shattering glass, a sharp, violent sound that ripped through the lab’s oppressive quiet. You threw your hands out to break your fall, and a spike of searing pain shot through your left palm as it landed squarely on a jagged shard of a broken vial.

“Ah—damn it,” you hissed, pulling your hand back instinctively. Blood, shockingly red against the white floor, welled up from a deep gash in the fleshy part of your palm.

Before you could even push yourself up, she was there. It wasn't that she walked over; it was as if she simply materialized at your side, a blur of motion in the periphery. One moment she was across the lab, and the next she was kneeling in front of you, the scent of lavender and something ancient, like old paper, surrounding you.

“Do not move,” she said. Her voice was a low command, devoid of panic but vibrating with an unnerving intensity.

Her cool fingers wrapped around your wrist, the touch sending a jolt up your arm. Her grip was impossibly strong, holding your hand steady as she examined the injury. You could feel the frantic beat of your own pulse against her thumb. From a pocket inside her lab coat, she produced a handkerchief—not paper, but dark silk, smooth and cool. She pressed it firmly against the cut, and you winced as the pressure sent a fresh wave of pain through your hand.

The faint, coppery scent of your own blood rose into the air between you. It seemed to thicken, to become a tangible presence in the room. And as it did, something in Elara changed. Her head lifted slowly, her gaze locking with yours. The professional mask, the cool detachment—it was gone. Her pupils were wide and black, swallowing the stormy gray of her irises. Her lips were slightly parted, and you saw the pale tip of her tongue trace along them. It wasn't an expression of concern or clinical assessment. It was something else entirely. Something primal and dark and starved. The look was one of such profound, raw hunger that it struck you dumb, stealing the air from your lungs. Your heart, which had been racing from the fall, began to hammer against your ribs for a completely different reason, a frantic, terrifying rhythm that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the woman kneeling before you, her eyes fixed on you as if you were the only thing in the world that could quench a desperate, centuries-old thirst.