He Hired Me For My Mind, But My Vampire Professor Wants My Blood

The lecture hall was stuffy, smelling of old paper and the damp wool of a hundred coats. Evie sat in the third row, her notebook open but her pen still. The guest speaker, Dr. Alaric Morgan, stood at the podium, a stark figure in the warm, dim light. He wasn't what she'd expected. The flyer had promised a visiting historian, an expert in medieval superstitions. She’d pictured a stooped, tweed-wearing academic.

Morgan was anything but. He was tall and unnaturally still, dressed in a dark, tailored suit that seemed more appropriate for a funeral than a university lecture. His face was a study in sharp angles—high cheekbones, a severe jawline—and his skin was so pale it looked like polished bone under the spotlights. But it was his eyes that held her. They were dark, almost black, and they didn't just scan the room; they seemed to pierce through the gloom and pin each student to their seat.

His voice was a low, resonant baritone, each word articulated with a precision that felt ancient. He spoke of strigoi, of the Nachzehrer, of the draugr, not as forgotten myths but as tangible fears that had shaped the very psyche of medieval Europe. He didn't use slides or notes, simply stood there, his hands resting lightly on the podium, weaving a narrative that was both academic and deeply unsettling. He glided over the material with an intimacy that felt less like study and more like memory.

"The fear," he said, his gaze sweeping over the audience before it snagged on Evie’s, "was not simply of death. It was of a perversion of life. An existence outside of God's grace, outside of the warmth of the sun, driven by a singular, insatiable thirst."

The air in Evie’s lungs felt thin. He was looking right at her, as if he’d plucked the half-formed question from her mind. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, stupid rhythm. Before she could stop herself, her hand was in the air.

Morgan’s lips curved in a smile that held no warmth. "Yes, Miss...?"

"Evie," she managed, her voice feeling small. "Evie Rowe. You speak of the thirst as a metaphor, but in the accounts... the folklore... it’s so literal. Was it the fear of being consumed that was the most potent? The loss of self, of blood, of life?"

He didn't look away. The intensity of his stare was a physical weight, pressing her into her chair. The rest of the lecture hall, the other students, her own professor nodding in the front row—it all faded into a dull, peripheral blur. There was only him.

"Fear of being consumed is elemental, Miss Rowe," he answered, his voice dropping, becoming a confidential murmur that seemed to cross the space between them in an instant. "But the true terror, the one that lingers in the quiet hours of the night, is not the fear of being prey. It is the secret, shameful longing to be the one who consumes. To have that power. To shed the frailty of your own flesh and blood and command the darkness, rather than hide from it." His eyes bore into hers, and she felt a hot, mortifying blush creep up her neck. It was as if he’d reached into her chest and exposed the most restless, hungry part of her soul. "Is it not?"

The spell broke. The overhead fluorescent lights flickered on, washing the lecture hall in a flat, sterile white. The murmur of students gathering their belongings filled the sudden silence. Evie blinked, feeling as though she’d surfaced from a deep dive. Her heart was still pounding a heavy, thick rhythm against her ribs. Morgan gave a slight, formal nod to the room and stepped away from the podium, melting into the shadows at the side of the stage as if he were made of them.

Professor Albright, a round, cheerful man whose tweed jacket was a familiar campus fixture, took his place. "A round of applause for Dr. Morgan, please!" he boomed, clapping enthusiastically. The applause was scattered, a bit dazed. "Now, before you all rush off," Albright continued, "Dr. Morgan has generously agreed to take on a student research assistant for the duration of his month-long residency. This is a rare opportunity."

Evie’s attention snapped back into focus.

"The work will be intensive," Albright warned, a twinkle in his eye. "We're talking late nights. Very late nights. Dr. Morgan's research requires access to the oldest collections in the Atherton Library archives—materials that can only be handled after hours. It's a paid position, of course. Anyone interested, please form a line here to my right to submit a brief application."

A current went through her, sharp and decisive. It wasn't a choice. It was a compulsion, a gravitational pull toward the dark figure still standing just out of the main light. She had to know more. She had to understand the unnerving resonance of his words, the feeling that he hadn't been lecturing about folklore, but delivering a confession she was meant to hear.

She grabbed a form from the stack Professor Albright held out and quickly filled in her details, her handwriting barely legible. A short line of other keen folklore majors had already formed, and Evie took her place at the end, her stomach twisting. She watched as Morgan spoke briefly to each student, his posture relaxed but radiating an aura of absolute authority. He took their papers, his gaze sweeping over them with an unnerving, evaluative intensity.

When it was her turn, the air grew thick. He turned his full attention to her, and the other students, the lecture hall, the entire world seemed to fall away again. There was only the silent space between them.

"Miss Rowe," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Dr. Morgan," she replied, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands as she held out the application form.

He didn't look at the paper. His eyes, dark and depthless, held hers. He reached for the form, his movements economical and precise. As he took it, the tips of his long, pale fingers deliberately brushed against the back of her hand.

The contact was a shock. It wasn't just cool; it was a deep, penetrating cold, like touching a marble statue that had been left in the winter dark for a century. The coldness was absolute, devoid of any trace of human warmth. A jolt, sharp and electric, shot up her arm, making her gasp. It was over in a second. He had the paper, his fingers no longer touching hers, but the ghost of that impossible cold and the phantom current of that shock lingered on her skin, a brand she could feel sinking all the way to her bones.

He held her gaze for a moment longer, a flicker of something unreadable in the black depths of his eyes, before he gave a curt nod and turned to the next student. Evie walked away in a daze, the cold spot on her hand burning like a brand.

Two days later, she received the email. The position was hers. Her first night was to be that Friday, 10 p.m.

The Atherton Library was a tomb after hours. The great vaulted ceilings swallowed the sound of her footsteps, and the only light came from a few green-shaded lamps casting pools of lonely yellow onto the massive oak tables. Morgan was already there, standing in the entrance to the rare manuscripts archive, a section of the library Evie had only ever read about. He wasn't leaning against the iron gate or waiting; he was simply present, a statue carved from shadow and stillness.

"Miss Rowe," he greeted her, his voice the same low resonance that had captivated her in the lecture hall. He unlocked the gate with an ornate iron key, the sound of the tumblers echoing loudly in the silence.

The air inside was thick with the scent of decaying paper and leather. Metal shelves stretched up into the darkness, packed tight with forgotten knowledge. For the first two hours, they worked in near silence. He directed her to a specific codex, a 16th-century treatise on demonology, and she carefully carried it to a reading table. He never seemed to move in a conventional way. She would look down at her notes, and when she looked up, he would be in a different aisle, his back to her, examining a spine. There was no sound of footsteps, no rustle of clothing. He didn't glide; he simply ceased to be in one place and appeared in another. She'd brought a thermos of coffee and a bottle of water for herself, but he consumed nothing, waved away her offer with a dismissive, almost contemptuous flick of his fingers.

Her task was to find any cross-references to a specific Romanian clan name. It required her to use one of the tall, rolling ladders to access the upper shelves. The particular shelf Morgan had indicated was ancient and overburdened, the wood groaning softly even under its own weight. She found the section she needed, her fingers tracing the faded gilt on a heavy, leather-bound volume. As she tried to work it free from the tightly packed row, it resisted. She gave a firmer tug.

There was a sickening crack of splintering wood. The entire bookshelf, a towering monolith of oak and paper weighing hundreds of pounds, tilted away from the wall. Time seemed to warp, slowing to a crawl as she saw the top edge begin its inexorable arc downward, directly toward her. A scream caught in her throat, a useless, pathetic sound.

Morgan had been thirty feet away, across the main reading area, examining a manuscript under a desk lamp.

In the space between one frantic heartbeat and the next, he was there. Not a blur, not a rush of movement. He was simply in front of her, his back to her, one hand braced flat against the falling shelf. The immense weight met his palm with a deafening groan of stressed wood, and then silence. It stopped dead. The force should have pulped his arm, shattered every bone from his fingers to his shoulder. He didn't even grunt. He held the entire, massive structure with the casual ease of a man leaning against a wall.

Slowly, with immense control, he pushed it back into place. It settled with a final, shuddering thud.

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the frantic, panicked drumming of Evie’s own heart. She was clinging to the ladder, her knuckles white. She stared, breathless, at his back.

He turned, his face a mask of cold composure, though his eyes burned with a dark, dangerous light. "You should be more careful, Miss Rowe," he said, his voice a low, chilling whisper in the sudden stillness. "These old things are treacherous." He looked at her wide, terrified eyes, the way her chest heaved. A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "Adrenaline is a remarkable chemical."

Adrenaline. The word was a lie, a flimsy piece of paper thrown over a chasm, and they both knew it. Evie’s hands were shaking so badly she had to grip the ladder’s rails to steady herself as she climbed down. She didn’t take her eyes off him. The adrenaline was hers, a frantic, chemical scream in her veins. What he possessed was something else entirely—a quiet, terrifying stillness that had held back death with one hand. She walked back to the table on unsteady legs and sat down, her own explanation dying on her lips. Thank you. Are you okay? The questions were absurd.

He didn't return to his manuscript. Instead, he pulled up a chair across from her, the scrape of its legs against the stone floor unnaturally loud. The space between them felt different now, charged with her fear and his impossible secret.

The nights that followed fell into a new rhythm. The academic silence was broken, replaced by a low current of conversation that felt more dangerous than any falling bookshelf. He began to question her, his curiosity a strange and intense thing. It wasn’t the idle chatter of a colleague. It was the probing of a man utterly alien to her world. He’d watch, his head tilted, as she scrolled through her phone.

“All of that information,” he murmured one night, gesturing toward the small, glowing screen. “Flowing through the very air. Do you not find it… deafening?”

“You get used to it,” she’d said, feeling strangely defensive. “It’s just how things are.”

“How things are,” he repeated, as if tasting the words. “A temporary state, Miss Rowe. It always is.”

He was fascinated by the mundane details of her life: her taste in music, which he called “structured noise”; her ambition to work in a museum, which he found quaint; the casual way she spoke of flying in a plane to visit family in another state. “To simply sever your ties with the earth and trust a machine of metal and fire,” he’d mused, staring into the middle distance. “Your generation possesses a unique form of faith.”

His fascination emboldened her. The fear she’d felt had not vanished, but it had sharpened into a fierce, consuming need to know. If he could probe her life, she could probe his.

“You talk about history as if you’ve seen it all,” she said one evening, looking up from a brittle map of 17th-century trade routes. “Where did you complete your studies?”

A slow smile touched his lips, a fleeting expression that never reached his eyes. “My studies have been… extensive. And conducted in many classrooms. Some of them were libraries. Some were battlefields.”

“You’ve never married? No children?” The question was outrageously personal, and it slipped out before she could stop it.

The smile vanished. He looked at her, his gaze so direct it felt like a physical touch. “To bind another to your own fate is the greatest of cruelties, Miss Rowe. I am not a cruel man.” The statement hung in the air, a confession disguised as a philosophy. He was lonely, she realized with a sudden, aching certainty. Profoundly and eternally lonely. And he had chosen it. The thought made him more terrifying, and more magnetic, than ever before.

The moment stretched, thick and heavy with unspoken things. It was nearly 3 a.m., and the air in the archive had grown stale. Evie’s eyes burned with fatigue. They were examining a folio bound in what Morgan had dryly called “human leather,” its pages made of a stiff, unforgiving vellum. The edges were sharp as razors. She was tired, her movements becoming clumsy. As she tried to separate two pages that had become fused by time and humidity, her finger slipped.

A sharp, slicing pain shot up her hand. "Fuck," she hissed, pulling her hand back instinctively. A deep, clean cut ran across the fleshy pad of her index finger. It was surprisingly severe. A bead of dark crimson welled up, then another, before a single, perfect drop fell, landing with a silent splash on the yellowed page. The red was shockingly vibrant against the ancient text, a stark stain of life on a surface of death.

The change in Morgan was instantaneous and terrifying.

He had been leaning over her shoulder, pointing to a line of script. The scent of her blood hit the air, and he recoiled as if struck. His head snapped up, his posture going ramrod straight. His eyes, which had been filled with a kind of detached academic interest, went black. The pupils blew wide, consuming the dark iris entirely, turning his gaze into two empty, bottomless pits. A muscle jumped in his jaw, and his nostrils flared, just once. He looked not at her wound, but at the drop of blood on the vellum, his focus absolute and predatory. It was the most visceral reaction she had ever seen in him—more primal than when he’d stopped the bookshelf. This wasn't about strength; this was about hunger.

"Morgan?" she whispered, her own pain forgotten.

He didn’t answer. He made a low sound in his throat, a choked, guttural noise of pure restraint. Without another word, he shoved himself away from the table, his chair screeching against the stone floor. He turned his back to her completely, stalking to the far side of the room where he stood facing a wall of unlit shelves, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides. His whole body was rigid, a statue of violent control.

"Are you alright?" Evie asked, her voice trembling. She fumbled in her bag for a tissue, pressing it hard against the cut. The blood quickly soaked through.

"Cover it," he ordered, his voice strained and harsh, utterly devoid of the cultured cadence she was used to. It was the voice of a stranger. "Get the scent out of the air."

Stunned into silence, she did as she was told, wrapping her finger tightly and finding a band-aid in a forgotten corner of her wallet. The atmosphere was ruined. The easy intimacy they had been building over the past week had not just evaporated; it had been murdered. For the remaining hour, he did not turn around. He issued commands from across the room, his voice clipped and cold. "Item 4B. Check the colophon. Compare it to the ledger."

When their time was up, he didn't walk her to the gate. He simply said, "You are dismissed," his back still to her.

Evie packed her things in the ringing silence, her heart pounding a confused, frightened rhythm. The secret he was hiding was no longer a romantic mystery. As she walked out of the library into the pre-dawn chill, she felt a certainty settle deep in her gut. Whatever Morgan was, it was something that starved. And it had just smelled a meal.

The coldness persisted for three nights. It was a sterile, brittle silence that coated every interaction. Morgan was a machine of research, his voice a monotone instrument for delivering citations and archival codes. He never met her eye. He never stood closer than ten feet. The warmth, the probing questions, the shared intimacy of their late-night world—all of it was gone, replaced by a chasm of arctic distance. Evie’s confusion curdled into a quiet, simmering anger. He had made her feel seen, and then punished her for bleeding.

On the fourth night, he broke the silence. "Our work on the monastic ledgers is complete," he stated, his back to her as he replaced a book on a high shelf. "The provenance of the collection points to a single private acquisition in 1888. The records are sealed, but the acquisition ledger references a sub-archival collection. Folio Gamma." He turned, and for the first time in days, his eyes met hers. They were flat, unreadable. "It is in the restricted stacks."

He didn't wait for a reply. He walked toward the rear of the archive, to a section she had only seen locked behind a heavy iron grate. He produced a key from his pocket—not a modern university key, but a long, skeletal piece of black iron that looked as old as the stones around them. The lock groaned in protest, the sound echoing in the dead air. He pushed the gate open and gestured for her to enter.

The air was different here. Colder, heavier, thick with the smell of undisturbed decay and brittle paper. He led her down a narrow aisle to a plain wooden chest secured with a tarnished brass lock. He opened it with a second, smaller key. Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, was a single, small book. It was no bigger than her hand, bound in dark leather so cracked and ancient it looked like parched earth.

"A private diary," Morgan said, his voice low. "Fifteenth century. From a convent near the Voivodeship of Wallachia." He placed it on the small reading desk under the aisle’s single bare bulb. "Check for any mention of book trading or scholars matching the collector's profile."

Evie sat, her fingers trembling slightly as she opened the fragile cover. The pages were vellum, the script a tight, spidery hand in faded brown ink. The Latin was archaic, but she could parse it. She began to read, her voice a soft murmur in the enclosed space. The first few pages were prayers, complaints about chores, fear of God. Then, the entries changed.

"A visitor comes to the cloister wall at night," she read aloud, her voice gaining strength as she translated. "He does not seek entry. He speaks to Sister Anna through the grille. He calls himself a scholar, a student of the eternal dark… he asks her of the old ways, of the superstitions we were told to forget."

Morgan was standing behind her, utterly still. She could feel his presence like a drop in pressure.

She turned the page. "Sister Anna says his face is carved from alabaster, beautiful but without life. His eyes… his eyes hold the darkness of the grave, yet burn with a cold fire when she speaks of her life within these walls. He never eats. He never drinks. He only listens, with a stillness that frightens the birds from the trees."

The air crackled. Evie’s heart hammered against her ribs. This was no coincidence. She was giving voice to his secret, reading the lines of his existence from a five-hundred-year-old book. She could feel his gaze on her, not on the book, but on her lips as they formed the words.

She swallowed, her throat dry, and read the next line. "Anna is pale. She says he speaks of a thirst… a thirst that knowledge cannot slake…"

Her voice broke on the last word. Before she could draw another breath, he moved. His speed was absolute. One moment he was behind her, the next his body was pressed against her back, his chest a wall of cold, hard muscle. His left hand shot forward, covering hers on the page, his fingers like ice against her skin. The book, her hand, his hand—all pinned to the desk. He leaned down, his mouth so close to her ear she could feel the absence of breath. His voice was a raw, frayed whisper, a sound that scraped directly against her nerves.

"Some things," he breathed, the words a vibration against her skin, "are better left unread."