Kalisan glanced at me. “And what’s your story?”
Barkley had come to sit next to me, and I patted his head absently. “I’m just a girl in need of a cure.”
He glanced down at the dog. “I suppose you can’t be all that bad if my werewolf likes you.”
I removed my hand. “Were-what?”
Kalisan smiled. “Ah, so you are a vampire who doesn’t believe in werewolves?”
Barkley licked my hand, and I immediately wiped it on my pants. “Gross.”
“His rude behavior isn’t his fault. He’s been stuck that way for a very long time. He forgets normal human manners. I’ve been working on a cure for him as well, but alas, the university’s grants for this sort of research are few and far between.”
I glanced down at Barkley. “Bad dog.”
He licked my hand again.
Kalisan turned to Quinn and took the photo back. “You truly want the cure?”
Quinn nodded. “Yes.”
“I’ll give it to you.” He handed the gun to Quinn. “But first you must shoot the woman.”
I heard a whimper, and I wasn’t sure if it was Barkley or myself.
Quinn frowned down at the gun in his hands. “You want me to—”
Kalisan pointed at me. “Shoot her. She’s a vampire; you’re a hunter. This should be no problem for you.”
I backed up a step. “Quinn.”
“Shut up,” Quinn said. Then to the doctor, “You’re saying that all I have to do for the cure is to shoot her. Right here. Right now. And you’ll give it to me.”
“That’s correct.”
Quinn raised the shotgun toward me, and I backed up against the wall. I was barely breathing, barely thinking. Just the word “no” going through my head over and over again. And the thought that I shouldn’t have made him sleep on the couch last night. Big mistake. Huge.
“Just shoot her,” Quinn said to himself as he aimed the gun at my forehead. “Easy as that.”
Then he turned the gun toward Kalisan.
“Sorry, Doc. Things stopped being that easy for me a while ago. Now about that cure?”
The doctor stared at him for a second and then laughed and pushed the gun away.
“Blanks. Just blanks. I was only testing you.”
I hadn’t moved. I’d been seconds away from needing adult diapers and was trying to make my brain work again. Guns are bad. Very bad. Especially when they’re pointed at me.
“Sarah,” Quinn said. “You okay?”
“Sure, no problem.” My voice was squeaky.
“Come,” Kalisan said. “I’ll make coffee.”
Five minutes later I was sitting in the doctor’s expansive kitchen trying to make my near- death twitches go away. He’d given me a coffee mug that read RESEARCHERS DO IT BY THE BOOK. I think it was supposed to sound dirty, but I wasn’t in the mood to find it amusing. We’d already called for a cab. Being where we were, it would be better to have one waiting outside than be stuck here forever. To put it mildly.
“You two are an item?” Kalisan asked after biting into an apple Danish.
Quinn glanced at me. “No. Just friends.”
“May I ask why you want to be cured?”
“It’s simple,” Quinn said. “We want our old lives back.”
“Then perhaps you should have thought twice before being sired.”
I shook my head. “We were both turned against our will.”
He studied me for a moment, perhaps trying to decide if I was lying or not. “You’d allow yourselves to be my guinea pigs?”
I didn’t particularly like the sound of that.
“Has the cure been used successfully before?” Quinn reached under the table and squeezed my hand.
“Yes, of course. But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a new technology.”
He nodded. “We’re interested.”
Kalisan went to refill his coffee mug, topping it off with a lot of cream and several spoonfuls of sugar. “Then there is only the matter of price.”
I’d expected that. You can’t get anything good for free anymore, even when you volunteer to be a guinea pig. I could sell my sofa. There were those commemorative Princess Diana plates that were probably worth a pretty penny on eBay. And I still had a bit of money my grandmother had left me in her will. It was only a few thousand, but it was nice to know I had it for a rainy day. And it was very rainy.
“Okay,” I said. “How much?”
“One million dollars.” Kalisan took a sip of his coffee. “Each.”
My Princess Diana plates couldn’t go up that much, even if there was a last-minute bidding war.
“What?” I managed. “Are you kidding me?”
I looked over at Quinn. His face was red. “That’s excessive. There must be another way.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the going rate,” Dr. Kalisan said, almost apologetically. “It’s not as though I have a lab here and am able to mix up the ingredients easily. It is a long, expensive process. Components have to be gathered from the four corners of the earth.
Dark magic is involved, too, and you would not believe how much the going hourly rate is for a wizard these days. Working wizards have such huge egos, you have no idea. I don’t care what the movies would have you believe.”