The Cursed Laboratory

Episode 2: They Call Me Their Ancestor

A silver-haired man stood in the entrance hall. He wore a vintage suit and a perfectly tied bow tie, and he bowed to me with textbook precision.

"Miss Vivian Ye," he said. "We have been expecting you."

His tone was gentle, but every word carried the certainty of someone who had known I would come.

"Where is my sister Talia?" I asked. My hand tightened on my backpack strap. Inside I had a stun gun and a scalpel.

"Please follow me."

His shoes made no sound on the marble floor. I followed him through a corridor lined with portraits. Men and women, old and young, dressed in clothes from different eras. They all shared two things: skin pale as paper and eyes that glimmered dark red in the shadows. I counted forty-seven portraits.

The newest one stopped me cold.

A young woman in a modern hospital gown sat by a window, smiling in profile with a blood-draw needle in her hand. Sunlight touched her face while everyone else in the gallery had been painted in shadow.

It was Talia.

"Where is she?" My voice shook.

The butler did not answer. He opened the doors to a banquet hall.

A party was underway. Candles hung from chandeliers. A long table stretched beneath them. More than fifty guests stood in clothing from every era imaginable: Renaissance gowns, Victorian corsets, medieval armor. Each held a glass filled with a thick dark red liquid.

Every one of them stopped moving and turned to look at me.

The silence was unbearable. Not hostile. Not welcoming. Appraising. The way people might examine a newly arrived relic.

Then a voice came from the far end of the room.

"Dr. Ye."

A man in black rose from the high-backed chair at the head of the table. He looked about thirty. Black hair. Black shirt. Black trousers. He seemed absurdly modern among all the antique splendor. As he approached, the crowd parted soundlessly.

"I am Adrian," he said. "The master of this castle. Your sister Talia lived here for two months."

"Where is she now?"

"I am sorry."

He signaled to the butler, who stepped forward with a dark wooden box. Adrian opened it and handed me a silver pocket watch.

Inside was a miniature portrait of Talia standing in a rose garden in a Victorian dress, smiling in that bright, genuine way she only smiled when she was truly happy.

"She left this behind when she departed," Adrian said. "She told us to give it to you if you came."

"When did she leave?"

"Three years ago. On the full moon in July. She said she was going back to find you. We heard nothing after that until last month, when we saw the missing-person notice you posted."

My thumb brushed the inside of the lid. A tiny line had been engraved there:

Sis, don't trust the blood test. Don't trust them. And don't trust me either.

I looked up. "What exactly are you people? A porphyria support group? Some kind of retro cult?"

A few people laughed softly.

Adrian only smiled. "How long have you studied blood diseases, Doctor?"

"Ten years."

"Then you know real porphyria patients cannot stand in moonlight."

He gestured to the window. A young woman stepped forward, opened the stained-glass panes, and let moonlight pour over her bare skin. Nothing happened. No burns. No blistering. She even lifted her face into it with a contented sigh.

"We simply live differently," Adrian said. "Nightwalkers. Moon-blessed. Call us what you like. More plainly... vampires."

Then he bared his teeth. His canines lengthened in front of my eyes, sharpening into something subtly inhuman and far more terrifying than any movie monster.

Around the room, more than fifty people smiled the same way.

"Welcome to Moonshadow Castle," Adrian said softly. "Or, as we prefer to put it..."

He lowered his voice.

"Welcome home, Prototype."

When Adrian spoke, the guests resumed breathing as if they had all been holding their breath for the same cue. Yet no one looked away from me. Some were curious. Some were reverent. A few looked frightened, which made no sense until I realized they were not afraid of what I might do tonight, but of what I might remember. To them I was not a stranger who had stumbled into their home. I was a lost origin returning in borrowed flesh.