Moonlight | Lucien Castle

Chapter 21

Kol dropped her off at the penthouse the next day.

Amaris had several bags of notes, and shuffled into Lucien's apartment whilst failing to ignore the funny looks he was sending her way.

"What?" she asked innocently. "You said to bring my notes, so I did!"

Lucien chuckled. "Well, I suppose I ought to be more specific next time. The astronomy ones aren't my area of expertise."

As she moved further inside, she saw that he'd set up a large table with microscopes of all sizes, as well as several petri dishes and other strange contraptions whose names she didn't know.

"Woah," she whispered. "You just own all that?"

"Indeed. I imagine you haven't gotten actual lab experience. I imagined you might enjoy this. Some fun exploration. And, because you mentioned you don't like going into heat, perhaps we could investigate together a way to make that not happen. It won't happen in a day, but... it may be a project you'll enjoy. I always find great entertainment in setting my mind to something and seeing it done over the span of months." He handed her a box of gloves. "Slip some on, and we can get started."

Amaris was staring in wonder at all the machines, finding there was so much she hadn't learned about. He showed her something called a centrifuge, where small tubes were put in to spin incredibly fast, in turn separating compounds. He showed her some equipment to perform gel electrophoresis, to separate DNA samples. The most impressive thing in her opinion were the micropipettes, which were rather large but meant to obtain very small amounts of samples.

"What do you investigate with all of this?" she asked, kneeling down to peer into different machines.

"Well," he said, "do you recall when I told you that you needn't worry about me dying if you accidentally bite me?"

"Yes."

"This is how I managed to fix that problem. I never interacted much with werewolves, but there was always a fear that one day, I would come across them and be unprepared. Initially, I was studying blood from witches, werewolves, and vampires, trying to find common threads in genes to find which gene made the venom... to see if perhaps I had a similar gene to make me resistant to it. Then, the whole world learned of Nik becoming a hybrid, and that his blood was the cure to a wolf bite. I transitioned to studying just my own blood... separating through comparison with other vampires of my sireline to isolate the common blood we shared— Nik's blood. And with that..."

"You used it to develop a cure," she said, fascinated. "That's brilliant. Well, if you managed that, surely there is a way to make me stop going into heat. Or all sorts of other things."

He raised a brow. "Other things? Love, I am a scientist studying biology, I am not a miracle worker. If you want the ability to read my mind in order to see all the dirty fantasies I have about you, you will need to figure that out for yourself."

She grinned. "I don't want to read minds. I just wonder about stuff. Like making me taller, if that's possible. Or immortal without having to be a hybrid."

Lucien sighed. "I am not sure there is a way to make either of those things happen. But we can learn together. The way I learned about all of this was analyzing my own DNA, my own blood. Perhaps you'd like to do that as well?"

"Sure. Just walk me through it."

Amaris felt she was learning more from him than from her actual professors. He was patient, showing her different parts in her notes that could be applied to what they were doing. They looked at bacterial colonies, they did mouth swabs to observe cells, and then, each bled into small test tubes to perform the gel electrophoresis for fun.