Her name was Flannery Gilman, she said. In a clear fresh West Coast American voice, she explained that she’d been studying “us” since the night I’d appeared on the stage as a rock star outside San Francisco, and so many of our kind had died as the result of my great scheme to be a mortal performer. She’d seen vampires that night with her own eyes, and had no doubt of their existence. She’d seen them immolated in the parking lot afterwards. Indeed, she’d scraped up samples of their burnt and oozing remains from the asphalt. She’d gathered burnt vampiric bones in plastic sacks, and she’d developed hundreds of photographs later of what she’d witnessed and captured on film. She’d spent five years studying and writing up her various specimens, preparing a thousand-page document to prove our existence and counter every objection she could anticipate from her medical colleagues. She’d gone broke because of her obsession.

What had it all come to? Utter ruin.

Even though she’d connected with at least two dozen other doctors who claimed to have seen and experimented upon vampires—perusing their samples, reviewing their material, and referencing it—she had found the doors of every reputable medical association in the world slammed in her face.

She was laughed at, ridiculed, denied grant money, and ultimately denied admission to conventions and conferences, and pointed out publicly as a laughingstock by those who ostracized her and advised her to “get psychological help.”

“They destroyed me,” she said calmly. “They ruined me. They did it to all of us. They cast us out along with the believers in ancient astronauts, pyramid power, ectoplasm, and the lost city of Atlantis. They sent me into the wilderness of crackpot websites and New Age conventions and fringe gatherings where we were welcomed only by enthusiasts who believed in everything from Ouija boards to Bigfoot. My license to practice medicine was revoked in California. My family turned against me. I was for all practical purposes dead.”

“I see,” I said dismally.

“I wonder if you do,” she said. “There’s abundant evidence in the hands of science all over the planet that you exist, you know, but nobody’s ever going to do a damned thing about it. At least not as things are now.”

I was speechless. I should have known.

“I used to think that once a vampire fell into the hands of doctors, it would be over.”

She laughed.