The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unspoken by L J Smith, Aubrey Clark

huddled together, pressing ice or bandages to themselves, or filling out paperwork with exhausted expressions on their faces. In the chair closest to Matt, a tired-looking older man held a cup of coffee with both hands as he leaned forward tensely, his gaze fixed on the door of one of the examination rooms. Matt looked away, shifting from one foot to the other, embarrassed by the naked fear in the man’s eyes.
    Still, that man would be helped here. They all would. That’s what Jasmine did—she helped people. In that way, she’d always been one of them. They foughtmonsters to protect the innocent, and Jasmine
fixed
the innocent.
    It was such an unequivocally
good
thing to do—no shades of gray, no occasionally evil vampire allies, no icy Guardians—that Matt’s heart swelled with love for her. Jasmine, with her sweet, soft lips and her shining intelligent eyes, was good all the way through. And she loved him, too, despite everything he had seen and done.
    Matt leaned back against the vending machine, looking at the elevators. Soon she’d be here. His heart fluttered in his chest at the thought that any minute now, those elevator doors would open and he’d see Jasmine.
    His phone vibrated, and he took it out to see a text from Jasmine:
    Come up to room 413. There’s something I want to show you.
    Matt rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, found room 413, and tapped lightly on the closed door. It immediately jerked open, and Jasmine smiled up at him, almost bouncing with excitement.
    “Come on in,” she urged, tugging him by the arm. She yanked him inside and closed the door behind them, then leaned against it, grinning.
    “What’s going on?” Matt asked, looking around. This was obviously some sort of lab, full of shiny white-and-chrome equipment, none of which gave him the faintest clue to its purpose.
    “Look at this,” Jasmine said. Leading the way across the room, she hopped up on a stool in front of one of the machines. She turned on a screen and began adjusting dials, her fingers moving competently over the controls. Two complicated-looking graphs showed up on the screen, one above the other.
    “I have no idea what you’re showing me,” Matt said, staring at the screen.
    “I ran an analysis of the two samples of blood I took,” Jasmine told him. “This is basically a genetic breakdown of Damon’s blood—” she pointed at the upper graph “—and this is the manmade vampire’s blood.” She indicated the lower graph. “They’re ridiculously similar. Much more similar than either is to normal human blood.”
    “I still don’t know what that means,” Matt said apologetically.
    “Long story short?” Jasmine arched an eyebrow, a pleased little smile on her lips. “Jack may have made his vampires in a lab, but he didn’t do it without help. There are all kinds of chemical and genetic modifications going on here,” she said, pointing to one edge of the lower graph. “But the basic structure of the blood shows that Jack didn’tstart with just ordinary human blood. He used
real
vampire blood. That’s not in the lab notes Damon stole from him, but it’s definitely true. There was a first step he didn’t document in that notebook.”
    “Wow.” Matt ran his eyes across the screen as Jasmine explained her conclusions in more detail. They still meant nothing to him, but he believed
she
knew what she was talking about. “It’s amazing that you figured this out.” He hesitated. “Is it going to help us kill them?”
    Jasmine’s face fell. “I don’t know,” she said. “The mutated strands must be what keep them from being vulnerable to the things vampires usually die from. But I can’t—I’m not a geneticist.”
    Seeing the disappointment in her eyes, Matt felt like a jerk. “This is great, though,” he said hastily. “The more we know about what Jack’s doing, the better.”
    He was glad to see Jasmine’s lips tilt up again into a smile. And it was true. He had to believe