After lurking around FK fandom for nearly a year now, I've finally gotten up 
the courage to try posting something. (So please be gentle; my ego bruises 
easily!)
The Forever Knight characters belong to TPTB.
Permission granted to archive at FKFanfic 1& 2 and the ftp site.


"Revenge of the Blood Bank, or, Nick Discovers a New Taste Sensation"
Part 1/1
By Mary Chamberlain
June 2000

	It was a sweltering July night as Nick Knight left Metro Police 
Headquarters after a late (or early, depending on your point of view) 
conference. Even though it was after midnight, the miasma of heat and 
humidity that had hung over the city for days refused to dissipate. The 
temperature was still well over a sticky 30 degrees Celsius. Vampires aren't 
normally concerned with weather conditions, but even Nick was beginning to 
feel that this heat wave had more than outworn its welcome.
	Nevertheless, he walked briskly down Bay Street towards the parking lot 
where he had left the Caddy. He didn't like lingering in this area. The 
Toronto branch of the Canadian Blood Services was just down the street, 
housed in a lowering old building that was about as Gothic as you could get 
around here. Clustered within a three-block radius were several of the 
largest hospitals in the city. For a vampire, it was almost like being a kid 
in a candy store. The urge to do a bit of shoplifting was nearly 
irresistible.
	Just as he was unlocking the Caddy, he heard raised voices from the side 
street several yards away, next to the aforementioned Gothic building. 
Glancing over, he saw what looked like an altercation between a taxi driver 
loading several brown cardboard boxes labelled "Canadian Blood Services" 
into the trunk of his car and a street kid looking for a handout. "Look, 
buddy," the driver was saying impatiently, "I ain't got as much as a spare 
loonie on me. Business is slow tonight. Now get outta my way, will ya? I've 
gotta get this stuff over to the hospital." He slammed the trunk lid down , 
climbed into his taxi and took off with a screech of tires.
	He'd left behind one of the boxes on the sidewalk. As Nick watched, the 
street kid gave the defenceless object a frustrated kick, sending it 
skittering into the middle of the road, then walked away towards brighter 
lights and hopefully better pickings. After he had gone, the street was 
quiet again.
	Nick stood by his car, looking at the box.
	The box sat in the road.
	After a while, Nick felt almost as if it was daring him to come closer. To 
approach, to inhale the scent of the riches it contained, to tear it open 
and expose its very core...
	He shook his head, realizing that he was in sad shape if he was about to be 
seduced by a cardboard box.
	However, he thought it was his civic duty to move the thing out of the 
middle of the street. After all, it was a traffic hazard. In fact, he really 
ought to deliver it to the hospital himself; it was only a block away. He 
went over and picked up the box by its encircling black nylon strap.
	A quick glance showed that the kick from the kid had not only smashed one 
side of the box, it had also punched a hole in the styrofoam cooler 
underneath. Pellets of dry ice had spilled out, and several packages 
protruded from the hole.
	Nick sat on the curb and pulled one out. Well, he had to inspect it for 
damage, didn't he, before he took it to the hospital? They wouldn't thank 
him for a box of broken blood bags.
	What was in his hand wasn't exactly blood. It was a large bag of yellowish 
plasma, frozen solid. He looked it over carefully.
	Fresh frozen plasma, said the label. Hmm. "Fresh" sounded appetizing - in 
fact, it almost sounded like advertising.
	"Volunteer donor." Well, that was certainly important.
	Weakening further, he observed that the bag was beginning to soften in his 
hand. It wasn't exactly frozen anymore. Going on the principle that it 
wasn't supposed to be a good idea for mortals to refreeze their food after 
it had been thawed, he wondered if the hospital would even want this now. 
Besides, the vampire within him whispered, it wasn't even red; technically, 
it might not qualify as blood at all, depending on how strict your 
definitions were.
	Before he quite realized what he was doing, he'd ripped open the plastic 
bag and was chomping its contents. After almost breaking a fang on the 
frozen stuff, though, he went at it a bit more circumspectly.
	It was utterly amazing. For the first time since he'd become a vampire, lo 
these many centuries ago, he actually had to chew his food. His molars were 
in shock.
	Then he realized he could just let it sit in his mouth for a few seconds, 
allowing it to thaw sufficiently that it would slide down his throat in a 
thirst-quenching, heat-defying gulp. It reminded him of something Schanke 
had been eating a couple of nights ago, a brightly-coloured semi-liquid in a 
sort of long plastic tube. He'd called it a Slushee. (Nick had refused to 
allow him inside the Caddy until he'd finished it, tossed away the bag and 
wiped his hands) Perhaps this was the vampire equivalent. Devoid of red 
cells, it had no particular flavour of its donor, only a vaguely sweet 
taste. The perfect thing for a summer cooler, he thought; if anyone asked, 
he could always say it was lemonade.
	Enchanted by his discovery, he finished off another unit before he even 
realized what he was doing. He was appalled to find himself clutching the 
second empty bag. Hastily he checked the box to see if there was anything he 
could still salvage to take to the hospital. There were still four more bags 
of plasma, but the dry ice had rapidly evaporated in the sweltering air, and 
they were all definitely on the soft side.
	Not knowing what else to do to hide the evidence of vampiric depradation, 
he wadded up the two empty vinyl bags, shoved them inside the box, and 
deposited the whole thing in the trunk of the Caddy. (Once a decade or so, 
Nick's practical streak surfaced - why throw out free samples?)
	Then, before he even thought about what to do next, his traitorous vampire 
feet were taking him briskly down the street towards the closest hospital, 
in search of an even larger supply of the ambrosia.
	Once there, he followed his nose to the blood bank.  If he was lucky, there 
would be nobody there, and he could easily pillage the freezer and slip out 
undetected with his booty.
	Unfortunately for Plan A, someone was home. He decided not to break the 
door down to start with, and went instead to a window a few feet away that 
looked from the hallway into the lab. Maybe, he thought hopefully, this 
functioned like the pick-up window at a drive-through coffee shop.
	A short woman in a lab coat, with frizzy blond hair and glasses, came over. 
"Can I help you?"
	"Er - ah - um - well, actually, I'd like to get some plasma. Some of the 
frozen stuff."
	The woman gave him a strange look. "Do you have an issue slip?"
	"A what?"
	"An issue slip," she replied patiently, although Nick got the definite 
impression that her eyes desperately wanted to roll. "With the patient's 
name and hospital number on it. I can't give anything out without a written 
request."
	Nick gave the woman his best little-boy smile, the one that usually caused 
females to go weak at the knees and become incapable of denying him 
anything. "Oh, come on. Nobody's around to see. Just give me a few units of 
plasma, okay?"
	Far from going weak at the knees, the woman was now looking at him as if 
he'd just started excavating the deeper regions of his nasal passages with 
his little finger. "I don't care if we're the only two people in this 
hemisphere. Not even God gets blood without that slip."
	With a sigh, Nick gave in to the inevitability of bureaucracy. He patted 
his pockets until he found his notebook and a pen, and wrote "Lucien 
Lacroix" and the Lotto 649 numbers he played every week. At the bottom he 
wrote politely "Twelve units of plasma please", (probably best not to be too 
greedy), tore off the page and handed it over.
	The woman stared at it. "That's not a hospital number. And I can't give you 
twelve units of plasma, at least not without talking to the hematology 
resident. You'll have to call the floor and get that information straight."
	"Floor?" echoed Nick blankly, staring down at his feet in confusion.
	"Never mind, I"ll call them. What floor is the patient on?"
	"This one," answered Nick, fairly certain of that much.
	"He's in the ICU?"
	"No..." Nick took a deep breath and decided on a different approach. Trying 
for the one-professional-to-another attitude, he said, "Actually, it's not 
for a patient, it's for me. For a research project."
	"Hmm," said the woman skeptically. "Just a minute." She walked off and 
returned in a moment with a large binder labeled "Research Approvals". With 
a sinking heart Nick watched her flipping through the pages. "Sorry, there's 
been nothing okayed for a Doctor Lacroix."
	Nick tried The Smile again. "Yeah, well, you know how long it takes to get 
the paperwork done for these things. Look, why don't you just give me a few 
old units? You must have some stuff around here that's past its best before 
date."
	Far from denying him anything, the woman now appeared to be thinking that 
he looked like something that had just crawled out from under a rock and 
could do with a good squishing. "Are you nuts? I can't just give you plasma, 
even if it's outdated."
	"Why not?" asked Nick. He'd thought it was a perfectly reasonable request - 
reasonable if you happened to drink blood, that is.
	"Why not? We have to be able to account for each and every unit of blood 
and blood product that comes in here, that's why. Haven't you ever heard of 
the Krever commission? Lab licensing? AABB and CSTM  standards? The Bureau 
of Biologics and Radiopharmaceuticals? I don't care if you want that plasma 
to feed starving vampires in Africa, I can't just hand it out! Now if you 
don't mind, I've got a liver transplant and a heart transplant to 
crossmatch, and a GI bleed in Emerg - "
	Maybe it was time for the hard-nosed approach. "Listen," he said, allowing 
a hint of vampiric irritation to show. "I came here to get plasma, and I 
don't intend to let a mere lab technician stand in my way - "
	The woman went red with fury. "That's lab TECHNOLOGIST, buster!"
	"Technician, technologist, what's the difference?" said Nick, nevertheless 
taking a prudent step backwards while still trying to maintain an air of 
restrained ferocity. "I want - "
	"The difference is about three years' worth of post-secondary education, 
for a start," snarled the woman. "Now get out or I'll call security." And 
she slammed the window in his face.
	Nick figured he was up to about Plan J by now. Drat, he'd never heard of 
any other vampire having this problem. He'd always gotten the impression 
that  blood was to be had for the asking. Or taking. Focusing on the woman's 
heartbeat, he said persuasively, "Listen to me. You will give me what I ask 
for. Then you will forget you ever saw me."
	He discovered that it was impossible to hypnotize someone through a smudgy 
window, especially when the someone in question had her back turned and was 
walking away in high dudgeon. He considered breaking into the lab, draining 
the woman and stripping the entire larder bare. He was a vampire, dammit, he 
had a reputation for bloodlust to uphold!
	Ultimately, however, common sense prevailed, and he slunk empty-handed from 
the hospital, heading back for the Caddy. As he drove towards the police 
station, he reflected with a certain sense of grievance on the fact that 
things were always more awkward in real life than they seemed in stories.
	But at least, he consoled himself, he still had the four freebies in the 
trunk. And there were plenty of other hospitals in the city, whose blood 
banks might be more accommodating. Or less well guarded.
	But it would take him a while to work up enough nerve to try again.

********************************************************************************
The End

Comments, queries, criticism and additional blood bank policy manuals to: 
mcham_thorn@hotmail.com