That makes it sound less like an e-mail address and more like a summoning ritual.

She's tempted to ask whether the lawyer experiences these messages as receiving an actual e-mail, or as receiving the message in his head, but that feels too much like getting sidetracked.

"Um… Thanks, but not right now." She'd be worried about him responding to that by showing up. "Maybe after we've gone our separate ways? I'll let you know. By the way, are there any consequences to using his name in any other context?"

Meredith believes he gets the message like an e-mail and also gets magically notified of someone trying to get his attention.

He’s less likely to show up for Meredith than for a new person because Meredith has called him or sent him messages an excessive amount of times but it still makes sense for Sanna not to want to risk it.

“Sure, my phone’s at home anyway.” She didn’t need it when she was out for a hunt. “It depends on how you use it. Just mentioning or writing it doesn’t usually do anything but he might show up if you say it with the intention to call his attention.”

Ooh. Good to know. "Thanks. So just reading it or thinking it in your head doesn't do anything?"

“Based on when I’ve tested it, no.”

"Okay. And if I were to say that I've changed my mind about not wanting my contact to be a vampire, who would be your top suggestion? If we're limiting it to people who'll do e-mail, I mean."

“Oh, think there’s someone you might like.” Meredith smiles, she hasn’t been very good at guessing Sanna’s preferences so far but she does believe she has a good suggestion this time. “My old mentor would love to explain things to you.”

Sanna suppresses a much bigger sigh than usual.

Of course Meredith didn't bother to mention this earlier. Perhaps she just didn't view it as in her interest to suggest this person if Sanna didn't ask, but honestly Sanna suspects that it's just because her mind doesn't work that way. Sanna said she didn't want a vampire, and a normal person might have said 'If I think your best option is a vampire, should I mention them or should I not bother?', but Meredith isn't a normal person and it's becoming clear that she doesn't think like that. Every switch is either on or off, there's no fuzzy logic there. (She's going to have to keep that in mind…)

Sanna might have been overly suspicious if she'd mentioned this person right away, though — she would have assumed Meredith was trying to steer her towards her own ends — so maybe it's just as well.

"…This is a different person than the person who turned you, I presume?" Since that person is supposedly dead.

Vampirism and nuance don’t usually get along, in Meredith’s experience. To a lesser extent, the same is true for most supernatural species (she hasn’t found anything conclusive about this fact being tied to magic itself).

“Yes, it’s a different vampire. The oldest one I’ve met, in fact.” Which might be why he’s better at interacting with humans but the sample size is was too small and it could be pretty much any other factor. Way too many experiments have that problem in the context of magic, actually. Meredith does not appreciate that.

“He’s a college professor and has more practice with humans, you’ll probably find him easier to deal with.”

The oldest vampire she's met… Wow…

"How old is he? And what's his fixation?" If he's a college professor, maybe it's something to do with teaching.

“He’s over two thousand years old, he was a mathematician and philosopher in Ancient Greece. His drive is teaching and the preservation of knowledge.” Meredith can’t understand how he manages to keep himself from revealing the existence of magic. She guesses that he leans hard on the things he’s allowed to teach instead but, if she were in his place, she thinks she would need to be bound by a coven.

Wow, okay. Sanna figured he'd be at least an order of magnitude older than whoever turned Meredith, and not just a couple hundred years older. But it's different hearing it confirmed.

"I presume this one speaks English?" Even if he happens to still live in Greece, if he's that old then surely by now he's learned enough English to be getting by. "And what kind of payment do you expect him to ask for?" Sanna won't complain if he's so hyped about teaching things that he'll give her a bunch of information for free, but she's not banking on it.

"…Oh, and does he have some magic way to hurt me via e-mail? …Or some non-magic way for that matter, for all I know he's an amazing hacker and he just loves to track people down and stalk them or doxx them or something." She can imagine someone parlaying a 'teaching and preservation of knowledge' fixation into leaking perfect strangers' personal details for no reason.

“Yes, he speaks English. He won’t ask for payment for it, although he will ask you if he can make copies of the e-mails.”

Meredith looks composed from the outside but that’s because she’s leaning on the ability to stay perfectly still that vampires have, rather than because she’s actually feeling calm. In fact, she’s comparable to a pressure cooker right now. She’s so very curious and she knows that asking now will make it less likely for her to get answers, not more. However, just because she rationally knows something, it doesn’t mean that her instincts do.

“He doesn’t have any magic that works through messages and I don’t know if he’s good at hacking but, either way, he is unlikely to 'misuse' that information. Elias is more… attuned to human sensibilities that I am.” She should ask him for help with that, now that she’s thought about it. Maybe then she can manage to make her future conversations with Sanna feel a bit less like torture.

"Copies of the e-mails for what purpose?" Hopefully just for his private collection, which he will not show to anybody without Sanna's permission, but she should be so lucky. "If I say no, will he refuse to answer questions?"

“Preserving them past the possible collapse of the Internet? I don’t know, I don’t think he has a fully worded reasoning.” The answer to Sanna’s real question is that yes, they’d be kept private except for possibly parts of Elias’ own explanations if he particularly likes the wording he used and wants to reuse it, but Meredith is still no more capable of reading between her words than she was earlier. “I don’t know if he’d refuse. I wouldn’t expect it but I’ve never asked him.”

That's going to have to be good enough.

"Okay. If you know his e-mail address I'd love to have it. I'll be more cheerful and grateful about having it before we part ways tonight than about having it sometime after, but like I said earlier, I'll take your word for it if you say he wouldn't be okay with that."

“I don’t think he’ll mind,” she replies. Meredith will writes down the address for Sanna if she gives her something to write it on again and will tell it to her out loud either way.

Sanna will give her the same piece of paper she used to write down the witch's e-mail address and the fae lawyer's name.

Once she has the paper back, and reads the e-mail address, she lets go of some tension she didn't even know she was holding. Not all of it, but – quite a lot of it.

She feels less cold, for a moment.

"Okay. Thank you. Very much. If this is on the level, then this actually means a lot. In a few different ways."

She takes a picture of the paper, and then…

"Time for your e-mail address. So we can contact each other. For various reasons I won't be giving you mine yet, but if this" – she waves the side of the paper with the mentor's e-mail address on it – "is on the level, then I will be e-mailing you in the near future."

Sanna wants to be really legible about which actions led to her trusting Meredith more and cooperating with her more, and what the other outcomes might've been…

"For a while I was thinking about getting your e-mail address and then telling you that there was a chance I'd contact you but no guarantee. I would've left you with the possibility of never hearing from me. I changed my mind partly because you gave me this." She waves the paper again.

"Things also could've gone badly enough that I would've refused to ever talk to you again. Part of why I didn't make that decision is because I think on the whole you did pretty well at respecting my boundaries and conditions."

(Relative to expectations, and relative to how genuinely difficult it seems to be for Meredith even when she's really motivated. And it helps that it did seem like she was really, really trying. But Sanna's not going to mention that part; if she makes it known that attitude and effort count for a lot, then Meredith might think it's okay to do poorly as long as she acts like she's really trying and really wants to succeed.)

(She's also not going to mention the part where she's desperate.)

"And because… at least a couple times you gave me honest answers even when you probably thought I wouldn't like them, or told me something that you knew would help me at your own expense."

"Anyway, as an assurance: If I don't e-mail you within a week from now, I give you express permission to come stake out this library, and bother me the next time I show up. Understand that this is not blanket permission to stake out this library in literally any other context, or to come bother me in literally any other context."

She holds out the paper for Meredith to write one more e-mail address on.

Yay, she didn’t ruin all her future chances. But also she’s going to have to figure out something to do so she isn’t just constantly refreshing her inbox for the next week, because that is incredibly tempting but would be more frustrating than anything.

Sanna probably has good-from-her-perspective reasons for all the things she’s telling Meredith now but, honestly, she’s not going to listen as much as she probably should because contemplating the cases in which things went badly makes her very upset in an entirely unhelpful way. Anyway, it seems to be mostly about having been honest (which is easy for her to keep doing) and having listened to Sanna’s preferences (which, like, she’s trying? She would like a checklist with extremely specific examples).

Meredith writes down her own e-mail address, listens carefully to Sanna’s last specification and tries her best not to outwardly express her drive-frustration (so many answers just beyond her fingertip, balanced on the edge of a cliff, just waiting to fall away if she makes the wrong move). She’s going to go run through the forest and stalk some random animals after this so she can satisfy at least some of her instincts and not be as much of a ticking bomb.

Sanna takes the paper back.

"Okay. Awesome. Thanks." FINALLY they are basically done. They're past the parts that have to happen now. She has one more thing, but if Meredith suddenly took off at this exact moment for no reason, it wouldn't be that big a deal, Sanna could just e-mail her what she was going to say. She is so excited. Soon she gets to go inside and warm up!!

"I wanna say a few more things before I go." Are your listening ears on Okay that sounds way too condescending even by her standards. "Do you think you can pay full attention?"

“That’s going to depend a lot on what the things you tell me are like,” she replies. That’s how it’s been for this whole conversation after all. Sanna’s comments have ranged from upsetting to fascinating, with some utterly incomprehensible (but apparently very important?) ones mixed in.

“If you don’t want to tell me them without knowing if I’ll listen or not, you could tell me what the general theme is or I can try to explain what kind of things I pay the least attention to.” But really, the only thing she truly dedicates her full attention to is ✨magic✨.