Chapter 19

Coral should have run. She should have turned and never looked back to the Obsifax building and the verms that dwelt within. That’s what a logical person would have done. But despite the horrific reminder of the hemomancers’ crimes the museum had stricken her with, it wasn’t long before she found herself riding the waves of surrender all the way back toward that parking lot and her five-by-nine world.

She returned to the hideout at around midnight. Getting back inside was much harder than getting out had been, but she was able to shimmy across the ledge from the fire escape and carefully duck back inside the third-story window. As she settled the window closed behind her, the heat was oppressive. Sweat stuck to her clammy skin. She peeled her coat and scarf off and let them fall to the floor. It still wasn’t enough. The heating system was too powerful; her tiny room was sweltering. The distant sting of burnt dust swam in her nostrils. Her whole body was burning up. She needed to escape it.

She threw the door open and sloshed into the dark common area. At once the heat dissipated. The chill stripped it away like a bucket of ice water and wrapped her in its embrace. The rush of cold air filling her chest almost toppled her. What was with the heating in this place? It wasn’t like this the last few nights. Was it all in her head? The reopened wound in her mind ached and burned, but the cold, dark amniotic of the common room soothed her.

As she stood there, soaking her lungs, something moved in the shadows of the room. Then the dusty yellow lights burned on all at once. She shielded her eyes with her forearm and squinted into the disorienting glare. At the entrance stood a stocky man, raw-scalped and dusted from the nose down with gray stubble. “Well, look who’s come crawling back,” he said, words sharpened to spears.

Coral’s heart stuttered, startled by the man’s presence.

Walter North exhaled loudly through his nose. He slid a step away from the conspicuously closed entry door. Rage carved fractal trenches through his face. “Where the fuck were you, slag?”

Had he been waiting for her? She began to shake, but she kept her mouth shut. If she spoke, she’d say something she’d regret.

The man trudged nearer until he was right on top of her. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but his presence was overwhelming, a mountain of muscle and fat and forest-green fabric. “Did you hear me? I asked where you snuck off to. Do you even realize how much trouble you’d have caused for me if anyone found out you’d gone?”

The man was an asshole. More important than that, he was a hemomancer. A bloodfiend. A louse. A verm. Here, in the nest of the Orchid Veil, he was the embodiment of all the crimes hemos had perpetrated against mankind since they crawled out of the pages of legend to feed. Coral felt her blood growing hotter.

“Do you have a fuckin’ brain in that skull?” he spat. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Implications wove themselves out of the black fog shrouding her mind. Hidden meanings linked together and sketched a full picture that she hated to behold. Her own anger rising, she tried to keep her tone level. “You’ve been spying on me.”

He snorted. “Did you think Lady Leblanc was gonna not keep a close eye on her prize?”

The thought of the man poking his head into her room while she slept came to the forefront of her mind. Just the idea violated her. Had he seen her while she was marinating in her own misery and muters? The image made her skin crawl, her stomach curdle.

“The Rosarium could be fucking anywhere,” Walter said, “so we need to know where you are at all times. And after all we’ve done, you go traipsing out unaccompanied. Leblanc would have all our heads on a fucking platter if Malthus got his claws into you.”

Her disgust and anger answered for her. “And I wouldn’t shed a single tear for y’all.”

The response disarmed him. A violent scowl vibrated through his lips. “What a mouth you’ve got, you irreverent little urchin. Never seen a nought with so little self-awareness. What makes you think you can talk to your superiors like that?”

Another answer flowed from a dark and vengeful wellspring. “You ain’t superior to anything.”

His stony face went red. One arm rose, and an impossibly strong grip bit into her left shoulder. “How fuckin’ dare you, you tramp!”

Coral struggled, revulsion washing over her and drowning all semblance of reason. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” Reckless impulse won. A surge of blood ripped through the scabbed wound at her wrist and solidified into a stout spike. She swung in a wide arc and plunged the point of the hemocryst down into the palm of Walter’s hand.

The room rolled with a black-red stain. Walter gave a horrid bellow and staggered back, fingers bent into a claw. A tight grimace leaked a hateful hiss. He ripped the dagger-sized crystal out through his hand, but it had already half-liquified. He gave his mitt a shake, and mixed droplets of their blood rained to the carpet. “Oh, you’re gonna regret that,” he growled. The blood streaming from his hand billowed into the shape of a flame caught in the wind. The stream formed a hemocryst in his quivering fingers. “I’m gonna peel you like an onion.”

Before Coral could brace herself, a wall of fabric stumbled toward her. Something blunt and rock-hard smashed into her face. The whole room tilted into a frightening angle. Pain shot through the cartilage in her nose and rattled through her jaw. The next moment, she was scraping her cheek against the carpet. Something warm ran from her nose down her chin. She tried to push herself up from the floor, a dream-like daze tranquilizing her.

“What’s the matter?” Walter’s voice rumbled all around her. “Don’t feel like running your mouth anymore?”

The next blow came, again right to her face. It was harder this time, a biting edge. Everything went white. It was like a star bursting and leaving the whole world washed out, stripped of its detail and meaning. Her hands grasped at her face, and they were immediately damp with blood.

Focus, she thought at the blood. Focus, focus, focus. It became a mantra, a madness. It stopped flowing from the wounds, but it filled her mouth. The kick had split her lips and bashed her gums. She again tried to get up, but she could barely feel anything aside from the array of wounds; they were competing to see who could scream the loudest. Her lips were winning, sizzling with electrical fire.

Was this it? Was this the way she was going to die? If so, she wouldn’t fight it. She’d spent all the shits she could afford. Better death than life as a verm.

A sudden tightening took her by the chest and dragged her in some unknowable direction. The floor dangled out of her periphery, and then she was dropped dizzyingly back to her feet. The mountain of a man released her, and she stumbled backward. She fell into the wall, halfway between her feet and the floor.

Walter’s voice came to her in a distorted smear. “I don’t give a damn what Leblanc’s thinking. I’m going to do what we should have done in the first place. Leave no blood for the Rose.” The hemocryst in his hand glistened with beads of fresh blood feeding it. He advanced on her, and all she could do was shrink away as he seized her again by skin and shirt.

A red blur flashed across her face, and an agonizing line of heat tore across her forehead and nose. A hot swell of fluid blotted out her vision and slopped thicker down her cheeks and chin. Intuition and instinct forced her to react. She twisted her body away from him just as the second blow should have plunged into her chest. Instead, it found her upper arm. It sliced, caught, and then broke off in her skin. Her fingers grappled with fabric, but it was no use. He was as strong as a gorilla, and she was as helpless as a child in his grip.

Was it fear? Was it hatred? Was it the underside of apathy? Coral’s stomach tightened and rolled. She snarled up at the man in the center of her whirling kaleidoscope. With her dying breath, she’d breathe a curse over her hemomancer blood—over her father for siring and her mother for birthing. A curse over vermkind. The pain was nearly too much to bear, and so she pressed her teeth together and growled. It was a primal sound, raw, undiluted adrenaline, flowing from somewhere dark and between.

And then there came a bang from the entrance of the dormitory. Bright, clinical light spilled into her burial cave. It was a deafening clatter of voice and ringing metal. A wave of immaterial force washed over her and her assailant. Walter recoiled, stumbled, and then fell, nearly dragging her down with him. As the red ran from her vision, she found the scene entirely repainted.

Walter was kneeling, the green of his trench coat accented by two weeping crimson stains. His hands clasped his wounds, in the center of which stood a pair of immaculate spikes of crystallized blood. The man was hissing through bared teeth, face twisted in agony.

At the door, one hand extended toward her, stood a tall, shaggy-haired man in a gray trench coat. It was Jase the Ace. She hadn’t asked for a savior, but she’d gotten one all the same. It was a pattern that reviled her.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?” Jase demanded, punctuating each word with enough force to kill. His tone was deep yet airy, soft yet stern, a velvet voice hiding an iron blade.

Coral teetered backward, and the sound of her blood pattering against the carpet reawakened her from her daze. The pain was paralyzing, but she was strong enough to break through. One hand went to the wall behind her to keep her knees functional. Warm, wet branchlets flowed down her arm, and she at once put her mind on staunching the streams.

“You stay out of this,” Walter growled. His frame trembled. He looked like a harpooned whale kneeling there, stains growing from the twin lances in his arm and shoulder.

Jase started toward them. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you right now.” The fingers of his hands curled, entwined with his hemomantic spell. Coral could see the pillars of garnet crystal sinking deeper into Walter with each step. Likewise, she could see Walter’s own hemocryst dissolving into liquid in his hand, eroded by the superior power of the ace.

“God damn you,” Walter said. The words were almost indistinguishable from animal grunts of suffering. “I’ll kill you for this.”

“Kill me? Shall we book a time? I’m free Tuesday. That work for you?”

Walter’s groans intensified. His thick neck strained, and his face went as red as the blood gushing from his wounds. Coral watched as the two spikes of blood embedded in him began to crack and rupture, returning to a liquid state that burrowed intelligently into the epicenter of the wounds. The man squirmed and thrashed, his attempts at control defeated by the foreign invasion.

“I don’t want to kill you, North,” Jase said. “Though believe me, Leblanc would give me a nod of official approval if I did. Get out of here while you can, or I’ll paint the ceiling with you.”

The wounded man glowered up at Jase. A ribbon of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. “And let the fuckin’ slag get away with this?” he choked. “This time she came back, but what if the Rosarium had found her, huh?”

“Intriguing way to justify cold-blooded murder.” Jase’s tone surrendered the pretense of amicability. “I just filled you with half a pint of aceblood. I’d say you’ve got about three minutes to take a muter—and that’s if you put your mind to slowing your circulation down. Coagulation cascade is a terrible way to die, I hear.”

Silence weighed the room. Coral’s breathing was deep and bestial. Her skin smoldered. Twirling ribbons fluttered down the length of her arm at her beckoning. An eternity passed as she waited for a reply. Finally, the green coat rose pendulously from the floor. Walter stood there for a moment, utter hatred washing off him as he glared first at Jase and then at Coral. Finally, he stomped past Jase toward the exit.

On his way out, a sweep of the man’s arm sent a chair crashing across the common room. “Think you’re so fucking strong,” Walter seethed over his shoulder. “Watch yourself. I don’t forget people who cross me.”

“Come back here and you’re dead,” Jase replied.

With a growl, Walter stormed out with a survivor’s haste. He vanished down the hallway, and soon the office’s depths swallowed the echoes of his footsteps. Silence reclaimed the room.

As the shock wore thinner, the pain coursing through Coral’s whole body intensified. It demanded her attention. It would break her, snap what little resistance remained in her. Even the act of staunching her wounds caused the edges of her injuries to blaze with heat.

Shoulders leaden with lethargy, Jase turned around to face her at last. That was all it took to bring her mind back from the edge of surrender. She was at once stricken by how tall he was. He’d have towered over Gavin, who was a mountain of a man in his own right. But Jase was thin, almost lankily so. His limbs were long, well-shaped, even through the obscuring fabric of his gray trench coat. His features were long but chiseled, his proportions suspiciously youthful.

He expelled a low, mesmerizing breath. “Are you alright?”

For a moment, she forgot how to breathe. She showed him a nod as she forced the loose pools of her blood to scatter airborne and return home to her opened wounds. Yes, the pain was dizzying, but the embarrassment of having to be saved once again by a superior hemomancer was far worse. “I’m fine,” she said to the floor.

“I was actually asking rhetorically. Obviously you are not fine, and clearly you cannot be trusted to evaluate your own condition.” He let out a resonant chuckle that bled warmth into the cold room. “Walter certainly made a mess of you. Here,” he said, gesturing toward the nearest chair. “Sit. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“I can take care of myself.” She started toward the bathroom, but as soon as she stepped out from around him, Jase swooped in front of her like a wraith. She jumped back in fright, causing a jolt to lick up and down the right side of her body. The attack she was subconsciously expecting didn’t come. Instead, he stood half-hunched and mischievous, his dark brown eyes level with her own.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I know better than to let a wounded pup run free. Come on. I don’t bite.”

His voice was again velvety. Coral tried to dissect it to see if there was still a blade hiding deep in there somewhere. The most she could find was a stern scaffolding, a stubbornness she feared would match even her own. She wanted to refuse his aid again, but the fatigue of everything was rapidly taking its toll. It was far easier to surrender to the tide of another’s whims, as she had for her entire life. And so she sagged into the chair, stripes of agony running all over her.

The man vanished down the hall toward the bathroom, and then returned a few moments later with a first aid kit. After upturning the toppled chair and swinging it around next to her, he sat, cracked the case open, and began to expertly arrange its contents.

Coral felt like a child. Not even allowed to treat her own damned wounds. A child. A battered child nobody wanted, no matter how pleasant they forced themselves to appear. It was tiring, draining. Or perhaps it was the flesh wounds, one of which was weeping down her chin, that were draining her so.

Jase pulled a yellow-capped syringe from the first aid kit. A muter. Coral held her breath as the man popped the cap off with his thumb and expertly jabbed the needle into her left arm. It went in rough, deeper than she’d ever pushed one before, and the frigid chill of the medical wonder started bone deep in a flash, choking off the yelp of pain that had crossed her lips.

“Sorry,” Jase said when the barrel was empty. “That was no lie back there, though. Death visits early the porous, as the old idiom goes. Now that we’ve got Walter’s pageblood taken care of, let’s get the rest of this cleaned up.”

Coral didn’t resist him, though she did push back against the muter’s haze. She didn’t deserve it. A cold tingle spread deep in her muscle and soon flowed toward her fingers. Meanwhile, Jase applied a liberal dabble of rubbing alcohol to a cotton swab and began to wipe at the mouth of her arm wound. The cut was deep. She hadn’t the guts to look at it, because she was sure it would turn her stomach inside out if the heat slopping down her arm was any indication of the damage. The alcohol’s icy sting sank right through her, searing the exposed tissue and making her jaw clench.

“Not to pry into your affairs,” Jase said gently, “but Walter was right about one thing. It was very reckless of you to leave unsupervised. Although perhaps not as reckless as a nought trying to tangle with a hemo as ill-tempered as he. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had a death wish.”

She said nothing. Her mind was entirely occupied by keeping her blood flowing and not leaking all over the floor. A burn lurked at the edges of her eyes, and she fought to keep it from conquering any more ground. The icy sting soon moved to her nose and forehead, and she let the pain extract a few of the tears. It was perfect camouflage for a pain deeper than she would ever reveal to another.

“There,” Jase said. “That should be a bit better, at least.” He set the rust-colored cotton ball into a small pile of siblings, the smallest satisfied grin sitting on his lips. Then it turned upside down. His eyes pried at her right shoulder. With a tense little sigh, he reached out.

Coral winced as his fingers found the bandaged wound Clive had given her. How had he noticed it? She could feel the gears grinding in his head, connecting the dots.

“Was this Clive’s doing?” Jase asked, tone tight and sharp.

She bit her lip. The truth surrendered itself. “I begged him to keep practicing with me. It ain’t his fault. It’s mine.”

She must have sounded truly pitiful, because rather than return to the earlier lecture, he just sighed and let his shoulders slump.

“You don’t have to pretend to care about me like this, y’know,” Coral said, grabbing the nearest distraction she could. “Don’t think for a minute I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

“Oh?” He clucked placidly, relinquishing his displeasure of her and Clive. “Very well, I’ll bite. Why am I doing this, then?”

She chewed her lip. The taste of copper radiated from the torn surface of her gums. “Because Lady Leblanc is paying you to. Were it not for that I’d be just another hazard. Like Walter said.”

Jase hummed. “I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. Money is one thing I need no more of. I’m here for justice and justice alone. Now, let’s get you some Factor Eight.”

The statement chilled her for some imperceivable reason. “How did you know I take Factor Eight?”

“It was in the file that you’re a hemophiliac. Besides, I saw it in your bag.” He paused, as though embarrassed. “I guess I should apologize. Lady Leblanc wanted me to make sure you weren’t hauling any tracking devices around with you or anything like that. Pretty rare to see a girl with hemophilia, now that I think of it. You’re probably the first hemo I’ve met with the condition. Here,” he said, drawing another syringe and an unfamiliar purple vial from the kit. “Better take some to staunch the bleeding.”

“I don’t need it. I can keep my blood in by myself well enough.”

He lifted the vial and drew a dose of fluid down into the barrel with practiced finesse. “Oh, I do not doubt you can. Hemomancers tend to be good at bleeding only when they wish to. But insisting on that kind of pointless exertion is going to send you to an early grave. Let science do its job.” Another pinprick came in her bicep. Jase depressed the plunger, and before she knew it, it was finished. “There. Isn’t that better?”

Despite the shame saturating her, she dared to meet his gaze. She found only kindness waiting for her in his dark brown pools. He exuded charisma with each breath. It was a genuine warmth that only Clive and Gavin had shown her. It was so divorced from Walter’s venomous demeanor that she half expected him to remark on her acute case of whiplash.

She only realized she’d been staring when he looked away, releasing the spell that held her in place. He set the syringe beside the spent muter. The purple vial, probably containing some off-brand Factor Eight, he recapped and returned to the first aid kit. “Now then, next is the wrapping.”

“I don’t need bandages,” she said, almost stuttering as she rushed to deny him.

“Yes, you do. You may be a hemo, but you’re not immune to infections. And between the two of us, Walter ain’t exactly the cleanest guy around. You have to take care of yourself.”

He produced a roll of gauze and a pair of medical scissors. In a daze, she could only sit there and watch in silence as he skillfully dressed her wounds, applying the majority of the material to her slashed bicep and taping it down. Adhesive bandages found their way to the cut between her eyes. She just allowed it to happen.

“There,” Jase said. “You shouldn’t need bandages again after tomorrow morning. Although if they look weepy at all, let me know and I’ll be happy to reapply the dressing for you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I mean, really.”

“Don’t even mention it.”

For an awkward moment, Coral sat there, feeling wrong. The muter’s seductive kiss and the alien pressure from her bandages made it all seem unreal. The throbbing pain was dulled but now pulsed deeper and nearer to the bone. She couldn’t bring herself to meet her savior’s gaze. A question sat on her tongue, one she couldn’t ask without looking at the floor. “Can I ask something?”

“Hmm? Of course. Is something the matter?”

She hesitated. “You said you weren’t here for the money, but for justice. What did you mean by that?”

A distant, hollow chuckle filled the air. Jase turned away from her, toward the door leading back to the rest of the base. “I’m sure you’ve heard all the stories you can handle by now about Malthus, the Rose Tyrant. But seeing as you were raised by humans, you can’t understand the cultural weight that bastard’s name has on the rest of us. I was one of the countless hemos who lost something precious to the Rosarium’s warpath. And because of that, I’ve pledged my life to Lady Leblanc and her quest for revenge.”

The dark, damnable earnestness of his words burrowed toward her heart. Her hair stood on end. “What happened?”

He turned back toward her, a sad smirk showing beneath sad eyes. “Does it matter? Tragedies are a scrip a dozen or more. Malthus has wounded everyone. He’s given every hemo and their mothers a reason to want him dead. Ask a dozen hemos why they hate Malthus and you’ll get a dozen premium screenplays for Hollywood revenge flicks. Though we might have to dress them up a bit. A bit of demon-summoning here and there, some blood-drinking—you know, things humans think verms like us do. Otherwise, the films would be panned for taking too many liberties with the hemomancer mythos.”

Coral found herself smiling a weak, wounded little smile of her own. She couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“Sorry,” he said. “I understand you have your own problems, and probably did not want to hear of ours.”

“No,” she said quickly. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Jase was quiet for a moment. “While we’re on the topic of apologies, I wanted to give you another. I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to apologize for the whole mess that happened with your parents back in Wheatling.”

“Oh.” She’d enjoyed not being reminded of that for a while. All good things had to end eventually.

“I hope you can forgive Gavin for what happened. He can be rather daft at times. It is a shame they had to find out. May I make a recommendation? Forget them. They don’t deserve you if they cannot see past the affliction.”

Affliction. It was one word for it. She became a tight, small wad in her chair.

“Take it from me. The sooner you move on and find people who accept you for who you are, the better. Every hemo who tries to hide among humans must eventually learn that we were not meant to coexist. Perhaps it is best to learn it early rather than cling desperately to a love that will never again shine.”

It was a fatalistic outlook, yet one she could not refute. Man and hemo had ever been enemies. From the Red Death to the great hemo-hunts, they had slaughtered one another since the first hemos partook of whatever demonic rite birthed them. The mutual massacre was unlikely to end anytime soon.

With that, Jase gave her a familiar-sounding line. He would keep her safe. He would keep watch. There was nothing to worry about except healing up. With a midnight farewell, he removed himself from the common area.

And with Jase out of her vicinity, she let her facade collapse. She winced at the pain still ripping at her arm and face. The pain in her heart was far worse. Deep down, she believed Jase meant well, and that he was different from the others. Different from Walter, in any case. But he was still a hemo. Humans and hemos cannot coexist. His words rang true, even if they were words she wanted desperately to reject.

That made it all the more painful that the hemos would never accept her. She was an existential threat to them, and everyone knew it. Beyond the horror of being a monster was the poison of knowing that no matter how hard she tried to immerse herself in hemo culture she would never fit in. Because she was a nought; she either had to be harvested or locked someplace forever out of Malthus’s reach.

She collapsed onto her bed, tears staining her eyes. How had everything gone so wrong? Why had this happened to her? It wasn’t fair, and as warm streams ran silently down her cheeks, she hated every single person more than she ever had before.

She hated her parents for disavowing her over something that wasn’t her fault. She hated Tamara for taking her love and crushing it into a thousand pieces. She hated Gavin for saving her. She hated Lady Leblanc for instigating it all. She hated Malthus for looming over her head and sucking the vigor and hope from her chest. She hated Walter for being Walter. She hated Clive for being so warm and accepting of her, and for tempting her to give in, to relinquish her humanity and accept becoming a goddamn verm. She hated Jase for daring to speak reason into her when she wanted nothing to do with the cold reality she was born into.

Hemos and humans, dancing an endless duel. At some point, the duel had become an act of one-sided brutality, all finesse and honor exchanged for dirty tricks and surprise attacks. It was payback for crimes amassed in kind. On which side could she bear to stand with the death worship of the museum so fresh in her memory? Become a hemo, or languish as a human. Why did she have to choose? Humans and hemos were both abhorrent creatures. Neither had a right to exist as far as she was concerned. More than anything else, she wished everything would disappear and leave her to a world devoid of those scars and scabs.

Her hot eyes drifted shut, and a shiver played at the nape of her neck. As her mind floated toward the edge of awareness, images of morbid and macabre paintings reappeared before her. The last thing she remembered seeing before falling asleep was the eyes of the Lady Saint, burnished rubies of fire, staring into her soul as the fields burned in the distance.