Page 4 of Blood & Ash

The blood in the vials caught the light. That metallic note was there again, vampire-infused. He’d seen it once before, in a hunter who’d been bitten and survived. But Cole hadn’t been bitten. Marcus would have smelled it on him.

“Talk to me, Doc.”

Marcus turned. Cole had put his shirt back on but hadn’t buttoned it. His face was drawn. The fever had a sheen on his skin.

“Is it bad?” Cole asked.

Marcus looked at the slides, at the three vials lined up on the steel tray, at the logbook open beside the microscope where he’d written nothing because he had nothing to write. “It’s not nothing.”

Cole nodded. He’d expected worse, maybe, or better. Marcus couldn’t tell.

“What do I do?”

“Rest. No shifting. Come back in two days.” Marcus capped the vials and set them in the cold storage box beneath the workbench. “I need to run more tests.”

Cole buttoned his flannel. His fingers were steady, which was something. “Marin’s worried.”

“Tell her I’m working on it.”

“She already knows that. She wants to know if she should be scared.”

Marcus closed the logbook. The leather cover was worn smooth at the edges from eighty-five years of his hands.

“Not yet,” he said.

Cole slid off the table. He was a big man and the carriage house shrank with him standing in it. He reached for his coat on the hook by the door. “Two days.”

“I’ll be here.”

The door opened and cold air swept in. Cole stepped out into the dark and pulled the door shut behind him. The latch clicked.

Marcus turned back to the workbench. The slides sat under the microscope, cells still degrading. He adjusted the focus one more time and stared. The metallic richness of the blood filled his senses even through the glass. Vampire-infused, but no vampire had done this.

He picked up his pen and opened the logbook. The page was blank. He wrote the date. He wrote Cole’s name. He wrote “fever, rib pain, elevated heart rate” and then stopped. The pen hovered.

He set it down and blew out the lamp.

The carriage house went dark. The samples waited in the cold storage. Marcus sat on the stool in the dark and listened to the wind. Somewhere in the trees beyond the property, an owl called twice and went silent.

He had two days.

Two nights later, Petra couldn’t walk a straight line from the door to the exam table. She crossed the carriage house with one hand on the wall. She was thirty, maybe, with dark hair pulled back and a strong build gone loose at the joints. Her eyes didn’t track right.

“Sit,” he said.

She sat. The exam table creaked. Her hands rested on her thighs and the left one trembled.

“Started when?”

“Yesterday morning. Woke up and the room was spinning.” She tried to focus on his face. Her pupils were dilated. “Couldn’t stand without holding onto something. Got worse by noon.”

Marcus took her pulse. One hundred and twelve, which was elevated. Her skin was cool but damp. He checked her temperature with the digital thermometer he kept beside the blood pressure cuff. 100.8.

“Any pain?”

“Ribs. Like Cole.”

Marcus nodded. He’d expected that. He reached for the blood draw kit. Petra held out her arm without being asked. The vein was easy to find. The blood came dark and rich, the same metallic note he’d caught with Cole. He filled six vials this time for full panels, everything he could think to run.