Page 56 of Blood & Ash

Delphine set the slide cover down with a small click. The sound carried in the quiet.

“It held,” she said.

Marcus’s expression didn’t change. His hand around the vial was steady. The reagent inside caught the lamplight and held it, amber and clear.

“How long,” he said.

“I stopped counting after two hundred pulses.”

He absorbed this. His jaw worked once. The line of it was tight under the stubble. He set the vial on the table beside the brass scale. The glass made a soft sound against the metal.

“How do we cast it?” he said.

The question was flat and practical, with no ceremony to it, in the same voice he had used a hundred times across an exam table when a diagnosis was confirmed and the next step was treatment. How do we fix it. What’s the move. The work continued.

Delphine looked at the row of failed slides on the rack to her left. Sixteen of them. Each one was labeled in Marcus’s slanting handwriting: copper filings, magnetite, sodium thiosulfate at half concentration, sodium thiosulfate at double. Each one was crossed out with a single line and a verdict: Fail, Relapse, No. The rack was full. The successful slide sat alone on the stage, its label fresh and uncrossed, and the contrast between them was obscene.

She turned in the stool. Her boots scraped the stone floor. The sound was small.

“Counterworking needs an anchor.” Her voice stayed clipped. “Witch’s blood. Freely given. In quantity.”

She kept her eyes on the worktable, on the brass scale, the weights stacked beside it, the mortar with its residue of sodium thiosulfate, white and fine under the low light. She didn’t look at Marcus.

“How much quantity,” he said.

“Enough that I may not survive it.”

The words sat between them. Delphine had said them as she said everything: direct, without cushion, the truth laid out clean on the table for whoever needed to pick it up. Her hands were flat on her thighs. The dried blood under her nails was brown and flaking. She’d known the answer before she spoke it. The ledger diagrams were clear on blood measures and anchor protocols. The dissolution-and-return she’d performed for Eric had taken less than a palmful and nearly knocked Aislinn unconscious. This would take more. Much more.

Marcus set the vial down. He didn’t reach for her. His hand moved to the rack of clean slides instead. He picked up the nearest one and turned it between his fingers. The glass caught the light. He put it back in its slot, a measured, deliberate gesture, the kind of movement someone made when he was buying time to think.

“Use mine,” he said.

His voice was flat and practical, the voice he would use to suggest a different suture technique or a revised antibiotic regimen. His hazel eyes held hers across the worktable. His jaw was set. He meant it.

Delphine shook her head before he finished the sentence. “It has to be a living heart. Yours stopped in 1936.”

The statement landed, clean and final. The reason was concrete. Vampire blood carried its own properties. It healed. It sustained. It didn’t anchor like living witch’s blood did. The difference sat in ink, written in every grimoire Delphine had ever opened and confirmed by the twenty-four tests on the rack behind her. Dead blood wouldn’t hold the suspension. The cells would relapse. The degradation would resume. Denny Alcott would have died for nothing. Petra would have died for nothing. The boundary runner asleep against the tree would wake to a fever that spiked and didn’t break.

Marcus’s jaw tightened. The muscle along it jumped once. He set both hands flat on the worktable. His fingers spread. The wood was scarred there from years of elbows and instruments. His knuckles went white. He looked at the space between his hands, at the grain of the wood, at nothing.

He said nothing.

The silence that followed had no comfort in it. It came after someone had laid down a truth that couldn’t be walked back, and the person hearing it had run out of useful responses. The copper-and-vinegar smell of the reagents sat heavy in the air between them. The lamp guttered.

Delphine looked at him: at his white knuckles on the edge of the table, at the lamp throwing half his face into shadow. The lines around his mouth were deep. The stubble along his jaw was gray at the temples. He hadn’t shaved in two days. He had been here for forty-eight hours straight, running tests, drawing his own blood, writing the failures in his slanting hand while the town sickened outside the carriage house door.

She had seen him tired before. She had never seen him empty. “Three hours.”

Marcus’s head came up. His hazel eyes found hers.

“Before sunrise,” Delphine said. “That gives us three hours to prepare the batch and draw the blood. The counteragent needs to set for at least forty minutes before administration. We’ll need clean vials. Sterile needles. The sodium thiosulfate measured fresh. The silver nitrate at one percent, not two.”

She was already moving. She stood from the stool. Her boots sounded on the stone. She crossed to the reagent shelf and reached for the sodium thiosulfate jar. The glass was cool under her fingers. She set it on the worktable beside the brass scale. The weights clicked against the pan. She measured seven grams by eye. Her hands knew the measure. She had done this enough times.

Marcus didn’t move from the table. He stayed exactly where he was, both hands flat on the wood, his weight on his arms. He watched her measure the sodium thiosulfate, reach for the distilled water cylinder, and pour two milliliters into the mortar with a precision long practice had given her.

The silence held. Delphine worked through it. She measured one milliliter of silver nitrate with the glass dropper, drop by drop. The mixture turned milky, then clear, then settled into the fine white suspension that had held the cells at two hundred pulses and beyond.