Page 6 of Blood & Ash

Marcus closed the logbook. He cleaned the workbench. He set the samples in cold storage beside Cole’s. The carriage house held stone, wood and the smell of reagents that hadn’t worked.

He had one more patient coming two nights from now, a young male shifter with the same symptoms.

Marcus blew out the lamp and stood in the dark. The samples waited. The logbook waited. The pattern waited, patient as bedrock.

The young man was twenty-five if he was a day. He had sandy hair and nervous hands. He sat on the exam table with his legs dangling short of the floor. His coordination was shot. He’d dropped his keys twice coming through the door.

“Started when?” Marcus asked.

“Three days ago. Fever first. Then the shakes.” The young man’s voice cracked. “Couldn’t shift this morning. Tried and nothing happened.”

Marcus nodded. He’d expected that too. He took vitals: pulse one fifteen, temperature 101.2. The rib pain was present when Marcus palpated the right side. The young man winced.

“Same as the others?” the young man asked.

“Yes.”

“Cole said you didn’t know what it was.”

“I still don’t.”

Marcus reached for the blood draw kit. The young man offered his arm. His vein jumped under the skin. Marcus slid the needle in and filled six vials. The blood came dark and metallic, identical to Cole’s and Petra’s.

He set the vials in the centrifuge. The machine hummed. The young man watched it, eyes wide: he’d never been sick before.

“I need to run tests,” Marcus said. “It’ll take time.”

“I’ll wait.”

Marcus prepared the first slide. Under the microscope at forty times, the cells showed the same degradation. The membranes were thinning and the hemoglobin leaching. He moved to one hundred times. The pattern held. Two hundred times confirmed it. The shifter cells were coming apart in sections, the membranes dissolving from the inside out.

He ran the reagent screens. Venom, injury, and toxins all came back negative, three patients with three identical results.

“I need a tissue sample,” Marcus said.

The young man paled. “From where?”

“Forearm. Small incision. Local anesthetic.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Pressure, not pain.”

The young man held out his arm. Marcus injected the anesthetic and made the cut. The tissue came free clean. The young man looked away. Blood welled along the incision. Marcus applied a bandage.

“Hold pressure.”

The young man pressed his thumb to the gauze. His hand shook.

Marcus prepared the tissue slide, stained it, and placed it under the histology scope. The human cells were intact and the shifter cells degrading. The border between them was knife sharp, with no transition and no ambiguity.

He lined up the samples on a steel tray. Blood from the young man, Petra, and Cole sat beside three tissue samples, and all three showed identical patterns of degradation.

Marcus opened his logbook. The entries had grown sparse. For the young man, he wrote the date, skipped the name he didn’t have, and listed the symptoms: fever, coordination loss, inability to shift, rib pain. He wrote “blood panels consistent with previous cases” and then “tissue biopsy shows identical selective degradation.”

He turned back a page and compared. Cole’s entry was the longest. Petra’s was shorter. This one was six lines.

He ruled out venom again. He ruled out injury again. He ruled out toxins again. He wrote “pattern consistent across all three patients” and then stopped. The pen hovered.