Page 7 of Blood & Ash

The young man had stopped shaking. He sat on the exam table with his bandaged arm held against his chest and watched Marcus write nothing.

“What’s it?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Will I die?”

Marcus looked up. The young man’s face was open, scared. He was young enough that dying had never once crossed his mind.

“No,” Marcus said. The word came out before he’d decided it was true. “No, you won’t die. But I need you to rest. No shifting. Come back in two days.”

The young man nodded. He slid off the table and found his balance against the wall. Marcus walked him to the door. The night was clear and cold. Stars overhead, sharp as pins.

“You driving yourself?” Marcus asked.

“I’ll be okay.”

Marcus waited until the young man was in his car. The engine started. The headlights swept across the gravel and then he was gone, driving as slowly and carefully as Petra had, trying not to let the sickness show.

Marcus closed the door. The carriage house held the smell of blood and reagents, and none of it added up to an answer.

He lined up the three sets of samples on the examination table. Fifteen vials of blood. Three tissue samples in sterile containers. All of them showed the same thing. All of them told him nothing.

Marcus opened the logbook to a fresh page. He wrote the date. He wrote “Case series: three shifters, identical presentation.” He listed the symptoms. He described the degradation pattern. The blood had a metallic quality. He wrote “vampire-infused characteristics without vampire exposure” and then crossed it out because it made no sense.

The next entry was two words: “No etiology.”

He closed the logbook. The lamp guttered. The carriage house waited.

Three patients. Three identical mysteries. Marcus had been a doctor for eighty-five years and he’d never seen anything target shifters this specifically, this cleanly.

He blew out the lamp and sat in the dark. The samples gleamed on the table in the thin moonlight coming through the windows. Three sets of something he couldn’t name.

Marcus sat alone in the clinic with the oil lamp burning low. Four nights running with these three samples, and he had nothing to show for it but ruled-out tests and a headache that wouldn’t quit.

The day clinic staff had gone home at six. The free clinic hours started at eight, but no one had shown tonight. It was a first in six months. He’d checked the door twice, propped it open with the brick he kept for wet nights, and gone back to his worktable. The town had other worries. He had these vials.

Three of them. Glass, cork-stoppered, each about the size of his thumb. No labels. He’d numbered them himself in black marker on the side of each cork: 1, 2, 3. They sat in a row on the examination table under the lamp, and the lamp threw their shadows long across the scarred wood.

Sample one was clear. Almost water, but not. It had weight to it. Sample two was cloudy, a faint gray tinge that settled when left alone and stirred when agitated. Sample three was the problem child, pale amber and viscous, with a smell that matched nothing in eighty-five years of practice, medicinal or chemical.

He’d run the full battery. Blood work first, because blood work was what he knew. He’d drawn his own (enough to test, not enough to weaken) and mixed a drop with each sample. There was no reaction: no clotting, no hemolysis, no change in the smear under the microscope. He’d checked for heavy metals. for plant alkaloids, and for the common venoms of the region: rattlesnake, copperhead, black widow. He’d ruled out infection markers, inflammation response, cellular degradation.

He had ruled out venom and injury.

He flipped through his log. The pages were dense with his handwriting, each test dated and initialed. He ran his finger down the margin where he’d marked the negatives. Blood: negative. Metal: negative. Alkaloid: negative. Venom panel: negative. Toxicology screen: negative. The list went on for two pages.

The samples had come from Delphine. She’d handed them to him four nights ago with her mouth set and her eyes flat. “These are from the shop. I need to know what’s in them.” She hadn’t said which shop. She hadn’t needed to. Nightshade & Nettle sat three streets over, and Delphine ran it, and whatever was happening there had put a crease between Delphine’s eyebrows that hadn’t been there before.

He’d taken the vials. He’d said he’d look. That was the job.

Marcus capped the centrifuge and set it spinning. The machine whirred in the quiet. He’d separated each sample twice already, looking for particulate, for layering, for anything that might give him a direction. Sample three had shown something the second time (a faint band at the top of the tube that shouldn’t have been there), but when he’d tried to isolate it, the band had dispersed, like it didn’t want to be caught.

The centrifuge wound down. He pulled the tubes and held them to the light. Nothing new.

He set the tubes in the rack and reached for the burner. The gas clicked on. He adjusted the flame to low and set a clean slide over it. He dropped a bead of sample three onto the glass and watched it heat.

The bead darkened from the inside rather than burning, as if something in it was concentrating. The smell changed. The sweet wrongness sharpened into something that made his sinuses ache. He turned off the burner and set the slide aside to cool.