Chapter 3 - The Cold Blood
The apartment was on the third floor of a rotting three-flat in Pilsen, wedged between a closed bakery and an empty lot choked with weeds and frozen debris. The stairwell smelled of stale cabbage, radiator steam, and damp plaster.
Marin had to stop three times on the stairs to keep Asa from tumbling backward.
His weight was staggering, but what terrified her far more was the unnatural, biting chill seeping through his clothes. It wasn't the winter air. When his hand brushed against her bare neck on the landing, it felt like an ice pack pressed against her skin.
She shoved open the door to her apartment, kicked it shut, and drove the heavy deadbolt home.
The living room was small, lit only by the amber glow of the streetlamp filtering through thin polyester curtains. A thrift-store sofa covered with a faded quilt sat opposite a television with a cracked screen. On the laminate dining table sat three unopened final-notice letters from Cook County Health.
“Bathroom,” Asa wheezed, his fingers clawing at the wall for support. “Now.”
She dragged him down the short hall and lowered him into the empty, clawfoot porcelain tub. The porcelain rattled against the floorboards under his weight.
He slumped back, his chin dropping to his chest. His expensive suit was ruined—slashed to ribbons, crusted with dirt from the alley, and soaked through with blood that smelled strange. Not like iron. Like ozone and burnt copper.
Marin tore open the medicine cabinet. She had no surgical supplies. She had rubbing alcohol, half a pack of gauze pads, butterfly bandages, and a needle and spool of nylon thread she used to repair torn hems.
“I can’t treat this,” she said, her voice shaking as she knelt beside the tub. “You need a surgeon. You need a trauma unit.”
“No hospitals,” Asa said, his voice dropping to a harsh rattle. He forced his eyes open. The irises, usually a deep storm gray, had rings of silver around the pupils that Marin hadn't noticed before. “Vance owns the administrators at Northwestern and Mercy. If my name... appears on an admissions ledger, they’ll smother me in ICU before morning.”
“Then you’re going to bleed to death in my bathtub!”
“Look at the wound,” he ordered, his jaw set in a rigid line. “Look at it, Callaway.”
She paused, startled that he had remembered the name on her brass work badge.
With trembling fingers, she cut his undershirt away with a pair of kitchen shears.
The puncture beneath his ribs was two inches wide. But the flesh surrounding it wasn’t red or inflamed. It was chalk white, hardened like marble, with thin, frost-like branching veins spreading outward across his ribs toward his chest.
Marin recoiled. “What is that?”
“A parting gift from Julian,” Asa said, his breathing shallow and brittle. “A tungsten blade. Coated with something his friends in the East call *Glacis*. It doesn't just stop coagulation. It lowers the core temperature until the heart locks up.”
“That’s impossible. That’s science fiction.”
“The world is wider than your twelve-dollar-an-hour basement, Marin,” he whispered, his head rolling back against the cold porcelain. “In twenty minutes, my heart stops.”
“Then why aren't you panicking?”
“Because panic wastes oxygen.” He closed his eyes. “In my coat pocket. The small leather case.”
Marin reached into the soaked lining of his jacket and pulled out a worn black leather pouch. Inside were three small glass ampoules filled with a clear, viscous amber liquid, and a heavy brass spring-loaded injector.
“The counter-agent?” she asked.
“A stabilizer,” he corrected faintly. “It will buy me twelve hours. If I can inject it into the muscle near the liver. But my hands... I can’t move my fingers.”
Marin looked at his hands. His knuckles were swollen, pale blue, locked into rigid claws. The frost-like discoloration had already spread past his wrists.
“Tell me what to do,” she said, her voice steadying as the reality of the situation pinned her in place.
“Load the ampoule into the chamber. Set the gauge to three. Press it directly into the edge of the wound.” He looked at her through hooded eyes. “It will burn. Don’t hesitate. If you miss the fascia, the cold spreads to my heart instantly.”
Her hands shook as she slid the glass vial into the brass cylinder until it clicked. She dialed the base until the brass notches lined up.
She knelt over him, her knees pressing against the rough bathmat. The cold radiating off his torso was so intense that her breath plumed in the air between them.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Do it.”
She pressed the injector against the pale, frozen flesh an inch below the deep laceration.
She pressed the release button.
A loud mechanical crack echoed in the small bathroom.
Asa’s entire body arched with terrifying violence. A guttural scream ripped from his throat—a sound raw, primal, and choked with pure agony. His heels slammed against the porcelain, chipping the enamel.
The amber fluid vanished into his tissue, but instead of warming him, a violent convulsion seized his chest. The frost veins across his ribs didn't recede; they turned dark, bruised purple, spreading faster toward his throat.
“It’s not working!” Marin cried, dropping the spent injector. “Asa! It’s spreading!”
His jaw locked. His eyes rolled up into his head. The monitors of his breathing went dead silent.
He wasn't breathing.
“No, no, no,” Marin panicked. She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. His skin was like dry ice, burning her palms with intense, searing cold. “Come on, Thornton! Breathe!”
She had no medical training beyond CPR classes taken five years ago at a community center. Without thinking, acting entirely on pure desperation, she slammed both bare hands flat against his bare chest, right over his still heart.
“Breathe!” she yelled.
And then it happened again.
Deep inside her chest, something shifted—like a pilot light catching fire in a forgotten furnace.
A wave of ferocious, golden heat surged down her arms. It wasn’t metaphoric warmth; it was physical, intense, searing heat. Her palms flared with a faint, luminous amber glow that lit the cramped bathroom tiles in liquid bronze.
The frost veins on Asa’s chest hissed as if touched by a hot branding iron.
Steam—thick, sweet-smelling vapor—rose from his skin where her palms made contact. The black-purple frost retreated rapidly, melting back into pink, living flesh.
Asa’s lungs sucked in air with a sound like a drowning man breaking the surface of the ocean.
His eyes snapped open, blazing with terrifying intensity. He surged upward in the tub, his hand snapping out to encircle Marin’s throat.
Not to strangle her. To hold her in place.
His pupils were fully dilated, reflecting the dying embers of the golden light still fading beneath her skin.
“Your mother,” he rasped, his voice dropping into a register that made the windowpane vibrate. “Who was your mother, Marin?”
Marin gasped for air, her hands falling away as the warmth drained out of her, leaving her utterly exhausted, her head spinning with vertigo.
“What?” she choked out.
May you like
“That heat,” Asa breathed, his gray eyes wide with a mixture of reverence and terror. “That’s not medical. That’s the Emberline. The Callaways were supposed to be extinct thirty years ago.”
***
