The trail of blood led them to an imposing slab of blue stone at the end of the passageway. White veins branched across its surface like a spider’s web. At its center a single Drakhar rune was engraved in the same flowing script as the words they had encountered on the path.
“This doesn’t seem good,” Jasper said. “The last time Echo went through a stone door into a mysterious inner chamber, she stabbed herself in the chest like the drama queen she is.”
“I am not a drama queen,” Echo said absently. She reached out her hand to the rune, but Dorian grabbed her wrist before her fingertips could touch it.
His single eye was trained on the symbol, his brow pinched.
“What does it say?” Echo asked, extracting her hand from his grasp.
“?‘Wind,’?” Dorian replied. “Or ‘air.’?”
Dorian nudged Echo aside as he inspected the door more closely. There was no blood on its surface, but a few drops had spattered the ground. Caius had come through here. Or had been dragged through. An unpleasant thought.
“How do we open it?” Jasper asked. “I can pick just about any lock, but I don’t see one.”
Some doors, Echo knew, didn’t require a key to open. Or at least, not a key in the traditional sense of the word. It was her turn to grab Dorian by the wrist. He frowned, but he let her pull his hand forward.
“Touch it,” she said.
He did.
The moment Dorian’s fingers brushed the carved lines, the rune began to glow a bright white that eclipsed the veins running through the marble. The light flared for an instant and then went out. The slab swung away from Dorian’s touch, revealing a cavernous room and the soft babbling of a distant stream.
“Magic door,” Echo said. “It’s always a magic door. And this being a Drakharin temple, I’m guessing it only responds to someone with Drakharin blood.”
Dorian huffed, as if impressed against his will. He fell back into his stoic silence as he walked through said magic door, single-minded in his quest to rescue the prince to whom he had sworn himself, body and soul.
Jasper followed him, with considerably less aplomb. “Magic doors and trails of blood.” He shot Echo a look over his shoulder. “For once, it might be nice to go on a normal adventure.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Why isn’t it working?”
Ivy watched the patient on the hospital bed, unease stirring in her gut. The elixir had proven effective on the first three people she had administered it to, but the elderly man she had just dosed showed no sign of improvement. The black veins stood out on his rail-thin arms just as prominently as they had ten minutes ago. Machines beeped a steady rhythm, tracking the man’s vital signs. No change there, either.
Helios spared her a glance from the door to the quarantine ward where he stood watch. Every fifteen minutes a nurse came by to check on the patients, recording vitals and making sure the equipment keeping them alive was functioning optimally.
Ivy and Helios had had to hide from her twice already, huddling behind a large cabinet shoved in a corner of the room to open up more space for beds. But the nurse’s rounds had seemed more perfunctory than anything else. She hadn’t noticed the subtle changes in her patients, nor was she likely to for a few days, when the elixir’s magic would heal them enough for non-magical eyes to see the difference.
Ivy could feel the change, slight as it was. Even humans had a magical trace to them, an aura. It was difficult to detect, since most humans went through their lives blissfully ignorant of their own magical potential, rendering their metaphysical presence all but inert, but Ivy had been taught to scan the aura of all living creatures for signs of illness or injury. The ku?edra changed the fundamental nature of one’s aura, altering it the way a stubborn stain affected carpet fiber. The bloodweed elixir removed that stain. So far.
“Did you give him enough?” Helios asked.
Ivy shot him a withering look. “Yes, I gave him enough. I know what I’m doing.”
Helios held up his hands in surrender. “I meant no insult. I’m only trying to help.”
“Sorry,” Ivy said. “I know…I just…”
Don’t actually know what I’m doing.
“Could there be a reason for him to be resistant?” Helios checked his watch—an antique pocket watch on a chain that Ivy had lifted from Echo’s stash of treasures in the library. Echo hadn’t gone back, but Ivy had. All her clothes had been lost at the Nest, and she and Echo were roughly the same size. Echo hadn’t said a word when she saw her own clothing appear in the room they shared at Avalon, but Ivy had seen the shift in her friend’s stance. A relaxing. Subtle, but there. A little something familiar went a long way when it felt like nothing in the world made sense.
“I don’t know,” Ivy admitted. “I guess it’s possible. Human bodies don’t all process human medications the same way, so maybe this is no different.”
Helios cast a glance down the corridor. It was empty. They had precious few minutes before the nurse came back, but they hadn’t seen another soul. Ivy assumed no one was eager to spend unnecessary time in the quarantined area. The medical mystery behind the condition the ku?edra had left these people in had unsettled even the doctors sent by the CDC. Ivy had read about it in the paper she’d picked up at a newsstand after her last foray into the city.
“We’re running out of time,” Helios called in a hushed whisper. He abandoned his post by the door with a last searching glance and came to join her by the old man’s bedside. He slipped the sunglasses down his nose and peered at the man over the top of the frames. His yellow eyes had a greenish cast to them in the ward’s fluorescent lighting. He made a noise that sounded like he was considering the man’s condition. Ivy suspected it was mostly for show. He didn’t know the first thing about the healing arts. Ivy might be out of her depth, but she was confident she knew more than he did. For what that was worth, which was evidently not much at all. Helios picked up the patient’s chart from the slot that held it at the foot of the bed and read, half mumbling medical jargon to himself.
“I don’t understand,” Ivy said. “He was affected at the same time and the same place as everyone else. The circumstances of his infection were identical. I already checked his chart. There’s no preexisting disease or condition that might—”
“Did you look at his date of birth?” A puzzled frown pulled at Helios’s mouth as his gaze bounced from the chart to the elderly man on the bed.
“No,” Ivy replied. “I didn’t think it was relevant.”
Helios handed her the chart. “I admit, I’m not great at predicting human ages—they live and die so fast—but this gentleman”—he waved a hand at the man’s wrinkled countenance—“doesn’t look twenty-three to me.”
“Wait, what?” Ivy scanned the chart. “He can’t possibly be…”
Her questioning gaze found his date of birth, sandwiched between his name and gender. March 21. Nineteen ninety-four.
“What the flapjacks?”