Chapter 5
CALIX
“Fuck—”
The word tore out of me as my palm met the blade.
Pain split through my hand, sharp and immediate, deeper than anything I’d ever felt before.
I jerked back, my chair screeching across the floor as it scraped away from the table.
A thin line opened across my palm, then widened as blood welled up too fast, spilling over and running down my wrist in thick, dark trails.
It dripped from my elbow onto the concrete, steady and slow, pooling beneath me.
My breath caught. Being a supe had its perks, and one of them was our faster healing, which had to do with the magic in our DNA—especially being a vampire.
Any cut I sustained should be sealed quickly, the skin knitting itself back together within seconds, yet this one stayed open, raw edges parted as if something invisible held the skin apart.
“It's almost tim—”
Rack’s voice cut off behind me, but his footsteps didn’t. They echoed across the lab floor, steady and controlled, until he stopped just over my shoulder. I could feel his presence before I looked back, his gaze following the trail of blood down my arm to my hand.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. The steady drip of blood hitting the floor filled the silence.
“What the fuck are you—”
Rip.
I didn’t wait for him to finish. My hands moved on instinct, grabbing the hem of my shirt and tearing a strip free. The fabric stretched as I wrapped it tightly around my palm, fingers clumsy as I tried to stop the bleeding.
The cloth soaked through almost immediately.
Something cold hit me square in the chest and dropped to the floor with a plop. What the fuck? Did he just throw something at me? Apparently, he wanted me to kick his ass today.
Before I started a world war between us, I looked down and saw a sealed blood bag laying at my feet. The dark liquid inside shifted sluggishly. I bent over and picked up the bag, rolling my eyes up to his fiercely irradiated abyss-violet gaze.
He stood a few steps away, phone still in his hand, shoulders rigid and tight. His brows had lowered, his mouth pressed into a thin line that told me everything his voice didn’t need to.
“I thought we agreed,” he said, each word calm and measured, “that you weren’t touching it until Syris got here.”
My ears picked up the creak of plastic as his phone squeezed beneath his grip. What's got him so worked up? It's just a bit of blood. Nothing he hasn't seen a lot of already in our lifestyle.
Shutting my eyes briefly, I drew in a slow breath, fingers tightening around the blood bag in my hand. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. Waiting wasn’t an option. Not with E depending on me.
“E gave me a job,” I said, turning away from him, looking at the blade that just sliced my hand. “I’m going to figure out as much as I can about this thing. I can’t just wait for others.” Not when I had this rising curiosity about the weapon before me, something I’d never seen or heard of before.
I had gestured toward the blade, about to tell him to calm his ass down, when the metal responded.
A faint shimmer rippled across its surface, subtle but unmistakable, chasing the path of my movement before settling into the hilt. My breath hitched as the sting in my palm flared, heat pulsing beneath the soaked fabric.
That hadn’t happened before.
The blade had sat quiet since I brought it into the lab, unresponsive no matter how much I handled it. Now the surface shifted as if something beneath it had stirred awake.
My blood.
I stepped closer, attention narrowing onto the table. Rack said something behind me, but it blurred into the background as I leaned in.
Slowly, I raised my hand over the blade again.
The metal shimmered in response, a thin wave of iridescent color rolling along its edge before fading. I adjusted the distance, lifting my hand higher, but nothing happened. Lowering it again brought the shimmer back, stronger this time, and it spread farther down the blade.
Ignoring the eyes drilling into my back, I shifted to the side of the table, testing the angle.
The reaction followed.
I circled the table, movements quicker now, more deliberate.
Each pass of my hand drew a slightly different response, faint pulses, brighter flickers, the magic tracking me with increasing sensitivity.
When I brought my injured hand closer, the blade lit more fully, a band of color sliding from tip to hilt and settling there, steady and thruming… like it was alive.
Putting the blood bag in my mouth, teeth tearing through the plastic so I could gulp it down as quickly as possible, I grabbed a pen and began scribbling across my notebook as I marked distances, angles, reactions.
Ink rapidly scratched across the paper, my hand drawing a glare when the occasional blood smear got in the way.
Despite the blood seeping through the cloth wrapped around my hand, I could feel my skin knitting together with each new draw of blood. Much slower than it should be, which was also interesting.
Behind me, a low buzzing sound cut through the room followed my Rack’s cool, professional tone.
“Yes. Yes. I understand. He’s in front of me. Yes.”
Rack’s voice carried across the lab, cutting through the scratch of my pen and the faint hum of magic still lingering around the blade. His footsteps followed, solid and unhurried, echoing off the concrete as he closed the distance.
My right eye twitched. Didn’t he see I was working? Couldn’t he just take care of whatever it was? I didn’t look up. The pen moved faster.
“Here.”
The word came with a shove. His phone appeared in my line of sight, blocking the blade, the notes, everything that mattered.
My lip curled, and the empty plastic blood bag fell onto the table.
I started to lift my hand, fully intending to knock it out of his grip, when a familiar voice sliced through the speaker.
“Calix.”
That was all it took for the room to seem too still for half a second. Even Rack didn’t move.
“The meeting starts in fifteen minutes,” she continued, her tone precise, each word sharpened to a point. “If you’re not on that call, I’ll come down to that little dungeon you call a lab, flay your skin, and hang it in my office.”
I closed my eyes and reminded myself that she was not just my sister, but the head of the Syndicate.
The overhead lights pressed through my lids, red and harsh, but it was enough to cut the noise in my head for a second. My pen hit the table with a sharp crack as I dropped it, and I grabbed the phone from Rack’s hand.
There was a twinkle in his eye, and the side of his mouth tipped up as I took the phone. Fucking asshole.
I covered the receiver with my palm and leaned in just enough for him to hear me.
“You fucking traitor.”
His expression didn’t change. If anything, he leaned closer, unfazed by my scrutiny.
“She’s the only one you’ll listen to,” he said, voice calm and factual. “And you know how she is about these meetings.”
Yeah. I know exactly how she was. But he was still my damn second, not hers.
On the other end, a quiet exhale filtered through the speaker before she spoke again.
“With Aniyah and Nova mated, I’m already dealing with a brand of chaos I’m not used to.” I could hear her crack her knuckles before she followed with an exhausted breath. “It’s like herding two feral disasters who won’t keep their hands off each other.”
She paused, then whispered underneath her breath even though she knew I could hear her.
“So I need my absent-minded disaster to show up on time.”
Rack dragged over a stool and sat, elbows resting on his knees, watching me like this was a show he’d seen before.
He flicked his hand, and a box with a large red X on it floated out of a drawer I never used and into his hands.
He took advantage of the distraction to yank my injured hand over to him, unwrapping the bloodied fabric to a half-open cut. His brows pinched even further.
Yanking my hand back, I shooed him away, muttering into the phone, “Yeah. Those two are the true irresponsible ones.”
The blade’s faint shimmer had dulled again, its surface returning to stillness. My notes sat open, half-finished, ink trailing off where I’d stopped. I really wanted to get back to testing this thing.
Silence answered me. Not empty, just a tightness I could feel even over the phone.
I could picture my sister Ezra in her big boss chair in her fancy office in Vegas, glaring at the space in front of her like I was there and she could intimidate me with her presence and expectation. I could almost feel it over the phone, and it almost made me laugh.
I exhaled hard through my nose.
“Alright. Alright,” I said, shoving the notebook closed before I could look at it again. The pen rolled across the table and hit the edge with a soft clatter. “I’ll be on in less than a minute.”
“You better be,” she growled before the line went dead.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a second before chucking it in the opposite direction of where Rack was sitting, giving him a wide, toothy smile.
Rack didn’t move. Didn't even take his eyes off me.
His hand flicked toward him. The phone arced away from the wall it was just about to crash into, and within a few seconds, it drifted neatly into his hand.
Without comment, he put the phone in his pocket and the first-aid kit away. Smart man.
“You two win,” I muttered, dragging a hand through my hair, fingers catching slightly before I yanked them free. “You always fucking do.”
He didn't respond to that either, just closed the drawer and looked at his watch. Reminding me of my promise to my sister.
I glanced at the blade, sitting there quietly. The silence in the air called at me to stay, to figure out this puzzle, so I did the only thing I could do.
I ran.
Using my vampire speed, I blurred past Rack, zipping through the door, boots hitting the ground in rapid succession. Lights streaked past overhead as I took the stairs two at a time, the lab’s hum fading behind me.