Chapter 3 Brecca #2
I pulled out my notebook, a battered spiral-bound thing I'd been using to track camp mortality statistics, and flipped to a blank page. I started writing.
Lucian healing: wound 2.5" depth, rib exposure. Day 1 post-injury — wound closure approx 60-70%. No signs of infection. Tissue regeneration rate significantly faster than Vampyren (est. 3-4x). New tissue quality appears normal. No scarring observed.
I checked his blood pressure next. Or tried to.
I had a manual cuff, but when I wrapped it around his arm and inflated it, I realized I had no baseline for what Lucian blood pressure should be.
The readings I got were lower than any human value: sixty over forty.
In a human, that meant hypovolemic shock, flat on the floor.
But he was sitting upright, alert, breathing steadily, watching me with those unsettling mercury irises. Clearly not in shock.
"Your blood pressure is lower than a human's," I said, writing it down. "By a lot. I'm going to assume that's normal for your species and not a sign that you're about to die."
Nothing. No response. Not even a shift in posture.
I noted his respiratory rate. Twelve breaths per minute. Slow, even for a human at rest. His pupils were fixed and dilated slightly in the dim light, but the silver iris made it hard to gauge dilation accurately. His skin temperature, when I pressed my fingers to his wrist to check for a pulse —
I pulled my hand back.
His skin was cool. Distinctly below human body temperature, though warmer than the Vampyren baseline.
What I hadn't expected was the texture. Smooth.
Almost silken, like touching polished stone that had been left in shade.
And underneath it, so faint I almost missed it — a vibration.
A barely perceptible hum, as if something inside him was oscillating at a frequency just below the threshold of touch.
I'd read about this. In the combat reports, survivors of Lucian attacks described a "buzzing" that preceded the creatures' fastest movements.
The prevailing theory was that it was the sound of Lucian bodies vibrating at high speed before a strike.
But this wasn't fast or aggressive. It was slow.
Steady. Like a resting heartbeat translated into motion instead of sound.
I put my fingers back. Held them against his wrist. Felt the hum, gentle and constant, against my fingertips.
His pulse was there. Slow, rhythmic, alien. One heart, not two like the Vampyren. But that vibration layered underneath it, as constant as breathing, as intrinsic as blood flow. It was part of him.
I realized I'd been touching his wrist for significantly longer than any clinical assessment required.
I pulled my hand away and wrote in the notebook.
Subdermal vibration — constant, low-frequency.
Possibly related to the "buzzing" reported in combat encounters.
Resting state: barely perceptible by touch.
Function unknown. Skin temperature: est. 94-95°F (below human 98.
6, above Vampyren baseline). Texture: smooth, reduced porosity compared to human skin.
"I'm going to need to draw blood at some point," I said, not looking at him.
"I'm a phlebotomist. That's — it means I draw blood for a living.
Or I used to. Before the world ended and I became a field surgeon instead.
" I was babbling. I knew I was babbling.
"I don't know if your veins are in the same places as ours, or if your blood reacts the same way to anticoagulants, or really anything about your vascular system at all. But I'd like to find out." Silence.
"You don't talk much, do you?"
Nothing. Those silver eyes. Watching.
"Fine." I repacked my kit, closed the notebook, stood up. "I'll be back this afternoon. Try not to bleed on anything."
I was at the tent entrance when I stopped.
I didn't turn around.
"How did you know my name?" I asked.
The silence in the tent was different now. Full. Dense. Like the air between us was holding a response that existed but hadn't been released.
I waited. Five seconds. Ten. Nothing.
I pushed through the tent flap and walked out into the sun and told the guards I'd be back at fourteen hundred and that if anyone went in there without my authorization, I'd personally stitch their mouth shut.
I spent the rest of the morning doing rounds.
Six people in the medical tent with various injuries.
A woman with a fractured wrist from a fall.
A teenager with an infected cut that was responding, barely, to the dwindling antibiotics.
An elderly man with chronic pain that I couldn't fix and could only manage with the aspirin equivalent we had left, which wasn't much.
Normal work. Familiar work. The work that had kept me sane and functional for three years by giving me something to focus on that wasn't the larger, howling horror of the world.
But I kept thinking about the vibration under his skin.
I kept thinking about the healing rate: three to four times faster than Vampyren, which was already three to four times faster than human.
What kind of biology produced that? What cellular mechanisms?
The phlebotomist in me, the part that had always loved the puzzle of blood and bodies and how things worked at the level of chemistry and tissue, was starving for answers.
And I kept thinking about his eyes. The way they'd followed me around the tent. Attentive. Focused. None of the heat or barely-leashed intensity I'd learned to expect from Vampyren males. He watched me like he was listening to something I wasn't saying.
I went back at two o'clock. I told myself it was just to check the wound.
I stayed for an hour.
The wound had closed further, nearly a seam now, smooth and tight.
I documented everything. I checked his vitals again.
I talked the entire time because the alternative was sitting in silence with a creature that had killed people I'd sworn to protect, and the silence felt like it would swallow me whole if I let it.
I told him about the camp. How it started — a handful of survivors who'd fled the city in the first weeks of the invasion and found high ground.
How it grew as more people came. How we'd built the fence and the gardens and the water catchment system.
How I'd become the medic because there was nobody else and people were dying and I'd been so goddamn angry about it that I'd taught myself surgery from a book meant for veterinarians.
He didn't respond. He didn't move. But he listened. I could tell he was listening because his eyes never left me, and his breathing shifted with the rhythm of my words, slowing when I slowed, as if some part of him was syncing to the cadence of my voice.
It should have been creepy. Maybe it was creepy. But it felt, in a way I didn't have the emotional vocabulary to articulate, like being heard.
When I left, the sun was low and golden and the camp was busy with evening preparations. I walked back to my tent and sat on my cot and opened the notebook and looked at the pages of clinical data I'd collected.
Lucian healing rate. Blood pressure. Subdermal vibration. Skin temperature. Pulse pattern.
I had more medical data on a living Lucian than any human alive. It was a scientific goldmine. Alek would want it for tactical purposes. Marta would want it for finding vulnerabilities to exploit.
I looked at the data and I thought about the way he'd dimmed his skin when the child was afraid. The deliberate, conscious choice to make himself less frightening. For a child he didn't know. While injured. While bound. While surrounded by people who wanted him dead.
Monsters didn't do that.
I closed the notebook and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw starbursts, and I told myself I was a medical professional documenting an unknown species, and that was all this was, and I'd go back tomorrow because that was the job.
Just the job.