Chapter 22 Saskia
Taika and I work through the day, isolating the active ingredients in Lucan’s blood and adjusting the pH of his resulting plasma. I’m in awe over the process, at how carefully Taika describes every step, showing me and then allowing me to try.
“And now to add the pepsin solution,” he practically hums, snatching up the little glass bottle.
“I’m glad you managed to get the liquid kind rather than the powder, since we don’t exactly have distilled water anywhere nearby.
Here.” He hands me a small, clear pipette before I can respond.
“We only have ten milliliters of plasma to work with right now, so let’s dissolve one ounce of pepsin in it. ”
I close an eye, sucking up the appropriate amount of liquid.
“How do you know what the right amount is?” I ask, eager for more information.
In our schooling phase, they skimmed over the processes of…
well, everything. There was no point in going into detail when the Guardians would ultimately choose our careers.
“I don’t know,” Taika admits. “A long time ago, I developed some snake antivenom for the kingdom using sheep blood, but vampire antivenom using werewolf blood… it’s an entirely new process. An experiment, if you will.”
My heart drops, even as I squeeze beads of pepsin into Lucan’s plasma and watch it dissolve among the thick, yellowish substance. An experiment? We don’t have time for an experiment. But I suppose testing it out on a Wall is better than testing it out on a human.
Still, my mind wanders to the possibilities…
If we can get this right, could we inject it into those stone statues in Arad’s garden?
Could my mother wake up?
“What would happen if we just used the raw plasma?” I ask, glancing at the empty bottles scattered around us. If we fail at this, we won’t have any more chemicals to purify the antibodies with. Only the centrifuge to filter out the plasma.
“In human patients?” Taika muses. “They’d probably die, due to some unwanted components in the plasma. Toxins that would shock their system. In the Wall? Probably nothing, because the antibodies wouldn’t be concentrated enough. Okay, now let’s bring this pH back up. Hand me the sodium hydroxide?”
By the time the sun fades once more past his clinic’s window, we have several sterile vials of an opaque liquid that no longer resembles or smells like Lucan’s blood whatsoever.
“Do you actually think it’ll work?” I whisper finally, staring at the vials that look so inconspicuous.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Taika says gently. “But we’ll have to let this incubate for a few days, and in the meantime… even vampires and werewolves need sleep. I daresay you haven’t gotten much since you fell off the Wall the first time.”
I flex my fingers, still feeling the foreign sense of power thrumming beneath my skin and remembering how Lucan said he once ran around the perimeter of the Wall for days and days before he finally fell unconscious. “Apparently, I don’t need as much rest as humans do.”
But Taika gives me a pointed look, peeling off his gloves, so I take that as my sign to leave. Maybe some real, solid rest after everything that’s happened in that time frame wouldn’t be such a horrible idea.
“Thank you,” I tell Taika. “For trying this with me. And teaching me.”
He bows his head. “Thank you for giving us the idea. I’d like to think we could have done it without you, but I’m not sure contact with the Wall would have created enough antibodies in any of our systems. And I never would have been able to acquire the right equipment.”
I nod and cast one last long look at the little centrifuge on the counter before bidding him goodbye, crossing my arms against the nip of the nighttime as soon as I open the front door.
It looks like everyone’s gone to bed, the wind warbling through an empty street, so I ease the door shut as quietly as possible and hesitate on the clinic’s ramp.
“You didn’t think I’d be able to sleep without you, did you?”
Lucan’s shape dislodges itself from the shadows across the street, and I instantly feel my chest loosen as I breathe a sigh of relief. He waited for me—for hours, judging by the crumpled, dirt-streaked state of his clothing.
“You’ve slept without me plenty of times before,” I say, taking his outstretched hand as he steps closer. His large, warm fingers thread themselves through mine.
“Never again,” he promises, and chills graze along the back of my neck at the intensity of his words. For the next five minutes, we walk hand-in-hand to his house—where the world suddenly tilts off its axis as he scoops me up off my feet.
“What are you doing?”
Lucan doesn’t even glance down at my best attempt at an affronted expression. He simply marches inside, me against his chest, as if I weigh no more than a rag doll.
“Replacing a bad memory with a good one,” he says simply.
It isn’t until we’re up the spiral stairs, through his bedroom, and toward those glass doors I’ve tried not to look at that I understand: the balcony.
I’ll show you how beautiful it can be the first cloudless night we get, he told me on my first night.
Is it a clear sky tonight? I forgot to look, so consumed with my thoughts about antivenom.
Placing me on my feet before the glass door, Lucan swings it open.
I step out first, quiet, almost reserved.
A heavy weight seems to pull my eyes downward, past the railing, where the dirt road stretches between rows of houses in varying degrees of degradation.
A strange sense of fear spreads in my stomach, as if every person still trapped within Xantera might rise from the ground and wave up at me with jerky, skeletal arms. As if I’ve already failed them and left them behind to rot.
Lucan’s presence steps up behind me, though, magnetic in the opposite way of the Guardians’. I feel his thumbs grip the sides of my face. And tilt it up.
Finally, my eyes lift to the sky.
For a few seconds, I blink, adjusting to the blanket of rich, velvety black speckled with bright lights.
The stars. They look far enough away to be separate universes, yet my hands twitch upward anyway, as if I might be able to touch them.
What would they feel like? Soft and silky like fabric?
Warm and sticky like honey? Or something else entirely?
“You are not a Chosen One anymore, Saskia,” Lucan says from behind me, his warm, rough hands still cupping the edges of my face. “And you don’t have to keep looking down.”
I lean my head back against his chest, wishing I could cement that declaration into my heart, but something keeps tugging at my peripheral.
What if no one else ever gets to experience the stars like this?
What if all my friends I left behind never get to see the night sky with no Wall around their entire world?
“What if…” I start out loud, swallowing thickly and squeezing my eyes shut. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“The antivenom?” he questions me as his rough palms skate down my arms.
I nod, trying to loosen the tension in my body, but somehow, my muscles cord further into cold marble.
Lucan carefully slides the straps of my dress down my arms before his thumbs press into my constricted shoulder muscles, working their way between my shoulder blades.
The light pressure feels a little like heaven.
“All we can do is try,” he says finally. “And keep trying. Over and over again, until the world caves.”
We’re both silent for a beat as his words settle heavily on my heart. If that’s what it takes then that’s what I’ll do, but the weight of it all, being the one who has success or failure resting on their shoulders… it’s a lot.
“I know what that feels like, to feel responsible for others’ well-being.
To lead despite not asking to be a leader,” Lucan continues, dragging a pleased moan out of me as he works out the tension in the muscles framing my spine.
His fingers move to my lower back, then hips—and when he hikes my dress up a few inches—my glutes.
I feel like a sculpture he’s molding out of clay, leaning heavily against the railing now. One where he occasionally presses his lips into my curves and hums against my skin.
And then murmuring, “If we fail, Saskia, then we fail. But it won’t mean that you didn’t try or that you don’t care.
I’ve failed thousands of times. Trying to bring down the Wall, obviously, but also as the alpha.
I’ve had to make hard decisions, ones that have helped us and ones that ultimately hurt us, even though there was no way of knowing at the time which.
One thing I can guarantee is that not everyone will agree with you, but when you know that you’ve done everything in your power to do the right thing, then there’s nothing to worry about.
And I’ve always done what I think is best for us, collectively, just like I know you will. ”
He pauses and crouches behind me. His hands drop to my thighs, massaging the tips of his fingers in slow circles along my hamstrings.
“Well,” he amends, “until you, that is.”
“Wha…”
Again, my words melt into a moan at his touch, louder this time, echoing into the night air.
I freeze, suddenly self-conscious of the fact that we’re outside, and that anybody could be looking out their window to find me pressed against the railing with my straps pulled down and my dress hiked halfway up. I scan the streets nervously…
“What did I tell you?” Lucan asks me, rising back to his full height and twirling me around so that I’m facing him with my back to the railing. He puts a finger beneath my chin. “Look up, little nightmare.”
I do, basking my sights in the blanket of stars once more. With my neck now fully exposed to him, Lucan’s lips find the skin just above my collarbone.
My mood shifts. Suddenly, the air turns sticky, like honey dripping from the sky. I want more than just a massage as his mouth trails along the curves of my breasts. But we’re still outside, still out in the open. Nobody else is out, but…
“Can you be quiet, baby?” he asks, a smirk lacing his tone.
This might be the biggest break-the-rules moment of my life, and my first instinct is to put my head down and say no, we can’t. But Lucan’s eyes turn molten as they grip mine, and I remind myself, just like he told me, that I’m not a Chosen One anymore—even if we’ve chosen each other.
So I glance over my shoulder one more time to make sure the streets are empty before I practically melt. “Yes, I can be quiet.”