Page 144 of The Serpent’s Shadow

At least that was what the nurses and acolytes must have seen when they looked at my placid face before throwing the hood over my head and leading me in here: a stoic, defeated bloodrender, incapable of feeling the intense emotions associated with this dreadful activity.

Inside, I told myself this time was different. This time, I had a purpose. A plan. After spilling my soul to Ravinica about the leechings, and seeing the horror on her face, something she had said struck me.

She’d wondered if there was a way to bolster her fledgling uprising with information found inside Fort Woden. I figured there had to be. This black castle was the primary residence of the Gothi, the command center for academy activities beyond the walls of Academy Hill, and the best-guarded hub of secrecy in the school.

Huscarls lined every inch of the place outside the doors, keeping constant watch. Breaking into Fort Woden was not like breaking into Mimir Tomes. The colonnaded library was a fulcrum for knowledge; the fort was a center forpower.

Now I was conveniently inside the castle. Brought here out of scientific greed and misguided visions of strength—dumpedin the lion’s den so the smartest minds at the academy could mingle with my blood and find new ways of using it.

I wasn’t going to sit still and patient any longer while they cut my skin, pumped me full of fake blood to rejuvenate me, and took my own.

In the past, I’d felt awful coming here. My physical condition deteriorated at such a degree I wouldn’t have been able to defend myself even if I’d wanted.

But something had changed. After the past few sessions under the knife and needles of my hooded jailers, I felt renewed. Stronger. More able-bodied. The plasma-pumping wasn’t having the same debilitating effect on me.

I could withstand this. I could grin and bear it.

When they turned their backs, I would be ready.

The first half hour went the same as it always did: Stepping in front of Fort Woden, announcing myself, and being greeted by a solemn, robed acolyte with a hood and mask to hide their features.

I recognized her voice as belonging to the same acolyte who always led me down the hallways after throwing the hood on my head and blinding me. I knew the exact number of steps to get into the laboratory. I knew the number of times I went left, right, no matter how much they tried to disorient me with differing routes. My senses were heightened in here, with my lack of vision.

When the hood was ripped off my head, it was at the exact time I’d anticipated. I was standing where I thought I’d be—blaring lights of the laboratory not causing me to wince or hiss any longer from the sudden change from dark to light.

Now, I was strapped to the gurney with leather wrist-bindings, slightly angled so my head rested above my chest. The nurse was pumping my depleted blood count with the fake shit they used to keep me living. While I gritted my teeth and closedmy eyes to stave off the pain of that procedure, I heard the nurse fluttering about the room, looking over some papers with her back turned to me.

I knew my chance was coming. I would not squander it.

She came to pull the needles out of my arms once the process was complete. I felt sickly for a moment, nauseous, but as usual the feeling drowned away within minutes, as if being held back by something stronger than it inside me.

Through the mask she wore, with pincushion holes in the front, she said, “I’ll return in a moment, Initiate Feldraug. You are doing quite well today.”

She needed to bring in the machine that would meticulously draw my blood for the next hour—enough vials to make it worth their time, but not enough to kill me. It was not the typical manual labor that went into a blood draw for, say, testing bodily functions. It was an automatic process from a machine that looked like a printer with tubes sticking out of it.

As she turned and left the room, the countdown started in my head. I opened my mouth and let a small blade I’d stored behind my gums slip out between my teeth. It was tiny—a finger-knife to cut thread—so it would fit in my mouth and be undetected.

With my hands pinned to my sides by the leather straps, I Shaped runes from muscle memory. I couldn’t see what my hands were doing, though I knew the Shapes.

I was rewarded with thewhooshof breaking air.

With my spell, I directed the blade to lift from my teeth. Shaping more runes in rapid succession, I forced it to cut into the leather bindings holding my left wrist.

The fools hadn’t kept me trapped with metal, instead using an archaic means of shackling me to this hospital bed. Realizing that ignited the first seed of my plan.

When the blade severed the leather, I caught it in my left hand and looped over my body to manually slice into my right wrist-hold.

My blood swam, dizziness pumping through me as I realized I was beyond the point of return. Now, if I was caught, I’d suffer a far worse fate than these tests.

There was a curtain in a full circle around my room. Once freed, I sat up completely and cut off the ankle bindings. I closed my eyes and listened to the footsteps outside from the various nurses and acolytes, to gauge where they were in the room.

I rolled off the bed silently, Shaped a rune to send one of my signature spells—drawing out a shadow being into the chair where I’d been sitting.

Shadows coalesced, twining together. In its wake was a vaguely humanoid shape, wispy and black as nightfog, in the bed where I’d been.

The penultimate step to my plan came next, when I used my tiny, finger-length blade to carve a rune into the meat of my forearm. My blood ran, and with a wince I pulled back.

Precious seconds were ticking away.

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