Page 31 of The Serpent’s Shadow

I was just as curious as they were, in that regard.

The acolyte led me into the same small chamber I’d been in three times over the past week. She sat me down in leather chair, pushed a button to recline me, until I was staring up at the blaring lights. I felt like a surgeon’s patient about to go under. My heart started to race—not out of fear, but out of hesitance and nausea.

No one liked getting stuck with needles. At least not involuntarily. I was used to drawing my own blood to the surface in order to bloodrend, but this was different. This was caustic and invasive. A complete thievery of my safety and independence.

I told the acolyte, “You can’t keep draining me without filling me back up. I’ll die before you get what you want.”

The acolyte hummed. She stuck my arm with a needle before I could respond. “That’s what we’re doing first, initiate.”

I couldn’t see her face under the hood because of her mask. I only recognized her femininity by the shape of her body under that robe, and her voice was a giveaway.

Warmth flooded my system. I closed my eyes. Slowly, I seemed to drift off. My thoughts became mangled, and it became hard to breathe. I winced and writhed in my seat, not from pain, but from discomfort.

The flood of blood to my system was a foreign sensation. It wasn’t like draining Astrid, which had been empowering and invigorating. No, this waswrong. Synthetic. Fake. It gave me no strength, but rather sapped me of my sanity.

When I opened my eyes, an unknown amount of time had passed. I stared up at another masked face, with a simple black fabric crossed over the surgeon’s nose and mouth. Dark eyes stared down at me, and a hood hid the person’s features.

During my first leeching session, they’d told me the masks and hoods were to prevent retaliation. I’d said, “You think you’re going to piss me off enough that I’ll try to find and kill whoever leeched me?”

It wasn’t a misguided thought, even though I’d sounded incredulous.

The acolyte had spoken for the doctor, saying, “You drained the silvermoor, didn’t you? What’s stopping you from doing the same to one of our esteemed scientists?”

It was a fair point. I was untrustworthy in the eyes of the academy at this point. It led me down dark thoughts—wondering if the academy would rid themselves of me once they’d stolen what they wanted from me.

They may not attack Ravinica . . . but what was stopping them from killing me once they had as much of my blood as they wanted?This isn’t a sustainable thing. How much longer must I come here?

Being a test subject for heartless surgeons and shamans was terrible. I was finally seeing what it felt like to interact with heartless people . . . like me. People who showed no emotion, no care for my wellbeing.

After the acolyte injected me with plasma, she said, “We begin.”

“When will it end?” I croaked, feeling weak as I stared up at the bright ceiling.

Again, the acolyte standing behind the surgeon spoke for him. I had never heard the voice of the man draining my blood—another measure to prevent potential retaliation, I assumed. If I didn’t know what the madman working on me looked or sounded like, how could I ever find him?

“When we have what we want,” the acolyte said simply. “We’ve already told you that, initiate. The blood goes bad after testing it. So we need more.”

“Then I hope you find what you’re looking for soon, dammit,” I grunted out, and then grimaced when another needle stuck deep into my left arm. “This is untenable.”

This was not a simple blood draw at the doctor’s office. It was painful. Whatever they were doing was abnormal. I left these sessions disoriented and weak. My stomach soured easily. I couldn’t hold food down. I had random hot flashes throughout the day. My mind wandered in ways it never had before, as if my body was fighting an infection of my soul.

I worried they were injecting me with something changing my physiology or genetic structure. Odin only knew what they were doing, since they made it impossible for me to look over and see.

Leather clamps whirred and encircled my wrists to bind me in place. At the base of the chair, my ankles were bound until I was firmly immobile, imprisoned in the leeching chair.

When the blood-sucking began, I growled. The growl turned into a grunt. I shut my mind off to the intensity of the sucking sound coming from their machine—the vacuuming of my life-force.

It went on for what felt like hours, though I suspected it was mere minutes until they had their vials full of my precious essence.

I breathed heavily, panting, and opened my clenched eyes. The pain let up. A wave of dizziness washed over me, dulling my senses as they finished their session and filled me with something that would numb my mind until I was out of Fort Woden.

The silent surgeon was already gone, like a serpent slunk underneath the dreary black waves of the ocean. I could hear the clanking of glass vials in his hands, receding down a hallway, before I was alone with the acolyte.

She raised the chair, unclamped my wrists and ankles. I stood on unsteady legs, putting a shaky hand to my forehead, feeling a layer of sweat.

She walked me out of the room, into the bright jumble of the testing chamber, where other acolytes roamed and did their business like ominous wraiths.

The hood fell over my head, disorienting me, and I was led back through the halls. I counted my steps, noted the turns, and tried to hold onto the fleeting memory as much as I could.

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