Page 25

Del nodded. “I know.”

“They can’t know what you contributed.”

“I know that too.”

They didn’t discuss what would happen if Gabriel found out. They didn’t need to. The alpha’s scars were hellforged and would never heal. His first mate and his children were buried on the eastern ridge. He had stepped down once and come back harder. The math was simple.

Marcus reached for the sealed jar of blood. He uncorked it and set it on the table between them. The smell hit Del first: metallic, wrong, the sweet chemical note she had scrubbed from her hands for two years. Up close, it was worse, rich and thick, something that didn’t belong in any creature’s veins.

“First test,” Marcus said. “Recreate the base compound. Valerian and oak gall. Seven to three.”

Del measured the valerian root from a jar on his shelf. The powder was pale, almost gray in the lamplight. She tipped it into the mortar. Three grams of oak gall followed, dark and fine. The two powders settled against each other, separate then mixed as she worked the pestle in slow circles. The stone made a low grinding sound. Her wrist remembered the ache from two years of nights.

Marcus watched. His arms were crossed. He didn’t offer to help.

“The iron next,” he said.

She measured four grams of iron filings from a tin he produced from beneath the bench. The filings caught the light, minute and gleaming. She folded them into the mixed powder with a wooden spatula. The metal darkened the mixture. The smell changed: sharpened, tightened, the wrong sweetness intensifying.

“Birch bark.”

She weighed out one and three-quarter grams of scraped inner bark, paper-thin and pale brown. It dissolved into the mixture almost on contact, the fibers breaking down under the pestle. The color lightened. The smell shifted again.

“Binding agent.”

Del paused. “I don’t have Chen’s formulation.”

“Use mine.” Marcus reached for a bottle on the reagent shelf. The label read Witch Hazel / AgNO3 2%. He measured two milliliters into a glass dropper and handed it to her.

She added it drop by drop to the mortar. The liquid hit the powder and the mixture hissed. A faint steam rose, carrying that sweet wrongness full force. Del’s sinuses burned. She worked the pestle faster. The mixture thickened, turned amber, then settled into a paste the color of old honey.

Marcus took a fresh slide from the box beside the microscope. He scooped a bead of the paste onto the glass with a metal spatula. From the sealed jar, he drew a drop of the sick shifter’s blood and placed it beside the paste bead. He mixed them with the edge of the spatula.

The combined sample turned a deep burgundy, almost black at the edges.

He placed the slide under the microscope and adjusted the focus. Del stood beside him. The eyepiece was hidden from where she stood. She watched his face instead.

Marcus went still. His breathing stopped. His hand on the focus knob tightened until the knuckles showed white.

“What do you see?” Del asked.

He didn’t answer. He adjusted the focus again, slower this time. His jaw worked once. Then he straightened and stepped back from the scope.

“Look,” he said.

Del bent to the eyepiece. The field was magnified two hundred times. The cells swam into view: human cells on one side, intact, membranes whole, nuclei dark and centered. Shifter cells on the other, their membranes thinning, coming apart in sections as if something was dissolving them from the inside. The border between the two was perfect, knife-sharp, with no transition and no ambiguity.

And the paste (their recreated compound) sat in the center of the field like a wound. The cells nearest it were already degrading. The membranes puckered. The hemoglobin leached into the plasma in thin, dark threads.

She straightened. The clinic tilted. She put her hand on the worktable to steady herself. “That’s it. That’s what I made.”

Marcus capped the blood jar. He set it back in the cold storage and closed the lid. His movements were methodical, unhurried. He’d already suspected this.

“We need the counteragent,” he said.

“I don’t have one.”

“Then we find one.” He reached for the logbook again. His pen was already in his hand. “Every component has an antagonist. Valerian responds to lemon balm. Oak gall to white vinegar. Iron to...”