I had seven days to turn myself from a nuisance into an asset. Seven days to patch holes in plans, assemble whatever scraps of power I'd scavenged, and make sure the hunters didn't regret inviting me along.
First rule of expedition prep: don't be weighed down by things you don't need. Food? Optional — nightmare-meat is surprisingly versatile and, honestly, tastes the same as everything else once you're used to chewing on sinew and regret. Water? I don't die of thirst if I have blood. So I packed light: a week's worth of actual rations (because the universe loves irony), a month of blood in a compact storage memory (the "gift" I'd swindled from Kai — bargaining, he called it), my crossbows, the new blood-arm framework I'd been teaching myself to summon, a handful of condensed-blood arrows, and a few tricks I wasn't ready to show off just yet.
Training was the boring half. I practiced condensing blood into denser shapes — cones, blades, a fragile little dart gun that looked cooler than it worked. I pushed myself to stretch the sin-of-envy sight: not full-time — that drained too much blood and turned my cheeks the color of an overcooked steak — but bursts. Envy-360, I started calling it quietly to myself. The ability to see the innerworkings of anyone within a sphere around me: the rhythm of their heart, where their tendons tensed, how long it would take a wound to kill them. It cost. It sucked. But the alternative was dying because I hadn't noticed the knife at your ribs. Worth it.
I told Effie and Sara I was joining. They were surprisingly nonchalant about my involvement — mockery and danger are the closest things to a love language out here.
"So we're sharing a quiet, uneventful trip, right?" Sara deadpanned, eyebrow cocked.
"Yep. Quiet," I said, smiling fiercely. "Except if I have to sacrifice someone, you'll be the first." Everyone laughed. Laughter lightened the weight of the upcoming march.
Meeting with the hunters and the priest… didn't. Anderson arrived like he always did: like a sermon you didn't want but had to sit through. He stared at me as if I were a stain on creation and then drew his blades in the way old men draw breath when they're about to lecture. White flames curled along the edges — holy light, righteous anger, the whole seven-course sermon.
"Why is a bloody heathen joining our crusade?" he asked, like I'd interrupted a hymn.
"Oh, learned new tricks, eh, bloodsucker?" someone sniped.
I summoned my crossbows with a casual spark and flexed the synthetic arm-bone I'd shaped with blood during training. "Yeah. Hopefully none of your new tricks involved little Timmy."
The room tensed enough to bruise. Anderson's jaw tightened. Sara and Effie, merciful saints of common sense, physically held both of us back. "Stop," Sara said, voice cold as bell-metal. "We need every blade that can hold a hilt. Kill each other when we're done."
Fine. For now.
We marched east from the castle, a rag-tag cohort: hunters in mismatched armor, pathfinders with crude maps, Anderson with a prayer on his breath, and me — the butcher of the dark city — trailing like an unwanted omen. The outskirts swallowed us, low roofs and rotting market stalls sliding past. The sky dimmed to bruised purple; night would come fast and close in this place.
The first wave hit before dusk fully dropped.
They came from shadowed alleys and broken courtyards — gaunt things with too many teeth and the wrong number of joints. We split into wedges. Anderson planted his feet like a cliff and began a metronome of strike and retreat with those white-flame blades: they cut light, not just flesh. His style was surgical, righteous, efficient. Me? I was chaos with a clever hinge.
Fight one: three skittering stabs from a thing that smelled like old iron. A hunter went down, throat opened like an apology. I saw it in the sin-of-envy — the artery that would bleed fastest. I reached out, feeling the enemy's blood as if it were a reluctant instrument beneath my palm. I didn't have time to manipulate its blood inside its body (still needs exposure), so I bled the corpse I'd just downed, condensed the outward blood into five brittle darts, and slotted them into my crossbow like ammunition. I fired in a staccato — one exploded against a creature's head, showering the next with viscera and buying us space.
Anderson pivoted through the gap I'd made, white fire making bright wrecks of the rushing cluster. He pivoted and shoved two more forward into the breach I'd carved. Between his method and my madness, the first fight ended with a heap of twitching bodies and a silence that tasted like metal.
Then the real show began.
We walked into a courtyard where four of the things had coordinated — not random animal ferocity but tactical lunges. I felt the blood within them: pulsing, organized, almost as if a single mind steered those heartbeats. Envy-360 pinged — a map of organs, of intent, of which limbs would strike next. I used it for a blazing moment and paid for it with a hot throb behind my eyes, but the information was priceless.
I started firing layered shots: crossbow rounds that unspooled into explosive darts at the moment of contact, blood-arrows that I'd coated in condensed shards of my own blood for extra density. One creature's chest exploded inward; the second staggered, blinded. Anderson moved like a fury, the white-flame swords carving arcs that cleaved bone as if it were fog. At a point when a screaming thing leapt for Effie, I launched myself through the air, my blood-arm lashing out like a rope and snagging the monster's jaw. I pulled, using my condensed-blood spear to slice its neck cleanly while Anderson hammered low, his blades making the ground steam where they touched.
We were working in a rhythm — his holy flame and my blood instruments — until an elder thing, larger and denser than the rest, lumbered up behind a toppled statue and reared. Its skin had the sheen of hardened blood; attacks bounced like pebbles. I shoved my hand into a puddle of pooled blood and focused an ugly, greedy thought. The pool obeyed; I shaped it into a whip that dug at the beast's leg. It barely flinched. It was like trying to stir a mountain.
Anderson grunted. He was breathing hard. I was bleeding, not from mortal wounds but from the drain of Envy-360 and the cost of condensing enough blood to feed my weapons. The beast swung — a blow that would have cleaved most of us in half — and Anderson blocked, the white flames singing against the hardened blood like knives against iron. Sparks rained.
We needed a finish. The elder creature's blood control was not mine to command. Whatever made it whole also made it reject my touch. I had to be cleverer than brute force.
I barked a plan mid-swing. "Anderson — hit its eyes! Blinds first!"
He grinned like a man who loved a clean ordinance. "On your mark!"
I took a breath and did something ugly and beautiful. I ripped a line of blood from my wrist — small, painful, precise — and with the last of my condensed shards, I fashioned a tiny, whistling dart. It was hollow, packed with condensed air and blood, fragile as a promise. I fired at the creature's mouth at the exact second Anderson's blades found their mark in its eyes. The dart slipped into the opening, burst, and the internal pressure I'd engineered flared. The beast's own hardened blood rebelled against the sudden change. It convulsed, then cracked, then gave way in a spray of dark liquid and bone.
Silence fell. The moon leaned harder over the courtyard. I dropped to my knees, taste of iron in my mouth and a thrill of exhaustion down my spine. Anderson sat back on his heels, breathing hard, white flame guttering like a calm storm.
"Not bad," he said, with the smallest smirk I'd ever seen from him. "You fight… differently."
"Different's the job description," I answered, wiping blood from my mouth with the back of my hand.
We gathered what we needed — a handful of soul shards from the dead, a few pieces of useful leather, and the sort of story that would keep the hunters' children awake. Night had officially fallen when we found a house that was intact enough for a camp: low walls, a solid door, windows that weren't completely blown out.
We piled in: Anderson, the hunters, Sara and Effie, me and beast curled outside like a weird guard dog. We boarded up the windows and doors — heavy timbers, chains, the kind of stubborn carpentry that said we meant to stay put — until no light escaped and the house inside felt like the belly of something protective. Someone muttered a prayer. Someone else laughed at the irony of the priest and the butcher sleeping under the same roof.
I sat near the hearth, bleeding into a small rag to stave off the urge to pass out from the strain, and watched the faces around me in the dim. Anderson cleaned his blades and hummed under his breath; Sara and Effie whispered plans and gossip; the hunters fussed. Outside, beast's gentle breathing was a steady metronome.
There's a funny thing about campfires and dark places: when every window is nailed shut, the world contracts until only what matters fits in the circle of your light. Tonight, it was blood, blades, and promises half-kept. Tomorrow, the outskirts would throw new horrors at us. For now, the silence was ours — taut, temporary, and somehow, for the first time in a long time, almost like peace.