Page 10 of Blood Currents
Mari?
Hope and terror twisted together like the dark veins under skin.What if she searched for me?What if she didn’t?Which would hurt worse?
I pressed my ear to the door.Voices, distant and muffled.Her name—or wishful thinking.Or planted memory.Uncle’s thorough work, weaving truth and lies until the seams disappeared.
“Your parents would be so disappointed, Keane.”
His voice.Or the echo of his voice.Or the fear of his voice.The distinctions mattered less each day.
Stomach cramping.Hunger—one of the few things that stayed real.When did food last pass these lips?Yesterday?Three days?Time moved wrong in isolation.Sun crossing in minutes.Darkness lasting weeks.
Kitchen memories.Sneaking down at night.Stealing bread.Terror of making noise.But also—memory of flying.Portal mages couldn’t fly.
Could they?
Focus.Count tiles.
One, two, three… Vision blurred by twenty.The corruption didn’t like anchors.Preferred its victims floating, untethered, unable to separate Uncle’s truth from reality’s truth.
Another flicker.Definitely blue this time.Wisp’s color.But Wisp left.Wisp couldn’t bear what Uncle had done, what the corruption had made of clean portal magic.
Unless…
Unless Wisp fought to return.Through the taint.Through the wrongness.
Paranoid delusions are symptoms, boy.
Uncle’s therapeutic voice.Medicine that made magic scream.Treatments that rewrote memories.Help that felt like drowning in oil.
Portal magic stirred.Agony lanced through my skull—not clean pain but diseased.Wrong.Portals flickered, showing lies.Parents alive.Academy burning.Mari saying she loved—Mari saying she wished—
Which?Both?Neither?
Blue light again.Stronger.Wisp pressing against the corruption like pressing against glass.Trying to show something.Images through spectral windows—fragments of truth maybe.Maybe.
Would Uncle think to look here?Bloodline wards protected the suite, but Uncle was patient.Clever.Years spent working corruption into magic, into mind.What else had he planned?
“The wards recognize blood, not intent.”
Darkness fell.Or had it always been dark?Time meant nothing.Only breathing too loudly, too harshly.Like someone else’s breathing.Like a monster’s breathing.
The hunger won.Always won eventually.
Door opened silently.Hallway empty.The light hurt—brightness against corrupted sight.Each step calculated.The suites might be warded, but the common kitchen?Neutral ground.
Kitchen dark.Safe.Bread and cheese and fruit stuffed into pockets.Water that tasted like copper.Or blood.Or fear.
Movement above.Footsteps.Someone searching?Someone reporting?
Stairs seemed longer going up.Sweat smelled wrong.Tainted.Like the magic.Like everything Uncle touched.
Back in the suite.Food like ash in the mouth.Had to eat.Body needed fuel even if mind was breaking.
Wisp’s light flickered stronger now.Fighting through the corruption to show—what?More fragments.Mari with Cyrus and Elio.Their magic harmonizing.Natural flow, the way Mother had taught before—
Before Uncle’s lessons began.
The corruption pulsed, pleased with confusion.Each day slipped further from solid ground.Traitor who opened portals?Victim of Uncle’s ambition?Both?Neither?
