Beautiful Blood

“No, but I’ve adjusted the dose to compensate for your lighter weight. It should be perfectly safe.”

As he said those words, he realized how irresponsible it was not to do some further testing, and he reached again for the syringe; but she blocked him with her knee and jammed the needle home, thumbing down the plunger.

“Let’s see,” she said, and appeared on the verge of saying more, but the blood overpowered her and all that emerged from her throat was the shadow of a sound, the faintest of gasps.

He had thought she would react as had he and that as she recovered she would grow fuddled and amorous; instead she sat up in bed, more alert than he had seen her in months and, dismissing his expressions of concern with a blithe gesture, she strolled about the room, inspecting gilt picture frames, touching the surface of a mirror as though to validate that it was her reflection she saw, caressing the sublime curves of a divan that had been owned by a Byzantine prince, and eventually coming to stand at the center of the carpet, directly between the two hemispheres, posed with her head turned to the side, her high, small breasts and full hips lacquered with gleams, her left hand touching her left shoulder, strangely demure despite her nudity. Whether due to a physical transformation caused by the blood or a perceptual distortion on Rosacher’s part, her body appeared enveloped in a white radiance, and this aura, this glow, spread from her feet across the complex patterns of her imaginary world, a puddle of light making it look as if the bloom of her beauty was the production of a luminous essence that had been imprisoned until now within the threads of the carpet.

Rosacher waited for her to speak, scarcely breathing, half-convinced that when she gave tongue to her thoughts, it would be oracular in nature…but rather than speaking she sprang for the door, grabbed up a gray cloak from a chair and enfolded herself in it, and fled the apartment. Stunned, caught off guard, he hesitated before chasing after her and she disappeared down the stairs—he did not catch sight of her again until twenty-five minutes later when, after searching through the House, questioning the passers-by he encountered in the corridors, he reached the front entrance where she was pointed out to him by a group of young men loitering on the steps. Visible in the strong moonlight, she had ascended to a platform atop the scaffolding braced against Griaule’s side—it still bore tatters of black bunting from Meric Cattanay’s funeral six weeks earlier—and was scrambling toward the joint of the dragon’s shoulder, using vines to haul herself upward, moving with such agility and grace that he was hard put to believe this was the same woman who had been more-or-less bedridden for months. Ignoring the young men’s catcalls, he ran to the base of the scaffolding and clambered up it, but realized that he could not match her pace and slowed his ascent, using a measure of caution in securing his footing. By the time he had climbed to the platform, she had disappeared into the thickets atop Griaule’s back, yet he kept going, fueled by a sense of desperation, plowing through brush and tangles of vines. As he skirted the limits of Hangtown, the lights of Martita’s fractioned by leaves and branches, he wondered what she could have in mind. Was she driven by delirium? She hadn’t seemed delirious, but rather focused and serene…but she may have gone mad after fleeing their bedchamber. And what was that glow emanating from her body? She hadn’t looked to be glowing any longer, so perhaps it had been a flaw in his vision, some mental defect brought on by stress. Be that as it may, her reaction to the blood had been completely different from his, that much was certain, and he feared for her.