The Golden Blood Husband

CHAPTER FIVE: THE SIXTH BED

The Ashcombe mansion slept with its lights dimmed and its cameras sweeping the lawns in slow, predictable arcs. Lorcan had memorized those arcs during his first month in the house. He slipped out through the laundry door in a black coat, a dark mask pulled over the lower half of his face, and crossed the garden in the forty seconds when no lens was looking his way.

He called Nadia from the street. "Who can you get me?"

"Nobody fast enough." Her frustration crackled down the line. "My team is still on a plane. Compass's local crew answers to the Port Selwyn boss, and he went silent on me three months ago. I don't know whose side those men are on anymore."

"Then I go alone."

"Lorcan, wait two hours. Just two."

"Esme doesn't have two hours," he said, and ended the call.

He flagged a night cab three streets away and paid cash. Twenty minutes later, he was crouched behind a hedge across from St. Oriel's, a converted Victorian hospital behind tall iron railings in the north district. Rain hammered the slate roof. Two unmarked white vans had backed up to the loading dock, and men in gray scrubs were carrying out crates, medical coolers, and folded IV stands as fast as they could move. They were not working like staff on a night shift. They were working like people who had been told to disappear.

Two guards in rain ponchos stood at the side gate, smoking under the overhang. Lorcan came out of the dark between one heartbeat and the next. The first man turned just as Lorcan's forearm struck his throat, and he folded without a sound. The second grabbed for the radio on his shoulder, but Lorcan caught his wrist, twisted it down, and drove an elbow into his jaw. Both guards were on the wet ground before either hand reached a radio. Lorcan dragged them behind a dumpster and went inside.

The service corridor smelled of bleach and old radiators. Nadia had sent him the building's plans, and the hidden ward appeared nowhere on them, but one detail had caught her eye. A linen closet at the end of the east corridor drew more electricity than the entire kitchen. Lorcan found it, pulled the shelves of folded sheets toward him, and felt the whole unit swing outward on silent hinges. Behind it, a narrow concrete stairwell descended into the dark.

The smell hit him halfway down. Antiseptic, cold metal, and something underneath it, faint and coppery. He had not smelled that exact combination in fourteen years, and his stomach tightened as if he were nine years old again.

The ward was a long, low room under humming fluorescent lights. Six beds stood in a row against the wall. Five had been stripped to their bare mattresses, the sheets and IV poles already gone. In the sixth lay a boy.

He couldn't have been older than twelve. He was so pale that the veins in his thin arms looked painted on, and his hair was damp with sweat against the pillow. An IV line ran from the crook of his elbow to a bag hanging below the bed, and the bag was slowly filling with dark red blood. It was stamped with a small golden seal.

Lorcan crossed the room in three strides and clamped the line shut with his fingers, then tied it off. A clipboard hung at the foot of the bed. Donor Six. Arlo. Rh-null. Below the name ran a column of dates, one draw every week, going back two years.

Golden blood, like his. Two years of needles, and the boy weighed almost nothing.

Arlo's eyelids fluttered open. He stared at the masked stranger with the dull, frightened patience of a child who had stopped expecting rescue. "Are you taking me somewhere?" he whispered.

"Somewhere better," Lorcan said quietly. "Can you hold on a little longer?"

The boy gave the smallest nod.

Lorcan turned to the empty beds, looking for anything they had left behind, and stopped at the fourth.

Above it, scratched into the plaster at the height of a person lying down, was a tiny compass, four crooked points around a circle, made with something sharp. Beneath it was a single letter. L.

For a moment he couldn't breathe. He reached out and touched the lines with his fingertips, the same shape he had seen on a cell wall when he was a boy, the shape he had carried across forty ports. Then he pressed his palm flat against the bare mattress beneath it.

It was still warm.

Esme had been here tonight. She had lain in this bed, under these lights, and scratched his initial into the wall in case he ever came looking. He had missed her by minutes. The thought went through him like a blade, and he had to lock his jaw to keep from making a sound.

Footsteps echoed in the stairwell.

Lorcan turned as a woman stepped into the ward, followed by four orderlies with pistols drawn. She was in her sixties, gray-haired and straight-backed, wearing a starched white coat buttoned to the throat. Her face was thin and composed, the face of someone used to being obeyed the first time.

The cold that went through Lorcan was older and deeper than anything he had felt on the steel table. Her hair had been brown fourteen years ago, but everything else was the same. The same posture. The same thin mouth. The same quiet voice that used to call the children by numbers instead of names.

The Matron. She had run the Nursery. And on the night it burned, Lorcan had heard her lock the doors from the outside.

She studied the masked man without a flicker of recognition. Her gaze moved from his mask, to the clamped IV line, to the bed under the scratched compass, and she sighed as if he were a mild inconvenience.

"So the rumors are true," she said. "Someone has been asking questions."

Before Lorcan could move, she stepped to Arlo's bed and drew a syringe from her coat pocket. It was empty, the plunger pulled all the way back, and she pressed the needle against the side of the boy's neck with the steady hand of a woman who had done far worse.

"Air in the vein," she said calmly. "Ten seconds and his heart stops. Take off the mask and get down on the floor."

The orderlies spread out, their pistols trained on Lorcan's chest. Arlo didn't scream. He lay perfectly still, the way children learn to lie still in places like this, and his terrified eyes found Lorcan across the room.

Lorcan didn't have a gun. All he had was the scalpel he had taken from Voss's tray after the stitches were finished, sitting cold in his coat pocket, its edge still carrying a trace of his own blood.