The Golden Blood Husband

CHAPTER ONE: THE HEART THEY ORDERED

The first thing Lorcan Harlow felt was cold steel under his back. The second was that he could not move.

He tried to lift his hand, then turn his head, then swallow, and his body ignored every command. Only his eyes obeyed. They opened to the white glare of surgical lamps and the sharp smell of antiseptic, while somewhere beside him a heart monitor beeped slowly, keeping time for a heart he could no longer feel.

"His eyes are open," a man said, sounding more irritated than alarmed.

"Does it matter?" The second voice was smooth and cool, the same voice that had corrected his table manners every morning for three years. "You said the drug stops everything."

"Everything except the eyes, Mrs. Ashcombe. The anesthetic will take soon."

Gloria Ashcombe leaned into view, still wearing the pearls she had worn at dinner. She had poured his wine herself tonight, smiling at him for the first time since his wedding. Then the dining room had blurred and gone dark.

Beyond her, the room sharpened into tiled walls and a tray of gleaming instruments. In three years of cleaning the Ashcombe mansion, Lorcan had never seen this room. It had to be somewhere beneath the house.

"How long?" Gloria asked.

Dr. Werner Voss, a thin man with gold-rimmed glasses, adjusted his mask. "Ninety minutes. Your son will have his new heart before sunrise."

"Good." Gloria looked down at Lorcan the way she looked at a stain on her carpet. "Do you know how rare he is, Doctor? Fewer than fifty people alive have blood like his. Rh-null. Golden blood. And the only heart in the world that matches my Crispin has been sleeping down the hall from him."

"Your son is fortunate."

"Fortunate?" Her voice hardened. "I paid for this. Three years ago I let a penniless orphan put his name beside my daughter's, because my son needed a living blood supply. Crispin calls him the Blood Bag, and Crispin is right." She straightened her pearls. "Tonight, we collect."

Lorcan could only lie there and listen. The anger rose slowly, like cold water filling a sinking room.

"And the body?" Voss asked.

"His car goes off the river road at three in the morning, with an empty whiskey bottle on the seat. No one will be surprised. Everyone already thinks he's useless."

"I still need next of kin on the consent form."

Gloria lifted a sheet of paper from the tray. At the bottom, in elegant blue ink, was Annika Ashcombe's signature. Lorcan had watched his wife sign that name on their marriage certificate three years ago, without once looking at him.

"Annika is on a flight to Geneva," Gloria said. "She'll land to a phone call telling her she's a widow, and she'll cry for an afternoon, if that. She'll never know her name was on this."

Voss picked up a scalpel. The cold tip touched the center of Lorcan's chest and drew a line, and pain flared bright as warm blood slid down his ribs.

His right index finger twitched, and neither of them noticed. A hot, crawling burn spread through his arms like a thousand needles. When he was a boy, men in white coats had filled his veins with things far worse than this until his body learned to fight back. He had hated what they made him. Tonight it would keep him alive.

The burn reached his shoulders. His fingers curled, and his lungs dragged in a full breath.

Voss lifted the scalpel for the second cut, and Lorcan sat up.

He caught the doctor's wrist and twisted, and the blade was suddenly in his own hand. Two steps carried them across the room, the IV tearing from his arm, and he slammed Voss against the tiled wall with the scalpel pressed under his jaw. Behind them, the heart monitor wailed into a flat line.

Gloria spun around, knocking a tray to the floor. The man in front of her had her son-in-law's face, the same lean features and overgrown dark hair. But the eyes were wrong. For three years they had stayed lowered at her table. Now they were flat and cold, and they belonged to a stranger.

"Lorcan," she whispered, as if his name might put him back in his place.

He didn't look at her. "One question," he said to Voss, his voice perfectly calm. "Who sold you my name?"

"I don't know what you mean," Voss stammered.

The blade pressed in, and a bead of red appeared on his neck.

"The Circle," Voss whispered. "It was the Circle."

Lorcan let the word settle. Three years of sitting quietly while needles drained his blood into bags labeled with Crispin's name, while the whole city laughed that the Ashcombes had married their daughter to a beggar. He had swallowed every insult and lowered his eyes every time, and none of it had ever been weakness. He had walked into this house knowing exactly what it was, and he had waited for that word.

"Your phone," he said.

Voss fumbled it out of his coat. Lorcan pressed the doctor's thumb to the screen and opened the most recent thread. The messages read like a shipping order. Gloria had crept closer, and as she read over his shoulder, her hand rose to her pearls.

"Kidneys," she said faintly. "Corneas. Blood, full volume." She turned to Voss. "Sold? You told me the heart was for Crispin. Only the heart."

Voss didn't answer. Gloria had believed she was buying her son a heart, and she had just learned she was one small customer in a much larger market.

The phone vibrated in Lorcan's hand, and a photograph opened. A young woman lay in a narrow hospital bed in a pale blue gown, an IV taped to her arm. On the side of her neck was an old burn scar shaped like a crescent moon.

Beneath it was a single line. Backup donor ready. If the first harvest fails, she goes on the table.

The room fell away, and Lorcan was fourteen again, choking on smoke as his little sister's hand slipped out of his. A burning beam crashed down between them. He remembered her screaming his name, and the wall of flame that swallowed her, and the night he stopped believing anything lost could ever come back.

Esme. She was alive, and she was lying in a bed somewhere, waiting to be cut open in his place.

If he walked out of this room tonight and Voss failed to deliver, the Circle would simply take the second donor. If he ran, Esme died.

Slowly, Lorcan lowered the blade. He turned Voss's trembling hand palm up, placed the bloody scalpel in it, and closed the doctor's fingers around the handle one by one.

Then he walked back to the steel table and lay down.

Gloria made a small, broken sound. Voss stared at the scalpel as if it might bite him.

Lorcan folded his hands over his bleeding chest and looked up into the lamps. "As far as they know, Doctor," he said, "you're still cutting me open."