Chapter 129: Blood Blade

White light spilled from Rook’s eyes and washed across the cave walls, though he could see none of it. The stone beneath him had become a narrow examination table. Straps pressed across his legs, something held his chest in place, and a machine worked beside him, drawing blood through a tube that disappeared beyond the edge of his vision.

He knew this room, although he remembered too many versions of it to separate them cleanly. Sometimes he woke with a mask forcing air into his lungs. Sometimes his chest hurt so badly that he could barely hear the doctors over his own breathing. Other times, he opened his eyes and found nobody there at all, only the machine continuing whatever it had been built to do.

Every Reaper he had spoken to about awakening had described the light. They had described the pain as well, the return to the moment of death with everything they had spent years forgetting suddenly clear enough to feel again. Rook had never known which death he was supposed to return to.

The machine had stopped his heart and started it again. It had taken blood, forced other fluids into him, and continued working after he lost consciousness. There had been times when he could not breathe and times when his chest simply went still.

Perhaps the thing inside him had killed him as well. There were gaps he still could not separate from the drugs or the long periods of darkness. He had died on that table, inside the machine, because of the machine, and something had brought him back again and again.

One memory held him now. Blood moved through the tube beside his arm, and he remembered watching the dark line while trying to understand why he felt so cold. His hands had gone pale. His fingers would no longer close properly, and lifting his head had become more effort than he could manage.

There might have been a fault in the machine, or someone might have set it incorrectly. He had never known. He only remembered the blood continuing to leave him while his body weakened until even fear became difficult to hold.

The room blurred. His heart struggled, paused, and failed to beat again. For a brief moment, he was gone.

Then the machine changed its rhythm. Something cold entered his veins, and pressure built inside his chest before a painful jerk dragged him back into the room. Air returned to lungs that had stopped asking for it. His eyes opened to the same white ceiling while the machine kept running.

He had spent so long treating that darkness as another period of unconsciousness. Now he recognized it. He had felt the same emptiness in the cave, with Gascoigne’s shot inside him and remembered blood spreading over the floor. His body had been approaching a death it already knew, and that was the one it had answered.

Rook sat upright with a violent breath. The cave returned around him, bringing blue light, cold stone, and the sight of his scythe beside his leg. Little pieces of metal lay scattered across the floor.

“Fuck.”

He looked at his hands and turned them slowly beneath the lantern light. Nothing remained around his fingers, but he remembered what had formed there before the memory took hold.

“No. Not this one.”

Rook pushed the dressing away from his chest. The wounds had closed completely, leaving smooth skin beneath his torn coat. He pressed two fingers against the place where a pellet had been lodged and found nothing beneath it.

“Anything else. Any other fucking Imprint.”

He turned his head toward his coffin, it was laying next to him where he had left it. He grabbed one of its chains and pulled it beside him scraping it on the ground. His leg supported his weight, and the old injury in his shoulder no longer pulled when he moved.

Rook sat back against the stone, tipped his head upward, and let out a long breath. Another followed while he tried to settle himself. The relief should have been enough to occupy him. Only moments earlier he had been dying, and now he could stand, breathe, and go after Mara.

Instead, he kept looking at his fingers. There had been claws around them, curved points made from his own blood, and he knew those claws.

“Fucking hell don’t be the same damn same thing.”

He picked up the one-handed scythe and made a small cut across the tip of one finger. Blood gathered immediately, forming a dark bead that he held beneath the lantern light.

The bead shifted before he had properly finished thinking about what he wanted. It drew forward, narrowed, and flattened into a small blade extending beyond his fingertip. Rook turned his hand slowly, watching the little scalpel hold its shape.

He looked around the cave for something to test it against, then lowered his eyes to the coffin beside him. One corner was already damaged enough that another small cut would hardly matter.

“Sorry.”

He touched the blade to the wood and drew it a short distance through the corner. There was almost no resistance. A thin piece lifted away, leaving a clean cut beneath it, and Rook stopped before removing more than he intended.

The little scalpel had cut better than most of the weapons inside the coffin. He stared at the mark for several seconds before closing his eyes.

“Same damn thing. Fuck.”

The blade softened as soon as he called it back. Blood slipped across his fingertip and entered the small cut, whose edges closed behind it. Rook rubbed the healed skin with his thumb, finding neither a wound nor any hardened blood left on the surface.

He looked at the scythe again. One more test would tell him whether the resemblance went beyond shaping blood around his fingers.

Rook opened a shallow cut across his palm, then took the handle in that hand. Blood pressed out against the wood and gathered between his fingers. After a moment, a thin red line began climbing the shaft until it reached the blade and spread.

The coating followed the iron curve, thickening along the cutting edge. Its point extended farther than the metal beneath it. Rook turned his wrist and watched the blood remain in place despite the movement, then stood to face a jutting section of the cave wall.

The first stroke passed through the stone. He stopped with the scythe extended beside him and looked at the narrow cut running across the rock. He had felt the blade enter, but none of the hard jolt he expected from striking stone.

He cut again, then a third time. A small wedge broke free and struck the floor beside his boot, leaving Rook staring at it.

“Shit.”

He lowered the weapon and examined the red edge. No chips or cracks marked its length, and the coating had not shifted away from the iron beneath it.

For three hundred years, he had dragged a coffin full of weapons across the Underworld. He had sharpened, repaired, and replaced them, breaking blades against things whose flesh refused to give way before finding some other way to keep fighting. Now a little of his own blood had turned one of those weapons into something that could cut through a cave wall.

He should have been delighted. Instead, he drew the blood back and watched it leave the iron, travel down the handle, and disappear into his palm. The cut closed behind it.

His scythe looked exactly as it had before. The metal was worn, and its edge would have suffered badly if he had attempted those same blows without the coating. Rook opened the coffin, placed the weapon inside, and sat down beside it.

He rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands. When he finally lowered them, the same face remained clear in his mind.

“She’s going to be annoying. So fucking annoying.”

The face belonged to a woman with a gentle voice and more patience than he had ever possessed. He could already picture the way she would smile when she found out. The questions would begin immediately, followed by requests that somehow never felt possible to refuse.

The Eleventh Bastion’s Manager was the strongest Reaper he knew. No other Manager he had met had given him any reason to reconsider that opinion. She was kind, soft-spoken, and usually willing to let people finish before explaining precisely why they were wrong.

Rook had seen her calm frightened souls with a few quiet words. He had watched her treat badly wounded Reapers with a care that seemed almost out of place in the Underworld. He had also seen what happened when she found someone with the same Death Imprint as hers.

Blood. Those people received her full attention, and Rook had never particularly wanted to join them.

He looked at his unmarked palm, then at the piece of stone he had cut from the wall. Of all the ways he had died, his body had chosen this one. He leaned his head back against the rock and closed his hand.

“She is never finding out about this.”

Finally Rook has awakened his imprint… what do you think the implication of such an ability would hold?