“Well,” Tenebres huffed, his voice as exhausted as the rest of him, “that was certainly something.”

Even with the help of the restoration potion he had taken, Tenebres felt weak, unable to even stand. He had leaned on his Blood Magic more thoroughly than ever before to defeat Sloan, and it had proven to be more draining than even his sequential invocations. For the moment, he decided it was easier to just stay where he was, kneeling on the floor.

Or at least, that was his plan, prior to promptly being bowled over by Allana. The taller girl’s sinuous muscles pressed him to the floor gently as her mouth found his in a heated and unexpected kiss. The pain blazing down his arms and chest didn’t compare to the fire her mouth ignited in him, and Tenebres found himself returning the kiss, his lips parting eagerly to admit her tongue.

The fight, the fear, the danger, the horrifying cellar they were in, the rune-shaped scars stinging his flesh, all was forgotten as the two hungrily kissed, as if trying to reassure themselves the other was okay after the fight. For once, neither of them let their anxieties and fears and hurts show, and instead they simply melted into each other’s embrace.

For a moment.

Until Geoffrey cleared his throat, loudly, and Allana suddenly pulled away, leaving Tenebres all but gasping for air.

“Not that I’m not charmed by this display,” the assassin said, “but we should probably get him to a healer before he bleeds out.”

Allana flushed, her already purple skin turning a bright magenta, and she shot a guilty look down at Tenebres.

He responded with a shaky smile, but he couldn’t keep the surprise out of his eyes. The sudden kiss was just so unlike her! Knowing that Geoffrey’s interruption would make the girl reticent once more, Tenebres just arched an eyebrow in a silent question. What was that?

Allana gave him a tiny shake of her head. Later.

“Here,” Geoffrey offered, kneeling next to Tenebres’s prone form and offering him a small vial. “It’s not the strongest, but you’re going to need more than a potion anyways.”

The older man’s gaze shifted to Allana. “Do you know Alleghy’s?”

“Yes.”

“Good. It’s only a couple blocks away. Get him there. The potion should keep him from losing any ground while you’re moving. Tell Alleghy I sent you.”

Tenebres sipped at the brew, not feeling up to tossing the whole sour, weak potion in one gulp. Thankfully, Allana asked the obvious question while he was occupied.

“What about you?”

“I’m going to stay here for now.”

Geoffrey’s curt tone made it obvious he didn’t want any further questions, but Allana pressed him anyway. “Why? What do you think you’re going to find?”

Geoffrey gave the girl a flat look. “We still don’t know who’s giving out these favors, and Sloan had the gift of bone instead of the gift of flesh I had expected. That means either there’s a second outsider in play, or that the one we’re hunting is stronger than I thought.”

“And what? You think Sloan wrote down their name somewhere?” Allana asked sarcastically.

“You never know what you might find,” Geoffrey’s voice was distant, eyes roaming the viscera-coated cavern for something unseen.

Allana rolled her eyes at the man’s enigmatic words. Tenebres, meanwhile, choked down the last of the potion and cleared his throat, managing to croak out, “Is it a gift?”

Geoffrey sighed. “Yes. A remnant of my misspent youth.” Allana started to ask another question, but the assassin lifted a finger. “No more questions. Go, now, before Tenebres’s wounds open back up.”

Allana made a sour face, but cast a reluctant look down at Tenebres–and, more noticeably, at the blood that had soaked through his leather tunic. The potion had stopped the worst of the bleeding, but otherwise accomplished little more than scabbing up his wounds and taking the worst of the edge off of the pain.

Tenebres nodded at her, silently agreeing with Geoffrey, and the stubborn girl blew out a breath.

“Fine, let’s go.”

#

“So… what was that all about?” Tenebres asked. Even through the pain his blood magic had inflicted on him, he managed to add a little bit of teasing to his words.

Allana had one arm under his, supporting some of his weight as they staggered down the streets.Night had fallen in full while they fought Sloan, and the dockside neighborhoods were largely quiet. With a thick fog already rolling in off the bay, the two fledgling assassins didn’t need to do much more than avoid the more raucous bars to keep from being noticed.

Allana cleared her throat uncomfortably, and Tenebres felt a small smile tugging at his lips. Until he stumbled on a misplaced cobble, at least, and a gasp of pain ripped from his mouth instead.

“Seriously? You want to talk about this right now?”

“I’ll be honest Allana, I’ll take just about any conversation that can distract me at the moment. If you have a better topic, feel free.”

He felt her tense against him as they walked before she finally asked, “So what gift do you think Geoffrey is using down there?”

Tenebres huffed a shallow breath at Allana’s perpetual evasion. Even after the time they had spent together and how close they had gotten, the street born wraith had a hard time expressing her emotions, too used to keeping them to herself or seeing them as a weakness.

Still, he knew that limping down the street while slowly bleeding out in her arms was not the time for that conversation, so he accepted the diversion. “Is it the gift of the assassin?”

Allana shook her head, her hair brushing against his shoulder and coming away tacky with blood. “From what he’s told me, the gift of the assassin is more stealth and damage than anything else, not information gathering.”

“His misspent youth…” Tenebres recalled the assassin’s parting words. “Do you know anything about what he did before he became an assassin?”

“No, he’s never really… wait a second.” Allana stopped and, as he was currently dependent on her strong arms for support, Tenebres did the same. “This is the place.”

The storefront was the same as many others in Emeston. A shoddy wooden building, the first floor had a plain, unadorned door and a large single-pane window showing the wares within, an assortment of herbs and potions of various colors, while the second floor had the smaller, shuttered windows of a private residence. There was no sign on it, but Allana led him to the door confidently. She conjured one of her daggers and used its pommel to pound on the door.

After a minute of the repeated knocking, there was the rasp of a lockbar being moved on the far side of the door, and it swung open just an inch, enough to show a slice of a suspicious face. Tenebres was startled to see that the man’s eyes were wholly black, with neither white nor iris visible.

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“What is it?” the man asked, his voice thick with sleep.

“What do you think it is Alleghy? We need healing!” Allana snapped at him.

The door swung open a little more, enough for Tenebres to see the man’s face in full. He had long features that had begun to droop with age, wrinkles and liver spots standing out on his pale northern skin, and the pair of horns curling out of his forehead spoke as much to his wraith heritage as his eyes. Those same eyes went wide as he saw Tenebres’s state.

The man looked up and down the street quickly, clearly uncertain, before Allana told him, “Geoffrey sent us. He’ll be along shortly.”

Alleghy’s gaze darted back to Allana, and he nodded curtly. “Fine, fine, bring him in, quickly now.”

Tenebres hobbled through the door as quickly as he could–or, more accurately, Allana hauled him across the passageway while he tried not to be dead weight. Alleghy cast another suspicious glance down the street before shutting the door behind and dropping the lockbar back in place. While it looked to be a simple iron bar, Tenebres noted the subtle grooves of runes carved into it, ensuring that it would be far more secure than it appeared.

“I’ll grab my supplies,” the man told them, “take him down the hall, second door on the right, and get him laid out on the ritual table.”

Tenebres stiffened at the words “ritual table,” giving Allana an alarmed look.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him quietly. “Alleghy is a healer.”

“And I’m going to need a real ritual to keep you from bleeding out, so whatever you’re concerned about, get over it.” The gaunt man gave Allana an urgent look. “I’m going for my supplies, get him moving.”

Without waiting for an answer, Alleghy turned and proceeded up a staircase, his steps brisk.

“Great bedside manner,” Tenebres groused. Still, he felt the man was probably right in his assessment. The trip to the healer’s shop had undone most of the work of Geoffrey’s potion, and Tenebres could feel warm, sticky blood dripping down his arms and chest again.

“He’s the best healer in Lowrun’s underground,” Allana explained as she helped him into the room Alleghy had indicated. “He gets to be rude.”

Tenebres winced with each movement, the pain returning in full now, if not even worse. “I may have used a little too much Blood Magic,” he admitted, his voice tight with pain.

“You think? C’mon, up you go,” Allana hoisted Tenebres onto the flat surface in the middle of the room. If he had been in a better headspace, he would’ve been fascinated by the so-called “ritual table,” or at least swooned at the way Allana lifted him like a limp, bloody bag of meal.

A raised rectangle of thick, carefully glazed clay, the table sat in the center of a complex ritual diagram, a magic circle that made Kellen’s void-beckoning efforts look crude and amateurish by comparison. Despite being more than a yard above the floor, the design proceeded flawlessly onto the tabletop itself, such that Tenebres felt sure, if seen from above, that the design would be perfect and uninterrupted.

He was too distracted to think about it for very long, though. Now that he was finally laid out, he could feel his body relaxing of its own accord, and with that relaxation came increasingly free-flowing blood. With every heartbeat, Tenebres’s vision darkened and pain shot through him.

It was impossible to say how long it was before Alleghy arrived, as Tenebres lost all sense of time in the confusion and pain of his blood loss. The older wraith looked very different when he re-entered the room, dressed in clean whites, complete with an apron and mask. His body language was brisk and professional as he inspected Tenebres, lifting the boy’s wrists and peeling away the fingerless gloves concealing his forearms.

“What happened?” Alleghy asked.

Tenebres tried to answer, but the reply came out mush-mouthed and confused. Alleghy quieted him with a harsh look. “Not you. You,” he pointed at Allana.

“He has a gift ability,” Allana explained. “It hurts him when he uses it, and he overused it.”

“Not like any gift ability I’ve ever heard of…” Alleghy mused under his breath, inspecting the scar on Tenebres’s arms. “Fine then, help me get this tunic off of him so I can see what we’re dealing with.”

Allana gave him a sympathetic look as she bent down, and Tenebres felt her fingers curl under the hem of his leather tunic. “This is gonna hurt,” she warned him, “but it’ll be okay soon. You’re safe here, and I’ll stay with you.”

Slowly, she began to peel his tunic up, and Tenebres couldn’t help but be oddly reminded of their first time together, the feel of her fingers on his sensitive skin as she pulled his tight clothing off…

And then her efforts reached one of his mildly scabbed over wounds and stuck. Getting any further forced her to pull against the tacky, half-dried blood, and suddenly Tenebres’s entire world was pain.

#

“He’s awake.”

Tenebres blinked bleary eyes. His vision was cloudy, and only slowly came into focus. He could only just make out the wood beams overhead when Allana’s face suddenly filled his field of view.

“Seo? How are you feeling?”

Tenebres started to answer, and found his mouth unbelievably dry, as if he had just awakened from hours of sleep in a hot room.

“Here, he’ll need water.” Alleghy again.

Allana looked away, and her face backed out of his view for a moment. When she returned, he was more able to make out her features and the worry that creased them. “Can you sit up?”

Tenebres smacked his lips, finding them cracked and dry. He managed a nod instead, and Allana’s strong, capable arms helped him into a sitting position, so that she could pass him a small tin cup of lukewarm water.

As he sipped at the water, Tenebres realized that, besides his confusion and dry mouth, he felt surprisingly good. Even the motion of sitting up hadn’t brought any pain or discomfort with it, just the almost pleasant pain of tired muscles stretching.

With the water in him, Tenebres felt able to talk, and croaked out, “How long have I been out?”

“A little less than an hour,” Allana told him.

Tenebres’s eyebrows knitted together. “Less than… that can’t be right. I feel like I’ve been asleep an entire day.”

“Side effect of the healing,” Alleghy’s gruff voice told him.

Tenebres took another sip of water, and looked around. His gaze found the healer standing over a washbasin against one wall, facing away from them as he scrubbed at something.

“I’ve never heard of healing like that.”

The gaunt wraith put down the tools he was rinsing and turned back to face Tenebres and Allana, resting his hands on the rim of the basin behind him. “And I’ve never heard of an ability that leaves bloody runes up and down your arms when you use it.”

Tenebres flushed a little at the harsh words, and the healer shook his head.

“It’s an Initiate level technique I used,” he explained. “Best for people who have a copious number of wounds like yours. I gave you a healing spell strong enough to get you stable, then used a ritual to strengthen your resilience, layered with a second to accelerate your body’s natural healing. That’s why you feel so tired–effectively, your body spent three days healing in the past hour.”

Tenebres blinked, looking down at himself, naked aside from undergarments. Sure enough, all of the wounds he had accumulated were gone–although, in their place, he now had even more of the scrawled, runic scars Allana had noted on him earlier that day. They now extended not just up his arms, but over his shoulders and down the slender curves of his chest, stopping a few inches above his ribcage.

“The scars resisted healing. I think they’re a byproduct of whatever gift it is that hurt you in the first place.”

Tenebres started to respond, but Allana spoke over him. “They resisted healing? Do we need to be worried about that?”

“Without knowing the gift, I can’t say for sure. But it doesn't seem like it. Scars left behind by certain abilities aren’t unheard of–I’ve seen an augment with the gift of fire that causes burn scars to accrue in a similar way. I will say you need to be careful using that ability, however. Unless you have a resilience boon, which you obviously don’t, those wounds will eventually cripple you if you keep carving yourself open that way. I’d suggest you consider that, should you make it to Initiate without killing yourself.”

Tenebres nodded. A gift with a resilience boon… that was worth keeping in mind.

“Now,” Alleghy gestured at Allana with his chin, “to parrot the young lady’s question, how do you feel?”

“A little disoriented,” Tenebres admitted. “And my entire body is tight and sore.”

“That’s normal for a technique like this. The good news is that the healing should be far more thorough than a normal spell, so once you get up and stretch, I don’t anticipate any further side effects.”

“Good to hear,” Geoffrey said.

Tenebres’s eyes snapped to the doorway, surprised to see the blonde assassin lounging in one corner of the ritual room. Based on the curses they both spat, Allana and Alleghy hadn’t noticed him either.

“Rogue’s balls, Geoff!” Alleghy cussed at him. “Are you trying to scare me out of a few more years of life?”

Geoffrey simply smiled.

Alleghy’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a second. I locked down the whole clinic before I started on this idiot. How did you get in here?”

Geoffrey rolled a shoulder indifferently. “Trick of the trade.”

“Trick of the…” Alleghy muttered, turned back to his cleaning. “Fine. If you’re done then, get out. It’s too late for these old bones.”

“Fair enough.” Geoffrey tilted his head at Allana and Tenebres, gesturing for them to go. “We’re even, Alleghy”

The old healer waved a hand without turning around.

Allana helped Tenebres off the table with unexpected, and unnecessary, gentleness. “I’m okay,” he reassured her. Then he paused, inspecting himself again. “Although… I think I need a shirt.”