Blood Bond

The woman behind the minimalist glass desk raised her chin, her gaze shifting to me. She was impeccable—an unnerving vision of corporate perfection. Her dark hair was swept back into a severe bun. The flawless makeup that sculpted her face and the sharp cut of her blazer seemed to match the dark, flowing lines of the wood grain on the wall behind her, making her a seamless part of the immaculate welcome room. Her expression was neutral, her voice as cool and smooth as the polished floor as she spoke. "The Director will see you now."

This was just like the antechamber in the keep. Except here, a dressed-to-the-nines assistant stood in place of soldiers at sentry. The heavy, foreboding air was replaced by the serene scent of pine. And the soft trickle of water from a bonsai took the place of an Aethelwing tearing into its prey.

In either case, the objective was the same: focus on what was at hand. I needed to find out what Blackwood really is.

Focus. Calm. Stillness.

Stepping through the doorway was disorienting. I had braced myself for more of the cold, corporate perfection, but this was something else entirely. The sharp scent of pine was gone, replaced by the smell of old paper and leather. The clean, ultra-modern lines of the welcome area vanished, replaced by a dissonance in time and place.

There were no decorations in this room. Instead, the walls were lined with towering bookshelves of gnarled, dark wood, some fronted with glass. They were stuffed to overflowing with old books, their pages yellowed with age.

It strangely reminded me of the Earl's study in Moonshade.

In the middle of the room, behind a large desk of dark, red-stained wood, sat a lone man who must be the Director. He had slicked-back blonde hair and wore a sharp blue coat that cut a stark contrast against the ancient books surrounding him.

"Welcome, Leo. My apologies for the late hour." The Director's voice was smooth, betraying no hint of an actual apology. "It was the only timeslot available." He steepled his fingers, tapping them together thoughtfully. "Now, I understand you've come across some... interesting data of ours. And that you have a request regarding its return."

He spread his hands wide. "I'm all ears."

Julia really didn't mince her words.

There was something jarringly familiar about the structure of his face that made me stare for a while longer than I should. I took a breath. "I want to know what Blackwood really is. And why do you have that file?"

"Ah yes, you can open that file." His blue eyes were locked intently on me. "Tell me, how did you manage to do it? And what is it that you saw in it?"

They couldn't open the file? How did they get it then?

"I just pressed my fingers over the points that appeared over the ward…umm… crystal. The file contained information about demons."

"Interesting, so you just pressed on the screen?"

He chuckled dryly when I nodded. "Somehow, I doubt that'd work for any of us."

I narrowed my eyes. "So you know what's in the file, but can't open it. Then that means you created the file and encrypted it using someone else's public key? Who are you guys sending this to?"

A smile crept over The Director's lips, it was eerily warm. "Very perceptive Leo. I was told you were a smart one. But we were doing this long before public-key cryptography was a thing." He gestured to a chair in front of the desk. "Sit, and let me tell you about the origins of Blackwood."

I hesitantly plopped down on the chair.

"What's disclosed here is strictly confidential. And unlike your friend, I'm trusting you to keep it that way."

My eyes popped as a wave of guilt washed over me. "What did you do with Kyle?!"

"Nothing, his father already handed over the laptop with the data. And your friend, well we don't believe he fully grasped what he had seen."

I sighed, nodding. In other words, this is another thing he can hold over me.

"Let's see." He eased back in his seat and looked to the side, his eyes seemingly focused on an old leather bound book. "The beginning of Blackwood could be traced back to a crystal unearthed in the mines near the Black Forest in Germany. One that even unpolished looked very much like the crystal that shows up when you open that file."

The Wardstone, there's one on earth?!

"This crystal, is it the size of this room?"

The Director's eyebrows creased. "The size of this room? No, it was just a handful, only a pound in weight." He leaned in closer. "Do you know of one much larger?"

I quickly shook my head. "It was just my imagination taking off. Please keep going."

He stared at me for a while longer, before sinking back into his seat. "The Germans found that it had interesting properties when one ran a current through it. Namely, it would only conduct in intervals that sometimes match certain patterns. It took them a long while, but they discovered the crystal could perform complex calculations based on encoded electrical pulses."

"So, the crystal is like a computer?"

The Director smiled, holding up one finger. "They might have gotten to that in time, but the war ended before then. One of the founders of the institute brought the crystal over to the states, where it sat in storage until one of our other founders decided to connect the crystal to a company mainframe."

My lips grew numb. In Aetheria, the Wardstone was considered sacred, the heart of a god to be approached with reverence and fear. These men found its twin, a literal piece of alien magic, and their first instinct was to just… plug it into the wall? The casual, arrogant recklessness of it was staggering.

"He… just decided… to connect an alien crystal… to a mainframe?"

"No one ever said it was alien, Leo." The Director squinted one eye at me, as if telling me that he had caught me once more. Then he smiled again, his hands spreading apart. "He probably didn't think much of it at the time. This was long before the era of viruses and malware after all. He knew it could do math operations, and decided to wire up a communication port adapter that would run current through the crystal."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Then?"

"It didn't take long for the Crystal to start printing out vast amounts of information. Our founders soon realized that the printout was a schematic for a more powerful computer that could communicate with the Crystal. And that was when the institute was formed."

"So the file was created by the computer that's linked with the Crystal?"

The Director stared at me for a long second. Then he rubbed over the bridge of his nose. "Not exactly. This stays here in this room only. But once the new computer was built the Crystal was able to directly communicate with detailed text and images. It gave us blueprints for a device that can send and receive communications from a non-terrestrial source."

"Wait, you're telling me you guys built a device based on blueprints from a thing you know nothing about?! Are you all insane? Isn't this like how those alien invasions begin?"

"You really seemed to be fixed on aliens Leo. Tell me, is there something I should know? Should we be preparing for an invasion?"

I rubbed my temple in frustration. "No, you all just should be more careful. But I assume you actually communicated with this outside source?"

"Yes, that file was the result of one of the requests from the source. The crystal would process the file, and then we'd send that out through the communication device. Until now, no one could open that file once the crystal processed it." He slowly looked over at me with a wry grin. "Well, it'd run on basically any device with a screen, but it'd only show that crystal. And we have tried everything to open it, every possible decompilation, and decryption tool."

"But, the research on file, some of it had to be on humans. You mean you guys were experimenting on humans on behalf of some outside being? How can you do that?!"

"It was never a one-way street, Leo. In return for our data, we received insights. Hints. Knowledge that has led to breakthroughs you can't even imagine." He gestured back to the stuffed bookshelf behind him. "The phone in your pocket. The satellite that gives you a weather forecast. The medical science that diagnosed your condition and has kept you alive this long… none of it would exist without the gifts we received. We have advanced humanity by leaps and bounds."

"So you sold us out as guinea pigs to a foreign, non-terrestrial thing that you know nothing about."

"We've been piecing together things here and there. And it seems we found one very large piece of the puzzle." He leaned forward, his blue predatory eyes engulfing me. "The file matters little to us, Leo. We are more interested in what you know about this… alien Crystal?"

A shiver ran over my body as if cold water had been poured over me. I nearly panicked. But I remembered what I still had to do in Aethelgard. Maya had told me, the opposite of Divine was Evil and Unholy, but isn't it also, Demonic?

First, I have to set this table he had stacked against me.

I steadied my breathing and met his gaze. "No, it matters a great deal to you. There were some other files in the thumb drive that were rather incriminating. You should be glad that I got hold of it before the Consortium."

There was a twitch at the corner of his eyes. I knew I had him.

"We had a deal, and you had your way. I've suffered through enough of your tests. The last one was a bit extreme was it not?" He didn't have anything in reply. My gaze narrowed. "Isn't it time you gave me something back? That file was over twenty years old. I'm sure you sent over others. I want to see them. Especially… the demon ones."

—

I turned the knight figurine that Sam had painted for me in my hand, letting the tiny lance skewer my finger. The Director had sent the files over. I looked through them. Actually, it was more like I devoured them. Just like last time, the moment I opened a file, something deep within compelled me to flip through them and etch every detail into my mind.

I knew it was my blood—thinking of any data point didn't just bring perfect recall, it brought a visceral urge. A tug from my blood to follow through, and form the claw, the muscles, the thick skin described within.

Antara, why would you do this? Why would a god need to have another world do his research?

Did he actually commission Blackwood's research to create the demons in Aetheria? But if he created them, why would he protect us from them? The timeline also doesn't make sense, since demons appeared hundreds of years back.

I stopped turning the figurine, the sharp point a sudden anchor in my spiraling thoughts.

That's right. Time moved differently between worlds. I had experienced this first hand when I switched between worlds. Still, his actions made no sense.

My jaw tightened. I don't have time to dwell on a god and his motivations.

A mirror. I had dismissed Maya's suggestion of reflecting back the holy light. It seemed absurd. But that healing glow… it was an actual physical thing that I had felt. It was light.

I remembered the search on natural defense I had done back at the hospital room. I had looked up octopuses, how their skin could see light, and use the memory of what they saw to mimic their surroundings.

Wait, Blackwood had done research on cephalopods. I'd seen the squid, wasn't there also…

I shot upright, the chair scraping against the floor as I snapped in the thumb drive. It didn't take long for me to pull up the file on the octopus.

Light-sensing proteins called Opsins allowed their skin to 'see' and analyze incoming light. This recorded light signature was then transmitted as a signal to specialized cells called Iridophores, where Reflectin proteins would dynamically align to reflect back those exact wavelengths.

Goosebumps crawled up my back. I had thought about using the healing light to disable my blood cells protecting the cancer, but I'd never even considered how I could get the healing light to Earth.

This is the way.

If I could form Opsins in my skin, I could face Lelian, endure her light just long enough to record its unique signature, and bring that data back here. This was it.

The path to victory and the path to a cure were the same.

I just needed to bear the pain.

Data flooded my mind. Someone had already taken it one step further. One of the more advanced demon skin types in the files was a 'Cloaking Skin'. I had dismissed it as simple camouflage. But now, my blood was showing me that within the data were detailed biological pathways for forming Opsins and Reflectins.

It wasn't just a cloak. It was an eye.

And a mirror.

—

"'Who cares for you?' said Alice, she had grown to her full size by this time. 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!'" I read as Annie lay slumbering in the bed beside me, her chest slowly rising and falling, with the pink bow headband still stubbornly on her head.

It was late, and she was long asleep, but I hadn't come to check on her this whole day. I had missed her reading time.

I flipped the page and followed lines with my finger. "At this, the whole pack rose up in the air and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger."

A hand rested on my shoulder, and I turned up to find Julia's beautiful, androgynous, elvish face staring down at Annie. She didn't say a word.

"I'm going to have to fight a big battle soon." I found myself saying. "If I win, I might find the cure you're looking for."

An eyebrow arched, her eyes shifted against the light as she slowly turned them to me.

"If I lose, well that might be it." The chuckle came hoarsely out of my throat. "I don't suppose it's too much to ask for you to watch over my mom and sister for me?"

She just stared at me, as emotionless as ever.

"Any words of advice?" I smiled wryly at her. "You seemed to have fought some battles."

She turned back to Annie. "Only one word, Leonard. I believe it's already etched in your soul. But let's call up its magic once more."

"Survive."