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Lily swallowed and nodded. “What do I need to do?”
“Bleed,” he replied. His eyes rounded for a moment in apology before relaxing and sliding half shut into a calm that bordered on trance.
Rowan turned back and started pulling small glass jars out of the pot, laying them on top of the sterile metal sheet to cool. There were ten in all. Rowan moved the metal plate and glasses away from the fire and placed them between him and Lily.
Tristan and Una returned with ten metal rods, holding them carefully so the tips that had the tissue samples didn’t touch. Rowan placed each rod upright in the ten glass jars.
“Thank you, Una,” he said, dismissing her. She left the tent and Rowan turned to Tristan. “Take off your shirt. Sit behind Lily and support her. She’ll probably faint at some point,” he said in a deep and calm voice.
Lily felt Tristan sit cross-legged behind her, his arms at the ready in case she tipped to either side. Lily took a breath to calm herself, focusing on the slow and steady thump of Tristan’s heart as he matched Rowan’s trance-like energy.
Rowan carefully picked up the first metal rod and showed her the tissue-laden tip. “Look at the cells. Find the life-helix. Do you see it?”
Lily concentrated on the cells, her awareness sinking into them on a smaller and smaller level until she found a perfect, coiled strand of DNA. Every single biological fact about this woman was stored in that one strand. Her whole life on a string. “I see it,” Lily said.
“That is pure. Store the pattern in your willstone,” he said. Rowan put the rod, tip down, into the sterile glass cup and took Lily’s wrist in one hand and his silver dagger in the other. “Let your blood be the creator of that pattern.” He slit her wrist and let her bleed into the cup.
Lily watched her blood pool in the cup and mix with the cells in the sample, and she knew instinctively what she needed to do. Her rose-colored willstone flashed and sparkled with power as Lily drew heat and strength from the fire. Her blood cells changed into something more basic and less differentiated and took on the pattern of that particular woman’s DNA. As it did so, her blood changed from red to golden.
“Stem cells,” she heard Tristan whisper.
“Look at this. It is pure,” Rowan said, holding up the next metal rod and flipping it over in the glass. “Let your blood be the creator of that pattern.”
He moved her wrist over and let her bleed over the next skin sample. Again, Lily changed her blood as it flowed, creating a stem-cell serum specifically designed for that woman’s DNA. They moved on to the next and the next, each time repeating the ritual. By the sixth sample, Lily felt herself swooning to the side as her blood pumped freely from her slit wrist. Tristan was there to hold her up, and Rowan’s eyes were there to focus her on the last four samples.
She heard Rowan end the ritual and call out to Breakfast, who was waiting outside the tent, and then she tasted something salty on her lips. Her eyes popped open as the salt revived her and she saw Tristan feeding her pieces of a cracker. She sat up, rubbing her wrist. She still felt a dull ache, but the wound was completely gone. Not even a red seam marked her pale skin.
“Eat,” Tristan urged. “Rowan said we aren’t done yet.”
“Where is he?” Lily croaked.
“Instructing the women on how to inject the serum.” Tristan smiled and shook his head disbelievingly. “He said that they’ll be cured. One injection and in a few days it’ll be as if they never got sick.”
“But only those ten,” Lily whispered solemnly. “The rest will die.”
“It’s still beyond anything we can do back home, Lily,” he replied. “It’s incredible. A miracle.”
Lily smiled at Tristan. “It’s your dream come true, isn’t it? You’re curing sick people.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Even without an Ivy League degree.”
“Well, I’m glad I didn’t completely ruin your life.”
“Oh, you still ruined it,” he said, breaking into a huge grin. “I mean, I’m in a tent in a hole in the ground. Not exactly a step up.”
They shared a good laugh while Lily finished off her crackers. “Any more?” she asked, still feeling drained.
“This was all we could find for now,” he said, his brow drawn with worry. “Are you okay?”
Lily shrugged. “I’ll make it.”
Rowan came back in the tent, his expression stormy. “I asked about salt again,” he said to Tristan. “Breakfast and Riley said they were on it.”
“What’s next?” Lily asked.
“They need water purifier badly,” Rowan said. “I know how much you hate kitchen magic, but without safe drinking water, making serum for those ten women won’t matter much.”
“It’s okay. Let’s do it,” Lily said, bracing herself.
