Page 36 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

JIN

Jin hadn’t known Arthie and Matteo had slipped into the sanatorium until he heard them get caught.

Then a cell door creaked shut as the guards locked them away, and that was that.

Jin was on his own. Undeniably this time.

He twisted his wrists ever so slightly, testing the captain’s claim.

Sure enough, the more he moved, the farther a row of spikes ejected from the cuffs. He wasn’t ready to die just yet.

The guards dragged Jin the rest of the way, one on either side of him, their arms hooked under his until they dropped him unceremoniously on the floor of a room.

He had never felt so directly disrespected in his life.

He was yanked and prodded, voices muffled by the rough jute cloth around his head.

The cuffs fell away from his wrists, clamps quickly taking their place, securing him like a leash to the wall. He couldn’t move.

“Get this infernal sack off of me,” he snarled, refusing to let his voice betray how breathless he’d become.

And they obliged. They tore it from his head, and Jin screwed his eyes shut against the blast of sterile light. It smelled just as bleak—like a hospital.

Like a morgue.

“You said you wanted more vampires to test on, eh?” the captain was saying in that smug, punchable tone. The fool could have had two more vampires but didn’t even know it. He’d seen Jin’s fangs and assumed that was the only tell? “We found this one loitering by the gates. It’s all yours.”

Jin was going to rip out the man’s throat.

When his eyes adjusted at last, he pinned the captain with a glare.

The room was large, as wide as a shipping warehouse, and there were various workbenches fitted with tools and machines and vials, as well as contraptions he’d never seen before, and inclined beds that looked as stifling as a rack used for torture.

The rest of the guards were already shuffling out the door, but the captain positioned a pair of them by the entrance before he left, casting Jin one last satisfied smirk.

Only then did Jin fully understand what the captain had said.

You said you wanted more vampires to test on, eh?

He had read those very words before, hadn’t he?

In a letter. Written in his father’s hand.

Ahead of him, two figures moved. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed them before.

Perhaps, in the way that a mind rarely takes note of things that are familiar, Jin had allowed himself to be distracted by everything that wasn’t.

He noticed now.

And that was when he saw them. A man and a woman he would have recognized blind, by sound alone.

His parents.

Alive, whole, here . Jin blinked wearily. His parents were standing before him.

His father was holding a needle. His mother was holding a vial full of something green—the same luminescent fluid from the darts the guards had loaded into their weapons.

They had aged, one decade older than the portraits Jin had painted in his memories. There was white in his father’s hair, there were fine lines on his mother’s face, but it was their eyes that had changed the most. They were not bright and full of possibility anymore; they were haunted and dark.

And for a moment, they could only stare, paling as if they were staring at a ghost. In many ways, Jin was a ghost. He stared back. What more could he do? His tongue refused to move, his brain refused to form words, his heart refused to stop weeping.

And he knew, without a single shred of doubt, that despite the ten years they’d spent apart, despite the endless changes he’d been through, they recognized him.

“Jin?” his mother whispered.

Don’t say my name , he wanted to snarl, but oh, how many years had he hoped to hear his name from his mother’s mouth again? He couldn’t spew any of his anger at them.

Only silence.

It was confirmation enough. She cried out, dropping the vial.

It shattered to the floor, glass and liquid spraying every which way.

He thought, at first, that she was going to embrace him, but in her other hand, Jin saw a weapon.

It looked like the grip of a pistol, as if the barrel had been sawed off.

As she held it, a current zapped from one side of a prong to the other, to and fro with unimaginable speed.

In his father’s hand, a matching one buzzed.

They looked dangerous.

Ten years apart, and the parents who loved him, birthed him, raised him, were going to hurt him.

Jin felt numb.

His mother almost looked apologetic as she approached, one side of her upper lip lifting higher in that odd way that it used to, making him feel like a little boy again. “Guards? Some aid, if you will.”

Jin couldn’t hold back his scoff. She couldn’t even touch him.

“Do you want us to hold him?” one of the guards asked.

“Yes,” his mother said.

When the guards reached for Jin on either side, both of his parents moved at once.

Jin braced himself for whatever pain was to come, knowing it would hurt tenfold not because of the unknown weapons but because they were the wielders.

His parents that he had longed for, searched for.

They shoved their hands forward, and Jin closed his eyes.

The guards yelped in surprise.

Jin’s eyes flew open. His parents had their weapons tucked against the necks of the guards.

They were shuddering, shaking, eyes rolling to the backs of their heads, stunned with the current zapping between the prongs.

They fell to the floor in twin thumps. His mother dashed to the doors and locked them tight.

Jin blinked.

He was not expecting that.

“My boy,” his father whispered, setting the stun weapon on a table before he broke into a laugh. It was a sound Jin thought he’d never hear again. A sound he had placed in a glass case and attributed to the hero he’d lost as a child.

It rearranged the pain echoing inside of him; it calmed him. It was his father’s voice, soothing away the years upon years of disquiet.

Jin forced his guard back up.

“You’re… not surprised to see me,” he said carefully.

His mother laughed. “No. We were waiting for you.”

When Jin was a boy, his father and mother would teach him the strangest, most random bits of knowledge that one would argue a child of his age didn’t need to know.

How to tie a knot, how to pick a lock in case he was trapped, how to treat a wound himself.

He had always been a sponge, soaking up what they taught him, but he hadn’t realized his parents had been teaching him because they’d been preparing for the worst.

“Oh, she’s been waiting for years,” his father said, a shine in his eyes.

“For me?” Jin asked.

He took a careful step back. Had the Ram sent word to his parents? No, even if she had figured out that he and Arthie had stolen her ship, she couldn’t have moved any faster than they had, and they’d wasted no time getting here.

“If anyone would save us, it would be you,” his mother said, sitting down on a chair and gesturing for Jin to do the same. “We’d long wondered if anyone even knew where we were. We had hoped Penn would come for us. Do you remember him?”

Jin rubbed at his chafed wrists and sat. He tried to, anyway. He appeared to have forgotten how to do the simplest of things, struck with the surrealness of this moment. His fangs had finally slipped away but threatened to come out in full force again.

He toyed with the clove rock in his pocket, remembering Penn’s visits when he would toss them his way.

“He’s how I learned you were here. He’s… dead now,” Jin said. Whatever plans Penn had wanted to enact, aid or otherwise, had died with him.

His father’s eyes widened in surprise before his face fell.

Jin glanced at the mostly empty room, immediately suspicious again. “Can we sit like this? Won’t the captain or someone come in?”

Jin’s father looked at the unconscious guards and shook his head. “The doors are locked, but they rarely come in here, particularly when we’re working.” He dropped his gaze to the floor. “They’re afraid.”

Was he afraid of Jin ?

He thought of the captain likening him to not being human.

Jin had worked with vampires for a good portion of his life—not counting Arthie herself, of course—and he’d never seen them as anything but human.

He might have held them to different standards and understood that standing before one was always a risk, but wasn’t that the case with a human too?

He had simply fancied himself stronger than most of the living then, or at the very least, skilled enough to outsmart one.

Jin glanced at the locked doors. They had time for an interrogation. Good. Especially with Arthie and Matteo safely locked away in a cell. Jin didn’t want to risk taking his parents to them, not yet.

“I can’t believe Penn is dead,” his father whispered. “He was a good man. A good leader. Is the Athereum still standing?”

It was promising to hear his father refer to Penn as a good man. How much of Ettenian affairs did his parents know? Not much, he supposed, if his father was asking about the Athereum.

“It is. One of his closest friends has taken up the mantle,” Jin said.

“You know quite a bit about all of this,” his father said, tilting his head.

Because at some point in time, he and Arthie had wriggled their way into the center of everything, but Jin said nothing.

He was keeping his answers to a minimum, holding back any information that could be used against him and Arthie and everything they aimed to do: like destroy the pillars holding up his parents’ boss.

He winced at that.

They sat in silence. Jin could almost hear the tick, tick, tick , of the seconds passing by.

He was torn between wanting to tell his parents he needed to rescue Arthie and Matteo from the cells and not knowing if mentioning them was a death sentence.

Was stunning two guards unconscious enough reason to trust his parents?

He was encased in ice, numb to feeling.