Page 43 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

ARTHIE

Arthie snatched the last pair of cuffs as they followed a defeated Shaw down the corridors. Beside her, Matteo and Jin were quiet. For two different reasons, she suspected. Arthie didn’t need to ask to know they were heading to see one of the Siwangs’ sins for themselves.

Her skin still crawled with that unsettling sense that they were being watched. Arthie knew vengeance well—the smell of it, the feel of it. And the eyes that tracked them from some of the cells they passed were exuding it.

“There you are.”

The four of them froze.

“Overseer Bloodworth,” Shaw said.

Arthie snapped the cuffs around her wrists, positioning her fingers in place to undo them and reach for her pistol at the first sign of trouble.

The overseer drifted closer, and he looked just as she had suspected: an eerie man, more bones than flesh, his dark eyes gaunt.

They looked hungry, and Arthie wasn’t sure it was a hunger that might ever be sated.

“Where are you going?” Bloodworth asked.

“To see you,” Shaw replied. “Horace said you were in the Ripper room and I had no reason to believe otherwise.”

Ripper room . Arthie hadn’t seen a room marked as such in Matteo’s sketches, but she vaguely remembered it being mentioned in the letter they’d found.

Bloodworth hummed, circling around them. Was this what the Siwangs had to deal with for the past decade? He eyed Jin until Arthie felt the need to squirm.

“Is this not the one you were given for testing?” Bloodworth asked, his gaze missing nothing.

“Have you tried speaking to him directly?” Jin sniped.

Bloodworth leaned toward him. “That would be beneath me.”

Arthie could see every fiber of Jin’s being winding up to ram his head into Bloodworth’s before he rocked back on his heels.

“Shaw?” Bloodworth asked, still staring at Jin. “I want to know why these three are here in our sanatorium, and why this one, in particular, is awake.”

Arthie knew the look on Shaw’s face. She’d seen it before when Jin would occasionally make calculated, spur-of-the-moment decisions he hadn’t previously discussed with her. The percentile in which they succeeded was excruciatingly low.

“His vitals are far higher than the majority of the vampires sent here,” Shaw said. “He’s never been inoculated. Sora and I decided he’s much more suited for Ripper testing.”

He spoke with an alarming level of confidence. It was believable—even to Arthie’s ears. Which made her wonder how much of what he had told them was actually true. But he hadn’t yet outed them to Bloodworth, so Arthie held her tongue—and held her hand back from Calibore.

“Is that so?” Bloodworth asked. He scrutinized Jin more closely, looking between him and Shaw until Arthie feared he recognized the resemblance.

How much of the Ram’s schemes was he aware of?

Did he know of Jin? “I’ve never seen you work with this new methodology.

Locking them in canisters sounds quite like canning the fruits of the season, no? I’d very much enjoy watching.”

Canisters? Shaw paled even more.

“What is he talking about?” Jin asked quietly.

Shaw turned in the direction of the Ripper room. The hall widened to the intersection from Matteo’s sketches that led in four directions. Arthie glanced up to where the massive chandelier hung in almost comical contrast to the dim, forlorn cells.

Bloodworth strode behind them, and though she’d kept a close eye on him, he’d given no indication as to where he kept the key to the vault-like door.

Calibore pressed against her side, and when she glanced at Matteo, he gave the pistol a pointed glance too, reminding her that there was another way out of here.

Shaw reached the doors to the Ripper room, and with a grim glance at Jin, Arthie, and Matteo, he unlatched the doors and pushed them open.

Arthie froze.

If she thought the rest of the sanatorium was eerie, compared to this, it was not.

The air sent a deathly chill down her spine.

As with the rest of the place, it was dimly lit, except for the glowing blue pill-shaped cylinders lining the room in rows, slanted at an angle, a faint light within pulsing as if in time to a heartbeat. Arthie counted seven.

Inside each of the seven canisters was a body.

“Are they alive?” Jin whispered.

“Yes,” Shaw said, just as hushed.

“I’ll be hanged,” Bloodworth exclaimed. “Every time I come in here, it’s a feat to behold.”

The canisters were filled with some sort of fluid, and because of the angled position, the heads of the bodies within weren’t submerged. They were almost entirely naked, with flesh that looked to be carved from stone.

“Vampires,” Arthie murmured. Of course they were vampires.

“Ripper vampires,” Bloodworth corrected.

“What are you doing to them?” Matteo asked, a frenzy in his voice.

“The Siwangs truly are the best of the best,” Bloodworth touted.

Two guards stood on either side of the door. On the inside , and Arthie had a sinking feeling they weren’t there to protect the caged vampires.

“They are no doubt brilliant, no? When the Ram asked for better, they provided. Starved vampires are an ingenious, brilliant utilization, but why settle for what’s available, when you have minds such as theirs?

Thus, their brilliant creation: the Ripper.

An unassailable foe. I named them myself, in memory of one of my old colleagues who was ripped to shreds,” Bloodworth continued.

Arthie wished she loved anything as much as this man loved to say brilliant .

“Creation?” Jin hissed at his father. The use of the word sounded no different from when the captain had referred to him as it .

Shaw’s perfect composure cracked then. He shuffled from foot to foot.

Bloodworth, conversely, couldn’t contain his glee. “Indeed. A newly developed serum that produces a specialized breed of super vampires.”

“No,” Shaw said.

A silence slithered into the room, as anxious as Shaw. Bloodworth’s brow furrowed, the color draining from his face, and Arthie was surprised by the power he held over Shaw. Why else did a simple word cause such unease?

“What did you say?” Bloodworth asked.

Shaw stepped closer, not to his so-called creations, not to Bloodworth, but to Jin. “I said no.”

“No, what, Shaw? No, you are not the best of the best? Or no, you did not create a specialized breed of vampires?”

“No, there is no serum.”

Bloodworth looked confused, glancing at the canisters lining the room. The “specialized breed” was standing—floating—before them.

“Am I imagining them?” he asked.

Jin drew in a sharp breath. “The long-lasting effects of the silver—when you said it was unknown, I knew there was more you weren’t telling me.”

Arthie was beginning to piece together what the Siwangs had told them since they’d met: their guilt, Sora and his need to remain with the vampires despite the opportunities for escape, the daily visits to the cells for necessary administrations.

“Well then, how are these brilliant vampires being made?” Bloodworth asked.

“Through the untold effects of the silver inoculation—on accident ,” Arthie whispered, looking at Shaw. “You don’t know, do you?”

It took several moments before Shaw shook his head.

“The silver inoculation triggers a mutation in some vampires that, over time, alters their brain function until only the need for survival remains,” he said quietly.

“They do not respond to their names, or at all. They’ve been stripped away of what makes them human, and with no moral boundaries, they’re—”

“Monsters,” Bloodworth whispered, drifting to stare intently at one of the vampires suspended in the blue fluid.

“Weapons of the highest caliber. Without these supposed morals and values, they can kill without mercy. But an accident?” He didn’t look angry that Shaw had lied, no.

He looked excited. “By golly, the Ram would be astounded to hear this. We’ll just have to starve each of your silver-injected vampires long enough to become these brilliant beasts.

Immortal, impossible to injure, bones of steel. ”

“Since when?” Matteo asked. Bloodworth might not have even existed for the way he stared at Shaw.

“At least two years.”

“Seven have mutated. So the one hundred and fifteen vampires out there and the rest waiting to be delivered from Ettenia are doomed to lose their humanity too?” Jin asked, and Arthie didn’t need to hear Shaw’s heart crushing. It was clear in his eyes when he saw Jin’s face.

“They could,” Shaw answered, his eyes flicking to Bloodworth for a moment before he decided to continue.

“But we’ve found that coconut fights the silver.

At the very least, it will delay the alteration, but blood test comparisons between those who had consumed coconut and those who hadn’t were vastly different. ”

“Keep drinking coconut water, and it’ll keep the monster at bay,” Jin said. He slid a glance at Arthie when the words were out of his mouth, for that was her life for a near decade. “Literally speaking. Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

Shaw looked away. The why was clear enough. This was a horror of his own making, his and Sora’s.

Shaw looked at the vampires locked in the canisters. “We were too late to save them though. We could do nothing but put them to sleep.”

What were the vampires in those canisters thinking? Was some part of their brains still conscious? They looked asleep, dead. Arthie was reminded of herself, adrift in a sea of blue, afraid of the monster beneath her skin commanding her bones.

That was how she’d felt when she’d been made into a half vampire. This—this was tenfold of that.

“Save? Hold on there a moment,” Bloodworth said, brow furrowed as he tried to follow along. “You and Sora—you’ve been feeding the others coconut water. I saw it! You’ve been staving off the effects?”

Shaw paused, glancing not at Jin nor Matteo, but at Arthie. It was a look Jin had given her a thousand times before: Get ready .