Chapter 2 2

He was facedown in the mud, his arms flung out like he'd been trying to crawl. Dark hair plastered to his skull. A coat, expensive, wool, already ruined. Jessie could smell the blood before she saw it, copper and salt cutting through the pine scent.

She knelt. Her knees sank into the wet leaves. She reached for his neck, her fingers still burning, and found the artery beneath his jaw.

Cold. Impossibly cold. Like touching meat from a freezer.

But there was a pulse. Faint, arrhythmic, a bird trying to escape a cage. He was dying.

Jessie leaned closer. She smelled something else now, underneath the blood. Chemical. Synthetic. A toxin she recognized, a scent signature she'd encountered in a life she fought to forget. Experimental. The kind that stopped your heart while you were still breathing.

She sat back on her heels. Her own heart was hammering, her skin steaming in the cold air. She looked at her hands. She looked at his neck.

The math was simple. She was burning. He was freezing. His blood was poisoned. Her blood was-different. Adaptive. It was a desperate, insane gamble. She had no idea what would happen when her volatile blood met his poisoned system. It could kill them both. But she felt the cold radiating from him, a siren call to the fire in her veins. He needed her heat. She needed his cold. It was a transaction of survival.

She reached for her boot. The knife was there, always there, a matte black tactical blade that had cost more than this man's coat. She pulled it free and held it up to the moonlight. No reflection. No gleam. Just absence.

She didn't hesitate. Hesitation was for people with choices.

Jessie grabbed his left wrist and turned it palm-up. She found the vein, blue against his pale skin. She pressed the blade to it and drew a clean line.

Black blood welled up. Not red. Black, thick, wrong. It smelled like chemicals and rot. It steamed in the cold air.

The man made a sound. A groan, deep in his chest, his body fighting even as his mind stayed dark. His fingers twitched, trying to close into a fist.

Jessie ignored him. She switched the knife to her left hand and drew the same line on her own right wrist. The pain was nothing. She'd had worse. The blood that came was normal, red, hot as coffee fresh from the pot.

She pressed their wrists together.

The shock of it made her gasp. His blood was ice. Hers was fire. Where they met, something happened, a reaction, a neutralization. She felt the cold rush up her arm, into her shoulder, toward her heart. She felt her own heat flowing out, a river of warmth leaving her, and she wanted to weep with relief.

She held them together, wrist to wrist, vein to vein. She watched his black blood thin, turn red, turn normal. She watched her own blood cool from boiling to merely hot to almost normal.

His breathing changed. The rattle in his chest smoothed out. His fingers stopped twitching and curled around her hand, weak but present.

Jessie felt it when the toxin broke. A shudder through his whole body, a release. His heart found its rhythm, slow and steady. Hers was slowing too, matching him, the wild gallop becoming a canter becoming a walk.

She pulled back.

Her wrist was a mess. His was worse, the wound gaping where she'd held it open. She reached for her belt, for the canister she kept there, military-grade, no brand name, no purchase history. She sprayed her wrist first, the foam sealing the cut instantly, turning from white to skin-colored in seconds.

She sprayed his. The foam caught in his coat sleeve, on his cufflinks, on the mud. She didn't care. She tore a strip from her hoodie, the hem already ragged, and wrapped it around his wrist. The fabric was cheap, the dye running, the smell of discount detergent rising up.

She stood. Her legs were steady now. The fire was banked, not gone but controlled. She could think. She could move.

She looked down at him. His face was still pale, but not death-pale. Living-pale. His chest rose and fell. His hand lay in the mud, fingers curled, the strip of her hoodie trailing from his wrist like a flag of surrender.

Jessie pulled up her own hood. She didn't search his pockets. She didn't check his ID. She didn't want to know who he was, what he was doing in these woods, why someone had poisoned him. Knowing was dangerous. Knowing made you responsible.

She walked away, placing her feet carefully, leaving no prints. The rain would cover the rest.

Behind her, distant but growing louder, she heard the thump of helicopter blades.