Gods of Rust and Ruin (Seeds of Chaos Volume 2)[PAPERBACK]

No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me. 

— Edna St. Vincent Millay 

I sat up abruptly, choking on my own blood. I jerked out of the little cot tucked into the side of the wall and spat the liquid onto the floor in a dark splatter. The heavy iron taste in my mouth added to the terror of the nightmare I’d been yanked from. My claws slipped out and I sliced through the empty darkness, lashing out at a nonexistent enemy. 

A second of flailing later, I got control of myself. I was alone. The only enemy attacking me was also the thing keeping me alive, now that I lived within NIX’s compound. The Seed of Chaos made me powerful enough to be valuable, while literally eating away at me from the inside. 

I gagged and coughed, trying to staunch the blood flow with one hand while fumbling for the backpack shoved underneath my mattress with the other. The only light in the room came from the small diodes on a couple of sleeping electronics, but it was enough for my augmented eyes to see. I pulled out a small pouch and fumbled for one of the large, marble-like Seeds within. “I wish I was more Resilient,” I mouthed almost soundlessly, pressing it to my neck. I was long past flinching at the pinprick. I sighed in relief as the Seed injected its contents into me and took hold, stopping the bleeding. 

Birch, my little monster-cat companion, woke, either from the noise I’d made or the smell of my blood dripping everywhere. He let out his scratchy little meow, the sound lilting upward at the end in an obvious question. He hadn’t yet displayed the ability of his late mother to share thoughts through touch, but he was far from stupid. 

“I had to take a Seed,” I muttered to him, my voice low in case something was listening. “I was bleeding again, but I’m okay now.”

Birch bumped me with his head and licked at the blood on my forearm with his prickly tongue. 

I withdrew my arm before his tongue accidentally removed the top layer of my skin, and moved to the shower in the tiny bathroom stall. I was the only one of my teammates with private quarters. The others were sleeping in a small barracks-like room across the hall from me, stacked two bunks high. I’d glanced at their room the night before, and then promptly passed out from exhaustion onto my own private little cot. 

Behind me, Birch grumbled and moved to lick up my blood from the cold hard floor. He had an excessive and disturbing penchant for raw meat and blood. Especially my blood. 

I turned on the water at a temperature most kindly described as “scalding” and let it wash away the sticky red residue, along with the lingering creepy feeling from my nightmare. I’d been waking up with nightmares, from nightmares, for a while. But they were getting worse than ever before, and I rarely went a night without them. 

Sometimes, it was the monsters of a Trial coming for me, ready to rip me apart and dance with my entrails. Sometimes, it was the last time I saw my team member China, as the light went out of her eyes and she died. And sometimes, the nightmare had no form. It was the creeping mass of decay and putrefaction devouring everything in its path. A shudder, a feeling, a smell. 

When I exited the shower, Birch had finished cleaning all the blood from the floor. My sheets and pillowcase still glistened with the dark liquid, but luckily, they were black. I took them back into the shower with me and cleaned the synthetic material as best I could. No one would know what had happened. 

Birch called to me from the doorway of the shower, his meow still scratchy from sleep. 

“It’s getting worse,” I murmured. 

The cub padded past the open shower door and under the spray of water, then licked my knee and peered up at me with his green human eyes. Water splashed down on him and his translucent second eyelids closed sideways for protection. He spread his downy wings to better catch the warm water. 

“I’m afraid,” I whispered, knowing that he couldn’t reveal my secret, and the rushing water would cover any other surveillance that might have slipped through my search. “The Seeds aren’t working for as long as they used to.”

The Seed of Chaos grew continually stronger, as Behelaino had warned me it would. I just hadn’t thought it would happen this fast. Every time I was forced to use it, it grew stronger, but being able to display it was the only thing keeping me—and the team—safe. 

The meditation technique Adam had taught me helped control Chaos, too, but I could only do so much without more Seeds. A lot more. Without them or some other way to heal myself, the outcome was obvious. I had wanted to keep my condition a secret, but I would need to reveal it to Sam, and hope that he could help me until I could find a way to fix myself. 

“I’m dying, Birch,” I whispered with terrible certainty, the words no more than a breath on the air.