I was drenched in a sticky red film. The blood seemed to boil off my skin, heated by passion and anger. My breath was heavy and sluggish like I''d just come off running a marathon. My fingers twitched, my pupils jittered. I could feel everything, every little sensation around me. I wasn''t smiling like I thought I''d be. Instead, I was lukewarm and apathetic.


    Rain''s body crumpled to the floor while spewing streams from the gash in his neck. He clawed at the wound with his hands, trying desperately to seal it shut. Against his best efforts, the blood flowed, soaking his uniform to a dingy brown shade. His blood pooled at my feet, sticking to the soles of my boots like wet mud. Rain looked at me from the floor, a wounded animal begging desperately to be put down.


    I wiped the knife on my pant leg, smearing the gunk off the steel until it was shiny and reflective again. I fiddled nervously with Eclaire''s eye in my coat pocket, trying to clean it off as best I could with my thumb. Eclaire, I needed to find her. She had to be close, close enough to use her arma on me.  Once I knew she was safe, we could search for Watts together.


    "I''ll kill you," Rain choked. He gargled the blood gushing in his throat, drowning in it.


    I stepped over him and discarded him from my thoughts. It was over. Rain would be left to bleed, alone, with no one there to save him. I''d left him how he left me, as nothing but a dying animal. I took one last look at him. His body was trembling, slipping into shock.


    "You''ve already killed me once, Rain. Now, it''s your turn to die."


    I swung the door open and escaped back into the hall. I carried a trail of blood with me as I searched through the remaining rooms, kicking doors open up and down the corridor.


    "Eclaire! Where are you?"


    One after another, I found them empty. I started running, searching for every conceivable hiding place I could remember in the facility.


    "I''ve gotta be out of her range at this point. Should I turn around?"


    Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!


    Piercing sounds of gunfire echoed off the walls around me, overwhelming my thoughts of finding Eclaire. I saw the spray of bullets from down the hall, shortly followed by someone being thrown into the wall. I could hear the concrete crack despite being at least 50 meters away. I gripped my knife with the blade reversed and ran toward the commotion.


    By the time I had reached the end of the hallway, the shooting had stopped. I looked toward the first soldier I had seen. He was face down, slumped against the cracked wall. He''d been splattered against the concrete, blood everywhere. Beyond the corner of the wall, I found more soldiers in similar states, all of them bloody messes, but with no gashes, cuts, or lacerations anywhere.


    "Watts? Are you here?" I called out.


    Silence, so I continued onward with caution.


    Watts was like a butler but also somewhat of a mentor. He trained Shugr in arma, firearms, hand-to-hand combat, and military strategy and tactics. Despite Shugr''s childish demeanor, he was a force to be reckoned with, which spoke volumes of his teacher. It was apparent from the stacking body count that Watts could handle himself and was more than enough backup with Shugr being absent. The evidence toward his credibility in combat even made me wonder why Rain felt confident at all about containing or killing him. As far as I could tell, once Watts decided someone was an enemy, run.


    "Hrrrgh!"


    As I turned the next corner, I was violently hurled back onto the floor. My head skipped off the stone, rattling my brain off the walls of my inner skull. By the time I opened my eyes, a girl was leaning over me, straddling me with her legs and sitting on my chest. I felt something cold against my forehead.


    A gun? No.


    I glanced up to find her holding a nail gun, finger on the trigger with a friendly smile on her face.


    "Hi! What''s your name?"


    "Uh–Why are you–"


    She pressed the barrel of the nail gun into my skin and frowned.


    "No. Your name," she scolded.


    "Sy–Sylas," I stammered.


    Her smile returned, and she relieved the pressure of the barrel.


    "That''s a dumb name!" she giggled. "Nice to meet you! I''m Cythe! It''s pronounced like a scythe, but it isn''t scythe! It''s Cythe! So don''t get it wrong!"


    What the hell was wrong with this girl? How could she insult my name while hers required an explanation? Cythe, like a scythe, but Cythe. Repeating this over in my head made me question if I had ever pronounced that word correctly in the first place.


    Cythe continued looking over me, staring with eyes that looked lifeless and manic at the same time. She tapped her fingers restlessly on the side of the metal tool, humming softly to herself. Her hair was seafoam green, tucked beneath a bowler hat. Her wavy bangs framed her round and dainty face, and her bright pink eyes glowed in the dimly lit hall.


    Cythe was a Cambion; she had to be. But, what was she doing down here? Was she working with Rain, or was she locked up here as part of their new program?


    "So, what''s up?" I asked, trying to insinuate the oddity of our sitting arrangement. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    She must''ve been daydreaming because my question seemed to startle her.


    "Oh! Sorry, I got lost in my head. What''s up? Not much, just hanging out. You?" she replied. Cythe was peppy, always bopping between her words with an erratic flow.


    "Well, Cythe," I started, "I was looking for someone before you decided to sit on me."


    "Are you asking me to get off?"


    "That''s kind of what I was getting at."


    "Ohhhhh," she exclaimed, "I get it."


    She hopped up quickly, separating herself from me by way of a back handspring without ever dropping the nail gun. I knocked the dust off of myself and leaned up.


    "Get what?" I asked.


    She stared at me, head cocked to the side. "You like men, right?"


    "What? No, that''s not what I meant—"


    "It''s okay if you do," she interrupted.


    "I know that, but what I meant was—"


    "Especially since you''re a Cambion," she interrupted again, "the bigots would prefer if we don''t reproduce."


    How did she know I was a Cambion so quickly?  Regardless, I''d become sidetracked by this ecstatic, flipping anomaly. I needed to continue searching for Watts and Eclaire. I stood up and finished knocking the dirt from my pants, only now noticing just how much dried blood I had caked on me. Though, Cythe either didn''t see or didn''t care, neither of which was comforting.


    "It was nice meeting you, Cythe, but I need to—"


    "You looking for that old guy?" she interrupted.


    I got excited for a moment, "Yes! have you seen him!"


    "Sure," she shrugged, "he''s with my boss. I can bring you to them."


    Boss. I wondered what implications that had. Was he a government boss? Or was he more of an underground leader, the same as we''d had when breaking out years ago?


    "That''d be fan—"


    Whizz!


    Cythe raised the gun and fired a single nail into my shoulder, fast enough where I couldn''t react. It stung, not as much as a bullet, but a much sharper pain. I tried to recoil, but my body didn''t move. All I could do was stare at the mysterious girl in front of me. As I did, I saw a stream of neon pink lines crawling up the left side of her body. They extended from her lowcut shirt to her exposed upper chest and neck and stopped beneath her eye.


    It was a subtle crown that could be mistaken for a vibrantly colored tattoo in the daylight. But, in this underground tunnel, they glowed brightly like a casino sign. Cythe held her malicious smile as if she''d caught something that had been running from her. I tried to make my body move to inspect the wound, but it wouldn''t. However, it wasn''t like something kept me from moving; I just felt as if my body wasn''t there.


    "Your body is heavier than it looks!" Cythe exclaimed, "you must have some muscles beneath that big coat!"


    She raised her empty hand and waved at me, and I waved back. It wasn''t until then that I noticed the thin stream of red from my shoulder to the nail gun, like an invisible thread that someone had spilled blood on. Was I being controlled? It sure seemed so because when she put her hand back down, I did as well.


    "Don''t worry!" she giggled, "I''m not going to hurt you anymore! This is just safer for me, is all!"


    Cythe cut the string from the nail gun then pulled the other end from my shoulder. It drifted whimsically to the ground as she approached me.


    "Now that my blood is inside you, I don''t have to worry about getting backstabbed!"


    "Your blood is where?"


    Cythe grinned and dug her fingers into the wound on my shoulder.


    "Ow! Cythe, what the hell!" I shouted as she pulled the nail from my skin and licked the blood off of it.


    "I''m not wasteful. I always get my nails back!"


    Great, a psychotic sadist with an affinity for blood and hardware tools. That was probably the number one personality combination that I''d choose to have control over my body. Cythe slung the nail gun at her hip with a long leather lanyard and slipped the nail back into the clip. She fixed her skirt and top meticulously, straightening out the creases as best she could, before doing the same to me.


    "Cythe, you really don''t need to—"


    She slapped a bloody finger over my lips to quiet me, then continued cleaning the grime off me with a small handkerchief.


    "Disgusting. I can''t walk with someone so filthy. I just know Basil will scold me severely. She''ll think I''m some gold digger, just sleeping with you for your money!" She barked.


    "I don''t even have that kind of money, and we aren''t sleeping together!" I responded.


    Cythe stopped cleaning for a moment to get within a centimeter of my face, scowling with a glare that made me shudder.


    "I suppose," she whispered before walking away. As expected, my body followed in her stride against my will.


    Cythe led me through parts of the facility I was unfamiliar with, service tunnels that I had never had the chance to explore when I was a prisoner.


    "Where are you taking me?"


    Talking was the only thing I seemed to be able to do. My body moved robotically without my help, mirroring my bubbly captor.


    "To see Heathcliff!" she sang back to me.


    I didn''t continue asking, assuming I''d continue to get vaguely informative songs in response. Instead, I resigned to my circumstances and studied the information I had before me. I wasn''t sure what allegiance Cythe had, if any. I figured Heathcliff must be her superior, but I couldn''t be sure what part of the government they belonged to. Would the police employ someone like Cythe? Would they let someone so obviously sadistic into their ranks? I guess they let Rain in. Hell, they made him a lieutenant after all.


    What else did I know? Cythe''s arma let her manipulate people through blood. More specifically, by injecting her blood into the victim. To do that, she used nails wrapped in a thin string lace, fired from a nail gun. There was blood on the thread. Maybe her arma wasn''t manipulating others. Perhaps her ability involved controlling her own blood. That explained why she required an injection point.


    "So, you have some kind of haemokinesis? Am I right?"


    Cythe paused her humming for the first time, stopping herself and me before turning around. She studied me from a meter away, seemingly keeping a conscious distance from me. Her caution was strange, considering I was her puppet currently. Perhaps I was spot on with my guess about how her arma worked. Many Cambions made it a goal to keep the specifications of their arma a secret from others.


    "No more talking till we get to Heathcliff." She made me nod, then we continued.


    By the time we reached the boiler room at the end of the service tunnel, I could feel the effects of Cythe''s puppetry wearing off. It''d been less than 15 minutes, but the control duration was likely proportional to the victim''s size and the amount of blood she injected. Cythe paused before opening the door to the boiler room.


    "Now listen," she began, "you need to be respectful to mister Heathcliff. We''re giving you and your people a chance here."


    "Giving us a chance? What does that mean?"


    Cythe swung the door open without answering and forced me to walk in with her.


    "Ah! Master Sylas!" Watts shouted as we entered.


    Watts was bloody, but it didn''t seem to be his own. He sat on a crate across from a man in a long olive coat, draped with golden accents and tassels, as well as military accolades on the breast pocket. Though I hadn''t recognized the name, I knew who it was as soon as I saw his face.


    Heathcliff had sharp and pressing orange eyes and jet black hair swept back into a messy combination of a bun and ponytail. He was unshaven, sporting the rough beard of a war veteran. Beneath his olive duster was a shabby button-down shirt, loosely tucked into an old leather belt. It was supposed to be white, but age and use had darkened it. His slacks were mismatched from his outfit, colored a brown plaid that only matched his chestnut boots. I''d seen him before when the Royal family was on television or at sparsely held parades; he was always close at the side of the ruler of Concordia.


    Heathcliff: The impenetrable bulwark, guardian of the Royal family.