Read Chapter 10: The Blood on the Floor

The blood had stopped dripping by the time Claire kicked my door open at dawn, but the wound hadn’t dried. It glistened, wet and wrong, the perfect ring around my wrist now swollen into a raised, angry welt that pulsed with something that wasn’t mine.

“Jesus, Julien.” She dropped her bag, crossed the room, and grabbed my arm before I could pull away. “This isn’t a scratch. This is— what the hell did you put on this?”

“Nothing.” My voice came out cracked. I’d been awake all night, watching the white chalk mark on my father’s watch shift imperceptibly, as if the path were being redrawn in real time. “It just did that.”

Claire’s jaw tightened. She pressed two fingers to the wound, and I hissed. The skin around it was hot enough to burn, mottled green-black under the light, and a faint, sweet smell rose off it—like rotting flowers in a church that’s been sealed too long.

“We’re going to see a friend of mine.” She grabbed my jacket off the chair and threw it at me. “Now. Before this gets into your bloodstream, assuming it hasn’t already.”

I didn’t argue. The whispers had quieted to a low hum at the edge of my hearing, but they were still there, watching, waiting. And for the first time since this started, I couldn’t tell if they were the ones talking or if the fever was starting to impair my judgment.

Claire drove a tiny Peugeot that smelled like stale cigarettes and cheap perfume. She drove fast, one hand on the wheel, the other pulling her phone out every thirty seconds to check directions. The scratch throbbed against the seatbelt. I tried to focus on the streets sliding past—Montparnasse, then the outer arrondissements, then a neighborhood I didn’t recognize, full of shuttered bakeries and laundry lines strung between buildings like spiderwebs.

“Who’s the doctor?” I asked.

“Not a doctor. An old colleague from my research days. He owes me.”

“What kind of research?”

She glanced at me, and in that glance I saw something hard and old. “Paleobotany. He’s the only person I know who won’t ask questions and won’t call the police.”

The building was a former print shop, the ground floor converted into a cramped studio apartment that smelled of ethanol and damp soil. The man who opened the door was in his sixties, bald, with thick glasses and hands permanently stained dark green. He took one look at my wrist and didn’t ask how it happened. He just beckoned us inside.

He laid my arm flat on a steel tray under a magnifying lamp. The light was brutal. I could see the texture of the wound now—not torn flesh, but something layered, like lichen growing over a rock. The green-black tinge wasn’t a bruise. It was alive.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, his voice low and clinical.

“Underground,” I said. That was true enough.

He was silent for a long moment, peering through the lens. Then he straightened and removed his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“This is a freshwater algae,” he said. “Specifically, a species I’ve only ever seen in one place.”

Claire’s face went pale. “Don’t.”

“Catacombs,” the man said flatly. “But not the ossuary chambers the tourists visit. This is a variety that grows in full darkness, on bone. It feeds on calcium. That’s what it’s doing to you now—it’s eating through your connective tissue, using your body as a substrate. If it reaches the bone, it will start to colonize.”

I pulled my arm back. “Colonize?”

“Like a reef,” he said, without apology. “Have you heard of bone eaters, Moreau? The kind that take root in the living?”

The room felt suddenly very small. Claire was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read—somewhere between fear and calculation.

“Can you cut it out?” I asked.

“No. It’s already beneath the skin. Antibiotics won’t touch it, and mechanical removal would take the tendons with it.” He paused. “I can slow it down. A fungal treatment, maybe—something aggressive. But I’d be lying if I said I could stop it.”

He gave Claire a bottle of something dark and viscous, with instructions in a language I didn’t recognize. She paid him in cash, and I watched the bills leave her wallet with a sharp pang of guilt. By the time we were back in the car, my account was even lighter, and I was no closer to Victor’s deadline.

The algae had gone quiet. For a moment, I thought the treatment was working. But as Claire pulled out of the narrow street and merged onto the boulevard, I saw the scrape had turned a deeper shade of black, and the whispers rose again—not through my ears this time, but through the wound itself, a cold vibration traveling up my arm into my skull.

*They’re counting the days,* someone whispered. *They’re counting your heartbeats.*

“You hear that?” I asked.

Claire looked at me sharply. “Hear what?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

She didn’t believe me, but she didn’t push. Traffic was thick near the port, and she was forced to slow to a crawl. And that’s when I saw him.

A man standing on the corner, half-hidden behind a stack of crates. He was wearing a long coat despite the heat, and his face was partially shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat. But I recognized the set of his shoulders, the way he stood too still, watching us with an intensity that felt like a physical weight.

The same man who had slipped the letter under my door, warning me to stop digging.

He realized he’d been spotted. He turned and began walking away, fast but not running, weaving through the pedestrian crowd.

“Stop the car,” I said.

“What? No—you’re in no state to—“ Claire started, but I already had the door open. The Peugeot was barely moving, and I hit the pavement in a stumbling run, the wound in my wrist tearing open again as the algae reacted to the motion.

“Julien!” Claire shouted behind me.

I didn’t stop. The man was quick, but I knew these streets—had explored them above ground and below. I cut through an alley, vaulted a low fence, and emerged directly in his path.

He froze. Up close, his face was wrong. Not scarred, not features arranged badly, but somehow smoothed, as if someone had taken an eraser to the details and left only the general shape of a man. His eyes were pale, almost colorless.

“You left the note,” I said, breathing hard. “You knew about my father. You knew about the door. Tell me who you work for.”

He opened his mouth. For a moment, what came out was no sound at all—just a puff of air, like a lung deflating. Then he whispered a single word:

“Élodie.”

And he crumpled.

I caught him before he hit the ground, lowering him to the cobblestones. His body was limp, his face slack. I pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse. There was none.

A small crowd had begun to gather. Someone was shouting for an ambulance. Claire arrived at a sprint, skidding to a halt beside me, her eyes wide.

“Is he—?”

“Heart attack,” I said, though I didn’t know how I knew. I could still feel the cold vibration in my wound, the residual echo of a power that had reached inside the man and stopped him mid-breath. “He’s dead.”

“What did he say?” Claire whispered.

“He said ‘Élodie.’” I looked up at her. “He said the name of the woman who was watching my father die. And then something killed him.”

Claire’s face went white. She looked down at the corpse, then at my bleeding wrist, then at the crowd gathering around us like a tightening ring.

“Julien,” she said slowly, her voice unnaturally calm. “Whatever you’re carrying—it’s not just tracking you. It’s killing anyone who gets close.”

I pulled my sleeve down over the wound, hiding it from view. But I could feel it still, the living thing beneath my skin, pulsing with something that felt an awful lot like hunger.

And high above us, somewhere in the maze beneath Paris, I could feel the door waiting.

It already knew I was coming.