Chapter 46

Ode’s feigned obedience lasted only until Cavendish’s figure vanished around the corner of the corridor. Then it fell apart completely.

He quickly crouched by the bloodstain, scraping off a sample before dialing Eva. “Remember when I mentioned spotting a burly guy outside Dreamcatcher Town who looked like a great white shark—like he was spying on the place?”

【You saw him again?】 On the other end of the line, the lazy strains of blues music cut off with a sharp smack from Eva. Hurried footsteps followed, along with the sound of a door being pounded. 【Faust! Faust, come listen to this. Ode says he might’ve found something about that secret society you’re chasing—the one using the Great White Shark as its symbol.】

“Wait, secret society?” Ode set down his sampling vial in surprise. “Faust never mentioned that to me—oh, probably because I’ve been fooling around down by the docks… All right, if there’s really a secret society like that, then a lot of pieces start falling into place.”

Faust’s voice joined the call, laced with bewilderment. 【Why do I get the feeling you’re just one thing after another, kid?】

【I just dropped you off at the cemetery to pay your respects, and next thing I know, you’re saying there’s trouble with our Soviet Branch brothers. Now you’re running into that secret society we’ve been chasing for over two weeks without a single lead? Good lord, you run into more action on vacation than we do on the job.】

“…” Ode stared blankly, thinking this didn’t sound like great news either. “Listen, I’m at a place called Reid Sanatorium investigating a case. I just ran into a burly guy who can shapeshift into a flying great white shark. He was about to kill my target. I tried interrogating him about who sent him, but all he managed was ‘deep’ before he exploded into mincemeat. I’m pretty sure now he’s a hitman from the secret society, sent to silence someone.”

【Deep…】 Eva murmured. 【Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell you—the society’s name?】

【All right,】 Faust summed up. 【So now we know there’s an ancient secret society operating under London, with members probably from high society.】

【They send spotters to watch Dreamcatcher Town; they’ll hire the Black Brotherhood to threaten the prime minister over his arms control summit; they’ll dispatch assassins to Reid Sanatorium to shut people up…】

【Is your target still alive, Ode? If he is, maybe we can get the name of that secret society from him—what he did to make them want him dead.】

Ode glanced up at Cavendish, who had returned to the sickroom. “I’m just about to find out.”

“Can you guys look into this Reid for me? Check where that statue by his side ended up when he turned himself in. From my limited experience with horror flicks, I’m betting that statue’s the vagrant he claimed to have killed—but who mysteriously vanished.”

What was a vacation? Only overtime was real and eternal.

The agents sighed in resignation and hung up.

Ode pocketed his phone and stepped away from the bed, watching as Cavendish shrugged off his suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A lean, sharp forearm emerged from the usually concealed fabric, bulging veins snaking up into the sleeve.

“…” Ode arched a brow, swallowing the quip on the tip of his tongue about needing to be so meticulous just to give a shot. Instead, he admired the way those hands—knuckles prominent and strong—loosely gripped the comparatively dainty syringe. The pad of Cavendish’s thumb pressed lightly against the plunger, forcing air and a droplet of medicine from the needle. “You know if this guy croaks here, I’ll turn right around and head to that soiree, right?”

Cavendish slowly pushed the medicine into Reid’s vein. “You know even though I can’t hurt you, I can still pin you to this bed and have my way, right?”

“Whoa.” Ode sucked in a breath, clucking his tongue. “Since when did the Duke’s speech turn so crude?”

“Life made me this way. Otherwise, how’s a blind man like me supposed to defend himself when everyone’s threatening and bullying him left and right?” Cavendish fastidiously sidestepped the blood smeared on the bedframe’s foot—though no one could explain how a blind man knew it was there. “He’s waking up.”

On the bed, the skeletal Reid slowly opened his eyes, staring vacantly at the ceiling.

He didn’t seem to care that two newcomers had appeared in his room, bringing the stench of blood with them. His cracked lips muttered on: “Praise be to You… Praise be to You…”

“Praise to whom?” Ode nudged Cavendish aside, smearing blood all over the other’s vest in the process.

“…” Cavendish glanced down at yet another ruined garment courtesy of Ode, rubbing his temple in exasperation. He wanted to snap, but being treated like a cherished possession had its appeals. On the other hand, he wasn’t thrilled about Ode constantly ruining his clothes—not that he cared about the expense; he just had OCD about it.

Ode, who had been watching Cavendish intently ever since the man’s inexplicable outburst earlier, caught the gesture. But he leaned down first to press Reid. “Who are you praising?”

“…Ah.” Reid stared dumbly at the man now looming over him, locking eyes with those emerald-green orbs.

In the next instant, he bolted upright from the bed! Barefoot and mad, he scrambled to the door and pounded on it frantically. Glancing back, his face twisted in horror. “Don’t kill me… Don’t, don’t…!”

“? That’s a new reaction.” Ode touched his face, wondering if he had missed some blood and scared the man. He started to pat Cavendish’s lower back to signal him to give questioning a try, but Reid dropped to his knees with a thud!

“Forgive me… Forgive me…” Reid trembled neurotically, kowtowing and pressing his palms together at Ode in a frenzy of religious gestures. “Praise be to You… Praise be to You…”

“?” Ode was starting to feel like he was losing years off his life from all this worship. “What, do I look like some god or something?”

Before the absurd guess could fully form, Reid jolted again. This time, the blood pooled on the floor seemed to terrify him; he banged his head even harder, his eyes fixed on the crimson stain.

“Hm?” Ode followed Reid’s gaze, forming a hypothesis.

He yanked the blanket from the bed and spread it over the blood, wiping it clean before pulling it away. Sure enough, Reid sagged in relief, gasping for air, his wide eyes locked on the now-dull red floor that no longer gleamed.

“He’s not afraid of me—he’s afraid of seeing himself in my eyes…” Ode mused. He pulled out his phone, recorded a video of Reid’s dazed muttering of “Praise be to You,” and sent it to Eva, adding that further interrogation would need her help.

Eva replied almost immediately: 【Send him to my lab—】

Suddenly, a broad, powerful hand seized Ode’s right wrist—phone and all.

“What’re you doing? Quit it.” Ode tried to tug the phone free with his left hand, but Cavendish clamped down on that wrist too. “…What? I don’t think I said anything threatening to the disabled just now, did I?”

“Tonight, you’re not going anywhere else. Anywhere.” Cavendish pressed in close, trapping Ode against the bed’s edge. Ode had to lean back slightly, his core muscles tensing.

The bloodstains, the ruined clothes—all of it faded into irrelevance.

Through the layers of his prim, restrained suit, Cavendish’s chest pressed firmly against Ode’s. With every breath, Ode felt like he might be crushed, gasping for air.

He tried to lever Cavendish off with his leg, but his knees were forced apart instead. “What the hell’s gotten into you—unless that cute Soviet boy from earlier is going too—ha.”

Cavendish abruptly hiked his knee up, cutting Ode off mid-sentence.

Ode’s earlobes flushed. He raised a hand to shove the man away, but his wrists were still gripped tight. “—God, I see you handicapped types don’t take any shit. You’ve got a real talent for manhandling, though.”

Cavendish didn’t budge, staring him down with that jaw-clenching irritation again. “Tell your colleagues you’ll be staying at my place tonight. Or I’ll tell them myself.”

“…” Ode tilted his head up with a smile, meeting his gaze. “You know I don’t like being forced into things.”

Cavendish leaned in another inch. “This is what you owe me… You promised you’d let me be your serpent, that you’d protect me before the gods. But what did you actually do? You ditched me without a word for some blond you just met. Twenty-one years… I’ve been searching for you for twenty-one years, and you show up hand-in-hand with that thing, come to kill me.”

“Uh… I’m not taking responsibility for shit I didn’t do.” Ode smirked. “Besides, by your logic, there’s gotta be some timeline where you betray me and I don’t ditch you, right? How does that balance the scales with the future you saw?”

“No such future exists.” Cavendish drew even closer; with each word, his upper lip brushed lightly against Ode’s. “The moment you appeared, all my futures converged into one. My future is chasing you. Unless you abandon me, our fates are entwined—until death.”

“…” Ode fell silent. After a moment, he leaned back a fraction more, creating some distance. “Don’t you think that’s a heavy fate? Come on, you’re just hung up on me because my situation’s unique—you’ve never encountered it before, so you’re hell-bent on hanging yourself from this crooked tree. But imagine if there were hundreds, thousands like me—”

“You know it’s different.” Cavendish fixed his gaze on him—even if he could never truly see the being who exhausted every one of his futures. “Isn’t The Little Prince your favorite book? Doesn’t it have the answer?”

This was hardly the place for reciting fairy tales: a dingy, cramped sickroom in a cash-strapped asylum, reeking of blood, with a lunatic muttering in the corner. Yet Cavendish’s voice rose, low and measured:

“‘My rose, a passerby would think she looks just like you. But she alone is more important than all of you, because it is she that I have watered. Because it is she that I have shut up under the glass globe. Because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen. Because it is she whose mosquitoes I have killed (leaving one or two for the butterflies). Because it is she I have listened to when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.'”

Ode’s breathing quickened slightly. “We’re not the Little Prince and his rose. We’re enemies, Cavendish. This road ends with at least one of us dead—”

“Isn’t the Little Prince sent back to his beloved by a snake?” Cavendish rested his forehead against Ode’s. “If you truly believe the body is a heavy burden and the soul can rise light and free, then why can’t death be what carries us back to our loved ones?”

His lips pressed against Ode’s, the touch warm yet cool and soft. His voice came out hoarse and gentle, like coaxing temptation or a plea to stay. “Tame me… just like the Little Prince and the fox in the wheat field.”

In a low murmur, he recited: “‘My life is very monotonous. I catch chickens, and men catch me. All the chickens are the same, and all the men are the same. And so I get a little tired of it. But if you tame me, my life will suddenly fill with sunlit joys. I shall know the sound of footsteps different from all the rest. Other footsteps make me run to ground. Yours will call me out from my burrow like music. And besides, look at the wheat fields over there. The wheat fields mean nothing to me, since wheat doesn’t grow on my planet. But you have golden hair. So it will be a lovely thing if you tame me. The grain, which is golden, will bring me back memories of you. And I will love the sound of the wind in the wheat…’”

The hospital room fell quiet for a moment before Ode’s voice rose softly. “The Little Prince is just a fairy tale written by some author. Cut it out. Give me back my phone. Fine, I won’t head back to base tonight, happy now?”

Cavendish’s expression made it clear that wouldn’t cut it, but he still grudgingly handed the phone back to Ode.

Ode let out a short breath of relief and went back to scrolling through Eva’s reply: 【Take me to the lab. Also, we found the self-sculpted statue.】

【Your hunch was probably right. On a material level, it’s just an ordinary plaster statue, but I detected traces of anomalous power lingering on it.】

【Faust thinks it’s a warning—you get the idea. Turning a living homeless guy into a plaster statue right in front of Reid, with the statue bearing Reid’s own face… that’s way more intimidating than any threat letter. Maybe that’s what drove Reid insane.】

Ode: “…” These days, even running a cult came with all the bells and whistles.

Ode had to admit, diving back into work felt like a weight off his shoulders. He really hated dealing with emotional entanglements—casual flings were so much simpler: 【Any chance of saving that plaster statue?】

【I can try.】

Eva’s reply was straightforward. Ode waited half a minute. “?”

What the hell? Eva wasn’t jumping at the chance to squeeze 2000cc of blood out of him?

He couldn’t help sending another message: 【What are you up to right now?】

【Eva: Paying respects at the graves.】

—GORCC South Pacific Logistics Base, Cemetery Area.

It was deep into the night, the fields around utterly deserted. Eva still wore her floral sundress from the beach getaway, clutching a bunch of freshly picked wild chrysanthemums as she stood before row after row of tombstones, gazing at the black-and-white faces etched on them.

Hurried footsteps approached from the edge of the cemetery. Soon, her lover Abel arrived, wrapped in a white lab coat. The sea wind made him cough repeatedly, his slender frame looking even more fragile beneath the oversized garment.

“I thought you called me here because you’d hit a breakthrough on the experiment. Turns out you’re just grave-sweeping again?”

“Just stopping by.” Eva’s pale golden curls lifted in the moonlight breeze. “You know I still dream about that day… Seven team members set out with me, and only one made it back to base. Even him, I couldn’t cure of his wasting illness.”

“At least I’m still alive.” Abel frowned. “Eva, we’ve talked about this a dozen times. You were the team lead back then, but we chose to follow you into the fray. That was our battlefield, and we chose to fight, prepared for the worst. Look at these graves… Which of these warriors wasn’t ready for that?”

“Yeah…” Eva’s gaze lingered on each tombstone as she murmured softly, “Only the gods know how futile our stand was against an overwhelming foe. Only the enemy truly grasps the gulf in our strengths. Every day… more warriors die…”

She shook her head, cutting herself off, and turned to Abel with renewed focus. “I did find a breakthrough on the experiment. I located Khirra.”

“For the next two weeks, I won’t be able to show my face. I need you to impersonate me at the lab. The ground-level church duties are light anyway—just send an illusion to hold the fort.”

“Watch out for Faust and Ode—especially Ode. I think he’s already suspicious about why I’m not rushing to draw his blood…”

Meanwhile, outside Reid Sanatorium.

Ode had just been mulling over “What’s gotten into Eva all of a sudden?” and “If I’m not heading back to base tonight, how do I get this guy home?” when a streak of golden light flashed at the end of the road. A GORCC medical armored vehicle emerged from an alchemy array.

Several well-trained medics leaped from the vehicle the instant it stopped. Two of them lifted Reid onto a stretcher while a third approached Ode with an empty blood canister and snapped a salute.

“…” Ode’s eyes locked onto the empty canister. After a few stunned seconds, he looked up. “Didn’t Eva say to bring him back to the lab myself…?”

“Yes, sir, but the chief just called again. She forgot to mention something important, so it’s more humane if we handle transport from the lab side.”

The medic flashed eight dazzling white teeth at Ode and shook the empty canister. “6000cc—but don’t worry, we brought emergency blood boosters.”

Ode: “…”

Ode: “…Sorry, how much did you say?”

The flicker of suspicion in his mind tumbled away like so many marbles. Ode stared in disbelief. “She knows I’m not some prime blood cow, right?”

“Or you can do it in smaller doses over time.” The medic tucked the canister away like a magician and pulled out a long string of empty blood bags. “Just 400cc per session, every four weeks. With the boosters—buddy, trust me, you’ll bulk up like a proper blood cow.”

Without giving Ode a chance to refuse, the medic shoved the armful of blood bags into his hands, hopped back into the vehicle, and sped off. Ode stood there, dumbfounded. “So she really is treating me like her personal blood cow? Hey!!”

That day, Ode was once again stunned by Eva’s audacity. It wasn’t until the Daimler DE27 pulled up at Cavendish Manor’s gates—where the blind man gallantly opened the door for the able-bodied one—that he snapped back to reality. “Let’s get this straight: I need to get blood drawn, so whatever you’re thinking tonight? Not happening.”

The bodyguards and old butler who’d been piling out slid back in perfect unison, retreating a good distance away, as if “avoid at all costs” were tattooed on their foreheads.

“…” Cavendish cleared his throat earnestly. “I’m actually pretty ascetic. Can you not make me sound like a sex addict?”

“Really?” Ode paused halfway out of the car and shot him a sideways glance. “Deep One outpost, cruise ship, ghost ship, sanatorium… Seems like your horny spots are pretty versatile. Where’s this ‘ascetic’ vibe showing up?”

“…” Cavendish rested a hand on the car roof and said calmly, “You know, this car’s starting to grow on me…”

Ode slipped smoothly out of the vehicle and strode into the manor. He’d just headed for the master bedroom from last time when Cavendish caught up and gently blocked him. “Your room tonight is this way.”

Ode glanced at the first-floor guest room Cavendish indicated, then at the row of doors upstairs. “What’s this? Demoting me from bed-warming duties already? No master suite, fine—at least bump me to a second-floor guest room?”

Cavendish opened the door with a slight arch of his brow. “Step inside and take a look. You might change your mind.”

“?” Ode wandered in and immediately spotted bookshelves lining nearly every wall. Each one groaned under ancient tomes, journals, stacks of geomantic charts on the floor, and hefty volumes bound with beast bones. “All of this… about Druids?”

“I can guarantee you won’t find this room’s Druid materials anywhere else.” So spoke the omniscient god.

Ode shot Cavendish a sidelong look, suppressing his excitement. “Or you could just give me a straight answer—why does a Druid descendant like me turn into a mermaid when I cast the Wandering Fish Incantation?”

“And how would I keep you here at the manor that way?” Cavendish took a natural half-step closer to Ode, then remembered his earlier claim of asceticism. He froze for a few seconds, gritted his teeth inwardly, and stepped back. “The small door to the left leads to the en-suite bath. Get some rest.”

The manor’s master stalked off, radiating pent-up frustration. Ode leaned smugly against the doorframe, arms crossed, and whistled at Cavendish’s stubbornly retreating back. “Not coming in? I thought your injection skills on patients were pretty solid today… Want to lend a hand with mine?”