So much pain.
Not the sharp, clean pain of a needle. Not the dull ache of a hangover after finals week.
This was wet.
Gurgling.
A hole where there shouldn't be one, and liquid bubbling through it every time he tried to breathe. Kael Vance tried to scream.
What came out was a bubble. Thick, pink, obscene. It burst against his chin and dribbled down his neck. Warm. Too warm.
His eyes wouldn't open. They felt glued shut by something crusty and foul. He tried to lift his hand to rub them.
The hand twitched.That was all. Heavy.
Like it belonged to someone else. (Because it did. He didn't know that yet. But some part of him, the part that read web novels under the covers while his roommate snored, already suspected.)
The smell hit him next. Copper. Iron. That particular stink of a penny jar left to rot in a damp cellar. And underneath it, something clinical. Ether. Lye soap.
The sourness of old linen stored in a cedar chest too long.He managed to crack one eye open.Crimson.Not the color of blood, though there was plenty of that.
The light itself was crimson. It filtered through a tall window to his left, casting long bars across a ceiling he didn't recognize. Stamped tin tiles. Patterns of roses and serpents intertwined.
The kind of ceiling you'd find in a government building, or a hospital, or a very expensive coffin.He turned his head. The movement tore something in his neck.Fresh blood spattered onto the floorboards.
Dark wood. Oak, maybe. The sort of floor that servants polished with beeswax every Tuesday, then got down on their knees to buff with lambswool until it shone like a mirror.
Kael tried to sit up. His body refused. Instead, he lay half-propped against what felt like a leather chaise lounge, staring down at himself.A white shirt.
Or it had been white.
Now the collar was a saturated mess of red and brown. A cravat, undone, hanging like a noose. A waistcoat with pearl buttons. (Pearl buttons. Who wore pearl buttons to die?)
His hands. Long fingers. Callused at the tips in a way his own gamer hands had never been. These were surgeon's hands. Hands that had held scalpels and sutures and—Kael reached up.
Slowly.
His fingers found his throat.The wound was ragged. Not clean. Not professional.
Whoever had cut this throat had hesitated. Or regretted it.
The gash ran from below the left ear to the Adam's apple, shallow at the ends, deep in the middle. He could feel tissue knitting underneath his touch. Flesh regenerating in a way that defied everything he knew about biology from his pre-med electives.
That was when he noticed the journal.It lay open on a desk three feet away. A heavy thing, bound in leather the color of a scab. The pages were thick, creamy, expensive.
The handwriting on the open page was cramped. Desperate. The ink had smudged in places, as if written while crying, or while blood was already flowing.Kael couldn't read it from here. The letters swam. But he caught one phrase.
The last phrase."...my patient wears the crown."
He didn't understand it. Not yet. But the words sat in his stomach like a cold stone.He tried to stand again. This time, his legs obeyed, though they shook. He was taller than he remembered.
Silas Veyne had been tall. Six foot one, maybe. Thin. The kind of thin that came from skipping meals to attend patients, not from exercise.
The mirror on the opposite wall confirmed it.The face staring back was not his. Kael had been twenty-two, soft around the jaw, with acne scars on his left cheek and hair that never stayed combed.
This face was older. Thirty-five, perhaps. Sharp cheekbones. A nose that had been broken and set poorly by someone who didn't care about aesthetics. Gray eyes, the color of winter mornings, sunken deep beneath dark brows. And the throat.
The terrible, gaping throat, already closing like a flower blooming in reverse.Kael touched the mirror. The glass was cold. Real."Okay," he whispered. His voice was wrong. Deeper. Raspy from the wound. "Okay. This is fine. This is completely fine."
It was not fine.He was in someone else's body. In a room that smelled of blood and money. With a crimson sky outside and a journal open to a page that spoke of patients and crowns.
Kael looked down at his hands again. The right hand held something. He hadn't noticed before. A scalpel. Small. Precision-made. The blade was clean, but the handle was sticky.
He dropped it. It clattered against the oak.From somewhere below, a bell rang. The sound of a clinic opening. Of patients waiting in chairs that cost more than his old monthly rent.
Of a life that expected to continue as normal, even though the man who had lived it had tried to end everything.
Kael Vance looked at the dead man's face in the mirror."Silas," he said, trying the name out.
It felt like swallowing glass. "Dr. Silas Veyne. What the hell did you do?"The wound on his throat pulsed.
As if answering.Outside, the aurora scars in the sky flickered.
Once. Twice.Then the screaming started downstairs.