Running with Rogues

CHAPTER 7 - TESCO

"See these?" Fion asked. "The lighter one is Cassie's blood. The darker one is mine."

"Human and shifter," I said.

She beamed at me. "Exactly! The question is — why the colour difference...?"

"I have the weirdest feeling you're about to tell me," I drawled, because her excitement was a teeny-tiny bit infectious.

"Tell you? No. Look down the microscope," she said.

I did look down the microscope. Fion helped me focus it until I could see a bunch of little red circles.

"Those are erythrocytes — red blood cells," she explained. "They're like taxis for oxygen. Do you see any white and purple blobs? They're bigger than the red ones..."

"One or two, maybe," I murmured.

"Leukocytes, or white blood cells, which fight off infection. And last but not least, the tiny little grey things around them are thrombocytes. Platelets. They do the clotting. Got all of that?"

"Nope," I sighed.

"Well, you got the gist, right?" Fion asked, and this time I shrugged. "Brilliant. That was human blood. This is shifter."

She swapped out the slides and helped me focus it again. Most of it looked the same, but there was a new type of blob. They were pitch black and about half the size of the red ones. I looked away from the microscope and blinked a few times.

Fion was waiting expectantly. "See those? They're like stem cells — they can become any other type of cell, as far as I can tell. What do you reckon they do?"

"Dunno," I said cheerfully.

"I'll show you, then," she said. She fetched a vial of black, gloopy fluid which reminded me of tar. "These are some of my black blood cells. It took me a few weeks to work out how to separate them."

First, she filled a syringe with some of the black liquid and injected it into the crook of her elbow. Then she took a scalpel and traced a line on her thumb, splitting an existing scar. Normally, a cut like that would take five minutes to heal. But even as I watched, the flesh knitted together and sealed itself, all in the span of about five seconds.

"Whoa," I breathed. "Can I try?"

"Not with my cells. It doesn't work — your antigens are different."

"Boo," I jeered, although I had absolutely no idea what that meant. "So the more of these things you've got, the faster you heal?"

She nodded. "Hence the Llewellyn family's fibre-optic healing. They have more black blood cells. It's genetic, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure it comes from the Shadowcats, but I'd need a blood sample to confirm that, and ... that's tricky."

Tricky because all the Shadowcats lived on Anglesey, and Anglesey wasn't very close. We'd visited a few times, since the Llewellyns had cousins there, but the packs had wised up to that and put a watch on the bridge. They had yet to visit us, and I didn't blame them, really — the north was a hellscape compared to Anglesey's quiet, cookie-cutter neighbourhood.

"I wanted to call them melanocytes, obviously," Fion sighed.

"Oh, obviously," I agreed, nodding vigorously. Bryn started sniggering from the armchair.

"But that's already a thing, so I had to settle with sanocytes, which means 'healing cells,'" she finished, scratching at the new pink scar on her thumb. "Cool as it is, there aren't many clinical implications yet. I can't store them for more than a few days. I need to work out if close relations can donate."