Following Hansen was surprisingly enjoyable.

  I had decided to stick with the smaller form, in case he decided to try and escape by running through some kind of tiny gap that a human/bug-person sized me wouldn’t be able to fit into. Just like the first time, I found the rhythm of moving on six legs rather satisfying, almost hypnotic if I let myself fall into it.

  This proved to be a good idea, because Hansen took me to a door with a flap in the bottom of it, which he nudged open and scuttle through without hesitation. After a moment of deliberation I followed him in, revealing a dark hallway.

  It was lit by lanterns filled with flickering teal flame, with grey wallpaper and ashen wood giving the corridor a strangely morose atmosphere. Out of curiosity I ducked back out again, swivelling to see that yes, the building was completely nondescript from the outside. Regular old brick, nothing special to be seen. There were even windows, although the curtains were drawn on each and every one of them.

  Ducking back through the flap in the door, I saw Hansen patiently waiting for me. He really was a polite little fellow, although my threat might have just gotten through to him. Either way, he was sat by a heavy looking door with another flap in the base, only going through when I scuttled over to him.

  After one last glance at the spooky hallway, I pushed through this door to find an equally spooky stairwell, which spiralled down into the gloom. It was lit by the same teal lanterns as the corridor, and on the far side of the stair was a mirroring set of stairs that were much smaller, clearly built for a creature approximately Hansen’s size.

  I took those ones, obviously.

  The stairs went on for a while. Not long enough to concern me about where I was being lead, but just long enough that I began wondering why it was taking so long to get to the bottom. Maybe being like a foot tall was confusing my sense of scale, I don’t know.

  In any case, after another door with a flap in it I found myself being lead into what looked rather a lot like a laboratory. I couldn’t help but mentally catalogue the differences between Matthais’ and this one, which I assumed to be Jenny’s.

  Where Matthais’ laboratory had been disorganised and kind of messy, Jenny’s was very much not that. There were a couple of specimens, much like Matthais had, but rather than out in the open they were all in cupboards. The room was lined with sets of drawers, each one labelled and lined up meticulously. There were even what looked like large pull-out draws built directly into one wall.

  It was also completely clean, at least to my untrained eye. Even if I gave Matthais a bit of an allowance for living in the literal sewers, which I wouldn’t, then Jenny’s lab was considerably cleaner. There was no dust, no scuffed stone and old fluids. Most importantly, there wasn’t a selection of literal corpses lining any walls. Not even one.

  Despite the differences, there were just as many similarities. The cold stone sterility and half-finished experiments set my teeth on edge. I pushed the discomfort down, though. Matthais was dead, and I had no reason to fear anything in this room.

  I reared up on my rear four legs to get a better look around, finally spying Jenny working in a far corner. She was dressed all in white now, as opposed to her black robes from before, and she also had on a thick pair of gloves.

  I watched as Hansen scampered over to her like a pet that had spotted its owner. He managed to climb the desk she was standing at and jump onto the table, doing a little dance routine that had her chuckling once she noticed he was there.

  She put down the… whatever it was she was holding and picked him up, giving him a good rub on the palm. Then she seemed to realise something and turned, spotting me in the corner and curling Hansen into her body protectively.

  “I see you, Bug Girl,” she called out. “I know what you did. Running down my precious boy like that. You should be ashamed.” Her voice dipped into the kind of pitch reserved for pets and children when she referred to Hansen. She really liked that hand.

  ‘You Wrote That Note,’ I wrote out to her, since I didn’t really feel like forming a voice box and human-like lungs right now.

  She shook her head. “Aha! So you did see the note. Where’s my money, huh?”

  ‘You Aren’t Getting Any Money. Why Send Hansen?’ I expelled a load of air from under my chitin, since this form got a lot more of it’s oxygen through a set of book lungs that were more efficient at this size. She was too far away to hear it though, so I scuttled closer to her and did it again.

  “What even are you right now?” She exclaimed. “Just… be normal, please. Talking to you like this is weird.”

  ‘Rude,’ I wrote, but I did as she asked. I reverted into my more bug-like form, which I still needed to name, but things had really gotten out of hand recently. Soon I stood in her laboratory, which now seemed a far more reasonable scale. Still very well put together though.

  “Why are you so neat here?” I asked, peering over her shoulder to see what she had been doing earlier. She had the tongue we’d found in Matthais’ lair on a table, cut open for some reason.

  “What, you don’t think I can be neat? Kind of a rude assumption,” she declared, stroking Hansen as he rolled around in her palm.

  I stared blankly at her, which was very easy to do when all of the muscles in your face were hidden under a chitin mask. Fun too, I got to see her get visibly uncomfortable. “Fine,” she sighed. “It’s my teacher’s place. He’s very uptight when it comes to neatness. Traditional too, if you couldn’t tell by the décor.”

  I rumbled in amusement, which got her to jolt and stare up at me. Her expression was worryingly similar to the first time she saw me shapeshift, which made me a little uncomfortable, but I did kind of break into her house so I let it slide.

  “You can purr!” She exclaimed, her voice going slightly squeaky. “Do it again!”

  I folded my arms and remained silent.

  “Come on… Do it! You know that you want to!” She urged.

  “I do not.”

  She huffed. “Fine. But I’m not telling you why I sent Hansen until you do it again.”

  That… actually got me. “Damn you,” I muttered. “It’s not a purr. I’m rumbling,” I tried to point out, but that explanation sounded weak even to me. That was two people in as many days.

  The moment I began the sound Jenny shoved her free hand at my chest, pressing it against the chitin. On instinct I leapt away, letting out a small hiss.

  She raised her hands, which caused Hansen to clutch onto the one he had been sat on for dear life. “Woah, okay. I get it, no touching.”

  I waited a moment before straightening up, removing the claws that had unknowingly appeared at the tips of my fingers. Even for me, that was an extreme reaction to touch. This place really had me on edge. “Sorry,” I murmured.

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  She waved a hand, placing Hansen onto her shoulder. “It’s fine. Just try not to freak out on me again.”

  We lapsed into an awkward silence for a moment, before Jenny broke the silence. “So… where’s Sparky?”

  “Sparky? Seriously?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Storm mage takes too long to say.”

  “She does have a name, you know. We all do,” I pointed out.

  Jenny just smirked and turned back to her desk. “Anyway, if she’s not here then you need to pay attention, because I can’t be bothered to explain this twice when she can be bothered to show up.”

  “Be bothered…? We got attacked by an assassin, I’ll have you know,” I protested.

  She turned back around. “Seriously? Huh. Okay, that’s the second point off the list then. How convenient. Anyway, you remember this?” She gestured to the tongue, so I moved over to the desk and peered over her shoulder, checking it was what I thought it was.

  “Yep. Vampire tongue, right?” I answered.

  “Correct. Now, you may be wondering what’s so important that I had to come and fetch you,” she proclaimed.

  “You didn’t, Hansen did.”

  “Well, it isn’t good,” she ignored me. “See here?” She directed my gaze to the underside of the tongue, where veins ran along the appendage. Specifically, there were two sets of bulges that were slightly discoloured, one set larger than the other.

  “This is where the venom is stored. The big ones produce and hold the stuff that makes it feel good. This stuff also had an anti-coagulant in them. These little ones though,” she continued. “These ones have the actual disease of vampirism in. Or at least, they have a whole load of stuff in, and that stuff transmits vampirism.”

  I leaned in. “They’re both empty,” I deduced.

  “Correct again,” she announced. “Which is bad. See, a vampire isn’t alive, so detaching part of it can’t exactly kill it. Sure, the vampire can’t use it anymore, but it still works, at least until the vampire is killed. Hearts still beat, bone marrow makes blood, glands,” she pointed at the tongue. “Still secrete hormones and other such substances.”

  This can’t be good.

  “There are only a few ways to stop this. First, as I mentioned, is killing the vampire. This kills their strain of the disease everywhere, because vampirism is part soul-plague. No soul, no energy. Second, you’ve got sunlight. Take this tongue and put it in the sun, it’ll react exactly like a full on vampire would. Except for the running away, at least. Hopefully,” she said with a smirk.

  “Finally, a skilled necromancer can sort of… redistribute the energy. It can be used elsewhere, essentially. The trick is that vampirism is a very stubborn thing, and it’s whole deal is keeping things the same. Same age, same body, same function. You can’t really use this energy for something it wasn’t already going to do,” she explained.

  I was beginning to see where this was going, and I didn’t like it at all. “So if this isn’t working, then either the vampire it came from is dead…”

  Jenny nodded grimly. “Or someone found a use for a bunch of energy predisposed towards turning people into vampires.”

  I… barely understood how this was meant to work. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I didn’t understand. At all. It sounded bad, though. Someone with a dedicated source of energy, in some form or another, that really wanted to turn a bunch of people into vampires, or at least ghouls? Bad news.

  “Wait, so are you saying Matthais did succeed with the plague?” I asked. If he did, then we needed to tell someone. Tell everyone. This was bigger than a single Revenant’s revenge quest now.

  She shook her head. “No. At least, probably not. Raw energy isn’t going to do much. They’d need some way to catalyse it, as well as distribution… No, I doubt it. Still, I need to see whatever was in that room.”

  I sighed in relief. The possibility was still there, but it was further off. We should still tell people, but I could trust Neil and the Guild to do that, since we’d given that report.

  Jenny clapped her hands together. “Right, that was bad. I don’t like bad things. You like biology, right?”

  “Yeah? How did you know?” I answered.

  “You located the glands on the tongue immediately. Anyway, you wanna see the inside of a body?”

  I considered her offer. As much as I kind of wanted to get out of here, it did sound rather intriguing. There was only so much you could learn from a textbook, and as helpful as they were the guiding impressions from my vitae were more… instinctual knowledge than they were visuals. “Sure. I don’t have anything urgent.”

  Jenny put Hansen in a cushy little bowl on her desk and meandered over to one of the large, in-built drawers on the far side of the room. She ran her hands along them before picking one seemingly at random, beckoning me over as she pulled one out to reveal a human body.

  “Where did you even get this?” I asked. I had kind of assumed she would show me an animal, but no. There was a whole person lying between us. He was an elderly man, completely nude and so well preserved he looked asleep.

  Jenny raised an eyebrow. “Donations. What, did you think we were all murderers?”

  I shook my head at her smirk. “What exactly are you showing me?”

  She spread her arms wide. “Whatever you want. Within reason, anyway.”

  I thought. “How about his heart?”

  “A classic. Well, your wish is my command, my lady. This might take a moment though, I am terrible with caromancy.”

  As Jenny raised her arms and began to incant, dark green energy swirling around her hands. For whatever reason, my chest began to grow tight. I was strangely uncomfortable, but I couldn’t pin down why. All I knew was that there was a pit in my stomach, and it was getting more and more dense as Jenny progressed her incantation.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d pushed through discomfort, but this felt different. More primal. I realised that my hands were shaking, and I was starting hyperventilate. More foetid energy coalesced around Jenny’s hands as she reached towards the corpse’s chest.

  She stretched out a single finger and drew a line across his chest, everywhere she touched beginning to bubble and rot, splitting beneath her touch like week-old meat beneath the jaws of a raven.

  The weight in my stomach tripled in size as, just for a moment, I was sure that the corpse before me was my own severed limb, decaying and wilting. I was shaking now, all over. Blood pounded in my ears as my head began to feel light. Had I been biologically capable I had a feeling I would have been in tears.

  Jenny looked up, concern playing on her face. “You alright, Bug Girl?”

  I didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear anything. How could I? My skin was crawling with putrid toxicity, rot and decay running through my very veins. I couldn’t escape it, couldn’t fight back. It was everywhere. If I wanted to survive, I had to escape.

  I had to escape.

  I had to escape.

  I couldn’t escape.

  My flesh began to warp of its own accord, chitin cracking, splitting or vanishing entirely in my panic. I didn’t know what to be, how to be free of the toxins in my body. I couldn’t see them, my vitae couldn’t rally itself against them. I flowed like water, a river polluted by the filth that he had cast upon me.

  In full fight-or-flight, I tried to repeat what I had already done. I funnelled myself into a part of me and detached it, freeing myself of the decay.

  Yet it was still there. I couldn’t escape.

  I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t know where I was or when I was. All I knew was that I was in pain, the agony of before becoming the torture of today. I watched in blind panic as the decay spread, my body melting before me as I flailed and cried out.

  I couldn’t escape.

  Just like before, my body began to decay in real time. What chitin remained grew papery and frail, fraught with structural weaknesses and wear. My skin split open, an orange that had ripened too far in the sun. My bones grew soft and spongy, unable to support the mass of discarded flesh that I had become.

  I split myself off again, a vain attempt to escape it in my mindless panic. Still there. Again. Still there. Again. Still there.

  I couldn’t escape the rot.

  Until, all of a sudden, I did. It was gone, mostly. I was… nothing. A pile of meat and bone. My last split had separated my consciousness from the last of my nervous system and, all at once, the panic fled me. I had no muscles to quiver, no glands to secrete adrenaline or brain to order panic. All that was left was the distant rush of an isolated mind. Everything was there, just neatly sequestered away where it couldn’t touch me.

  I was… embarrassed, to say the least. If there was one thing I was good at it was shame, and boy did I feel it now. I skimmed over my memories without the fog of hormones and felt ridiculous. All of that panic over one tiny spell? It wasn’t even directed at me. It was being used for me.

  How stupid.

  I floated in relatively calm detachment for some time. I didn’t know how long. I felt the coming and going of a couple of vitae signals, but I paid them no mind. I could support my own existence here as a living steak for as long as I needed.

  I didn’t want to return to panic and shame. I saw now, through the fog, through the fear and the hallucinations. I was not wasting away. I was not back in that room, a wave of rot tearing my form apart at the seams. I was in control. I had done that to myself, in my panic, my belief.

  It frightened me. I had no desire to return to my body, to my brain. To fear, shame, fight and rot. I needed this time, this forced detachment, just to process everything.

  So, with this on my mind, I decided to wait. Not for long, no. Just for a bit.

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