After dinner, Heldon took the opportunity to slip away and peel back his fake bandage to look at his bite mark again with a proper looking glass. The blue had seeped further through his major artery and veins and now began to spiderweb out.
It wasn’t a good look.
What came next made Heldon hold his breath.
The blood on the bandage was now fully blue. He reached for Janz’s side knife and dug the blade into one of his fingers. The cut bloomed open red with swirls of blue. The magic had raced through his bloodstream more quickly than he had expected.
The tent became a coffin. Heldon’s breath came in gulps and gasps that made his chest balloon in and out as he tore through his things, looking for the torn in half document with the flower on it.
It was gone.
Heldon dumped out his satchel onto the ground. The smudged treaty with the blood prints were missing too. Heldon’s chest twisted into a dark spiral.