Chapter 80 Delia
Delia’s healing center lived in the shell of an old textile warehouse, one of the few slum buildings that hadn’t collapsed or burned in the last siege. She’d rigged blankets for privacy, crammed cots end-to-end, and set up a triage system that operated on equal parts desperation, invention, and sheer refusal to let anyone die without a fight. The place smelled like boiled roots, candle wax, and the tang of ozone left behind by too many spells gone sideways.
When Daisy arrived, the waiting room was chaotic. People overflowed onto the steps outside, some sporting injuries, others just clutching limbs gone stiff from magic shock. The new world had gifted the city a million powers, but it hadn’t taught anyone how to live with them. Delia hustled between beds, her face set in a mask of focus that looked nothing like the girl Daisy had met as a kid. She’d always been a healer, gifted with a green thumb for herbs, a knack for mending, but now, with the old order gone, she was something more. Her hands glowed faintly blue as she laid them on a feverish child; the heat of the infection faded in seconds, the kid’s color coming back as Delia wiped sweat from her brow.
“Stop gaping and help,” Delia snapped when she saw Daisy in the doorway. “We’ve got another overflow upstairs.”
Daisy moved through the crowd, noting the new types of wounds: not just cuts and bruises, but weirder things. One man had a spiral of ivy sprouting from his shoulder, the leaves twitching with every breath. A girl on the far cot had hair growing inwards, roots burrowing along her jaw and into her teeth. Most of the patients looked terrified, which was the correct response to the post-revolution city.
Delia shoved a pile of poultices into Daisy’s arms. “You’ve got a touch for the stubborn ones. Third cot on the left, then the corner, then take a round with the newborns. If you see anyone bleeding weird, call me.”
“Define weird,” Daisy said, but Delia was already halfway across the ward.
She got to work. The first patient, a young woman with hands that wouldn’t stop growing leaves, sat up straight when Daisy approached.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, voice panicky. “It gets worse if you touch me.”
Daisy shrugged. “We’ll try my way.” She reached out, letting her blood-magic hum beneath the skin. As soon as she took the girl’s hand, the red spiral on Daisy’s wrist flared, and the leaf growth slowed, then stopped. The woman’s eyes went wide. “What? How?”
“It’s in the blood,” Daisy said. She rolled up her sleeve and showed the scale just below her elbow. “See? You’re not alone.”
The girl’s panic bled into curiosity, then relief. “Can you teach me to stop it?”
“Maybe,” Daisy said. “But first you have to want to.”
She moved on. Next was a man whose shadow detached whenever he sneezed, the damn thing drifting around the clinic and scaring the infants. Daisy grounded the shadow with a touch, then told him to stay away from cold cellars for a while. “It’ll rebind eventually,” she said, though she had no idea if that was true.
After an hour, she noticed a pattern. Some of the patients, the ones with the most dramatic reactions, had something else in common. They all bore a mark, faint but unmistakable, somewhere on their skin: a spiral, or a birthmark shaped like a blade, or a patch of scales that looked too much like Daisy’s to be a coincidence.
She asked a few questions, watched their answers, then let her own blood-magic reach out as she worked. In every case, she felt the echo—a resonance, like finding a long-lost sibling on the other side of a war.
After the midday rush, Delia cornered Daisy in the storeroom, her hands shaking from adrenaline or rage or both. “What are you doing?” she whispered, glancing at the closed door. “Some of the council are already scared of you. If word gets out you’re making a…” She struggled for the word. “A school.”
“It’s not a school,” Daisy said. “I’m just helping people with my blood. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
Delia’s look was pure exhaustion. “You don’t get it. It’s different for you. The spiral, your kind of magic, scares them. The old order used it to punish and kill. If people see you gathering, teaching…”
“They’ll call it a cult.”
Delia nodded. “Or a rebellion. Or worse.”
Daisy was quiet for a long time. “I don’t want to be their monster.”
“I know.”
Daisy felt the ache in her bones, the spiral now a phantom pain. “But I’m not going to be their scapegoat, either.”
They stood in silence, the only sound the bubbling of a cauldron on the far side of the wall.
Delia softened. “You could teach them. One at a time. Quietly.”
Daisy shook her head. “They need more than that. If we don’t own it, someone else will. And then we’re back where we started.”
Delia smiled, small and sad. “You always were the dumbest brave person I knew.”
Daisy shrugged. “Gotta be good at something.”
In the afternoon, after Delia cleared the worst cases, Daisy gathered the blood-magic patients in a corner of the warehouse. There were six in all: three women, two men, one kid with a shock of white hair and eyes like steel ball bearings. They eyed each other, wary, as Daisy began.
“You all have it,” she said, not bothering with ceremony. “Not the same as me, but close enough. The old council called it forbidden, but now it’s just… loose.”
A woman with spiral tattoos on her jaw spoke first. “What happens if we use it?”
Daisy thought about her mother, her uncle, the old hunger that had driven so much of the city’s history. “You get stronger, but it gets hungry. You have to teach it who’s boss.”
Another man, older, arms wrapped in bandages, asked, “How do we keep it from hurting people?”
Daisy took a deep breath. “You practice. You fail. You try again. The only thing that stops you from becoming a monster is remembering what it’s like to be a person.”
They stared at her, not sure if she was kidding or dead serious.
The kid with white hair piped up. “Can you show us?”
Daisy nodded, rolled up her sleeve, and let a line of blood spiral from her arm. She shaped it into a flower, delicate and impossibly precise. Then she crushed it in her fist, the magic dissipating harmlessly.
“That’s the trick,” Daisy said. “Make something beautiful, then let it go.”
For a moment, no one moved.
Then, one by one, they tried. Awkward at first, but each managed a shape: a ring, a feather, a line of music written in the air. They laughed, surprised at their own power.
Daisy watched, thinking of her mother’s memories, of every ancestor who’d carried this curse and never known how to use it for anything but survival or hate.
After the session, she spoke to the group. “Blood magic was always dangerous because it didn’t fit the rules. It can’t be measured, can’t be taxed, can’t be owned by a council. That’s why they tried to kill it. But we’re still here, and it’s ours now.”
A silence, then the tattooed woman: “What do we do next?”
Daisy smiled. “We learn. We make a guild, or a club, or just a bunch of weirdos who look out for each other. We keep practicing until nobody’s scared of us but the people who should be.”
She looked around at her new tribe, broken, scared, but alive. “If you’re in, come back tomorrow. If not, nobody will make you.”
They nodded, some already plotting what they’d try next.
Delia watched from a distance, pride and terror warring in her face.
Daisy exhaled. The spiral didn’t hurt so much, not when she was busy.
As the last patient left, she heard one of them say, “Maybe she’s not a monster. Maybe she’s just a person.”
It was a start.
Outside, the city screamed, but in here, there was something like hope.