Chapter 13: Petra
The puncture in Jane’s shoulder wasn’t deep, but the blood bloomed through the silk of her kimono in a persistent, spreading stain the color of rust. It had soaked a patch the size of a saucer, and it wasn’t drying. It just kept oozing, slow and steady, threading in a wet, dark line down her arm.
“She said something,” Jane murmured from the couch, her head lolling against the back cushion. A dreamy smile played on her lips, her gaze fixed on the ceiling. “About the mobile lab. Said the Lord corrupted it. A trap. Her trap.” She blinked, her focus returning for a sharp moment to Marcus. “She’s not her fault, Marcus. She came from your system. She came from me.”
“Don't talk,” Marcus said, his fingers pressing a wad of paper towels against the wound. They turned crimson in seconds, the fabric beneath sodden. The blood was wrong. It wasn’t clotting. It just welled up, thin and persistent, with every beat of her heart. He remembered the fangs. An anticoagulant venom. This wasn’t stopping.
“Erin, call Petra,” Jane sighed, her eyes drifting shut. “My sweet Erin.”
Marcus looked at Huntress—Erin—curled on the floor by the couch, her head resting on Jane’s thigh. Her dark eyes were glazed, utterly passive. He fumbled for his phone, scrolled with blood-slick fingers, and hit the contact.
“Petra. It’s Marcus. 6201. Bring your med kit. Now.” He didn’t wait for a reply. He ended the call.
He peeled the kimono from Jane’s shoulder. The puncture marks were clean, two neat holes spaced a precise inch apart. The skin around them was already an angry red. The bleeding wasn’t arterial, but it was a constant, ominous trickle. Petra arrived in under four minutes, the private elevator disgorging her into the apartment in a rush of efficient motion. She wore smart black slacks and a crisp white blouse, her hair in its signature tight bun. A heavy, professional-looking black case was in her hand.
She took one look at the scene—Jane bleeding, the dazed goth woman nuzzling her leg, the blood all over the white couch—and her professional mask didn’t even flicker. “Right,” she said, setting the case on the glass coffee table with a decisive click. “Help me get her to the bedroom. That couch is finished.”
Between them, they lifted Jane. She was pliant, almost boneless. “Erin,” she whispered. “Don’t leave her.” Huntress uncurled and followed them, a silent, graceful shadow, into the expansive, minimalist bedroom with its wide, low platform bed. She crawled onto the mattress the moment they laid Jane down, curling herself around Jane’s hips, face pressed against her uninjured side.
Petra opened her kit. The contents gleamed under the soft room lights: sterile packets, suture kits, vials, a small scanner. She snapped on gloves. “Marcus, get me more light from the main room, that articulated lamp, then you’re in the way. Go.”
He did as he was told, dragging the heavy lamp in and positioning it. The beam cast the wound in a harsh, clinical light. The blood looked even darker. Petra was already swabbing, scanning the injury with a pen-shaped device that beeped softly.
“Venom payload confirmed. Contains a potent heparin derivative and a localized vasodilator. Nasty stuff.” She shot Marcus a look. “You can go now.”
He backed out of the room, pulling the door partly closed. He could hear Petra’s low, steady voice, the rustle of medical supplies, Jane’s soft murmurs. The white couch in the main room was a crime scene. A dark, wet stain on the leather, the edges already beginning to dry to a dull brown.
He couldn’t let that set. He moved on autopilot, a deep-seated need to fix something, anything, kicking in. He went to the kitchen, found a spray bottle of industrial fabric cleaner Jane kept for the rare spill, a brush, and a stack of fresh white towels. For twenty frantic minutes, he worked. He sprayed, he blotted, he brushed gently. He watched the rust-colored ghost lift, millimeter by millimeter, from the weave. The process was meditative, a narrow focus that kept the panic at bay. Your code did this. Your dream girl is bleeding because of your fucking daydreams.
He was on his knees, inspecting the spot under the lamplight, seeing only a faint, lingering shadow, when the apartment’s main lock chimed and the door opened.
Serena Hayes stepped inside. She’d changed from her alley-wear into a severe, navy-blue pantsuit, her hair perfect. She took in the scene: Marcus on his knees by the couch, the smell of cleaning chemicals, the discarded blood-soaked towels by the kit.
“Where is she?” Serena’s voice was a controlled blade.
Marcus stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Bedroom. Petra’s with her. The… Huntress is in there too.”
“Huntress?”
“The woman from the crash. She’s… she bit Jane. The venom has anticoagulants. The wound won’t close.” The words tumbled out. “Jane told me. About the mobile lab hack. She said Huntress wasn’t to blame.”
Serena’s eyes narrowed, calculating. “She spoke about the lab? To you?”
“Yes, but it’ll have to wait. She’s losing blood, Serena.”
“I need to see this… creation.” Serena began striding toward the bedroom. “If she’s a threat, she needs to be contained. Now.”
“Serena, I don’t think that’s—” Marcus started, but she was already pushing the half-closed door open.
He followed, a step behind.
The wave of scent hit them like a physical wall. It wasn't just Jane’s pheromones now; they had deepened, intensified by pain and blood-loss endorphins, and were tangled with the clean, sterile scent of antiseptic and the wild, dark musk of Huntress. The room smelled like a heated, metallic garden. The air was thick, warm, humid with breath.
Petra’s smart glasses were on the nightstand. Her blouse and slacks were a pile on the floor. She was naked, kneeling between Jane’s legs, her head bent, her mouth working with a focused intensity on Jane’s inner thigh. Jane was arched back on the pillows, one hand tangled in Petra’s neat bun, the other stroking through the cascade of Huntress’s black hair. Huntress was curled against Jane’s side, her mouth on Jane’s breast, one long, pale leg hooked possessively over Jane’s hips.
The pristine white bandage was a stark square on Jane’s shoulder. The bleeding, it seemed, had finally stopped.
They were a tangle of glowing, sweating skin and soft, hungry sounds. Moans.Whispers. The wet slide of lips and tongues.
Marcus felt the familiar warmth bloom in his gut, the pull, but it was distant, muted. Months of constant, low-level exposure to Jane’s scent in this apartment, in the lab, had built a resistance. He could feel the desire, recognize its shape, but he could still think.
He looked at Serena.
She stood frozen in the doorway. Her composure had shattered. Her pupils were so dilated her eyes looked almost black. Her lips were parted, and she was breathing through her mouth in short, sharp gusts, her chest rising and falling rapidly. The crisp lines of her pantsuit seemed absurd in the face of this primal tableau. A faint sheen of sweat glistened at her temples.
Jane turned her head, her baby-blue eyes landing on them. They sparkled with a feverish, possessive light. Her smile was a slow, inviting curve.
“You’re just in time,” Jane purred, her voice rich and syrupy. “Don’t just stand there. Join us.”
Petra lifted her head, her mouth glistening. She gave Serena a look that was both challenge and invitation, then returned to her task.
Huntress let out a low, vampiric growl of pleasure that vibrated through the mattress.
Serena’s hands went to the buttons of her jacket. Her movements were jerky, automatic. She fumbled the first one, then tore it open. The jacket slid from her shoulders and hit the floor.
“Serena, don’t,” Marcus whispered, reaching for her arm.
She shrugged him off with a force that surprised him. It wasn’t a graceful evasion; it was a primal rejection of all obstruction. Her blouse followed, then her pants. In moments, the Director of New You was standing naked at the foot of the bed, her skin flushed, her breath ragged.
She climbed onto the mattress, her carefully curated elegance gone, replaced by a single-minded need. She didn’t speak. She simply pressed herself against the nearest available warmth—Petra’s back—her mouth finding the concierge’s shoulder, her hands grasping blindly for purchase on slick skin.
Marcus stood alone in the doorway, the only clothed person in a room breathing like one vast, heated animal. He stared at the pile of writhing, moaning bodies. Serena’s slender foot twitched near his face. Jane caught his eye over the heaving forms and winked.
He took a slow step back. Then another. He pulled the bedroom door closed until it clicked, shutting in the symphony of gasps and sighs. The sudden quiet in the vast white living room was deafening. He looked at the couch, the faint shadow of the stain, the half-empty spray bottle.
He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out at the warped, fractured city reflected in the building’s twisted glass..
For four solid hours, Marcus remained at the window, watching the fractured lights below crawl and shift. He could track the room's disintegration through sound alone. The hungry, breathy escalation, the distinctive percussive slap of an empty saline bag hitting the marble floor of the ensuite, Serena’s choked-off, almost angry cry. Later, the guttural, inarticulate groans of exhaustion and release before the low hum of the water jets in Jane’s sunken tub began, blurring everything into a single liquid murmur.
He cleaned the rest of the apartment robotically, moving through a ghost-lit script of domestic damage control. He didn't think. He just scrubbed the floor where they’d tracked out of the blood-clotted bedroom, zipped the soiled linens and towels into a specially-designed biosac for incineration, ordered new versions of everything in Jane’s glacial white palate with his employee account for express delivery at dawn.
He’d plucked Serena’s discarded pantsuit from the floor with a kind of clinical detachment. It still hummed faintly with her heat and the musk of the room. He carefully arranged it on the back of a dining chair, a strange, wrinkled monument to a vanished person.
Sometime around three AM, the apartment’s main systems cycled, the soft lighting shifting to a night mode, plunging the open space into a deeper blue. The door to the bedroom slid open with its quiet shush.
Petra emerged first. She’d retrieved her clothes, dressing with slow, drained movements, but she looked nothing like the concierge. Her tight bun was long gone; damp brown waves tumbled to her shoulders. There were bruises on her throat and inner wrists, red marks that looked like teeth against her fair skin, but her walk had a new, loose-hipped grace.
Erin followed behind her, padding silently on bare feet. She’d found one of Jane’s black silk robes in the mess and was wearing it loosely cinched. It was short on her, ending mid-thigh. Her voluminous hair was a chaotic, magnificent storm around her sharp face, her dark eyes clear, focused, predatory.
Marcus watched from the periphery of the kitchen as Erin walked Petra to the main door. It was not a walk of shame. They walked slowly, fingers loosely entwined, each step a conversation in stillness.
At the door, Petra leaned back against it.They kissed. It wasn’t frantic or desperate. It was slow, thorough, and intimate. It was a kiss that tasted like finality and transfusion. It lasted and lasted.
Marcus tried not to watch.He failed. The casual intimacy of it burned hotter and was more unnerving than the tangled knot of limbs in the bedroom. They knew he was there, framed in the glowing blue from the recessed lights over the kitchen island. They didn’t care.
Petra whispered something, traced Erin’s jaw with her thumb, and slipped out the door when it automatically retracted.
Erin let it seal shut, then turned, her gaze sliding across the room to find him. She began walking toward him with an unnerving, fluid silence. The robe did nothing. He felt himself instinctively tensing, his back pressing against the cold stone of the island. She stopped less than a foot away, well within his personal space, a physical violation that felt intentional.
“You watched, Maker,” she said, her voice a low, sensual layer of Romanian and New York. She gave him an appraising look, from his tired eyes down to his white-knuckled grip on the stone countertop. “Poor Marcus, out here with a spray bottle while we taught Serena how to forget her own fucking name.” Her lips curved. “You should have joined us. You would have been fun.”
“I doubt it,” he managed, his voice a dry crackle.
“Oh, you would have been.” She leaned in a fraction, her pheromones an intoxicating fog of dark chocolate, leather, and electric heat. He held his breath. She smiled, sensing his struggle. “I would have broken you in the most wonderful way. Twisted you into a sweet little shape you didn’t know you could hold.” Her smile widened, full of fang. “Petra was spirited, determined. But she lacks the appropriate hardware for such specific projects.”
Marcus felt the edge of the counter bite into the small of his back. He had nowhere to retreat. “What do you want from me?” His own voice sounded too thin in the dense, warm air between them.
The cruel tilt of her lips softened, just a fraction. The predatory focus in her dark eyes blurred, replaced by a flicker of something confused, human. She stepped back, creating a sudden, cold pocket of space.
“A memory,” she said, the rasp gone from her voice. It wasn't sensual now. It was raw. “It starts with the smell of cut grass and a bucket of shag balls. The weight of a seven-iron.” She stared at her hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time. “They're not my hands.”
Marcus looked at them. They were elegant, powerful, pale, with nails painted a chipped black. They were the hands of his design, of the Michelle++.
“Tell me,” he whispered.
“My name is Erin Ortega,” she said, the words tentative. “I was a golf coach. At the Silver Creek Resort. I was good at it.” Her gaze lifted, locking onto his. “She is still in here. Jane…” She glanced towards the silent bedroom. “She pulled her forward. Held a mirror up. Taught me to focus through the…” She gestured vaguely at her own head.“The noise. The hunger. The mission file screaming about the Vampire Lord.”
She walked to the vast window, placing her palms flat on the cool glass, her reflection a ghost over the city. “She was very clear. I am to tell you that you are the Maker. The other maker. The one who coded the shell I’m wearing. The things buried in my head.”
Erin’s reflection in the glass seemed to waver, the city’s distorted lights shimmering through her. “She said you could help me find the edges. Between what I am now and what I was.”
“I can try,” Marcus said, the words feeling hollow even as he said them. He pushed away from the counter. “But first, the shoulder. Did Petra get it fully closed?”
Erin turned from the window. The predatory grace was still there, coiled in her posture, but her expression was more open. Troubled. “She did. Used a dermal welder from her kit. Steri-strips wouldn’t hold.” She gestured vaguely toward the hall. “Jane is sleeping. The… transfusion helped. Mostly.”
“Transfusion?” Marcus’s stomach tightened.
“An exchange,” Erin said, a dark amusement touching her lips. “Petra gave a little. I gave a little. Jane took what she needed. Equilibrium.” She saw his face and let out a short, breathy laugh. “Relax, Maker. It was clinical. Mostly.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. Okay, good. Let’s… let’s get you something else to wear.”
He led her past the silent bedroom door, down a short hall to a panel that slid open at his touch. Inside, Jane’s walk-in closet was a symphony of muted luxury. Racks of precisely organized garments hung under soft, sensor-triggered lights. Silks, linens, fine wools. It smelled of her, of that impossible perfume, but fainter here, layered with the scent of cedar and clean cotton.
“Help yourself,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “Jane won’t mind.”
Erin drifted into the space, her fingers brushing over a sleeve of emerald green silk, the fabric whispering under her touch. She seemed suddenly smaller amidst the curated abundance. “She has so many,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.
She pulled a simple item from a drawer: a soft, heather-gray t-shirt. From a lower rack, she selected a pair of black leggings. She held them up, looking at Marcus. “These?”
He nodded. “They’ll work.”
She began to untie the belt of the silk robe.
Marcus spun around, facing the hallway. “I’ll just, uh—”
“Don’t be so squeamish,” Erin’s voice came, a mix of mockery and warmth. “You built this body, line by line. You think I don’t know you have the schematics memorized?” There was a rustle of fabric. “Turn around. I’m decent.”
He turned. She was dressed. The simple clothes should have made her look normal. They did the opposite. The casual fabric clung to the impossible proportions of the Michelle++ frame, transforming everyday wear into something sculptural, potent. She rolled the sleeves of the t-shirt up her forearms, a practical, human gesture that somehow emphasized her supernatural elegance.
“Better,” she said, gathering her wild hair into a loose, sloppy knot atop her head. She looked at him, her dark eyes searching his face. “Now, the other thing.”
“Right.” He took a breath. “What did you do to Jane? In the elevator.”
A slow smirk spread across her face. It was pure Huntress. “Nothing she didn’t do right back to me.” She walked past him, back into the main living space, her movements a liquid contrast to the stiff worry in his shoulders. “The venom will pass. Its effects are… temporary. I would have sealed the wound myself up there,” she said, nodding toward the ceiling as if the rooftop were just above them, “if I hadn’t been lost in her musk.”
She stopped by the clean, but ghosted, sofa and ran a hand over the leather. “I am grateful I did not, though.”
“Grateful?” Marcus asked, frowning.
“Because then I would not have met Petra.” Erin’s smirk softened into something approximating genuine warmth. She glanced toward the door, as if she could still see the concierge there. “She has very skilled hands.”
Marcus felt his face grow hot. He looked away, toward the darkened bedroom. “Right.”
“Relax, Marcus,” Erin said, her tone shifting to something lighter, almost teasing. “Jane was very specific. You are off limits.” She padded closer to him, her head tilting. “No biting. No matter how much you beg.”
“I wasn’t going to—” he started, defensive.
“Of course you weren’t,” she interrupted, a playful gleam in her eye. She reached out and tapped his chest with one fingertip. “But I know what she sees in you now. You know just what to say to a girl to make her love you. ‘Help yourself, Jane won’t mind.’ Very smooth.” She turned and walked toward the kitchen, her voice floating back. “Is there any blood left? The synthetic kind? I’m famished.”
He stared after her, at the casual drape of the t-shirt over the shoulders he had coded, at the easy way she now inhabited this impossible skin. The fragments—Erin the golf coach, Huntress the predator, this new, merged creature—were beginning to coalesce, and the shape it was taking was both terrifying and fascinating.
“The fridge in the lab,” he said, his voice rough. “Left side. We keep a supply.”
She opened the sleek, paneled door. The interior light painted her in stark relief. She found the carafe of deep crimson fluid and poured a glass with a steady hand.
As she lifted it to her lips, her eyes met his over the rim. They were clear, focused, and full of a knowing that felt centuries old. She took a long, slow sip.
“So,” she said, setting the half-empty glass down on the stone counter with a definitive click. “Shall we dig up those things buried in my head?”