Chapter 3 – A Taste of Blood in the Air
POV: Jasper Hale Location: Cornell University Time: Late September
He shouldn’t have come today.
Jasper sat stiff-backed in the far corner of the seminar room, hands folded too neatly on the desk in front of him. From a distance, he might’ve passed for calm. Bored, even.
He wasn’t.
She was already here. He didn’t need to see her to know. Her emotions brushed against his ribs like static—delicate, frayed, too open.
Nervous. Tender. Untethered.
She doesn’t want to be seen. But she doesn’t want to disappear either.
His jaw tightened.
The room smelled of damp ink and paper glue and synthetic perfume, but beneath all that: bruised peaches. Burnt sugar.
Her.
It wasn’t just blood. It was memory. Summer fruit in a soldier’s hand. Warm skin beneath linen. A touch remembered more than felt. It made something in him ache with the familiarity of a wound long since closed.
He kept his eyes forward. Tried not to breathe too deep.
The professor’s voice drifted like dust, Fredericksburg, stone walls, crimson fields. Casualty estimates. Tactical failure. Normally, lectures like this calmed him. The past didn’t shift. Didn’t surprise.
But Olivia…
Olivia was a live wire strung through a lightning storm.
A sudden spike hit him, sharp, slicing. Her anxiety. Not soft like most. No gradual rise. A blade between the ribs.
He flinched.
Before he could stop himself, his eyes found her.
Middle row. Shoulders hunched. Hands pulled inside her sleeves like she was bracing for impact. Her pulse stammered in her chest.
Then the professor said her name.
Gently. No threat in it.
But her whole body locked.
And everything inside her broke open.
The panic hit him like wildfire through dry grass. A breathless, tearing thing. Not just fear, humiliation. Shame. That horrible, invisible scream of someone who desperately needed to vanish before they shattered.
He’d felt it in soldiers seconds before the charge. In newborns on the edge of the thirst.
And now, in her.
The scent sharpened, turned metallic. Ash and sugar and blood. It hit the back of his throat like a memory he didn’t want.
Maria’s camp. Screams in firelight. Dirt soaked in fear. And the sick sweetness of it.
Olivia’s voice, small, fraying, tried to answer.
He was on his feet before he realized it.
His chair scraped back across the floor. Heads turned. A girl beside him blinked, startled.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t wait. Didn’t breathe.
He just walked out.
The cold slapped him hard across the face.
Outside, the wind smelled like frost and distant woodsmoke. Students passed behind him in pairs and threes, chatting about coffee or politics or deadlines. The world moved around him. He didn’t feel a part of it.
He crossed the quad without aim. Toward the edge of the trees. Toward quiet.
Amber leaves twisted overhead as maples shivered in the wind. He stopped beneath one, leaned his back against the trunk, and let the silence bleed into him.
It didn’t help.
He could still feel her panic under his skin. Hear it like a melody burned into memory.
He had spent decades perfecting the art of muting others, Maria’s army had been fire and frenzy. Alice had been clarity and motion. Controlled chaos.
But Olivia?
Olivia was truth.
And truth, in its rawest form, was the one thing that scraped clean through the rot.
It made him feel something close to living.
And it made the thirst worse.
He should leave.
He still could.
But that night, back at the farmhouse, he sat motionless in the dark as frost bloomed silver on the windows and silence wrapped around him like a cloak.
Eventually, he opened Alice’s old journal. And wrote:
She is not the threat. But she’s the beginning of something. And I am not ready. God help me, I want to be.