Bloodbound: Vid:ilantes, #2

By K.M. Carroll

One by oath, one by blood, one by election.

 

In a world of superheroes, Jayesh has a rare healing power that he uses in the local hospital. When teenagers are admitted with feather-patterns burned into their backs, Jayesh is reluctantly drawn into the underworld of black market magic smuggling.

A chance encounter with Omniscient, the villain in charge of the smugglers, leaves Jayesh with his magic shattered. A portal to the hospital goes wrong and Jayesh is instead sent to an island in another dimension: an island that has awaited its Bloodbound for centuries. In exchange for healing, he is magically bound to the island, and half his magic is turned into a tiny dragon.

Now, with the help of the Islesworn, James Chase, Jayesh must go undercover to recover the mysterious Pandora. But this means facing off with Omniscient, a villain who can bring a person's fears to life—and who is increasingly ruled by his own power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.M. Carroll
• Release date: Apr 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393643869

Book preview

Vid:ilantes 2:

Bloodbound

by K.M. Carroll

"Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire?

Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?"

Those who walk righteously

and speak what is right,

who reject gain from extortion

and keep their hands from accepting bribes,

who stop their ears against plots of murder

and shut their eyes against contemplating evil—

they are the ones who will dwell on the heights,

whose refuge will be the mountain fortress.

Their bread will be supplied,

and water will not fail them.

Isaiah 33:14-16

Chapter 1

JAYESH WALKED THROUGH the hospital on the heels of a doctor, hands in his pockets. Despite his casual denim shorts and t-shirt, the staff barely gave him a glance. He worked part-time at the Desert Community Hospital, as supers with rare healing powers were always in demand.

He breathed the strange hospital smells of latex, hand sanitizer, and coffee as they walked. Where are we headed, Doctor?

Burn ward, the doctor replied, glancing over his shoulder. Patient came in this morning with third degree burns across her upper body. You'll save her weeks of skin grafts.

Jayesh winced. He'd been around the hospital enough in the last year to know how skin grafts were harvested. The burn ward was his least favorite section, while the maternity ward was his most favorite—nothing beat laying his hands on a suffering baby and watching the life return to their little faces.

Jayesh, himself, had turned twenty that spring. He was short and lightly-built, his Indian heritage giving him wavy black hair and skin the color of a caramel latte. But his soft brown eyes were a bit too light for his complexion, and his sensitive mouth often betrayed his feelings.

They entered the burn ward. Jayesh washed his hands and put on a face mask—not that it mattered. He'd still be able to smell the burned flesh and antiseptics, which was another thing he disliked about working there. He also couldn't wear gloves, because his healing powers required skin contact.

The doctor led him through the ward to a room with the new patient. She was a girl of about fifteen years, her tangled blonde hair damp with sweat. Several piercings decorated her lips and eyebrows. She lay on her stomach with an IV in her wrist, deep in a morphine-induced sleep. Her back and arms were burned in a huge V pattern. The bandages followed the contours of the damage.

What caused this? Jayesh asked in shock as the doctor peeled back the first part of the bandage.

Shard misuse, as best as we can tell, the doctor replied. The patient was in no condition to tell us when the ambulance brought her in. The funny thing is, she doesn't have a shard.

Jayesh placed a hand over the exposed burn and drew on his own shard—the magic, semi-corporeal piece of crystal that developed inside of most people at age ten. Shards granted powers that roughly fell into four classes: arcane, physical, metamorph, or psi. Healing shards were a rare member of the psi class. But Jayesh's shard had formed in two halves, like a butterfly's wings: one half granted healing while the other granted light. It made his hands glow as he healed. It also made him a liability for any kind of hero work—glowing hands gave him away as a healer and would make him a target for any thug or villain.

After a moment, he lifted his hands from the burn. The angry red-brown had been replaced by the fresh pink of new skin.

The doctor pulled back more bandages, revealing the entire wound. Jayesh stared, disconcerted. The burn was in the shape of wings, each feather branded crisply into the girl's skin. Uh, sir ... why is the burn shaped that way?

That's why we think it's shard-related, the doctor replied. Some magic shards do grant wings. But for this girl to have no shard? He lifted the girl's hair, revealing one ear. It was pointed, like an elf's.

Jayesh's mouth formed a silent O. A certain tribe of people from Brazil had been historically unable to grow shards of their own. As their bloodline had spread, so had the lack of magical ability. This had led to a busy black market of stolen shards, smuggled inside the body of a courier to prevent the shard's deterioration when away from a host for too long. Jayesh was writing his thesis on shard theory and had been forced to do a lot of research on the topic.

He asked no more questions and focused on healing the burn, a hands-breadth at a time. Healing didn't require focus so much as it required compassion. Jayesh had to work his mind around to pitying this girl, assigning her the dignity of a human being, and easing her pain. He couldn't let himself wonder if she was a smuggler. She was too young, wasn't she? But crime took no notice of age. Jayesh, himself, wasn't even old enough to drink, and here he was, doing regular hospital work.

A sense of fatigue grew on him as his magic passed into the girl. It started as an itch behind his eyes, then became an added heaviness in his limbs. When he’d been younger, he had pushed himself so far in a healing that he had collapsed, but he tried to save his strength, now.

The burn was entirely healed, and Jayesh was washing his hands again, when the girl awoke. She sat up on her knees, staring wildly around the room. The Pandora! The Pandora!

Shh, the doctor said. This is a hospital. You've been hurt quite badly. Lie back down.

The girl stared at the doctor, then stared at Jayesh, who had pulled his face mask off.

You! she cried. Where's the Pandora? Did you take it?

I'm sorry, Jayesh said. I don't know what that is.

The girl blinked and seemed to awaken from her drug-induced hallucination. No. No, you're not him. Sorry.

The doctor helped her lie down again and gave Jayesh an apologetic grimace. Morphine.

Jayesh understood, but that didn't make it any less unsettling. He gazed at the girl, who stared up at him from the bed. So many questions swirled through his mind—questions that the police would probably ask her, later. He simply turned and left the room.

Out at the nurse's station, Jayesh stood there for several minutes before anyone noticed him. When a nurse finally did, Jayesh displayed his badge. Super healing paperwork, please.

Just as regular supers received state bounty money for catching a crook or stopping a crime, healing supers were paid by whatever insurance company covered that patient. Since the burned girl was uninsured, Jayesh had to appeal to three different companies and hope that one of them condescended to pay. Burn healing always paid well, when the insurance cooperated. Sometimes he went months between payouts. Those were the hungry times.

As he worked, one of the nurses offered him a donut. Why don't you go out and work on a super team, Jayesh? she asked. You're good at what you do, and you like people.

Jayesh didn't really like people—he liked helping them, but his idea of a fun weekend was a new book series to work through and a lot of food. He smiled and shrugged. Supers do their thing. The results wind up in the hospital. I'm doing my part here.

Well. The nurse gave him the kind of look his mother did when she told him he was wasting his talents. Look into a staff position, then. They pay better than freelance.

Jayesh smiled politely and said nothing. The last time he'd asked about a staff position, they immediately asked about his shard strength. He'd had to admit that because his shard was deformed, his healing powers could only work at half power. The HR rep had told him that he would never find a staff position anywhere, and even his days as a freelancer were numbered.

He tried not to think about it too much.

The paperwork took an hour and a half to fill out. By that time, it was early evening, and one donut had not been nearly enough. Working healing magic depleted Jayesh's energy reserves and left him famished. All he could think about was the leftover pizza in his fridge at home. He checked through the paperwork, handed it off to a secretary to file, and walked home.

Jayesh had taken an apartment two blocks from the hospital so his commute would be short. Phoenix, Arizona was unforgivingly hot in the summertime. But during the winter, temperatures barely flirted with freezing, and it rained sometimes. He wore a light jacket and jeans, and breathed deeply of the cool air as he walked. Even though the city had become an expensive place to live in the past few years, he was thankful for the good weather and dry air, so unlike his native Oregon.

He lived in a studio apartment on the second floor of a complex that catered to people making more money than he did. There was simply nothing cheaper available. Jayesh went in, retrieved the pizza, and sat at his laptop to eat it.

The room was decorated differently in each corner. He had a southwestern corner, a corner paneled in dark colors, the corner where his bed hid behind a folding screen, and the corner with a window. Whenever his parents insisted on a video call, he positioned himself in front of one of these corners to make them think he had a three-room apartment.

He checked his email and found two letters from his mother. She and his father were flipping a house in Portland and hoping to make at least a million off the sale. She inquired about his healing work, and if he had considered a medical degree to increase his payout.

She was always on about that medical degree. Jayesh typed a short reply. Hi Mom, so glad you and Dad are doing well. I healed eight people this week, so things are going well. Talk to you later.

There was no point in addressing the degree thing. Jayesh didn't want to be a doctor. He wanted to study shards and ride the cutting edge of new powers and technology. The stack of books beside his laptop had titles like, Advanced Metaphysical Theory, or Shard Slicing: A Study, or A History of Shards from Atlantis to America.

But he was too tired to study at the moment. The paperwork had fried his brain. So he loaded up HeroTube.

His bookmark took him straight to Amberlit's channel. She was a super with electrical powers, and commonly used lightning to terrify criminals. She could turn both her hands into tasers, making her one of the best capture heroes on HeroTube today. Jayesh had also gone to school with her all the way through high school and crushed on her from a distance. Her move to Kansas put a stop to that, though.

She had a new video up, so Jayesh watched it as he ate. Amberlit gazed earnestly into the screen, her fair skin contrasting with her plum-colored hair. I just wanted to warn everyone, this video isn't like my usual. This is a defeat video. If you don't like defeat videos, click away now.

A defeat video? Jayesh straightened. Amberlit never posted those. She and her boyfriend, Thunderfist, were usually an unstoppable team.

The video started the way most superhero streams did, with Amberlit's headcam showing a view of the street she and Thunderfist were patrolling. A car pulled alongside them and drove slowly, keeping pace with them. The side window rolled down.

The camera view erupted into psychedelic colors and shapes. The street turned into a funhouse, the sky flashing red and green, the buildings melting into different shapes, and things flying in the air—goldfish? Jayesh squinted. It looked like a psychic attack, but psi power was brain to brain. A camera shouldn't pick it up.

Amberlit and Thunderfist exclaimed in confusion, staring around for the source. There was a blurred shot of the car's door swinging open. A figure stepped out, but the psychic effects made them hard to see. To Jayesh, it looked like a person in an animal costume—maybe a fox. Wasn't that a tail behind it?

Thunderfist charged at the figure, but the shifting reality threw off his aim. He crashed into the car instead of the fox-thing. The car unfolded, transforming into a huge robot, all blocky limbs and a torso that held the engine block. It smashed an arm into Thunderfist’s head, crushing him to the pavement.

Jayesh watched in growing bewilderment. This couldn't be real. Psychic interference was one thing, but it looked like a hallucination had just delivered a tangible injury to a super. That was impossible. Jayesh glanced at his pile of books. Absolutely impossible.

Amberlit screamed and hurled lightning at the fox-figure. But her lightning turned to bubbles and floated harmlessly in the air.

I don't think so, said the figure, hovering several feet off the ground. You've gotten in my way for the last time, Amberlit.

The robot that had been a car swung a fist at Amberlit. She didn't dodge in time and the camera blurred from the impact. Ouch, that had to hurt. The camera view spun sideways until it collided with the brick front of a building.

The video cut back to Amberlit's face. She held up her arm, which was in a cast and sling. Thunderfist is in the hospital with a fractured skull and a broken neck. They ... they don't know if he'll make it. If you're religious, please pray for him. She drew a shaky breath, trying to steady herself. But her voice trembled as she went on, The police and several superpower experts have analyzed my video. They all agree that such a power shouldn't exist. It isn't possible. But ... She looked down at her broken arm. Thunderfist might die. If anybody out there has any information on this villain, please report it to the police.

Jayesh checked the date on the video. It had been posted that morning. This had to have happened within the past few days. He whispered a quick prayer for Thunderfist, then scrolled down to read the comments on the video.

Other viewers were as baffled as he was. There were plenty of arguments about what villains wore fursuits, how psychic powers could appear on a camera, and lots of links to videos with comparable powers.

Jayesh clicked on each one, but none of them showed powers like Amberlit's video.

What had the villain said? That Amberlit had gotten in his way for the last time? She must have encountered him before, somewhere. Jayesh clicked back through her older videos, searching through each one for views of the various thugs and villains she had taken down. None of them even vaguely resembled the fox-man. The only connecting thread between the videos was that Amberlit had been working on taking down a shard smuggling ring. Was the fox villain a smuggler?

There wasn't enough information. Jayesh pulled out Advanced Metaphysical Theory and flipped to the section about shard classifications.

The four main categories were Arcane, Physical, Metamorph, and Psi. While there were plenty of subcategories, nothing matched the power in that video. Illusions fell under Psi. Transforming objects fell under Arcane. Hard Light constructs fell under Arcane. Altered reality fell under Psi.

Could this villain have two shards and be using them in tandem? It was very rare for anyone to have two separate shards. They usually only appeared as two weak, conjoined shards like Jayesh's. If someone tried to have a second shard implanted, one shard absorbed the other. This was why only non-sharded people could work as smugglers.

This villain broke all the rules.

Chapter 2

Jayesh got up and paced around his apartment, ending up at his window. The sky above the buildings was streaked with dark blue clouds, the sun already set. Darkness came swiftly in January, even in Arizona.

He glanced down into the courtyard below his building. There were three little courtyards in the complex, paved with gravel and landscaped with little trees and bushes. Several people were struggling on the sidewalk outside the courtyard. Jayesh squinted. The complex was usually pretty quiet—he hadn't seen a fight like that in a long time. The combatants grappled and punched, trying to force each other to the ground. Then one of them broke free and ran toward the courtyard. One of the others pulled a gun and fired. The running figure stumbled, fell to the ground in the courtyard, and lay still. The others dashed away into the twilight.

Jayesh didn't stop to think about what he was doing. He sprinted out of his apartment, clattered down the stairs, and rushed to the fallen person.

It was a young man in a black hoodie and jeans, his skin slightly darker than Jayesh's. There was a bullet hole in the back of his jacket, already damp with blood. But it was too dark to see properly. Jayesh summoned light. One hand began to glow a soft gold, like a shaded lamp.

The victim gasped and twisted sideways, looking up at Jayesh in panic.

I'm a healer, Jayesh said in his most soothing voice. Keep still. The bullet's still in there.

A healer, panted the young man. Who sent you? The cops?

I live here, Jayesh said, pressing his other hand to the wound and focusing on his healing powers. The bullet had lodged behind a rib, and the rib was cracked. The bullet had been mercifully small caliber. He began coaxing the healing wound to force the bullet to the surface.

The young man groaned. You call anybody?

Not yet, Jayesh said absently. Had to stabilize you, first.

Don't call anyone, the young man begged. Just heal me and forget about this, okay?

Jayesh didn't answer. The bullet was making its way out, but was blocked by the rib. Maneuvering it free was tricky—

The victim began cursing through his teeth. A healing like this was pretty painful, and at first Jayesh thought that was the cause. Then the victim tore away from Jayesh and leaped to his feet.

Wait! Jayesh exclaimed, scrambling after him. The bullet's still in there!

The injured man was staring over Jayesh's shoulder. Jayesh turned.

Two superheroes in expensive suits were fighting with the thugs from earlier. In the gathering dark, Jayesh couldn't make out the insignias on