Fever Blood

Chapter 86: The Power of the Blood

"I don't think so," Po Shun said.

"Oh. Well, I don't really think about it," Laidu said.

"What about your power?" Po Shun asked.

Laidu paused, thinking. "I mean, it doesn't feel warm or cold..."

"How do you know what hot or cold feels like?" Po Shun asked.

"This is going to sound crazy," Laidu said, "but you know how I said I don't remember anything before I Changed?" 

"Yeah?" 

"That's not entirely true," Laidu said. "Remember our classes on the Common tongue?" Po Shun nodded. Laidu had always excelled with languages, whether archaic Ten-Zuani, classic Qin (which they had just started to learn), and Alberic. "I knew most of that stuff already. I can speak more Common tongue than we learned. Why else am I the only one here with a bit of an Alberic accent?" 

"Oh, um, so you're saying you remember some things?"

"Skills, mostly," Laidu said. "I don't remember where I lived, what I even looked like. But I remember what hot and cold felt like." 

"Oh," Po Shun said. "So what does your power feel like?"

Laidu thought. "Well, you know how, after you eat a bunch of sugar rolls, you feel all like you just have to move, and if you try to keep still, this force builds up inside you and you just have to move?" Po Shun nodded. "It feels kind of like that, like a buzzing in my veins. Kind of annoying, but not unpleasant," he said. Laidu shrugged. "It is what it is."

"Oh." Po Shun stepped down a particularly steep path. "How do you use it?"

Laidu shrugged again. "How do you use your magic?"

"I speak."

"But you're not using it now," he said.

"Well, I have to draw on it. I just... do it. There's no way to explain it," Po Shun said. "It's like trying to explain how you move your arm. You just decide to do it and it happens."

"Same for me," Laidu said. "I just do it. It's like trying to explain how I move my arms." 

"And you can control it wherever you want it?"

"Yeah," Laidu said. "I mean, some places are kind of stupid to do it. My eyes, for example. I can make them glow, but all I see is this orange-red color, and there's nothing I can make out besides that."

"Oh," Po Shun said.

"Yeah. Kind of dumb to do," Laidu said. "Oh, we're close."

They had reached the edge of the forest. "Why here?" Po Shun asked as they walked in. 

"It's where my father and I trained." Laidu looked over to his father.

"So that's where you kept disappearing to!" Po Shun exclaimed.

"Where did you think I was going?" Laidu asked.

"I don't know." He didn't say what the others thought. Some said he went crying off by himself. Others that he lived in a cave like a monster, eating raw animals. Po Shun surely didn't believe the latter, but occasionally he believed the former. He did tend to mope.

"Anyway," Po Shun asked again, "what are we doing here?"

***

Laidu leaned on the scrap of wood. "And...start!" Po Shun's father shouted.

His hands lit up with brilliant scarlet light, and his veins lit up with that strange fire, up past his elbows. They looked like long gloves, made of flickering light.