Blood Which Burns

Excerpt

Blood Which Burns
BL Jones © 2025
All Rights Reserved

Prologue

ANDY

I was six the first time I broke into my mum’s lab.

Even at that age, I knew I wasn’t allowed in there because it was full of dangerous and fascinating things.

I had to break into the lab at least two dozen times before Mum gave in and simply took me down there with her.

She would sit me up at a table and give me work to do. Just simple things at first, calculating equations and mixing low-risk substances as required.

When I watched my mum move through her lab, I marvelled at her intellect. She knew so much, understood so much of the world that I did not.

It seemed to me she was one of the most brilliant people alive, and I wanted to be exactly like her.

Then there was my dad, a man like a natural disaster, unrelenting and inexplicably dangerous, his unique genius as captivating and destructive to watch as a tornado tearing across continents. His mind was unrivalled, a man destined to change the world.

And he did. With my mum’s help. My parents were the creators of Liquid Onyx, the gods of superheroes, the killers of children.

But, in most ways, Alex Nova was the man who taught me how to swim at our local pool and how to do a cartwheel, who took me out for ice cream when I did well on a test in school. He was the man who tickled me until I cried with laughter and dried my tears away when I got hurt falling off my skateboard. He was the man who told me I could do anything I wanted with my life because I was brave and clever, when all anyone else did was call me pretty.

My dad was my hero, not because of his extraordinary mind or the things he could do with it, but because he was my dad, and I loved him desperately.

When he died, my world crumbled and my heart broke. A piece of my childhood was set ablaze, never to be recovered from the ashes.

From then, it was just Mum and me. Mum became my everything; there was no one else, really. She didn’t want me to have any contact with my dad’s side of the family, and her side didn’t want anything to do with either of us.

Mum tried to make up for it by always being there when I needed her, by being my best friend. She came to all my science competitions and supported my academic dreams with all the attention, energy, and money she could spare. She bought me enough books to sink a ship and took me to museums all over the world, encouraging me to seek knowledge wherever I could find it.

I came out at fifteen and Mum made me a cake with the pansexual flag colours, which we ate together in front of the TV, watching our favourite 80s eighties films, quoting lines from Top Gun and Back to the Future in terrible American accents.

For a very long time, all I had in my life was my mum and my work.

Then there was Dru, who was too easy to love, and through her I met my little brother for the first time. Rex. A boy I’d been thinking about for too many years, imagining what he would be like and all the things we might have in common. Shared DNA doesn’t have to mean much, I know that, but it still felt like a connection I couldn’t pass on the potential of. I was too curious, have always been too curious by nature. Mum used to say that was how she knew I’d grow up to be a scientist like her and Dad.

Now, Mum is dead, and it was Rex who murdered her, and all I could do was scream for him to stop. Useless. Fucking stupid. As if my pleading would mean anything to him at that moment, after what I saw in that factory, what happened to Damon North. After what happened to our uncle Roux.

Thing is, I was right about how it would feel to meet Rex. There was a connection, instant and visceral. I felt it wind around my heart like barbed wire the moment our eyes met across the university lawn. Eyes the exact replica of our dad’s. He looked so much like Alex Nova, my breath had caught in my throat, threatening to choke me up. It had been a long time since I saw our dad’s face, and seeing it reflected back at me, albeit in an undeniably younger and angrier iteration, was bizarre. It’s like there was an edge there in the cut of my brother’s cheekbones, in the sardonic twist to his mouth that I can’t remember our dad ever possessing. Almost too much to deal with. But when he looked at me, I felt something, a tether pulling taut between us, and I’m certain, even now, that Rex felt it, too.

That’s what makes hating him so hard.

“What are you doing?” Dru asks as she sits down next to me at a table in what was my mum’s lab.

It’s been weeks since Mum’s death and Dru hasn’t left my side for more than an hour at a time. I feel shame over how deeply I’m grieving my mum, after what she did to Dru. Every time my eyes catch on the faint scars around Dru’s mouth, I can’t help an internal flinch.

Turns out, my mum was the villain of this story, and you’re not supposed to mourn the villain. You’re not supposed to hate the hero who stopped them. You’re not supposed to cry every night in your girlfriend’s arms over the person responsible for maiming her.

But this isn’t a story, this is my messy, brutal shit stain of a reality.

“Going through Mum’s files.” I nod at the computer screen in front of me.

I’ve spent the last few days reading through my mum’s electronic journal entries. They were password protected, but Dru helped me to hack into them. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read them at first. Rationally, I knew nothing in them would fix what happened. But the more I dig through my mum’s tangled psyche, the more I understand why she did what she did. There’s not a thing on this earth that would make me agree with her resolve to kill all the Liquid Onyx survivors, but it’s become obvious to me that she genuinely thought it was the only way forward.

In her mind, she was saving the world. More than that, she was fixing what she believes she broke when she and Dad created Liquid Onyx.

Dru scoots closer to me on her stool and reaches over to press her hand to the back of my neck. My blonde hair is up in a messy ponytail, leaving the skin there exposed. She wraps her warm fingers around my neck and squeezes gently. “You’ve been down here for hours, babe.”

Her implication is clear. It’s three in the morning and I should be trying to get some sleep. That would be pointless, though. All I ever do when I fall asleep is have nightmares about that night at the factory. I keep replaying Mum’s death over and over again. I hear myself screaming. I smell fire, overwhelmingly hot and sharp, from the warehouse explosion. I feel the freezing-cold rain soaking into my skin.

I dream of my brother’s face—my dad’s face—as it hardens in response to my begging. I dream of his mouth forming the word, “No”. Uncompromising. Cruel. There was so much anger in him that night, so much pain. It hurt to look at, like staring into the heart of an infant volcano just as it’s erupting for the first time.

I’d rather live with my exhaustion than see any of that again.

“I’m all right.” A standard lie that I don’t even pretend Dru will believe.

“You’re not, though.” Dru exhales tiredly, moving even closer, resting her chin on my shoulder as her thumb rubs soothing circles into my neck. “And that’s okay, Ands. I don’t expect you to be all right after everything. But staying down here all the time, surrounded by your mum’s work, can’t be helping.”

“Not sure anything would help,” I murmur, but lean into Dru, steadied by her presence. I truly think that if it weren’t for her, I’d have lost my shit and given in to the urge to do something terrible and reckless, like confront Rex. What a bloody, traumatising mess he and I have got ourselves into. Sometimes, when that clawing, furious hatred roils through me at the thought of him, I contemplate the idea that I might never be able to talk to him again, which feels like a loss all its own.

Dru doesn’t contradict me, pressing a light kiss to my bare shoulder instead, soft lips a sort of balm to the blend of dread and bitterness swirling around inside me on a near constant basis. Both of us are in our pyjamas, chequered bottoms and vests, a hers and hers matching set some of our friends got us for a joke at Christmas, having been asleep before I gave up and came down to the lab.

She turns her head and squints at the screen, reading out loud from one of my mum’s journal entries. “None of the Liquid Onyx survivors have made it to twenty-six alive. And, whether I succeed in my mission or not, none of them ever will.” Dru shakes her head, expression deeply disturbed. “Jesus Christ.”

Neither of us speaks for a while, the gut-punch of those statements too much to absorb all at once.

I keep forgetting that Dru has a personal connection to all this. She was friends with Rex and Damon, and she’s mentioned working closely with the scientist, Rohan Sathe. She said it was Jamie Moon, the older brother of another Liquid Onyx survivor, who saved her from being imprisoned by OI, convincing the director to hire her to work for them instead.

She knows these people. Cares about them. They aren’t just faraway tragedies to her. When they die, she will be affected by it in a very real way.

“It was me, you know,” I say, voice too loud in the eerie quiet of the lab.

Dru pulls back to frown at me apprehensively, no doubt reading something in my tone she doesn’t like. “What was you?”

Sighing wetly, I raise a hand to rub at my tired eyes. “She got the idea to use a blood ritual to kill the Liquid Onyx survivors from something I said. She wrote about it in here.” I nod my head at the computer. “I had no idea at the time, but she made it sound like we were discussing a project from work.”

When I first read that entry, it took me a moment of searching through my memories to pick out that day. The two of us sitting on my sofa with cups of tea, talking about how she was struggling with a problem, and me, being so eager to help her. It makes me feel physically sick to think I was even peripherally responsible for the suicide of Damon North. I’ve thought about him non-stop since that night. He was younger than me, not even twenty-two. Far too young to die.

Bursting into that room to find Damon’s lifeless body crumpled on the dirty factory floor, and Rex chained to the wall staring with horrible, dead eyes at his equally dead boyfriend, isn’t something I’ll be able to scrub from my memory any time soon.

But, as my mum’s journal entries suggest, all the Liquid Onyx survivors will die young.

Dru affords me the respect of not trying to convince me it wasn’t my fault that my mum used what I said to hurt people. She squeezes my neck again instead, offering comfort rather than reassurance.

“I found something else as well,” I tell Dru, shifting away from her and getting off my stool. I move towards the pair of large lab fridges, where Mum stored chemicals that needed to be kept at a certain temperature.

Dru slips off her own stool and follows me. I open one of the fridges, a gust of coldness causing goosebumps to rise along my arms, and gesture at what I discovered when I was going through the lab earlier. Dru moves to my side and bends slightly to see where I’m indicating.

Sitting on the second shelf is a small, black safe.

“What’s in it?” Dru asks, brows pulled together.

Shrugging, I move closer, going down on one knee so I’m at eye-level with the safe. “I don’t know yet, I got distracted by Mum’s journal, but she mentioned the safe in one of her entries. She didn’t say what was in it, only alluded to its importance.”

“To one of her Obsidian Inc projects?” Dru goes down on her knees beside me, her own curiosity piqued.

I brush a long strand of hair behind one ear, a nervous habit. “I think it’s something to do with Liquid Onyx.”

Dru’s eyes widen slightly, and she leans forward, peering at the safe with more acute interest. “Did your mum mention the passcode to get into it?”

Rather than answering, I reach out and punch in the code Mum buried within her journal entries. It took me a while to figure out the pattern, but once the first few numbers revealed themselves, figuring out the rest was easy. I recognise the date she used.

It was the day my dad died.

Once I’ve put in the code, there’s a soft couple of beeps and the little door pops open. Sitting at the very back of the safe, hidden partially from view by shadow, is a vial full of some dark chemical. I exchange a quick look of apprehension with Dru before reaching inside to take out the vial. I bring it up into the light so we’ll both be able to see what it is.

Dru lets out a short gasp, but I’m unable to tear my eyes away from the vial to see what her expression is doing.

The chemical inside the vial is a pure black, like ink or oil.

“Holy shit, Ands!” Dru exclaims, disbelief thick in her voice.

A faded label is plastered on the vial, with two words printed on it.

In hushed awe, I read, “Liquid Onyx.”