Now, while I’m not one for making excuses, this was only the second time I’d seen someone give up the ghost. And the first time was Steven. I’d been too busy surviving and too amped up on adrenaline then to pay it too much mind. I’ve thought back to the scene a few times since, but apart from a general sense of sadness, I don’t really have any strong feelings about it.

But this time was different. A vivid woman who I’d just been talking to, who had been eating food I’d just prepared, had keeled over dead. I shot to my feet and checked her pulse on instinct, and when I failed to detect the familiar thrum of life, I’m not proud to say, I froze.

My mind went blank, my thoughts receding like a tide. Then they crashed back in a tsunami of anxiety and speculations about future consequences. My pupils dilated. We were at the heart of the Egyptian Empire and we had a dead Saintess on our hands. We were so screwed.

Thinking back, I realize that my first thoughts were about how her death would affect us – me and my wives. Not once in the first few minutes did I think about the young woman whose life had so unceremoniously been snuffed out.

Then again, I had known her for less than a week. And while she might have taught me much and operated on Ceres, in the face of incumbent disaster, she was an insignificant eddy in the whirlpool of my thoughts.

I still felt guilty about that later, though.

My ears thundered as my blood rushed to my head, my vision narrowing down to the omelette-smeared face of the Saintess. Someone was calling my name, but I couldn’t hear their voices over the clamour of my own thoughts.

Crack!

A sharp pain bloomed on my cheek and my head swung so hard to the side that I think I heard my neck creak. Dazed, I staggered back with a hand on my cheek. Just in time to see Hei Lian retracting her palm with a satisfied expression.

“Good,” she said, “you’re finally back with us.”

Taking a deep, steadying breath, I nodded.

'She didn’t have to slap me that hard.’

I lowered my hand from my burning cheek. I was sure there was a bright red imprint of her palm there.

“Get your act together, Drama Queen," she said. "She isn’t dead. Yet.”

‘Huh? What?!’

“And you would have known that if you’d used your soul sense instead of just checking her pulse and then freaking out…”

Before she even finished the sentence, I was scanning the Saintess with my soul.

She was right! Instead of the blankness I had thought I would find, my senses brushed up against the edges of her soul. To my senses, it looked like a softly glowing ball of swirling white fog. Just… it was in a rather strange state. Like she was stuck looking inwards, rather than outwards at the world as was normal.

She wasn’t dead. But she was close. Her soul had disconnected from her body and without its guiding force, her body was busy dying. Unless the situation was remedied, and soon, we’d have a corpse on our hands.

I pushed harder with my soul sense, trying to ‘see’ what she was ‘looking’ at. I mean, what could be so interesting that seeing it was worth dying for.

Her untrained soul put up a token resistance before it thinned and I caught a bright flash of bluish-white before the mist of her soul covered it again. Just as I was about to take a closer look, I was knocked out of my contemplation by a hard smack on the back of my head.

“Hey, idiot! Unless you want to force a marriage contract on someone, don’t stick your soul so deep in theirs,” said Hei Lian, scowling at me.

‘Ah, damn…’

She pointed a thumb at Ceres, “And tell your little ladies to stop glaring holes into the back of my head. You won’t learn if everyone coddles you like they do.”

Turning, I saw that Phobos and Deimos looked distinctly discontented with her treatment of me while Ceres’ eyes seemed like they would spout fire. At some point in time Artemis had come into the room. She just looked confused.

“I totally deserved that,” I said, trying to calm them down. “Isabella made it very clear how dangerous soul magic is when she was teaching me, but I still forgot all about that in the heat of the moment and dived too deep. If she didn’t knock me out of it, I might have made a real mess.”

“Thank you," I said to Hei Lian. "The Saintess is still alive, but her situation is quite critical. Is there anything we can do for her?”

“So, you can fess up to your mistakes," she said, reaching out and patting my shoulder. "A promising young man. As a reward, I’ll help you solve this problem of yours for free.” She paused. “But only if you can guess what caused her sudden collapse. Hint: It’s got something to do with you. If you guess wrong, then I’ll count this time as one of your two life-saving opportunities.”

I fell into deep thought for a moment, my eyes roaming the scene as my mind worked furiously to find the culprit.

‘Ah…’

“Damn! I knew I should have kept the salt and the detergent further apart. To think a soapy omelette would take out the Saintess of an Order of healers.”

I ducked under another swipe at the back of my head.

“I was just joking. Trying to lighten the atmosphere, you know?” I said retreating out of the irate Hei Lian’s range. I mean, the tension in the room was so thick, you could probably cut it with a knife.

Reaching into my pocket, I brought out a pale blue mind crystal with a tiny cat made of light trapped in it. The cat was pacing back and forth within it like a caged animal. Noticing that it had been taken out, it turned and hissed at me, the fur on its back standing on end. Not that I could hear it across the impediment of the crystal, but if I could, I was sure it wasn’t spouting words of praise.

“It probably has something to do with this, right?”

Hei Lian’s stopped her menacing advance on me, her attention attracted by the crystal. She stared at it for a long moment before looking up at me with a strange expression on her face.

“Does your family have some kind of fetish for sealing stuff in mind crystals? First the witch’s soul fragment, now a manifested bloodline.”

She shook her head.

“Anyway, you’re right.” She nodded towards the crystal. “That thing affected your lady friend here. You’ve been spending a lot of time with her these past few days and that gave it the opportunity to trigger her bloodline activation ahead of time.”

I nodded. Both the Saintess and the crystal contained the same bloodline, and the Saintess’ was concentrated enough that she was even able to resist Vita’s influence using it. Which meant two soul fragments of the sacred beast, both of them large enough to have some limited measure self-awareness, had been in quite close proximity for these past few days. That had led to some unknown mutation that had prematurely activated the Saintess' bloodline.

It was both lucky and unlucky for this to have happened now. Lucky for her. Unlucky for us. If the mutation had triggered just an hour later, she would no longer have been our problem. But, her chances of survival would have plummeted. After all, she wouldn't have both the source of the mutation and a Demigod close at hand. A snarky, slap-happy Demigod. But a helpful one nonetheless.

“What do I need to do?” I asked.

Hei Lian shrugged. “Nothing.” She pointed to the crystal. “Cat, light, water…” She pointed at herself. “Wolf, dark, fire… We don’t get along.”

Then she turned and slapped the unconscious Saintess; a sharp crack across her face. I felt her fiery soul ripple out from the point of impact and wash across the Saintess’ body.

“I’ll just slap the kitten and get it to behave.”

I thought I heard the phantom yowling of an enraged cat before the Saintess’ eyes flew open and she drew a deep, shuddering breath. She bent forward, coughing and clutching her clothes over her heart.

She looked up, her tears and kohl running down her cheeks in black lines that soaked into her veil.

“What *cough* the hell happened?!” she exclaimed, ripping the stained piece of gauze away.

I quickly stuffed the crystal with the cat back in my pocket and handed her a napkin. Schooling my expression as well as I possibly could, I said seriously:

“You choked on your food.”