The Parasite Rose

Chapter 15 — The Transparent Person

Morning light through the curtains. Gold and white, cutting across the bed in a thin stripe. I was already awake—had been for hours, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, my left hand tucked under the pillow where the light couldn't reach it.

The light moved. The sun tracked across the room, slow and inevitable, and the stripe crept toward the pillow like a finger pointing at a secret.

I pulled my hand out. Fast. Pressed it against my chest, under my jacket, where the fabric would block the light. My heart was beating hard—too hard, the kind of pulse that meant my body knew something my brain was refusing to process.

I didn't want to look. That was the truth of it. I'd spent the last two weeks pretending I hadn't noticed the thinning skin, the way the light caught the edges of my fingertips, the faint transparency that appeared and disappeared depending on the angle. I'd told myself it was nothing. A side effect. The parasite adjusting, recalibrating, finding a new balance.

I looked.

My left index finger. Held up against the stripe of sunlight that had reached the bed.

I could see the light passing through it. Not just the edges—through the finger itself. The skin was translucent, the flesh underneath thin enough to let the sunlight through, and in that pale, golden glow, I could see the shadow of my own bone. The phalanx, the joints, the thin white line that ran from knuckle to tip like a wire inside a lamp.

The finger was half-transparent.

I pulled it out of the light. Pressed it flat against the mattress. My breathing was fast, shallow, the air coming in short bursts that didn't reach the bottom of my lungs.

Fear. Pure, cold, the kind of fear that doesn't scream—it just sits on your chest and waits.

I curled into a ball. Drew my knees to my chest, wrapped my arms around them, pressed my face against my kneecaps. The mattress was soft under me. The room was quiet. The light continued its slow march across the floor, indifferent to the fact that something was very, very wrong.

I stayed like that for a long time. Maybe minutes. Maybe longer. Time doesn't work right when you're calculating how many pieces of yourself you have left.

Eventually, I uncurled. Sat on the edge of the bed. Pulled my journal from under the mattress—the one with the tally marks, the one I kept buried in the same place I kept everything that mattered.

I opened to a blank page and wrote.

First noticed cold fingertips: age 15. After stealing wolf blood. First exchange with a target. Duration of cold: 3 days.

Cold duration decreased over time: 3 days → 1 day → half day → nothing.

Sweetness in blood: first noticed ~2 weeks ago. Increasing.

Skin thinning at fingertips: first noticed ~1 week ago. Progressive.

Transparency: confirmed this morning. Left index finger, half-transparent in direct sunlight. Bone visible through flesh.

I stared at the list. The ink was black, the handwriting small and precise, the words arranged like items on a grocery list. Facts. Data. The kind of information you collect when you're trying to solve a problem.

The problem was me.

From 15 to 19. Four years of blood exchanges—hundreds of cuts, hundreds of transfers, hundreds of times I'd opened my veins for someone else's benefit. Each one had cost me something. The cold, the sweetness, the thinning skin. I'd been trading pieces of myself for survival, and the price had been accumulating in the shadows, invisible, patient, waiting for me to notice.

I did the math. Rough estimates, the kind you do when you don't have precise instruments. From 15 to 19—four years. At the current rate of decline, based on the speed of the transparency... I stopped writing. The numbers didn't make sense. They said I was running out faster than I'd calculated.

I put the journal away. Walked to the window. Pressed my palm against the glass.

Outside, the city was waking up. Distant sounds—voices, footsteps, the clatter of metal. Life. Ordinary, human, nothing-to-do-with-parasites life.

I looked at my hand on the glass. The palm was opaque—still solid, still real, still flesh and blood and bone. But the fingertips, pressed against the glass, were pale at the edges. The light from outside caught them, and for a moment I could see the faintest outline of the bones underneath.

I pulled my hand away. Left a handprint on the glass—pale, incomplete, the edges fading where the skin was thinnest.

Damian noticed.

Not the transparency—I'd covered my hands with cloth wraps that morning, a new habit, the excuse of a "cut" that I kept fresh by reopening the same wound every day. He noticed something else.

We were in the study. The exchange. The ritual. Knife, cut, press, flow. His blood met mine, the current running between us, warm and steady. His breathing was even. His old pain was retreating further each week—my blood was doing its work, pushing back the silver that lived in his chest, mending the damage that three centuries hadn't managed to heal.

I was taking less. Deliberately. The journal's numbers had told me what I needed to know: every exchange was a withdrawal from an account that was already overdrawn. I needed to slow the drain.

"You're holding back," Damian said.

His eyes were closed. His wrist was pressed against mine. The candle threw shadows across his face—the jaw, the cheekbones, the dark hair that never moved, never mussed, the kind of stillness that came from centuries of practice.

"I'm tired," I said.

"You're not tired. Your pulse is normal. Your grip is steady. Your blood output is reduced by thirty percent." He opened his eyes. "You're deliberately giving less."

"Thirty percent is within normal variation."

"Normal variation is five to ten percent. You've been at thirty for the last two exchanges." He paused. "What are you hiding?"

My hand tightened on his wrist. Not enough for him to feel. Just enough for me to feel my own bones under the thinning skin.

"Nothing," I said. "I've been eating less. The parasite compensates."

"You've been eating less." He repeated it like he was testing the weight of each word. "And the sweetness in your blood—that's also from eating less?"

I didn't answer. I pulled back. Pressed my thumb over the cut. The wound was closing fast—faster than his, faster than normal, the skin knitting together with a speed that made me want to look away.

"Your healing rate has increased," he said. "In the first exchange, your wound took eight minutes to close. Now it takes two."

"The parasite adapts."

"The parasite is accelerating." His voice was quiet. Measured. The voice of someone who'd spent three centuries watching patterns and knew when one was breaking. "Something is happening to you, Nessa. Something you're not telling me."

I stood. The chair scraped against the floor. "We're done."

"We're not done."

"We are when I say we are." I walked to the door. His voice followed me—not loud, not commanding, just present, the way a shadow is present when you step into sunlight.

"Whatever it is," he said, "hiding it will not make it smaller."

I closed the door behind me. Didn't respond. Didn't need to. He was right, and that was the worst part.

In the bathroom, I unwrapped my left hand.

The bandages came off in layers—gauze, cloth, the outer wrap that I'd tied tight enough to leave marks. The skin underneath was pale. Not the pale of someone who'd been wrapped up too long. The pale of someone whose skin was losing its color.

I held my hand under the tap. Water ran over my fingers—cold, clear, catching the light from the single bulb above the basin. The water didn't pass through me. That was something. My fingers were still solid enough to hold water.

But the light...

I turned off the tap. Held my hand up to the bulb. The light was harsh, direct, the kind of bare-bulb illumination that hid nothing.

My index finger was transparent. Fully transparent now, not just at the edges. The light passed through the entire finger—skin, flesh, muscle—and I could see the bone clearly. A white line against the glow, the phalanx floating in a column of light that should have been blocked by flesh.

My middle finger was next. The transparency had spread—halfway up the first knuckle, the tip glowing faintly in the light, the bone just barely visible through the translucent skin.

I put my hand down. Looked at my reflection in the mirror above the basin.

My face was the same. Solid. Real. The dark eyes, the sharp jaw, the brown skin that was still brown, still opaque, still mine. I leaned closer. Examined every detail—the lines around my eyes, the faint scar on my chin, the way my lips pressed together when I was holding something back.

Everything was normal. Everything was intact.

I straightened up. Stepped back.

And then I saw it.

In the mirror, I was smiling.

My reflection's mouth was curved upward—not a lot, not a grin, just a small, quiet smile. The kind of smile that said I know something you don't.

I wasn't smiling. I pressed my lips together. Felt them hard and flat against my teeth. I wasn't smiling. I was doing the opposite of smiling. My face was a mask of controlled terror, and the thing in the mirror was smiling through it.

I blinked.

The smile was gone. My reflection matched my face—same expression, same terror, same flat lips. The mirror showed me exactly what I was.

I stared at it for a long time. Long enough for the water to stop dripping. Long enough for my heartbeat to slow. Long enough for the light above the basin to flicker once, twice, then steady.

Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the angle. Maybe it was the exhaustion, three days without food, the parasite burning through my reserves, my brain misfiring from the stress.

Maybe.

I left the bathroom. Walked to the bed. Sat down and pressed my hand against the mattress, feeling the tally marks under the fabric. Each one an exchange. Each one a piece of me, given away.

My hand was warm. Not cold—warm. The blood was moving fast, the parasite working overtime, processing, converting, burning through whatever was left of the normal human machinery that used to keep me alive.

I held my hand up one more time. The candle was still burning on the nightstand, its flame steady, its light weak.

The light passed through my fingers. Through the skin, through the flesh, through the thin architecture of bone. My hand was a lantern with the shade half-removed, the light leaking through gaps that shouldn't have existed.

I was disappearing.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The light was passing through me because there was less of me to block it. My body was thinning from the inside out, the parasite consuming the substance of my flesh and replacing it with something that held shape but not weight, presence but not substance.

I lowered my hand. Pressed it against my chest. Felt my heartbeat—steady, strong, the pulse of a body that didn't know it was dying.

Or maybe it did know. Maybe the sweetness in my blood was the taste of a body consuming itself, the sugar of breaking cells, the dessert of decay.

I lay back. The ceiling was dark. The candle burned.

And somewhere in the space between my skin and my bones, something was eating me alive. One drop at a time. One exchange at a time. One layer of flesh at a time.

I stared at the ceiling until the candle went out. Then I closed my eyes and listened to the silence.

The silence was growing louder. And I was growing quieter.

And in the mirror, I could still feel the ghost of a smile that wasn't mine.