Free The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) by Chris Eisenlauer Page B

eyes easing what felt like an immeasurable weight upon his brain. He put the glasses back in his pocket. They would be  more of a hinderance than a help since he was already rather adept at infiltration.
    He made his way up the Tower, taking the memorized route, the most direct way through seams between walls, through rooms that would otherwise not allow progress to his destination, and sometimes through actual doors.
    He stopped briefly when he came into a room with a man floating in a thick glass cylinder filled with fluid and lit with eerie green light. Stoakes had heard about Kapler’s brother and knew that he was being kept alive in this way, but to Stoakes he looked dead. He shrugged and continued on his way up the Tower.
    After a mere total of three minutes, Stoakes slipped through the seam between door and jamb into the apartment he sought. He hugged the wall, sliding liquidly along it, and made not the slightest sound. He rounded a corner and saw her. Anis Lausden stood at the window looking out at the new troops filling the Black Fields below.
    Slowly, silently he retrieved the glasses again and put them on. This time, this close to the source, the funnel issuing from Anis Lausden’s head overwhelmed all else. He couldn’t remember in all his thousands of years of life ever seeing anything so beautiful. Anis Lausden was beautiful, sparking the beginnings of lust in him, but the funnel was. . . was divine . There was no other way to describe it. The sense of warmth, of welcome, of satisfaction coming from the furious little cyclone touched him in a way that he thought impossible. A single tear dropped to the floor. There would be no more, of course. Stoakes could be ashamed of what he was about to and still do it. He had agreed to a contract and his will was iron. He noted the origin point of the funnel, its depth and orientation, and once again removed the glasses.
    Stoakes reached for the small of his back, gripped the hilt of the Suicide Knife with one hand and the end of its sheath with the other. The weapon was thirty-three centimeters long and eighteen of that was blade, dark and glittering, and which whispered now as he released it.
    Anis turned from the window, thinking she’d heard something or someone, but she found herself alone. She moved forward as a shadow slid along the wall, positioning itself behind her.
    “Jav?” she said, tentatively.
    The spell of the Suicide Knife had taken her.
    Stoakes frowned. Holson moves fast, he thought to himself. The fact that she was seeing Jav meant that she trusted him. This kind of work wasn’t beneath Stoakes, but it still seemed a shame. She was so pretty and so young. She’d done nothing to deserve this, but such was the way of assassination. Stoakes crept up behind her, seeing what she was seeing and knowing that it wasn’t real.
    Jav Holson rounded the same corner that Stoakes had. He moved in slow motion and put put a finger to his lips.
    “Jav,” Anis said. “It’s so good to see you. What’s the matter?”
    “Shhh,” he seemed to say, and Anis thought that it was for the second time.
    She cocked her head in confusion, but did not disobey. Indeed, her confusion gave way to comfort and a feeling of safety with the person she trusted above all others before her and within arm’s reach.
    She stretched out her hands for him but he faded as Stoakes drove the sharp-angled chisel tip of the Suicide Knife into her temple and slowly pushed the blade up to half its length into her head, pricking what he knew to be the source of the funnel. She opened her mouth, trying to speak, but little more than faint, plaintive whimpers escaped her throat. She frowned but could not move. Everything was fading and getting farther away, abandoning her.
    Stoakes pulled the blade free with a forceful yank and the wound at her temple, a perfect hairline of red, hissed as it spat out a fine, cherry mist. But when it was done, there were only droplets of blood beading the