The Blood Bag

They called her my sister while my blood ran into her arm.

I lay on the narrow bed in the Silverpine healer house and watched a red drop crawl down the glass tube. It was the third time. My fingers had gone numb an hour ago. My head felt like a cracked bowl, and every sound reached me from far away.

On the next bed, Lila lay under a white blanket with her golden curls spread across the pillow. Her lashes rested on her cheeks. She looked like a painting of a sleeping angel.

“Is it working?” my mother asked. Her voice was soft and warm. It was the voice she saved for Lila.

“Her color is returning,” the healer said. “A few more rounds and she should stabilize.”

A few more rounds. I turned the words over in my slow, foggy mind. Nobody had said a few more rounds for me. Nobody had asked how many I could give.

Lila had come to us ten years ago, a tiny girl with a torn dress and a dead father. Dorian Vale had served beside him in the last northern war. When the battlefield took the man, my father brought his daughter home and called it a debt of honor.

I was nine then. I remember standing at the top of the stairs, holding a doll I had saved for her. My mother knelt and smoothed Lila’s hair. Then she looked up at me and said, “Don’t crowd her, Sera. She has been through enough.”

That was the day I became a shadow in my own house.

Mother painted Lila’s room in warm yellow. My brother Cael brought her honey pastries she had mentioned only once. My father looked at her with a gentleness I had never seen aimed at me, his own daughter. If I got a cold, I was told to stay out of the way. If Lila sneezed, the healer was summoned.

She was always timid. She lowered her lashes when she spoke. She paused for breath three times to finish a single sentence, and the whole room leaned in to wait for her.

“It is the war,” Mother would say. “She saw terrible things.”

“Her blood is thin,” the healer would add. “Anemia, and a heart that runs too fast.”

So I learned to be quiet. I learned to eat in the kitchen and to walk lightly. I learned to be strong, because someone had to be.

Then, six weeks ago, Lila collapsed at the dinner table, and the healer announced that she needed blood. Strong blood. A close match.

I was a match.

“Of course she is,” Mother had said, almost laughing.

“Sera could carry a horse.”

The first transfusion took one hour. I walked home on my own legs and felt only a little dizzy. The second took two. I walked home leaning on a fence. Today was the third, and I could not remember the walk to the healer house at all.

Now the tube pulled at my skin. I looked down at my arm. It was a map of purple bruises and tiny puncture marks. The nurse had tried four times to find a clean vein. She finally put the needle in my wrist and apologized with her eyes.

“I cannot take more from her today,” she whispered to the healer. “Look at her lips. They are gray.”

My mother stepped between us.

“Don’t bother with her,” she said. “She is as strong as an ox.”

I waited for someone to argue. Cael stood by the window with a pastry in his hand. He glanced at my arm, then away.

“She’s been pretending to be weak since she was little,” he said, and he laughed. It was a light, careless laugh. It landed on me like a slap.

I looked at my father. He stood by the door with his arms crossed and his jaw set. I silently begged him to say one word. Just one.

He looked at the floor.

No one asked if it hurt. No one asked if I was willing.

No one said thank you.

The nurse took the needle out anyway, and I think it was the only kindness anyone gave me that day.

I sat up too fast and the room tilted. My knees bent, and I caught the edge of the bed. A cold sweat ran down my back.

“I need air,” I said.

“You need to rest,” Mother corrected. “Sit still. Your sister needs quiet.”

I did not sit still. I stood, and I walked. I took the long hallway one hand on the wall, and the floor swayed beneath my feet like the deck of a ship. I pushed through the side door into the courtyard and gulped the cold night air.

The stars were sharp above the pines. Somewhere deep inside me, something small and stubborn spoke for the first time in years.

If this continues, you will die.

It was not a dramatic thought. It was a plain one, like noticing rain. The healer would call for a fourth round, then a fifth. My family would call it love. They would grieve for me at a funeral, and Lila would stand at the front in black, whispering her sorrow, and they would comfort her.

I pressed my bruised wrist against my chest. My heartbeat was thin and fast.

I would have to leave. Tonight, before the fourth round.

I turned to slip back inside and gather my courage.

That was when I saw her.

Lila stood at the end of the dark hallway, framed by the window. She was walking. Not drifting, not swaying.

Walking quickly, with her shoulders back and her chin high, her arms swinging easily at her sides. In the pale moonlight she looked taller than I had ever seen her.

I stopped breathing.

She reached the corner and glanced back. Her eyes found mine through the glass.

For one heartbeat her face held no weakness at all. It was calm, bright, and hungry.

Then she blinked. Her knees folded, her hand fluttered to her throat, and she sank toward the floor with a faint, perfect gasp.

“Mother!” she whispered. “Sera is staring at me again.”