Bloodletting

I never fell ill as a child, and even when I got injured, any cuts and bruises would heal in less than a minute. I broke my arm once and it healed in just two minutes. Everyone in town was scared of me, and even my own parents resented me because both our neighbours and their colleagues avoided them as well. Neither of them had such regenerative abilities, so I had no help at all to understand what was different about me. They were too scared to have the doctors run tests on me, although they didn’t say why.

When I was sixteen, the town I lived in became ground zero for an epidemic that swiftly spread to nearby towns and cloaked the entire district in just three days. Thousands of people were falling ill; hundreds more were dying. It was then that a group of scientists called my parents. I overheard my parents on the phone and decided to eavesdrop on the conversation that followed.

“If only it were that easy to get rid of her. She has been nothing but a burden from the moment she was born,” my father said.

“You’re right. Those scientists can bleed her dry for all I care, but this plague will be nothing if she becomes like Ethel,” my mother said.

I was shocked and ashamed of what I heard. I knew they thought low of me, but hearing those words… They may as well have killed me. But at the same time, I was also intrigued by what my mother said.

Aunt Ethel is like me?

My parents rarely talked about Aunt Ethel. They only ever said that they were not on good terms with her, and that she preferred to live alone. That night, I decided to run away from home and find her. I took a detour through the woods that few people knew about and slipped into one of the neighbouring districts to take a train to where she lived. After an hour on the rails and another half an hour on the road, I finally arrived at Aunt Ethel’s house. It was in a secluded area in the middle of nowhere. At least I knew my parents were telling the truth about her preferring solitude.

Aunt Ethel hugged me the second she saw me. “I’m so sorry, my dear… I’m sorry for what they’ve put you through.”

“Aunt Ethel, what’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You just inherited a mutation that tends to appear in our family from time to time. It’s one of the greatest blessings and also one of the darkest of curses.”

“What do you mea—”

Before I could finish my sentence, I saw on the news that police were looking for me. Then Aunt Ethel’s phone rang. It was my mother. She warned us that there was a bounty on my head. Some of the locals had begun a witch hunt, and the police were supporting it as well. My mother said it wouldn’t be long before they figured out Aunt Ethel’s whereabouts, and that we should leave at once before any of them got hurt.

I was perplexed. What did she mean by ‘any of them’? Aunt Ethel saw the confusion on my face and told me she’d explain it on our way to her safe house: a cabin deep in the woods that she had built in secret. However, before we could grab any belongings, the door came crashing down and an angry mob poured into the house. They kicked Aunt Ethel and threw her against the wall before grabbing me by my hair and hitting me repeatedly in my face.

“You thought you could run and leave us all to die, did you?”

“Cursed witch. I bet you were the one who brought the plague upon us!”

Their insults and accusations were ceaseless. I felt my nose cave in and my jaw crack with each blow. The scent of my own blood started to suffocate me, and I suddenly felt an anger unlike anything I had ever felt before. All the resentment and rage that I had bottled up for so long erupted at once.

The flesh all over my body began to tear and regenerate faster than it had ever before, releasing jets of blood that swiftly turned into a black mist that engulfed the room. Everyone around me except Aunt Ethel started falling to the floor, writing and wailing as they foamed at the mouth and choked to death.

The mist remained until every last one of them died. It didn’t even take a minute. I fell to my knees, unable to process what had just happened. My rage was finally subsiding, but how… Did I just kill them all with my blood?

Aunt Ethel grabbed my hand. “We need to leave! Now!”

She helped me to my feet and led me through the woods until we finally reached her safe house. There, I learned from her that while our mutation’s primary mechanism was instant regeneration, its secondary mechanism was the release of a deadly miasma. She said it is triggered in a life-or-death situation, when someone is actively trying to hurt us. It was the main reason she sealed herself away from the world as well; she had once taken the lives of an angry mob just as I had done that same day.