He sits back down on his throne, sighing into the silence, and places his hand atop the other on his chest. He happily ignores the pile of little sick faces staring at him from his desk. An audience of watery eyes pleading for an encore. Children from all corners of the continent who are sick with no cure or sick with no root. Whose parents have sent chart after file after chart from past doctors who couldn’t find an answer, doctors who stood there with their clipboards and lightboxes without words. He recognizes a few of the conditions: MRSA, Kuru, Von Hippel-Lindau, cancers of all kinds. Some of the conditions have an unknown cause or a strange combination of symptoms.

But the cure is always the same.

As long as the parent signs the contract, he takes the child in for a few weeks of blood injections, drawn from his arm to theirs, and returns them better than ever with nothing but a few dots to show for it. He doesn’t have to feed them or clean them because the blood does its work, freezing the essential systems of the body so that the healing process can take over. So that his blood can easily slither through them as it mends the destruction in its path. The child feels no hunger or thirst, no internal movement, and very little pain. And when they are sent home, their functions kick back into gear. The symptoms abate and rarely return.

No one ever asks how he does his work and no one cares enough to investigate. Because without him, they’d lose the game. Because he keeps them in play.

And how they love to play.

A soft grin sits on his lips. He gives in, sifting through the pile of two-dimensional children to relish in their helplessness. Each picture, a card in a deck of useless plays. One young girl with blond pigtails, blue eyes, and gray skin, her mouth clenched around what is about to be a painfully raspy cough, lands atop the pile. The resemblance isn’t exact, but it’s there, present enough to pull his mind toward Vanilla, and for a moment his heart aches. He’s been shoving thoughts of her into the back of his mind, trying to avoid micromanaging, to let the process unfold. As it naturally will. But it has been ninety-six hours, and it makes him irritable to be away from her for so long. As if she is the cure to his rage. Or to his withdrawals.

What sweet irony.

If it weren’t for this practice, he would never have been given Vanilla. Been offered money and fake gold by a tweaked-out grin that sparkled with decay, in exchange for the rotting corpse of a baby soon to become his one and only sweet. Her body wrapped in a pink blanket and handed to him like a delicious gift to cradle in his cold arms. That blanket he would have handed back if not for that thin mouth that, despite the pain, struggled into an upturned crescent at the sight of him and sang to him like a muffled song from a closed music box. That little skeleton hand, so translucent and emaciated, from beneath the blanket, reaching out for him. Her sweet brown eyes—the only life-filled part of her—staring right at him. Right into him.