Gifted powers can be transferred through blood

Gifted powers can be transferred through blood, a rule that turns supernatural ability into something that can be maintained, combined, and passed to other people. Its central importance lies in the way it supports both Dorian’s extended immortality and his plan to build a powered force: blood is not merely a sign of supernatural inheritance, but a practical medium through which powers endure in new hosts. The rule also stands beside a different bodily cost. Esme’s healing shortens her life, making the transfer and use of power part of a wider pattern in which extraordinary abilities carry consequences rather than offering unlimited advantage.

The Mechanism and Its Uses

Dorian’s account identifies blood as the means by which he has found immortality. He says that the first stage of his plan was easy because he had discovered immortality through the blood of the gifted, and later identifies Draco’s blood as the key to his work. By mixing Draco’s blood with the blood of other people whose DNA carries power genes, Dorian has kept those powers active in their new hosts. The process therefore enables more than the retention of one person’s ability: it allows Dorian to reproduce powers within a group.

The method is also used to sustain Dorian himself. To remain immortal, he must infuse gifted blood with his own, a process lasting several hours that leaves him bedridden. The infusion machine combines his gold-tinged blood with donated blood from a man powered by a god. The procedure makes the maintenance of immortality recurring and physical: it is not an effortless, permanent state, but one that Dorian must renew through a specific blood-based process.

From Individual Ability to an Army

Dorian’s transfer method provides the foundation for an organized force modeled on the Hero Society. He describes his group as possessing powers like those of its opponents, not as their clones but as people who have received the same abilities. Its roster includes strength, empathy, shifting, computer expertise, and a killer; magic is the one power he says he lacks and considers of little use beside divine power. Blood transfer thus scales individual gifts into a strategic resource, allowing Dorian to assemble a force around abilities already found among powered people.

The supply comes through a system of blood donations. Dorian says he once took donations from people on the streets, but later the hospital had accumulated so much blood that he no longer needed to obtain it himself. Donors, he notes, did not consider their powers when giving blood. This detail links the supernatural mechanism to an ordinary institution and an apparently routine act: people can provide the material Dorian needs without realizing that their blood may be used to sustain immortality or maintain powers in other bodies. His army is therefore enabled not only by a discovery about blood, but by access to a continuing supply.

Limits, Costs, and Contrasts

Blood transfer does not erase the novel’s distinction between different ways of using power. Esme’s healing is governed by a life-thread cost: she and Eli discover that every healing makes the golden line in her arm shorter. Their research leads them to the Three Fates and the possibility that the diminishing thread brings Esme closer to death. Later, when she heals Dorian, she recognizes that she is giving up what remains of her life so he can survive. The contrast is consequential: Dorian uses blood to prolong his own condition and distribute abilities, whereas Esme’s power saves another person by spending her finite life.

Eli’s refusal of healing makes that cost an issue of consent as well as survival. Though Esme pleads to heal him while he is dying of leukemia, he refuses; he would rather have a shorter life with her as his sister than live without that relationship, and he would not forgive her if she acted against his wishes. The scene establishes that access to healing does not settle whether it should be used. Read alongside Dorian’s use of donated blood, it distinguishes a power’s technical possibility from the choices and consequences surrounding its use.

Narrative Significance

The rule gives Dorian’s rise a material logic: his immortality requires renewal, and his army depends on transferring powers into new hosts. It also makes blood a point of connection between supernatural inheritance and organized power, linking a divine source to a repeatable process involving other people. The result is a system that can be expanded, but not treated as consequence-free. Dorian’s procedures require blood and time, while Esme’s healing diminishes her life; across these different applications, power is inseparable from what bodies provide and what they lose.