Twelve bags.

  Twelve whole bags stuffed to the brim with fresh produce, dried herbs, medicinal powders, and a bundle of razor-needled leechstalk the vendor had practically thrown at Cara for half price. The man must’ve thought he was pulling a fast one on her, unloading old stock on some clueless woman eager to haggle, but please. She’d inspected every stalk, made a face at the wilted ones, and sighed just enough to make him sweat.

  And the real triumph was that she’d done it all while looking stunning, if she did say so herself. The deep emerald green drown she’d taken from Old Banks’ vault fit her like a glove, clinching at the waist with silver buttons, with floral embroidery at the sleeves—just enough to whisper ‘maybe I have some wealth’ without excess. Not wealthy enough to warrant getting robbed, but every vendor in the Black Bloom Bazaar had seen her dress today, and suffice it to say, they knew she wasn’t just another tired city girl bartering for potatoes.

  She smirked, shifting the bags in her arms, shoulders burning just a little from the weight as she skipped on back to the clinic.

  Gods, it’s late, she grumbled. Haggling for these prices still took the better half of the day, huh?

  Well past sundown, nine in the evening, the bioarcanic street lamps were oozing sickly orange light. The Vile was thickening in the air. Down here on this abandoned, desolate street where no man dared to roam at night, she had the entire block all to herself. And she was feeling skippy today. She hummed and smiled and skipped all the way back until she reached Asphodel Lane Number Two.

  The abandoned church came into view just up ahead at the end of the street, pipes and beams twisting along the outer walls, the stained glass windows flickering with warm, low gaslight coming from inside the building.

  But she didn’t pause and throw herself back around the corner because that warm light was strange, no.

  Scrunching her brows, she peeked around the corner and caught sight of Gael, outside the front door—on a ladder.

  He was perched up there, muttering under his breath, fiddling with a pipe above the front door. Below him stood Maeve, arms crossed, lips thin, watching him like a cat eyeing a particularly stupid bird.

  … No.

  Not just watching.

  Directing. Cara couldn’t hear what Maeve was saying at first, but judging by her sharp gestures and the way Gael kept stopping to throw his head back in exasperation, she could guess it wasn’t a pleasant conversation.

  Cara focused a little harder.

  “That’s the wrong spot, Doctor.”

  “This is exactly where you told me to put it.”

  “No, I told you to put it above the pipe, not on it.”

  “That’s the same fucking thing. What do you want?”

  “Do you know what ‘above’ means? Put it far over the pipe. That’s—no, that's on the pipe. Put it one pipe above.”

  “I don’t need a lecture on beautification, Exorcist. I asked you to help me make it look decently good because I can’t see very well from up here, not for you to nag me over what ‘above’ and ‘on’ means.”

  Cara raised a brow as the two continued squabbling out in the open, but it took her another moment looking at the front of the clinic before she realized what looked a little different about the building today.

  Right now, the entire front of the clinic was decorated with tiny glowing green crystals. Dozens and hundreds of them were already affixed to the walls, gleaming beautifully in the dark where they were tucked between pipes, metal beams, and along the cracks of the walls.

  What a surprise.

  They may have been in a different form at the time, but the sickly green glow of those crystals were unmistakable. The blood they were made out of had been everywhere a week ago: drenching the bedroom, eating through the wooden floorboards, and burning through everything else organic and in between. Cara had been the one cleaning up the blood while Gael and Maeve were still knocked out cold, draining them from the corners of the bedroom.

  It wasn’t hard to tell the blood was coming from Maeve. Cara had poked the Exorcist’s face more than once in her sleep and figured she had ‘Crimson Weep’, an ailment many Bharnish had that caused blood to seep out of their skin in times when they had the least control over their own body. Case in point, when Maeve was asleep.

  Cara had thought cleaning the blood would be a hassle at first—another thing to add to the endless list of maintenance in that rat’s nest of a clinic—but honestly, absorbing the puddles of blood with an alcohol-drenched towel turned out to be easy enough. She may not be as immune to poisons and venoms as Gael may be, but she could accidentally step in one of those blood puddles and get away completely scot free, no problem.

  Containing the leakage of blood while Maeve was sleeping was an issue Cara had been worried about, but by the second day, she’d already figured out a solution: replacing the bedsheets with intense liquid-absorbing fabric was all it took. As long as Maeve slept on her own bed every night, any blood she leaked while unconscious would never leave her bed. It was almost funny how simple it was. Maeve’s condition wasn’t really that big of a problem for the clinic, nor for any Bharnish with half a brain to figure out effective countermeasures.

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  What wasn’t simple—what lingered—was the image of Maeve’s teary face while she slept.

  Cara couldn’t say she knew what the Vharnish dreamed of—nor did she know what had happened to the Exorcist that led to her essentially getting banished to the lower city—but a girl was a girl, and no amount of disdain Cara held for Vharnveil could possibly make her enjoy seeing a girl’s homesick tears.

  …

  A small smile crept onto Cara’s face as she walked around the corner and started heading for the clinic.

  Maeve looked much prettier with her arms crossed, voice raised, alive and furious, so Cara supposed she had Gael to thank for making her pretty.

  Cara hitched her bags higher, squared her shoulders, and strode toward the clinic door. The weight of twelve bags of groceries tugged at her arms, but oh, she still found the time to pause at the door and scowl up at Gael.

  “... But, like, what the hell are you two doing?”

  Gael grinned down at her. “We’re making the place pretty. You know Maeve’s poison blood? I scooped all of it up, heated it up in a pot, then added frigid silverleaf extract to crystalize and detoxify all of it so I can—

  He took a step down and promptly missed a rung. There was a dull thud as he crashed to the ground, landing in a tangled mess of limbs, coat fabric, and an armful of crystals.

  The ladder wobbled dangerously as well, so Maeve barely managed to dodge out of the way before it toppled.

  Cara exhaled through her nose.

  “Anyway, as I was saying…” Gael winced, rolling onto his back. “Instead of just draining her blood and tossing them away, I was thinking we could crystalize it into pretty stones, remove their toxic properties in the process, and then use them for decoration.” Then he gestured at the front of the clinic. “See? They glow. That’s mad useful. It makes the clinic look all… mystical and shit, no?"

  Cara glanced up at the crystals again, assessing their placement. Gael and Maeve had stuck them on top of the pipes, around the frames of the stained glass windows, and stabbed them straight into small dents in the walls all randomly. There was no real pattern. No artistry. It was cluttered like someone had sneezed glowing rocks all over the place, but… Gael had the right idea.

  From afar, the glowing crystals did make the clinic stand out.

  So, she sighed and shifted the weight of her groceries. “I’ll fix the arrangement tomorrow morning. Go inside. It’s getting late.”

  Gael groaned louder as if making a point about finishing the decorating tonight, but Maeve ignored him, dragged him to his feet, and pushed the door open, stepping inside. Cara followed, already bracing herself for whatever mess awaited them.

  But, to her surprise, a giant Vile Eater lay sideways in the middle of the prayer hall and it was rattling like a dying beast.

  So he did manage to buy one from Juno.

  I’d heard the Repossessors were snagging all of them up, though.

  More importantly…

  Cara’s gaze swept across the prayer hall. Unlike the haphazard mess outside, the crystal arrangement inside the building actually had some thought behind it. The green glow was evenly distributed in the corners of the hall, placed far and away from where the benches would be, and where puddles of toxic blood had once eaten into the wooden floorboards to leave dents and cracks, smoothened and inert crystals filled up those cracks to give the floor some gloss.

  Combine the pretty green light from the crystals and the warm orange light from the gas lamps, and she had to admit, maybe her little brother did have some beauty sense after all.

  "How much did that thing cost?" she asked, nodding toward the Vile Eater.

  Gael muttered something under his breath. “I’ll deal with it.”

  Translation: It cost too much, and he didn’t want to talk about it. Cara folded her arms, watching him. Meanwhile, Gael dusted himself off and stretched as he walked into the clinic, shaking off his fall like a stray dog shaking off water.

  Then, with renewed energy, he clapped his hands together.

  “But now that we’ve got a Vile Eater that’ll start working in, I dunno, a few weeks, maybe a few months,” he said, “it’s time for phase two of the clinic revitalization plan.”

  Maeve gave him a flat look. “Phase two?”

  “Spreading the word.” Gael gestured broadly around him. “We can’t treat people if they don’t know we exist, and they definitely won’t come if they know this clinic is run by a Plagueplain Doctor and a Symbiote Exorcist. The glowing crystals will attract attention, but it can only do so much if they don’t feel like coming in.”

  Cara hummed. The clinic’s reputation wasn’t exactly welcoming. A Plagueplain Doctor and a Symbiote Exorcist squatting in an abandoned church with a crooked statue of the Saint—the symbol of good health in Bharncair—didn’t exactly make for the most trustworthy pair of healers. Most people would be more likely to burn the clinic down than step inside.

  “So how do we change that?” Cara asked. “What’s the bright idea this time?”

  Gael grinned. “We do good deeds.”

  “You?”

  He placed a hand over his heart, feigning offense. “I’m an honest doctor.”

  “You suggested breaking in and robbing an old man last week.”

  “An honest doctor, not an upstanding citizen.” Gael gestured up at the surgical chamber. “Now, I really should dissect the Myrmur carcasses we still have and turn the edible one into pot stew, but besides them, we need to find more.”

  Maeve frowned. "More Myrmurs?"

  "More Myrmurs, more Hosts. If I wanna refine the symbiote elixir even further, I need more patients to test it out on. See how it works in different cases." He stretched his arms behind his head, yawning aloud. “And besides, killing Myrmurs makes people happy. People like it when monsters die, so if we’re the ones doing the killing, they’ll start liking us, too.”

  Maeve nodded slowly, but hesitation flickered in her expression. “Alright. Increase the clinic’s reputation I understand. But how, exactly, do we find Myrmurs to fight? We got lucky with the first two. We can’t just run around and hope our eyes go red when we’re looking at one.”

  Gael smirked. “Here’s a fun fact about the southern ward: whenever there’s trouble, ninety percent of the time, it’s always got something to do with Nightspawn. We don’t have to look for Myrmurs specifically. We just need to find a problem and then throw ourselves neck-deep into it.”

  “And how do we find trouble?”

  Gael grinned wider.

  “Simple. We go birdwatching.”

  Cara snorted.

  “And what, is ‘Bird’ the household name of another old baron you’re planning to rob?” she asked.

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