Maeve staggered up the final flight of stairs, boots scraping against the carved cemetery path, leaving wet red footprints behind her. She knew she smelled of iron and damp rot. Her own breath was sour in her lungs. The weight on her back dragged at her spine—too heavy. The trainee hunter she carried was completely deadweight, but she couldn’t just leave him behind in the catacombs. What if there were more Myrmurs down there?

  The moment she staggered out the doors of the catacombs and stepped into the Old Amber Graveyard—where gold leaves flaked off twisted old oaks in the warm morning light—she was greeted with the sight of a dozen men and women standing around her.

  Six Symbiote Exorcist pairs in waiting.

  They were black-cloaked figures wielding grim briefcases, silhouettes cut against the gold, stark as statues. Maeve’s breath hitched. She knew this sight. She’d seen them stand like this before: whenever the Purity Tribunal stood watch over trials of corruption, waiting for the condemned to be brought forward on the Stand Purity.

  She had watched, as a child, from the high towers of the academy dorm as the Symbiote Exorcists delivered mercy to the parasitized.

  She had never been the one standing on the stone.

  Now, they moved. Three Hunters rushed toward her, boots snapping against the marble paths, but the other three Hunters darted past with their Hosts in tow, vanishing into the black maw of the catacombs behind her.

  She barely had time to register it before the first pair of hands caught her and shook the dead trainee off her back.

  “Maeve!”

  Her mama’s voice. Clear, sharp—like it always had been when she was caught doing something she shouldn’t—and she wanted to speak. To say something, anything at all, but when she opened her mouth, nothing came out.

  Her tongue felt too thick. Her throat felt too tight. The dead weren’t done with her yet. Oh, the catacombs were still wide open behind her, and the names of the dead were still curled around her lungs, whispering against her skin, clawing at the edges of her mind with their hollowed-out faces.

  She tried again, voice barely a breath.

  “... I didn’t mean to.”

  It was the truth. She hadn’t. She hadn’t.

  The other two Hunters heard her. Their hands—before steady, before careful—clamped down on her.

  One of them grabbed her collar. The world tilted. Her boots lifted from the ground, her spine bowing beneath the iron grip of a man whose face she knew, but whose eyes had turned to stone. She’d been taught to read eyes. Taught to understand people before they spoke.

  This was not understanding.

  “What did you do?” he growled. “Where is my disciple?”

  Another hand. Another shake. The voices rose around her, sharp as glass.

  “What happened down there?”

  “Where are the Myrmurs?”

  “What did you do?”

  Her breath turned thin. The sky seemed further away, the graves smaller, the hands larger. It was the murderous look on the interrogating Hunters’ faces that told her she hadn’t left the catacombs yet. Not really. The dead had followed her up here, or maybe she was still down there.

  Mist leaked from her skin.

  It was unintentional. A mere reaction to the Hunters’ aggression. Her poisonous blood started leaking out of skin, burning the golden grass beneath her.

  Then came the sound of metal blades being unsheathed.

  The panic in the cemetery rose fast.

  Maeve barely had time to react before two swords from the two interrogating Hunters swung at her, but then her mama snapped out a single, snarled command.

  She was yanked back so fast she nearly lost her breath, but the blades missed, and her mama’s arms locked around her in a firm, unyielding barrier.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re all doing?” her mama growled, snapping with something so sharp it could slice through bone. “Drawing blades on a child? Have you all lost your minds?”

  The others hesitated, but more Exorcist pairs were rushing towards them from the distance, having caught the commotion.

  Maeve barely heard anything after that.

  The catacombs were still in her ears. Still in her skull. Her vision blurred, but the dead stayed in perfect focus.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” she whispered.

  “I didn’t mean to do it.”

  “I didn’t mean to do it.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  Gael cracked his eyes open just as his chair tried to kill him.

  He was tipped too far back, balanced on that precarious edge between being mostly asleep and getting his skull cracked open by gravity. And gravity, that cruel bastard, was just about ready to claim its due.

  He snapped his head back forward at the last second, the world lurching.

  … Where the fuck am I?

  Bright green morning light oozed through the warped windowpanes, painting the wooden floors in shades of sickly jade. The dining room stank of warm syrup and old wood, the kind of scent that clung to places long past their prime.

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  His vision was still fogged. His skull ached. He barely had time to register the taste of stale whiskey on his tongue before—

  Whack.

  Something cracked against the back of his head.

  “The hell—”

  “Breakfast,” Cara grumbled, entirely unimpressed. “Stop dozing off, you useless lump.”

  Gael grunted back, reaching into his pocket for a waking syringe. He didn’t find any. He turned his pockets inside out and scowled down before realizing it wasn’t the world that was blurry. It was his right lens.

  The cicadas had screeched so loud last night that they’d cracked it down in half.

  God fucking damnit.

  I mean, I’ve still got a bit of the dragonfly’s eyes back in the clinic, but still.

  Cara read his mind and tossed him a replacement lens, so he turned around on his chair to screw it on with practiced ease, the dining room came into full focus. He was the only one dozing off on the chair. Old Banks was meandering in and out of the kitchen, serving plates of pancakes to him, Cara, Fergal, five of Fergal’s favorite Repossessors, and…

  His eyes lingered on the Exorcist sitting at the end of the long table, already buttering her pancakes with childlike glee. He hated how exact her movements were. It was the kind of methodical that only came from people who’d been raised in the golden city, where even the way they cut their damned food was some kind of test of etiquette.

  But at least she was having fun, and she was just about the only person digging into her breakfast cheerily as Old Banks took his seat on the other end of the table.

  “Let’s eat,” the old man said, clapping his hands lazily.

  Gael exhaled through his nose, rubbing at his temple as the rest of the men around the table picked up their forks. That ‘dream’—if it could even be called that—had left a bad taste in his mouth. It clung to the edges of his brain, heavy like a fog, but damn if that was going to stop him from chowing down free food.

  Cara nudged his plate toward him. “Eat.”

  He grabbed his fork, stabbed a pancake, and shoved it into his mouth. His brain processed the strange taste half a second too late. Sugar. Too much of it. Cara cackled next to him; she’d done this on purpose precisely because she knew how much he hated sweet stuff.

  Piece of shit.

  Before he could get up to look for a bottle of alcohol, Old Banks set his cup of tea down with a loud thud.

  “... So,” he began, tone thick with business. “Mind filling me in on why all of you are having breakfast in my humble abode?”

  The words sat in the air, waiting.

  Gael chewed slower.

  Fergal, the real man, looked the old man sternly in the eye before replying. “Apologies, Mister Banks. I am Fergal, Second Finger of the Repossessors. The physicians of the Heartcord Clinic were under my employ when we all barged into your manor last night hunting down that girl, who was most probably trying to steal from you. We call her—

  “The Flighty, yes. I am aware of the Nightspawn’s rumors.”

  “But that wasn’t a Nightspawn,” Cara said mid-chew, lifting a chunk of pancake with her fork. “That was just a girl. A sick girl.”

  “And with three ‘hounds’ to boot.” Old Banks, narrowing his eyes on Maeve this time. “How is that even possible, young Exorcist?”

  The entire table turned to Maeve as well, and the Exorcist stopped chewing for a second to gulp, staring blankly back at everyone as though thinking about how best to explain last night’s Host.

  Then her eyes lit up, and before Gael could stop her, she leaned over to stab his sausage with her fork.

  “Imagine this is… a worm,” she said plainly.

  The entire table groaned. Gael’s stomach, already queasy from last night’s festivities of blood, alcohol, and barely-closed wounds, twisted at the sudden violation of his plate. Cara pinched the bridge of her nose, Old Banks muttered something profane under his breath, and the Repossessors collectively looked like they’d lost their appetites. Even Fergal, the man of grim indifference, put his fork down with a barely audible sigh.

  Maeve, completely unfazed, jabbed a blueberry on Gael’s plate next. “And this is a Myrmur.”

  She plopped the blueberry onto the sausage, miming the Myrmur landing on the worm. Then, with the precision of a serial killer, she sliced the sausage open with the fork and shoved the blueberry inside its still-steaming innards.

  The second table groan was louder than the first.

  “The first Myrmur has now parasitized the worm by squirming inside,” she said, poking another blueberry off Gael’s plate. “And this is a second Myrmur. Sometimes, the worm doesn’t give off any pheromones or indicators that it’s already parasitized.” Then she stuffed the second blueberry into the sausage. “So the second Myrmur comes along and parasitizes the worm as well.”

  While she leaned back, utterly pleased with herself, the table stared in horror at the massacred sausage now stuffed with blueberries like a grotesque mockery of a fruit pudding.

  Gael tapped his fingers against the table, watching the light catch on the ceramic. “You could’ve explained it without ruining breakfast—”

  Maeve popped a blueberry from her own plate into her mouth and chewed, unbothered. “I said this last night, and I’ll say it again: this phenomenon is called ‘superparasitism’. Myrmurs inherently lack host discrimination. Because they do all they can secreting chemicals and altering hormonal balances to prevent their Host from figuring out they exist, they also can’t notice—most of the time—if another Myrmur has already ‘taken’ the Host. By the time the second or third or fourth Myrmur squirms into the Host’s body, they usually can’t be bothered to back out, so they’ll parasitize and feed off the same Host.”

  Fergal set his fork down with a quiet clink and wiped his fingers on a napkin, slow and steady. “I’ve heard of Myrmurs before,” he said, "but can’t say I’ve ever seen one in the flesh. Do they all look like hounds?”

  Maeve shook her head. “No. My system identified them as 'shrill cicadas’, but Myrmurs don’t necessarily have a set form. Grave-Class and Wretch-Class Myrmurs tend to take on whatever the Host trusts the most to make them harder to suspect, because if they’re caught while they’re still relatively weak and young, they’ll be slaughtered by an Exorcist." She nudged the sausage-turned-exhibit with her fork. “So whoever that girl was, those hounds mattered to her. If we wish to find her, we must look for someone who is taking care of at least three hounds.”

  The thought sat heavy over the table. No one spoke. No one chewed. The idea of a parasite borrowing the shape of something beloved, using it as a mask while it drained you hollow—surely, even for the limb-worshipping Repossessors, it made the sausage look even less appetizing than it already was.

  Then Fergal stood, brushing nonexistent crumbs from his coat.

  “No problem, then.”

  Gael squinted at him. "No problem?"

  Fergal shrugged. "If the girl has got three of them feeding off her, she’ll die three times as fast, correct?"

  Maeve hesitated. "That… is true."

  "In that case, since the Flighty will die anyways, we can simply collect her corpse and deliver her to the boss at our own leisure. There is no need to chase her across the city like rats in a cheese pipe," Fergal reached into his coat, pulled out a neatly bound pouch of Marks, and tossed it onto the table in front of Gael. “I consider the job done. The Flighty has been hunted down. Thank you for your assistance.”

  The finality in his voice was a door slamming shut. He adjusted his cuffs, then glanced at his men. They all rose in tandem, chairs scraping against the floor as they headed towards the door, but Fergal alone gave Old Banks’ a solemn look before placing another pouch of Marks in front of him.

  “For the trouble, damages, and food,” Fergal said curtly.

  Old Banks grunted, unimpressed, but waved him off as the Repossessors filed out one by one.

  And silence settled.

  Gael drummed his fingers against the table, staring at the sausage bloated with blueberries. A Myrmur, after all, wouldn’t care if the Host had space for it. It wouldn’t care if it was late to the feast. It only wanted in, and if that meant gnawing alongside two others to kill the Host thrice as fast, then so be it.

  Fergal’s strategy to just look for a corpse instead of wasting time chasing after a winged thief was a good strategy if he just wanted the body. Gael wasn't stupid, either. The payment wasn't for a job well done. He'd barely done anything to begin with, so the Marks were simply... 'enticement' to keep him in the Repossessor's contact.

  But Old Banks exhaled through his nose as he cut into his pancake, shaking his head slowly.

  "Is that the kind of clinic I am sponsoring?”

  …

  Gael didn’t answer immediately.

  Then his lips curled into a smirk as he stood, stretching like a man waking from a long, long nap.

  “Of course not.”

  Cara eyed him. "No?"

  “Now that we’ve technically finished our job for the Repossessors, we’re free agents again.” His gaze flicked to Maeve, then Cara, eyes glinting with glee and excitement. He was going to get to refine his symbiote elixir again. “The Heartcord Clinic has a new mission: we’ll find the girl before the Repossessors do and exorcise the Myrmurs the only way we know how.”

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