Glass gave way, and sharp at midnight, Evelyn crashed into her room like a drunk spirit falling back to haunt its grave. Her shoulder slammed into the moldy wall as she yanked her mask off her neck, then her side hit the rotten floorboards of her den with a meat-slap thud that rang all the way through her skull.

  She didn’t scream. Couldn’t, more like. She just curled in on herself like she always did—like the world might just pass over her if she folded small enough. The pain was a dull, echoing throb behind her ribs and down her spine, the kind that felt like something else had moved in beneath her skin and was chewing through the walls to get out, but her head was burning, too.

  She gasped through her teeth.

  “Shit,” she hissed. “Saintess, I’m proper… broke.”

  Her bones trembled. Her spine spasmed like it wanted to split open. But then came the paws—furred and warm and licking at her face, her hands, her legs, her blood—and her hounds yelped and whined and fussed over her like she was something worth keeping alive.

  “’M alright,” she mumbled, lips crusted dry and half-busted. “Stop fussin’, guys. I’m… alright.”

  She wasn’t.

  She knew she wasn’t.

  The poison-ache curse had crawled back in again. Not Carapthy—she’d snatched a Symbiotic System clean off some dead drugrunner in Ragpit a few months ago, so she couldn’t possibly be turning into a flesh-hungry Nightspawn—which meant this curse was something else. Something worse. She’d kept it at bay with stolen medicine for a few months, but it was getting quite clear that she wasn’t able to handle it anymore.

  She touched her head and almost screamed from the heat.

  “Saintess Severin,” she murmured. “I lay wax to your altar, I leave honey at your shrine… so don’t take me yet.”

  Her gaze flicked to her hounds.

  Tomo was limping. Patch’s eyes were leaking again. Bonnet hadn’t moved since morning. More than eighty percent of them were dying of some curse she couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  She was next.

  And if those bastards in the manor came after her—and they would, the Repossessors didn’t forget burnt houses or stolen cash—then that Raven and that Caser would also find this place. If they were to see her little family, she had no doubt those silver-tongued asshats would decide the hounds were all death-touched. Pestilent. Too dangerous to let roam around.

  They’d torch the whole damn lot and take her down with it.

  “Hell’s a Raven and a Caser doing with the Repossessors, anyways?” she mumbled, voice cracking as she hugged her hounds back. “Am I… really worth that much—”

  Then came a sound from the hallway.

  Boots.

  Soft ones, like leather dipped in quiet. But she heard them all the same—slum ears, honed from years of hiding from men who’d rather snap her knees than pay for info—so she rolled onto her stomach, gagged on nothing but spit, and clawed her fingers into the floor.

  … Who?

  Her whole pack of hounds went still as well. One by one, they backed away from her and slunk into the darker corners of the room. She didn’t even have to tell them

  And then the door creaked open with the slow breath of a sleeping house woken too soon.

  A man stood in the doorway.

  Just stood.

  Evelyn blinked up at him.

  Shadow shrouded everything above his shoulders. Not regular shadow. The kind in a basement you weren’t supposed to go into. The sort that settled over your soul and said ‘hush now’.

  But though she may not be able to see his upper body, she could see his gloved hands resting gently on a long black cane, and even with her eyes swimming and her head ringing like old bell towers, she instantly recognized him.

  Her limbs moved on their own. She crawled toward him, one twitch at a time.

  “Doc,” she croaked. “Doc. Please. My hounds… they—”

  Her voice cracked again. The words burned coming out like her throat was full of sulfur, but she reached him anyway and grabbed the fabric of his trousers, folding her shaking fingers around it like he might vanish if she didn’t hold tight.

  “They’re… getting worse, doc” she whispered, tears stinging hot in her lashes. “You got medicine for me again, don’t you? Please. I’ll pay, just… not yet. I’ll get the money. I promise I will.”

  The man tilted his head. A small movement. Mechanical. Calculated. Then his voice came like it’d been dredged from beneath wet stone.

  “Of course, my dear,” he said calmly. “Let’s get them treated.”

  He stepped over her—no weight to his footfalls at all—and began moving through her den with syringes clamped between every finger. The vials were glass, but they didn’t clink. They just gleamed dull green under the moonlight like they were filled with liquefied poison.

  But what do they say about medicine again?

  The only difference between medicine and poison… is dosage?

  The first hound he knelt by and jabbed made a little whimper, but then he stroked its back and cooed soft words in an old, old tongue Evelyn didn’t recognize. The hound stilled, still breathing. He moved onto the next hound, which didn’t shy away from him.

  They all recognized his scent.

  “Tell me, dear,” the doctor said without looking back, “last we spoke, you said you were about to come into a fortune. What happened?”

  Evelyn coughed. “Was… was gonna. But some folk stopped me.” Her fingers scraped at her sleeves as she forced herself to sit up against the wall, wheezing all the way. “Big ones. Real strong ones. They… they got in my way.”

  The doctor hummed as he jabbed the next hound.

  “That’s no good. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  She opened her mouth, but the breath didn’t come. He turned to her, and she flinched.

  “It means,” he continued, stepping toward her now, “they’re trying to kill your hounds.”

  His eyes were invisible behind his faceless steel mask, but she could feel them on her.

  She shook her head vehemently. “No… well, they just think I’m a no-good thief. They ain’t really trying to—”

  “But they are,” he whispered, crouching beside her, one hand ghosting over her shoulder like a shadow with fingers. “They stopped you from earning coin. That coin keeps your hounds breathing. No coin, no cure. No cure, they die.”

  Then he did it. The sting. One needle in the back of her head. One in the base of her neck. The last in the base of her spine. Her breath hitched on the third. She gasped, chest hitching as the coldness bled into her veins.

  Her bones felt waterlogged. Her limbs felt soft. But her vision was clearing up, and her head wasn’t pounding nearly as hard anymore.

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  “So you see, my dear, they are trying to kill your dogs.”

  She stared at him, dazed, unable to move—unable to think—so he leaned in again to breathe in her ear.

  “You want your hounds to die, my dear?”

  “I… no, I… I don’t—”

  “Then you know what comes next,” he breathed. “You must kill them first.”

  She blinked. His words slid under her skin like needles. Her stomach churned.

  “... What?”

  “It’s the only way to protect them,” he murmured, not unkindly. “You know it already. That’s why you’re scared. That’s why you’re shaking. But to end a life is no horror, my dear. In Bharncair, death is only the soft undoing of a thread already fraying.”

  His hand cupped her chin. He tilted her face up so she had to look at him—into that smooth, black mask, where no eyes gleamed but for the faintest shimmer of stained, bloody steel.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Do they know your face?”

  She was too slow to lie.

  “Y-yeah,” she whispered.

  There was the faintest shift in his posture. A twitch, maybe. Or a tightening. Hard to say. Everything was syrupy now. The floor swam.

  His voice turned colder.

  “Then they’ll come for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded slowly, tears bubbling again.

  “They’ll come to finish the job,” he continued, almost tender. “You’re a thief. You’re the culprit. You’re a curse. They’ll kill your hounds, and then they’ll kill you.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Yes.” His hand gripped the back of her neck. “So you must strike first.”

  Her lips trembled. “They’re strong,” she said, choking. “The Repossessors are one thing, but there’s a Raven… and a Caser… and I can’t scrap. Not for my life. How’s a slum fly supposed to beat men like them?”

  The doctor didn’t answer. right away. His head tilted a little as he glanced about the dim room—at the peeling walls, the blackened ceiling stains, the too-many hounds curled in nests of rag, wheezing softly in their drug-induced sleep—and then, almost absentmindedly, he tapped his cane once against the rotting floorboards.

  “Crumbling. Overgrown. Infested with beasts. It’s got charm.” He rose to his feet and stood over her, nodding slowly. “Yes, yes. This could work nicely.”

  Evelyn blinked up at him, her breath still shuddering. “Work… nicely?”

  “Let’s prepare a little welcome for your enemies,” he said softly. “In a few weeks, you’ll lure them into a trap right here. Where it’s dark. Where it’s tight. Where the hounds know the corners better than they do.”

  He crouched again, and this time, she didn’t flinch.

  “You will kill them here, my dear,” he said plainly. “And no one will ever find the bones.”

  The midday sun bore down on the Heartcord Clinic, and while it wasn’t obvious, the thin poison fog was gradually getting sucked up by the Vile Eater tucked behind the statue of the Saint. Gael reckoned it’d take just a few more weeks before the air was clean enough that Cara and Maeve no longer had to wear their masks indoors.

  But just because breathing’s a little more difficult with a mask on is no excuse to make the resident doctor play clean up.

  He wiped a grimy sleeve across his jaw, smearing sweat with blood, sweat, and who-knows what. Washing the bloodied bench cushions the Repossessors left behind just last night wasn’t a task the doctor was supposed to do, but if he and Maeve didn’t help Cara out with the tidying, he feared she might just take away his access to the clinic funds.

  And ain’t no way I’m not gonna tap into that stash over the next few weeks.

  As he washed off the last of the bloody cushions with a vial of cleaning reagents and pondered about hiring cheap-as-dirt staff to take care of the manual labor around the clinic, he noticed a prickle on the back of his neck. Eyes on his back. He whirled, freezing mid-motion, and caught Maeve looking away not-so-subtly again. She turned back around and resumed cleaning up her set of benches.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Suspicious’ was the least he felt about the constant looks she’d been giving him since they returned from Old Banks’ manor, but whenever he turned to catch her, she'd snap away, cheeks coloring like a guilty street urchin.?

  If there was one thing he knew about street urchins, it was to not confront them unless he was prepared to kill them or take at least an arm from them.

  “... After that last job, we might as well hang a 'closed' sign on the door,” Cara said, sighing as all three of them stood by the front door, admiring the clean and prayer hall. “Who’s gonna trust a clinic that moonlights as a base for Repossessors?”

  Gael only chuckled, reaching instinctively for a bottle of alcohol inside his coat. “Well, the big Vile Eater’s behind the Saint, and it’s like she’s sucking up all the Vile for us, so maybe we should start charging admission fees for a clean breathing space where you don’t gotta wear your mask just to really hammer home the—"?

  “We have to find the girl before the Repossessors do,” Maeve cut in all seriously, turning to glare at Gael. “First things first: how many do you have left?”

  Instead of procuring a bottle of alcohol, Gael pulled out three slender vials filled with shimmering, iridescent green liquid. “Just the three. We’ll be all outta the symbiote elixir after we finish this job, and I ain’t gonna be able to replenish the supply for a while because of… reasons.”

  “Good. So now we just have to track her down.”

  It was Cara’s turn to raise a brow. “And how do you propose we do that? ‘Birdwatching’ didn't exactly pan out last time. I doubt the Flighty will be prancing around after two close calls with Repossessors. Even the dumbest gutter rat wouldn’t dare show themselves after last night.”

  Good question. One that Gael didn’t have the answer to. Maeve, however, immediately tapped her green eye, smiling softly.

  “Technically speaking, our passive mutation isn’t our eyes going red when we’re staring right at a Nightspawn. Our eyes are just particularly sensitive to unique bioarcanic essence given off by Nightspawn, and with three whole Myrmurs in a single Host, the bioarcanic essence they’ll be leaking out will be incredibly intense. I believe our vision will go red as long as we’re within thirty meters of her and staring in her general direction, even through thin walls and the like.”

  Gael tilted his head back, recalling last night. “Our vision did go red every now and then while we were chasing her last night, huh? I ain’t seeing shit with these crappy night vision lenses.”

  “Then fix them, upgrade them, and sew the chitin plates into your clothes like you said you would,” Maeve countered. “In the meantime, we’ll hit the streets, take the roads less travelled, and let our eyes lead the way. Blightmarch is big, but we know she’s gotta live around this neighbourhood. We’ll walk until we’re close enough that our eyes go red as blood.”

  A solid plan. And Gael could use patrolling the streets of Blightmarch as an excuse to harvest a few herbs and materials he’d need to replenish his symbiote elixir supply.

  Cara, however, stood firmly in their way as they both turned in sync to walk out the front door.

  “And let’s say the two of you find her: how in the hell are you going to subdue her? Those three hounds nearly tore you two apart. You just going to brute force her and lose again?”

  Maeve grimaced at that, and Gael caught the flicker of shame in her face: just a twitch at the corner of her lip, a twitch like she remembered landing on her ass in front of everyone last night.

  Poor girl.

  But truth be told, Cara wasn’t wrong. Gael hated to admit it, but she had a point. The numbers weren’t in their favor, plain as that. Sure, he could fix his night lenses and stitch some fancy chitin plating into his coat—and maybe he’d figure out what to do with that other Myrmur carcass still rotting in storage—but three Myrmurs were three Myrmurs, and unless the two of them had enough points to overwhelm them with sheer superiority in attribute levels, they were always going to be down four limbs.

  A fight like that needed more than better gear and levels. They needed coordination. Cohesion.

  Maeve arrived at the same conclusion.

  “...I can train you,” she said all of a sudden, lifting her head with something close to resolve in her voice. “My mama taught me swordwork herself, and all Exorcist Hunters are rigorously trained in close-quarters combat before we even get our Symbiotic Systems. I could show you—”

  “Nope,” Gael cut her off, already shaking his head. “Absolutely not.”

  She blinked, taken aback momentarily, then started scowling angrily.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you train me, we ain’t training to fight together. We’d be training to fight each other.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve been in my fair share of alley scrapes, Exorcist. Brawled with drunk priests, stitched myself mid-fight, dodged ghoul guts and real knives. I ain’t helpless in a fight,” he said, lifting his cane in one hand and pumping his biceps in the other. He had little muscle to show for it even under his thick sleeves, making Cara groan, but he kept on grinning at Maeve. “But neither of us have ever fought with someone. Not me, the Plagueplain Doctor without a fighting sidekick, and not you, the Symbiote Elixir who has never had a Host. If you bark orders at me and I’m trying not to knock you flat, we’re gonna trip over each other and die. For sure.”

  Maeve still look a bit miffed, but then she opened her mouth and paused—like she was coming to the same conclusion as him again—and that only seemed to make her more irritated, knowing they were in sync, but she wasn’t dumb stupid.

  Just naive stupid sometimes.

  “... Fair,” she muttered. “And I wouldn’t listen to you barking orders at me, either.”

  “See?” He stretched, joints popping, then winced as he twisted his still-bandaged arm. The hound that bit him did a number on him last night. “So unless you’ve got a stand-in hound to pretend to maul me during training, we’re gonna need someone else.”

  “Do you know anyone?”

  “Fuck no. Do you?”

  “You ask that knowing I’m—”

  Before Maeve could finish her sentence, Cara snapped her fingers. “I do.”

  They both turned.

  And Cara grinned, smug as the day she conned their first landlord out of a three-week rent delay. “We just saw him in action. He caught two hounds with his bare hands and slammed them like meat sacks. Maybe, with the right incentive, he'd be willing to teach you two a thing or two about killing monsters.”

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