The acid rain was pissing down especially hard tonight, thick and cold as knives, and it was the kind that didn't just soak.

It cut.

Despite it, Gael stood in the middle of a grimy cross-junction, coat flapping, hat slick, spinning in a lazy half-circle like a drunk who'd forgotten which way the nearest tavern was. Dark and unlit streets ran off in every direction, all of them choked with mist and shadow. The lamps—where they hadn't died completely—flickered with sick orange sputters, just enough to make the neighborhood look worse. His night vision lenses and the small lantern hanging off his waist were pulling most of the weight as he squinted at the letter in his hand, now curled and damp at the edges despite how tight he'd been holding it.

"Left at the dry well, right at the broken stone… or is it right at the dry well, left at the…" He spun again, then stopped, scowling down the rightmost path. "What the fuck?"

Behind him, Maeve let out a long, delicate sigh, shouldering her umbrella as she tapped her feet like she was counting down the seconds of her patience. Rain pattered off the black fabric as she looked around the abandoned neighborhood grumpily.

"You can remember a hundred lines on a bioarcanic glyph and memorize the name of every curse and poison from here to the City of Splendors, but you can't recall a few directions, Doctor?"

"Shut it," he snapped, turning over the letter again even though it didn't help. "This fuckin' bitch can't spell for shit. Even I've got better handwriting than this, and I'm the Plagueplain Doctor here. If you're so clever, why don't you lead the way?"

"I would," she said primly, "if only you'd let me read it under the safety of my umbrella, which conveniently blocks out the acid rain that's slowly eating through the paper."

He was about to shoot something back when he noticed the edges of the letter were starting to curl up, so begrudgingly, he turned around and stepped under the Exorcist's umbrella so they could peek at the words together.

"Just show me what it says," Gael muttered, snatching the letter from Cara's hand only to be slammed in the back of his head with a retaliatory broom swing. Cara snatched the letter back with an irritated click of her tongue, walking deeper into the room until she plopped herself right down on the surgical table.

"I already told you what it says," Cara snapped, unfurling the letter to read from it again while Maeve peered over her shoulder. "Listen closely, bitch. I'm only gonna read it one more time."

"To the Esteemed Doctor,

Please, sir, I write to you in great need. My mama is gravely unwell, and I fear that should no aid come swiftly, she may not stand much longer upon this earth. Her back is most dreadfully afflicted. She cannot rise from her bed without great pain, and oft I see her trembling, her hands grasping at the air as though she might hold onto something to stop the torment.

Her spine is crooked, like the old tree in our courtyard, bent and twisted. When she moves, it is as if something inside her grinds and catches. There is a stiffness, she says, from the base of her back to the tops of her legs, and she cries when she walks, though she tries to hide it from me. Her legs give way at times, and she falls like the air was snatched from her.

Her skin, too, has grown pale and cold, and there are nights when she shivers though the fire burns strong. Her breath comes shallow, and I hear her whisper to herself that the pain creeps into her bones. Sometimes, I see her back arch in spasms, her mouth clenched tight as if she dares not scream.

I do not know what else to do. I cannot leave her for long, and so I asked a kind courier to take this letter to you, for I heard you are a doctor who helps the suffering. Please, sir, I beg you, come to our home. Mama needs you. I have coins to pay you. I will give you all that we have.

Please do not tell anyone you are coming. Just come quickly. The directions are at the back of this letter.

Yours in desperation,

A Daughter in Need"

"... And then there are directions at the back, just as she wrote," Cara finished, looking between him and Maeve as she waved the letter around. "You're not actually going, are you?"

Gael turned on his heel, giving up on the directions for now, and walked to the edge of the junction. "The directions are pointless. As a wise man once said, 'when the map fails, trust the ravens—you won't like where they lead, but at least you won't be lost'. Heh."

Maeve tucked the letter into her dress pocket and trudged after him, trying to keep up. "But even you cannot say it isn't suspicious," she argued. "She knows frighteningly much for her apparent age. What kind of child with that kind of handwriting is capable of observing her mother's ailments as detailed as that?"

"Hey, give Bharnish credit where credit's due. We may not have gone to your gold-walled academies or worn your crisp white uniforms, but I hear Blightmarch has a thirty… nah, twenty-five percent literacy rate. Some of us do know how to write."

"So she's sharp enough to be able to write all that, but not sharp enough to try to treat her own mother herself?" Her voice was pointed. He shrugged under the rain.

"Knowing what's wrong ain't the same thing as fixing it."

"Then why write a letter? Why not just have the courier deliver a message to us face-to-face? Who would place an easily washed-away letter at someone's doorstep knowing it's raining like this?"

That was a better point, but Gael just shrugged again "You're in Bharncair, Exorcist. People don't talk unless they have to. Why risk mistranslation from a courier when a letter will do just fine?" He shook the rain from his mask, flicking droplets into the dark. Maeve purposefully sped up so they could both walk under her umbrella. "Don't matter how it came, anyways. A call's a call, and the Bloodless Mandate dictates that no plea for health goes unheard. I am a doctor, am I not?"

Maeve narrowed her eyes.

She thought for a second—then two more—before squinting hard at him.

"No," she said plainly. "You're just giddy because someone is requesting you specifically for the first time."

Gael grinned, flashing his teeth. "Oh, but it is my first proper house call! It means we're getting noticed! That letter's proof that we've been doing good, and now someone who hasn't met us personally knows about the clinic!"

"They didn't refer to you by name, though—"

"Besides, I do believe I know exactly what's wrong with our patient. It should be an easy fix," he continued, raising a finger. "Based on the symptoms, it sounds like a case of Cursed Crook. Prolonged exposure to damp, rotting air—mixed with years of bending over low hearths, lifting heavy wash, and sleeping on crooked floors—makes the spine slowly warp from the base and vertebrae swell like overripe fruit. The warp slowly pulls the nerves in the spine taut like strings on a strung bow, so it also hurts like shit."

And it really was going to be an easy fix. All he had to do was cut the lady's back open, manually unhook the twisted vertebrae, pull them back straight, and then bind them with bloomwire, a biocompatible herbal wire that'd degrade inside the human body after a little while.

But all they had to do now was find the goddamn place.

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So they wandered through the night, circling through rain-slick alleys and leaning towers, arguing about directions, taking wrong turns, and bickering over which turn to take, when and where. Maeve kept fussing over the letter. Gael kept waving her off.

Eventually, though, they turned down one more alley soaked in gutter rain, rounded a crooked row of shattered lamp posts, and there it stood at the end of the street. A fat, sagging town hall of a wooden building, its three-storey high roof slanted like it was bowing under some invisible weight. The metal fences were long dead, snapped in half and leaning outwards like broken ribs, overgrown with vines fat with black leaves and thorned stems.

Gael stopped dead before the front gate, his boot splashing into a puddle slick with oil and rain.

He squinted up at the building's face. Past the courtyard of dead trees and wilted grass, the windows were either boarded or shattered, the front steps to the double doors were cracked open like bad teeth, and not a single light—not even the flicker of a candle in the deep gloom behind the broken glass—illuminated the building. Even the air around the place felt colder, the mist thicker, crawling along the block like it didn't want to leave.

…

Maeve didn't stop with him. She paced right up to the gatepost, her thumb scraping off moss and grime until the brass plaque beneath caught what little light was coming from the lantern hanging on her belt.

"It says 'Sallow Hearth, Orphanage for the Unfortunate'," she read, glancing back at him with a thoughtful frown. "The first time Old Banks saw me, he said he thought I was from this place."

Gael didn't move. Maeve took a step back and continued staring at the orphanage.

"But this place has been shut down for years, at least," she muttered. She leaned forward and peered through the rusted grates, still shouldering her umbrella as she squinted into the dark. "I don't think anyone lives here anymore."

"Right. Exactly," Gael said quickly. "Which means this was all a prank. Haha, very funny. Let's go home."

He spun on his heel, already imagining the warm hum of the clinic, his bed, his booze—all the good things in life. Rain pelted down harder, stinging his cracked lenses as he left the umbrella's shade, but before he could even take three steps, Maeve snagged the tail of his coat and yanked him back.

"Hold on." Her voice was calm, but there was steel in it. "Why're you in such a rush, Doctor?"

Gael threw a glance over his shoulder, twisting his lips into a stupid smirk that didn't quite reach his lenses. "You're right. The place is dead. Nobody's living inside, so it's evident we're just wasting our time."

Maeve angled her head, staring at him suspiciously. "That's not what you'd usually say. Why aren't you lecturing me about how Bharnish can squat in the worst of the worst, and how just because a place looks abandoned—"

"Sometimes, an abandoned building is just that," he cut in, waving a hand. "Don't gotta find ghosts in every goddamn ruin. And besides, even if someone's in there, they're squatting. Ain't no way they got the coin to pay for a splint, let alone the back surgery they promised to pay me. Therefore, we should leave—"

"Do you know this place?"

Gael didn't answer at first. Couldn't, really. His eyes ached a little just looking at the building, and considering his eyes were connected to his skull and his brain—a little well known fact amongst learned men—a migraine was also starting to claw and itch at the inside of his head.

He just wanted to go home now.

… Damnit.

Stupid Bloodless Mandate.

And yet he couldn't walk away. The oath he'd made on that rainy night was something he couldn't ignore. It wasn't going to let him leave this place—not without poking around first.

Twisting his head, scratching his neck, he spun back towards the gate like a man facing an executioner's squad. "Fine, fine," he muttered. "We'll take a fucking look."

He didn't wait for Maeve's reply. He kicked the rusted iron as hard as he could, tearing the gate off its hinges with a screech and sending it crashing sideways into the overgrown muck. Then he strode forward quickly, cane in hand, like he wouldn't have time to regret it if he went fast enough.

The narrow cobbled path cracked underfoot, weeds brushing against his coat. Just walking through the wilted courtyard made him want to rip his eyes out.

Nope.

Can't do this sober.

Free hand into his coat. Bottle out. Cork gone. A long pull of fire down his throat burned away the cold crawling up his spine as he skipped up the steps to the front door. The wood was rotted and warped like the gaping mouth of a corpse, but he stepped inside without hesitation, and moonlight vanished behind him.

The dark hall inside stretched long, shadows pooling at the corners. Damp crept in through the walls, slicking the floorboards under their feet, and Maeve followed him in just in time. He looked down the left hallway, and she looked down the right.

"... I smell something down the right," she said quietly, closing her umbrella and shaking off acid droplets as she did. "Something living. Maybe it's our patient?"

Right. Her 'Scent Latch' mutation or whatever. But before she could go down the right, he jerked his ankle back to pull her by the chain, stopping her from wasting their time.

"The right hallway loops around to the left, so just go left to begin with," he said, pulling her in front of him so she could lead the way with her nose. "Go on. Fetch."

That irritated the Exorcist alright, but begrudgingly, she didn't say a word as she started down the left hallway. He followed, bottle in hand, as the floor groaned under every step.

He didn't like this place. Not one bit.

The hallways stretched narrow, the plaster walls warped and pocked with old rot. Paint peeled off in fat curls, revealing the sickly yellowed wood beneath. Doors hung ajar along the corridors, most barely clinging to their hinges, some collapsed entirely. Behind some of them, he glimpsed old dormitories stripped of life: rows of rusted bedframes, moth-eaten blankets crumpled in corners, and plush toys half-buried in dust and damp.

It was all the same on the second floor Maeve brought him up to. Rot and abandonment everywhere. The only reprieve from the dull and dreary sights were the windows lining the right wall, looking into the inside garden surrounded on all four sides by the giant orphanage. The 'garden', of course, was barren. Black soil, broken benches, and dead trees littered the earth downstairs.

His lips curled as they walked past window after window. He kept drinking.

Hmph.

Serves this place right.

By the time Maeve led him up to the third floor, he was good and sick of looking at the place, but just as he was about to let out a sigh and a declaration of giving up—

Maeve suddenly halted in front of him, her umbrella shooting to the side as they both rounded a corner to a particularly long corridor.

"Wait," she whispered. "The weird smell… is coming from there."

She nodded to an open door halfway down the hall, moonlight spilling across the floorboards in a long, pale stretch. Gael, of course, didn't smell anything, but his Bharnish senses were tingling.

He pulled his cane free, blade catching the dull glint of moonlight from the windows on his right.

"Alright, then," he mumbled. "Let's have a looksie."

Maeve gripped her umbrella tight as they crept towards the open door, step by slow step, until they reached the doorway together.

They peeked inside.

It wasn't a large room, not by any stretch. The walls pressed in tight and the ceiling sagged low, but what made the space really crammed was the rusted cages spanning wall-to-wall. A dozen of them, maybe more, all stacked and leaning on each other like a makeshift prison. The floorboards beneath them were blackened with old blood, slick and sticky—he supposed that was where the weird smell was coming from.

But Gael was looking at what was inside the cages.

Hounds.

At least, they looked like hounds.

About six of them sat still in their cages around the room, unmoving, their pale eyes locked onto him and Maeve like they'd been waiting. Each one was wrapped in dirty, blood-soaked bandages. Their tails were limp. Their breaths were shallow. They weren't properly illuminated inside their cages, so he couldn't see more than just their heads, but even Maeve could tell they weren't in the best of conditions.

The Exorcist immediately crouched, reaching a hand out, fingers coaxing them to come forward.

"They're sick, Doctor," she whispered. "You can heal hounds, too, can you not?"

Of course he could. But that wasn't the problem here.

The hound in the cage closest to them obeyed Maeve's coaxing. It limped out of its cage, slow and stumbling, one paw dragging uselessly behind it, and as it crossed into the pale moonlight pouring through the window, something shifted.

Its eyes.

Pale orbs turned bright green. Wholly unnatural. Pulsing veins, thick and red, crawled up the sides of its skull.

Gael narrowed his eyes.

"Back off, Exorcist," he said calmly.

She didn't need telling twice, quickly standing and taking a slow step back as the rest of the cages rattled. Metal groaned under the weight of bodies far too large. One by one, the other hounds pushed out—heavy steps, dragging limbs—and stepped into clear view.

They weren't normal hounds anymore.

They'd been hiding it, but each one of them loomed tall as a man, shoulders hunched, backs twisted. All of them had three snarling heads stitched crudely onto a single massive frame, jaws drooling with thick ropes of spit. Their muscles bulged. Their skin stretched and strained, the messy stitches grafting multiple heads onto a single body making it raw and inflamed—and every last one of them stared at him with those same green, burning eyes.

They were four three-headed hounds drugged to the brim and biologically mutated past common sense.

"... Well," he muttered, lifting his blade as they crept slowly forward. "This ain't a back problem."

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