Angelika’s ass was numb from sitting on an icy Malten street for far too long. Like the many refugees surrounding her, she was cold and hungry and wearing loose, ragged clothes—her disguise while she staked out the hospital’s domed entrance. She waited here all evening, an eternity, and her target still hadn’t arrived. A yearning for Leona’s cooking and a warm bed grew.

But she couldn’t go home yet. Not until that fucker Josef arrived. How much longer would Angelika have to wait before the bullshit surgeon showed up to kill plagued patients and steal their money? Hell, if it wasn’t for Dimitry, mom could have been one of his victims!

While Angelika despised heathens and bandits—parasites that preyed on her city—anyone who might hurt her mom or sisters pissed her the fuck off. Josef among them. His disposal would be a boon to Malten.

Angelika grinned in anticipation of the act, when an odor fouler than bedpan fumes made her gag. Did a refugee shit themselves?

Keeping her face hidden in the shadow of her hood, Angelika scanned the three-way street for her target. Nope. Josef still wasn’t here. Just a pile of ceramic and wooden scrap beside the hospital entrance and people huddling around fires or under makeshift blankets. Damn refugees were no better than bandits. They robbed and begged and cluttered the streets, pillaging all of Malten’s resources without giving anything in return! Food, clothes, and even vol grew expensive because of them.

Her glare paused at a scrawny boy who shivered against his purple-skinned mother’s chest. How long had passed since they ate a square meal or slept on a warm bed?

Angelika’s meanderings halted at the sight of an approaching hooded figure. She peeked out from under her ragged cloak to look at their face, a dark green moon illuminating its features.

A small, graying beard. No hair upon a bald head. A shit-eating grin.

It was Josef.

Motionless, Angelika hawked his every gesture as he approached the hospital’s closed doors. She had to time this perfectly. A single misstep would either kill him or let him live long enough to tell his tale.

She reached into her cloak’s pocket to retrieve a pellet she prepared specifically to kill this asshole. Cold and sleek between her fingers, she rolled the vol into her palm. Angelika absorbed all of its power through her circuits, which made her body hot despite chilling winds and biting frost, then concentrated half of it into her palm’s core.

Josef stopped in front of the hospital’s door. Beside him was a pile of ceramic and broken crates assembled from the mess he left behind when he ransacked the church last night. How satisfying that he would die by his mess.

Angelika held out a palm underneath her cloak, aiming at the edge of a wooden beam poking out from the bottom of the heap.

“Propelia,” she whispered.

It swept under Josef’s feet, causing him to lose his balance and stumble into the church’s wall.

“Propelia,” she muttered once more, targeting the asshole’s back.

Josef’s descent accelerated, slamming his belly into the pile of scrap. An agonizing cry rang out across an otherwise quiet street. His shrieks and shrills awoke refugees from their uncomfortable slumbers, many of whom rushed over to help.

The hospital’s doors burst open, oozing light onto a filthy stone road and a dying old man. A wooden splint dug into his shoulder, and another into his stomach. Josef’s cloak brandished expanding spots of blood as his shouts transitioned into whimpers and faltering prayers.

A group of refugees helped a nurse drag the body inside, and everyone’s attention focused on the soon-to-be-dead Josef. The fucker wouldn’t bother Dimitry anymore. Now he could concentrate on treating mom.

Angelika smirked. Although she took no pleasure in murder, she certainly did in a job well done.

Pained moans and concerned voices echoing from behind, Angelika headed home to warm up. She craved nothing more than a heated bath.

Morning’s first light illuminated the gloom and chilled cellar below the hospital, its luminosity aggravating Dimitry’s growing headache and nausea. He massaged his temples with two hands that were a darker shade of purple than yesterday and sighed.

His disease was progressing, thugs had set up camp outside the hospital to threaten anyone that got close, and aside from the faerie napping in his hood, Dimitry had no one to watch his back. Clewin and Claricia’s worsening symptoms required them to rest on hospital beds while Angelika was out running an errand. The plague exhausted everyone, and he was no different.

Sat beside a wall lined with containers holding diseased rats, he looked over his results once more, making sure he didn’t miss the slightest detail that could aid him in identifying what bacteria caused the plague.

Or that was his intention. Dimitry couldn’t focus.

His thoughts returned to the gruesome sight he saw when he arrived at the hospital that morning. A bald and lanky surgeon lay cold and still beside a bowl of hastily plucked and bloodied shards. The cavities they created now played host to spices and herbs. Just the way Josef taught them, the night shift nurses had tried to save his life.

They failed.

This time, no one accused Dimitry of a failed surgery. Josef’s death resulted from an accident and an unfortunate decision made by the celestial bodies themselves. Common sense common only in a medieval cesspool like this one.

Although Josef’s passing bestowed the hospital’s ownership to Dimitry, allowing him to instruct the nurses unimpeded, implement functional medicine, and claim the positive reputation that accompanied every saved life, something dark and looming festered within. Its harrowing clawing became more frantic the longer Dimitry reflected on his actions. What scared him, however, wasn’t incessant guilt, but his growing ability to embrace it.

Dimitry had killed another man, and he ordered a girl not even twenty years old to carry out the assassination—a burden that should have been his alone. However, it wasn’t one he could carry himself due to a relentless pursuit by thugs and a mysterious third party that stalked him from the rooftops, trailing him from the hospital to the castle and everywhere in between.

One could never be too cautious in this world: Dimitry learned that lesson well. If he had his own version of the ten commandments, it would be second on the list right below ‘thou shalt kill so others may live’.

Josef’s death served as a testament to that fact. Even if Dimitry somehow forced him to leave the hospital, the lanky man would have worked elsewhere, continuing to take lives under the guise of perverse pseudo-medicine.

One murder prevented hundreds more.

That was how Dimitry rationalized his unsavory philosophy. He would exploit Josef’s death by mentoring the hospital’s entire staff. All of them. Even if instructing the night shift nurses on how to properly care for and dress wounds required working around the clock, forgoing sleep, he didn’t mind. Especially if it meant that filling gashes with condiments became a thing of the past.

The goal was to turn the hospital into a vehicle for curing the plague. And, if the results of his latest experiments were anything to go by, it wasn’t a distant dream.

Rats afflicted with preservia disintegrating the DNA of rod-shaped or gram-positive bacteria fared better than both the negative control and positive control. Their skin was grayer, they had more energy and, more importantly, their bowels no longer splattered liquid feces everywhere. If his next round of tests targeted gram-positive, rod-shaped bacteria exclusively, the spell would become more potent while reducing side-effects further.

Simply put, it was a triumph.

However, not all results showed promise. Preservia affecting subjects by cleaving peptidoglycan monomers didn’t show improvement. The rats continued to crawl around, their skin rigid and purple. They were nearly identical to the negative control vermin that received no treatment. Subjects with denatured bacterial ATP synthase or ribosomes were slightly healthier, but not as well off as those with disintegrated DNA.

Dimitry lacked a crucial piece of information regarding the efficacy of his magic. Why were some spell pathways better than others, even if they would all doubtlessly lead to the death of any bacteria they affected? While microbes could produce more ATP synthase and ribosomes, the energy and protein bottleneck would kill them before then. How about peptidoglycan? All bacteria relied on the essential molecule to keep their cell walls intact, so why did they survive?

Was preservia less effective on smaller molecules like peptidoglycan? No. If illumina could target electrons, compounds containing multiple amino acids wasn’t an issue. Or did spells differ in what they could hit? That was one possibility.

Another explanation was that far more peptidoglycan existed in bacteria than DNA, ribosomes, and ATP synthase combined. Disintegrating organic molecules required a lot of power. Since vol took on the form of heat when absorbed, perhaps it was a fuel source with a predetermined amount of energy. Like gasoline or coal.

Was magic more efficient when it took efficient pathways to accomplish its goal? Now that he thought about it, it seemed obvious. When there was time, he would—

Two sets of boots thumping down stone steps awoke Dimitry from his musings.

The first to enter the cellar was a red-robed girl.

Trailing behind her was another, whose wavy scarlet hair flanked a beautiful face. Leona nodded in greeting while catching her breath.

Angelika pulled off her hood to reveal red cheeks and dark bags under tired eyes. “Just like you asked me to last evening, I brought Leona, and I did the other thing too.”

Her fatigued features reinvigorated the darkness lingering in Dimitry’s gut. Did she sleep at all last night? Did stress from Dimitry’s murderous orders give her insomnia? “I hope it wasn’t… too difficult on you.”

“What? No. I don’t give a shit about that.” Angelika stepped forward. “Is your magic ready yet?”

“I-I see.” Dimitry’s burden lightened. “Unfortunately, it still needs testing.”

“Can’t you go any faster?”

“I don’t know if it’s ready for human—”

“Come the fuck on!” Angelika stomped with a heavy boot. “Mom’s nose was bleeding all night, and now she’s having trouble standing up, too!”

Leona pushed her distraught sister aside before stepping in front. She pulled a leather pouch out of her cloak and held it out with both hands, bowing deeply all the while. “On behalf of the whole family, we brought vol in hopes that it would expedite your efforts. Please accept it.”

Dimitry diverted his gaze from a seething Angelika and reached for Leona’s offering, which was heavy in his hand. Just how much vol was inside? Sadly, even an infinite amount wouldn’t change the fact that treatment wasn’t ready yet. “I need more time. It’s too early to know if the modified preservia enchantment will work.”

He pointed at a dark pink glowing towel enshrouding a vase. “I’ve only started testing it this morning, so I don’t know how the rat will react to it yet. And even if the enchantment cures its plague, I still wouldn’t know what effects it’ll have on people.”

“For fuck’s sake!” Angelika’s bottom lip quivered. She looked down at a sitting Dimitry, orange irises trembling. “By the time you figure it out, she’ll be dead!”

“Angelika!” Leona shouted, her voice shaky. “Control yourself. You’re not the only one who’s scared.”

“What do you want me to do? Wait around like a jackass?”

“I want you to shut up.”

Angelika groaned and leaned back against the wall. “Fine. Let mom die.”

Leona turned to face Dimitry. “Please.” She bowed lower than last time. “I’ve heard about your powerful magic. Could you please, please try? We can’t afford to lose our mother. She’s all we’ve got.”

How was Dimitry supposed to respond to that? What if his magic created long-term complications that killed Raina? What would he say to them then? He massaged his forehead to soothe an intensifying headache. “Give me a second to think.”

Bed-ridden patients didn’t have long to live. It wasn’t long before dark blisters cropped up along with peeling skin, resulting in increasing amounts of necrotic tissue. Some people lost entire limbs to amputation—a dangerous prospect in a world without a functional understanding of germ theory.

Raina, Clewin, and Claricia had less than half a week before then. Not enough time to conduct proper trials. Although the concept of testing magical medicine on people before verifying its safety on animals irked Dimitry, he had no choice but to push his plans forward.

“Fine. Let’s try it.” Dimitry glanced up at a girl in the middle of a tantrum, and at the other, who remained bowing. “Leona, do you know why I asked Angelika to bring you here today?”

“I am ready to channel your spells at any time. Give me the word.”

“This time, we’ll be making a blanket-sized enchantment. Is that okay?”

Leona took off her robe, folded it, and placed it on an empty cask. “The result might not be as good as one made by our mother, but it’s not often that I receive complaints about my work.”

“Good.” Dimitry stood up and rolled his stiffening shoulders. “I have something interesting to try.”