Rain drummed on the emergency room's roof like a funeral march. The smell of sterilizer clashed with the coppery tang of fresh blood. Dr. Lyra Virelle didn't flinch as the gurney slammed through the double doors, its passenger convulsing, half-transformed, tendons twitching like cables under skin that couldn't decide whether it was man or beast.
"Bite wound. Not from any known canine," the nurse whispered. She handed Lyra a pair of forceps like she was passing a holy relic. "You might want gloves made of something holier."
Lyra's eyes narrowed. The patient was a weregod—she could feel the hum of corrupted divinity under the flesh, the static pull in her veins that buzzed only around their kind. His fur shimmered with fragments of ancient Taoist sigils, and his breath reeked of myrrh and iron. But worse: he bore the mark. The mark. A crescent scar branded by fangs.
The Wolf King's venom.
She shouldn't care. But the acid in her blood churned with treasonous warmth. She leaned close.
"You're not dying today. Unfortunately."
Her fingers moved fast, unrolling a crimson-threaded needle made from her own hair. She dipped it in a phial of Vatican holy water, and the silver fluid hissed on contact like it touched hellfire.
The stitches glowed—Latin prayers snaked up the wound, hissing and healing. The weregod twitched but didn't wake. Lyra whispered a warning anyway: "Bite me, and I'll harvest your soul and sell it back to Rome by the ounce."
Behind her, the shadows deepened. She knew the Philosopher was watching.
Kael reclined in a shattered cathedral pew, reading a bloodstained copy of The Art of War. He marked a line with the edge of a silver blade.
"If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is superior in strength, evade him."
He smiled. Tyrant side liked that line. Philosopher side preferred the margins, where he'd scribbled equations theorizing divinity as a quantum infection.
When the moon vanished behind eclipse clouds, the Tyrant emerged.
"She stitched a god. With holy water. Using her own hair," the Tyrant snarled.
"Resourceful," the Philosopher murmured.
"Blasphemous."
"Potentially curative."
Kael's body twitched. A battle of selves, equal parts brutal and brilliant. Tyrant rose, dripping venom. Philosopher watched, calculating.
In the hospital, Lyra's comm unit pinged. Vatican frequencies. She didn't have to look to know: they'd found her. The Purifier blood in her sang, ancient instincts awakened. But she also felt the venom in her stitches vibrating. The weregod was linked to the Wolf King. Her King.
A choice. Stay, suture more gods. Or run, and let Kael rot.
She looked down at her patient.
"You call this a curse? I've seen darker things in the Vatican's tax returns."
The weregod groaned.
Her scalpel clicked open.
"Now lie still. I'm going to cut the divine infection out of your DNA. And possibly stab some priests."
Far away, in a skyscraper tuned with Feng Shui, a weregod twisted the building's energy, sealing Vatican hunters in a cursed elevator shaft. On the roof, Kael's pack readied Norse rune grenades.
War was coming.
And Lyra had just chosen a side.
Next: The Tyrant leaks her location to the Vatican, mid-surgery.