Read Chapter 2: The Hunter's Arrival

The fever-boy was sleeping now, his breath finally easy, his skin cool beneath Elara's trembling fingers. She pulled the rough blanket up to his chin and allowed herself one moment of stillness before the ward called her onward. Four more beds. Four more bodies burning from the inside. Her legs threatened to give way with each step, but she took them anyway.

"Sister Voss." The voice came from behind her, low and hard as stone. "We need to talk."

Elara turned. The man from earlier—the one with the scarred knuckles and eyes the color of winter slate—stood in the doorway of the Plague Ward, blocking the torchlight from the corridor. He wore the same dark leathers, the same patient stillness of a predator who had learned to wait.

"I told you," she said. "I'm needed here."

"You'll be dead by morning if you stay."

The words landed like a blow to the chest. Around them, the moans of the sick filled the silence—a low, constant tide of suffering that Elara had learned to read like scripture. She heard fractures in it now. Breath that came too fast. A child whimpering in her mother's arms. The stranger's threat seemed obscene in this place, a foul thing dragged across holy ground.

"You don't know that," she said.

Dain crossed the ward in three long strides. Up close, he was younger than she'd first thought—mid-thirties, maybe—but his face carried the wear of harder years. A thin white scar ran from his left temple to his jaw, vanishing into the collar of his shirt. He carried no weapon she could see, but she felt one anyway, the way you feel a storm before it breaks.

"I've been tracking this thing for six weeks," he said. "Three healers found drained, empty as husks. A midwife in the Low Quarter. A bonesetter near the river. And three days ago, old Marta who tended the candle-makers' guild—you knew her?"

Elara's throat tightened. Marta had taught her the proper way to set a broken wrist, the trick of finding the fracture line beneath swollen flesh. She'd smelled of beeswax and anise and had laughed at her own jokes before the punchline.

"Marta was ninety years old," Elara said. "She died of the wasting sickness. Everyone knows that."

"Everyone knows what they're told." Dain reached into his coat and withdrew a scrap of cloth, wrapped around something small. He unfolded it carefully, revealing a shard of bone no longer than her thumb, its surface smooth and strangely polished. "This was all that was left of her right hand. The flesh was gone, but the bone wasn't broken. It was *drained*—like marrow and blood had simply been siphoned away. The wasting sickness doesn't do that."

Elara stared at the bone. A coldness bloomed in her chest, separate from the exhaustion that pulled at her limbs. She'd held Marta's hand at the end. It had been thin, yes, papery with age—but whole. She remembered the weight of it, the way the old woman's fingers had curled around hers with surprising strength.

"That could be from anyone," she managed. "Grave robbers, or—"

"Grave robbers don't polish bone." Dain wrapped the shard and tucked it away. "Three healers in six weeks. All of them found alone, all of them drained of pain itself. Their bodies didn't just fail—they *forgot* how to hurt. Their hearts didn't know to beat. Their lungs didn't know to breathe." His jaw tightened. "I've seen what happens when something makes a person feel nothing. It's not peace. It's the closest thing to death that still walks."

The ward seemed to grow quieter. Elara became aware of her own heartbeat, the laborious push of blood through veins that felt thinner than they had a month ago. Each healing cost her. She'd known that since she was twelve, when she'd pulled a splinter from her father's hand and felt the sting bloom in her own palm like a flower opening. But the cost was supposed to return, balanced, measured. Lately, it didn't.

"Is that why you came?" she asked. "To warn me?"

Dain's eyes met hers, and for a moment, something flickered in their depths—not warmth, exactly, but recognition. "I came to bring you to the place where it hunts. I have a theory about its territory, a pattern to its strikes. But I need a healer to bait the trap. To feel it coming before it takes root."

"You want me to be *bait*."

"Together we can end this. Alone, you're a wounded deer in a forest that's already learned your scent."

Elara shook her head. "I can't leave these people. The ward is full—the fever's spreading faster than the city's physicians can treat it. If I go, they die."

"They'll die anyway if this creature isn't stopped." Dain stepped closer, lowering his voice so only she could hear. "Your ability is weakening, healer. I can see it in the way you move, the grey beneath your skin. You've been taking on more than you can give back, and it's eating you from the inside. This thing—whatever it is—feeds on healers precisely because they're already hollowed out. Easy meat."

The words struck home. She'd been hiding it for weeks: the tremors in her hands, the moments of dizziness when she stood too fast, the growing distance between her and the pain she absorbed. She'd healed a boy with a broken leg yesterday and felt nothing but a dull ache in her own shin—a wrongness, like a note played off-key. She'd told herself it was fatigue. She hadn't told herself the truth.

"I won't abandon them," she said again, but her voice had lost its edge.

"I'm not asking you to abandon anyone." Dain's gaze swept the ward, settling briefly on the fever-boy, on the coughing woman in the corner, on the child who'd stopped whimpering and now lay suspiciously still. "I'm asking you to choose which battle you can actually win. This ward is beyond one healer. The creature isn't."

From somewhere down the corridor, a door slammed. A moment later, a young man in healer's robes burst into the ward, pale-faced and breathing hard. His eyes found Elara and widened with relief.

"Sister Voss—thank the saints you're still here. The abbess sent me. There's been another one." He swallowed. "It's Brother Aldric. They found him in the chapel an hour ago. He's alive but—" The young man's voice cracked. "He's not responding. To anything. They stuck him with a needle and he didn't even flinch."

Elara felt the floor tilt beneath her. Brother Aldric was the abbey's strongest healer, a man who'd taken a plague ship's entire crew onto his own shoulders and walked away smiling. If something had gotten through *him*—

Dain was already moving toward the door. "Show me."

The young man hesitated, glancing at Elara.

"Show him," she said. The words came out steadier than she felt. "I'll follow."

She made it three steps before her knees buckled. Dain caught her before she hit the ground, one arm around her waist, his grip like iron. Up close, she smelled woodsmoke and old leather and something sharper beneath—a scent she couldn't name, metallic and cold.

"You're in no condition to walk across a room, let alone a city." His voice was gruff, but his hands were careful as he steadied her. "I'll carry you if I have to."

"You'll do no such thing."

"Then you'll come willingly, and we'll do this my way. Fall here, and the creature doesn't need to hunt you. It can just wait for the fever to finish what it started."

The irony wasn't lost on her. She was a healer dying because she couldn't stop healing. And the only person who seemed to understand that was a hunter she didn't trust, offering her a path that felt less like rescue and more like surrender.

She looked back at the ward. The fever-boy had turned in his sleep, his face peaceful, his breathing steady. She'd done that. Whatever happened to her, she had done that.

"One condition," she said. "We stop at the chapel first. I need to see Aldric."

Dain's eyes narrowed, but he nodded. "For now."

He released her, and she swayed, catching herself on the doorframe. Her body screamed at her to rest, to lie down, to close her eyes and let the darkness take her. But Brother Aldric was in that chapel, his nerves gone silent, his heart no longer remembering how to hurt. And somewhere out in the city, whatever had done that to him was still hunting.

Elara straightened her shoulders and followed Dain into the corridor.