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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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The white mask moved through the alley on six pale legs.
It was small, barely the size of a palm, and it kept to the shadows the way things keep to shadows when they understand that being seen is a problem. A crack ran across its surface from the upper left to the lower right, the kind of damage that comes from being adjacent to something that could have killed it outright. It had survived. Barely, and mostly by accident.
Ren Hector was dead.
The body was gone. The primary mask was gone. Both were in a crater eleven meters short of the Victoria border, and whatever Gregory Hood's declaration had left in that crater, it was not anything that could be worked with. What existed now was this: a secondary mask that Ren had thrown from inventory three seconds before the strike, not because he had a plan, but because putting a backup somewhere before something tried to kill you was a habit that surgeons developed and apparently kept.
The blast had caught the secondary mask anyway. Half power. Cracked face. Six insect legs because that was what the unhosted state produced when it needed to move.
He had been crawling for two hours.
The city was a border town. Merchants, travelers, people whose business required them to ask very few questions. It was also full of people, which meant bodies, which meant options. In the unhosted state he had environmental perception and nothing else. No skills. No inventory. The combat capability of something a dog could kill.
He needed a host.
He found a man sleeping against the alley wall. Broad, mid-forties, deeply asleep with an empty bottle in the crook of his arm. The assimilation process needed ten uninterrupted seconds of contact. The man was out cold. Ren crossed the gap and settled onto his face.
The man stirred at the contact and Ren pressed down. One, two, three. The man's breathing shifted. Four, five, six. A notification surfaced in his degraded perception.
WARNING: Host viability assessment in progress.
Seven, eight.
ASSESSMENT FAILED.
Current mask integrity: 41%. Host vitality exceeds threshold for compromised assimilation.
You are too weak to possess this creature.
Nine.
The man's eyes opened.
He stared upward, then his brain caught up, and his hand came up and hit the mask with the flat of his palm. Ren skidded across the stone floor. The crack spread. He felt it the way you feel a tooth cracking.
The man scrambled up. He stepped toward the mask and raised his foot.
Ren moved first. The crack edge was clean where the porcelain had fractured. He drove it into the man's ankle, found the tendon, and the man went down. Before he could shout Ren was at his throat. It took under thirty seconds. The alley stayed quiet.
Ren moved back into the shadow.
The attempt had failed and made the crack worse. He still had no body. The threshold for assimilation scaled with the host's vitality, which meant he was looking for someone already close to death, someone whose body had done most of the failing for him.
He kept moving.
.
.
.
The boy's name was Elias Vane. He was six years old and he was on his knees in the street outside Harlen's Bakery with bread behind his back and Harlen standing over him.
It had been a simple plan. The heel end of a loaf sat at the front of the cooling tray every afternoon, the piece that didn't sell, the piece that went to the street dogs at closing. Elias had watched the pattern for four days. In and out in under ten seconds.
He had not been fast enough.
Harlen crossed his arms and looked down at him. Big man, flour on his forearms, the look of someone who had never once thought the things around him weren't his.
"That's my bread," Harlen said.
"I know. I'm sorry. My mother is sick. She hasn't eaten in two days."
"Give it to me."
Elias held onto it another second. His mother hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. She never said when she was hungry because saying it used energy she didn't have. He'd checked the pot on the cold hearth before he left. Empty.
He handed the bread over.
Harlen set it back on the tray without looking at it. "How old are you."
"Six."
"Six." He said it like he was writing it down somewhere in his head. "And you thought you'd just walk into my shop."
"It was going to the dogs," Elias said. "You throw it out every evening. I watched for four days."
"So you've been watching my shop for four days."
"I wasn't going to take anything else. Just that piece."
"That piece is mine to throw away." Harlen crouched down, which put his face close to Elias's. His voice stayed even. "It doesn't matter what I do with it after. It's mine. You don't get to decide what I waste and what I don't."
"She hasn't eaten," Elias said. "She's sick and she hasn't eaten and I've asked everyone on this street and none of them will give me anything. I just needed that one piece."
Harlen stood back up. He looked at Elias for a moment and Elias thought something might shift.
"If I let you take it," Harlen said, "every beggar kid in this district is in my shop tomorrow. It's not about you."
"Please," Elias said.
Harlen hit him across the stomach with the flat of his hand.
It knocked the air out of Elias completely and he doubled over and couldn't straighten up. Something deep in his gut felt wrong, a clenching hot ache that didn't stop when the impact did.
"You come back here, I call the constables," Harlen said. "They put child thieves in the workhouse. You stay until you're old enough to work. You won't see your mother again."
Elias was still trying to breathe properly. He straightened up by degrees, one hand on the door frame. His vision swam.
"She's dying," he said, when he had enough air. "My mother is dying and I don't know what else to do."
"That's not my problem," Harlen said.
He shoved Elias sideways hard and Elias went down on the street stones. His hands caught the ground. His stomach was still clenching, that deep hot ache getting worse now, and there was something sour at the back of his throat.
He pressed his forehead against the cold stone for a moment. Then he heard the bakery door close.
He lay there until he was sure nobody was coming back out. Then he got up slowly, one hand on the wall, and made it to the alley behind the bakery.
.
.
.
He sat against the brick and pulled his knees up because it hurt less that way.
The stomach pain hadn't faded. It was worse than before, spreading a little, and when he shifted position it got sharper. He thought maybe Harlen had hit him harder than it felt in the moment. He'd been hit before and it always faded. This one wasn't fading.
He didn't think too much about it. There was nothing to do about it.
The sky above the alley was grey-white and cold. He looked at it for a while.
When he'd left this morning his mother had been awake. She'd looked at him the way she always did, watching his face, reading the things he hadn't said yet.
"Don't steal," she'd told him. "Whatever you do today. Don't steal."
"I won't," he'd said.
She'd reached out and touched the side of his face with the back of her hand. He'd left.
He pressed his wrist across his eyes. His face was wet. He hadn't decided to do that but it was happening anyway and he was too tired to stop it.
He thought about the priest.
Two years ago. A man from the Blinding Light Guild who'd come through the border town and taken every coin they'd saved over two months. He'd stood in the doorway and told his mother he would cure one of them and she should choose.
Elias had been standing behind her chair. He remembered the afternoon light coming through the window and the priest's hands folded in front of him, waiting.
His mother had said: "My son."
The priest had done something with light that made Elias hold still and shut his eyes, and then it was over, and the man left with the money. His mother sat in the chair and didn't say anything for a long time.
Elias had been four. He didn't understand what she'd given up.
He understood now. He'd had two years to understand it.
She was at the boarding house, in the rented bed, under the blanket that had been washed so many times it was thin. She'd been there for most of the past two years. He'd watched her hands go thin. He'd watched her stop being able to stand for long. Some nights he woke up and listened to her breathe in the dark, counting the pauses.
Every morning he left and every evening he came back and she was still there. He never asked for more than that. Just one more day.
"I told you I wouldn't and I did," he said. His voice was small in the alley. "And I didn't even get it. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."
His stomach clenched again, harder, and he pressed his hand against it. Something warm came up his throat and he turned to the side and vomited onto the alley stones, mostly bile, and when it was over he sat with his back against the wall and his eyes closed and his breath coming short.
He didn't know why his stomach was doing that.
He didn't feel good.
"I don't know what to do," he said, quieter. "I keep thinking if I try hard enough it'll work but it never does. I can't make it work. I'm six and I've never once made anything better for you and I don't know how."
He stopped. His stomach hurt. His head felt heavy.
"I don't want you to die," he said. "I know you are. I've known for a while. But I don't want you to."
He stopped.
Something was in the alley with him.
He felt it before he saw it, some awareness that the dark at the far end had changed. He looked toward where the wall met the drainage channel and there was a shape there. Small. White. Low to the ground and very still.
He was too tired and too hurt to be afraid of something that small. He just looked at it.
It spoke.
"Do you wish to live?"
The voice was strange. It had a depth under the words that didn't come from the alley walls, the kind of sound that made Elias feel like whoever made it had learned to talk by listening from very far away.
He had blood in his mouth. His stomach hurt in a way that wasn't getting better. His mother was a quarter mile away in a rented bed and hadn't eaten in two days.
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to him all day.
He looked at the white shape in the dark.
"Yes," he said.