My Patients Are All Mythical Monsters

0021 — The Crimson Sterilization

Six thousand, four hundred Hell Gold.

It sat on the scarred oak table in neat, oily stacks. The bills were heavy, woven from something that felt like linen but smelled like burnt hair. Victor counted them for the third time. The texture was revolting—greasy, warm to the touch, as if the currency itself was sweating—but the number was beautiful.

He rubbed his thumb over the watermark of a screaming face on a hundred-note. It didn't scream audibly, but if he pressed hard enough, he could feel a faint vibration in his metacarpals. A tiny, trapped frequency of agony.

It was enough to replace the shattered window, buy a generator that didn't run on prayers, and finally get coffee that didn't taste like battery acid.

"Perimeter secure, Boss."

Victor didn't look up. He moved a stack of fifties to the left, aligning the edges with surgical precision. "Iron-Jaw, sit down. You're bleeding on the floorboards. I just scrubbed those."

The gangster stood by the front door, his massive frame blocking the morning light. His left sleeve was pinned flat against his chest, the stump of his arm wrapped in fresh, white gauze that was already spotting with red. He should have been in a coma. He should have been dead. Instead, he was trying to load a sawed-off shotgun with one hand and his teeth.

"Just a scratch, Boss," Iron-Jaw mumbled around the shotgun shell. He bit down on the plastic casing, angling the weapon against his hip to slide the shell in. "Got eyes on the treeline. The Shadows... they're quiet today. Too quiet. Even the crows are gone."

"They're quiet because it's nine in the morning," Victor said, marking the total in his ledger. "And stop calling me Boss. I'm a doctor. You're a patient. If you pop those stitches, I'm charging you extra for the re-suturing. And I'm out of anesthesia, so it’ll be the vodka again."

Iron-Jaw spat the shell into the chamber and racked the slide with a violent jerk of his hip. CLACK~CLACK~. The sound echoed in the empty foyer. "Doctor, Warlock, same thing. You saved my life. My life is yours. That's the Code. The Old Ways."

Victor sighed, finally looking up. The man was a biological marvel. The parasitic bone Victor had extracted yesterday—the "Ghoul Bone"—had been eating him alive for months, knitting itself into his marrow, drinking his calcium. Now, free of the necrosis, Iron-Jaw's body was rebounding with terrifying speed. His skin had lost its grey, corpse-like pallor, replaced by a healthy, if bruised, flush. The dark circles under his eyes were fading, replaced by the manic energy of a survivor.

"Your life is yours," Victor corrected, picking up his coffee mug. It was chipped, declaring 'World's Okayest Surgeon'. "Your debt, however, is mine. Put the g*n away. You're scaring the dust mites."

"Can't be too careful." Iron-Jaw squinted through the dirty window, his good hand white-knuckling the grip. "The families... they'll know the bone is gone. They'll know I'm weak. They'll come looking."

"Let them come. We have a waiting room now." Victor gestured to the foyer.

It was still a ruin—water stains on the wallpaper mapped out continents of mold, holes in the floor where the drone had crashed revealed the rotting joists—but he had cleared the debris. He had a table. He had a chair. He had a patient.

In this economy, that was a clinic.

Iron-Jaw frowned at the pile of scrap metal in the corner—the twisted remains of the surveillance drone that had tried to assassinate them. Wires spilled out like guts. "You gonna build a turret with that?"

"No. I'm going to build a wind shower. Maybe an autoclave if the stepper motors are salvageable." Victor took a sip. "This place is filthy. Hygiene is the first line of defense. Infection kills more men than bullets."

Then the sun went out.

It didn't fade like a passing cloud. It was strangled.

One second, the foyer was bathed in the pale, watery yellow of autumn sun. The next, a heavy, suffocating shadow fell across the windows. The temperature in the room plummeted. Victor's breath misted in the air. The coffee in his mug stopped steaming, the heat sucked out of it instantly.

Iron-Jaw dropped into a crouch, the shotgun leveling at the door. His pupils blew out, swallowing the iris in a biological response to predator presence. "Incoming! Get down, Boss!"

Victor didn't drop. He stood still, the mug halfway to his mouth. He tasted it before he saw it.

Copper. Heavy, metallic, coating the back of his throat. Then salt—the thick, oceanic brine of deep arterial flow. And underneath it all, a bizarre, sterile note of lavender.

A thick, red mist rolled out of the forest. It wasn't natural fog. It was heavy, clinging to the ground like spilled syrup, moving with a deliberate slowness. It moved against the wind, flowing over the overgrown lawn, digesting the dead leaves. Where it touched the grass, the vegetation didn't wither—it hissed, releasing tiny plumes of white steam.

"Crimson Court," Iron-Jaw hissed, his face draining of color. The tough gangster vanished; the terrified prey returned. He backed away, his boots scraping on the wood. "They found us. Oh god, they found us. That's Blood Mist. It melts flesh off the bone! It turns you into soup!"

He scrambled backward, kicking the table. The stacks of Hell Gold toppled. "We need to run. The basement—does this place have a catacombs? Sewer access?"

"Sit down," Victor said. His voice was calm, but his pulse hammered a slow, heavy rhythm against his collarbone. Thump. Thump. His Ancestral Gnosis flared—a sharp migraine behind his left eye. It wasn't fear. It was data. Identifying the chemical composition. Identifying the threat level.

The mist reached the porch. It didn't seep under the door. It stopped. It swirled, rising like a tide, turning the view outside the window into a wall of churning gore.

Sssssssss...

The sound of frying bacon filled the room.

"It's eating the house!" Iron-Jaw screamed. He pulled the trigger.

BOOM~

The blast shattered the top pane of the window. Buckshot tore into the red fog and vanished without a ripple. The mist didn't recoil. It didn't swirl. It poured through the broken glass, heavy and wet.

Iron-Jaw scrambled back, shielding his face with his stump, waiting for the acid burn. Waiting to dissolve.

Victor walked forward. He crunched over the broken glass. He inhaled deeply.

The scent was overwhelming. It wasn't the rot of death. It wasn't the copper of violence.

It was the sharp, chemical burn of industrial sterilization.

"Sodium hypochlorite," Victor muttered, analyzing the sting in his sinuses. "Hydrogen peroxide. And a binding agent... human plasma? No, synthetic."

The mist didn't attack them. It attacked the window frame. The grime of decades—the mold, the soot, the fly droppings—dissolved instantly. The wood beneath hissed, steaming as the red fog stripped it down. The grey rot vanished, replaced by a bleached, pristine white.

"What..." Iron-Jaw lowered his arm, blinking. The mist had scrubbed the windowsill down to the raw grain. It looked like bone.

A massive shape coalesced outside the door. A claw, formed of solid, coagulated blood, rose from the fog. It was the size of a truck engine, veins pulsing along its surface like hydraulic lines.

Iron-Jaw whimpered.

The claw lunged.

It didn't strike the door. It gripped the handle.

SCREEEEEEECH...

The sound of metal on metal was deafening. The blood-claw rotated, grinding against the brass. High-pressure jets of red liquid blasted into the keyhole, flushing out fifty years of rust.

"Is it... picking the lock?" Iron-Jaw whispered, his reality crumbling.

"No," Victor said, taking a sip of his cold coffee. "It's sanitizing it."

The door swung open.

The mist surged in. It didn't touch the floorboards. Instead, it hovered an inch above the rot, forming a solid, shimmering walkway of coagulated red.

A figure drifted in.

She didn't walk. Her feet, encased in boots that cost more than the entire manor, hovered six inches off the ground. Her dress was a cascade of black silk and red velvet, defying gravity to drape perfectly around her.

Her skin was the color of moonlight on a tombstone. Flawless. Poreless. Dead.

Carmilla. The Vampire Queen. The apex predator.

She stopped in the center of the foyer. She looked at the peeling wallpaper, the pile of drone scrap, the shattered window. Then she looked at Iron-Jaw, who was trembling so hard the shotgun rattled against his teeth.

Finally, she looked at Victor. Her upper lip curled in pure nausea.

She raised a gloved hand—white silk, unstained—and pointed a trembling finger at the door handle.

"Four million," she whispered. Her voice was like crushed velvet, soft and heavy, but it carried the weight of a tomb slab. "Four million, one hundred and two thousand colony-forming units."

Victor raised an eyebrow. "Good morning to you too. You're letting the draft in."

"I almost touched it," she said, her voice rising in horror. "I almost touched that... petri dish you call an entrance. Do you cultivate E. coli for a hobby? Or is this just natural selection at work?"

She waved her hand. The blood-mist outside surged. It washed over the porch steps, scrubbing them until the stone shone like new marble. The moss was gone. The dirt was gone. Even the texture of the stone seemed smoother.

"You're welcome," she said, floating closer. She refused to look at the floor. She kept her eyes fixed on Victor's face, likely the only thing in the room she considered marginally acceptable. "I need a consultation. Immediately. Before I catch tetanus from breathing your air."

Iron-Jaw stared at her, then at Victor. "Boss... you know her?"

"She's a prospective client," Victor said. He set his mug down on the table. "And she has terrible manners."

Carmilla's eyes narrowed. They were red, glowing with an inner luminescence that made Victor's teeth ache. "I am the Matriarch of the Crimson Court. I do not have manners. I have standards."

"You have a bill," Victor said.

The room went silent. The red fog stopped churning. Iron-Jaw made a small, high-pitched noise in his throat.

"Excuse me?" Carmilla asked. The air temperature dropped another ten degrees. Frost began to form on the edges of the table.

"The carpet cleaning," Victor said, gesturing to the pristine, bleached-white door and the spotless porch. "You used high-pressure blood solvents on a heritage-listed building. That's a specialized service. I didn't order it."

Carmilla blinked. The sheer audacity seemed to short-circuit her rage. "I... I sterilized it. It was filthy."

"It was rustic," Victor corrected. "And now it doesn't match the rest of the house. I'll have to strip the whole foyer to match. That's labor. That's materials. That's bleach."

He picked up a pen and a piece of scrap paper. He scribbled a number.

"Five hundred Gold," Victor said. "For unauthorized renovation."

Iron-Jaw looked ready to faint. He was witnessing a man mug a natural disaster.

Carmilla stared at him. For a long moment, the only sound was the sizzling of the blood-mist as it ate a spiderweb in the corner.

Then, the corner of her mouth twitched.

"You are..." She struggled for the word. "Repulsive."

"I'm expensive," Victor said. "And you're floating because you're afraid of the dust. You're not here to kill us. You're here because you're sick."

He leaned back, crossing his arms. The fear was there—a cold knot in his stomach, a primal scream in his hindbrain telling him to run—but he suffocated it. He was the landlord. This was his house.

"State your symptoms," Victor said. "And wipe your feet. Or... hover them. Whatever."

Carmilla floated forward, her expression shifting from disgust to something more painful. Desperation.

She slowly peeled back the pristine white silk of her glove, exposing her wrist.

It wasn't a bruise. It was a void. A patch of creeping, vantablack rot marred the marble-white skin, pulsing with a faint, sickly rhythm. It seemed to eat the light around it.

"It's not a sickness," she whispered, the arrogance cracking. "It's a stain. And it won't wash off."