I Clean Gods to Pay the Rent

0015 The Reward

    "Send it to the kitchen to be stewed."

    Under the Soot Bishop's stare of maximum possible shock, the red-haired woman closed the case file marked [Bellfounder Memorial Hospital Incident], then picked up the goat head, tossed it to Cassius at the desk, and instructed, perfectly breezy:

    "We share a kitchen with the Police Department. After you drop this thing off, tell their head chef it's goat-head soup this time — same requirements as the last few rounds.

    "No ginger, no onion — extra rosemary and juniper. Double the dark ale to cut the gaminess, plus a pinch of white pepper and a splash of that Worcestershire sauce shipped in from the East. We're adding a special dish for the branch at lunch today. Off you go."

    "Wa... wait a minute! You bastard!"

    It had pulled off a genuine feat of merit, and this was its reward. The Soot Bishop's rage shot straight up past its brows as it lay in Cassius's arms, arguing its case on the merits:

    "Hes... you stinking woman! This time yours truly trained your new hire AND solved your incident for you, and THIS is how you repay me? Do you have any goddamn decency at all?"

    "I'm being EXTREMELY decent!"

    The red-haired woman — who'd rushed back overnight the moment she heard Smoke City had a mass-casualty incident — gave a snort. She rapped her knuckles hard on the desk, narrowed her lovely almond eyes, and demanded, looking anything but friendly:

    "Fine, you want to talk decency? Then let me ask you this: do you have any idea what that hospital director was doing right before your new hire blew him away?"

    "What was he doing? Wasn't he controlling a whole mob to swarm Agnes?"

    "Not just that!"

    Remembering what she'd read in the after-action report, the red-haired woman snapped, absolutely fuming:

    "He thought he had Agnes dead to rights, and he was busy gloating about his background! And right as he was about to spill who's behind him, you two went and shot his real body dead!"

    "..."

    The Soot Bishop's jaw dropped. Then it frowned and shot back:

    "That... come on, what are the odds? You're not pulling my leg, are you?"

    "Heh..."

    Looking at that half-believing, half-doubting face, the red-haired woman pressed a hand to her chest — tight and aching from sheer aggravation — couldn't be bothered explaining, and just chucked the report from the desk straight at it.

    "Read it yourself!"

    Fine, reading it myself it is! Yours truly has a man now — no need for YOU!

    Snatching the thrown report out of the air with its teeth, the Soot Bishop swung its head around and passed the report to Cassius — who caught its drift instantly, steadied the thing with one hand, flipped the report open with the other, and held it right up to its eyes.

    Soot Bishop: ...

    Cassius: ?

    "It means it wants you to read it out loud."

    Looking over the one man and one goat locked in a staring contest at her desk, the red-haired woman tipped her head back, took a pull of booze, gave a scornful little laugh, and waved a hand:

    "Just read it for him. The idiot can't read!"

    "..."

    "Yours truly doesn't NOT know how to read... it's just... there aren't that many words I know..."

    Meeting Cassius's astonished stare, the Soot Bishop snapped, embarrassed straight into anger:

    "Yours truly is a DEMON! You understand? A demon! As long as I can speak Demonic, why in the world would I learn you humans' little scribbles? Now hurry it up! What's it say in there? Tell yours truly this instant!"

    "Oh..."

    Rude as the Soot Bishop was being, the thing had genuinely helped him a lot, and it was even willing to teach him how to use it, free of charge. Cassius owed the demon a favor, so he let it slide, turned to the report, and started reading.

    [Bellfounder Memorial Hospital Incident Cleanup Report]

    [Incident Rating: Incident-Level]

    [Incident Status: Cleaned Up]

    [Incident Handlers: Agnes Harrow, Cassius Thorne]

    [Anomalous Objects Deployed: the Soot Crozier, the Serpent Bandages]

    [ ... ]

    Tearing through the intake forms at ten lines a glance, Cassius flipped quickly to page two, hunting for the part about the mastermind — but somewhere along the way, his reading slowed without him noticing.

    [Per follow-up investigation, the runaway Contaminated has been identified as Aldous Wick, director of Bellfounder Memorial Hospital. He is believed to have received an infusion from a certain Grand Bell, merging his authority as director with the hospital itself, thoroughly corroding the entire building and refashioning it into an anomalous object of his very own]

    [Two powers of this anomalous object have been confirmed so far. The first: seizing control of the hospital's staff, forcibly converting them into puppets for its manipulation — suspected to be a displaced manifestation of the director's authority, warped by the corrosion.

    Additionally, in the course of carrying out the cleanup, I found that one member of the medical staff was never taken over — even in the face of danger, she insisted on ushering patients to safety. I therefore offer the further conjecture that this ability may not take hold on individuals who are truly kindhearted, or who dare to defy authority]

    [The anomalous object's second power: absorbing patients to strengthen itself. Anyone stepping within its bounds while suffering from a serious ailment will be directly devoured by the hospital itself, their life force draining away in a slow, steady stream.

    With each patient successfully absorbed, Bellfounder Memorial Hospital grows a little hardier. After it had absorbed over three hundred and fifty patients, the custom nail rounds — which had originally been able to punch through six walls in a row — lost all their kinetic energy after only two.

    Per follow-up investigation, it is conjectured that the source of this life-draining power is likely tied to the hospital's long practice of squeezing its patients dry — padded line-item billing, pushing expensive medications first, deliberately prescribing addictive drugs, and the like...]

    So that's how it was...

    By the time he got this far, Cassius had gone properly serious, his heart swelling with genuine admiration for the bandaged woman's rigor and thoroughness.

    Last night, when he'd packed up the sniper rifle and hurried over, she'd already beaten him to the sixth floor, rummaging through the director's office — she'd walked off with plenty of items, cracked the office safe clean open, and stripped it bare.

    At the time, not knowing she was conducting an incident investigation, he'd assumed she was after the director's "private savings." And here, one night later, was this exhaustive, professional report. That's a Bureau veteran for you — the woman's work was simply beyond reproach.

    "Hey, kid... what's with all the nodding and zero talking? READ!"

    Having waited an age with no sound out of Cassius, the Soot Bishop — increasingly worried it really was going into that shameless red-head's stew pot — got anxious and pressed:

    "Come on! If you won't read it, just skim the record and tell me whether what she said is true! That's all I'm asking!"

    "It's true."

    After a quick scan of the relevant entry, Cassius nodded, helpless:

    "The director had just gotten started — he was about to reveal who the mastermind was, and right then we pinned down his location and shot him dead through the director's office wall..."

    "..."

    So... it really WAS that razor-thin a miss? What kind of rotten luck is that?

    Seeing that Cassius's expression held no trace of a put-on, the Soot Bishop — still flaunting its swagger a moment ago — deflated on the spot, shrinking into itself and mumbling, short on conviction:

    "Yours truly... yours truly was hundreds of meters away! How was I supposed to know the intel over there mattered that much? So what if I cost you the information — surely that's... forgivable..."