It took me a few days to find the next book. One of the books I found in the meantime was rather hypnotic, and it took a swig of one very special cocktail to make my mind flexible enough to wriggle out of it. Then I got ambushed by a bunch of gremlins and other small folk. All in all, it was a difficult past few days. Then I found the journal of Coribeth Breckenridge.
Coribeth Breckenridge was born in the mid-1700s when the Agency was in a state of transition. The previous incarnation had been largely dissolved almost a century ago, and the isolated cells and secret orders left behind were only beginning to come back together into some semblance of unity when she received her training as a doctor. Her family was rather wealthy, and they had been connected to one of the remaining cells for three or four generations by the time she was born. Being a woman, she would normally have been given no duties more serious that keeping the home base maintained and attending to any wounded huntsmen who came by, however when she was educated in the healing arts (both mundane and arcane) she easily surpassed any of her male counterparts. Between that and her grasp of cryptobiology, she wound working in the field in record time. Which is how she came to be in the woods of Massachusetts in 1761.
Coribeth Breckenridge was still at home in the mountains of Wales when she got the message about a disease that seemed more like a curse running through New England. By the time she arrived in America, the cell she had been in contact with was completely wiped out. Granted, that was only four or five dudes, but still. Anyway, she found their records and discovered that the cell had been holding a man not only infected with but positively possessed by the disease. The safe house had been out in the woods, and she rode out at once with whatever weapons she could find. Fortunately, she found the patient before he made it to town. He was stumbling along, there were sores all over his arms, foam bubbled occasionally up from his mouth, and his eyes had gone a pure, bright green. Coribeth approached the possessed man with every precaution, but she found that subduing him and bring him back to the safe house was easier than she could have hoped. It was holding him there that was the hard part.
Over the course of six months, Coribeth Breckenridge fought to drive out the Moarte Verde, and for six months it fought back. She tried all the usual metals, herbs, and other substances to repel a supernatural creature. Most of them had some small effect, (I've copied down everything she tried and the result and will be sending them to Shauna and Gilbert) but none of them were able to do any significant harm, and she couldn't find any way to amplify the effects. It took her just under two weeks to go through that process and to figure out the logistics of maintaining the safe house. For the rest of the time, she got into the serious business of the medical arts. I don't know enough about medicine or real potions (I can only pull off the minor league stuff), so most of her notes relating to that business are out of my area of expertise. I did, however, notice one little detail, which was that by the end she was making frequent use of pigs blood. This is a bit odd since as far as I know pigs blood doesn't have any significant supernatural or biological properties. Of course, she might have just gone a bit crazy by then.
The visions started before the first month ended. It began with dreams of the men who had occupied the safe house before her. Every night she would watch the die. One puked his guts out, but the others went mad and turned on each other, laughing all the while. Later on, the Moarte Verde showed her more customized nightmares. There were quite a lot, but the ones that stood out for her were the ones that featured her brother. William Breckenridge had always felt threatened by his younger sister. He had been a fantastic huntsman in his own right, but he had never gotten over all the little ways in which she was talented and he was not. And he had dealt with it by lashing out. He bullied her, humiliated her, and even attempted to sabotage her career. So the fiend showed her the time he had manipulated her into trying to spar with him, and in the vision the swords weren't made of wood. It showed Coribeth the time he had snatched away a letter from her tutor and poured out all the mockery he could muster as he read it aloud to his friend and cronies, and in the vision the laughter was higher and louder and the grins were far too broad. It even let her see her own horrid fantasies. It let her see herself unleashing years of bottled resentment on her brother and anyone else she had reason to hate. By the last two months or so, the visions kept on going nonstop all day and all night.
And every time the thing tormented her, it would also show Coribeth the signs and the words by which she could invite it in. The truth was that the fiend's host was unfit to carry it. The Moarte Verde was slowly tearing the man apart just by being in him, and it couldn't even come close to unleashing its true strength until it had a more suitable body to inhabit. All Coribeth had to do was let it in, and the nightmares would end. Or she could wait until the host died or she managed to drive it out, and the nightmares would end. She might have simply left at any time, but she refused to intentionally kill the host, and she couldn't be sure the thing would remain bound if she left it alone. It was a race to make the other break first, and both runners did everything they could to win.
And thus it was that after six months in the woods, Coribeth Breckenridge rode into Boston. Her hands shook, she would wake up screaming from time to time, and it was several years before she was able to do field work again, but she was still herself.
