The bray of hounds echoed off the darkened walls, reflecting and multiplying as they came closer. She leaped over a hedge of rose bushes, scraping her exposed legs as she went. The lights were on in every building, burning out into the damp heat of the night like watch fires. Women stood in the windows, their silhouettes searching the patches of darkness for the fugitive, for her. The men were already out in force, calling to each other or speaking into radios as they swept the grounds. It was a good thing there was no moon, the darkness the only reason she hadn't been caught already. She had to get out of here. This was the story of a lifetime, but only if she lived to publish it. There was no point going for the motor pool or trying any of the cars in the driveways. The former was guarded and the latter had their keys removed with the pedantic attention to detail these brethren paid to all their tasks. If it were not for the hounds, she might have considered hiding in the trunk of one of the cars, but there could be no hiding from the snuffling nostrils of those slavering beasts. No, her only hope was to reach the chain-link and go over. It was a hike of a mile and a half to the road, a mile and a half through thick scrub and then, with luck she could hitch a ride to some place safe. It was a desperate longshot, but it was her only option. Where in the world could be safe from these people? If ‘people’ was even the right term.

“Sweep west from Luke!” a voice called, harsh and grating ahead of the squelch of a radio. She pressed herself back against the wall of a potting shed a moment before the speaker, an indistinct shape with a big military flashlight rounded the corner. The walkie talkie in his hand squawked something that was too distorted for her to make out as he tramped through the flower bed. It seemed impossible he couldn’t hear her heart hammering in her chest, but he walked past without seeing her, the frosty white beam of the flashlight sweeping back and forth closer to the wire. Fuck, how was she going to get out of here? Fuck, fuck, fuck. Desperate she risked a look at her burner phone, cupping a hand tightly around the display to block any light. No bars. Fuck. The hounds were closer now. No time left. She edged along the wall of the potting shed, all her control employed to stop herself from shaking.

“All clear to the wire from Luke,” the patrolling man said into his walkie talkie. He was only six paces from her, his back turned, the flannel of his shirt black on gray in the gloom. She could smell the scent of bleach and woodsmoke on him. He sighed, playing the beam of his flashlight across the woods a hundred yards from the wire. Owls hooted in annoyance and there was a chitter from some other animal. Just a hundred yards. Now or never.

“Where is this bitch,” the man muttered to himself. In a movie she would have made some witty remark, but this was no fairy tale, at least not the kid friendly Disney kind. She jammed her taser into his back, right between his shoulder blades where the nerves sprayed out from his choroid plexus. His body spasmed and he dropped to the ground with a thump where he continued to thrash and spasm until the butt of his mag light cracked into the back of his skull, and he went slack.

“Right here,” she allowed herself, buoyed by her own success, but she wasted no time rifling his pockets and retrieving a small caliber handgun from his waistband and a leatherman multitool from his pocket. Boyscout assholes. The hounds howled again, close now, no further than the end of the street. She ran for the wire and began clipping the links with the cutter as quickly as she could. Click-click, click-click.

“There! STOP!” someone shouted, but there was no force on earth that could have stopped her now. She snipped one more link and shoved herself through the gap. The jagged edges of the short vertical incision raked cuts across her thighs and arms that burned like fire. A gunshot cracked out and something whined past her head but she was free now, running like the college athlete she had been, though the sophomore long distance championship’s had never motivated her like flight from this nightmare. Two more shots cracked behind her before she reached the treeline but she didn’t look back. She crashed into the undergrowth, the mag light held in front of her as hurdled over fallen trees and wove around stringy saplings. Branches scratched at her like skeletal hands, a vine caught her across the forehead stripping back skin as effectively as a burn. Her breath burned in her chest, her muscles screamed with lactic acid, behind her the bark of the dogs and the bloodthirsty shouts of their masters. The only thought in her head was flight, flight and escape from this horrible night. Any hurt, any pain, was worth it if it meant getting away from this place.

Run, weave between the trees, don’t slow down. Not for anything. Time lost its meaning. Every second took her further from the horror behind her. Just keep running.

The ground suddenly gave way beneath her. Screaming she tumbled, the flashlight was smashed from her hand as it struck a rock with a crack that probably meant a fractured wrist. The night sky and the dark earth cartwheeled as she careened down the steep slope, long grass ripping at her like stinging nettle. She crashed violently into a ditch, the impact driving the air from her lungs. Gravel cuts covered her arms and blood was leaking from above her right eye, though scratched on something in the forest or in the fall she couldn’t tell. She was in the drainage culvert on the side of a paved road. Lights were approaching. She staggered to her feet ignoring the pain, waving her arms and shouting herself hoarse. The lights dimmed to low beams and began to slow. An old but well-maintained Buick rolled to a halt in front of her and she ran to the door, ripping it open frantically.
“Help you missy?” An older man with salt and pepper hair asked in concern, reaching up to squelch the harangue of talk radio pouring from its ancient sound system. He had a kindly face that was contorted in concern by the mask of blood and dirt worn by the woman before him.

“I need to get away from here, now!” she cried, finally pulling the passenger door open and hopping in, heedless of the small avalanche of trash and personal possessions she caused.

“I see,” the kindly old man replied. Something in his tone tipped her off and she glanced over at him and saw it. He gave her a hopeful smile. She pulled the pistol from her pocket, pressed it to his head and pulled the trigger in a single panicked motion. It was very loud. The gunshot blew out the driver’s side window as the round empties his brain case and sprayed the wooden door paneling with gore. The jet of ejecting brain matter lolled the driver's head towards her for a moment before his seat belt snapped him back in a motion curiously reminiscent of a crash test dummy in slow motion, flicking a lazy tail of blood and pulped synapse over her. The concussion of it shattered two more windows. Luckily the car was too old to have an airbag or a car alarm. Her ears rang tinnily, and the car stank of blood, cordite, and human waste voided when the body died. Her heart seemed to be trying to rip its way out of her chest. Thump-thump, thump-thump. The old man shuddered and then sat up, his face horribly disfigured by the gun shot that had punched through his head. Blood ran down into his face and his thin fringe of hair was on fire from the muzzle flash, his right eyebrow burned away entirely. Grains of burning powder flecked his face, glowing like the coals of damnation.

“Well, that’s just unfriendly,” the man wheezed, its voice hideously distorted by its gunshot opened nasal cavity. It’s hands grabbed for her, closing around her throat with a maniacal strength, fingers sinking into her neck like a wire noose. The gun rang out three more times before the darkness took her.




_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To: TEJ@anglefire.com, BCordova@sundaygroup.org, AMires@sundaygroup.org, ABlake@sundaygroup.org
From: ETregellan@sundaygroup.org
BCC: SPriest@PHI.inv.org
Subject: New Case Assignment <urgent>

Let those who look upon this writing {characters degrade into strange incomprehensible glyphs}

Report to 222 West Hubbard Street Chicago.

E

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The body lay in the alley like a discarded rag. It glistened like a jewel with some liquid tar like substance that covered every inch of it, from teeth to toes and pooled on the asphalt around it besides. Eleanor had seen more than her share of bodies since she joined the Sunday Group but this one was weirder than most. She pulled her coat tighter around her body and sipped coffee from the thermos Emmaline had packed her, both minimally effective against the chill in the air.

The alley was a narrow one between two red brick buildings that lead onto West Hubbard. It was typical of of its kind, trash bins and other unsightly detritus of urban life. Wrought iron fire escapes climbed the sides of the buildings like ugly rusting ivy. There was nothing remarkable about it other than it as a little closer to the affluent down town than was normal to find a corpse. Eleanor wondered who had reported the body and to whom. Possibly it was one of Adri's contacts on the force.

Eleanor drew her cellphone from her pocket and turned it on. She opened a specialized app. Thaumaturgic Actinic Correlation Oscilloscope was one of Jocasta Glyn's projects. It was bad enough that she had engineered the backronym without the whimsical choice of icon. Eleanor tumbled it live and pointed the camera at the corpse. The picture was overlayed with color, not unlike a thermal camera would render but entirely in the magenta range. The background was a deep purple but the corpse glowed a pink so bright it was almost white, clear evidence that magic of some kind had been at play. Eleanor sighed and took a couple of pictures which she shunted into the discord thread for the rest of the team to see. A train rattled passed not far away, momentarily draining out the normal symphony of honking horns, rumbling engines, and raised voices that were soundtrack to Chicago life. Eleanor crossed to the body and knelt beside it, sniffing experimentally. There wasn't any smell of decay, and whatever the black fluid was, it wasn't particularly pungent. Still there was something familiar about the scent.

"Who were you?" Eleanor asked the corpse. It didn't answer, which was less of a certainty in her line of work than you might think.

"The usual, Al?"

He lifted his hand from the countertop, the sticky residue of cooking grease and strawberry jam on the tip of his fingers. Barb hadn't cleaned the counter this morning. Big surprise. Tony dropped freshly cut onions on the grill, the sizzling deceptively satisfying to hear. If you could see past the smudged windows and the quaint sign at the front, you might think this was a nice diner. One need only eat the eggs to realize the enormity of the mistake. But the coffee was good, the people left you alone, and the food was deservedly cheap.

Alcander raised his other hand and pushed a wave of his tangled hair out of his face. He hadn't found the time for a haircut in months. One crackhead had creatively said he was LARPING as an apostle, which he guessed was not too outlandish. But it did get him to shave, at least. Before he opened his mouth, his phone vibrated audibly on the counter. He lifted it up and gave it a cursory glance. He took a moment and nodded.

"Yeah Barb, put it in a cup."

The weather had cleared, the sun peaking intermittently through the fleeing clouds, leaving the decrepit stink of the city wafting as clear to the senses as the food at the diner. He had grown used to it, passing the offices and apartments that littered the business sector of the city. He sipped his order, letting the coffee heat his belly as he walked the three blocks from the diner to the crime scene. He finished just before he found the alley, tossing the cup in a corner bin and clearing his throat.

"El," He said by say of greeting. Alcander was an unassuming figure, his lean greyhound frame hidden by the large overcoat he wore day by endless day. Passed his hair, his face was finely formed, but the bags under his eyes and the weathered look to his face betrayed the fact he hadn't slept six hours in two days. His eyes glanced down at the corpse, then flew upwards.

"Well, he didn't fall. At least..." He wrinkled his nose as the smell of refuse and piss finally hit him. The detective looked straight up at the sky, as if the clouds had answers. -not off the roof."

Alcander wasn't shaken easily. Not anymore, at least. He felt at home when looking at mangled corpses, which was a bit of therapy he would have looked into, in another life.

"His arms aren't aligned in the way one might try and shield themselves from a fall." He explained, taking a pen out of his jacket and dipping it into the black sludge that had accumulated along the uneven pavement the government so generously kept up to standard, as far as they told the taxpayers. Even a man committing suicide would instinctually try to block his head from striking the hard ground. He scooped up a bit of the alien liquid, fishing in his jacket with his free hand and producing a lighter. The small metallic click accompanied the flame, and he raised the coated pen, gingerly placing the flame beneath it.

The black sludge erupted in flame, which swiftly turned a sickly green, illuminating Alcander's face, his dark irises glowing with a muted forest color. "Could be wyvern bile, or maybe even cockatrice blood. I'll know better once Jo runs some tests."

He dropped the pen even as it dematerialized, the flame somehow spreading the ichor across its length, as if it made the flame hungry.

When Blythe’s alarm went off, she was already awake, sitting in the bottom of her glass-walled shower while hell-hot water flayed her back and shoulders. The raucous sound brought her slightly more into the present, out of the alive-but-not-consious fog she’d been drifting in since giving up on sleep two hours before. She let it ring because it would annoy Kolratheth. It didn’t matter to her.

“Blythe…” The demon’s voice in her head was as sleek and warm as a cat’s purr, but Blythe’s hands had caught her attention. Her knuckles where busted and her cuticles red from where she’d picked at them unconsciously. The nails cut to the quick.

She used to take such good care of her hands.

“The alarm, Blythe!”

Out of pettiness, she waited another couple minutes to rise and took her time drying off, applying lotion, and combing heat protector through her hair. By the time she was finished, Kolratheth was seething in the back of her mind like a petulant toddler—a comparison he did not care for—and Leone’s cat was yowling at the bathroom door. She clicked off the alarm.

“You are a hateful, bitter thing, and I hope you die alone.”

“I was planning on it.” She just had to get him out of her head first.

Blythe tried to slip back into mental oblivion, but the clawed, angry thing that lived inside her rib cage—her, not Kolratheth— was awake and pressing on her lungs like it wanted to get out through her teeth. She clenched them and went to feed the cat, playing a simple counting game her therapist swore would help.

Five red things: her knuckles, the spine of a book on ritual magic, Dragon’s collar, blood in the photos on her pinboard, the string linking them together. Four orange things: the logo on her punching bag, the shade on the ugly lamp Leone’s aunt had given her, the cover of an encyclopedia…

It was supposed to put her PFC back in control of her emotions, but she was still angry when she sat down at her desk and opened her laptop. Eleanor’s email was at the top of the list.

---

When Blythe first joined the Sunday Group, she thought that Kolratheth would like this sort of thing more than she did. As it turned out, he didn’t care about dead bodies—something about how it was much more efficient to sow chaos with living beings. They both disliked the crime scene and enjoyed the hunt—two of the very few things they ever agreed on.

“I’m hungry,” Kolratheth growled as they approached, and a thread of fear and revulsion wound through Blythe’s anger. He leaned towards Eleanor and Alcander’s emotions, twitching to change them. She pulled him back.

“We’re on a case. You’ll eat soon enough.”

“Put it off if it bothers you so much. I’ll take over this body for a while.”

Blythe clenched her jaw, running her tongue over her teeth to make sure they hadn’t begun to sharpen. Still square, but she kept her lips closed when she smiled a greeting at her coworkers. At least, Alcander’s observations distracted her from thoughts of feeding her demon.

“If he was dropped, there might be signs of whoever dropped him on one of the roofs,” she said, “but the real question is why the liquid did that to the pen and not the body. Does it just burn that hot, or does it have properties activated by flame? And if so, why the fuck did the perpetrator not bother to light the body on fire? It would have hidden the evidence.”

She crossed her hands over her chest, distantly annoyed by the wind pushing long strands of dark hair into her face. She wasn’t cold—demons ran hot. Blythe didn’t think she would ever be especially useful at a crime scene. She had no training in this kind of detective work, only in the sort that included chasing down primary sources, but she could ask decent questions. And how else was one supposed to find an answer?



She supposed it was possible that the perpetrator was an amateur who didn’t know the properties of the fluid they had used or that the substance worked differently on human flesh than it did on inanimate objects like Alcander’s pen. Maybe they had wanted the evidence found, though there was no obvious statement to be gleaned from this coated body. If none of those options were true…



“Maybe they were interrupted before they could light up the body. There might be a witness.”

Samuel Priest had a routine with certain kinds of emails. He didn't let the computer do the sorting for him; he might know the rules of arcane bureaucracy but he had no real interest in working out how to make the computer do something he was perfectly capable of himself. Instead, with the kind of deliberation that could - and did - drive the younger members of his organization up the wall, he considered each message, then with all the speed of a growing oak, resigned it to whatever folder or trash bin it might belong in. He didn't even delete the endless messages from marketers and people who were certain that what he needed were "dynamic, modern, data-driven approaches" to his very peculiar business, but he did have a folder for them. If you could read the words, the label would say "Fools, Damn Fools, and Liars."

And then there were the...other messages. Missives from, well. You could call some of them peers, or fellow delvers in the darkness. Others were communications from dark gods, lost prophets, or the Faen courts. All had their particular strata of Priest's attention, given in their turn. And at the very top of that priority list were messages from Eleanor Tregellan. They were so special, in fact, that Priest even had a special routine for those messages.

He made them not his problem.

Priest sighed, then reached to his desk phone, a heavy, corded thing, and punched a number in while cradling the receiver on his broad shoulder. The line rang three times, before clicking with connection.

"Oh, you're awake, how lovely," he said without preamble, "Miss Blackwood, I do hope you have a moment. It seems our...associate...is looking for her employee. Yes, again. I don't suppose you've seen her lately? Well, I would ask you to get a message to her, if you wouldn't mind..."

----------------------

"You know that I'm not actually your messenger service," said Morgan Blackwood, her quick fingers buttoning up her shirt. "It is possible for you to look at your phone now and then."

"I check my phone all the time," Teajay replied from the bathroom. She pulled a brush through her hair, then used her fingers to tease the strands the way she liked.

"Let me guess, to see who you've matched with on Deisul," Morgan sighed.

Teajay poked her head out of the bathroom, "Morgan Blackwood, as I live and breathe. You know about Deisul?"

"I..." Morgan waved a hand, "Not what we're talking about." Could that be a flush on her cheeks? Surely not.

Morgan let out a surprised breath a moment later, Teajay having bolted out of the bathroom and wrapped her arms around Morgan's waist from behind in a hug.

"I'm so damn proud of you," Teajay said into Morgan's back, "Look at you! Baby's first online dating profile! You have to let me see it. Wait, did we match? Holy shit, is that why you're here?" Her tone held nothing but playful, teasing delight.

"Tarah," Morgan said, clearing her throat, "Tregellan says you have a case." She reached down and gently pulled herself away from Teajay's embrace, "And since apparently she included Mr. Priest on the email, this one might be important? So, please, if you could, just check your messages."

Teajay stepped away from Morgan, a sly grin still on her face. She walked into her bedroom and scooped up her phone, her thumb tracing a complex sigil on the screen. A moment later, she let out a sound halfway between dismay and surprise.

"Urgent, huh?" Teajay said, "I guess I'll have to wear pants for this one."

-----------------------

Chicago in February is not anyone's idea of a good time. The winter had lost its novelty earlier in the year, and the knowledge that there was still quite a lot more to go could be enervating. The last few months had been dry and mild, but the wind still blew with icy teeth. Teajay stepped down the alley wrapped in a wool coat to her calves, bright blue scarf at her neck, and a knit hat with a pink cat's paw on one side, her steps careful while she approached the knot of other investigators.

"Heya, everyone," Teajay said, stepping past Alcander. The man looked even more tired than usual, the poor thing.

"Oh, fuck," she managed, seeing the ichor-coated body. "You know, Eleanor, that you could mention something like 'don't wear something you mind getting stained,' in the messages sometimes."

Teajay stepped closer to the body, then lowered herself to take a closer look. No expression, no contorted limbs. Not even a smell, which...well. The less said about that, the better. Other than the black goo - which Teajay was not going to touch - hardly anything remarkable at all. Curious, that absence.

And while she thought about it, focused her attention, that absence deepened and grew. More than a simple lack of context, and lack of clues, there was something important missing here. Something about the body felt...wrong. Not just out of place physically, but something else. A cold blankness where even an impression should have been. She swallowed.

"Do...you guys feel that?" Teajay said, standing. She turned, her eyes scanning the empty air. The hair on her arms prickled, even under her jacket.

She took a few steps further down the alley, almost unconscious. There, a little way further away from the rumbling El tracks, she felt...something. With a start, she realized it was the Outside, but not an invitation, nor a demand. A presence, like a hand on the other side of a pane of glass.

"Oh, fuck," Teajay said to herself.

"Talenarael" came a voice, like a whisper on a wind. "You come for the soul."

"I..." Teajay swallowed, "No, I...don't..."

"Gone," the voice interrupted, "Missing. Taken. Destroyed. Lost. Nothing to speak for. Only a hollow." The words seemed to take a tremendous amount of effort, or come from a very long distance away.

"I don't know what to do with that right now," Teajay said, "Okay, fuck it. Do you know who he was? Anything about him?"

"Not the first," the voice said. And with those words, the presence faded, the pressure of the Outside falling away at the same time.

"Shit," Teajay muttered, then turned to look back at the group.

"Er...how much of that did any of you hear?" She said.

Adri woke up before her alarm and spent two hours willing herself to fall back asleep before her phone finally started beeping at her. This was not an everyday occurrence, but today was not an ordinary day, not for her. She followed her routine as usual:

6:00 Quick snack and her prescriptions (including half a Xanax, which she normally skipped but today she knew she needed it).
6:15 Run. Outside. She had no interest in running, but it was healthy, so she put up with feeling like a cold, clammy corpse. 
     (The irony.) The visual was nice, at least; she ran through a park. And she did get to pet a dog.
6:40 Shower. Today was not a hair-wash day, thank goodness. She blow-dried the dampness out and put it up in a neat bun. No 
     make up today. She was dressed for business today, with a blazer and skirt over a plain long sleeved shirt.
7:00 Breakfast at 7. Eggs and toast.
7:30 Brush her teeth.

She ended up at the courthouse a good 45 minutes before she needed to be, which was fine with her. With her outfit she could have easily been mistaken for a lawyer as she waited, if not for the fact that she was sitting there reading a novel, not hard at work. She was absorbed in the words up until a Hispanic man in a suit walked up, putting his toes right up against hers. “Aren’t you cold?”

She closed the book and grinned, standing up to give Santino Estrada a hug. “No, thermal tights. Are you still Sarge or should I call you Lieutenant?”

He squeezed her back, laughing as he stepped away, shaking his head. “No word yet. Supposedly I’ll find out today. How has life been treating you?”

They began down the hallway. “Good. I’ve been doing good.” Their path was slashed with sunlight, the columns outside the tall windows casting their shadows on the wall.

“I’m sorry they keep bringing you out to talk about Kendall. It must be hard.”

She shrugged. “I’m used to it. Thanks for being here anyways.”

“At least they’re closing the case soon.”

“Yeah, I am looking forward to that.”

——

Adri checked her phone as soon as she was out of court. Fortunately, the address was only a five minute drive away, and she kept a go bag in her trunk. She swapped her blazer for a well worn, dark green hoodie before leaving, wanting the freedom of movement that the blazer simply would not provide.

She parked across the street, saw everyone in the alley, and went around the other way, clipboard and pen in hand. She started her crime scene diagram as she walked. The Sunday Group wasn't the police, but old habits die hard.

“Sorry if I'm late, I had court this morning,” she said as she finally strolled in, giving a wave with the hand that was not holding a clipboard. “Did I miss anything?”

“Just the one victim?” she asked. “I might have seen some of the black stuff on the corner back there, but there are four dumpsters down that way, so…”

cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/121426…

Blythe’s ears itched somewhere between hellfire and a double dose of beta-alanine. There were fire ants inside the cuff, spiders biting her ear lobes. She half-wanted to let Kolratheth turn her hands into claws so she could scrape them off, but his attention was so wholly focused on the fur-the-wrong-way clamor that he didn’t even notice her mental yell.

She ground her teeth and forced herself to focus on the sound that had so enraptured her demon. Gradually, it became clear. Teajay was speaking to a disembodied voice—something ancient, sexless, and powerful. Something inimical to Kolratheth.

There was no soul attached to the corpse they’d found.

“I want her.” Kolratheth hissed. “They waste her potential, keeping her in the dark. Can you imagine? Oh, the things she could do if she stopped following their rules.”

Blythe resisted the urge to put her hands over her ears and straightened her blouse instead. “The Sunday Group is off limits.”

“You’re going to have to feed me soon,” he purred, “and between your rules, the soul-saving angel, and a case that leaves the bodies dry… You’re either going to have to bend or get creative.”

“You’ll eat. The Sunday Group is still off limits.”

She ignored his grumble and turned back to the group, nodding absently at Adri as she walked up. Teajay was a little difficult to look at after her otherworldly chat, so Blythe only glanced at her briefly and turned back to the crime scene before her eyes began to itch. “I heard it. The body’s soul is missing, and it isn’t the only one.” She smiled grimly. “There are plenty of things that eat souls, though. Demons, for one.”

“They aren’t necessarily my favorite meal…”

“Are all demons so discerning?”

“The more things you can eat, the easier it is to thrive. Just look at humanity. It’s a veritable garbage disposal.”

“I don’t know many humans that could live off a lecher’s eyeball or a night of chaos.”

The rumble that served for Kolratheth’s laugh felt like a belly ache. “That just goes to show demons are the higher form of existence.”

“Or better at eating trash.”

“Have you seen the kitchen of a McDonald’s? Or—Satan forbid—a KFC?”

Blythe had spent too long speaking to the demon. She straightened her clothes again, a little awkwardly. “We know we’re dealing with a soul-stealing killer that uses some sort of flammable black goop that could have come from a mythical creature. This is not the only victim, and there could even be more nearby. For whatever reason, the killer didn’t light their goop on fire and destroy the evidence. Do any of you know a spell for stealing surveillance footage? There are a few cameras around here. Along with the garbage cans to check.”

“I take it you have some kind of insight?” Adri said with a glance over at Teajay. She had arrived too late to know what was happening and quite frankly saw it as no problem; she had no idea if she would have seen whatever they were discussing, but it would be just one more reason for her to question her sanity (which she sometimes wished wasn’t intact). “So, we need a search of the greater area to see if the scene needs to be widened,” Adri murmured to herself, flipping the map up to jot notes down on a blank sheet underneath. “A spell would probably work, but I usually just… ask.”

There was an interesting disconnect, sometimes, in the different understandings everyone had of the world. She usually went for a mundane solution, saving magic for when she had exhausted all her options. “There are probably more in these areas, but I haven’t been that way yet,” she said, gesturing at the section of her drawing devoid of any camera listings. “For example, there’s one right over there. Question is where it looks, which may not be this way,” she said, pointing up over at a doorway.

Teajay felt her shoulders stiffen just before Blythe spoke. The...other being, the thing that made its home in Blythe's chest, had focused its attention on her; the thing that called itself a demon. Teajay liked Blythe, she really did, but it was so hard to get close to her. Not only because of the demon and its pull on Blythe's soul, but the rage, the pain, the fury that drove the woman radiated off her like heat from a forge. Every time Teajay thought about asking her out for a drink, she wondered if the cocktails would vaporize before they got to enjoy them. There were, of course, times for that sort of thing, that kind of fierce, furious potential, but...well. Not now, certainly.

She could hear the thing that shared Blythe's body, but Teajay couldn't understand it. The language was one she didn't speak, or perhaps it merely chose not to let itself be understood. The words arrived via something other than her ears, stripped of any meaning other than malice and a dark, distant desire. In that way, the demon wasn't really different from her DMs, but somehow it always seemed more immediate, more potentially dangerous. Teajay expected they would probably have some kind of reckoning, eventually - that's how that story goes, after all - and she honestly had no idea what would happen. If there were avenging angels, the red right hands of the Highest, Teajay wasn't one of them. She listened and she spoke, and that was that.

Wasn't it?

The distant rumbling of the thing in Blythe faded, and Teajay shook her head, clearing her thoughts. She blinked, and noticed Adri having arrived, her dark coat making her one more vaguely sinister figure in the increasingly busy alleyway. A cop, whether she left the force or not; her bearing stiff, proud, official. There were reasons that she came to join the spooky side rather than stuffing her truth down and staying on the force, but from what Teajay could tell, the job never left you.

"Blythe's got what we know," Teajay said, gesturing at the other woman with a thumb, "It's a little early yet. But you're right, camera footage isn't that hard to come by most of the time. You wanna take Blythe and go see if you can sweet-talk your way into the security offices for that building? See if that cam caught anything? This one feels weird enough that I'm guessing we probably shouldn't be alone."

Teajay pointed at Alcander, "And before you fall asleep on your feet, c'mon. If there's more of this stuff, let's see where it leads. Adri says there's some dumpsters up the alley with more of this stuff on it. Between the two of us, we can probably move 'em, see if there's something under or behind them."

Alcander kept himself busy while the others spoke, checking the cadaver's weight of limb, the skin texture, and he performed a small spell to determine if any vile spirits still dwelled around the corpse. Unfortunately, he received no reply when he attempted to summon the spirit of the deceased. But that was not the most disconcerting part. When he pulled out the mandrake and performed the rite, he not only felt as if there was no one at home. He felt as if there was a vacuum where a soul might have been. For a brief moment, Alcander felt a tinge of fear as he felt the pull of his own soul. A less experienced mage might have stepped in to search, but that would have spelled the end of him. He suppressed a shudder and closed the summoning.

By this point, the others had arrived and made quite the spectacle, as they often did. By the time they had decided to acknowledge him, he had run out of ideas without further assistance from Jo, Alcander was merely standing there as if waiting for an elevator, hands in his jacket.

"Good idea." Alcander said, the toothpick in his mouth undulating as he spoke. "I'm not the best at sweet talking the security guards."

If Alcander was alone, he might have done a larger summoning, perhaps asking a stone spirit for aid. They were rife in the city, all the concrete and imported stone for the more exotic buildings attracted them like. However, they were far more volatile than the spirits locked in natural mountains. In modern terms, you'd call the rock spirits that fled to the city as 'bums,' exiled from the true stone to fraternize with a low class, made-man mixture. In fact, cities often had the worst or least honorable of the old powers. Anything that trucked with humanity tended to be pretty seedy, as far as the ancients were concerned. Except the Black Dogs of Britain, and he lamented they weren't in London. That would have been cased closed almost immediately.

Unfortunately, he was not alone. Most members of his 'team' if you could call it that, had spirits or heavenly beings already residing in them. Summoning more to congregate with a spell was just asking for trouble.

He fished in his jacket, and produced an old box camera in his left hand, letting the group get a good look at it. He then lazily tossed it to Adri. "Here, catch." The contraption was solid and as heavy as a rock, made from industrial grade, small form iron, but the make of it gave it an edge in capturing the supernatural on film. Even if it hit the ground, it would take a fall from a real height to break it.

Old was gold, as they say.

"Just take a few photos of the body and the surrounding area. Alright, Teajay. Let's go move that shit." The detective sighed, turning his back to the group and meandering that way. He nonchalantly spit the toothpick into a refuse pile he passed.

---

Adri had her clipboard tucked under her arm, the other working its way out of her sweatshirt, revealing a white dress shirt tucked in at the waist. Looking the role was half the part when it came to getting information, and this was one of those times where being done up would make all the difference. She paused, half out of the thick fabric, to catch the camera in her arms. They curled inwards, pulling the weight into her chest, for a moment forgetting that no one here was normal and wondering how he had managed to toss it over with such ease.

She looked to the camera and then back at him as she gently placed it on the ground to pull her other arm out of its sleeve. “You touched the body before you took photos?!”

Adri sounded downright scandalized. Really, it was mainly to be dramatic, and she would never have commented if it had been someone else; Al was the only other person here who would know anything about standard operating procedures, and nothing the Sunday Group did was really standard. It was not at all unusual to discover that scenes couldn’t be photographed. There was the slightest bit of actual horror, only because she liked to work in an orderly fashion. She had long ago learned to shrug her shoulders and let it go; that didn’t lessen her confusion as to how anyone else got anything done.

“I’ll grab a few photos and we can head over, sound good?” she asked, looking over to Blythe as she folded her sleeves up. She looked more like Adri’s mom than Adri did; Adri had turned out like a darker version of her father, but with features just vaguely exotic enough to make people question where she was from.

Now, where did you come from? she mused to herself as she started snapping photos of the corpse, one at this angle, one at that angle, whipping out a pair of gloves to turn the body get snaps of its front. You could tell where the face was, of course, but the black substance obscured and distorted everything.

Down the alley this way. Down the alley that way. From the opposite wall to the body. From the body to the opposite wall. She was efficient but thorough with her choices. A few more and she decided she had enough.

“Okay, I’m ready whenever you are.”

With @nightmare medx

“I’ll be the bad cop and you’ll be the good cop,” Blythe said. Sweet-talking wasn’t exactly her thing, but people were. Their every desire or fear or irritation would be as open to her as a library catalog, and nowhere near as fixed.

“Open to us, you mean,” Kolratheth purred into Blythe’s thoughts. ”I hope you find someone especially corruptible. That could be enough to satisfy me… for a short time.”

Blythe mentally rolled her eyes, even as something deep in her belly relaxed. She had an out. For now.

“Let’s try the corner store first. They're probably open late.” She pointed out a pharmacy with rows of sunglasses and cheap tchotchkes in the window. It was a block away on the corner with a bright red and white sign that read Darcy’s Pharmaceuticals in curling script.

“Drug stores usually have good cameras, too… with the drugs and all,” Adri said, pulling the strangely modern strap to Al’s camera over her head so the camera rested on her hip, throwing her sweatshirt over top. It saved her from taking a trip back to her car, or trying to juggle everything in her arms.

She patted herself down before they left as if something might have gone missing while she was standing there. “With any luck, they’re the owners of the closest camera to the body so we can narrow down who’s best to talk to next.” Of course, she was already looking ahead, mapping out the rest of the investigation. They needed information to figure out this scene, of course, but supposedly there were previous victims, which raised the question of whether this was a spree killing or a set of serial murders…

“So all we know is that this isn’t the first victim, not when the previous ones happened?” she asked, pulling herself out of her head.

“Unfortunately—or possibly fortunately— mysterious, divine voices aren't always the most forthcoming,” Blythe said dryly. “Until we have something more tangible to go on, you'll just have to bug Teajay for any details she can get. Not that heaven will answer. They don't exactly have a direct line.”

“One the many added benefits of going the route of demonic possession.”

“Oh yeah? Are there others?”

Without waiting for an answer, Blythe swung open the door to the pharmacy, taking in the chaotic array of toys, medicines, useless decorative nonsense, and small useful items like umbrellas and reading glasses. The counter was at the back, the uninterested slouch of a person just visible behind the counter. She held open the door for Adri and then followed her in, gesturing towards the cashier with a nod.

“After you.”

“Thank you. Yeah, they aren’t forthcoming until they want to mess with your head at which point… you hear many things. I don’t know how many of the things I’ve learned are real things, but they are, nevertheless…”

Adri walked in with an air of authority as always, a friendly but not overly happy smile on her face. Her eyes darted around, assessing the room as she marched directly to the counter. Leah, assuming the name tag was correct, straightened up and tapped her glossy blue nails on the counter as the duo entered.

“Hi there. How can I help you?” Leah was pleasant, although it was clear from the tone of her voice and the slump of her shoulders that she did not want to be here.

“Hi. I’m Detective Blake. We’re investigating an incident that occurred in the alley next to the store and need to see if the cameras here caught anything. Can you get your manager or whoever would be able to help me with that?”

“Uh. Yeah, of course, just, uh… wait here, I’ll go grab my manager.” Leah followed along her counter, heading through a door to a back room.

“So… 240229-1003,” she muttered to herself. It was usually the bigger businesses that wanted a case number, but you never knew.

“240229-1003,” Blythe repeated precisely, cataloging it in her memory with customary efficiency.

She was sure she didn't look like a cop. Maybe a Fed, given the business clothes, but a lifetime of peering over tomes and at computer screens didn't exactly give one a cop-like stance. Subtly, she eyed Adri, placing her feet a little farther apart and mimicking her expression. Blythe shook her head and gave it up just as Leah returned with her manager. Bart, by his name tag.

The stench of worry and lust hit her before he even reached the counter. The man was average looking—not particularly greasy or well-groomed. He was maybe in his thirties, with an unfortunately recessed hairline despite his young age, a slightly hooked nose, and the physique of someone who had a gym membership but didn't spend more than a cursory amount of time there. The idea of police in his store had sent a jolt of anxiety through his belly that Kolratheth was already greedily breathing in, and… other stirrings pointed towards a distinct interest in both his visitors.

So predictable…

“Officers,” Bart said, putting on a flimsy show of good manners, “How can I help you?”

Blythe pulled back, allowing the professional to go to work first. She would just assist a little. From behind Adri, she smiled at Bart and began to dampen his worry. Maybe it was true that everyone felt a little guilty in the presence of a cop. Maybe he had a bit of drugs stashed somewhere in his car or had lifted something that didn't belong to him. No matter. He wasn't feeling it now. In its place, she gave his lust a little nudge.

His breathing slowed a little, his pupils darkened. Bart's smile left off being something strained and started being something he couldn't quite get off his face. “Anything you need.”

Kolratheth purred.

“Hi, Bart?” Adri said, offering her hand to shake. Bart’s handshake was sweaty and firm. “I’m Detective Blake. We’re investigating an incident that happened in the alley and your security cameras might have caught footage that we need. So, we’re here to see your cameras.

“Ah. Mmmm. Well, we’re not really supposed to do this without a requisition order, but why don’t you two come back to the security office and you can… fiddle around, find what you need?”

He gestured for them to follow. “Thank you, Bart.”

Blythe and Kolratheth sighed in unison. It was a little disappointing that he had been so easy to convince. She hadn’t really had the chance to show off her skills in front of the Sunday group.

They followed Bart to the back, Blythe glancing around curiously at the employee-only section of the pharmacy. It felt a little strange. Like being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be even though they had permission. Or else like looking into the guts of a computer or dissected frog. Maybe a combination of the two.

She smiled at Bart when she caught him glancing back, and he started chatting away, evidently no longer concerned about company policies. “Is this about all the noise last night? I got a frantic call from one of the employees last night talking about screams.”

“Oh yeah?” Blythe asked. “Did they wake you up?”

“No, it was only around eleven. I offered to drive in to investigate, but she said it didn’t last long.”

“I’m sure he did…”

Blythe let some of her laughter show in her smile. “That was brave of you. What did they hear?”

“A crash loud enough to shake the windows—a few of the lucky cats were broken this morning, having fallen off their display— and screams. She said it sounded like someone fleeing the scene of a crime but she didn’t see anyone.”

He stopped in front of a dingy door leading into an even dingier office, home to a tiny desk and a computer showing several camera angles in and outside the store. Papers covered most of the desk, and it had been a long time since the small trash can in the corner had been emptied if the odor was anything to go on. A few empty togo boxes half spilled out of it, and the desk sported a number of cold disposable coffee cups all bearing the name Bart in cheerful sharpie scrawl.

Bart seemed to have forgotten about the mess because now he blushed. “Sorry. I keep meaning to get the other manager to clean up her mess, but you know how it is.”

“It’s all good,” Adri said with a wave of her hand. “May I?”

“Absolutely, go right ahead, right ahead.”

She didn’t sit down- she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The software was one she had dealt with before; with practiced ease she was shuffling the feeds she needed onto the screen. “You said around eleven, are you certain of that?” she asked, not looking up from her work. She could feel his eyes on her backside and resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

“Yes, one hundred percent. I have cable and… a particular… show… that I watch had just come on.”

She rewound the tapes to 9pm, just to be safe, letting the video play at a rapid speed as she patted her pocket before pulling out a flash drive. “This’ll just be a minute,” she said with a glance over to Blythe. “You all good?”

“Unequivocally,” Blythe said and then stiffened as a slouching, ill-dressed form briefly crossed the screen. “Wait. Who was that?”

“Oh him?” Bart said it in a way that suggested that they couldn't possibly be interested in that person. “Just a homeless guy that hangs around the area. I haven't seen him today, but I'm sure he'll be back. He's like a roach that way. Impossible to get rid of.”

Blythe exchanged a glance with Adri. “And he was here yesterday? Before the late night call?”

“Like I said: he always is.”

Except not today.

“Excellent choice for a victim, don't you think?” Kolratheth asked. “No one to miss him.”

“Why? Are you taking notes?”

“As if you'd let me go after someone not assuredly guilty of much worse crimes than loitering….”

He sounded petulant, but Blythe was glad her demon hadn't pushed her this time. With a thought, she turned down the lust ramping up in Bart’s imagination. “I think that's about all we need, don't you, officer?”

“I have no further questions, so… once we get the footage…”

And there it was. “I think we have something here.” Once the file was copied to the flash drive, Adri pulled it out, jotted it down, and flashed a smile at Bart.

“Thank you for your assistance.”

Blythe squashed any emotion in the pharmacy manager but paranoia and he ushered them out without a second thought. Together, they turned away from the pharmacy and back towards the others.

Alcander ran his hand over his head, moving the fringe out of his face. He gave Teajay a look and gestured for her to follow.

The alleyway was dirty, as one might expect. The afterbirth of yesterday's rain still clung in small puddles where the rancid liquids of whatever trash had been tossed casually away accumulated in a thick soup. Al idly kicked aside an old can of beer as they approached the dumpsters. He had not expected the heavy objects to be on wheels, but it would have been a welcome sight. Still, he stopped at the first one and leaned left to get a better view inside. Black trashbags and the occasional loose refuse were piled together, but no sign of the black sludge. He sniffed a small, sardonic laugh and rolled up his sleeves.

Alcander set his feet firmly on dry ground, planting his hands against the aluminum siding. The dumpster was not entirely full, so he had confidence he could move it himself. Alcander was wiry, but he had a lean strength to him. A moment passed, and then the deep scraping of metal on concrete screeched, and Alcander grunted as he pushed forward, until he nearly slipped. His foot slid along an strange substance and his knee almost struck the ground, but he caught himself. Al fully expected to look down and see a trail of wet chicken grease, but instead his eyes caught something unexpected.

A small stream of black sludge leading just under the dumpster. But its path stopped right at a small pool of the stuff, staining the hilt of a strange dagger. Alcander stepped away, waving Teajay over.

"Hey, come look at this." He bade her, wiping his lip with the back of his hand. "Ever seen a blade like this before?"

The dagger was a around a foot in length, the steel of the blade almost bluish in coloration. It looked incredibly sharp, wrought in a single edge that smoothly transitioned into a keen stabbing point. The hilt was abyssal black, so dark it was almost impossible to tell where it ended and the sludge began. A small fuller ran down the length of the blade, but it did not look like a modern KABAR or Bowie knife. Alcander was not a medievalist, but it had the look of a thick bladed, single edged rondel dagger.

Her skin prickled while she walked with Alcander, leaving the body and Eleanor's examination behind. Something was happening, threads of power that nudged at her mind. Teajay's lips narrowed - that thing in Blythe, its exerted will laying like a weight on the universe while it pressed and pulled at someone else's mind. The thing's power sent shivers up Teajay's back, not out of fear, more like an unexpected winter's chill. She shook her head, and tried to pull herself out of the sensation. Things seemed...closer, lately, with the thing that called itself a demon, like its thoughts were brighter in Teajay's mind, but now wasn't the time to worry about Blythe and her passenger. She pushed the feeling away, but the moment she turned her attention from one set of supernatural feelers, another sent lightning-sharp crackles through her mind.

She felt it before she saw it, even before Alcander had finished shoving the dumpster away from the wall, like standing too close to a live wire. Teajay looked down, following the scrabbling of Al's boots, then the line of his attention.

Find the truth

The jolt in the back of her mind almost felt like a physical shove, and Teajay staggered, clamping her hand on the edge of the dumpster to keep her balance. She swallowed, her throat suddenly thick, her tongue unfamiliar and unwilling to form words. In her mind, she could feel...something, whirling around the length of sharp steel, like the memories she would feel when she was Outside, but something altogether more insistent.

Follow the lines

Teajay gasped and tried to form words, to ask Alcander for help. Nothing came out, her breath coming in sudden, sharp rasps. She lost her grip on the dumpster, fell to one knee on the cold asphalt. Her eyes swam - what was this? The words pounded against the inside of her skull, a command scraping the edges of her consciousness raw. Her hand moved, almost without her awareness, and in the skin of a second her fingers had wrapped around the dagger's hilt, pulling it toward herself, cradling it against her chest.

She stopped breathing, the ragged scraps of an indrawn breath spilling out of her in a ghostly wave.



One fist held the figure by the front of its jacket, already overbalanced on the edge of the rooftop. Behind their eyes, not malice, only a kind of satisfied determination. The other held something hard and sharp, the winter chill making the handle sharp against wind-chapped skin. So much had led to this, so many hours of study, so many dead ends and lost paths. But they had gotten this far, they would finally know secrets no mortal had ever even begun to understand.

Nobody had gotten this far, nobody had seen how the pieces truly fit. The centuries had burned down to this last nub of time, and they were the bright, final candle. The flame that would unlock a new world.

The tip bit through wool, through cotton. So close now...


The memory, the view playing across her eyes wavered for a moment, and Teajay seized what control she could. With a cry, she twisted at the waist and slammed her own wrist against the corner of the dumpster, hammering against it hard enough to make the whole thing ring like a deep bell. The dagger flew from her suddenly nerveless fingers, pinging across the asphalt with a scraping sound that rang more like glass than steel. For her part, Teajay fell back, catching herself with her arm and scrabbling backwards, toward the wall and away from the dagger. She pulled in air like a drowning woman, great gulps of the frigid, fetid alleyway coursing down her throat with each steam-engine breath. She kicked again, and felt something fold against her back, the moment strange enough to press the smallest bit of the panic away from her mind.

"Shit," Teajay managed after another few breaths, and looked behind her.

Cardboard on the ground. A few bottles, a blanket, a tarpaulin. Socks and a single shoe. And to each side, scrawled on the back of dumpsters and the brick of the building, the same phrase. Written in marker, in wax, in things that Teajay did not want to think about right now.

Follow the lines

Follow the lines

FOLLOW THE LINES

"I heard it," Teajay said, her tongue now under her own control, "The...I think it was the dagger," she swallowed again, "Or something about it. I couldn't turn away from it. I...what the fuck is going on?"

Another facet of the...vision? Dream? Commandment? floated through her mind, and she looked up at Alcander.

"The roof," Teajay said, trying and failing to get her feet under her, "Al, the roof. Something happened on the roof, we have to get up there, now!"

Eleanor watched the change come over Teajay. Her guts tightened and she felt her adrenaline spike. Anything that upset the woman was more than cause for concern. Something was going on here beyond one unexplained body.

“Adri, Blythe, see if you can run down our witness,” she told the pair. Adri had the skills and Blythe was muscle in the worst case. A distant part of her shuddered at what Blythe’s muscle actually entailed.

“Keep me updated,” she called back over her shoulder as she followed Teajay and Alcander as they headed up the fire escapes to the roof, irritated that her jacket and skirt made climbing so awkward. Even before she reached the top she felt the tingle or arcane energy through her palms. Teajay reached the top and turned to offer her hand to help Eleanor the last few steps, she took it grateful, feeling the unnatural aura of the other woman through her sensitive flesh.

“There was a spell,” she began but Alcander was already gesturing to the obvious source. A perfect pentagon was cut into the flat top roof of the building, descending through concrete and insulation with the precision of a microtome. Sigils were marked around the opening with metallic paint. Empty krylon cans lay scattered where they had been tossed. A brass plate had been screwed into one point of the design. A pair of jumper leads connected the plate to a raspberry pi wired to a cell phone. Black fluid, like a slug trail, slicked the rooftop from the hole to the edge of the roof.

“Looks like we found the source at least,” Eleanor noted redundantly. She walked over to the edge of the hole, carefully avoiding stepping on any of the scribings, and looked down into it. The room below looked like a storage attic. Even from here she could see it was filled with books and papers, some lose, some in crates. Other items, antiques, musical instruments and other less identifiable things were scattered around, tossed chaotically as though by frantic hands. The rain had done extensive water damage, swelling and ruining hundreds of books. Already a faint smell of mold wafted up to tickle her sinuses. A rope ladder had been bolted to the roof with a masonry drill, allowing people to climb down into the hole.

“This must be storage for the auction house,” Eleanor said, pulling the street map from her memory.

“It looks like it might have been a heist,” Eleanor decided, crouching down to examine the raspberry pie. She flicked a finger and both alligator clips snapped free. She picked it up and tapped at the control.

“Looks like a … like the opposite of a summoning,” she explained. “He.. they.. sent the roof piece… somewhere else.” It was a sophisticated spell, Eleanor could have managed it without the electronics but she wouldn’t have attempted it. The list of practitioners who could work it even with the programming wasn’t huge. She would need to take a look at the code and see if she could narrow it down.

Honestly, if she were going to pick between hunting down a homeless man or scoping out an closed auction house, Blythe would have picked the auction house. She understood. If anyone were going to convince some random, likely half-scared-shitless guy to talk, it would be Kolratheth. Still, she would always be first and foremost a librarian, and there was no telling what treasures of scholarship might lie hidden within those storage shelves, far away from the more deserving eyes of academia.

If you want to so badly, come back at night. I could get you in.” In the aftermath of their run-in with the pharmacy manager, the demon sounded petulant. Like a lover who had wanted three great orgasms and gotten one mediocre one instead. “Maybe there will even be a guard to deal with.”

Somehow, Blythe couldn’t see herself turning cat burglar. Even if it was for the sake of knowledge.

”You’d do it to find Leone Cordova’s murderers.”

And like that, the grief was back. A downpour. A yoke of stone. She could feel it in the muscles of her forearms and between her shoulder blades like deep-tissue ache. She will never be back. She died alone, and in pain. An endless atrophying wound. And beneath it? An even greater rage.

Perhaps she was not a librarian first and foremost after all.

Blythe swallowed, adjusted her blouse, and beckoned to Adri. “Come on. Time for more good cop, bad demon.”

It wasn’t difficult to find the homeless man’s camp behind the dumpsters in the ally where Alcander and Teajay had found the strange, ancient dagger. It smelled vile—little more than a pile of discarded clothes and an overturned shopping cart. It was abandoned for the moment, but had obviously been recently inhabited.

She turned away, heading in the opposite direction of North Wells Street towards the near-empty parking lot shared by the pharmacy and a few other small businesses. The far side opened into yet another alley, this one behind an Olive Garden, and was home to two particularly ripe dumpsters. The homeless man hadn’t yet made a new camp there, but there was someone leaning at the far end of the alley, holding a cardboard sign and smiling awkwardly at people walking past on the sidewalk.

Blythe had a feeling that this might just be who they were looking for. She reached into her purse and palmed a couple tens as they approached. The man turned—she hadn’t been trying to be quiet and the click of her heels rang loud against the brick walls ringing the alley—and smiled uncertainly. He had all his teeth, though they were crooked, and his skin was an uncomfortable pink beneath a crop of unkempt red hair receding from his forehead—more likely from malnutrition than age. She put him somewhere between 19 and 22. He was skinny and nervous, and Blythe had the sinking feeling that he would tell them whatever he thought was most likely to make them happy.

She dropped the first ten in his hands. “Something weird happened by the auction house last night. Wanna tell us about it for the paper?”

@Atalanta@nightmare medx

The nervous man's eyes flew wide at the mention of the auction house. A tick crawled across his face slow at first and speeding up as it passed his eyes. The smell of him was rank, long neglect overlain with the more recent stink of fear both glandular and urinary. Scared as he was, the ingrained reflexes of poverty made him reach for the second twenty, his hand freezing on the way towards it in an agony of indecision. His lip trembled violently and he seemed to strain to speak, the prominent Adam's apple working as though trying to swallow something unpleasant.

A flutter of feathers sounded from above and a large sleek crow swooped down and landed on the vagrants shoulder in a parody of a pirate with a parrot. It looked its beady black eyes with Blythe, then turned its eyes to Ardi in an appraising glance.

"Caaaawp," the crow cawed, struggling mightily to create the P at the end of the word.

"Cawwwp, Cawwwp." Cop. Cop The vagrant's lips moved in the shape of the crows cries, though no sound actually issued from his throat. The crow hopped down the vagrant's arm and clambered out onto his outstretched fingers. The homeless man moved not a muscle as the crow climbed over him, though his eyes were wide and terrified. The bird leaned out and pecked experimentally at the second ten dollar bill. It stamped a clawed foot and then looked up at the two women.

"Blaaaad," it cawed, "blaaad, blaaad." Blood. Blood, blood.

"Caaaaaap blaaaaad."

Adri handed Al his camera back, figuring he was more likely to need it, before turning to follow Blythe, walking quietly by her. She was concerned, sure, about her and Teajay, but there would be time to dwell on everything later once they had finished their work. Besides, if there was one thing she had learned it was that filling the silence was sometimes the least helpful thing you could do for someone.

It was habit to assess and analyze, and it was no different with their witness: she noted the spider veins faintly spreading across his cheeks, which, combined with the distinct sickly scent underneath his general malodour, told her that he probably had an alcohol problem. His jacket was too big and unlikely to be warm enough for the weather, but at least it looked like he had layers. That was probably a steel bar tucked in an inner pocket, but he was unlikely to be able to move fast enough for it to be a problem.

He also, apparently, had a pet crow. A pet crow that was talking directly to her.

Well, if any animal was going to correctly identify a police officer without a uniform, it was going to be a crow. Adri looked around, on the off chance a patrol unit had magically appeared, but no, the crow was talking to her. Once upon a time she might have asked herself if she was losing it- way back before she became a cop, maybe.

“I am indeed a cop. Or I was one, I guess. Either way, you’re not in trouble, we just need some help.”

She put one hand on her knees, stooping just low enough to be around eye level with the crow, resting her clipboard flat against her thighs. She could see the man’s mouth moving in her peripheral vision, but she did not directly focus on him. No, she was having a conversation with a crow like she did this on the regular.

It took a moment for her brain to parse what the crow was saying. “You want… blood. My blood?”

“Cawwwp blaaaaad,” it repeated, seemingly happy that its words had been understood. It trotted back up the man’s arm, claws digging into the jacket for purchase, digging its beak into the pocket on the front of the beige jacket several sizes too big for its wearer. The crow emerged with a cooker, stained from far too many uses, flapping its wings to land gracefully at Adri’s feet. It set the metal down on the ground and stared up at her, its head cocked to the side.

The crow seemed to be the one in charge, she decided.

“I get it, you want blood. I- motherfffff-!” She bit down sharply on her lower lip as pain briefly seared through the back of her hand.

In a flash of feathers, the crow had swiped a claw across the back of her hand before retreating to its perch on their witness’ shoulder. She shot it a glare; it merely stared back with its beady eyes, looking from her to the container it had set out on the ground.

“What do you want cop blood for, anyways?” she asked, idly making conversation as the metal cup quickly filled up. The crow was nosing around the man’s jacket again and ignored her, not that she was really looking for an answer. The man’s mouth was moving still; she could hear a faint shhh, a fff, but she wasn’t entirely sure the man even had the capacity to speak.

Once that was done, she pulled her injured hand inside her sleeve and pressed the fabric down to stem the remaining blood flow. “Okay, so, about the auction house-“

The crow resurfaced with a bottle cap this time, dropping it right next to the filled receptacle. She took one look at it and shook her head. “No. That’s not how this is going to work. You got what you wanted, now-“

“CAWWWP BLAAAD!”

This time, at least, she was expecting it to come at her, and all it managed to do was scratch at her clipboard. She sighed, turning her head to look at Blythe as the bird took to the air and swooped down at them. “As entertaining as it would be to arrest a bird, I think it’s your turn.”

Blythe’s hand closed around Adri’s wrist, her eyes on the little cup beneath it. “You have no idea what that could do with your blood! It could mean your life! Maybe all our lives, if it can possess you. This is why we need a more thorough training course for the goddess-damned Sunday Group! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

The crow cawed from above them, it's claws tearing out a few hairs as it swooped past and readied itself to dive again. Blythe’s pulse throbbed in her ears, Kolratheth waking back up in her chest as a response to her fear and anger. Heat and pain flooded her eyes, her gums, her fingertips. Black spooled across her eyes and her teeth elongated. Her nails grew into claws. She had to let go of Adri to keep from hurting her.

“No, hurt her. Claw them all!”

Adri just didn’t get it. The least horrible thing the pair was likely intending was to ward their nest against police. They could be planning that blood for rituals, for possession, for curse—

Blythe growled. Of fucking course. The cop was curseproof. No wonder she wasn’t worried.

In a movement more born out of spite than need, Blythe reached up and snatched the idiot creature out of the air as it dove at Adri’s head. It battered her with its wings, screaming and desperate until she managed to pin it in place beneath black tipped fingers. The homeless man whimpered, falling back against the wall, unable to move his eyes from his bird.

Blythe sighed. Now she just felt like a brute. What is this thing?

“A parasite,” Kolratheth sighed. “To lowly a thing to be considered a demon. It feeds off its host slowly in exchange for a little safety, and then hybernates for a time before taking a new shape and finding a new human host. Eat it. It would sustain me for days.”

What would happen to the host?

“He would go mad, most likely. What does it matter? He is of no use to your species. And the parasite will consume all the parts that make him human eventually.”

Can you make it give back whatever it’s taken from him?

“No. It hasn’t taken much. Only memory. The human might even be able to relearn how to use his voice, if he isn’t too far gone. It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone manage it."

Blythe ran her tongue over her teeth, and finding them only slightly pointed, grinned. There was no point in trying to play with any emotions now. The homeless man was already frightened enough. “Adri, if you would be so good as to let me borrow your clipboard….”

The homeless man—homeless boy, really— took it when Blythe thrust the clipboard at him, though he nearly dropped it. He couldn’t seem to remember what to do with his hands, so Blythe amended her earlier assessment and turned down the fear pinging through his head. Just a touch. She was calming down too, the black fading from her fingers though the ache lingered in the space behind her eyes. They were usually the last to turn.

The bird squirmed in her grip, but stilled when she tightened her fist around it. “Draw everything you saw last night. Include details like sizes and times and sounds.”

When he gave it back, Blythe only got a vague impression of scratchy figures with wide, blank eyes before she thrust the clipboard back at Adri and got an elbow up to block the homeless boy’s grab for the crow. He fell back against the wall immediately.

“Uh uh. This thing is incredibly bad for you. Here—“ she fished out a couple more bills and shoved them at him. “Catch a taxi. There’s a shelter on 5th and Cesar Chavez with a half-decent therapist. Let her help you get yourself back and don’t go accepting deals from strange creatures any more.”

“You’re one to talk.”

Yeah, well. She turned on her heel and purposely kicked over the little cup of Adri’s blood. “Come on. Let’s get back to the others.”

"Stay here," Alcander told Teajay and Eleanor, gently lowering himself into the storage room. The three of them weren't super close, but he felt they knew well enough he was not trying to coddle or patronize them. He wanted to see the crime scene first, as he had the most extensive background in investigations. Unfortunately, as he lowered himself, he realized the water damage had done more to ruin the crime scene than a bull could have. His boots touched the wooden floor with a wet smack. Under him was a soaked copy of a once-beautiful limited edition copy of Crime and Punishment.

They did not remove the roof when it was pouring, he surmised. Otherwise they would have risked destroying whatever they wanted to find. Magic could have come into play, but the more mundane answer was likely the most probable, even considering the 'orgy of evidence' they had found on various arcane practices. The beams of light from above cut a swathe through the piles of mostly useless books and memorabilia, catching the waves of dust freely floating in the air.

Logic dictates that they were attempting to acquire a book, unless some small nick-knack looking object was their primary target. Unfortunately he could not even begin to wade through the majority of these books, even if they were not weather-beaten. He stepped idly through the mounds of wet paper and leather, making his way to the door that led further into the building. He checked to make sure it was still locked, using a cloth to mask his fingerprints, before a dias caught his eyes.

Alcander approached, surprised to find the auction ledger already opened. He glanced up, as if he did not already know the hole in the roof was not present above him. It was opened on page 34, with a list of dates, items, and relative locations. He looked for creases on the paper, something a man in a hurry might leave. Alcander's observant eye caught a crease and a peculiar name, simultaneously.

"Van de Oneindige Mogelijkheden Van Inkt," He murmured, running a finger over the name. It was one of the few volumes not titled in english. His mind reached back into his years in academia, trying to decipher the words. He was no linguist, but he liked to think he had a better grasp on langauage than most people. If his hunch was right, it roughly translated to: "From...the... infinite...." He couldn't decipher the rest, and he ran a hand through his hair. They could check the translation later. Instead he checked the log, eyes scanning the location it was supposed to be stashed in. The detective turned and rummaged through the book pile that had mercifully been spared from the weather, only to realize after a minute that the search was futile.

The Grimoire was missing.

He strode back under the light, gazing up at the two women who still peered down. Alcander shielded his eyes from the dull light. "I think I know what they were looking for..."