i'll learn to beg

What the fuck is that?

She'd never seen a beast with a damn fish tail like that. But before she could get a proper grip, Althea grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back toward shore. "Fu— Hey! What the fuck?" Anika pushed back, "I need to see what that fucking thing was—" Althea's boot came down so fucking hard it almost crushed the damn thing's skull. It was too damn late now, she thought, as she watched it plummet into the watery graveyard below, its body sinking farther and farther into the black depths until it disappeared completely.

"I'm fucking fine. What the fuck was that, Althea?"

Her words came out harsher than she'd intended, but rage was already storming through her veins. The fucker could've killed her right there if Anika hadn't acted on impulse. If she hadn't come back to that fucking shithole. Althea just stood there, unmoving and stiff. Anika had never fucking seen the other so fucking frozen. Her anger faltered as frantic green eyes swept over the other woman.

There's no anger in her tone, and she looks down to the water lapping at her body and starts to trudge out of it, her entire body shivering as the exposed parts of her clothes start to freeze over in the wind. When she's back to shore, she holds her head in her hands to try and stave off the headache. "I wasn't - it started to - there was music or some shit, or singing. And I reached for my gun, and then next thing I know, you're here."

It brought a bitter taste to her mouth, one that she could make a face about and spit out, and she wasn't sure which one of the two she resented more for it. It was easier to blame Anika because she had already lost so much time with her brother. She didn't want to lose any more.

There's been a few times where she'd had to sit with and confront her own feelings about Murph, about Anika, about Heron-- none of it ever got easier, for entirely different reasons.

Someone had to have done it, passed on the moon gift to the next. She makes him think that maybe she's always been a moonshifter, or a late bloomer, or something? Tomás wishes he saw the body too (respectfully), to wonder if he'd see something they didn't. Like what, he doesn't know. But something. Because now they're digging a fresh hole, and the soil they're throwing could land anywhere. Where do they look now?

"We'll find out." He won't say he doesn't know. But it's obvious he's grasping at straws. He's determined to solve the mystery, now that he knows there's something far more to the story. "They heal with like moon juju? You sure it didn't uh, heal?" Just to be sure. Not to say he doesn't believe the revelation. "We gotta solve it. This is important. When you saw her... um, sleeping, was it just how she died that well... no other marks?"

He's trying to be polite, and honourable about her autopsy. But he hadn't been there.

Nightchildren. Artists, and the family of such. Tomás doesn't see the conection. Even in all the collections of documents, first accounts, pages ripped out of books he probably shouldn't have been allowed near, printings and sketches with maps and locations. Endless lists, and photographs, blurred or otherwise. They're missing something, but he's not sure what it is.

He feels less stupid knowing she doesn't think it makes sense either.

"Well, you think we should talk to them, then? Maybe they know things we don't." He thinks the artist liked him, maybe. He doesn't like recalling what he remembers of that night, really. But this is bigger than him. "If that'd been her um, job, then that's gotta have something to do with it, right? ... I got a lot of accounts where they talk about different times of moon changes, for the... first time, yeah? Maybe something happened with those people, or the job, something new." Had to be. He doesn't know why Althea doesn't want to try talking to the packs — but he's mostly denying admitting he does know, but doesn't like to think he's got any part in hurting anybody. "I think we should start with the family you said about, the ones Ms. Yearwood knew, and the nightchildren that you know about. That makes most sense, doesn't it?" He looks down at the self-made markings of the moonshifters he thinks he's spotted in town, and wonders if there's correlation to nightchildren in the same spots. 'Cause maybe they're friends or something, and they have information that'd help.

Tomas seems nice enough, and she hesitates to say anything too inflammatory to break his fragile little heart. Seems like he wants to believe the best in people - even her. That sucks for both of them, she thinks.

"Yeah." She chews on her lip. She does know the last remaining member of that family, and unfortunately there's no talking to her right now. "I can't get in touch with Anika right now. But as soon as I can, I will." If she'll even want to answer questions about that night - she highly doubts it. She's about to take her stuff, and call it good, when he starts rummaging again.

"Wow, I recognize some of these names," she says as she cards through. A few memorable cases from her first year working as a medical examiner in town involved a few of these people, either directly or indirectly - she snorts, because it only fortifies the notion that she was only ever a step away from connecting the dots - something that frustrates her for prideful reasons.

The little grunge girl's wandered off though, and she looks in the direction of the universal eureka that is Bingo. She sets the notes down and closes the gap between them, arching over Althea's shoulder. "Nice."

She lets Althea pull the cart of tapes out. "Okay. So this is gonna take a lot of time to go through. I say we split the load."

What she actually prefers is for this girl to butt out and leave it to her, but she has a deep inkling that won't happen... and then she sees something behind Althea, at the bottom of the now mostly empty door.

It's a single glossy photo - two women, one taking the photo, and the other an older woman, smiling and shying away from the camera. Atop it rests a neckles, the pendant of which bears a singular red jewel. Tressa reaches for it, picking it up in her gloved hand and eying it before she scoops the picture up too - the woman's in the same necklace, absent the big, fat red jewel present in the one in her hand. "Was homegirl a fang banger?" There's an almost callous laugh there as her composure breaks, reflexive and full of uncontrolled contempt.

She doesn't get far in trying to go through the organization that Heron laid out - nor figuring out the names, dates, and numbers that are scrawled on the label - because Tressa picks up a necklace and a photo. Frowning, she turns her head from where she's still crouched on her knees.

"What?"

Fang-bang..? Her nose wrinkles as she realizes what Tressa means, "Fuck no. She hated all of you guys." But Tressa laughs, and that makes Althea get up to see the photo in question and her cheeks color red - not in embarrassment, but shame and anger. How long..? What is a means to an end or..?

"Her boyfriend is my brother. I met her when she first came to Port Leiry. She seemed cool enough, but we were each going through our own shit. Didn't really get the chance to bond with her or anything." Lis shrugged, looking over at Althea to see what the reaction might be.

But she swallows down a swig of her drink to stop herself from talking too much.

Something awful happened to her, and it probably wasn't her fault if her brain was juju mush for a little while.

"I'm sorry." Priestley says, solemn and honest. He takes pause in the quiet, where some barebones respect beats the excitement for what knowledge they could share with each other. The silence is three seconds long. Althea's got tears at the ducts and it make Tomás think about loss, and his sister. He's a coward about going back, and he knows it. He doesn't know what he'd say if he sat at her bedside whilst she slept as his parents bickered about work like nothing was wrong. He dreads the day they think enough time's passed, that there's no longer a bed for her. There's going to be a way that's gonna bring her back, juju can best sleep; he had a boyfriend — ex, now with juju powers to go into minds. There's going to be a way.

Just as there will be a way for Heron's memory to be respected. "Juju fog. Yeah." Something else to research more.

And then Althea presents him with an equation he's never once considered.

"No bite?" Tomás eyes bore into hers, expectant for more than that. "Whadd'ya mean there's no sign of a bite?" Did it heal? No scar? Did she hide it all this time, she's one of the moonshifters born that way? "There's gotta be a bite. That's how it works—"

This changes it all. Pity, and loss goes out the window because there's a puzzle now.

Now there's a new name? He thinks he knows that one. Waits. Eyes dart to the pages to think back to his own foggy, messed-up memory. "Like Anika Booker, the artist?" Nouveau. He remembers, in pieces. The way it ended, not so much. "Where's she come from? She's not a moonshifter." He knows that because he's talked to her, he thinks he recalls that conversation about animals, too.

And nightchildren? If Althea didn't just widen her heart about Heron, Tomás might have thought she was screwing with him, and taking him for a ride.

But now it's just got messier. "Okay." he begins again, deep breath and fingers strecth out on the documents between them; backtrack to the first lead. "You know the packs? That's awesome. Wow. Neat." Holy fuckballs. "You talk to them?" Maybe they'd have said something about Heron being around, if that's a new thing?

A new spell from juju, a curse? A gift, maybe, to them. "Where's the last you had contact with her before uh, y'know..."

Murdering her, I guess.

Heron had wolf venom, but she was careful, and she would have taken herself out if she'd accidentally infected herself. Or told Althea before it was even a problem. So the conclusion is that she had no idea she'd been infected either.

YEARWOOD INVESTIGATIONS, the door announces quietly as the Hunter keys them in. The air's stale, and the space is cold as it is dark. Orderly, too - pictures of various adventures line the walls.

"Uh, look for logs, or you know. Records. Tapes, videos, journals, whatever she might have talked about stuff in."

She peers through the dark, unaffected by the dour, dim place. There's a locker at one end of a small nook that connects to the office. She tugs on the door; locked. "Heads up, loud noise."

Inside, she stares at what's left of the office. She'd not cleaned it up. It's the first time she'd been in here since she died - and it's only Tressa's voice that kicks her into action from her frozen state. There's a lot of stuff to dig through, but Althea knew where Heron kept her information - she'd gotten her whole note taking system from her.

She finds the folders and notebooks full of case notes to dig through, and winces at the screeching noise of Tressa ruining the safe. Pausing, she looks over and laughs. "Yeah. Well-stocked." Case notes in hand, she wanders over and plucks a bolt off of the wall, touching the tip with her hand. "Careful touching the sharps and looking in vials and shit - she liked to keep souvenirs. Venom, teeth, you know. But I found these." She holds the notes out for Tressa. "I've gotta find her recordings, but these are both regular human shit and hunt shit, we'll have to sort."

There was a grave at the beach in Port Leiry she hadn't brought flowers to in months. The small stones forming a circle laid under a thick layer of snow, uneven heads poking through the white blanket as if dreaming beneath the frost. No name marked the grave, but it still rested quietly on her lips as Anika knelt and pulled off her gloves to touch the frozen ground.

The peace of the moment shattered with a scream somewhere in the distance. Her head snapped toward the sound, green eyes catching on a thin figure standing waist-deep into the cold ocean. Who the fuck was taking a dip in weather like this? Waves crashed against her boots, as Anika stepped close enough to notice this was no human. Scales covered it's neck and ribs. Long hair stuck to pale shoulders. What the fuck—

Blinking again, she realizes the scaled, icy creature lay dead underneath a familiar body. Taking in a shaky breath, she runs the rest of the way towards the two of them, and she wrenches Anika away from the dead thing - pure instinct to make sure she isn't hurt. The thing doesn't move.

She stomps its head in just to make sure.

Tressa leans back, knuckle to her lip as she ponders, and her eyes land on the shrouded corpse. She moves over, lifting the sheet up again, eying the rigors of decay.

"What is your secret," she asks out loud.

Althea's answers linger, and Tressa scoffs. "You know, maybe if you all stopped trying to kill us out of hand you wouldn't have to scrounge for magic. You guys are like... the PETA of the monster world, it's insane. Like, yeah, animal cruelty's bad but so is running a kill-shelter for abandoned pets, it's like you make your own p..."

She doesn't interrupt, doing her own thinking. There might be something in the office. Althea'd just been too overtaken with fucking grief, of all things, to even try and go there.

Ms. Yearwood? Eyes drop down to the bracelet tightly wrapped around his wrist. She'd given it to him, once. Protection. Something. His mind's all messy, now. Because she's dead, and he's looking at her murderer. There's a murderer in his apartment. But that's suddenly so unimportant, he's almost laughing (and then crying). Heron's gone? Instead, he just feels hurt. Aching. A hand pulling at the bracelet on his wrist, and the memory it held. He's quieter, "You were Ms. Yearwood's friend?"

He didn't know her much, but he'd call her a friend. Kindness didn't cost anything.

When she catches his eyes again, she probably sees that Tom's are uneasy. Trying to compose himself, he sucks in a breath. She has a point, there had to be reason? Heron must have known them, maybe there's more to the story that they've yet to chalk up. He'd like to know, too. "We can find that out." He's confident in it, and he looks to all the clippings, and notes he's drawn on various documents.

If she can tell him who she might've ruled out, or what areas. Maybe some of the places Heron went, they could start talking to some people. "She wouldn't have meant to attack you. Not her." That's something he's certain of. "Probably confused, lots of reports say that it's a big shift through the juju brain, yeah?" Takes a second to adjust. It's on a first account he found posted online, on a forum.

He doesn't like that she did something so bad as to kill... but she's not the first of the type he's met, either. It sounded like a mistake, and he's not going to get bogged down by that. If he does, he'll have to get heavy with his thoughts and he can't do that right now. "I wanna help. I can. Look, I got stuff on a bunch of folk, and there's moonshifter packs, you know what she might've been looking for? Or maybe we uh, hold on," He sifts through more papers, "She go anywhere, I made a map, see, every moonshifter I bumped into, and where?" Albeit, he leaves off that a bunch of the dots on his crassly sketched out map, were him making assessments of the situation. Some he talked to, others he just passed. "I got one for every month I've been here. Look."

But he thinks he's pretty good at figuring it out; it's all in the fingernails.

"No, I don't think she wanted to attack me - not if she were.. aware." Clearing her throat, she wipes at her face, trying to ignore that sinking feeling in her gut that's reappeared for the first time since it happened. "So far I've ruled out any sort of bite, which is unusual as fuck. But I have no idea how else that would even happen."

She's lost.

"Last I heard it was something about Booker. But I don't even know if that was related - because that was all bloodsuckers." She looks down at the map though and sucks in a breath through her teeth. "You're close, man." She points down to a few areas - "The packs, I know 'em - that there's one territory, and over here by the docks is that Warwick shit. But she wandered."

"So I've heard," she chirps as she leans in, still convinced she'll find a bite mark somewhere.

At first Althea's musing is background noise, but then the hunter, she hisses in her head at the thought, asks a pertinent question. Tressa stands, leaning back and folding her arms. "Only that 'witch shit' and 'magic' make things frustratingly broad."

Her brow peaks. "I have somebody I could get ahold of, but she's not always reachable, so I don't know how long that would take." She looks at Althea then. "Those tattoos are magic aren't they? Don't you guys have witches we could pull on?"

Her hands clasp at her elbows, holding her arms tighter to her chest as she waits for Tressa to do her examination here, more fully. "Our tats are magic, yeah, but I'm not B-hood." Does she know what that means? "I'm a fellow, which means we ain't that organized 'n shit. I get my magic where I can take it, sometimes that means cutting deals or forcing it. Haven't had a re-up since that fucking conclave. Deal I was making fell through, witch skipped town."

She'd also been way too fucking busy to think about anything other than making sure the reason's Heron's on her table and not fighting this freak-ass snowstorm gets their comeuppance.

"Uh. Yeah, I inherited her office." She hasn't touched it, either.

"Sorry about your mentor." Annalise offered, glancing over the other again. No, she definitely didn't recognise Althea, but that was no longer a bad thing. She found herself longing to be around people who didn't know who she was or what she may or may not have done. The comment about the friend leaving had her brow furrowing, tilting her head in thought. Lis was sure people came and went from Port Leiry all the time, but a woman who hadn't been in town her entire life just upping and leaving with her boyfriend was certainly familiar. "Are you talking about Anika?"

Would Murph still be someone she grieved and feared in equal measure, or simply just missed like she does with Heron?

"Just you, so far. Don't know if you've heard, but fellows don't have a fuck ton of resources or contacts here. It's just been me." And she doesn't think Anika is coming back. "And getting word out with this crazy fuckin' storm has been more than a hassle. Even my CB in my camper don't work no more." She'd kicked it enough times to try, too. "We could head out, do some recon together, though. Been stuck in the shit so long on my own, I forgot what having someone with me is like."

Leaning back in her chair and tipping it back on two legs, she hums. "We got silver, and we got wood. Can try either of those before we have to outsource, yeah?"

Not even ten minutes later, she was approached, jaw clenched as she prepared for the worst, but it hadn't come yet. The other was familiar, but a name couldn't be put to the face.

Some story about.. family, or something? She doesn't wanna call attention to it or make her feel like shit about something that probably is just a whole bunch of horseshit, so she just nurses her drink for a few more sips.

"Not that I'm doing much talking, sorry." She offers a crooked little smile, "Port Leiry's been doing my fucking head in, making me feel crazy, like I forget how to talk to people 'n shit." Her accent hasn't loosened up since she's been here, though. "Came around here to meet up with my mentor, she fuckin' died. Met an old buddy I knew back in Boston, and she just up and left with her dude man.. boyfriend, thing. Never met him, though. So now I'm, like, figuring shit out."

She could try just yoinking her out, she supposes - ungraceful but doable, given the latent strength vampirism's left her with, but that risks making one problem into two, as well as obfuscating anything they might glean from the corpse.

Tressa's lips flutter in resignation - they aren't going to get a digger out here if they want this off the books, and so shovels it is.

—

It is an endeavor, and Tress makes deft steps to avoid the spikes, though they're so loam-rotted by now that their soft, spongey tips are more warning than threat, and by the end of two hours' time Tressa's hauling the fragile, leathery thing up and onto the ground, falling back on her hands and kicking mud off her boots.

The exam is hasty, and tempered by the fact they're out in the open. She instructs the hunter to meet her at her funeral home, where this can be more private and encompassing, and where disposing of evidence will be simpler.

—

Tressa opens the door to Embrace to let Althea in next, eying her briefly. The time she's been allowed has hopefully let her steel herself for this next part, and it's with little pomp and circumstance that tressa leads her into the suite below the house's ground floor, where what's left of the hunter lays out on a prep table.

Back at the table, she crosses her arms over her chest and looks down at her former mentor. It's fuckin' weird, seeing her like this. "Nah, we've hunted together on full moons. Far as I know, there's no way around that."