DEATHWISH

Nolan -- or the person who appeared to be Nolan -- stood at the back of his business, eyeing those that he'd hired to ensure the place was ready for the event. New sand was being brought in, glasses being cleaned, alcohol being stocked, and every ounce of blood in the residents of the downstairs were being drained.

"Callum." Nolan's voice reached across the room towards the friend. Friends. "What's the drug supply like?" As far as they knew, this witch helped around there. "We need to ensure that we have everything before people arrive. I'm not going to open up the doors if we're just going to run out of shit."

No. This needed to go smoothly. They'd not have it otherwise.

Nolan clenched his jaw as he heard the door to SR open and when he turned, he recognized the human immediately. "Annalise, what brings you here?" He asked, not taking a step towards her. "Callum and I are a bit busy." He paused. "Unless you're here to help?" A wide smile appeared on his lips, sharpened fangs flashing at her.

Lis dressed herself up, getting ready to spectate, but also to try and get a little of Nolan before he opened the doors, if she could. To her dismay, he was already engaged in conversation when she walked through the doors; nothing she couldn't deal with, though.

"Why else would I be here so early?" She grinned, walking straight over to Nolan, ignoring Callum and draping herself over him. "I know what you get like, all jittery and full of energy, can't sit still. Figured I could help by helping you burn some of that off. Get you that laser focus back."

Her gaze dipped, eventually meeting Callum's, "You wanna watch or something, honey?" @ofdeathwiishes

Callum is leaned against the wall near the back of the Ring, arms loosely crossed, the bruises across his knuckles gone yellow at the edges beneath fresh gauze. There is sand coming in by the bag, glasses being polished, bottles lined up by kind and proof, all of it moving around him with that particular pre-event panic. 

He hears Nolan say his name and the Sight flickers. Like bad static at the edge of his skull, like a moth battering itself against a lamp. This is Nolan. This is not Nolan. Something stains the corner of Callum eye, dark and smeared, and it refuses to settle into sense. For one brief, stupid second Cal considers pushing into the Sight and just suffering the cost - migraine or exhaustion or a twelve-hour blackout or whatever the going rate is for knowing too much too quickly.

But he does not. Instead, the list comes easily. Child’s play. Callum once reconstructed a library from sense memory and magic; he can remember inventory.

“All of it's there and the Pixie’s all accounted for.” His gaze moves briefly over Nolan’s face. “Which does bring me to my follow-up question: are you sampling the merchandise, or is this just the face we’re doing tonight?”

It is casual enough. A stone skipped across water instead of thrown through a window just as Lis rounds the corner and sidles up to their little band of three musketeers (which is generous, considering Callum doesn’t remember enlisting and the musketeers had better interpersonal skills.) Anyway, Lis is doing that thing where she throws herself at Nolan and Nolan is doing that thing where he pretends to give her the time of day and Cal is doing that thing where he knows they’ve been fucking for forever, even without the clairvoyance.

But something Lis says catches. Jittery. All jittery and full of energy. Callum looks back to Nolan - Nolan can be many things. Volatile. Obnoxious. Sentimental in ways he would deny under oath. But there is a texture to him Callum knows, a familiar pressure. Jittery is not one of them.

You wanna watch or something, honey?

Callum’s eyebrows lift a little at the jab. Not much. Enough to count as generous.

“Watch? Nah. Call me when you want me to join.” He pushes himself off the wall, slow and loose, and rolls his shoulder. What's he even doing here? He's supposed to be cleaning up his image, he's the Speaker now. But Nolan is wrong around the edges, and Callum does not have enough proof yet, and there are only so many ways he can stall before he’s handed something more substantial. “Are you fighting tonight?” he asks Lis.

The heavy clank of a rusty prison lock rang sharply against the basement walls. It was the pin in the coffin of the trembling, petrified human girl he had just acquired. As per the client's request: blonde, busty, and born with three thumbs. Not Olin's cup of tea, but a job was a job, a fetish was a fetish, and admittingly, her face made up for the peculiar mutation. He tapped his hand against the cell bars as a farewell gesture, flashing the girl a wolfish grin.

"Sleep tight, sweetheart."

And with that, he ascended the stairs back to the Slaughter Ring’s main floor, the sounds of her pleas along with the other slaves’ exhausted, broken cries fading behind him. They swayed him none. Appealed to a conscience that simply didn’t exist. All it did was remind him how hungry he was. Not for blood—his health was in good standing—but for chaos. Capturing these slaves scratched the itch only in passing. The real thrill came from the kill. And the torture before the kill. And the hunt before the torture.

The girl screamed for mercy as the door behind him slammed shut. Fuck. He really needed to kill something.

Fully intending to satisfy that need, Olin moved toward the exit before the shadow of a man caught in his periphery. On a normal night, he'd greet Callum with cordial and brotherly ease, but considering the way they last left off, that approach didn't come so naturally. A pause. A beat passes. Then four more. Just enough for the sorcerer to know what's coming next before it happens.

A strong hand cups the curve of Callum's shoulder from behind, fully intending to startle him, clairvoyance be damned. Olin’s grin followed, wide and toothy, ill-fitting for the tension between them and transparently condescending.

Olin is not yet touching him, but near. Five seconds near. A shadow slipping through the water of the air. Callum exhales through his nose. There is an arm coming for his shoulder, and before Olin’s hand can settle with all that affected brotherly ease, Callum kicks his elbow back. Not hard enough to break anything. Just hard enough to catch him neatly in the gut as the arm swings around him. 

(Callum’s life has become this: a series of tiny rebellious acts performed with surgical timing until the world grudgingly reshapes itself around him.)

“Daddy?” Callum says. “Hey man, you and Nolan can keep your roleplay to yourselves. I don’t need to feel included here.” 

Because Callum is nothing if not a straight shooter. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the shot tends to land. His gaze drops to the ticket in Olin’s hand. Blonde. Busty. Three thumbs. Alive and in one piece. Okay well, they’ll see about that last part. 

He looks back up in time to catch the way Olin’s vintage fangs hook the basement light. Olin’s centuries sit under the his skin like wine gone dark in the bottle. The vampire's all hedonistic and sour in the worst possible way. Callum watches the smile change shades until what remains is not a smile at all. “Now what’s that for?” He reaches out to tap the sneer, personal boundaries be damned. “There’s no need for that. We can play nice.” Callum pulls the slip of paper from Olin hands. With begrudging understanding Callum knows that if he does not file it, it will get crushed underfoot, and if it gets crushed underfoot, then the books are fucked, and if the books are fucked, then what are they even doing here because well, if no one tracks the paperwork, society collapses. “You’re not giving me a reason not to play nice, right?” 

The veneer of politeness is sickening. In fact, it's downright bullshit. So maybe Callum isn’t as straight a shooter as he says he is. But to his credit, his last encounter with Olin had spun out sideways and ugly, leaving them both with one eye over their shoulder so neither had to turn a full back. Callum has not proved it yet, but he is fairly sure Olin has been skimming from the top of whatever deal he has going on with Nolan. And Callum knows men like Olin - people who steal first and ask questions never. 

He has to put a pause on his interrogation. The girl is clawing at the bars hard enough to split nails. Blonde, terrified, breath coming in shallow animal bursts. Her fear is so loud it almost has a pulse. Callum tucks the slip of paper away and turns to her, reaches through the bars with his freshly wrapped hands. He catches the sides of her head before she can flinch away from him. His thumbs close over her eyes.

Sleep magic is not his specialty, not truly. But dreams live adjacent to divination. So does the dark behind the eyelid. So do all the little doors the mind opens when it cannot bear the room it is in. Callum finds that threshold with the same brutal precision he uses for everything else. He draws the spell up from the ache in his hands, from the ruined sleep banked behind his own eyes, from the old Calder habit of turning a body into a ward when no proper tools are near.

The magic comes thin and silver-blue, threading over his fingers like moonlight caught in wire. A hush folds itself over the girl’s panic and he puts a veil of sleep between her and the rest of the room. 

Her body surrenders all at once. The fight goes out of her limbs. She slumps against the bars, boneless with sleep, and Callum catches her before her head can crack against iron. There. Maybe a little peace. He stays crouched there beside her.

From his coat, Callum draws a narrow stick of chalk and marks three small lines on the concrete. Then he presses two fingers to the center mark, and the spell opens beneath him. Speaking to time is a little like speaking to the dead. Time, when coaxed properly, remembers everything and resents being asked. Callum lets the Sight widen by fractions. Not forward, this time, backward. He feels for the impression of the girl’s passage through the evening - where terror first hooks into her, where her path skips. 

“Where did you find her?” he asks Olin. Underneath his fingers, the chalk gives the faintest of moonlight flickers. “Was she alone?”

When he says these things, what he means is: 'careful.' What he means is: 'hey how about you tell me the truth, tiger? Cause I think you’re a fucking liar.' Callum does not trust Olin. Callum does not even enjoy pretending to trust him. He is looking, with mounting patience, for an excuse to push Olin out of a tower. In fact, he would have thrown the punch a long time ago. The trouble is, he is almost certain Olin would enjoy that too much.

It takes a second of her breathing, and she's also confused by how his gentle tone is helping her, despite her best efforts to try to not become weighed down by the idea that if she wins this, she's facing werewolves, demon, merfolk. The green doesn't come, but the nausea of anxiety doesn't fade either. The crowd has started to jeer, and if one of them doesn't act soon - they're both probably dead.

She glances to the knife. She stands up straight. She circles him, and moves closer to the post to grab her knife. It's a little thing, but a thing that she cherishes - it's helped her get through tough times out in the wastes and the fields. It'll help her get through this.

Her hand wraps around the handle and it takes her two tries to yank it out of the post, and she nods at him. "I'll.. I'll try again." It almost feels like they're starting the fight over, and this time she doesn't throw it or charge at him. "Thanks." She murmurs, and truly means it. Maybe, after this, she'll have to find him and actually have a conversation.

He's not taking the knife, so he takes the swipe of the punch with the off hand. That is the deal he makes with himself in the half-second before she comes at him. He can see the shape of what she is building: the knife in one hand, the punch in the other - and the Sight lays the two possible sequences out in front of him like sheet music: deflect the blade, eat the punch / catch the punch, take the blade in the ribs. One of those is a very short conversation with an emergency healer. The other is a bruise. Cal picks the bruise.

He shifts his weight, angles his forearm, and catches the knife against the length of his sleeve. It's clean, it's tidy. He doesn't do pats on the back but he should get one for form. Cal is very pleased with himself for exactly the length of time it takes Aspen's off-hand to come up under his jaw.

She has, Cal notes with something like professional respect, been holding back for the entire fight. She is not holding back now. The punch lands in the exact place a punch is supposed to land and Callum's head snaps sideways in this sort of neat, involuntary way.

The Sight flickers open a future in which he stays on his feet. Callum (with something like affection, with something like relief) folds it into the smallest square his fingers have ever made and lets it fall. He goes down, keeps his elbows tucked, makes sure his head is kept up off the boards.

She honestly couldn't remember the last time she had spoken to her brother. Things were difficult with Ward; it was hard to know when he was her brother, and when he was The Second, and knowing when to differentiate between the two was even harder.

Still, she could imagine that he had been through it recently. She knew that he had been away, but she didn't know the details. She knew Ophelia was back, and though again, she didn't know the details, something wasn't right. She was kept away, like a secret locked in a cage. Secrets could destroy this place more easily than any supernatural hunting them, and with the lack of offensive measures recently, Lis was beginning to feel like they were making themselves sitting ducks.

Annalise found him, finally, managed to get him to stay with her for more than a minute to talk - a rarity.

"I know we don't talk much, I don't know what's going on with you, Ward, but I just gotta say... I miss you, and I hope that you're okay." She murmured, reaching out to squeeze Halstead's arm.

"Do you want to talk about it? I know there are things you're not meant to tell me, but I'm your sister. I can keep a secret for you. So that you have someone to talk to about whatever is going on, because honestly, it looks like it's killing you."

Ward stands in the bleachers with the rest of the crowd roaring around him, the sound gone distant and tinny in his ears, and stares down into the ring at the man he had - what? Trusted? Counted among his own? Called comrade, if he was feeling generous and stupid in equal measure?

Magic sparks off Jack like a struck match in dry grass. Ward is on his feet before he remembers deciding to move.

“What the fuck,” he says. He has spent the whole event posted up beside Ophelia, watching too much and then - Jack. The curse falls easy off his lips. Easier than it ought to. But then, most things come easy when a man is busy trying to keep the whole goddamn place from sinking by stuffing his hands into every leak he can find.

Jack. Lis. Axel.

His mind kicks from one to the next like a spooked horse in a stall. Ward's is already moving when Annalise catches him first. Gets a hand on him. Pulls him aside, just far enough from the crowd that the world narrows down to her face, her hand on his arm, and the tight, careful concern in her eyes.

She sees it. Of course she sees it - that gut-shot look on him.

For one second, Ward cannot tell if she saw Jack. Cannot tell if she has come to talk about Ophelia. That is a whole other can of worms sitting heavy in the dirt, and he has not yet found a way to look down the barrel of it without feeling something in him kick back.

Then she speaks: I miss you.

Ward looks at his sister and feels something old and sore twist under his ribs. Annalise, standing there with all that care on her face, like she has not learned better yet. Like he has not given her every reason to stop trying.

He should talk to her more.

The thought comes plain and brutal, with no room for his usual dodging. He should ask how she is. He should tell her he is sorry. He should say that every ugly thing he does, every line he toes, every order he carries, has her name buried somewhere in the reason for it. He should tell her that he misses her too. But Ward Halstead has never been much good at standing in the open with his heart in his hands and his mind is constantly, constantly on every danger in the room. Right now that danger is Jack. “Lis,” he starts, and his voice comes out rougher than he means it to. He stops.

Did she know? About Jack? If she knew before him, then that is not her failing. It is his. Another hole in the fence. Another wolf already through.

Ward’s jaw works once. He looks back toward the ring, where the truth of Jack is still ringing in the air, bright and wrong and impossible to unsee.

When he looks at Annalise again, the expression on his face is strained into something almost calm. Almost. He scrubs a hand over his face and a “I'm fine - just.... that fucking liar" escapes him.

More and more each day.

That was the whole point of living. More. The word itself felt intoxicating.

More attention. More influence. More hunger. More souls turning their heads when he entered a room. More people wondering if the stories were true. More people wishing they were.

Stagnation was a fate worse than death. What was immortality worth if one stopped reaching for something? If centuries passed only to repeat the same motions over and over again until existence became a habit? Najelon would rather burn himself alive pursuing excess than spend eternity preserving what he already had.

Why waste an immortal life hidden away beneath damp stone, nose deep in ancient books and grotesque experiments with the dead, when you can be the one to decide who stays among the living? But contempt had limits. Results did not. Marius was still here millennia later, against every natural law that should have claimed him. The thought sat bitterly on Najelon's tongue. Was there a toll to take? Did he need to make periodic sacrifices? Did his body still house a soul despite every single one of his actions telling Najelon otherwise ever since they met so long ago?

The devilish smile slowly dropped into a thin line. “Your secrets are precisely why I came to this wretched place,” he confessed without batting an eyelash. There was no beating around the bush against a smart oponent, no manipulation that could deliver the information Najelon was after smoothly.

One, two, three lightweight steps closer to the mad scientist.

“Tell me, Marius—how is it fair for such a hateful creature like you to live so damn long after releasing so much evil in the world?” He stepped into the dim and otherwordly light above the sorcerer’s macabre endeavours. There was only a table between them. Already too close for Naj’s comfort. Shadows pooled around the demon, as if unable to resist his pull, and as the room grew darker, the crinsom in his gaze glowed brighter. “How does a mortal–born like you achieve the immortality of greater beings?”

The disdain in his voice didn't completely hide the desperation. For a moment, Najelon hated that realization more than the laboratory around him. Desperation. That was the only explanation for this visit. Not his recurrent curiosity or even his endless arrogance. Desperation had carried him through the shadows and into the home of a man he loathed.

So much for that.

There had been years where Najelon was opened like a book and read until the ink ran - years sealed in salt-black circles, in bone script, where Marius forgot to feed him because a demon's suffering made no greater claim on his attention than a candle guttering low. In those years Marius had swung between cruelty and absence with the steady measure of a pendulum above a pit. Abuse. Neglect. Abuse. Neglect.

And then Najelon had fled (no surprise in that; all trapped things learn to love the crack in the wall) and a different disappointment had settled into Marius. It had to do with what the demon did with freedom afterward. That after all that kicking and screaming and breaking free, all Najelon had amounted to was… this.

Marius lifts the eye-stone toward the light. Within its depths the ash-memory of Najelon spins in miniature, a tiny maelstrom under a crystalline skin, tethered now whether the demon wills it or not. Marius watches it with an expression almost bored enough to pass for patience. Najelon has come to waste his time. Something soft has gotten into him. How grotesque.

Who are you trying to turn, Najelon?

He does not ask it aloud. There is no answer that would improve the room - and sure enough the room worsens under the weight of that one childish word: "fair:

"Fair," he repeats. "You walk into the Crucible, into my house, and you stand there with that pretty mouth and ask me about fairness." His open eye moves over Najelon with the cold precision of a scalpel finding the weakest seam. "I am a greater being," he says, with the simplicity that comes only to greater beings. "I have stopped death in its tracks and made it wait outside my door like a beggar. I have made the whole machinery of the world scream, Najelon when I reached in and stopped the wheel - and I did not care. What is the definition of greater if not that? That is the only reason I am still standing here to be insulted by a thing I once kept on a chain."

He turns the eye-stone between two fingers; the milky swirl thickens to the color of curdled moonlight.

"Why would I give you those answers? So you can squander them? On what? Some warm little animal you have decided deserves eternity because it looked at you kindly enough to make you stupid?"

He rounds the table. His thumb strokes the crystal's face and the sealed ash-eye there darkens under it.

"Is this what became of you, after all that trouble? After clawing out of my keeping, after breaking circles better creatures would still be screaming inside, after proving, briefly, there might be something in you worth refining?" The old sourness coats his tongue. Wasted potential. It has always offended him more than defiance ever could. "You ran from the knife and became meat anyway."

Once, Marius had taken Najelon the way one lifts a ruined instrument from a battlefield, strings cut, wood cracked, and thought there might be music in him still, if enough rot were scraped away. He had tried. Neglect, the lash, every hour between the two, labored over like a weaponsmith over a blade. And Najelon stayed exactly, precisely, insultingly the same. A mouth. A hunger. A great nothing that wants and wants and cannot hold a single thing worth having.

"All that labor," Marius says, low and venomous, "and still - a begging thing. You cannot forge steel out of tallow. You cannot raise a temple out of filth, no matter how you gild it. I know. I tried."

He tosses the eye-stone upward. It spins once through the dim light - milk-white, black-veined, watching - and the little tethered maelstrom inside lurches, and Najelon lurches with it. He catches it without looking away from the demon.

"Big questions," he says, mocking. "With bigger answers. And expected me to hand them over because you came close enough to the table." He cocks his head, studying the empty air where the horns should crown him, measuring the demon for something. "What are you going to give me?"

There is so much he could ask - but Marius lets the question hang for a blink.

"What if I asked for another eighty-four years?" His voice drops to something almost tender, which is the worst of it. "Would you do it? Would you crawl back into the circle and call it payment? Kneel in that old room? Let me close the door again and teach you the difference between wanting freedom and deserving it?" Faux consideration. "No, I think not."

His hand flattens on the table. There is a windpipe within reach and he can imagine it folding shut beneath this thumb - the wet, delicate collapse of it = and for one long breath Marius lets himself want it, lets the wanting fill his whole cold body, before he drives the hand down into the crystal instead and holds it there until his knuckles ache. Step back, Najelon.

"You want the fruit from the black tree, but you have no stomach for the roots," he says, and the venom runs plain now, stripped of its polish. "Immortality is not some bauble to hang around the throat of whatever creature has made you sentimental. You escaped me and called it victory. Yet here you are, dragging your want back to my table, begging for power you do not understand, for a purpose I would be embarrassed to name."

He sets the eye-stone down beside the weapon with exquisite care. The ash inside it turns once more.

"Prove I am wrong," he says. "Or get out of my sight before I decide nostalgia has made me generous."

Callum says something and she can't quite make sense of it in the turmoil while she does not take advantage of the position they're in, and instead rolls away from him. She should keep going, should just end it with the knife stuck in the post, but there's a sick taste in the back of her mouth.

The usual anxiety worms its way through her brain, and she lets instinct rule her movements. Years of survival so far have led her to hit quickly and then run as fast as possible. His quiet words register as she's getting to her feet and it makes her stomach turn, the cold shock of reality sinking into her.

The shakes start in her fingertips, and she backs up away from him, shaking her head. Aspen feels herself start to say something, but all that comes up is a heave and a burp that she has to fight down lest last night's dinner come up.

She looks like she is about to be sick. The Sight, (un)helpfully, confirms it: a small green future in which she puts last night's dinner on the boards in front of a paying crowd. Ah, Callum thinks. No. Not that. Not now. Not on these boards, which someone has to mop.

"Oh, hey," he takes a step toward her, hands out. "What? Hey. How about we just breathe for a moment, huh?"

Futures flicker as he does this, the sight unhelpfully showing him a flipbook: a few where she does not throw up, considerably more where she does. He folds them down as fast as they arrive, the kind of triage a man does when he is rapidly running out of free hands. Callum's juggling futures, while giving an unexpected pep talk at an unexpected time. He powers through.

"No, you didn't fuck up, you were doing great. I wasn't expecting that. I didn't see it coming." He says it earnestly, even though there is the potential for it to be a little tongue in cheek - a thing he can clarify later, if there is a later. Which, coin toss. "You're not a fuck up."

He keeps his hands open, where she can see them, the way he was once taught to approach skittish horses. The lesson is, apparently, transferrable. He gestures toward the knife, still buried in the post behind him.

"Look - how about you try again? That was great."

Around them, the crowd is doing what crowds do when a fight pauses without their permission, which is to say: getting bored, getting creative. Someone behind him hollers something Callum elects not to translate. Someone else is already wagering on the vomit. He keeps his eyes on her.

When it's time for her to enter the ring, Aspen almost bolts. She's shoved more fully into the area when she starts to turn around. The moment she'd put her name in for sign-ups, she'd tried to reach in and fish it back out, but it was too late. And it was definitely too late now, as one of the attendants shoves her shoulder.

She'd not really planned any specific weapons or tried to push for special.. anything for this round. All she has is the small pocket knife in her boot, already found and approved as she walked in. Just a knife.

The announcer goes. The opponent is rolled in - there's a moment where she thinks maybe she recognizes him, but can't remember his name until the announcer finishes. She's a scout, she hides in the shadows and pickpockets, steals where she can. There's no hiding here, but she knows she's quick.

The bell rings, she crouches down and grabs the knife from her boot and first chucks it at him. Then she charges. If anything, maybe she'll take him off guard to get the upper hand.

The knife comes zinging at him; that gets a sidestep, the blade burying itself in the post behind him with a small private thunk the crowd is too loud to notice. He turns his head back toward her. He has the next five seconds laid out in front of him the way a chessboard is laid out before a player. The play says: she will hesitate, you will close the distance, this will be over before either of you has to think about it.

She barrels.

This is what the Sight sometimes gets wrong. Probability lives in the gap between "fear" and "the thing fear makes you do," and Callum's gift has never been especially good at people who are too afraid to do the smart thing. Aspen (he registers the name a half-second late) comes at him with unteachable, unstrategic momentum.

He could still take her. He has, in the past, taken people exactly like her. But there is a habit twenty years old in his body, and the habit chooses for him before his thinking does. The shift of his weight is half a beat late. His guard drops an inch lower than it should. The sight unfolds a future in which he ducks her clean and ends this, and he folds it shut and lets it fall.

Among the many paintings that could be found in the Galerie de Désir, one of them had a peculiar way of drawing the eye, birthing rumors with every glance.

A moonlit balcony stretched across the canvas, silver light spilling over marble balustrades and through the open glass doors behind them. Intricate shapes of dark stone and cold iron adorned every surface. Beyond lay a lavish chamber frozen in another century: a neatly made bed with an ebony wood frame, a writing desk littered with yellowed papers, shelves crowded with dripping candles that had been burning endlessly and books whose titles had long since faded from memory.

And standing at the center of it all was the man himself. Nestor. Or so the small plaque beneath the gilded frame claimed.

Dressed in dark brocades and impossibly composed, he leaned against the balcony railing as though he had been standing there for years. His expression carried the sort of quiet melancholy that artists loved to immortalize, the kind that made strangers wonder what tragedy lurked behind a handsome face. Most visitors passed by after a glance; some lingered. The latter were rewarded.

At first, it was easy to dismiss it as a trick of light: a subtle shift of posture, the slightest tilt of his head. Then, a slow blink and the rise and fall of his chest as he took an empty breath.

Nestor’s gaze settled upon whoever stood before the painting, and for a moment, neither moved. The corner of his mouth curved upward, something close to a smile that invited conversation. Or perhaps temptation.

The council convenes in two hours. Some of the witches who keep him in his seat would not approve of where he has chosen to spend the interval before it: at the Galerie de Désir, in the Dominion, in afternoon light. But Callum treats these visits as a matter of jurisdiction. The painting is enchantment, and enchantment is magic, and magic is, by every charter he has signed, his to answer for. Someone has to help Nestor find a way out of this frame. Callum has decided that someone is him.

Some afternoons, he and the painting have whole conversations. Some afternoons, the painting only watches. Today the painting gives a slow blink, offers rise of breath inside a chest that should not be capable of breath - and Callum's mouth tightens at one corner in something that could pass for greeting if you were not looking closely.

Today was meant to be quick. A nod of the head, the closest thing he allows himself to 'we are still working on it.' Callum has spent the morning scrying after the lost knowledge of imprisoned things and he had come to deliver the small offering of that effort. Two minutes, he had told himself, and back across the city before the meeting.

But then Callum is front of that painting and his eyes, trained to catch the slightest slip and change of the future, follow something else. There - at the lower-right, beneath the hem of the painted brocade - is a brushstroke he did not catalogue last month. Callum has catalogued every other inch. He is certain. He steps closer. Then closer again. Close enough that his breath would fog glass if there were glass between them. The flagstones of the gallery are quiet under his boots. The afternoon sun through the high windows lays itself across his cheekbone and gets ignored.

"There's something in the corner that wasn't there last month," he says, forgoing a greeting. They don't do that anymore. "Tell me what you've done. Or tell me what's been done to you. Either answer would be useful."

"Ugh... shut up..." he barely managed—with all the strained tolerance of a wild animal, his lip pulled into a half snarl, sharp canines peeking as he lifted his head from the table, the blonde curtain of hair parting as those perilous yellow eyes pierced through its gauzy veil, staring unkindly. "I don't know where your worthless whelp is..." whatever horrible things he had done, whatever atrocities he had committed—surely it did not warrant something as mindlessly cruel as working customer service. He looked down at his own sharp claws and fantasized of slicing open that throat—why must he be forced to indulge this mindless drivel? "I have no recollection of snapping their neck, sadly..." a sigh expanded in his lungs, loud and provocative, making his displeasure known. He did have a very clear memory of beating said whelp within an inch of their life with a lamp—but whatever they did or didn't do after the humiliating spectacle was hardly his business. Perhaps they had some pride left and decided to spare someone else the trouble and jumped off a ledge. The thought did amuse him, if only a little. "Do kindly take your nonsense elsewhere, will you? Your shrill voice is making my head hurt and my master is busy being... busy." the demon waves off the disgruntled customer as if dismissing a petulant child, with a casual flick of his wrist and a sharp turn, the bracelets on his wrists and ankles clinking like cymbals as he unceremoniously sauntered off, massaging his temple.

Callum does not startle. He has been giving people the courtesy of his stillness since he was a child, and it has, over the years, been mistaken for any number of things. The sight had warned him five seconds ago - a fragile petal of a future showing a flicker of pale hair, a wind shifting in a room with no wind - and he had simply gone on counting cards. The bracelets at his ear sound like small bells rung by an irritated god. Callum recognizes the demon by the noise alone.

He shifts his shoulder, very slightly, to make a better resting place of it. This demon is being hosted. And in that hosting, Cal makes a sound, a sigh, closer to the sigh a man makes when a cat sits on the page he was reading and refuses to be moved. He wants, quite honestly, to make him wait out of some small touch of sadism. 

"You carry yourself well," he says evenly, eyes still on the wheel, "for someone currently being carried. And your voice, when it is not being shrill at the retail class, is actually rather pleasant. There. Two compliments. Should hold the praise kink over until lunch."

He tilts his head, the quarter-inch adjustment a swordsman makes before a cut, and one future folds itself into a small crisp square and is laid aside - the dealer's hand twitching wrong, sixty kochba gone - while the shift of his weight onto the back foot creases another future lengthwise and tucks it under, the one in which the demon bites him, dismissed before it can ripen.

The present demon remains draped. Callum reaches up, deliberate, and lifts a strand of pale hair from his own eyes with the indifferent precision of a man correcting a crooked frame on a wall. "Define horrible," he says. "I need to know if I'm consoling or competing."

@ofdeathwiishes [for Ward Halstead] Somewhere on the East Side

Autumn's been tracking who or whatever this is for days. Some human is tired of them picking off fringers outside of the Haven. She wonders, if it's so dangerous, why they don't move into the Haven itself, but then she hasn't exactly sunk herself into safe places either, for her own reasons.

But she's traced them this far in, and so now she's invested. She doesn't need the money anymore, just the blood on her hands.

The trail's been sniffed out to some blasted farm, and in the dark, it sits like a ghost. But the scent here's strong, and it lingers. The house, ramshackle as it had been, was empty save for the shredded bodies of its occupants, steaks of blood and the smell of gunpowder heavy in the dry-rotted woodwork.

But the farmhouse was empty, and so now she's peering through the half-open door of a barn that seems to lean towards its death, How long, she wonders, since this farm had produced anything? And why stay here, when the Haven is so close? Silly question, as if she wouldn't give anything to keep what little she had. As if she hadn't already done so.

Her brows peak when she picks up another scent - unfamiliar. A hand reaches inside her jacket and wraps around the grip of her over-sharpened athame, pulling it free. Does the thing she's hunting have help, or does she have competition?

He can smell it, when he reaches the farmhouse, the rot of those that have been ripped down to strips. The fresh-torn sort, meat made wrong, like whatever did the work had been in a hurry and a temper both. 

He slows, dismounts, and then he sees a dark shadow move against the wooden flat of the barn. Just a shift, dark on dark, the suggestion of a shape where a shape oughtn't be. Warden stills. He stills the way a man stills when he's seen a rattler before it's seen him. Now then. Were they cause of all this, or just another buzzard come to pick?

He hears the clean shift of the blade pulling free of its handle. It puts a knot between his shoulder blades. He's got his own handgun tucked to his side, and his palm drifts to it without him quite asking it to.

“Hey - “ He calls out, voice flat and even across the dead yard. No friendlier than it needs to be, no meaner than it has to start. “Step on out to where I can see you.” 

"If I say yes to this... what's the price?" His head tilted sideways as he turned his attention to the man next to him. Akemi had access to a lot of kochba and if that's what Marius wanted then he'd give it over. But money wasn't all people used to pay for services. Not in this world. Not in Calamity.

Some decisions aren’t made because they’re good. Even for someone who kept a neatly organized archive of all the contracts he’d made over centuries of scheming and soul–collection, sometimes recklessness won over logic. Especially when the circumstances involved a certain human pushing forty–five.

“Still decorating like a mausoleum keeper,” a gravelly voice echoed in the shadows surrounding Marius, breaking the cryptic silence otherwise interrupted only by the occasional clack of bones against stone. “Or is grave–digger more suitable for you?”

He didn’t reveal his face yet. Despite the arrogance of his unannounced visit, Najelon’s instincts advised everything contrary to what he would attempt. Red eyes narrowed at familiar symbols; shelves crowded with ancient grimoires, glass jars containing preserved organs and blackened herbs. The air smelled of damp stone and sweet rot. Everything was just like he remembered it, unfortunately. Including that gut–wrenching magic that oozed from every pore of the necromancer’s skin.

Najelon couldn’t afford to show a shred of weakness.

Smoke and embers flooded the room as the demon did a quick inspection for anything dangerous—other than the bane of his existence. Once pleased, he materialized at a cautious distance from Marius, crimson eyes emerging from a dark corner with nothing but a shit–eating grin.

“You know…” he murmured in a mocking tone, although it sounded more grounded now that he was corporeal. “It’s quite easy for a demon to trespass, even a little fae wouldn’t have any trouble.”

Marius notes Najelon’s distance without annoyance, without pleasure, without even the courtesy of surprise. The demon has placed himself at the far edge of comfort, toeing some perceived line of safety. All Marius can think is 'wise of him.'

The smoke and embers that come in Najelon's wake curl through the workshop in lazy, infernal script, threading between hanging chains and half-forged artifacts. Marius raises a hand and plucks — pluck — a fleck of ash from the air as delicately as another man might remove a seed from his tongue. He presses it beneath his thumb against the crystal set before him, beside the half-finished weapon he has been feeding with blood. The ash smears easily over the crystal’s smooth face.

At once, the stone clouds from within.

Milk-white veins web inward, as though some dead thing trapped inside has begun to breathe. A thin thread of black light slips from Marius’s closed eye, but he does not open it. He lets the ash drink and lets it begin to favor the taste of demon fire. Death move out of him in slow, sovereign measure. Through his hand, into the crystal, down through the iron table, into the waiting bones beneath the Crucible.

The spell is a courtesy, in the old sense of the word. A small pivot to what he was working on, but convenient none the less. The ash will remember Najelon; the crystal will hold the memory; the dead below will listen for the shape of him thereafter. Somewhere beneath the workshop, beneath the court, beneath all that drowned and darkened stone, something answers with a hollow knock. Once. Twice. Then silence.

Mausoleum keeper. Grave-digger.

Hardly insults, though Najelon casts them as such. Marius has never been ashamed of graves. His thumb drags once more through the ash-blackened crystal, and the smear takes the shape of a small, lidless eye. “I am not here to quell anyone’s curiosity, Najelon,” Marius says, “I keep my secrets tucked away well enough.”

His open eye settles on the demon then, cold as a corpse in winter. "Seeing as I kept you tucked away once, you should know that better than most. " The crystal gives one faint pulse beneath his hand. Marius' thumb presses harder into the ash, sealing the little eye shut.

"What brings you to my doorstep? How have you chosen to waste your life now?”

"Call them out?" He asked with a smirk. "You think they can hear us from this side?" Akemi stood from his seat and moved until he was next to the man. With his hands in his pockets, he peered through the waters, as if getting closer would allow him to see a mermaid.

“It is more like a sturgeon on a hook.”

Not a spell sung sweetly into the tide. Not a calling out across the blue in the hope that some beautiful, hidden thing might turn its head and answer. Marius has no patience for magic that waits to be loved. There are gentler arts, certainly. Rites of invitation. Names offered with salt, silver, milk, blood warmed in a bowl. Little bargains that he could scratch into these runes that might call the sirens out. But that's never been his way. He wants a current tightening around a body, a barb set beneath the soul.

“You are the one who wants the show,” he says to the other. “Should you not be the one to pay for it?”

By the look of him, that wasn't the case.

"It's been a rough couple months." Axel admitted as he gathered the papers on the desk, opened a drawer, and placed them inside before shutting the door. "Peace is still being pursued. Although, two Speakers were recently killed. A Witch and a Fae." He pressed his lips together into a firm line. "Some poisoned blood rain happened for about a week afterwards. All of them claim to not know who could have done it." Which, Axel felt was bullshit. How could none of them -- none of the species -- know who caused such a fucking event?

And there it is. That old rhythm of it. Them ribbing each other. Feels a little like coming back to life, being in the company of his closest friend again, like breaking the surface after too long down in the fog. Yes. This is right. This is correct. Home. It feels more like his with every passing second.

The word 'rough' sets off a quiet alarm somewhere in his chest, and Warden says fuck it and downs the rest of his drink. A real 'give it to me straight' sort of gesture. He’s already striding across the room before the glass is empty, looking down at the papers like personal space is a privilege he never afforded his leader.

Well, fuck. Two leaders dead.

“I feel like these things always come in threes.” There’s a twist to his face at that, something dark and dissatisfied. “Big mistake telling me that, by the way. Like I’m ever gonna let you out of my sight now,” he mutters.

And then Axel keeps going, and Ward’s expression only turns worse with it. Poisoned. Blood. Rain. Three words that ought never belong in the same sentence, and yet here they are. Sure. Why not.

But then Ward hears that pause in Axel’s voice. Hears the shape of what gets swallowed down instead of said. Ward turns it back on Axel at breakneck speed.

“Don't leave anything out. Tell me everything.”

Ward doesn't want to talk about himself, he never wants to talk about himself. Joke’s on you, Axel. Two could play that game, and hadn’t they always been the best at it?