#coldcigarettes

Columbia seems a good place to stop. It’s starting to get warm, and Neil sweats easily, between the heat and the constant anxiety, and he hacks off the bottom half of some of his jeans to make shorts. The feeling of sunshine across his skin is a novelty, even if it’s only his shins.

Neil scours the newspapers, and practices with his knives. He collects every article he sees about the gory, unsolved murder with gang ties. He lines them up in a scrapbook he makes himself, slipping the funds from his mother between the pages. Most articles seem to think that Romero was either caught by a rival gang, or came out on the wrong end of some internal politics.

The article in the local newspaper, The State, is removed, detached; a mobster from Baltimore dying is hardly relevant here, but the article opposite is about some teenager on trial for beating up four men outside of a nightclub, one of whom died. He’s being tried as an adult due to the seriousness of the crime, but the detail that catches Neil’s eye is that he is apparently only five foot -- the teenager, not the dead man.

Size was always an issue with Neil’s father. He suspects that if he were a foot taller and naturally muscled, his father would have taken more of a liking to him. As it were, Neil has always relied on his speed and trickery to get by. He frowns at the article about Andrew Minyard, and gives a little more thought to learning hand to hand combat. It would certainly make the knives more useful.

He returns the rental car, but not before using the dashboard lighter to sear his fingerprints off the tips of his fingers. It burns, and it makes knife practice almost unbearable for a week, but he doesn’t want to be linked to Romero. Not yet. He strategically hides his money, and then dyes his hair back to auburn; it’s starting to get brittle after so many treatments, but it’s a surefire way of luring his father’s people out.

There’s no rigged bookshelf this time. Neil needs them to look like two completely separate crimes. Besides, Jackson has never seen Neil with more proficiency than awkwardly stabbing at some dead animal. He never sees it coming; Neil goes for the eyes first.

Merlin has been encountering the bizarre and magical since he was a kid. Weird things seem to seek him out, for some reason: a fairy hiding in his sock drawer, a goblin causing mischief at his school (he kept getting in trouble for that - no one seemed to believe that the mishaps weren’t his fault), a unicorn wandering into his backyard.

It was all fairly harmless until he got to college, when a series of inexplicable crimes around campus had his roommate ranting to him about the impossibility of it all.

Economics major Arthur Pendragon, who had a not-so-secret passion for investigative journalism (possibly inspired by reading copious amounts of Nancy Drew novels as a child) and a father obsessed with finding and eliminating the paranormal, refused to believe Lance’s earnest suggestions of supernatural involvement even as the evidence (or lack of it) began to build. Thanks to the far more open-minded Gwen and her cryptozoology course, though, his skepticism began to waver.

Arthur’s half-sister Morgana had begun rebelling long before her teenage years began - the only thing that changed was the extremity of her crimes (from political protest graffiti and petty theft to “borrowing” cars), how often she got caught (every other week to not at all), and her skills (lock picking and pick-pocketing to hot wiring). Never anything malicious - “all proceeds go to the homeless,” as she liked to say, and she always returned the cars after using them - but Arthur still disapproved…until he came to her for help getting through a few locked doors. For the sake of journalism and the pursuit of truth, of course. and proving everyone wrong about the goddamn spirits that don’t fucking exist.

But what he found didn’t make any sense - at least, not to him, and it turned out to be a good thing he’d dragged Merlin along. Who else was going to talk to the Sidhe fairy possessing the principal?