He reeked of cheap whiskey when he leaned in close to press an unwelcome kiss to her lips.

It was justifiable, then, when she lured him into her office with promises of sweet nothings, as old habits die hard.

Adrenaline, she reasoned.  A shock to the system after three months of eighteen hour days, seven days a week.  There was surely no need to look deeper at the sexual thrill that sizzled to her loins as she straddled his waist and watched as he choked on his own blood by candlelight.

Bruce returned home to a woman that needn’t be coaxed from her desk, but already abed, naked, and waiting for him.  She was unabashed, shameless and hungry.

From there, it all went tits up.

Guards showed up the next morning–something about Admiral Matthews’ last known whereabouts and an investigation underway.  They promised to return with a warrant.

An Admiral!  The bastard could have led with that, but then, he was likely sly enough to know Kallarel would have charged him double for the honorific.  Even her contact in the Royal Apothecary Society said the body was too hot to take.  Kallarel had to get rid of it herself, and quickly.

Dismemberment was a rough, choppy job for a woman who normally takes so much pride in her work.  His limbs plopped and sizzled in the drums of lye which her contracted felguard Akra carried outside her shop.

In the morning, the guards would return and ransack her place, but eight hours would render the body unrecognizable in her new soap-making ‘hobby’-- or so she had explained the extreme purchase from the alchemist to a perplexed and concerned Bruce.  She knew he didn’t believe her, but that hadn’t been a problem yet in their relationship, she reasoned.

Besides, by morning light, Declan’s assets and body would both be liquidated–

If he had stayed in the drums, that is.

A rattle jostled the catch on the bedroom window.  Kallarel lifted her sleepmask, revealing smudged liner and red-rimmed eyes from a day of butcher’s work and caustic chemicals.

“Fucking cat…” she murmured, presuming Her Majesty had once again chosen stirring her servants to let her in through the high windows rather than lowering herself to the catdoor at the ground floor.

If only.

She dropped the curtain as quick as she pulled it from the window, a sharp hiss careening past her teeth.

A shadowy figure stood in their tiny slice of lot behind the shop, head askew where it was severed from his shoulders.  Soaked clothes clung to his dilapidated flesh, half-singed by acid, and his musty brown hair was burned away in clumps.

It was Declan Matthews, staring at the ground with vacant, cloudy eyes.

What the actual fuck?!

Of course it was real, of this there could be no doubt.  She could not be seeing things–that would imply a reality she refused to accept: one where there was something truly, deeply and even fundamentally wrong with her.

No, at best, it was some student’s idea of a very funny joke.  At worst…

What if Zelion had caught up to her?

A dagger from her bureau found its sheath down the plunging front of her robe, hilt masked by the welcome fluff of black marabou.  At the bottom of the stairs, she slipped into a practical pair of heels and pulled out the pistol she kept under the register–an elegantly crafted weapon, if messy and noisy, but without the patronage of an ancient satyr, all she had left was whatever would fit in her clever hands.

At best, she would have to re-kill Declan.  At worst…

She cocked the hammer.

The corpse stood stock still.  Without breath, he may well have been a statue…until the door creaked open narrowly, and the black gleam of her pistol caught the midnight moon.

Slowly, the corpse’s arms ascended, rising like a puppet on a string.  Between the spots where the hacksaw had severed, now long, thin, antenna-like stalks sprouted, white bulbs faintly glowing in the dim–which rose with his arms, guiding them skyward.

His limbs halted abruptly when his body formed a perfect ‘T’, then a beat of silence filled the air, before…

With stick straight fingers, he buried his eyes into his elbow, mimicking a dance move which took over the Dalaran college in a craze.

His arms collapsed to his sides, then his head violently jerked to the right, as though his neck were snapped. He turned his entire body to face the same direction, then leaned back, half-crouched, and gyrated his hips, his shoulder popping up uncontrollably at the same time.

In the nighttime air, all that was heard was the sound of ratty wet clothes scraping, and yet, it was almost too easy to hear the music to which he danced.

Despite the feat that it was, a careful eye would notice how uncoordinated the movements truly were. This was not the sort of craftsmanship an expert at necromancy would employ.

“What the actual fuck…”

Kallarel corrected her slack-jawed expression at the corpse’s gyrating by pursing a cigarette between her lips.  Her arm extended fluidly, leveling on Declan’s head as it rose back above his shoulders on the next pop.

Bang!

A roost of blink doves took panicked flight, phasing halfway through walls and windows in sprays of violet mana sparks and blue feathers.  Loud and inelegant, one couldn’t argue with the results as Declan folded backwards at the waist from the impact to his temple before hitting the ground with a heavy thud.  The stitching connecting his head to his shoulders tore, baring the fungi to the mana-thick, night air.  It spilled out from his neck, as though it sought to crawl away.

No, it definitely wasn’t Zelion’s doing.

“Fucking students,” Kall presumed with a huff as she lit her cigarette, tucking the gun into the silk sash of her robe like a glamorous pirate.  She approached with care and irritance rather than curiosity, puffing smoke all the way.  A manicured hand raised to cup her pointed ear, her index pressing gently at a black pearl stud, its setting erupting in fel green light.  “Akra, I need you in the backyard. — I don’t care if they aren’t dry, get up here or so help me…!”

But by the pricking of her thumbs…

It came from the neighbor’s backyard: a whispering spellcast, uttered by two voices woven together– a young woman’s and something ancient, deep and scratchy. Between the slats in the fence, she could glimpse vibrant, multi-colored luminescence, a rack of antlers decorated by strips of symbol-laden cloth and two glowing violet orbs–

Kallarel grit her teeth, left hand flying for the butt of her pistol, as the spell scratched and rasped.  The voices were wholly unfamiliar, but the ancient nature of the magicks was unmistakable.  Binding, growth and–

The corpse exploded.

Vines launched upward, wrapping themselves around Kall’s limbs, waist and neck like a sensual hug, pressing the body against hers.  A vine spiked into the corpse’s skull and lifted his face within kissing distance of hers.  His jaw opened and clicked as though he tried to speak, a breath of rot-filled air caressed her check.

And as her backyard erupted in verdant and crimson, the night air exploded with Kallarel’s blood curdling scream.

She flailed like a cat in a bag, scattering vines and viscera all over the patio steps and tidy patch of lawn.  She shoved his head from her cheek with such force it flew across the yard and struck the neighbors fence with a wet thud before falling into the mageroyal bush below.  Her shoulders hunched and heaved with each ragged breath, fel eyes feral.

Someone or something had just made a terribly spiteful enemy.

“...Miss Mourningvale?”  Akra rumbled timidly.

One by one down the lane, bedroom lights flickered on.  Dogs barked and cats cried in echo of the jeweler’s animalistic shriek.  In the distance, indigo lights flashed over the guard station.

Fuck–

“...babe?”

Bruce was home early from his Friday beers and darts with the lads, a bouquet of flowers tucked in the crook of his elbow for his adoring lady only to come home to a blood-splattered beast of a woman.  Worry clouded his thoughtful grey eyes. Her stomach sank.

Fuuuuuck…

“Prrow?”

Not to be left out, Her Majesty trotted up and sat demurely by Bruce’s side, surveying the red-headed can opener with contempt.

Another cigarette was passed from clenched fingers to her lips and lit with desperation.

“Well–” she huffed a stream of smoke as the distant clamor of voices and bells began to draw near.  “--pack your bags.”

“But–”

“Please.”  

It was as much a command as the first.  Such was Zelion’s way; polite to a fault, the perfect gentleman but every stunted inch of him ten times the Lord his father was… or so he strived to be.

Hester fled as she was bidden, lurking like a ghost by the upper banister in her shapeless, white dressing gown.  She crouched at the rail and peered through the ornately turned bars at the floor below.

Zelion shooed the house staff back to their rooms below stairs, drew a sharp breath, and standing safely to the side, flung the door wide.

Caught off guard, the assailant fell through the entry in a rumpled heap on the marble floor.

“Larin,” Zelion greeted dryly as he shut the door with a heavy thud followed by the hefty click of the lock.  “This is a surprise.”

“Zuh… Zels…?”  Disoriented, the elf struggled to find his footing, pressing up onto his hands and knees.  Blood dripped from his busted nose, soiling his shirt and speckling the floor.  He reeked of piss and beer.  “Whurr… whurr isshe?!  Yer wife, th’--th’ fuckin’ whore–!”

“I heard what happened, Larin,” the rabbit pitch of Zelion’s heart didn’t reach past his neck; his expression was cool and his timber colder.  He made no motion to assist.  “The reversed sentences?”

Larin coughed and spat on the tile.

“Your badge and rank stripped for shoddy work–”

“Th’ fuhkin’ city… want’d resultsh–”

This fucking city…

“Of course it did,” Zelion agreed, bending his knees to crouch closer to the ex-investigative officer unraveling on his floor.  “An unprecedented case: a pile of five noblemen dead outside a brothel, all stabbed once through the heart–”

“--op’n ‘n sh…sshut!”

“Open and shut,” Zelion parroted cleanly.  “Despite the varying ages of decay?  A left-handed stab and a right-handed perpetrator?”

The lord rested his gloved hands upon his knees to lean in further.  Larin coughed and choked on the bite of formaldehyde mixed with his own stink.

“You didn’t even have a murder weapon, Larin.”

“Th’... th’ shcity want’d… th’ fffam’lies…no time t’ dub’le scheck–”

“And Miss Mourningvale offered you a lot of money too, did she not?”

The unruly groaning and growling of Larin quieted at the accusation, bleary eyes leveling on the stoic regard a scientist reserves for a specimen.

“You’re quite lucky Hesterlynn didn’t uncover that part,” Zelion stood back up to his full height as Larin made his way upright with the aid of an end table.  “Treason carries a heftier price.”

“...ffuhck you, Zels–”

“You’re right, Larin.  It was a gross and baseless accusation,” the lord soothed but only just.  “I know you’re familiar with them.”

Larin coughed and spat once more before dragging his sleeve roughly across his nose and mouth.  A thick swallow returned bile to his gut.  “I did… I did wha th’ shcity wanted.”

“Of this I have no doubt,” Zelion agreed.  “But you understand, I can’t have you storming into my home threatening to harm my wife–”

“She ruined me!”  It was the clearest he had been.  He shouted it so loud Hester trembled.  So loud that the servants eavesdropping at the doorjams drew back.  So loud that Zelion may have spared him a precious moment of pity.

“Come then,” the lord gestured to the door of his study; a formidable slab of ironwood banded with saronite fittings and locks to deter even the most curious.  “Let’s see if we can fix you.”