Infernal Investigations

I gave in to Gregory’s suggestion to get a carriage shortly after we left the temple. Only after he agreed to split the costs with me. Even if I wasn’t planning to have much use for my coin in the near future. Still, it was the principle of the thing. Although at least this meant less time being in the public eye. And less time alone with Gregory, where he could ask about what had happened. I’d beat a swift retreat from Garretsville and Alice for similar reasons.

The ride had mostly been trading theories back and forth about who might be involved in this. It all centered on existing members of the program, but repeatedly hit the wall of no firm evidence against anyone. From there it went to outside parties, since at least there were some who were clearly more suspicious than others.

“Holmsteader might know more, but I doubt anyone at the top of this let her get too much information on what they were doing,” I said. “She probably didn’t even know the full breadth of the scheme. Tyler might have, but since he’d be the one getting the reward, he would have gone along with anything that undercut his boss, assuming his reward would be enough to take over from her.”

“Assuming a bit much,” Gregory said. “He could have been loyal, and is there anything saying that diabolists would be the only ones who could claim part of the reward?”

My eyes narrowed. “Fair point, although I think if Holmsteader was aware of what was truly going on, she would have been a lot more insistent on us all dying. Myself at a minimum. Either way, she’s our next best source of information.”

Tonight was aimed at cutting off any hope of their plan succeeding for the near future, but once that was done, finding them needed to be the next step. Just leaving them alone wouldn’t be enough. There were no signs this ritual had a time limit on it, so it would stay as a ticking time bomb waiting for a victim, and desperate people could get very creative with what they did.

First, abduct a cleric of Zaviel, and then you could try convincing them to send their soul into eternal damnation. Assuming the devil behind all of this was willing to cough up rewards and status, they just had to go down the list until they found a cleric willing to go through with it. Or use torture as a motivator until they agreed to practice diabolism.

More difficult to do, but possible. We couldn’t just defang the snake; we needed to kill it as well.

“I assume Intelligence and your fellow clerics are trying to ferret out the other circles,” I mused. “Honestly, without any more leads, they’ll be the best for that. They have the people to cover the city and look into a thousand suspicious things better than you or me.”

There was no avoiding the fact I’d only stumbled onto the second by happenstance and luck, and the first from an informant who definitely wasn’t going to tell me about the first. Methods such as trying to track down the purchase of supplies that could conceivably be used to make them? Better saved for people who could actually get records on that.

“We’re here,” Gregory noted as the carriage came to a halt.

The driver waited only long enough to get a tip, not even staying a second to see if we might hire him to take us anywhere else. Given his nervous glances at every shadow and place where an Infernal might hide, I could guess his reason for wanting to leave.

“Looks like you’ll be walking back,” I told Gregory drily.

He chuckled nervously, staring at the fleeing coachmen with a mix of shame and annoyance. “I suppose I will be. Perhaps you’d be willing to escort me?”

I stared at his suddenly proffered hand, trying to clamp down on the swell of different emotions inside me.

“We have a job tonight,” I told him brusquely. “I doubt you’ll be able to head home anyway. Not if you want to be involved.”

“Right,” he said, withdrawing the hand. If I’d disappointed or insulted him, it didn’t show. “I do not want to miss out on that. We’ll be spending the rest of the day here then?”

“I have one last place I’ll need to go,” I told him. “By myself. It shouldn’t take too long.”

It better not, given that we were halfway through the afternoon and melding biomass onto Melissa or Alice would take at least four hours. More if I wanted to stop more than a firm push tearing flesh off of them.

“Can I know where?” Gregory asked.

I glanced around. The stares from other Infernals in the street were less numerous than those outside the Quarter, but they were there. At least they lacked the painful signs of Halspus that usually accompanied them.

“Inside,” I said, making for my door, sparing a polite nod for Delia Marstess next door, busy sweeping the snow away from her store’s entrance.

I got ignored. Bring some devils, Imperials, and Black Flame into the neighborhood, and suddenly people wanted even less to do with you.

“Alright,” I said, shutting the door behind me. “As long as you’re back by the time we agreed on, you should be good to do whatever you want. I don’t have a lot for someone else to do, and no food prepared.”

Please leave before he and Alice decide to start talking. She’d gone off to find Melissa after our meeting with Versalicci, but she would be back eventually. I didn’t see either of them bringing up my pouncing on them in casual conversation. Well, Gregory might. Maybe Alice, if she saw Gregory as a rival and wanted to prove he didn’t have a chance.

Oh, I‘d doomed myself. Even worse, it wasn’t in the way I had planned. It was a struggle to keep a little laugh escape my lips.

“Well, there is always the pig,” Gregory commented lightly.

“Don’t you dare,” I replied. “Bad enough I’ll need to get a second one to actually carve up as bacon, that hog is vitally important to the plan and you know it.”

“It’s a waste of good ham,” Gregory said. “Can’t we kill this one and cook it, then just use the second one when it arrives?”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“No,” I said. “It’s going to take time to sculpt it, and I want to work with the other preparations as well beforehand. If the second pig arrives, you can butcher it yourself. There are knives under the counter.”

I chuckle as Gregory stared dispassionately at my counter, his expression making it clear what the odds are of him actually butchering a pig.

“Malvia,” he called out before I could reach the stairs leading to the basement. “Where were you going to go?”

I paused. Would it hurt to let him know? It certainly would hurt to have him along, given what I had planned. He wouldn’t approve. Neither would anyone else in my circle of acquaintances.

Still, I could say the general truth while leading him to the wrong place if he decided to follow.

“Trying to secure some extra help from the Watch,” I told him.

He frowned. “You think that’s worth trying? Considering Walston?”

“I intend to appeal to her sense of civic duty,” I said, getting a chuckle out of him. “I think it’s worth it. For the legal cover if nothing else. A Watch-sanctioned operation might sound better to our respective superiors than ‘we’ve gone rogue, sirs and madam. Please don’t kill us.’”

“You have a point there,” he admitted.

***

Alchemy was one of those magics whose usefulness varied entirely on what you built up. You painstakingly stocked up equipment, waiting for that rainy day when it would be useful, or you rationed it out piece by piece and didn’t waste it all at once.

Unfortunately, it was looking to be some stormy days ahead, and that meant making sure my stocks were still functional.

I had an entire night to prepare for before going off on my late afternoon visits. Also because I needed time for my intelligence network to find out where certain people were.

Since my intelligence network at the moment was Varrow, that might mean tomorrow at the earliest. That was fine. I only needed one for tonight’s work, and even that would just make things easier.

I winced as I made it to the bottom of the stairs.

My diabolism training room, now thoroughly blessed by clerics of Tildae, so the spiritual rot and corruption were gone. Not the physical damage though, outside of some planks of wood someone had been nice enough to put over the gaping hole. It was at least something.

Some of those blessings were still there, faded but enough to make my skin itch and the stones in the wall glow. Such a dim glow, but my eyes still watered even glancing at it. Inside, shuffling about nervously, was the hog. Someone had put a collar on it and attached it to a jagged chunk of brick where my doorframe used to be. Asleep, it lay in the middle of the wreckage, snoozing away.

What wasn’t snoozing was whoever was breathing over in my actual lab. Quietly, but still audible enough for my ears to pick up. My hand went down to my saber as the door opened.

“Malvia, it’d be real fucking sad after everything we just did for you to stab me on accident.”

“Alice,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to back up against the door. Why was she here? “I thought you were going to find Melissa and-”

“Your little half-sister was waiting here,” Alice said, gesturing to the wreckage of my diabolism training room. “Said she was tracking a lead about the Infernal ritual circles.”

Tracking what? My eyes narrowed. The Tildaen blessings and purifications obliterated any traces of diabolism when they were cast. Melissa had nothing left to track.

“Did you ask her about the lead she was tracking?”

“Yeah,” Alice said, folding her arms. “She told me if I wanted so much I could punch the answer out of her, and while I hate getting back talked, I figured you’d throw a fit if we started fighting in your home.”

Fair, I conceded. But also suspicious. Damnations, had I missed something when I’d talked with her? Blindsided by my shock at a new sibling? Was she in on it?

No, not with what I knew. Going to Tyler’s house made little sense if she was in on the conspiracy and knew who Tyler was. The last thing she’d want is to bring attention to him.

Still, it was something to talk to her about. For now, though, I headed towards my lab, Alice following close behind.

She hadn’t touched anything. Good. The devil had wrecked everything in my shop’s displays and shelves in the attack, leaving only my stock down here. Rows of glassware on tables, small oil-burners, Erlenmeyer flasks, laboratory flasks, condensers, even a couple of retorts I’d managed to pick up on the cheap from a contact. The entire room smelled of pungent odors, I hadn’t had the ventilation for this many preparations even before the devil had gone on a rampage.

I’d started the more difficult preparations this morning after breakfast. Dozens of them, most of them of a kind I’d been hesitant to make even with Intelligence’s unofficial blessing. Explosives. The ones I could make in a day. I’d be dipping into my reserves, all of them. I didn’t see much point in hoarding them given what I’d planned.

“Are we going to talk?” Alice asked me.

“Talk about what?” I replied, grabbing a tray full of flasks from a table.

Ah, good, I’d left them in there long enough. Without a hot room or a cold room, I’d been stuck relying on the natural formation of condensation in these to get them into the right state. Having the stove down here going all night to counteract the horribly cold weather had paid off.

“Let’s see, let me pick one,” Alice deadpanned. “You want the one where you decided to start kissing me, or the one where you decided to risk your life to satiate some low-life’s paranoia?”

“I think we’re all low-lives,” I said. “Don’t be racist; we’re not much higher on the rungs of society than-”

“Don’t deflect,” she growled. “You’re acting weird. I chalked it up to not just whatever the Hells you went through last night, plus us having not seen each other for a few years, but then you decide to offer yourself as collateral to appease some gang’s feelings? Your brother could have just twitched at the wrong time, and your brains would have been all over a fucking wall, Malvia!”

“Followed swiftly by his own,” I replied, forcing my hands to remain still as I shook each vial just a little, watching the mixtures foam ever so slightly. I grabbed a new one halfway through the box. “It wasn’t in Versalicci’s interest to end up dead, so I trusted him not to make that happen-”

Alice’s hand slammed into the wall next to me, the sound like a gunshot. My heart raced as I instinctively drew back, back bumping against it. I almost dropped the vial in my hand before her tail wrapped around it, my hand, my arm, slithering across my skin.

“You are not risking your life like that again, do you hear me?” She said furiously, glaring up at my face.

Heart pounding, it felt like the difference in height was actually reversed. Only one of the half dozen foolish things running through my head as Alice scowled at me. My tail tried to act on another, but my free hand grabbed it before it could latch onto her.

“I…l “I said, nearly stuttering, cheeks flushed. Get ahold of yourself, Malvia. Even if she doesn’t mean you any harm, she wants you like this for a reason. A little physical affection or attention and suddenly I’m unbalanced? No. “I’m going to be risking my life tonight, we all are, and- “

Alice’s anger turned to frustration. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

And like that she was gone, storming out the door, while I tried to get control of my pounding heart.

I gingerly set the vial down. That hadn’t gone as well as it could have. I followed the sound of her stomping up the stairs, Gregory’s startled question about where she was going, and then all the way to the front of my store.

Someone opened my front door, then roughly slammed it shut. Well. Hopefully she’d be back. Two seconds later it opened and closed again, much softer, and from the sound of the footsteps, Gregory had followed her out.

Probably to try to get her back inside. I wished him the best of luck. Or the worst?

I did not need one of the other fuses I had lit burning down.

Mechanically, I worked at checking the alchemicals. It kept my mind off what had happened. Fool of an Infernal, to kiss either of them. Or to try to deny she had a point.

I knew she had one. And it had been foolish, what I had done. But I didn’t intend to die for this.

Just something both of them would dislike equal to that. Something even riskier than that. Something that had been weighing on me ever since the graveyard. Something deserved and owed.