The storm over Toulouse was worsening. Blue and purple hued lightening split the sky in a symphony of thunder. Sagacia looked out of the window of Le Café des Artistes towards Le Pont Neuf that loomed over the rising Garonne river and flipped up the collar of her threadbare brown oilskin duster. She hated the rain, and the cold.

"People shouldn't die at a time like this, " she said taking a deep breath as she stepped out into the downpour. The nearest metro stop was Esquirol, she couldn't risk apparating in this storm, besides she would need the will. Regardless, with all the ambient electricity bouncing around even she might splinch. From there she could make it to the stop just outside the Lycée des Arènes.

Sagacia was beginning to hate this arrangement. She didn't like flics as a general rule, she disliked them even more than the average muggles. But Fleur was her god-daughter as Sagacia had gone to school with her mother Apolline. They had been best friends at Beauxbatons and she had begged Sagacia to help Renault Delacour just this once. Sagacia didn't like muggles knowing too much about la sorcellerie, much less that she was une sorcière.

The rain came down in near horizontal sheets. This was going to be a long day.

"What do I care if someone killed a bunch of muggles, " she said aloud as she shook her head from side to side and climbed down the steps to the metro stop.

It was another short walk in the rain, from the stop Arènes to the Lycée.

A few portly gendarmes were standing guard at the entrance. She walked right past them and through the entrance. The slamming of the front doors caught their attention and they stared at it bewildered. She didn't want to be seen, and she didn't want to spend 10 minutes arguing with them that she was invited to be there, and have them have to call the person in charge and more talking. Muggles. Lots of talking.

Another murder. A mass murder.

Sagacia looked around the massive entrance hall, to the lonely plain clothes man standing in the center, she cleared her throat.

"Es-tu Sagacia?, " the man asked.

"Vous pouvez me tutoyer, si vous voulez moldus, " she responded, which roughly means "don't speak to me like you know me, muggle, " but loses something in the translation. She was here because the boss of his boss's colleague told the biggest boss that she was essential. French muggles love the pecking order, but Sagacia didn't fit in that order. She was just, une specialiste. Perhaps he wanted to establish himself as her equal with hopes of being her superior, which almost made her throw up a little in the back of her throat.

Captain Jean Duprix didn't bat an eyelash at the response, he only smiled genially. To him, she must have appeared to be little more than a feisty woman with a chip on her shoulder. She was probably some femen academic type with a degree in psychology who spent her time obsessing over serial killers and listening to jazz records; or so he might have said to himself. She looked the type. Short and thin with straight black hair and dark eye makeup. At 44kg on a 1.5m frame, Sagacia did not have what one would call an imposing presence. Unless you were a witch or wizard, then you knew who she was, and you wanted to be somewhere else.

Sagacia eyed Jean Duprix for a moment. He was the normal muggle military type, he had probably played rugby as a youth, but had let himself go and was a bit soft around the middle. Married. For longer than ten years and probably had a child, no definitely a child. His wife was blond, pretty, but they were growing apart. Sagacia ticked off all the facts in her head. His build said sports, not football, so rugby. His ring finger had a deep depression from wearing a tight wedding band, but he had taken it off. And his tie was too well coordinated. The rest was fairly easy to figure out. She smelled two perfumes on him, one was cheap, his wife, the other expensive, his mistress.

Sagacia slipped into his mind with legillimancy to confirm her read. She liked to do it the old fashioned way, to stay sharp. Wife and kid, check. Mistress, check. But no blond.

"Merde," she said aloud, as she walked toward the crime scene. It was just like the previous one, five bodies, all girls under the age of seventeen, arranged in a pentagram, each body posed within its large points. The Gendarmes thought it was Satanists. Renault was convinced it had something to do with the wizarding world. No matter how many times he had been told that pentagrams were meaningless to wizards, (something cooked up by wannabe muggles), he still begged. Apolline begged. Fleur asked. She couldn't say no to Fleur or Gabrielle, or at least she didn't want to. She spoiled her god-daughters rotten.

The victims were pretty, mostly blonds and brunettes. A few dye jobs, petite. Each had been garroted from behind. The killer was most probably male, average height and strength. He left few traces. There were no traces of semen, or saliva, and all of them had were pucelles. Each one had been put in a freezer, for at least a month in some instances.

Sagacia took out her wand, 30cm Brazillian Rosewood with a Thestral hair core, and bent down over one of the girls, with her left hand she forced open one of the victims' left eye and touched the wand tip gently to the cornea. "Theiza mou te stigme," she whispered. Nothing happened.

"Odd," she said.

"What is?" asked Duprix.

Sagacia walked to the next, but it was the same. Nothing. None of them would show what they had seen the moment of their deaths. The last group had. They had seen a wall, a dark wall and light shining through it. The walls were wooden, like those you'd find in a shack, and the light seemed to move as if from the headlights of a moving car.

Sagacia paced around the bodies for several minutes, slapping the tip of her wand against her forehead, her eyes closed.

"We could have sent a car to pick you up," said Duprix, still more familiar than she liked.

"I hate the rain, and the cold," she said. "But this is wrong, it's all wrong. Who found the bodies?"

"Janitor, about 2 hours ago, we've kept him in that room across the hall," said Duprix gesturing with his head, his hands reaching for a small pad.

"Jacques Compostelle, forty-seven years old, widowed, no children. He's worked here for three years, clean record," he finished.

"Has anyone but you talked to him?" Sagacia asked.

"Not that I am aware of. The responding officer, gendarme Franc Louis. But he's the sensible sort. Rang it up straight away and secured the area," he said. "We've been waiting for another one since Paris."

"Get on your knees," she said.

Duprix looked around for a second, "excuse me?" he said.

Sagacia flicked her wand and his knees buckled as she approached him, her wand pointing at his face.

"Legilimens," she said and entered his mind.

All the details were there, the testimony of Compostelle, Louis' report. The old man seemed shaken, tearful, but not guilty.

Sagacia leaned in closer. "The girls?"

His thoughts flipped through her mind like a slide show. Two local, the rest unknown, possibly not even French like the last group which had two Spanish and one Bulgarian. Pictures sent out for ID, could take days or weeks. Sagacia eased back out.

"What are you doing, " Duprix asked, "and why am I on my knees?"

"You're about what, 1.90m, I'm too short to look you in the eye, " she said. "I need to go."

Sagacia stormed off towards the exit, and Duprix chased after her.

"Don't you want to see Compostelle?" he asked.

"No," she replied as she pushed out the door.

"At least let me give you a ride; it's still storming," he pleaded.

"I hate the rain, and the cold, " she repeated.

"Then don't go out in it. Come on, I'll give you a ride back to the station. The Commandant wants to speak with you anyway, then I can drop you off anywhere you want, " he offered.

"I need the will, " she replied taking another look out at the storm. It was just as bad as it had been when she had left the Cafe des Artistes, "and I am not ready to speak with him. I left my coffee at the café half finished. I don't like leaving things half finished."

With a whirl she was out the door and gone into the rain.

"She's mad, " said Duprix shaking his head, "stark raving mad."

Her cup was still there on the table of the booth furthest from the door. No one touched her cup. Phillipe wouldn't dare. Once he had left the cup there for an entire week, and just put a big bowl over it to keep the smell down. No one sat in the booth. Sagacia had cursed it years before. Phillipe had secretly tried to get it uncursed, but to no avail. Half the wizards in France wouldn't do it because they didn't want to cross Sagacia, the other half didn't because they couldn't. Sagacia's curses tended to stick, and she was the only one who could undue them.

She sat down and sipped the café élongé with cream and sugar. It was ice cold. Sagacia was a compulsive. Not in the usual way, mind you, she didn't fear stepping on cracks, and didn't count stairs, but she had little quirks, like finishing things. She couldn't leave something undone. Shoelaces or buttons, food, drinks, and work, all of them had to be finished in good order. She was obsessed with order, equality, symmetry.

"It's all wrong, " she said aloud to no one in particular.

It was all wrong. They couldn't have seen nothing, that's not possible, even the black of a hood would have been something. This changed everything. It was a message. The message screamed loud and clear.

"I know about you. And I know what you can do."

But there was something even more to the message.

It said, "I am stronger than you."

It's possible to block the spell in two ways. Both require powerful magic. The first way is simply by removing the person's mind before killing them. No mind, no memory. The second way is to suck the memories out, which is powerful Animancy.

"Two ways, " she said, "two ways."

Sagacia started to rock back and forth, faster and faster.

"Only two ways," she repeated.

She stopped.

"Three ways. I don't like three," she said shaking her head as she started rocking back and forth again. "No, three is always bad. Three times two is six, six is even. Six times two is twelve, twelve is even. Twelve times two is twenty-four, twenty-four is even. Two is even and four is even. I like twenty-four. But three times eight is twenty-four. I don't like three."

Suddenly she stopped rocking.

The storm was breaking, the sun muscled its way through the clouds. Sagacia liked the sun even less than she liked the rain. She began to fold in on herself, and with a pop, she disappeared and a two euro piece clanked onto the table. The price of a coffee was 1.30. She hated 1, and she hated 3. She always paid in increments of 2, 4, 6, or 8.

Eight is a perfect number. Like infinity.