"Beat Still"

Meta time frame: about a week after "I Know It's Crooked".

Told you all I'd be back! And I brought you some... further textification of what was previously subtext. Next chapter will be up in the usual three-weeks-to-a-month. This should be another three-shot, and then there's a couple oneshot projects waiting in the wings. Enjoy!

Massachusetts

Three Years after the Treaty:

It was a soft June night on the New York Stateline, and Worth was working with about half an hour in the worst case scenario before Captain Goodvibes and his loyal undead lieutenant came stomping back in. Worth had woken up that evening to an empty RV, and a note on the kitchen table informing him that Hanna was out getting his marching orders from the council—although how that worked, he wasn't quite sure. Last time he checked, the great omnipotent council of delegation was still in Massachusetts , and they were all the way in New York. But whatever. He was satisfied to know that he had the place to himself for now.

Mostly to himself.

With a shoulder propped against the exit doorway, the doctor observed his ever-so saintly and even-tempered roomie seated on the other side of the tin can they called a home, tucked into the far corner of the booth at the kitchen table. Conrad had a book in his hands. The title was irrelevant as far as Worth was concerned, but it looked like one of those English paperbacks the vampire was always so inexplicably eager to trade for—he must have gone looking for them at some point when they were raiding the library back in Deerfield. The doctor dropped down into the seat on the other side of the table, fingers dancing over the surface in random, quick patterns. He had been pacing, outside the RV, and the early summer air was still clinging to the collar of his shirt.

There was no flinch of acknowledgement from the other side of the table.

Worth made the beginnings of a quickly aborted snatch for the cigarette packet in his pants pocket. It was empty, it had been empty for nearly a week, and there was nothing to be gained from peeling off its battered plastic casing and tearing apart the white cardboard.

"Hey," he said.

Conrad didn't look up, and the doctor scowled.

"Hey," he repeated, grabbing the top of the book between him and the object of his attentions.

Now Conrad looked up.

"What?" the undead man growled. "I'm kind of in the middle of something here."

"Ya wanna fuck?"

There was a trickling, empty minute in which the vampire stared at him with his mouth half open, blinking bright red eyes like a stunned deer. The strip of light in the kitchenette crackled faintly. Worth started up his tapping again with the hand that wasn't clenched around Conrad's book.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Conrad demanded at last, curling up into himself by just a fraction.

Doc Worth let out an irritated breath. "You, me, bedroom. Dicks. Ya wanna fuck?"

Another pause, shorter, and then Conrad had wrenched his book out of Worth's hands and flung it spine-first at the doctor's head, screeching something incomprehensible as he marched out the side door and into the darkness.

The door swung closed behind him.

Worth's tapping fingers came to a stand-still. After considering the grain of the tabletop with deliberate concern for a moment, he leaned over to the wall and unlatched the window.

"Yer loss!" he yelled after the disappearing figure of an irate vampire. "Woulda given ya a reach-around!"

-A-

It ended up taking more than an hour for Hanna to get back, but they were off just about the moment he stepped onto the threshold dragging a sulky Conrad behind him, informing anyone within earshot that they were off to do some old school bounty hunter shit. Blah blah blah, Worth wasn't paying attention. He had other things on his mind.

So the night flashed by hour by hour, and the moon crept up in the rear view mirror, and the RV trundling down the interstate rumbled with stomachs as well as tired mechanical bits. Hanna was in the back, reading side by side with his undead BFF, and Conrad was up front steering them through the usual maze of tree blockades and washed out roads. Worth had fallen into silence a long time before, in the first hour of driving, with his feet up on the dashboard, sorting through the CD case for something that would piss off Conrad for later on in the night. It was a quiet more than a silence, an absence of sound rather than the hard nothingness you got elsewhere, the kind that Hanna calls family quiet time, although Worth wouldn't really know about that with the family he'd had.

Occasionally he wondered about his sister. He'd be better off if he didn't.

They took a turn onto a smaller road, the kind that usually left off with a dead end, but Worth didn't bother to comment on it. Connie had the map out, and in spite of all reasonable logic he hadn't gotten them irreversibly lost yet in three years.

About five miles down that dubious trail, their undead chauffer pulled them over aside the clearly abandoned husk of a massive trailer, covered in moonlit vines and peeling paint. The headlights went out, and Conrad threw his door open.

"What, somebody throw up the bat symbol? Ya runnin' off to yer secret double life already?"

Conrad slammed the door, and a few seconds later Worth got a face full of yellow light as the vampire yanked open the passenger side.

"Just so you know," he announced, "I'm going to look for water. Hanna said we were low a couple hours ago and I think I saw a river on the map, so if you'll just stay put for ten minutes I'll see about refilling the supply and everybody with a working set of organs will be happy again. Unless you want to do it."

"An' deprive ya of one'a those few, shinin' opportunities ya get ter be useful? Wouldn' dream of it."

Conrad rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Not even gonna mess with that. Just keep an eye open, okay? I don't want to come back to find this thing hauled away by some rogue Amish gang."

"Sweetcakes, if a band'a rogue Amish gangbangers come rollin' up to this vehicle, ya can bet they won't be after the car."

"Maybe that's why they're rogue, dickbag."

Worth cocked a brow. "Dickbag? 'S that one new?"

"Yeah, I picked it up at Insults 4 Less. I hope you like it; I got it just for you."

"Ya shouldn'tve."

"I'm generous like that."

And then Conrad closed the door in the doctor's face. Worth blinked at the glass and the new smudge from the end of his nose, and figured he might as well check on Hanna. Various bits and pieces clicked and snapped as he got up—Christ, but he was getting older every day, wasn't he—and he did a couple stupid looking stretches while he could get away with it. Some concessions to health had to be made if you wanted to keep barreling into the kinds of situations they always ended up barreling into, and he'd be damned if he got ditched in the middle of a raid because he threw out his back like somebody's goddamn grandfather.

With one final pop, he made his way out of the cockpit and into the den. Hanna looked up as he pushed through, the dark semi-circles that had loomed under his eyes for the last couple weeks finally lightened to a faint smudge.

"Hey," he said, "where's Connie off to?"

"I 'unno, he gave me some bullshit abou' toppin' off the water jugs. Maybe he's searchin' fer a copy'a Cosmo in the house up there."

"Oh." The redhead turned back down to his book. "I hope he does find water, we could kinda use it."

"Hey." Worth paused with a hand on the table. "Ya think he sneaks off ta squeeze the weasel?"

Hanna scrunched up his nose. "Uh, no idea. That's reaaaaally not something I'm interested in finding out. Ask him if you want."

"I mean, can vamps even pull that off?"

"See, I would never think to ask that question?" Hanna replied. "And you think you're subtle."

Worth reached over the table and knocked the novel up out of Hanna's hands. "I'll show ya subtle, eh?"

While the younger man was muttering and flipping pages, the Doc sailed off towards his destination while avoiding the mass of scavenged books spilling across the floor. It was like living in a nutshell, or a roach motel maybe. Honestly, he couldn't blame Conniekins for ditching the wheel—they weren't headed anywhere on a deadline, as far as he knew, and the place was too stuffed with salvage from Philadelphia for breathing.

Worth settled in on the bed in the back room and stared at the ceiling for a while. The possibility that Conrad actually was out there in the woods jacking off kind of dulled his impulse to get out of the RV himself. As funny as that would be, there was always the possibility Conrad might tear off something that couldn't be reattached. Minutes blurred together in an unmeasured trickle, and Worth figured at some point after the fourth blast of random laughter from Hanna in the kitchen that whatever Conrad was doing, he ought to be done with it by now. Time to go round him up.

The doctor pushed his way out the side door and into the summer night, boots kicking up dust on the dry road. Now, if he were a blushing lady of the court, where would he wander off to in an unfamiliar forest in the middle of the night?

Huh, kind of thought himself into a paradox right there.

Alright, so if he were an irritable fag avoiding his benevolent and completely tolerable company, where would he go?

Ah.

Worth grabbed a spare jug from under the camper and went looking for the river. Figure Connie wouldn't want to come back empty handed after throwing such a hissy fit about his motives, and chances were he'd gotten lost looking for a water source of some kind. It took a while, but eventually he did stumble on a spring tributary running into whatever river was around there, and set about looking for footprints in the mud for lack of clues. No luck. He could do with a bit of rain about then, or rather, he could have done with some rain here a couple hours before. The banks were pristine and bone-dry.

"Oi," he called, "Meriwether Louis, ya down this way?"

The inky water bounced his sound away on the empty channel, and brought back no reply. Worth shoved his hands in his pockets. Nothing for it but to keep walking. He was a little wary of leaving Conrad for too long near running water—it had a nasty habit of leaving the undead man dizzy and disoriented. When they crossed long bridges in the RV, Conrad usually locked his elbows so they wouldn't swerve into a wall. Sometimes he had the Zombie take over for a couple minutes.

"Connie!" he called again, further down the bank, "Conrad Achenleck, ya stubborn idiot, didja fall in already?"

Nothing.

Christ, if he had to go swimming in after that dumbass corpse he was going to be one seriously pissed off camper.

The banks were steep as Jesus-fuck, and these little flashes of potential events were scrabbling for attention at the back of his head. Somewhere along the way—with the nagging feeling he was going to have a hard time finding his way back, too—he stopped and filled up the spare jug at the edge of a bend. A mass of stars glittered up at him like bubbles in black champagne, scattering when he dunked in the plastic container. There was something white floating not too far—

Oh, of course. For fuck's sake.

It was their other gallon jug, and he knew that because he could see the top of the sharpie inscription reading "if found return to Hanna F Cross in the big RV with the Zombie in it". Well, at least he knew Conrad was somewhere around here, and at least he couldn't drown. Couldn't get himself out, but couldn't drown, so.

He rolled his eyes and began a preliminary search. "Gonna hafta start callin' ya Ariel, ain't I Princess?" he asked the air.

The banks were empty—that was too much to hope for, he decided—and there were no cross-eyed spooks stranded in the forest, so that left one option. Probably could have saved himself time if he'd just done this first like he'd figured he was going to have to anyways. Swearing, Worth shucked his shirt and his undershirt and his boots, and his pants too for good measure. Ought to just pull off the boxers too, serve Lady Achenleck right to get his ass saved by a naked bloke. He didn't though, mostly because the water was spring water and thusly cold as icy fuck.

Doc Worth went stomping in.

An indeterminable amount of time later, and despite finally giving in to diving under the surface, Worth had found absolutely nothing. Not an inch of pallid skin, not a corner of floating fabric. The current couldn't have taken Conrad much further along than the jug he'd dropped, and still facts were facts. There was no Conrad.

Worth swore again, this time louder and with a lot more spit. He pulled his shirt on haphazardly and threw the rest of it over an arm, ignoring the rocks and roots that punched up at the soles of his feet on the way back to home base. They were going to have to do the search party thing now, and he was aggravated to high hell already.

Wasn't it usually Hanna who started trouble? One thing you'd always been able to say about Conrad, he never caused trouble. Reported it sometimes, always managed to get involved one way or another, but never started it.

Worth pounded on the RV door. Water was dripping down his neck and it was dripping right over his newly irritated nerves too.

"Whoa," Hanna said, as he popped the door open, "what happened to you?"

The doctor shoved his dry clothes into Hanna's arms and pushed his way inside. "The Lady'a th' Lake fell into a puddle an' drowned himself. I can't find the useless twat anywhere, an' as ya can see by the ocean I'm sheddin' here, when I say anywhere I mean anywhere."

Hanna looked down at the denim and cotton wad he was now holding. "You jumped in the river? Wait, you couldn't find him?"

"Just said that; ya gone deaf on me?"

The zombie caught Worth's arm as he passed by the table, green fingers curling a gentle but firm grip around his damp wrist. Grudgingly, he paused and looked down.

"Doctor," the undead man said, "this is a bit more serious than you seem to think. You clearly weren't paying attention when we were filling in Conrad earlier tonight, but the rogue we're supposed to be hunting down tomorrow is a feral vampire. We don't know where it's hiding right now, but the last sighting was in the Staten Island refugee camp. Considering how territorial even our allies are…"

"Vampires," Hanna moaned, in the background, "you lift up a rock and they come scuttling out."

The doctor yanked his hand back. "You tellin' me ya let Conrad, can't-tell-my-own-dick-from-a-doorknob woe-is-me-I-broke-a-nail Con-fuckin-rad go off inta the forest by hisself when ya knew there was a loose cannon pinballin' around out there waitin' ter go off?"

The magician threw his hands up. "Hey, in the area means anything from the Vermont border to Jersey. Our guy could be anywhere in New England at this point! I'm not saying it's even a likely thing, I mean Conrad probably just got stuck on the other side of the river. But we should, you know, go look for him now. Cause I've seen a territory battle before and woo it ain't pretty. They always go for the eyes first. Then the heart, like slooosh, you know why they have those wicked looking fingers when they go all one-winged angel transformation sequence? It's for poppin' a hole through—"

"Hanna," the zombie interrupted, firmly setting down his book. "Please. You'll only make Worth more… irritable."

"Irritable?" Worth growled. "Who's irritable? I'm just as cheery as a fuckin' cherub over here, bloody well thrilled ter get a chance at playin' seamstress with Connie's corpse. I'm already diggin' out the motherfuckin' eyepatches an' peglegs."

"It's probably nothing," Hanna insisted, hands out, with that awkward smile he always plastered on when he wasn't sure he believed himself. "I mean, the odds of stumbling across them in exactly the same place we just happened to pull over, the one time that Conrad went out alone have gotta be…"

"A million to one?" the undead man suggested.

"Oh," the doctor replied. "Well in that case, we better buy ourselves a fuckin' urn."

-A-

The zombie stood ramrod straight on the bank of the creek, as absolutely still as a tree stump. Now a human, a human would at least tilt a little with their feet that close together. That was the thing about him—even if you took away the glowing eyes and the stitches, and the inexplicable green color, he still set off just about every button in the depths of a human brain that fired up the not-like-us sirens. They'd actually done it before, about a year ago, made him look human for a while. Story for another day. If anything, he'd made people more nervous, not less. Lucky thing it wore off, probably.

In any case, at the moment he was standing on the bank and Doc Worth was really irritated by his absolute lack of movement.

"Think ya might want ter help any time soon?" the doctor demanded, tossing a chunk of cement off a larger pile of rubble. "Not that ya don' make a fine flag pole as it is, but without a flag it ain't doin' us much good, issit?"

"I'm sorry," the dead man replied, glancing briefly downwards. The sand at his feet took on a faint orange tint. "I don't think that I'll be of much use after all."

Worth straightened up his spine and gave the revenant a battery-acid glare. "Yeah? An' why not?"

"This hill is… very steep. To be completely honest, I'm suffering an unexpected form of paralysis brought on by the knowledge that I might lose my balance and fall."

"Lay off him, Worth," Hanna called from across the river. "You know he's afraid of water. Have a heart, kay?"

The zombie looked down again. Worth glanced back and forth between him and the river, suddenly feeling a little bit like he might stop talking for now. Forgot about all that, actually.

"Bet if the ginger moron fell in you'd be flyin' down that hill about now," he muttered, teeth grinding the syllables a bit. And then he went back to searching the sand for some kind of clue.

All together, they found four discarded bras in various states of decomposition, two tires, and a stainless steel pocket knife that looked like it hadn't been out there too long. By the end of it, Worth sat on the bank flipping the knife open and closed as Hanna patiently coaxed his unusually timid partner up the hill with all the diabetes-inducing gentleness of a horse trainer from one of those award-bait movies where the main character literally has no human friends. God damn, he hated those movies. Ought to suggest they buy Tall Green and Nameless a saddle next time they were in town, the way they carried on.

And Worth sat there, flipping his knife, trying not to crawl out of his own skin.

"Okay!" Hanna called down the hill, "so this was kind of a bust! The good news is, there's definitely no sign of a fight and I'm not seeing any, uh, well you know. So he's out there somewhere."

The older man glared up at the pale face peeking over the top of the bank. "Well then, what're we gonna do about it? Cause at th' moment, I'm just sittin' here with my thumbs in my ass waitin' fer ya ter talk the pony down from crazy land."

Hanna's square face blinked at him. "Pony?"

Worth tossed the compacted version of his new pocket knife at the magician's head. "Ferget it."

"Ow, what'd you do that for? Uh, hey this thing is new. And it's got some other guy's initials engraved on it. You steal this? Dude, you know I hate the stealing thing."

"Didn' steal it," Worth bit out. "Found it stuck in the sand over there."

"…And… you didn't think that was relevant?"

The doctor looked up immediately, narrow gaze crashing into Hanna's. His thoughts did leap frogs over each other, racing towards the inevitable conclusion. "Humans?"

"Could be," the redhead replied, tossing the knife back down. "You know how he gets around rivers. It wouldn't be impossible for them."

"Th' fuck would humans want with Count Fagula if it wasn' ter stake 'im?"

"Heck if I know. But I haven't found any ashes and neither have you and it doesn't look like Connie is anywhere along this river, so when you've eliminated the impossible what remains must be the truth, right?"

"God bugger the day yer parents letcha read Sherlock Holmes."

"Um, ew? I think?"

Doc Worth stood, bare feet sinking into the thin, dry layer of sand. His muscles were itching to move. "Awright, so we track down whoever dropped that thing an' shake some answers out of 'em."

"Yeah, okay. Let me get some stuff, we can do a rune track. You know, I'm starting to see the positive side to human kidnappers. At least you can out-magic them."

The older man didn't bother to reply. An owl hooted just over their heads, and he had a sinking feeling that it wasn't going to be anywhere near that easy.

-A-

Even in the sunlight, Hanna's palms glowed the same magenta as the neon sign of a strip club Doc Worth had once frequented, a long time ago. It brought back memories, most of them good.

The man Hanna was attempting to wring information out of didn't seem to be reacting to the glow quite as amicably, because the nervous twitch downward in his gaze was actually preventing him from formulating sentences. Worth kicked his feet up on the porch swing, pouring over the details of the property as Farmer Brown attempted to spit up a coherent phrase. A clothesline fluttered in the breeze, the mass herd of milk cows was doing an annoyingly good job of blocking his appraisal, the bright midday sun left shadows under every tree in the field, and where the river ran through the faded green some hundreds of yards away there was the new wreckage of a small boat.

"Listen, sir," Hanna was saying, still maintaining his patience by some miracle, "we just want to know if they came through here. We're not stopping by, and we're not gonna blow up your house or anything. I promise. Just, which way did they go?"

The farmer stuttered.

Worth gave up and pulled the bill of his stolen hat down over his eyes. "Mebbe we oughter burn it down after all. See how tongue-tied 'e feels about it then."

Hanna scowled at him. "Don't joke about that. He's freaked out enough as it is, and I'm not gonna have a heart attack on my hands if I can help it."

"Says I was jokin'?" the doctor mumbled, mostly just to get the last word in.

Weariness was seeping into his bones along with the northern summer air, and there was a part of him that wanted to just lean his head back and sleep for a while. He was shot on stale adrenaline and frayed nerves, and tired of tramping up and down the blasted river looking for twelve-hour-old clues.

But that was just one part, and the rest of him was as hellbent as ever to be out of this chair and doing something.

Hanna took a step back, across the grayed wooden slats of the porch and into the shadow of his undead babysitter. "Okay," the magician sighed, his hands finding pockets. "It's alright, we'll leave you alone. Sorry for the bother."

The magician stumbled down the steps in a rag-dollish sort of jarring motion, fatigue painfully obvious, with the dead man close on his heels and a hand on his shoulder. Worth extricated himself from the chair and waltzed past the petrified farmer after them, sparing a nasty glare for the useless sack as he passed.

"I have to wonder what he was so afraid of," the zombie mused, as they circled the house. "A normal man isn't stunned to speechlessness by a little dayglow skin."

"Post traumatic stress?" Hanna offered, thoughtful. "Maybe?"

"I've never studied psychology," Greeny admitted. "I wouldn't know the symptoms."

There might have been more speculation, except that at that moment Doc Worth spied a miniature face blinking up at them from the bush under the western window. He elbowed Hanna in the ribs.

"Ow, dude, what?"

The doctor jerked a thumb over at the shadow with the pair of wide, blinking eyes. "Looks like Farmer Brown ain't holed up in here alone."

The immediate lighting up—ten thousand gigawatt smile flips on—across all of Hanna's features had Worth rolling his eyes. Figures somebody has to like kids, and Hanna was about one party hat away from being a five year old himself. It bears considering, too, that they still need a tip-off and if there's one thing Hanna can do it's communicate.

With everything that doesn't have tits.

"Hey, um," Hanna paused, "little boy?"

The kid made a face like a particularly grotesque latex Halloween mask. "I'm a girl."

Hanna winced, and Worth pinched the bridge of his nose. Right. Never mind tits, apparently anything female was a lost cause. He should have known as much.

"Right," the magician replied, palming the back of his neck. "Sorry, you're kinda in the dark and your hair is really short and… uh, sorry. We were just wondering if you could help us out maybe?"

The girl sniffed, stuffing tiny hands into her overalls. "I don't talk to strangers. Go talk to my dad."

The three of them shared a look. "Well, we tried that," Hanna admitted, uncomfortably, "but he couldn't really help us, yanno? And maybe you can't either, but maybe you can. It'll just take a second."

After a short pause in which Hanna looked hopeful and the dead guy looked stoic and Worth looked suspiciously at the shadowy enclave underneath the foundations of the house, the kid let out a massively put-upon sigh and sat down in the dust and the grass.

"Okay," she said, "but I'm supposed to be weeding the garden right now."

"Excellent!" the redheaded man cried, flopping down into the dirt beside her immediately. "Kay so, we're trying to find our friend who totally disappeared into like thin air last night, and the only clue we've got is this knife that Worth picked up—this is Doc Worth by the way, yeah, I know, he doesn't smile much. Unless other people are miserable. Anyhow!"

Hanna threw up a hand and the dead man obligingly slipped the pocket knife into his still-glowing palm.

"The thing is," the magician went on, flipping open the knife for inspection, "whoever it belongs to has some sort of scrambler spell on them. It keeps pushing us off course every time we get close, like it's leading us down side streets in the hopes we'll get lost and give up. It's not particularly sophisticated, I'd explain but I figure you're, oh, ten? Nine? And you probably don't care. I will if you want me to, though! No? Okay. The point is, knife's owner was here at some point, but not recently. Maybe a couple weeks ago? So—"

"It's my brother's."

Hanna blinked at her, mouth open in mid-word. "Really?" he asked. "That's… does your brother live here?"

"Yeah," the girl answered—and then paused. She directed a contemplative stare at an ant crawling past her leg. "Well, nobody's seen him in, like, a week or something. Delany says he ditched us, 'cause he's been talking about going south to Staten Island. He's a teenager you know," she informed them seriously. "They do that kinda stuff."

"Anythin' we know about in Staten?" Worth mused, still hanging back. "Delicatessen black market? Zoo? Hostage trade? …Prozzy ring?"

Hanna shot an annoyed look over his shoulder. "Those are all stupid and you know it. Besides, who the heck would sell Conrad to a prostitution ring? They'd all get their unmentionables bitten off." He turned back to the kid. "So, your brother left a week ago. Okay. Did he say anything to you before he left?"

"No."

"Seriously? Nothing?"

"Nope."

Hanna's head clunked into his folded knees. "Damn. I guess the trail goes cold here. At least we know we're in the right area… maybe we go on to Staten after all. Thanks for the help, uh, what's your name?"

"Max." The kid looked at Hanna, all black circles and frizzy, disheveled curls and seeping disappointment. And she bit her lip. "Hey, you're leaving right?"

Hanna looked up, vaguely. "Oh yeah," he replied, "we'll be out of your hair as soon as I can get my legs working. I've been walking all morning and I'm kinda tired."

"No," she pushed, "I mean, when you leave, you're gonna go away immediately? You're not gonna talk to my dad?"

"…No? I mean, no. Wasn't planning on it."

"Okay. Well, this is pretty much top secret," she informed them, eyeing the window above her nervously, "but as long as you're leaving I think it's safe to tell you. The day Jimmy left, a bunch of his friends came over. Like, all of them. They didn't say anything to me—they never do—but his friends were saying that his girlfriend wanted him and he had to go. I didn't even know he had a girlfriend until a couple nights before that and he never talks about her, I don't think anybody knew. So Jimmy was gonna go, but Dad said he had to stay and then they all got into this fight with Dad and… I don't know what happened because I was in my room, but whatever it was it totally freaked my dad out. I came out after they left and he was all quiet and stare-y."

Running a hand through the thin grass, Hanna considered that for a moment. "Do you know anything about this girlfriend?"

The kid bit her lip. "I followed him out to the river and he was meeting with his girlfriend, once. I wasn't supposed to—I'm not supposed to leave the house, but I really wanted to know. And his girlfriend was… she was really pretty, kinda short, but I think she was a witch."

Hanna frowned, surprised. "A witch? Really?"

The kid shrugged. "She did this glowy thing… like that, like your hand. Kinda. And she made my skin crawl. And she did this poof thing and then she was gone, like the wicked witch of the west."

Looking up at the zombie looming over him, the magician murmured, "maybe a sorceress, can't be a rune-mage or I'd feel it in the second we stepped into the area, and witches don't have poofing powers. What do you think?"

Whatshisface contemplated the question for a moment. "Do we even genuinely know that it's female?"

The girl screwed up her face. "My brother doesn't kiss boys."

Hanna glanced back at her and shrugged. "I'll take that for now. The real question is, what does a sorceress want with Conrad? Could be a live sacrifice thing, I've heard some rumors, but the whole thing is just kinda weirdly opportunistic—I mean, nobody noticed anyone tailing us and we just left official Council territory and you know how hard it is to get hostile parties onto neutral land…"

"Unless it really is a vamp," Worth noted. "Could'a been doin' a batman with the poofing."

"Vampires can't do magic," Hanna replied, patting down his pockets for something. "They're basically animated by nothing but magic and bad attitude. If you tried to get a vampire to cast a spell they'd just short out like a blown fuse. Same reason you can't track them with magic. It's like shining a flashlight into a funhouse full of mirrors."

"Um," the girl said, "can I go now?"

The three men glanced down at her.

"Oh, yeah," Hanna replied, flashing one of his brilliantly grateful smiles. "Just one last thing. Was there somewhere you brother and his friends used to hang out? Boy's club of some kind?"

"No."

"Somewhere he used to stay a lot?"

Max tapped the ground, raising tiny clouds of dust. "They all used to go out to Jeremiah's house whenever Daniel got in a fight with his dad. Jeremiah's parents both died during the 'demic and they've got this huge house in Arkham."

"An hour from here," the zombie filled in, without prompting. "If we take the interstate we could cut that down by half, but…"

"Bandits," Hanna agreed. "Right. Well, thank you so much Max, you've been a whole mess of help and if there's ever anything you need help with… maybe a pesky ghost, or a local skirmish even…"

Hanna fished a coin out of his pocket, a silver dollar with a hole punched through the center. It glittered in the sunlight, a faint blue sheen glimmering oddly around the ridges.

"Take this, and we'll find you. It's got a wish upon a star charm on it. If you need us, we'll be there."

The girl blinked at him, dusty freckles and nervous fidget, and then she nabbed the coin and scurried off under the bushes, headed god only knew where. Kids usually had something in mind when they dashed off like that.

"Since when've ya got those?" Worth demanded, extracting a toothpick from the tiktak case he'd shoved full of them. "Fancy bit of magic ta be passin' around like a cold."

Hanna stood up, joints popping loudly. "I thought it would be nice if we could be where people need us when they needed us. Rush to the rescue and stuff, like proper heroes."

"Sure, sure," Worth muttered. "Make us the fuckin' A-Team, why doncha."

But Hanna was already halfway off the property line, racing through grass knee high and yellow in the sun—in khaki shorts and a bright orange t-shirt, he looked for all the world like man-shaped forest fire rushing over the field. Worth shared a look with the dead man beside him.

"Come on Doc," the redhead shouted, "Ludwig, you too! We got a mansion to investigate!"

The doctor rolled his eyes and called back, "Comin' Hannibal, don't get yer pannies in a twist!"

-TBC