Well, readers, I'm starting out that M rating with a bang - this chapter might be a bit gruesome, so beware.

On the bright side, it is a chapter, and it is online, so that's a step in the right direction. I've had to stomp on my inner editor a bit, but in the long run, I think I'll be more motivated if I get these chapters up as I write - at least it's some form of writing accountability. I may be popping back to edit chapters here and there, but if I make any major edits that affect the plot/characters, I'll try to make a note of it when a new chapter goes up so that you can check back for what was updated. A big thanks to those who took the time to read, review, or follow the story - I hope you enjoy this next chapter.


Morning dawned cold but clear over London. The mayhem of millions of people normally hidden beneath a curtain of smog was open to view, and Inspector Julian Griggs cursed his luck as he watched his constables try to covertly go about their business. He turned to Constable O'Brien.

"Still no word from the detective?"

"No, sir, no reply given when our message was delivered last night and we've not heard a thing since."

Griggs swore quietly. "Send another."


Madame Vastra was nursing her third cup of tea when the messenger from Inspector Griggs arrived on her doorstep. She took the note and tried to shoo the boy off, but he refused to budge, so she left him shivering on the stoop while she retreated indoors to read the missive. It was short and to the point - rather like the inspector himself.

"St. James Park. Descretion required. Come immediately."

Vastra sighed. The air had a sharp edge to it that signaled an impending frost, and she wasn't looking forward to leaving the sanctuary of her drawing room and its oversized fireplace. She had ignored Griggs' note the evening before; she was somewhat nocturnal by nature, but no amount of criminal intrigue could have lured her out into the mix of freezing rain and biting wind that had plagued the city.

However, a second summons so soon on the heels of the first could only mean that Griggs genuinely did need help. He was a difficult man, but a good inspector and not given to exaggeration. She scribbled a brief note indicating she would arrive shortly and returned to the front door, pressing both the note and a hot scone into the delivery boy's hands. He stuttered out a thank you through chattering teeth and dashed off.

Returning to the drawing room, Vastra hesitated before deciding there was time to finish her last cup of tea. While she still resisted many of the human conventions she found herself surrounded by, the tea drinking had grown on her. There was something soothing about sipping the hot liquid, and the warmth helped fortify her cold-blooded constitution against London's less-than-tropical climate.

The tea finished, she reluctantly rose and began donning her warmest outerwear. After a year in London, she had a fatalistic acceptance of the cold, but Vastra still had to dress carefully in order to avoid sending her system into shock. She finished off the ensemble with a hat and veil designed to hide her from excitable human observers.

The bells of St. Paul's Cathedral and the dull roar of bargaining voices from shoppers and storekeepers alike formed a continuous background as Vastra strolled down Paternoster Row in search of a cab. She huffed in frustration as three of them sped past with no signs of stopping. The veil on her hat was actually a present from the Doctor, modified with a slight perception filter to avert curious eyes, but on days like today, Vastra half suspected the filter was doing its job too well and preventing cab drivers from actually seeing her at all.

She finally managed to hail a cab and was soon en route to St. James Park, absently watching the pedestrians as she contemplated what sort of crime had Inspector Griggs so concerned. She was even more surprised to alight in the Park and see little evidence of a police presence. A lone constable waited on the street.

"Madame," he said quietly. "If you'll follow me, the inspector is just inside. I've got to warn you, ma'am ..." He hesitated.

"The scene is gruesome?"

"Yes, ma'am. Fortunately the cold kept the smell down, but, well ... I know you're not the type to swoon, but best brace yourself."

Vastra inclined her head and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It was hardly the bobby's fault that his concern was misplaced. He'd be the one swooning if I removed my veil. She was still smiling slightly to herself over that thought when she was led to Lord Edwin Burrows' townhouse. A high profile murder, indeed.

The smell of death might have been reduced for the humans due to the freeze, but it hit Vastra's heightened senses like a slap in the face when she stepped into the foyer. Several constables milled about, generally looking useless and getting in the way, and she could hear Inspector Griggs shouting from further into the house.

"I don't care what the damn morgue people tell you. You arrest 'em and bring 'em here in cuffs if you have to! These bodies have to be cleaned up before we move them. I won't have the broadsheets getting wind of this!"

Vastra heard a mumbled response, and then the door to the sitting room flew open with such force that it knocked a dent in the hall's paneling. Griggs stormed out but pulled up abruptly when Vastra cleared her throat.

"Ah, Detective. You're here, finally. Come with me. Body's this way. Mostly." Griggs set off down the hall, constables hastily clearing a path. Vastra followed in his wake. The smell of decay grew stronger as they neared the back of the main hall and the door to the servant's passageway.

The inspector spoke over his shoulder as he led the way through the kitchen. "Had a summons from Duke Poyntz yesterday evening. Seems they were to accompany Lord Edwin Burrows to some affair at Hyde Park, but he never showed. When they didn't hear from him the next day, His Grace became concerned and sent a man around. Upon receiving no response at the house, they sent a message to the Yard asking us to investigate. Some constables forced entry last night and found ... well, a massacre."

Griggs opened a door at the rear of the kitchen. "Leads down to the meat cellar." He glanced at Vastra's long skirts. "Careful of the stairs."

Not for the first time, Vastra found herself mentally cursing the absurd human fashions of the day as she tried to navigate the steep cellar stairs. A young constable offered a steadying hand and she took it reluctantly, resenting the show of weakness but sensible enough to realize that her heeled boots were no match for the climb. She glared at the men's sturdy work boots, but when she reached the cellar floor all thoughts of footwear were wiped from her mind.

The body of Lord Edwin Burrows was spread-eagled on the floor. The hands were held extended with large railroad spikes driven through the wrists; the right leg was a tangle of bloody flesh and protruding bone, while the left was missing altogether from the knee down, the stump charred and blackened. Fingers were ripped from both hands. The large pool of blood under the corpse matched the hundreds of small and not so small cuts across the body, and a random pile of severed ears magnified the horror.

Vastra held her breath to prevent being overwhelmed by the decay and leaned closer to study the face. Lord Edwin's mouth was open in a never-ending scream of anguish, and she could see bloody gaps where several teeth had been removed. The nose was smashed, the ears slit, and she imagined the eyes would have been bulging if they hadn't already been scooped from the skull. The man would obviously have died in short order from massive trauma, but the slit throat and gaping hole over his heart seemed to indicate that his torturers had finished with him first.

Stepping away from the corpse, Vastra finally allowed herself to inhale. She frowned and took another breath, flicking her tongue out briefly. A strange scent teased the air beneath the blood, but she couldn't quite place it. Something to track down later.

"You found him last night. Have you any idea when he was killed?" Vastra asked.

"He was at Westminster on Monday for a vote, so sometime between then and Wednesday when he missed his outing with the Duke," Griggs said.

"Was the leg removed as part of this torture, or had that been done already?"

Constable O'Brien, Griggs' frequent shadow, cleared his throat. "We don't know. However, Lord Burrows was in the Navy during the wars, and we've been unable to find the missing leg. The other, er, pieces are in the study."

"There are at least three different sets of boot prints," Griggs said. "Couldn't find the knife they used, and with the household staff dead, we had no way of knowing if they took it from the kitchen or brought it in. No witnesses around ..."

The inspector trailed off as Vastra waved him into silence. She closed her eyes for a moment. Tasted the air again. Four men. Griggs was almost right. With the unique scents firmly settled in her mind, Vastra resumed her study of the body.

The slices appeared to have been done by a thin, sharp edge, likely the same one that slit Lord Edwin's throat, but as Vastra studied the torso, she became convinced that something much more clumsy had been used to punch the gaping hole in the corpse's chest. The blood had dried nearly black, coating the edges of the wound and standing up in an odd pattern. Wait, what? Vastra bent down and let out a small noise of surprise as she realized that what she had taken for more blood was in fact a black feather mashed into the wound.

"Hold on, what's that?" Griggs protested as she tugged at the feather.

"Fetch some water, and perhaps a pair of tongs," she said.

A judicious application of water to soften the blood allowed Vastra to pull the feather free. She held it carefully in a gloved hand. Even broken it's an excellent size. Raven, perhaps? Griggs scowled, though whether it was due to the complication of the evidence or because his constables had missed the feather, Vastra couldn't say.

"Anything else down here you need to see?"

"Are we on a time table, Inspector?"

Griggs' scowl deepened. "Aye, we need to wrap this up before it gets out. Murdered peers make the department look bad and get the good citizens in a panic. We'd have had a bit more time if you'd come when I first let you know," he added under his breath.

Vastra raised a brow at him, which was wasted behind the veil, and let the room stew for several moments. Griggs fidgeted with the baton on his belt. She felt he needed these little reminders every so often that she wasn't one of his constables, available at his beck and call.

When she decided she'd let the silence drag on long enough, Vastra scanned the room for anything else immediately relevant. Bloody footprints showed where the murderers had walked about, including one that appeared to leave and return to the cellar several times. Something about the footprints nudged at Vastra's mind, but she couldn't yet say what.

A hard stare, a moment of focus, and the room was committed to her eidetic memory for future study. She turned back to Griggs. "Let us proceed to the other victims."

As they passed through the kitchen, Vastra eyed the cabinets and shelves. Neat, orderly, everything in its proper place, including good silver and fine china. An experimental sniff told her that the murderers had not lingered in this room. So, not garden-variety thieves, though that was hardly likely given the torture.

The upstairs drawing room revealed a line of bodies laid out like a slaughterhouse floor, throats cut and ears missing.

"Reckon they weren't all killed at once," Griggs offered.

Vastra nodded. "Killed off one by one, perhaps in a further attempt to torture Burrows, with the severed body parts taken back downstairs as proof."

Whoever these killers were, Vastra realized, they were experts at suffering, both physical and psychological. The level of ferocity suggested both a desire for information and a desire for revenge.

"Whatever Lord Burrows had," Griggs said, putting emphasis on the title, "he must have wanted to keep it almost as badly as they wanted to take it."

"Or, he no longer had it and they didn't believe him." Vastra frowned at the bodies. "I suppose these are all the household servants?"

"All the ones we know about. Not really anybody to ask about who might be missing."

Vastra took another mental snapshot of the room. "Very well, Inspector. Let's view the office. Perhaps it has more to tell us."

Bloody footprints lead across the Oriental rug to a desk piled with what Vastra could tell at a sniff were the missing pieces of Lord Edwin Burrows. A few desk drawers stood open, and a picture had been knocked off the wall, but the room showed a remarkable lack of ransacking. A small safe was built into a wall, but Vastra could see no signs of scratches or other attempts to force it open, and the scents in the room told her the intruders had not lingered at the safe.

"Impossible to tell what if anything's missing without anyone to ask, of course."

Whatever the murderers were after was large, some sort of physical object, Vastra surmised. No attempts to check the safe or other small hiding places. She beckoned Griggs to follow and began a walk-through of the house, watching for spots clear of dust or other signs that something had been removed from the house. Scent told her that the intruders had explored thoroughly, but she saw no signs that they had found what they were looking for.

A loud crash sent them running back to the front hall, where a constable stammered an apology as he tried to sweep up the remains of a shattered vase he'd knocked off the table. Vastra surreptitiously pocketed a piece of ceramic. She was no expert on real artifacts and forgeries, but there were many people who specialized in such work. A few ideas about the killings were beginning to form in the back of her mind. I need to be alone to think things over.

"Well, Inspector Griggs, I think I have learned enough for the time being. I have some other inquiries to make, and I shall of course wish to speak with Poyntz, as well as any relations of Burrows."

Griggs looked pained, but gestured to O'Brien. "Send a message to His Grace requesting a meeting." O'Brien nodded and slipped out, and Griggs turned back to Vastra.

"What can you tell us?"

"Nothing yet, Inspector. I must evaluate the facts of the case. All in due time. I shall be in contact soon."

Ignoring the unintelligible muttering from Griggs, Vastra took a last long look around the townhouse and made her way back to the street. A constable offered to summon a cab for her, but despite the cold air, she declined. It was a rare clear day, and a walk in the sun would do her good. Besides, she had found that a rattling carriage was not conducive to clear thinking.

She was still mulling over several unsatisfactory gaps in the evidence when she arrived back on Paternoster Row. Her distraction dropped away as she opened the door and immediately realized that she was not alone. The strong smell of pipe tobacco permeated the air and prevented her from getting a fix on what kind of intruder waited for her.

Claws and tongue at the ready, she stalked quietly through the house before pausing at the door to her study. Flinging the door open, she jumped in, ready to attack, only to stop short.

"I know, I know, pipe smoking, not really my thing. But I had to get the drop on you somehow." The young man sitting at her desk ran a hand through his spiky brown hair and grinned at her.

"Doctor!"