Author's Note: Hellooo there! It's been a while. I'd like to thank everyone for the great feedback! A review recently brought it to my attention that the value of Fiore's currency in my story is a bit low; I was using the American dollar instead of the Japanese Yen, which is what Mashima intended. Therefore, I've gone back and updated the job request's reward. That is all. :)

Chapter Three

"So this is it?"

Gray's question flopped face-first in the grass as the six of them stood in a straight line, looking out into the pasture beyond the gray little cottage under a maple tree. They'd been standing that way in silence for a good minute, after Elfman had just stopped walking.

"Yeah," the man in question grumbled. "This is it."

Erza put a gauntleted hand on Elfman's arm. "Walk us through what happened again."

So he did, his voice slow and monotone as he walked them down to the pasture where he'd been attacked, showed them where Lisanna had stood, brought them to where he'd found her body. He stared at the whitewash door of the cottage as he finished up. There was a big blood smear across its surface.

"We'll divide up the tasks," Erza said once he was finished. "Natsu and Happy, you two walk around the pasture where Lisanna was. Try and figure out what she was crouching to look at before the attack. Elfman and I will try to hunt down the sheep and see what's in the farther pasture near the tree line. Gray and Lucy, you two inspect the cottage."

They split. Elfman and Erza jogged their way toward the tree line. Natsu and Happy scrambled down the hill toward the spot where Elfman fought the cloaked men. Gray and Lucy stared at the bloody entrance to the cottage, apprehensive.

"You go first," said Lucy.

"Why me?"

"Because what Elfman described was pretty disgusting, and I'm a lady."

Gray ran his eyes up and down Lucy's revealing outfit. "You don't exactly dress like a lady, do you?"

"You're one to talk. Just open the door."

He scoffed, but obeyed, then reeled back as soon as the first wave of heat from inside hit his face, coughing with his sleeve over his mouth. Lucy gagged and covered her own mouth and nose, looking incredulously at the door. "What is that smell?"

Gray tentatively kicked the door open further, grimacing at what he saw inside. "Elfman wasn't exaggerating," he said, voice nasally as he plugged his nose against the stench. Flies swarmed around the carcasses of animals hanging from the ceiling, giving off the horrendous odor. Some of them were still a gray-pink; two or three were literally rotted, green and black. Gray gathered his courage and stepped through the threshold, eyes watering at the smell. There was blood splattered all on the floor, and little tuffs of pink wool. "Found the missing sheep," he proclaimed.

"Aries would cry," Lucy remarked, joining him inside the detestable little house. In the center of the room was a rickety wooden table that was also dyed red, piled high with cruel blades and thick needles and instruments of torture they couldn't even name. Shelves lined the walls, filled with heavy leather-bound books, bottles of warped glass, jars full of eyes and wispy black spirits and liquids and powders of every color and consistency. Gray opened a book and winced at the diagrams inside, bodies cut open neatly numbered and illustrated in dull black ink. He closed it again and set it on the shelf.

"We should get this back to Levy and Bixlow," he decided, looking around. "Let's see what they can make of it."

"How can we take all of this?" Lucy inquired, peering cautiously into a bottle with some sort of worm suspended in yellow jelly. "I don't know if we can even touch some of this stuff."

Gray sighed. "We'll take the books, they're probably important. We can probably manage to take some of the…devices. Whatever's in these jars, we'll catalogue and bring to them. Anything we don't recognize will go in a bag."

"That's a lot of jars," Lucy said wearily, shuddering when one round eye seemed to focus on her from the other side of the glass.

"We'd better get started."

When Lucy turned around, Gray was slipping his shirt over his head. "Hey!" she cried, grabbing the fabric and pulling it back over his chest. "You don't want to disrobe in here! There's no telling what kind of fluids you'll get all over you!"

"Damn, you're right."

Lucy shook her head and pulled a pen and paper from her bag. "You get started on putting stuff in the bags. I'll summon Loke and he'll help me catalogue."

"Yeah, did you tell Loke about this yet?"

"Mmhmm, told him as soon as I found out. He was pretty shocked about it, said he wanted to help in any way he could." Lucy pulled the key from the key ring on her belt. "Open, the Gate of the Lion! Leo!"

Loke appeared in a bright flash of light. He staggered when the stench of the cottage hit him and he saw the carcasses hanging from the ceiling. "What the hell—?"

"We're in the place where Lisanna's soul was taken," Gray explained. He handed Loke a bag. "We need your help. Start putting books and those things on the table in here. Lucy and I are cataloguing what's on the shelves."

Lucy shot the exhibitionist a dirty look before handing him a legal pad and pen, irritated that he'd take advantage of her Spirit's obliviousness, but knowing full well she'd do the same if their roles were reversed. No one wanted to touch the bloody weapons on the table, or the dark manuscripts.

Loke took the bag, still absorbed in the scene around him. "This was where it all went down? This place is…beyond belief. I've never seen anything like it."

"It's disturbing," Lucy agreed.

"Poor Elfman. He had to pull his sister out of this mess."

"Poor Lisanna," Lucy said. She didn't elaborate.

They began cataloguing while Loke gingerly collected paraphernalia, wrinkling his nose at it distastefully. They hadn't gotten very far when Natsu poked his head inside the cottage, scarf wrapped around his sensitive Dragonslayer nose to protect it from the rank decomposition.

"Hey, guys," he called, "you might wanna come look at this."

The three of them followed him outside, grateful for the fresh air. Natsu walked them down to the center of the pasture, where Happy, Elfman, and Erza were standing.

"We couldn't find any sheep," Erza told them, hands planted firmly on her hips. "Either they fled from all the commotion, or the cloaked people came back for them."

"There were only eight carcasses in the cottage," Gray said.

"That's how many were missing according to that bastard Lowell," Elfman rumbled. "The other five must have gotten away."

"Happy and I found something, though," Natsu put in, pulling the scarf off of his face. He pointed a circle in the grass, about the circumference of a hula-hoop, everything inside it dead. There was a ring of black ash on the outside. "These are scattered through the pasture. There are thirteen of them."

"That's where all the people appeared from," Elfman said.

"Yeah, but that's not the weird part," said Natsu.

"I flew up to get a better view of them," Happy explained, "and I saw that they form a perfect circle around the cottage."

"What?" everyone cried, surprised.

Happy nodded. "I think whoever planned this knew what was going to happen, that some mage was going to come knocking on the door of the cottage. That's always where the soul-extraction was to take place."

"My guess is that they were only expecting one mage," Natsu said. "That they were surprised when both of you showed up and didn't really know what to do. I think that if it had just been Lisanna, things could have gotten a lot worse. They could have pulled her inside and put her on that table, done whatever they wanted for as long as they wanted."

Loke clapped a hand on Elfman's shoulder. "You probably saved Lisanna's life, man."

Elfman shoulders shook with little sobs. "It doesn't matter," he sniveled, wiping snot from his nose with the back of his hand. "Lisanna's soul is still missing. I should have been a man and gone to help her."

"You were fighting off eleven other guys," Lucy said. "Lisanna can take care of herself. She's not helpless. The only reason she's even in danger is because she was ambushed. You were both ambushed."

"We're going to find her, Elfman," Natsu declared. "We lost Lisanna once. We aren't going to lose her again."

A single tear fell from the shadow of Elman's brow into the dead grass at their feet.

Bixlow's hang over was just beginning to subside when, out of the blue, he heard a frustrated screech and something solid and square hit him right on the back of the head with enough force to send his entire upper body crashing onto the counter top of the bar.

Evergreen burst into uncontrollable laughter, loud and out-of-place in the somber guild hall.

He blinked bright stars out of his eyes before he turned and saw a thick leather-bound volume laying open on the floor. His head pulsed angrily, pain radiating from under his hood.

The little bookworm girl came scampering up to him, hands clasped over her mouth in horror. Her wild blue hair was secured in a red bandana, but wiry strands still poked their way out, and her glasses were askew. "Oh, my god," she whispered. "I am so, so sorry. I don't know what came over me, I just—"

Bixlow groaned as he bent down and retrieved the book for her. He handed it back. "You threw this at me?"

"No!" Levy exclaimed, her small hands fidgeting nervously along the book cover. "Well, yes, I mean, I guess I technically did, but not on purpose! I threw it, but not at you. I wasn't aiming at anything."

"Good arm," Bixlow commended. His head blared a horn. "Don't worry. I've been hit harder." His babies confirmed the statement.

"Right," Levy said. "Still, I'm sorry."

"Why're you hurlin' books around, anyway?" Bixlow asked curiously. He peeked at the spine, reading the faded gold lettering. "'Understanding Souls, Ghosts, and Other Spiritual Apparitions: a Manual for Beginners.'"

"That sounds riveting," Evergreen wheezed sarcastically, recovering from her fit.

Levy huffed. "It's the most useless thing that's ever been printed. It's all about what to do if you think your house is haunted. And everything is either like this or is so advanced that all it does is make me confused. I've never studied seith magic before."

"Y'know, I'm kind of an expert," Bixlow said. His babies agreed, "Expert! Expert!"

"Could you help me?" Levy cried hopefully. "I can't figure out a lot of this positive versus negative energy stuff, and a lot of books are contradicting. Also, they call the same equipment by different names, and there's so many different ways to do things depending on the culture. I don't think I can stomach everything at once."

"Are you sure you'll be able to stomach him?" Evergreen said, jabbing a finger in Bixlow's direction.

"I'll help. The old man said to, but I didn't know if you'd need it." Bixlow stood, ignoring his partner, and rubbed the back of his head. "And y'know, for future reference, next time you need to ask me somethin', just come up and ask. Black Steel over there doesn't need to start chuckin' heavy objects at people's heads."

"Yeah," Evergreen agreed. "He could've hit me."

Levy blushed, but she smiled and hugged the book to her chest as she led Bixlow back to her table of books. He thought he saw her give Gajeel a discreet thumb's up.

The task force finished cataloguing everything in the hut, grabbing anything that they couldn't identify. They also took samples of the dead grass and ash, and wrote down detailed descriptions of the sheep corpses' states of decay.

"I think this is the most thorough detective work we've ever done," Erza remarked.

"And nothing's burnt down yet," Lucy added cheerfully, shooting a sly glance at Gray and Natsu, who were about to rip each other's heads off. Erza followed her gaze and immediately the two rivals were getting along just fine.

"Let's hurry and get this back to the guild," Elfman urged. They began picking their way through the meadows back into town, stopping every once in a while to converse with Lowell's neighbors. None of them claimed to know him very well, and unanimously agreed that he was an unsuspicious little man who kept to his herd quietly. The most helpful information they got was from a plucky ten-year-old boy who'd apparently tried to sneak into the cottage on a dare, only to be chased away by the shepherd.

"I've never been so scared in my life," the boy claimed. "He was, like, frothing at the mouth, running after me with that staff up in the air, telling me that he'd bash my head in if he ever saw me on his land again. Mr. Lowell was always pretty nice to us, let us pet his sheep and stuff. After that he never talked to us again, and he'd yell at us to go away if we went anywhere near his sheep. Said that we'd invaded his privacy, that he couldn't trust us."

"You never tried to sneak another peek inside?" Gray pressed.

The boy shook his head. "No, it really freaked me out. Besides, my parents were super mad about it, made me go back and apologize with a muffin basket. Mr. Lowell wouldn't touch it. Then me and my friends ate it, and my parents got even madder."

"Our son learned his lesson," the mother said, pinching him by the ear. "It shocked me then that Lowell was so worked up about it, but he is old. You know how the elderly are about their homes. He always seemed so…placid, I never figured he'd be into bad business. I never thought a man like him would have anything to hide. Guess I was wrong."

They weren't in high hopes when they brought their findings back to Fairy Tail. Everyone wanted to know how it went, but the task force wasn't prepared to say. They deflected most of the interrogations and went to find Levy.

The solid script mage had her own quadrant in the back of the guild hall, at least three tables piled high with books and papers and scribbles galore. Jet and Droy had long since collapsed from the exhaustion of cheering her on, and laid in a heap on the floor. People were gathered anxiously around Levy, waiting for a spark of inspiration in her brown eyes, but Gajeel's brooding presence in the corner was a sufficient barricade. It kept some of the pressure from her tiny shoulders.

Along with only Jet and Droy, Gajeel seemed to have let Bixlow into the barrier. He sat across the table from Levy, and, although it was clear he wasn't reading a word, every once in a while Levy would look up, ask him a question, and he'd answer it.

They both looked up when Elfman dumped the bags on the nearest empty table. Levy's hand still scratched along the paper, blotting ink over some of her cramped handwriting. "Tell me everything," she demanded.

And they did, reciting their discoveries from the cottage, the pasture, and the neighbors. A crowd had gathered around by the time they were finished, as Gajeel was also too engrossed to maintain his wall of intimidation. Everyone was silent when Natsu, the primary storyteller, trailed off.

"Thirteen," Bixlow muttered, scratching his chin. "That's a lot."

"What do you mean?" Levy asked. Over the course of their partnership, she'd been surprised at the depth of the knowledge he had for his field, and drank up his offhanded comments eagerly. Most of what he'd regurgitated clearly came with experience; seith magic was such a vague topic that many books didn't adequately discuss. Bixlow was very helpful, but he always required a little bit of prodding, guarded like an oyster protecting its pearl. Levy assumed he was just shy—although previously that was never an adjective she would have applied to Bixlow—but Gajeel suspected more accurately that Bixlow's magic was a darker gray than he was willing to admit, and he was carefully avoiding phrases that could possibly incriminate him in the future. The dragonslayer didn't mention his observations to anyone—who was he to judge, anyway?

"Souls aren't stable beings," Bixlow explained, "so they don't like order. They're all about freedom and fleetingness and chaos. That's why when a seith mage…well, I guess you could say we 'employ' the souls—when a seith mage puts the soul in the container, it's always in odd numbers. Three, usually, or five if the mage is pretty powerful."

At this, Bixlow's five dolls each rattled off a number in their tiny voices for elaboration.

"What about thirteen?" Levy insisted.

"That's unheard of," said Bixlow with a shrug. "Groups have managed to control seven souls at once, but never more than that. It's a lot of chaos to deal with. Plus you gotta be careful the souls don't get so organized that they fuse together to make somethin' more dangerous."

"Like a demon?" Gray said wearily.

"Nah, demons subsist on souls, they aren't made up of 'em. But they could create an apparition, kind of like a really big, solid ghost. It's hard to explain." Bixlow shook his head. "But we're gettin' off topic. What I was gonna say is that thirteen is unusual 'cause that's a lot of spiritual power flyin' around. It could get outta control pretty quick."

"But it wasn't thirteen souls," Pantherlily, who was seated beside Gajeel at the table in the corner, pointed out. "It was thirteen mages."

"Right," Bixlow said, "but they were doin' a soul-extraction ceremony, it sounds like. And that's not easy. It takes serious manpower. Those thirteen mages were dealin' with souls—souls that were extracting Lisanna's from her body. They weren't usin' containers, which is…crazy. That's, like, handlin' uranium with your bare hands crazy."

"Crazy, crazy!" his babies cheered.

"They weren't, though," said Elfman. "They were fighting me."

"Which only added to the chaos, which is what souls feed on," Bixlow explained. "Your fight probably attracted souls for miles. Sure, the work might've been sloppy, but really a soul-extraction ceremony only needs one person to guide it. With one this big, maybe two people. The rest is all generating enough power to do it. Which is why I'm guessin' they had thirteen mages. Still, though, that seems like overkill. For one person, they wouldn't've needed more than five."

"Maybe they were playing it safe," Macao suggested.

Bixlow let out a bark of a laugh. "People like this don't play it safe," he sneered. "Besides, this is the exact opposite. Safe would've been usin' as few people as possible. See, all that chaos, it can get to your head." He tapped the temple of his mask for emphasis. "Thirteen people? Let's say…without containers…they can maybe control three souls at a time, if they're good. And then there's that one person tryin' to guide it to Lisanna, tryin' to find that balance between order and disorder where the souls will do what he wants, but won't organize themselves into something bigger. That's heavy stuff, serious brain-buster. Somethin' that would've screwed up his psyche. I mean, when you control a soul, it's like you're…sharing your senses with it. It's like it's part of you. Think about that, about sharing your brain with that many other things, things that don't even really have complete, coherent thoughts."

"What you're saying is that this person was dispensable," Makarov said. "They burned through his brain and left him for dead."

"Doubt it," Bixlow said. "The ceremony wouldn't've succeeded if the guy's brain was oozin' from his ears by the time it was done. He wouldn't've had the mental capacity to pull through."

Makarov looked up. "So then…?"

"We're dealin' with someone who's already bonkers," Bixlow said, nodding. "Ain't got any sanity to lose."

The guild's eyes shifted collectively toward Bixlow's own babies, but no one said anything.

"I'd say you're dealin' with a cult," he continued. "A big one. Most of those mages'll be wiped out for a couple days, maybe less. Soul extraction, like I said, takes a lot out of you, even if you've got thirteen other mages workin' with you."

"Sounds like you know from experience," Macao remarked, raising an eyebrow.

Bixlow turned to him, frowning. "And if I do?"

"That's illegal, isn't it? Soul extraction?"

"Like you ain't ever done anything sketchy, playboy?"

The babies squeaked the accusation: "Playboy! Playboy!"

"That's enough," said Makarov, stepping between them. "It's time we refocus. This is not the time to get into petty quarrels. Lisanna's soul is missing. Let's find it."

Bixlow shot Macao a tongue-wagging smile before he departed with the others, leaving him and Levy back inside Gajeel's ominous bubble. The bookworm was already diving into the texts Elfman had dumped on her table. When she noticed Bixlow settling down again, she peeked out from over the top, eyes big and brown and inquisitive, like a puppy's.

"What?"

"Have you done it?"

"What?" he repeated, confused.

"Soul-extraction. Have you?"

Levy's eyes weren't critical. They were just curious. You should read what they say about that, girlie, he thought, but he offered her the truth anyway.

"Nah. Not from anything living."

Satisfied, Levy nodded and went back to her research.