Title: By Paths Coincident 29/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Isaac Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Sophie Devereaux, Nathan Ford, Tara Cole, Flynn Carson, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, Eve/Flynn, Nate/Sophie, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident


Portland, Oregon, USA

Jenkins' Buick was the only thing making noise for the first half of the return to the last known location of Jacob Stone. Jenkins drove, looking so completely unperturbed that Eve wanted to stick a pin in him to see if he was real. Ezekiel was occupied with his phone. No surprise there. Make that two pins. Cassandra sat next to Eve in the back seat, her face making up in misery for what the others lacked. Eve wanted to hug her, but the seatbelts limited her to covering Cassandra's hand with her own and trying to infuse comfort into the clasp of her fingers. Cassandra gave Eve a tight, pre-occupied smile that did nothing to relieve the tension vibrating off her. Having her team to take care of was the only thing keeping Eve from sliding down into her own Slough of Despond. Their morale was her responsibility. But Jenkins and Ezekiel didn't seem to need her, and Cassandra was beyond her reach.

"That's the turn, right up there," Ezekiel informed Jenkins, breaking the silence and then subsiding back into it.

Jenkins turned off the highway onto the forest road. The station wagon bumped along the worn gravel on springs that had long since relaxed into retirement.

"Do we know that Jacob was the one injured?" Cassandra asked, startling them all.

"No," Eve replied, her memory transporting her back. She shivered. "The dog tracked him there, and I saw one of his popsicle sticks broken. So he was at the scene. But I don't think there was any way to tell for sure."

"So he might not have been hurt? Maybe it was someone else?"

The hope in her voice was not completely irrational. They would not know for sure until the forensic analysis was complete.

"That depends on whether Stone was the victim or the villain. What?" Ezekiel took in the shocked expressions of his teammates. "Nothing to say he went unwillingly."

"You can't seriously think Jacob has been involved in anything criminal!" Cassandra's voice rose in pitch.

"Who knows? The man's entire life is a lie. He's fooled his family for years. What makes you think he can't fool us?"

Eve thought about the man who kept art supplies in his room, who turned that room into a work of art, who used art to heal. Jacob Stone had hidden that love, that gift, from a callous world that would have despised it. That was an act of pain and fear more than it was an act of deceit and guile. Those lies had been camouflage, protecting something tender and precious with armor plating.

"No." She shook her head. "If Stone errs, he errs on the side of beauty, not ugliness. He would hide something soft, not something hard."

"But the police are going to consider whether he might have been the perpetrator or at least an accomplice if that blood turns out not to belong to him." Ezekiel shrugged.

"It would take that DNA test you mentioned to confirm whether the blood is his," Eve said to Cassandra.

"A DNA analysis," Cassandra mused. "That should take about 24 hours."

"Ha!" Ezekiel snorted. "Do you know what the backup for DNA work is in Oregon? Twelve to sixteen weeks!"

"That long?" Cassandra's voice caught between indignation and despair. "We can't wait that long!"

Ezekiel shrugged. "I might be able to push up the priority, but that won't buy us more than a week or two at most."

Cassandra frowned, her eyes ceasing to focus on him or anything seen. One of her hands traced an invisible bit of data as if she were constructing a chart or graph in the air. "I suppose they have to wait to run the serology in batches . . . and then there's the review process . . ." her voice trailed off. Suddenly she clenched her hands together and threw away her visionary work. "We need to get those DNA samples ourselves. I can do the analysis. Ezekiel Jones, world class thief, can you steal me a crime lab?"

"Cassandra Cillain," Ezekiel offered her his hand to shake, "watch me!"


"I believe this is as far as we will be able to drive." Jenkins interrupted Cassandra and Ezekiel plotting to commit any number of illegal activities of which Eve was pretending to take no notice.

The woods were no longer empty. Two police cruisers blocked the road just before the place where Ezekiel's car was parked, so Jenkins was forced to halt his station wagon. As Ezekiel opened the door and hopped out, Eve caught the sound of voices drifting up the road from where Jacob's truck was parked.

"Well, if numbers are what it takes to keep the scary thing away, I think we've got that covered," Ezekiel commented.

"How are we going to make it past all of . . . this?" Cassandra climbed out after him, shaking out her skirt and waving her hand at the commotion.

"I don't know." Eve joined them, scanning the officers standing by the cruisers for a familiar face. "But there's our detective. Let me see if he can get us in. Or at least provide a distraction so that you three can make it past the tape."

Cassandra and Ezekiel grinned at her. Eve rolled her eyes. Working with Librarians was having a deleterious effect on her military discipline. She had just tacitly agreed to be an accessory to their crimes. Ironically, Jacob would probably disapprove.

Detective Ingram met Eve as she reached the caution tape that marked the outer cordon of the crime scene, deliberately ignoring what her charges were up to and drawing his attention to herself.

"Colonel Baird, I'm not sure you should be . . ."

Eve steamrolled right on over him. Steering him toward his colleagues with a comradely hand between his shoulder blades, she asked, "Detective, can you bring me up to speed? Hello there, gentlemen."

Three quarters of them had that "beautiful blonde incoming" expression on their faces. The fourth one just looked irritated. Eve suppressed a sigh. Work with it, Baird, she reminded herself, breaking out her diplomatic-circus smile that she had perfected from far too many embassy dinners—the one that had the advantage of baring her teeth. "Colonel Eve Baird, NATO Counter-terrorism. What is the status of your investigation?"


While law enforcement was occupied dealing with Colonel Baird, Cassandra tiptoed after Ezekiel in stealth mode up the road and around the bend, out of sight of the cruisers. Jenkins magically transformed into a shadow who had no trouble matching their pace. For such a large man, he made astonishingly little noise.

The late sun caught on the tips of the trees, threading through the new leaves and heavy evergreen boughs to stitch the ground with patches of bright and dark. The stippling light and shade that chased over Jenkins' grey jacket moving ahead of her teased at Cassandra's senses suggesting patterns into which she could fall, far away from the tightness in her chest that had been making every heartbeat hurt from the moment she had known Jacob was missing.

Holding out her hand, Cassandra captured a bright circle of sunlight on her palm. When she closed her fingers around it, it escaped onto her knuckles.

"Cassandra!" Ezekiel hissed. "Come on."

Oh. She'd stopped moving. Cassandra realized that she was holding back, afraid of what they would find ahead. Taking a grip on her courage, she hurried to catch up. Jacob needed them. If he could endure whatever it was that had taken him from them, she could face whatever it took to find him now.

"You okay?" Ezekiel asked when she reached his side.

"Yes, let's go." Cassandra grabbed his elbow and tugged him after her with sudden urgency.

Rounding the next corner, the three of them found themselves face to face with a woman in a white, hooded coverall and booties, carrying a camera.

Startled, the woman took a step back. "Who the hell are you?"

Jacob had been the one who usually answered those sorts of questions. Cassandra found she couldn't force a single word past her throat.

Ezekiel took over, holding out his hand like Jacob would have done. The cocky smile, however, was all his own. "We're the Librarians, and we're here to . . . to take . . . to collect . . . data about missing persons. Yeah. That's it."

Cassandra held her breath.

The woman relaxed. "Oh, well. All right, then." She held up her gloved hands and camera in explanation for why she wasn't taking Ezekiel's proffered hand. "Lieutenant Santiago. Let me introduce you to Investigator Rosen. He's our primary scene responder and manager."

As the lieutenant turned to lead them back the way she'd come, Cassandra frowned at Ezekiel.

"That worked?"

Ezekiel shrugged. "Jenkins?"

"The Library . . . has its secrets, Mr. Jones."

And Jenkins had his. Apparently that was all the enlightenment they could expect on the topic of uncanny cooperation from law enforcement.

Lieutenant Santiago led them around another curve in the road to where a harried looking coverall-clad man with a sweating red face was directing the activities of four other people in identical white suits. The pitch of his voice itched along Cassandra's nerves and the scent of mothballs stung her nose.

"Merino! Don't walk over there. This is a crime scene! What do they teach at the academy these days? Hans! Bring me those cardboard boxes! I sent you for them half an hour ago! What are you doing over there? Texting your girlfriend? Come on people. It's going to be dark soon. Get your asses moving!"

He rounded on Lieutenant Santiago before she had a chance to open her mouth.

"Why are you back here?" he roared in her face. "Who are these people, and what the fuck are they doing cluttering up my crime scene?"

Lieutenant Santiago appeared unfazed by her superior officer's pyrotechnics. She waved her camera-free hand to indicate Ezekiel, Jenkins, and Cassandra. "These are the Librarians," she informed him. "They've come to . . . what was it you said you do?"

This time Jenkins took the lead.

"We're here to do research," Jenkins informed the Investigator.

"I don't have time for an audience," he growled. "Sunset is less than an hour away, and our window is closing. It'll be raining again before dawn. The thing about crime scene investigation is we always come too late. The only help we can give the victims is to do the best damn job possible gathering evidence Now what do you people need that is more important than what I'm doing?"

As much as being near this man with his itchy, acrid voice was overloading her senses in ways that made Cassandra want to wrap her head in a blanket, she was glad Jacob's fate was being investigated by someone who really seemed to care about his work.

"Perhaps we can be of assistance," Jenkins offered. "My . . . interns are finishing graduate work in . . ."

"Forensic Science," Cassandra put in quickly, elbowing Ezekiel.

"Oh," Ezekiel looked startled. "Um. Criminal Justice?"

"Hmph."

Investigator Rosen's glare shot at them from under scowling brows like the pinpoint flame from an oxyacetylene torch—3480 degrees Centigrade. The number 5 rang in in Cassandra's ears. She held her breath and crossed her fingers. Would the Library magic work?

"Can you follow directions? I don't have time to babysit incompetents."

"We'll do exactly what you say," Cassandra promised.

"I can vouch for their abilities," Jenkins assured Rosen. "I guarantee they will do superior work."

"Okay, then. Let's get you over to the van. If you're going to be in my crime scene, you're going to wear personal protective equipment."

As Rosen led them over to a vehicle where the driver and a police officer in uniform instead of coveralls lounged, observing the proceedings, Ezekiel asked, "Can you tell us where you are in your investigation?"

"A couple of my team strip-searched the area between where the vehicle was abandoned and this point, but not too surprisingly, they found nothing conclusive. The rain probably removed most traces we could have found. The tow truck is coming for the pickup. Once it's back at the lab, Forensics'll be doing a thorough analysis. Prints. Fibers. Chemicals. That's not my area. I'm blood and ballistics. No need for ballistics here. But blood? I got plenty of that."

Cassandra shivered and moved closer to Ezekiel.

Rosen thumped on the side of the van and a white-suited, be-spectacled head appeared out the back doors. "Get these people some gear, Mason. They're helping us collect evidence."

"Right away, sir," said Mason cheerily, disappearing back into the depths of the van.

"Forensic science, hmm?" Rosen scowled at Cassandra. "I assume you know how to swab a person for DNA?"

Cassandra nodded.

"Good. Because I'm going to need elimination samples from you three. Can't have you shedding your damn genetic material all over my crime scene without some way to tell whose it is. When you're done, meet me at the main entrance to the scene, and we'll log you in."

Rosen wheeled abruptly and strode off down the road towards where the other figures in coveralls were at work.

Ezekiel turned to Cassandra as if he expected she knew what to do next.

His confidence was touching. Unfortunately, she had no idea. Her scientific experience up until the Library had been largely in the lab or theoretical. Fieldwork was a different matter.

Mason saved her from floundering by popping back out the door. In one hand he clutched plastic packets containing the coveralls, masks, and booties they would be wearing. His other arm was tied up in a sling. Noticing her staring, Mason shrugged. "That'll be why I'm stuck in the van," he said. "Broke my good arm being a stupid klutz. I'd do more harm than good out there with my left hand. So I hand out supplies, run the computer uplink, and file stuff. Here you go. Put these on while I get the DNA kits."

Thrusting the coveralls into their hands, he vanished inside the van.

"Well," said Ezekiel, eyeing his packets quizzically. "Time to cosplay CSI."

The baggy garments fit Cassandra and Ezekiel just fine, but Jenkins was left holding his obviously too small suit.

"That's the biggest one I've got," Mason apologized, appearing in the door again. "Our team is a bit vertically challenged."

"I am large, clumsy, and aging," Jenkins said, not as if he believed any of it. "I shall wait here on terra firma and observe."

Since he was going to be tracking magical beasties instead of scientific evidence, that actually made sense.

Mason held out the DNA kits. "You good with these?"

DNA collection was something she could do. "Yes, of course," Cassandra said, double-gloving up with all the unthinking speed of a hospital janitor dealing with a biohazard. "Ezekiel, open wide!"

Tilting his head in acknowledgement of a fellow expert, Mason disappeared back into the van.

Ezekiel looked unconvinced. "Do I have to?" he objected.

"It won't hurt a bit," Cassandra reassured him.

"What part of World Class Thief are you forgetting?" Ezekiel hissed so that no one inside or around the van could hear him. "I try not to leave genetic samples lying around where law enforcement can get their hands on them."

"Then you'll just have to wipe the records," Cassandra whispered back, having grown disturbingly inured to crime. "Now say 'Ah!'" Liberating the swabs from their sterile packaging, she fixed Ezekiel with an authoritative glare.

Ezekiel wrinkled up his face and shifted on his feet, but he finally opened his mouth and let her scrub the swab around the inside of his cheeks for the 30 seconds it took to acquire a usable sample of his epithelial cells.

"There," Cassandra said with satisfaction, returning the swab to its storage container. "That wasn't so bad."

"If I ever end up in jail," Ezekiel said, "you're posting all the bail."

Cassandra ignored him, carefully labeling the sample. Then she stripped and replaced her outer gloves and repeated the process for Jenkins and herself.

"This should be interesting" was Jenkins only comment as his DNA disappeared inside the CSI van along with the energetic Mason.

"Here you are." Mason materialized in the opening of the van a final time. "Evidence kit, ready to go. Don't forget to tag samples with the bar codes when you're done labelling and put the biohazard seals on any blood evidence. Have fun, kids."

Cassandra pushed the kit into Ezekiel's gloved hands. "That," she said, "is your job."

"You're getting as bossy as Colonel Baird," Ezekiel commented, but he took the kit.

"I'll take that as a compliment," Cassandra told him, wheeling and leading the way down the road in the direction Rosen had gone.

Jenkins followed them far enough away from the van that they wouldn't be easily overheard. "Now can you indicate where the canine expressed objections to the non-corporeal?" he asked Ezekiel.

"It was right here." Ezekiel waved his hand. "In the middle of the road. Freakiest thing I've seen, and I'm saying that after almost a year of being a Librarian."

"Worse than the haunted house?" Cassandra asked.

"Well, no. I'll give you that. But the house turned out to be a good guy."

"Very well," said Jenkins, palming the magic spectrometer. "I shall take what readings I can and wait for your return."

They left him fiddling with its dials.

"Ezekiel," Cassandra whispered as they approached the primary scene cordon. "Can you help me collect duplicate samples? And not let them see we're doing it?"

"You're asking me if I can steal little plastic tubes from people who just handed them to me?" Ezekiel quirked the corner of his mouth.

"Okay, so it's a little easy. But I need them labelled, and we can't use their labels, or they'll miss them."

"I can use a pen, even if the technology is a little primitive." Ezekiel flourished the Sharpie provided in the kit he was carrying.

And then they had to be quiet because Rosen met them at the single opening in the yellow and black caution tape. "Alright, you two . . . what am I supposed to call you, by the way?"

"Cassandra Cillian," Cassandra said, "and he's Ezekiel Jones."

"Okay, Cillian, Jones," Rosen nodded. "I've divided the area around the scene into quadrants, and we've done spiral searches. The photographer and sketch artist have finished recording all the evidence in situ, and I'm working on the blood pattern analysis. The rest of the team is collecting evidence for transport to the lab. That's where I can use an extra set of hands."

He waved to where two white-suited figures crouched over a tire-track engraved into the mud of the ditch. "The quadrants nearest the road are ready to go. Merino and Hans have got that one."

A yellow scale marker with the number 43 on it marked and measured whatever piece of evidence they were inspecting. Cassandra could see a total of 58 markers dotting the area inside the cordon. Square metal stepping plates linked each marker to a common path of approach.

"We have evidence of passive, transfer, and projection stains," Rosen continued, holding out a tablet and stylus for them to log their presence on the site. "At this point, nothing indicates that there was impact spatter, so we're not looking at gunshot wounds. It's rained since the stains were laid down, but they had a chance to dry first, so some traces remain, and there's blood in the puddles."

"That means whatever happened here must have taken place between 1:17 in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 3 and around 3:30 in the morning on Wednesday, March 4," Cassandra said softly, turning the stylus in her hand as meteorological maps for the last week marched across her vision.

Rosen raised his eyebrows at her, "That's correct. Though I must say I'm surprised you know those numbers."

Cassandra froze, her signature wobbling off crazily.

"Numbers are kind of her thing," Ezekiel explained.

Controlling her breath of relief, Cassandra vowed she would be more careful what she revealed she knew about the case from now on.

"That's when the owner of the truck was last seen. And trust her to know what hours of the day it rains." Ezekiel gave her arm a fist bump.

Cassandra smiled her thanks at him. Sometimes it was good to have a colleague so adept at thinking on his feet—and at manipulating law enforcement.

Frowning, Rosen pivoted and beckoned them to follow him through the opening in the tape. "Come on. I don't have all night."

Following him, Cassandra stepped gingerly onto the first plate of the cleared path. The smell of spruce and young aspen and rich, dark, rotting vegetation turning to soil tickled the back of her nose like the beginning of a sneeze. The scents of crushed grasses and ferns and fireweed were overlaid by . . . something else.

Oh. That was blood.

Cassandra had spent enough time in hospitals and labs to have that scent burned into her synapses. The voices behind her faded as the numbers beat at her consciousness. Calculations swirled across her sight—the length of the grass, the depth of the marks where someone had been dragged, the wavelengths of the colours of dried blood staining fresh green. For a minute the hammering grew unbearable. She took an unsteady step, her hands rising not to organize her thoughts but to wipe them out.

She couldn't do this.

She had to do this.

Jacob needed all of them, but she was the only one who could do this part.

Her anxiety for him was not helping. She felt like every single one of her nerve endings was exposed. Science was about making reliable observations, but right now her senses were such a jumble of blaring information that they were of next to no use to her.

Stop it, she commanded herself.

If only she could shut down all those useless blasts of data that had nothing to do with the task at hand. Experimentally, she tried to ignore the smells. The percussion in her head abated slightly. That was better. That might work.

Cassandra reeled in her senses, one by one, until she felt almost smothered in lack of sensory input. Ordinary scientists did this all the time, she told herself. They felt about blindly in the world, touching everything one time only, extrapolating data with scarcely anything to go on. She could gather evidence this way. She could. Just follow procedures. Do what she was told.

And then she wouldn't have to think, to imagine, to know . . . what had happened here.

"Cassandra!" Ezekiel's concerned voice penetrated the cocoon into which she was withdrawing. He sounded like he was mumbling through a mass of wool.

"It's okay," she reassured him, her own words muffled and dim. "I'm okay. Let's do this."

Rosen was stopping at a series of markers close to the road. "You can start here," he informed Cassandra and Ezekiel. "This one is interesting." He leaned down and gripped the thin branch of a small tree, manipulating it so that the silvery underside of the leaves showed. "See the fine mist of blood here? That's expirated spatter. This victim had an internal injury—there was blood in the nose, throat, or respiratory system. The pressure exerted by the lungs expelled blood mixed with air. You can see the bubble rings from air in the droplets if you look with a magnifying glass." Glaring with professorial intensity at Cassandra, he asked, "Now what can we interpret from the fact that this pattern appears only on the underside of the leaves?"

"It tells us that he . . . that the victim was lying on the ground," Cassandra said around the sudden taste of bile in her mouth. She took another wrench at her senses, trying to obliterate the vison of Jacob's body crushing the grasses, of his chest straining for breath as he drowned in his own blood. Her own breath caught beneath her breastbone like a knife.

"That's right," Rosen said, raising an eyebrow. Taking a plastic packet from Ezekiel's kit, Rosen opened one end and held it out to Cassandra. "Show me how you collect evidence," he said. "Take a sample of the surrounding uncontaminated flora so that we can compare the DNA results."

Ordering her hands not to shake, Cassandra extracted the tube containing the swab. Removing the thin plastic wand with its cotton tip, she blinked at it in a moment of confusion. It needed to be wet.

She looked around about to panic, but Ezekiel whipped out the small tube of sterile water from his kit and snapped its top. Mutely, Cassandra held out the swab and let him put a drop of the liquid on the cotton. How had he known that's what she needed?

Bending down, she selected a leaf well out of range of the blood spatter. Carefully, she rubbed the cotton tip over its surfaces. Then she slipped the swab back into its plastic tube where the desiccant in the bottom would dry it while it was transported to the lab. Handing it back to Ezekiel, she watched as he returned it to its sleeve and slid it into a tamper-proof evidence envelope.

"Label it with the scale marker number and note that it's a control," she told him.

Ezekiel did so with a flourish and then slapped the barcode on the envelope.

Rosen gave them an approving nod. "You'll do," he said. "I'm off to the next quadrant. Take that to Mason. If you have any questions, you can ask him. Change your gloves for each different sample. Don't step off your plates."

Pivoting, Rosen left the two of them alone with the patch of bloodied earth and the spattered leaves.

As soon as she was sure Rosen wasn't looking, Cassandra held out her hand for a second swab. Swiftly she re-did the control test. This time when Ezekiel packaged and labeled it, it disappeared as though it had never existed. Ezekiel really was a little bit magic.

Cassandra stripped off her outer gloves and deposited them in the trash receptacle Ezekiel held out for her. Silently, he exchanged it for the box of black gloves. Taking a deep breath, Cassandra pulled the new pair over each of her fingers, mentally listing off each of the bones, tendons, and ligaments, and when that didn't help, adding their origins and insertions. She felt disconnected from her hands. Nevertheless, she managed to take the next swab from Ezekiel and wait while he added the sterile water to the tip before he headed back to the van with the first sample.

Doing science usually rang chimes in her head, notes madly scrambling all over the scales in joyful arpeggios, occasionally swelling into a full orchestra when she was close to a solution, but today, the music hurt in her temples like the first bars of a requiem.

No matter. She could and would do this.

Bending down, Cassandra reached out to cradle one stained leaf as tenderly as if she held Jacob's life in her hand. Touching the cotton tip to the dried mist, she painstakingly swirled it until the leaf was clean and green again. The swab flushed from pale pink to deep red, but she couldn't think about what that meant.

Ezekiel fetching up on the plate behind her was a relief.

"Here, take this. Quick!" Cassandra demanded.

The sooner he packaged and labelled the evidence, the sooner she could take the second sample. They needed to be twice as fast as the others if they were to avoid being deemed too incompetent to work with the professionals.

The mask over her mouth and nose hid much of her face, for which she was grateful. She didn't want Ezekiel to guess how close she was to losing it.


Confined to his plastic stepping plate, Ezekiel bounced restlessly on his toes as Cassandra collected another pair of samples, the official one and their surreptitious one. He took the swabs as she handed them to him, secured them in their individual plastic drying tubes, sealed them in their envelopes, labelled them, and deposited the first one in the designated receptacle. The other disappeared up his sleeve—a praiseworthy feat, if he did say so himself.

He approved of the anonymity of these white suits. In fact, he was already plotting a scenario, hypothetical of course, in which a criminal might return to the scene of his crime disguised as part of the CSI team and remove or contaminate the evidence. However, the garment did not provide much scope for concealment of pilfered items. He was going to have to find a way to stash all the samples around his body in ways that wouldn't betray him when it came time to strip out of his protective shell.

Ezekiel had been a fan of CSI shows a long time ago. Before so many things had changed.

Before he had changed.

Later, he'd researched the ways actual crime scene investigation differed from the shows because being the World's Greatest Thief required not getting caught. If you knew what evidence they were looking for, you could avoid leaving it behind. Even for MI6—no—especiallybecause of MI6—he'd learned how to avoid getting caught ever again. The best criminals knew how not to leave incriminating evidence, or how to leave misleading evidence.

He left crime scenes behind him. He didn't hang around to watch the investigations take place.

This was his first real-time experience with CSI. He'd never had the chance to observe this stage of a missing persons hunt—the part where you found actual evidence, where you might actually get some answers. Not that the answers were looking particularly good. But knowing anything, no matter how bad, was better than never knowing wasn't it?

With the ease of long practice, Ezekiel re-routed those unprofitable thoughts.

Anyway, it had been fascinating to watch. At least the first dozen or so times. But right now, Ezekiel was growing bored. Boredom felt like being nibbled to death by goldfish. Ezekiel Jones needed action! High risk and higher adrenaline! And this adventure was not cutting it. He'd taken to seeing if he could slip the evidence in at his neck and stash it in his socks without anyone noticing. Unfortunately, that was too easy. The other evidence collectors were obsessively focused on whatever they were doing.

Honestly, these people called themselves crime scene investigators, but they couldn't see a crime taking place right in front of their eyes.

Ah! Good. Cassandra was straightening up from where she had been working. They must be moving on. Maybe the next marker would be different. Mix it up a little.

As he backed out of Cassandra's way so he could follow her to the next marker, he admitted that he was actually a bit worried about her. The little he could see of her face was so intense he scarcely recognized her. Usually, observing Cassandra doing science was like watching the whole Fourth of July fireworks show set off in a single explosion—all sparkle and eye-aching brightness. But now it was like she had disappeared inside that coverall, and he was following around an empty suit.


Peripherally, Cassandra was aware that Rosen was beckoning her and Ezekiel into the last quadrant of the crime scene. By now, she was merely functioning on auto-pilot, collecting over and over again samples of blood-drenched soil (thinking only once from very far away that DNA analysis on that was going to be hell), swabbing the residue of blood off of grasses and leaves and the early spring petals of trillium ovatum.Inside her head she was reciting the digits of pi while simultaneously calculating the locations of all the planets in the solar system with relationship to the spiral arms of the galaxy as they would move through the universe over the next thousand years. Even that hadn't quite been enough, so she added in all known comets. Her consciousness of what she was doing narrowed to a fine, dull line of painful repetition.

Mechanically, she adjusted her trajectory. They were nearly done, and the light was failing fast. It would be over soon, and she could go. Just go.

"Cillian! Jones!" Rosen called. "I need you on the swipe stain on that tree over there. We've got the fingerprints, so take as much of it as you can."

"Yes, sir," Ezekiel answered for them, prodding Cassandra towards the tree in question.

The sight of the handprint snapped her back into her body with a crack that shivered from the roots of her hair to her heels.

It was his. She did not need to see the fingerprint analysis to know.

Pi turned into another number and blinked out. The solar system disintegrated, and the planets spun off into the dark of intergalactic space. The comets shattered into glittering dust and rained down around her.

That was the exact proportion of his index finger to his middle finger. And there was that slight inward curve in the top joint of his little finger. She could see exactly how he must have stood, not completely upright, leaning for support.

Jacob had tried to stand there, with his hand covered in blood, four days ago, and now he was gone.

Her senses, so tightly controlled moments before, were blown wide open, and Cassandra threw herself into them like a dolphin escaping a net for clear water.

The leaves of the tree rustled, calling her to trace their equations, how they moved with wind direction and speed, the interplay of light and color and sound waves, until the world dissolved into pure mathematics.

The entire crime scene became nothing more than angles and lines and equations.

The deeper she plunged into the natural rhythms, the more glaring were the disruptions where human beings had barged blindly through, crushing and bending and snapping the logic lines into new and cacophonous patterns. Mud torn up by heavy boots disrupted the lay of the grasses. Depth of impression and length of stride transformed into height and weight. There had been three, she could see clearly, two moving from the north and one from the south, but the fourth, she could make no sense of the movement—there was no pattern, no consistent data. The fourth eluded her. There was something wrong. She focused on finer detail. Her attention caught on the wavelengths. Taken alone they made no sense, but from the right angle, the tiny shifts in color scattered on trunks and leaves made a straight line. The wavelength indicated an absorption spectrum consistent with . . .

Cassandra gasped for breath, wrenching back into her conscious mind. That was more blood.

The effort left her dizzy and breathless. Swaying, she clung to the arm supporting her. Ezekiel's quicksilver, elastic strength, not Jacob's iron, solid steadiness.

"Cassandra? Are you okay? What is it?"

Once she knew what she was looking for, it was possible to extrapolate where the other drops had likely landed. Most of them had left no trace, but she knew they were there.

Her head was boiling with the numbers. The surface tension and specific gravity of blood, weight multiplied by gravity exceeding surface tension, droplets more than 3 millimetres in diameter indicating a low velocity, 5 feet per second. Yes. She could see the angle of impact for each one.

The equation hung in the air, rotating gently:

Each drop grew longer and narrower the farther away it was from the tree with Jacob's handprint. The calculations for theta sin spun frantically from her fingertips.

All the lines extending from the angles converged on a single point.

"Here," she said holding her hands around a shape in space about 0.87 meters off the ground. "They originated here."

"Hey, Cillian! Jones! What's going on over there?" Rosen strode over to where Ezekiel was still holding up Cassandra.

"I think she found something else," Ezekiel told him.

"Yes, you need to look at this," Cassandra managed to gulp, shaking free of Ezekiel's grasp. "Do you see here, there's a drop of blood that the rain didn't quite get. It's part of a whole line of drops, but you can't tell they're related unless you're at the right angle. They're on different surfaces and different distances so gravity had more time with some of them, and some probably didn't hit any surface before the ground. They originated right about here," she indicated the position. "I did the math."

Rosen raised both eyebrows. "That is cast off spatter," he said. "It occurs when an assailant draws back a weapon at high speed from the wound it created in order to make a second blow. As the weapon moves through the air, it flings a line of blood along the path it travels. Someone struck twice here with the same weapon. Excellent observation, Cillian. You have a gift for this sort of analysis."

Following Cassandra's direction, Rosen examined each of the drops that remained. Finally, he shook his head. "I don't know how you saw these, but good eye. Judging from the smaller, more linear pattern of these drops, I'm leaning towards sharp force injury. A knife, perhaps, or something like it. Well, you've saved me a bit of work with the angle of origin—do you always do complex trigonometry in your head like that?"

Cassandra nodded.

"It's like having a calculator. On feet." Ezekiel crinkled his nose. "Without an off button."

"Okay, then. Good work." Rosen shook his head, jotting down notes on his tablet. "Finish collecting this evidence, and then I'm calling it too dark to do any more. Once it's completely dark, we'll try Luminol. That should reveal any latent blood stains and hopefully give us a better picture of what happened here."


The Librarian team coalesced a short distance away from where the CSI team was tying up loose ends while waiting for absolute dark to fall. Shadows had swallowed the ground now, and banks of clouds loomed in the western sky heavy with the threat of approaching rain.

Cassandra could smell it in the wind that was picking up as day relinquished its dominion to the night without the fanfare of sunset.

Colonel Baird had joined them, informing them that Jacob's truck had been towed away. While she spoke to them, her attention never stilled, scanning the area with military precision, focusing with laser intensity on any sudden movement.

"Jenkins, report," she ordered.

Jenkins frowned at the magic spectrometer. "I recorded no readings that would explain what you experienced. The ley lines in this area are unremarkable and not particularly close to this exact location." He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. "There is nothing here. I have no way of knowing whether a magical creature has been in the vicinity in the past, but there is none here now."

"Ezekiel and I didn't see anything that would suggest magical interference," Cassandra added. "The tracks are all ordinary human."

"Hmph." Jenkins shook his head. "There are a number of beings that pass very well for human, but Miss Cillian is correct. We have no way of confirming their presence or absence without more intensive testing of the evidence."

Baird turned to Cassandra, some hesitation apparent in her face for the first time. "And the ordinary evidence? Do we know any more about what happened here?"

"Not enough." Cassandra crossed her arms, feeling chilled in spite of her warm coat under her coveralls. "We know that someone had an injury that resulted in blood in their airways. We know that someone further into the woods was likely stabbed more than once. We have no way of knowing if those injuries occurred to the same person at different times or to two different people."

"But do you concur that the dog was right? No one died?"

"The human body contains about 4.7 to 5.5 liters of blood." Cassandra said, feeling remote from the information. "You can lose just past 40 percent and still survive with adequate medical care. There isn't enough blood here that someone died on the spot."

"Unless they finished bleeding out wherever they were taken," Ezekiel pointed out.

Cassandra had been trying not to think that thought, but now that it was hanging there blazing like a neon beacon, she could think of nothing else. Tension pneumothorax. Hypovolemic shock. Massive infection. As a janitor in the ER, she had cleaned up the aftermaths of too many deaths that took place far from where the fatal injuries occurred. There were so many ways the fragile human organism could hang on to life and still lose.

She needed something to do. Now.

Baird looked like she was contemplating strangling Ezekiel, but he was right. They didn't know that Jacob was still alive.

The four of them lapsed into a silence that held no comfort. Over at the entrance to the cordon, the photographer was collecting her equipment in preparation for capturing the fleeting evidence the Luminol would reveal. In the gathering dark, the indistinct figures of the CSI team moved out along the common path, their flashlights blinking like fireflies.

The strident, unfamiliar ring of the phone Ezekiel had provided her startled a high-pitched squeak out of Cassandra. With her heart spurred by adrenaline, she fought her way through her coveralls to her pocket to pull it out. She didn't recognize the number.

Frowning, Cassandra accepted the call. "Hello?"

"Hey, Cassie."

The voice was Jacob Stone's. His warm, low drawl enfolded her name like the coziest fleece blanket, familiar and comforting. Her heart gave a wild lurch of joy. "Jacob!" she exclaimed, fumbling her phone and barely hanging on. He was alive! He was alive and well enough to call! Everything was going to be all right!

She was instantly the center of attention. Eve took a step forward, reaching out her hand, her face transformed with hope. Ezekiel focused on her, expectantly alert. Even Jenkins looked less dour.

"No, this is Eliot."

Not Jacob. Eliot. His words, still sounding exactly like his cousin, snapped the bands of pain back around her chest so hard they stole her breath.

"I was wondering if you'd like to take that riding lesson tomorrow afternoon."

She wanted to scream. She wanted to weep. She did neither.

"Um, let me check," she managed to choke out, muting her phone to give herself time to recover. The others could see something was wrong, but they didn't know yet what it was. Hating herself for having given them unfounded hope, Cassandra shook her head. "It's not Jacob; it's Eliot Spencer," she said.

She couldn't bear to look at Eve's face.

"He wants to know if I want to go horseback riding tomorrow afternoon."

"I know we want to catch the Murder Horse of Doom, but are you sure you should be riding it?" Ezekiel asked.

"He's not letting me ride Spark of Midnight," Cassandra said. "A girl we met offered to loan me one of her old horses. I need to give him an answer." She forced herself to meet Baird's anguished glare. "This is really our best chance to get near the horse."

Baird looked like she'd rather do anything else, but she gave Cassandra a terse nod.

This had to be hell for their Guardian, Cassandra knew. She unmuted her phone. "Okay, I can meet you," she told Eliot, careful to keep her real emotions out of her voice, trying to counterfeit some of her former enthusiasm. "What time and where?"

"Does two o'clock sound good? I'll text you the address."

"Two o'clock is great!" Cassandra gushed, praying he wouldn't notice her lack of sincerity. "Oh, I can't wait! Thank you so much!"

"I'm looking forward to it."

She could hear the flirty smile in his voice. Cassandra had never been farther off from feeling flirtatious, but she managed what she hoped was an eager "Me too!"

He would go away, now. Say good-bye and stop reminding her with every cadence of his words how much she wanted to see that smile on Jacob's face instead. Except he didn't.

"Can I ask a favor, Cassie?" Eliot sounded serious now, all the charming act laid aside.

"Sure," she chirped. He could never know how nervous he was making her.

"Since you thought I was Jacob, I gather my cousin ain't anywhere nearby?"

"No," Cassandra gulped past the constriction in her throat. "No, he's not."

"If you're expecting to hear from him, could you tell him I sent him the key to a security box at his bank? I left him some information he needs."

She would give anything in the world to be able to deliver that message to Jacob. The urge to tell Eliot his cousin was missing was nearly overwhelming, but Colonel Baird hadn't given her permission yet. Cassandra bit her tongue until she tasted copper.

"I'll let him know as soon as I can," she managed after a pause that went just a little too long.

Eliot's "Thanks, Cassie. I owe you" sounded tired and almost discouraged.

"No problem." She wished he would just go away. If she had to force this brittle brightness one minute longer she was going to shatter.

With relief, she heard Eliot say, "Goodbye, then. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Goodbye," she said, hanging up her phone like it burned her fingers.

Almost immediately, her phone chimed the arrival of Eliot's text.

When she looked up from her phone, she was the focus of her team's undivided attention. To her relief, she was rescued from having to discuss her impending riding date with Eliot Spencer by the arrival of Rosen.

"Cillian, Jones, whoever the rest of you are, it's dark enough. We're going to try the Luminol. You might want to watch this."

For a man whose voice exuded naphthalene, he was really very accommodating and willing to educate these accidental "interns" with which the Library was saddling him. Cassandra forgave him the way he made her want earplugs.

Still in silence, the four of them followed him back to the primary scene cordon.

During the time Cassandra had been on the phone with Eliot, the last of the twilight had surrendered to the oncoming dark, a dark that pressed on her eyelids like fingertips when she closed her eyes.

"So I know what Luminol is supposed to do." Ezekiel's voice right by her ear made her jump. "But what is it, and how does it work?

"It's a chemical compound, C8H7O3N3, that's carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen . . ."

"Isn't everything made out of that?"

Cassandra paused. He wasn't entirely wrong. "That's what's cool about organic chemistry. Anyway, it's this pale yellow, crystalline powder that they mix with hydrogen peroxide and hydroxide. The mixture has the potential to chemiluminesce . . ."

"To what?"

"To glow, of course." Cassandra shook her head at him even though it was too dark for him to see the full effect. "But it needs a catalyst. That's what blood is—the iron in the hemoglobin produces an oxidation reaction with the Luminol creating 3-aminophthalate and emitting a light photon."

"I don't know why I ask," Ezekiel groaned.

"Shhh," Cassandra shut him up with a finger to his lips. "They're going to spray it on the area near the expirated spatter."

Even though she was expecting it, the eerie blue glow made Cassandra gasp. Little nervous chills ran up and down her spine like fingers playing scales.

There was so much more blood than they'd seen before. But it was contained in the area of the spatter. There were traces of footprints, transfer stains where people had picked up blood on their shoes that had been invisible in daylight, but no drip trail of blood led back to the road.

"They stopped the bleeding before they moved him," she murmured.

The crime scene photographer had set up her tripod and was rapidly snapping pictures utilizing various time exposures. The glow faded as swiftly as it had appeared.

The investigation team moved on to the next site. Luminol descended in a fine chemical mist on the ground surrounding the tree where Jacob had leaned. Invisible at first, it hit the traces of blood. Then, like magic, the blue glow of the oxidation reaction lit the dark. Jacob's handprint shone as if he were reaching out to them.

The first drops of rain felt like tears on Cassandra's cheeks.

The shadows of the crime scene investigator and the photographer crouched at the base of the tree where the pale light spoke of someone standing for a period of time bleeding into the thirsty soil. Had it been Jacob who was injured, or had he wielded the weapon that had left the cast-off spatter? Was it his blood that glowed in a trail of drops leading away from the tree to the place where a body had fallen?

The picture of the site in daylight superimposed itself in her mind over the ghostly illumination—the broken foliage, the clots of soil gouged from the earth. Along that track ran fine smears of blue where someone had been dragged, bleeding, to the road. The stain of light on the road showed where the victim had lain, unmoving. And then there was nothing.

Cassandra shuddered and felt Eve's comforting arm around her shoulders.

Whoever it had been, whatever had happened, that was where it had ended. That was where persons unknown had transferred the body or bodies to whatever means of transport they had used to vacate the site. And Jacob had gone with them—either badly injured or guilty of this violence.

Cassandra refused to believe he was guilty, but that left only that he had been injured, and no one had taken him to a hospital. Somewhere, out there, Jacob was alone, hurting, and in the hands of enemies.

The thought was unbearable.

"Do you see any more evidence we need?" Baird had her Colonel voice back in place, the one that snapped your spine straight even when she whispered.

Grateful for the distraction, Cassandra considered. "No," she concluded. "We have samples of every possible variable. The Luminol gives a better picture of what happened, but I don't see any new evidence."

"Then I think we should go now." Baird decided. "This weather is getting worse."

"Thank you," Ezekiel said fervently. "I've got water running down my neck."

"Yours is a soft and luxurious generation," Jenkins said with a touch of disdain.

"Hey, mate," Ezekiel tossed over his shoulder as he led the way back down the road. "Sorry your generation didn't have the sense to come out of the rain. Mine does."

Cassandra and Jenkins lingered to take their leave of the CSI team and Rosen and to accept his brusque thanks. Then they followed after Ezekiel and Baird.

Baird was already seated in Jenkins' station wagon when they arrived at the outer cordon, so Cassandra joined Ezekiel in his car. As she pulled on her seatbelt, Ezekiel held up his phone.

"I've found us a crime lab. East Coast, so they're already shut down for the night."

Cassandra gave him a shaky smile. "You're the best," she told him. And she really meant it. She'd never have made it through this ordeal without him.

Ezekiel snorted, "Of course I am," and sent his car careening in a spray of mud and gravel through the glitter of rain, back towards the Annex.


TBC