A/N: Yaaaaaaaaay! Echo fully intended, pain and all, and OH MY GOD THAT PLOT.
Warnings: language, moar depressed unZombie, Long Overdue Reunitings and the more Sense-Makey part of the previously seen Plot with an Uncomfortable Amount of Remaining Questions
Reveal
"You heard what he said."
The living-room was a void all over again.
Conrad's visit seemed more hallucination than anything concrete: the floor was clear of take-out bags only by the grace of Veser's rote tidying on the way to a glass of water, but the food inside remained untouched and chilled more and more by the moment. The way that Conrad had stalked off almost brought the Detective some relief, even as the older man was subconsciously alarmed by the idea of the coroner taking things into his own hands. He would like to believe that Conrad always had good intentions, but that still left method and execution to consider, which the older man was beginning to learn were the pitfalls suffered by many.
Still, the coroner had said something about a doctor. Mostly he had said something about helping Hanna, which was much more than the two of them were accomplishing, even with five tomes and a major in sea-magic between them. Just for a moment, it felt like there was a doorstop in the closing portal that was Hanna's unlife, but it just gave the exhausted older man enough room to take one breath – and start thinking about everything else.
"You heard it, didn't you?"
Veser just looked over at him, a string of pale beads now looped around his hand and wrist, unnervingly tooth-like in their irregularity and plaque-like yellowing. He pressed them under his chin, his oversized fae eyes as empty as he felt, but with a near-imperceptible shadow of reservation. If he did remember what Hanna had said while possessed, he didn't want to be the one to release it into the stagnant air of the den. The fact that it already felt like speaking ill of the dead disturbed the Detective to his core.
The older man took a silent breath and scraped his fingers along his scalp, letting his aching spine lower him to his knees, where he leaned double and covered his mouth.
"He said I killed him," he said blankly, into his palm.
After a moment, the sea-witch shrugged with one shoulder, head listing to the side as he dragged another of his tomes between his knees and began to flip through it.
"He was channeling her. Coop anger like that up for a while and it doesn't give a shit who it gets its hands on."
"How can you be sure?"
A look – such brittle succinctness would have been impossible without the toxic hue of his eyes – said he couldn't.
The Detective sat back for the hundredth time, wiry arms falling palms-up to his sides. Gravity leeched the last of the energy from him, but he couldn't shut his dry eyes. He didn't try. His gaze was drawn to the relentless blinding orange of the dying day outside, perhaps because it distracted his senses from his charred insides, or because the concept of evening had ceased to make sense to him. He was adrift in a dark place without time, one that had taken hold of him the moment that the suffocating presence of Lee Falun had exited his body and he realized that Hanna wasn't moving.
The hours-long struggle to find something to cure the small zombie seemed at once an eternity and a half-hour, and now that their best chance lay with Conrad, all he could think about was what the small zombie had said – screamed at him – before he had managed to restrain his possessed partner.
The Detective had never seen anyone so angry. The emotion he felt surging out of the zombie had been real, curling and cracking him at his seams and driving the young man's empty body forward, but it hadn't been as foreign as he had expected. Truthfully – terrifyingly – it had felt like Hanna.
"Look, it's impossible to tell."
A heavy book slammed shut and the older man looked over to see Veser hunched over, glaring at his own scraped fingers. Any reluctance the younger man might have felt had been boiled down in the wasteland of his mind and siphoned into a stoic stare.
"It's pretty obvious that she was nothing but a hot mess of rage and blood-lust at that point, even if she'd only been left to boil for a month. Hanna should've taught you a thing or two about ghosts. People don't hang around post-croak just because they forgot to do laundry."
"Something has to compel them to stay here ... or to come back," the Detective said quietly, remembering the ghost of the man protecting his granddaughter from the Japanese cat spirit.
"Yeah. Location and method of death matter the most, but in violent deaths, the strongest emotion definitely gets left behind. Revenge was my mom's MO, but, I mean, the stuff that came out of Hanna's mouth ..."
"What?" he asked, straightening at the slight burr in the teen's voice. It was the only emotion he had heard in hours, and the sea-witch confirmed his frustration or confusion by bundling down further, clawing his fingers into the baggy sleeves of his tattered hoodie.
"It's just fuckin' weird, okay? It sounded like classic revenge tourettes, but sometimes possession can bring out parts of you even you didn't know you had. She could have even accessed Hanna's locked memories and just let 'em loose like a berserker. Like I said, possession is a rat-maze inside your own head. Pumped full of that much anger, a psycho witch on your heels, you'd shoot toward the worst thing that ever happened to you."
The idea of Hanna holding that much anger – ever, for anyone – made the Detective feel like he was swallowing down the tar-like blackness trying to surge up from underneath his scar. It was too much to process. The rational part of him put a hand to his jerking mental ribcage, trying to streamline his thoughts.
They knew Hanna had been murdered. They knew he had been stabbed seven times in the back with a strangely-shaped knife. The anger he had seen in Hanna could very well be representative of the event that led him to his death.
The older man tried to say of course and take the facts into himself, but he could not move past the last thing Hanna had said: I trusted you.
"What are the chances that your mother was murdered by someone she trusted?"
"Pretty fucking slim," Veser grunted, wedging a bead between his razor-teeth. He bit down absently, slicing his knuckle and sucking on it in the same motion, unaware of the older man's dark eyes trained intensely on his profile. "She was a paranoid old bat. Didn't really get on with anybody but selkies and, y'know, exiled. Wasn't just one person who did it, either. He … Lee said 'they'. He definitely said 'they.'"
The name brought it all rushing back.
The Detective looked down, an unidentifiable emotion or pressure moving up his body as he clasped his hands in front of himself, long fingers shaking visibly. He tried to say something back, perhaps something about Lee Falun or how sorry he was; how much he had felt how sorry Lee was about everything, the only comprehensive emotion he had retained from that suffocating inundation of love and self-pity and raw purpose that he couldn't possibly put into words even as he knew Veser might want to hear how his foster father had truly felt for him. The Detective even began to ask how they could begin to connect the murders of his parents to something 'larger than they had ever thought', but found that he couldn't.
He just glanced up at Hanna's still form on the couch and immediately looked away so quickly it qualified as a flinch, confusion and preemptive dread knotting under his Adam's apple.
"You don't seriously think he was talking to you."
Once again, Veser's nasal voice surprised him, as did his ability to duck around what truly hurt him. This time, the older man had to think about the tone in it before he recognized it as the thinnest veneer of incredulity, reflected in the irritated wrinkle of the teen's pug nose.
"Like I said, if that was Hanna, she was letting his memories out helter-skelter. You were just the person he saw first, and whoever his memory reel wanted you to be. And besides, you said you guys met a few months ago, in an alley or whatever. If he's been in the ground for a year, how could you have killed him?"
"I can't remember anything from before a year ago," the Detective said sharply, fingers clenching about each other. Then he made himself relax and breathe in, sliding his hands together. "We found some hunters Hanna knew when he was alive. They said that Hanna was looking for me and maybe … he found me. And maybe I killed him."
Veser soaked all of this in uncertainly, then narrowed his eyes at the zombie's partner.
"Dude, we're talking about ghosts and demons here, not unicorns. We've got enough crazy to deal with without conspiracy theories, and I can pretty much guarantee you're not a murderer. Not with the way I saw you bro out with him." The Detective was about to crack his caving chest open and express that festering doubt that he'd managed to talk away – the possibility that he was a far different person now than he had been before – but Veser kicked one of his old tomes away with a disgusted sound, cocking one patched knee and popping a kink in his neck. "So you both are memory-locked? That's fucked-up."
"I'm not memory-locked," the older man said without thinking, then looked over at the sea-witch. "Could I be? I thought it was just amnesia, but … could I have a spell on me as well?"
"Maybe. I could try and see."
Taking a prolonged stare as an affirmative, Veser took a minute to lurch tiredly to his feet and then crossed the distance between them.
The older man sat back with wide eyes, almost too numb to feel the split-second stirring of apprehension as the half-selkie carelessly invaded his personal space, whipping the free length of beads twice around his palm. First absently yanking his hoodie straight and glaring down at him, Veser bowed his head and muttered in a distinctly different language than the celtic spell, holding his bead-wrapped hand close to his mouth. The Detective jerked slightly when the sea-witch breathed out and bit into his knuckle. His needle teeth slid deep; a brilliant thread of red raced down his finger and wound down the length of beads, quickly gathering at the bottom and smacking audibly onto the wooden floor. When Veser extended his bleeding fist toward the older man's face, the sheer number of scars that slid into focus was staggering and a blunt reminder of the inescapably visceral nature of magicks.
Everything in the ether had a price of flesh.
The Detective's breath caught in his chest as he felt or imagined something buzzing insistently in his periphery; Veser's bloody hand was soon too close to focus on as it moved right between his eyes. It traveled down his body in complete silence. Veser's focused expression made it look as if he were scanning for something past the older man's skin, an unearthly sliver of bright green visible between his dove-grey lashes. Closing his eyes, the older man tried to breathe and relax, but the nagging energy sound-sensation fought him and slowly drove his nails into his leg.
When the scan reached his chest, he opened his eyes in time to see Veser tighten in front of him for a second before he was visibly knocked back a fraction, hand retracting and face blanking. His face then crumpled in confusion and he drew back his hand even further, pressing it to his chest.
"What? What was that?" the older man demanded, hand clenched stiffly atop his thigh. The moment Veser had retracted his hand, or the electrified air that had clung around it, his limbs suddenly came alive with pins and needles.
"Dunno. Never happened before," Veser answered. After a moment, he put his hand out and wiggled his fingers as though they were no longer connected to his body, clearing his throat. He looked very, very unsure. "I'm probly off my game or ... something. But it looks like you got a knock to the head. It's no memory charm I've seen, at least."
The older man sat back, but the next deep breath did nothing to avail him of either the bottle-necked sense of anticipation or the irritating buzzing he felt still trickling down in his limbs. A knock to the head it was, then. He wondered briefly if Veser would have something to say after looking at the stapled-over scar on his chest, considering that the spirit of his mother had been so intent on ripping it open, but the time for his own questions and issues was over. The Detective nodded shortly and went back to watching Hanna's blank face, the malaise of silence settling back over them as if it had never left.
Veser took a few unsteady steps away, then looked at the older man long and hard, putting his finger to his nose.
"Since we're talking personal, here … I wasn't gonna say anything, but you stink."
"I do?" the Detective murmured, looking down at the rest of his wiry self as if he'd forgotten it was there. In the clench and worry for Hanna's safety, he may very well have willed himself into nonexistence but for the mild wounds that kept pulling him back into his body. After staring uncomprehendingly at both the clothed span of his scarred chest and the dirty bandages on his arm, he cautiously raised his hand to his own nose, wondering why the teen had chosen just then to care about his hygiene. Veser grimaced, flashing his lamprey teeth, and nodded once.
"Yeah. Like a dead person. I was just chocking it up to Hanna, because, y'know, walking corpse, but you seriously reek."
"Thank god somebody's got a fuckin' nose in this place."
The two men looked over to see a gaunt man in a white lab-coat standing in the open doorway, hands hooked into claws.
What began as a sneer of disgust and aggression twisted into a snarl of unmitigated rage when he caught sight of Hanna laid out flat on the couch, unmoving. Before the Detective could rise to his feet, the stranger stalked over and began to brusquely test the zombie's unresponsive form, raising his skinny limbs and pushing his eye-lids up and finally slapping his cheek, then looked up. When the man's eyes fell on the Detective, they flared red with rage and the next moment — after a blurr of white and a distortion of air — he was at the Detective's throat, needle teeth bared.
"The hell'd you do to him?" he roared, hoisting the Detective up by the collar much like he had done in the alleyway so long ago. It had taken the older man up until that moment – and that grip – to recognize the vampire, which was a case of pitifully bad recall he didn't have the oxygen to chide himself for. His attacker's strength was so colossal for his skinny frame that it sent the other man staggering with a squeezed noise, hands clamped onto the vampire's bamboo wrists.
"Luce!" Conrad bellowed from the doorway, which actually made the vampire look over.
Maybe it was the way he was keeping weight off of his barely-healed leg or the resulting battered irritation in his stance, but Conrad, flushed and sporting a half-opened peacoat, actually looked like a force to be reckoned with in that moment. The coroner then ruined whatever small ounce of command he'd exerted by looking downright startled that it had actually worked. The vampire's lip instantly curled up and stuck there as he turned back to the man in his hands, red eyes picking him apart.
"You smell like a fuckin' graveyard and I don't trust you any further'n I can throw you, and even then's a sight too far," he hissed, close enough for the Detective to feel the creature's tepid, uneven breath on his cheek. "An if I find out that you let Hanna get near any ghosts, I'm gonna fill you so full'a holes —"
"Luce, seriously."
Though lower and a touch more exhausted, Conrad's reprimand still had the desired effect. After freezing for a second like a scolded beast, Luce snorted at him, actually growled deep and gravelly, then dropped the Detective without a word of warning and paced back over to Hanna.
Veser had watched the tense event with one hand in his jeans, the nasty expression on his face an assurance that something equally unpleasant was within reach in his pocket, but ended up stumbling to get out of the vampire's way. In doing so, he cast a look that was equal parts mystified and wildly resentful to the older man. The Detective, however, was leaning woundedly on his chair and rubbing his neck and clearly had no answers for him.
Conrad appeared too mortified to offer them a real look of embarrassment or an apology, and so settled on a harried bit of eye-contact before limping over to Hanna's bedside to close all the living room shades against the last slivers of the reddening sun. Vehemently muttering to himself, the vampire was ignoring this helpfulness and was instead pulling things helter-skelter out of what the paranormal investigator realized was a skinny, fur-lined coat. A lab-coat.
This, evidently, was the doctor Conrad had gone to call.
So, taking the coroner's trust as their own, they let him 'work'. Once the vampire had been labeled as a non-threat and the situation seemed under control, Veser hovered on the edges of the tiny living room, obviously intensely intrigued. Possibly he had never seen a 'live' vampire before, and the Detective didn't begrudge him the late introduction. It was only by a sense of necessity that Hanna's partner gave the tetchy undead man the space he seemed to need, barely having the presence of mind to observe some truly strange interactions between the vampire and their coroner friend: ones that he felt didn't truly illustrate the last serial harassment update Conrad had given him and left a lot of questions to be answered. Mostly, the vampire very much appreciated his own sense of organization in his work environment and seemed surprised and irritated to find a helpful human underfoot.
"Ey, the holy hell're ya – that's my shit!"
"Wha – you threw it on the ground!"
"Yeah, an on the ground is where I want it, ya OCD faggot. Quit tryin' ta play nurse an' get ta work on that nong's DVD collection. "
"You are such a bastard. I was trying to -"
"Only kinda nurse I ever had a use for wears nipple tassles, Peaches, so if you don't got any'a them, you kin fuck right off. Yer not a real doctor, lord only knows how much you'd fuck up nursin'."
"I – you –!"
"In fact, fuck off anyways. This here's classified."
"He's, Christ, he's our zombie ... too. I guess. Not just yours! What are you doing to him that's so classified?"
"If I told ya, it wouldn't be fuckin' classified anymore, now would it?"
"Ohgofuckyourself."
Just when the Detective was about to speak, either to ask who the undead man was or just request that Conrad stop interfering in whatever he was doing, the white-coated vampire thrust a hand out for quiet or stillness or both. Once the living room was as still as a grave, he put down a suspicious-looking orange pill bottle and tapped some freshly-crushed powders into a folded piece of paper, then went down on his knee and placed the paper v underneath Hanna's upturned green nose. Next, he bent with an air of concentration and, pinching one nostril shut, blew it up the zombie's nose.
The trumpet-esque sound made everyone in the room straighten; the Detective would have seen Veser staring at him with a severely disturbed expression if his own eyes hadn't been locked on Hanna, unchanged on the couch. His hand tightened on the back of the cheap kitchen chair, not so much telling himself to hang back but finding himself incapable of interfering.
"Oy, kid. Wakey-wakey," the vampire grunted above him, glaring at the limp zombie for no more than a few seconds before following the medical treatment with another sound slap to the face. "Oy!"
Mouth popping open, Conrad grabbed for his hand to prevent another blow, fury and disbelief competing for dominance on his splotchy face – then sneezed. Except it was too high-pitched and sudden to come from anyone older than twenty-five, and both Conrad and the vampire's heads snapped around, leaving them staring at the couch.
Between Conrad's finely tailored slacks, the Detective saw a bony green hand twitch then splay out like a palm-frond, shaking.
"Oh man, woah, wow, whad habbend, oh by – jeez – agghk, 'by dose – "
The sound of Hanna's voice, no matter how stunned and stuffy, made the cruel fist around the older man's heart squeeze once then relax with a painful creak. He let out a breath so sharp it was almost a bark, clammy hand covering his forehead. The vampire made no expression of joy. On the contrary, he flicked the used bit of paper at the zombie's head with a disdainful noise.
"Yeah, had to go the nasal route: usually it's a bit easier ta get this stuff in ya, but it's yer fault fer losin' all'a yer damn blood. Who loses all their fuckin' blood and still has the nerve ta keep prancin' around?"
When that seemed to cause no response except for more muffled choking and some muted wiggling, the vampire stepped back and the Detective got his first actual glimpse of his partner, who was half-propped on a skinny green elbow, eyes clenched shut. Then the undead man leaned over so far that he nearly halved his impressive height, red eyes narrowed to vengeful slits. He gave the dead boy a hard poke in the sternum and the sound was like a smack on a leathery drum.
"So what'd I tell ya," the vampire grit out, fangs inches from his patient's nose. His sense of personal space was clearly something he had left in his human body. "'Bout ghosts?"
"Um, nothing?" Hanna answered weakly, still groping around with his eyes shut. From the left, Conrad's hand mysteriously produced a handkerchief and Hanna scrubbed at his face with it, at least having the good sense not to blow his nose.
"No, m'pretty sure it was somethin' else," the vampire hissed mockingly, scratching at his stubble with truly terrifying nails, then actually took Hanna by the shirt and waggled him. "I said no ghosts!"
"But -" Hanna outright whined, fumbling with his thick-framed glasses that Conrad had tucked into his other hand.
"None. No more." The undead man released him with a shove, bullying urges apparently satisfied. Hanna bounced as much as their deflated couch could offer and coughed feebly, poking his glasses onto his nose.
"Come on, you don't even know what ha — " he began groggily, peering up into the vampire's pale face for an uncomprehending moment before his glowing blue eyes snapped open and he scrambled up onto the arm of the couch, face drawn. "Woah! Who are you?"
The vampire opened his mouth to snap something more, then his pale, narrow features hardened, fangs hooked over his thin lip. Struck, he huffed out a single breath of air and stepped back, long fingers twitching absently at his sides. Conrad watched him worriedly, realizing something the others didn't, then swallowed when Luce crossed his arms and glared at the crumpled dead boy – the dead boy who used to be alive, but was now crouched on the arm of a couch, looking up at him in fear.
Fear, and no recognition whatsoever.
"I'm yer fuckin' doctor, kid."
"Conrad's my doctor," Hanna said uncertainly, looking very caught with his thumbnail wedged against his teeth and his knees knocking together nervously.
"Iss'e, now," Luce said suspiciously, casting a very displeased look to his left, where Conrad shrugged lamely and muttered something about giving his five weeks notice about two months ago. After a moment, Luce snorted again and turned back to the zombie, rolling up his sleeve with an officiousness equal parts relieving and fearsome.
"Well god help ya you've survived this long. I'm here ta patch whatever he fucked up an' whatever you've managed ta do ta yerself in the meantime, you right? Now sit still, I gotta get a damage count after these nongs nearly let you fall apart."
Without waiting for any form of permission, the vampire began to press and poke at him, making various noises that expressed various levels of escalating disgust and snapping at Conrad if he knew how to sew a straight line because Jesus Christ 'is arm is nearly fallin' off and lookit these fuckin' holes what do you think he is a fuckin' cross-stitch mat, and so on and so forth.
Hanna appeared immensely unnerved the entire time, suffering the rag-doll treatment in silence as if he knew it would go better for him that way. This worked until Luce started barking questions at him. The zombie answered them in a suffering way that Conrad could see was very, very natural to him; suddenly, like a shift in clouds, he saw how they must have been while Hanna was alive.
He could see it: Hanna crawling back to Luce on a weekly basis, bleeding and giggling, and answering his accusing questions miserably, hearing the you bloody idiot beneath every one of them. Probably averaging four or five slaps a month. The thought made him twinge a bit on the inside, and if a hypothetical situation was doing that to him, he couldn't imagine how much it was tearing through Luce's immortal viscera.
Veser watched from the kitchen, the only other chair turned around, back between his knees. The Detective remained waiting out of sight and out of reach as well, but the ball of his foot had begun to tap at the floor and it had long become clear that Hanna wasn't going to drop off into that dreadful paralysis again: he wanted to talk to his partner, or just let him know that he was there. He could feel himself at the fringes of the scene like he felt in the office: forgotten, overlooked, but not by any rudeness or personal shortcoming. He naturally faded into the fabric of the environment, but this time he wanted – needed – to be involved. Still, there was technically some sort of healing process going on, and only when the vampire flung the dead boy's arm down and stepped away in disgust did the Detective begin to approach.
Before he could even reach Hanna's side, the doctor stopped in between them and whirled with a dramatic sweep of his lab-coat, hands entrenched in his pockets and cock of his horribly thin shoulders spelling business.
"I'm keepin you under observation, kid." Nearly everyone opened their mouths, but the look in the vampire's dark-ringed eyes would not be trifled with. "I don't give a shit if you don't trust me. Yer gonna sit in front'a me the whole night and if I see so much as a flicker in those blue lightbulbs'a yours, yer in deep shit."
"I think I'm ... staying over too," Conrad spoke up after a moment, holding in a sigh. The Detective looked over at him in weary surprise and Conrad shrugged, offering weakly: "My curfew is up."
One glance revealed that night had finally overtaken the city, heavy black blotting out even the poor, crumbling urban skyline visible from their window. Below the lopsided panel of black glass, Hanna was talking in a rising voice.
"Look, I don't care if you stay over – we don't have any coffins so you'll have to rough it – but I need to talk to Imogen – Imogen?"
"Imogen? The fuck kind of a fairy princess name is that?" Luce fairly spat, looking as if it had been confirmed that he really did hate everything about the man.
"The name of the hour," Conrad breathed out as the Detective finally slipped between them, concern deeply carved into his unshaven face.
"Yes, Hanna?"
The vampire turned towards him. The twitch of his lip to expose his yellowed fangs was purely territorial, but the Detective was too tired to care. What he did care about was the nearly manic energy pouring out of Hanna and the way the young zombie nearly fell off the couch reaching for him, all grasping hands and open mouth. The older man moved over to him just as Hanna gripped onto his torn sleeves and found the words, blue eyes wide.
"She was trying to kill you!"
"Who?" he managed to say before Hanna yanked at him harder, trying to stand up and instantly falling back to the couch as his knees gave way underneath him like bendy straws.
"Her! The witch, Veser's mom, the woman with the silver hair and the honkin' huge green eyes just like his."
"How do you ... what?" It was as if something clammy and immovable had just clamped itself at the base of his brain, preventing any other information from getting in. He looked down at Hanna with an almost infantile helplessness. "I don't understand."
"Look, I saw some stuff when I was inside her head, or when she was in mine or whatever," the zombie grit out, the explanation far too sparse to make up for the blank spot his partner had been forced to suffer through. He was about to say so, but Hanna had managed to get one foot beneath himself and was manically intent on shoving the discussion further ahead. "Listen, did you ever remember seeing Veser's mom in real life? Like, ever?"
"No. But I dreamt of her."
He cast a quick, almost guilty look at Veser, uncomfortable, but the look in the teen's eyes was nothing if not firm. It was clear that, if nothing else, a simple yet brutal want of information would carry him through this.
"I saw her in my dreams very soon after she died. Was murdered." The Detective swallowed, skin prickling involuntarily at the memory of a tiny doll hand shoving into the folds of his split chest. The noise that came after. "It wasn't pleasant."
"She was in your dreams? She was the reason you were asking about ghosts and dreams at the nekomata house?" Hanna demanded, slapping at his temple so brutally that the older man's eyes immediately locked onto his neck stitches. "Oh man, it all makes sense!"
Before the Detective could move to strongly refute even the possibility of that, Hanna grabbed his arm and looked up at him with his blue eyes blazing, round face both luridly green and deadly serious.
"Nikolai. Do you remember what happened the night you almost got mugged and I rescued you?"
"The night we met, yes." It seemed so painfully out of context that he had to restate it to make sure they were talking about the same thing – or even having the same conversation. He nodded, then haltingly began to recount it when Hanna's x-ray stare didn't lessen or waver. "I had a drink at the bar on twentieth, then left, then -"
"No, in between. You talked to someone."
"I can barely remember," he muttered, almost embarrassed. The truth was, he could only remember being very intoxicated, which was a miserable and mundane little something he didn't care to discuss at length in front of Conrad and the others. To his surprise, however, nothing more was needed: it seemed to be just what Hanna wanted to hear. The small zombie nodded, pointy features condensing almost fearsomely into a deep, knowing frown.
"Because she spelled you," he said shortly. "It was Veser's mom. She charmed your drink and confounded you because she was trying to get you defenseless and kill you. She'd been following you for a long, long time before that, too. She was the one I felt casting in that alleyway, when my homing rune started prickling for the first time."
Perhaps it was just Hanna's brutal rhetoric, but the clamp snapped off of his brainstem in one instant and brought with it a gush of images and memories, all too expansive for his paper-mache skull. Gaze pin-pointing on nothing, the Detective flashed back on that night and the baffling intensity of drunkenness that had sent him clattering against the brick wall at a simple push from a stranger. He remembered what happened after, and how quickly he sobered once he realized that his savior was nothing but a boy, almost as if the spell of the rum itself had been lifted. Next returned the hazy dream segments that had occurred before Ieda's violent attacks: every time he had turned around and those big green eyes were waiting for him, too close for comfort but too far to allow for words. She had been waiting for him, repeating the action as if in another life. It all came together.
"And the muggers?" he asked the black window, barely hearing himself say the words.
"Might have saved your life," Hanna said darkly.
"Hold the phone. You were the one she was trying to kill?"
The whine, scratchy and sudden, came from their right. Hanna whirled on Veser as best he could from his awkward half-kneeling position, one hand still clamped into his partner's torn sleeve.
"Your mother was trying to kill someone when she was murdered and you didn't think to tell us?" Hanna grit out, expression downright livid. Veser put up his bandaged hands, instantly surly.
"The fuck, man, I didn't figure it was important. And she was always really fuckin' vague about it, okay? She wouldn't shut up about the big bad thing that was gonna happen: I didn't know whether she was gonna cook a chicken or murder a man. Like I said, she went fuckin' bonkers before she got axed. I stopped listening months ago," the sea-witch snapped as he heaved himself up from the kitchen chair, then stopped to think about something and turned those acidic green eyes on the Detective, gaze simultaneously exacting and incredulous.
"But why the hell would she want to kill you? And why didn't she just do it? No offense, man. I'm sure you can lift a buck or two and that stink of yours would warn anybody off, but my mom knew her stuff. She could have fried you without a problem. Why'd she even take the time to drug you before trying to do it?"
The small yet sparse living room was left quiet as the grave in the wake of Veser's question. The older man could feel other questions and other suspicions knotting around every single head in the room, but most prominent of all was the rank vibration of utter confusion. However, mere minutes after being told that a powerful sea-witch had spent at least a few months attempting to murder him, and, even more shocking, with no success, the Detective rallied at least one clear thought. There were only two motivations he could see that would explain his would-be murderer's behavior: discretion or fear.
A look down at Hanna confirmed that they were on the same track. Unfortunately, that track ended a mere step from where they began it, and the only person who could answer their questions was already dead herself. Someone had killed her before she could kill him.
The older man frowned down at Hanna, feeling incredibly blank.
"If she was ... in your head, you must have known it was yours. Your memories are still inside you. What else did you see, Hanna?"
It took the small zombie a moment to process the change of subject. When he did, he abruptly shrank an inch or two, shoulders jerking inwards as if he were a wind-up doll and had been given a particularly jarring turn with a rusty key.
"Not a lot," he said uncomfortably, long green fingers falling from his sleeve to twine around each other as he clumsily hopped off the couch and put his weight on his other foot. The zombie bit his cheek and looked at the floor. "Just like … random stuff. Just … stuff."
The Detective was peripherally aware of several things in the room: Veser was about to open his mouth, maybe to demand that they begin searching for the man with the half-moon glasses again, and the older man knew that the vampire was still in the room and Conrad was likely horribly confused. But then the small zombie looked up, locking eyes with him, and the Detective remembered the previous night in the theater in vicious detail. He remembered the fear and the falling sensation of blacking out as Lee possessed him. What had happened before, and what Hanna said.
If Hanna had truly been inside his own head, where his locked memories were, there was a definite chance the possessed zombie had unconsciously pulled from the life he had before – and the moments before he died.
"And do you remember anything that happened?" The Detective swallowed, throat suddenly dry. Or maybe he had just noticed. "Anything you ... said?"
"No. I was on another planet." Hanna frowned, peering up at him dubiously. "Did I say something weird when she possessed me?"
His shoulders dropped, countered by a heady mixture of confusion and relief and disappointment rising to butt against the back of his raw throat. He cleared it away with a choked noise.
"We'll talk about it later. I'm just glad you're ..."
Words didn't fit. Not dead? Alive?
"Alright," the older man said faintly, exhaustion finally conquering him as he reached out and put a hand on Hanna's tiny shoulder, mouth tweaking stalely at the corners. It made him feel every bristle of his stiff, scummy-feeling facial hair and the weight underneath his eyes, but the zombie was solid underneath his hand, line of his bird-bone collar jutting into his palm. Hanna regarded him almost warily for a moment before returning the smile, after which they were solidly interrupted by the vampire and Conrad, the latter of which had lost the rising battle with the former's impatience.
Clearly the new undead addition to their group did not appreciate being shunted to the side, particularly when he had work to do. In a matter of minutes, the vampire had reclaimed the pathetic living room and began his reign of terror with gratuitous snarling and flashes of his long fangs, rushing everyone out of the area to keep them from 'harassing his patient.' As it was soon known, he had a long night and an early morning ahead of him if he expected to walk the unpleasantly thin line between frying and being skinned, damnit.
Veser, having nowhere else to go, balled up in the corner and quickly passed into the undead doctor's periphery. On the 100-foot journey to his bedroom, the Detective stopped and gave Conrad a sideways look that stated quite clearly that there was a good deal that the other man wasn't telling him: especially concerning the vampire whom the older man had last seen in pore-level detail, pressing a knife to his quietly pulsing kidney, but who now appeared to be a doctor and somewhat under the coroner's sway. The surly creature could be called down like a half-trained dog, at the least, provided he could see the treat in hand and he also wanted to do the desired act, neither of which were circumstances the Detective was comfortable with. Conrad didn't seem entirely confident in their bond either.
This left the two men staring at the vampire, and then at each other, until Conrad gave a sigh that shook his whole body and put a hand to his forehead as Doc Worth yelled loudly enough to wake the whole floor and smacked Hanna across the back of the head, then blamed him for the resulting broken stitches.
"… Do I really have to explain him?"