Chapter 3

-Lisa-

I was searching the cupboards for coffee when I heard footsteps heading up the stairs to the loft. Alec's off in the living room with his videogames, no dogs - can't be Rachel. Brian should have been done working for a while now - must be him.

The guess turned out to be right, naturally. Brian looked around for a moment and headed straight for me. He seemed rather upset.

"Lisa." Yep, definitely upset.

"Brian."

"You never told us we're working for Coil." Ah, he caught the "caged fox" thing then. I'd better not incriminate myself any further in case he somehow hasn't thought it all the way through, though.

"I had orders not to. Is that a problem?" I answered carefully, watching for his reaction. He definitely caught on to what I was doing.

"That depends on one thing. Why did the crazy girl call you a caged fox, exactly?"

"...Beside the part where she's crazy?" I said with the closest thing I could make to an innocent expression. Well, there goes his patience.

"She knew who we are and who we're working for. You're not here by choice, are you?" Brian gritted out.

"No," I sighed, and continued in a bitter tone. "Now that you've figured it out, why are you mad at me? What was I supposed to do with a gun to my head? And the boss knows things. I couldn't risk telling you and having him find out."

"So you didn't warn us. At all!" Brian punched the wall hard enough to rattle the cupboards, then took a deep breath. "And now the guy who's apparently willing to recruit people at gunpoint knows about Aisha," he said, in a tone that implied that if he'd had less self-control than he did, it wouldn't have been the wall.

"Just kiss already, you two!" Alec jeered from his couch in the living room.

"I'm sorry about that, but I couldn't have warned you. I had just met you - I'm good, but I still had to take time to make sure none of you were secretly reporting to him. By the time I was sure I could trust you, well. We were all too deep in it, and I didn't even know about Aisha until she walked up to us at the Boardwalk and flat out asked if I was your girlfriend..." I trailed off, but didn't even try to look apologetic - I'd learned long ago that I couldn't do that and not make it look mocking.

"Mommy? Daddy? Why are you fighting?" the goddamn clown ribbed us again from the living room.

Brian glared at me for a very long moment, then stormed out.

Late that night, I looked up from the screen when I heard heavy footsteps pass my door, accompanied by panting.

"We met a weird new cape last night, Rachel. Ask Alec for the details, I'm trying to get into the PRT database."

Rachel paused outside, grunted, and took her dogs to their room without even turning to look at Alec, which was hardly surprising. He had a talent for getting on the nerves of far more patient people than the feral girl.

I stared at the clock, counting down the last minute until the night shift started in the PRT building, waiting to use the backdoor that transferred one particular account's access to me while making the rest of the system think it was logged out. Getting in had become such a hassle after Dragon updated their security several months ago, and the admin currently on rotation actually made people change their passwords as frequently as his now unemployed predecessor should have. Despite the frustration, it didn't take that long for the chance to get in to present itself, and the PRT's reports were in front of me soon enough. I updated my local copy of the data and logged out for real before anyone noticed - getting out and deleting the evidence left me fairly safe, but if I was noticed while the connection was still open, VPNs and proxies wouldn't save me.

The BBPD reports were already in a separate folder on my laptop, but I didn't want to start on that without the PRT files. Going through so many reports, when the critical pieces could've been in the PRT database instead? I'd have called that pointless.

That is, if a quick check hadn't shown that the PRT did not get any reports from the BBPD even remotely suggesting the possibility of a new cape - either the cops didn't get anything, or they didn't pass it on to the PRT. Bureaucratic dick-measuring at its finest. Shaking my head, I sorted through missing person, battery and murder cases.

Most of the disappearances were, surprise surprise, near Merchant territory. I wondered briefly, but recalled that Cassandra refused to bite a drug user last night, so she probably wouldn't hunt in those parts of town. Though she knew we were watching... was that a bluff? Mark that for later, but it's probably nothing.

The others did not form any pattern I was willing to burn my power on. One particular report stood out, though. A girl with a vaguely matching physical description had been reported missing, last seen going to school a few days ago. Considering I was fairly confident that Cassandra was a fresh trigger - too unsubtle to have been around for long, and a cape that strange would likely be the cause of many rumors - it looked like a potential lead. Sadly, the only picture of the missing girl provided was old enough to be unreliable, though. I marked Taylor Hebert's case as "potentially relevant", a sadly small category so far, and moved on to battery cases. Huh, Brian's sister goes to Winslow, doesn't she? Maybe she knows the girl...

I made a note to talk to Brian about that. Maybe he could frame it as having heard of a girl disappearing at school and being worried about his sister? He wouldn't even have to lie, not about anything that mattered.

Brockton Bay being Brockton Bay, I eventually decided to narrow the battery cases down to the reports that mentioned biting. Unfortunately, even looking at them put together...

Not human bites, dog. Empire dogfighting ring. Somewhere on Maple Street.

"I need to hear about the crazy cape, not the dogfighting rings. Stupid power," I groaned out, and started looking at the murder reports.

As the numerous shootings and stabbings scrolled past my eyes, Rachel stuck her head into the room.

"What was that about a dogfighting ring?" she asked without preamble.

"There could be one on Maple Street, I think," I answered distractedly, more concerned with one particular report of a particularly fierce woman biting a man twice her weight. Not Cassandra. Thug on PCP. ... no, not important.

"I'm going for a walk."

She retracted her head and went to wake her dogs. Some time after she'd left, I wrote the murders off as a lost cause and brought up the camera footage from last night.

A couple of hours later, as I was trying to find the best shot of the mystery girl's build to compare against the image of Taylor Hebert I managed to get off Winslow's website, my phone rang. Brian's number was on the screen.

"Hello."

"Lisa. Have you seen Rachel tonight?"

"...Yeah, she left for a walk an hour or two ago, why?"