Less description today, more dialogue. Sorry to those who like description, and you're welcome to those who like dialogue. Ha ha. On another note – you are all getting a science lesson today! Woo! Vocabulary words: strychnine, rigor mortis, livor mortis, lividity, vitreous humor. I am hellbent on expanding the knowledge everyone has of forensic science!

starsorcerous: Thank you so much for your awesome review! It made my day! I'm also terribly flattered that you added me to your favorites. Squee!

the pawn shoppe heart: Yes, Vic, I knew it was you even before you told me. And I plan on boggling your little minds with forensic detail! Yehaw!

Disclaimer: I no own you no sue.

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Children of Mercury – Chapter 1

It was four in the morning. The stars had pulled themselves awkwardly over the horizon, glimmering meekly through the nighttime fog of the city. Their light was dim and sickly looking, as though shining through a haze of cigarette smoke, and if she had taken the time to look outside before going to bed the evening before, she wouldn't have liked it. However, Holly Noble had not taken the time to look at the stars in a while now. At the moment she was half-sleeping in her modest urban flat, sprawled out on top of the covers on her bed, eyes half open in a cloud of exhaustion. The previous night she had consumed unmentionable amounts of red wine and whiskey in celebration of her first day off in two weeks – the day that was about to dawn in about two and a half hours. Unwilling to commit her day of freedom to an enormous hangover, Holly had drunk about a gallon of water and taken two aspirin before going to bed, but neither had done their job as of yet.

It was four in the morning, and her telephone was ringing. Holly snapped out of her reverie with a start, spread-eagled and gasping like a fish out of water. It took several more rings before she had recovered enough to scrabble blindly for the phone in the dark, and a few seconds of silence longer before she was sufficiently responsive to answer.

"Noble." She winced. Her voice was raw, garbled, and about an octave lower than usual. She heard a male chuckle and a couple of voices calling to each other in the background.

"Is Holly there?" the voice said sarcastically. "I didn't know she had a date last night."

"Shut up," she snarled, passing the phone to her other ear and twisting the cord through her fingers. Male voice. It took her a second to connect the voice to the name.

"All in due time. Anyway, you're probably wondering why I'm calling at this ungodly hour…"

Holly rolled her eyes at the ceiling.

"…but we really need you here. We're tapped out." The voice paused, and Holly was silent for a few moments. Then:

"Jesus, Archie! It's my day off!"

Archie grumbled. "Weren't you listening to me? We're tapped out. Almost the whole shift can't come in, and graveyard is running on fumes already. Marcie has the flu, and Rob's on mandatory leave for burnout, remember?"

"What about Paver?" she demanded, clutching the phone to her ear and sitting up higher in bed.

"In Kent for his mom's funeral." Holly made a small oh. "And Clark – get this – his girlfriend dumped him last night, right after he bought her a fancy dinner, too. So, yeah, I called him and he was a wreck, moaning like a damn zombie, so I figured he wouldn't be too focused on a case right now-"

"Bullshit!"

"I know. But what can you do?" Holly could almost hear him shrug across the phone line. She tapped the side of the phone with her fingernails, then turned and looked out the window. The sky had lightened somewhat to a murky grey. She sighed.

"Fine. But you owe me. I want this counting as overtime."

"I knew you'd come around." He gave her directions before hanging up. Holly moaned dramatically and rolled off her bed onto the floor.

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She arrived at the scene by four-fifteen. In a desperate attempt to look as if she hadn't been woken up less than a half hour previous after a night of hard drinking, Holly had opened all the windows, letting the cold early morning air graze past her cheekbones and whip her dark brown hair around her face until she was as wide awake as to be expected. She had also blasted the music from a rock radio station that was having some sort of Led Zeppelin marathon, although she didn't know if that as to wake her up or make her feel like she had some company in her mildly angry, rebellious mood. As she pulled up to the scene (in an old warehouse, it appeared) she saw a number of policemen milling about and one darkly suited detective waving his arms wildly at her. She pulled to a stop and flipped off the radio with some reluctance. Robert Plant's crooning came to an abrupt halt, and Detective Archer Roach jogged over to her company-issued SUV. She slid out of the driver's seat, popping a mint into her mouth.

"Caucasian female, twenty-five to thirty," he said, gesturing at the warehouse glowing fluorescent yellow with police tape. Holly let him take her elbow as he led her over to the check-in table.

"Homicide?" she inquired, furrowing her brow. They reached the folding card table that served as a check-in point to the warehouse where a round-faced policeman was cheerfully scribbling down the name of everyone that entered and exited the building. She flashed her badge at him with a certain degree of sarcasm, and he winked at her as both Holly and Roach continued on.

"That's for you to decide," the detective said, lifting up the crime scene tape so that she could enter the warehouse. "It's hard to tell. Could be suicide." She nodded. Roach had been grinning since he had first helped her out of the car, and now it became even more pronounced.

"What?" she demanded indignantly, wondering if she really looked as pathetic as she felt.

"I think you're going to have fun on this one," he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet like an excited child. "You haven't had one of these for a while."

Holly was about to ask what he meant until her eyes adjusted to the light inside the warehouse and she finally saw what Roach was talking about.

"Damn!" she exclaimed, drawing out the word until it sounded as if it had multiple syllables. Roach just smirked.

In the center of the warehouse and slightly off to one side was the body of a young woman. Scattered around her were miscellaneous items that looked as if they belonged in a woman's purse, and off to one side was an empty bag. That, however, was not the reason for Holly's awed curse. The victim was positioned on her back, muscles taut and stretched, back fully arched. Only her heels and the back of her head touched the concrete floor, and on her face was a classic example of a death leer. Her open eyes had clouded. The scene looked like something from a horror movie, a grim – and terribly accurate – vision of death.

"So…" Archie said, twisting his lips wryly. "I take it you're thinking what I'm thinking."

Holly nodded. "Classic strychnine poisoning. You're right, I haven't had one of these in a while." She began circling the warehouse, studying the body with practiced eyes. A crime scene photographer was flitting around the corpse, taking pictures from all angles, and she eyed his movements, making sure he didn't contaminate any evidence. Suddenly, her walking came to a halt, and she craned her neck back at the detective. "Who found it?"

"A nightshift worker was taking her dog out for a walk. The dog smelled something, pulled the leash. Luckily, she managed to harness him in before he touched the body. She's been excluded, by the way."

"Ah." Holly continued her circling. "Body been declared?"

Roach shook his head. "Beth should be here soon." Holly raised an eyebrow. Beth was the primary forensic pathologist, and while she occasionally came to a crime scene to evaluate it, it was almost always another person's job – the forensic investigator's, to be exact – to declare a body officially deceased. "Why is Beth coming?"

"Because, as Roach will have already told you, we're tapped out!" A cheerful voice rang through the warehouse, and the pair whirled around. Beth Schmidt, MD, was a cheerful woman of thirty-seven with pale blonde hair and a petite build, almost dwarfed by the forensic kit she was lugging along towards them. "Alex," she referred to the forensic investigator, "is at the hospital. His wife went into labor twelve hours ago." She dropped the kit with a thunk, placed her hands on her hips, and surveyed the body. "Hey! You didn't tell me it was a poisoning!"

"It was a surprise. What can you tell us?" Roach inquired, glancing at the physician.

Beth shrugged. "Well, the position," she waved her hand at the arched figure, "corresponds with strychnine or a similar toxin. Strychnine prevents the chemical 'off switches' for the muscles from being properly recognized, leading to painful muscle spasms and, eventually, the bow position and death."

"Victims die from asphyxia," Holly finished, "because the muscles in the chest contract tightly, preventing the victim from being able to take in a breath." Beth nodded and squatted next to the body. The photographer indicated he was finished and backed away to take photos of the bag.

"Homicide or suicide?" inquired Roach.

"Strychnine is rarely used for suicide because it's very painful, but for someone who didn't do their research, who knows?" Beth said, examining the corpse's eyeballs. "As for homicide… why would a murderer take someone out into a warehouse, or follow them there, just to poison them? Wouldn't it be easier to just slash their throat, or shoot them, or something?"

"Unless this is only a secondary scene," Holly pointed out, joining Beth next to the corpse. "She might have been poisoned somewhere else, and moved."

"I don't think so. Usually, the concentration of lactic acid and ATP in a corpse changes gradually, and it is this change that sends them into rigor mortis. They don't get completely stiff for at least ten hours or so. It's all a different ballgame with strychnine. Strychnine victims go into rigor almost immediately after death because of the high concentration of lactic acid and low amounts of ATP left in their muscles from the spasms. It would be very difficult – almost impossible – to transport a body in rigid bow position without being noticed. Also…" Beth dropped off, bent her head, and pulled down a bit of the victim's jacket and shirt at the nape of her neck. What looked like a purple-blue bruise spanned all the lower regions of the corpse. She then lifted the shirt at the side and examined the woman's armpit, followed by her shoulder blades, the sides of her ribs, and the small of her back, all of which possessed the same discoloration in varying shades of darkness.

Holly stayed silent and watched the woman work, relaying all she knew about lividity in her mind. A voice in the back of her head droned like a textbook. Also known as livor mortis, lividity is the discoloration on the skin of a corpse that results from the sinking of blood in its vessels. In a stationary corpse, lividity follows gravity and sinks down into the lowest regions of the body, where it eventually settles into a permanent bruise. However, lividity can be changed before it sets. If a body were rolled, for example, lividity would start to settle on the opposite tide of the corpse, resulting in a discoloration on both the top and bottom of the body.

"No, she wasn't moved. Lividity," Beth gestured toward the discoloration that covered the corpse's back, "is only on the lower regions, not the top, sides, or anywhere else. This girl stayed on her back from the moment she died."

"Well, this is all fascinating," Roach said dryly, trying to absorb the technical jargon, "but I really need an answer for the Sheriff." He was the only one who hadn't sat down by the corpse, and was looking distinctly uncomfortable. Holly relished this and was about to make fun, but something caught her eye.

"Hey," she said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves and squinting down at the empty bag on the other side of the body. "This has been slashed open. The ends of the weave along the cut end evenly." Without touching anything, she took a quick inventory of the bag's contents that were still scattered across the floor, eyes flicking back and forth rapidly.

"I think we can rule out suicide," Holly declared, standing up. "There's nothing of worth here. Keys, tissues, lipstick – she's been robbed."

"And murdered with strychnine?" Beth finished incredulously, raising her eyebrows. "I find that hard to believe."

"Hard to believe or not, that's what the sheriff will be hearing." Roach clapped his hands conclusively. "Farewell, ladies! I trust you can handle this." With a final uneasy glance at the body, he swept out of the warehouse. Beth pursed her lips at him.

"He's creeped out, you know," she whispered conspiratorially in Holly's direction. "I don't think he's had a body that's smiled at him before."

The investigator shrugged. "I suppose it is a little… disconcerting." Disconcerting was an understatement. The corpse's wide, clouded eyes glimmered at them eerily, and its grin was decidedly painful. Holly could have counted every one of her teeth. She put that out of her mind and tore her thoughts back to business.

"Can you tell me how long she's been dead?"

"Hard to say," Beth mused. "It's cold in here, so a core temperature reading might mean nothing. I'll do it just in case. I can't get anything off her stage in rigor because of the strychnine – we'll have to wait until she begins to loosen up to know how long she's been rigid. Right now I think I can only base a definite time frame from lividity." Holly nodded and began collecting fibers off the body, occasionally sneaking a glance at the other woman.

First Beth slid an instrument resembling a meat thermometer into the victim's abdomen, stopping when she reached the liver. There was a brief pause. It was a strange scene, Holly realized; a woman such as Beth, so vibrant, so full of life, working with such supreme concentration over something so still and cold and unmoving and dead.

Not a thing, a tiny voice in the back of her head reminded her. She's not a thing. She's a person. She was alive, once. You always forget about that.

Holly furrowed her brow and moved to collect the scattered contents of the woman's purse into their own evidence bags for future dusting. Beth read out the temperature.

"Eighty-six."

Next, the pathologist began pressing her latex-covered thumb along various points on the woman's back and side. Keeping firm pressure on the purple flesh, Beth waited several seconds before pulling her hand away. There, on the lividity, the faintest pale impression of Beth's thumb remained before fading once more to nothingness. She repeated this process several times, starting in the light upper regions before gradually working down to where the lividity was the darkest shade. Satisfied, she sat back on her heels.

"Lividity blanches, but barely. She's just about fixed. Combined with the core temp, I'd say your girl has been dead five to eight hours." She stood and grinned at Holly. "Sorry I can't narrow it down for you further."

"You piece of Schmidt," joked Holly, picking up the lipstick tube and placing it gingerly into a bag.

"Ha, ha," commented Beth dryly, moving toward the warehouse door. "Like I haven't heard that one before." She signaled the coroner waiting outside, who moved forward with his team. "Anyway, I can get a potassium test on her vitreous humor once we're back at the lab. Might help us knock off a few hours." She watched mildly as the team struggled to put the awkward corpse in a body bag. "Use a sheet, boys, she's not going to fit in that – and for God's sake, don't close her eyes! I'm testing those later!"

Holly smirked. "You staying?"

"Nah, I'm going back with the body. See you." Beth waved, picked up her kit again, and moved to depart.

"Bye." She watched mildly as the crew exited and was checked out at the card table.

"Guess it's just you and me, then," she muttered wryly, collecting together some mud clods from the concrete floor and sliding them into evidence bags.

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An hour later, Holly had finished with the scene. Resigning herself to a long day at the lab, she pulled herself into her SUV, turned on the radio, and smiled. The Led Zeppelin marathon was still going on.

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Meanwhile, at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, London, the members of the Order of the Phoenix were on the verge of nervous breakdown.

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A/N: Well, this chapter was fun to write. Your brains are probably exploding from science overload. I apologize.

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