A/N Again, even though this story is already finished I really would want to know your opinions on it. Reviews are the muses of the writers!
Chapter 4
Gold's shop rose in one small street almost an hour away from the docks. Bathed in the light of midmorning, the dusty sign that presented the place as one small pawnshop glimmered on the sunrays. The interior, however, with its walls completely covered with wood panels, spoke of a kind of richness a small dealer shouldn't have.
A coward, Gold had been known for many years for being what he liked to call himself; The dealer of deals. There was nothing he couldn't provide once the payment was done. Payment that wasn't mere money most of the times and so the Division had tried to end him more than once only to see their efforts frustrated by the power the old man seemed to have.
Hater of weapons, he rarely used one and Emma would need to count with the fingers of one hand when she had seen him using anything more than his tongue and wits. His power, however, wasn't on any blade but his cruelty and the information he always managed to own. Both Regina and she had been forced to ask for a favor almost four years ago, for one of their first cases, and even though they didn't trust him he had proven himself worthy and useful alongside with awfully cocky. It was precisely his smirk the first thing they found once the dinging at their back died down alongside with the sound of the door closing and Gold turned towards them, one hand on his cane and the other one hidden behind his back.
"Miss Mills, Miss Swan, what a pleasure to see you two today."
Emma could feel Regina stiffening at her side and so she swallowed, doing the same out of reflex. It didn't matter at which hour one presented at Gold's shop; the man always seemed to be there and the knowing look he had was enough to tell her he already knew why they were there. Tightening her jaw, she moved closer to the shop's counter, away from the contraptions that made its way down from the ceiling, mobiles created out of glass and copper slowly spinning without the aid of any kind of breeze. Regina stayed slightly behind, the whirring of her bracelet clinking unnaturally loud as Emma could feel her pendant getting warmer around Gold's inventions.
"Cut the crap." She finally said, leaning her body on the counter, narrowing her eyes at the man's satisfied smirk. "You know why we are here."
Truthfully, Gold rarely answered to intimidation any more than the ones that waited at the deck, lips tightly sealed, unwilling to tell them what had happened with the man and the woman. The way the old man carried himself, however, was enough for Emma to want to punch him on the mouth.
Predictably, the man's face twisted and feigned confusion.
"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Swan."
Emma could feel the warmth on her pendant getting stronger the longer she stayed up so close the man. The place reeked from machinery, probably half of it not being declared and so she twisted her own hand, the simpler lines of her bracelet gleaming into the light.
It was Regina, her right brow arched into an impossible arc, what stopped Emma in the last second, her warm hand stopping for a millisecond on the blonde's back before she turned her eyes to Rumple, one hand atop the counter as she did so.
"The Dust, Gold. Someone is either smuggling bigger quantities in the market or someone is doing something you probably don't want on your territory."
The voice of the brunette made the man pause for a moment, apparently battling on either telling them the truth or remaining silent. Around them Emma could see the mobiles twirling from the corner of her eyes, each one with a more fantastic form than the previous one; creature's extinct centuries ago – unicorns, ogres- staring at the thee of them from its glassed forms. At the end, a sigh escaped Gold's lips and he placed both of his hands atop his cane, a calculated movement Emma followed with her gaze, not trusting the man.
Man whose voice echoed on the walls of the shop, his smooth accented voice ricocheting against the glass and copper.
"Dust?" Have you thought on asking the Blue Fairy for it? For what I know she is the one dealing with it."
Emma groaned. The Blue Fairy -or Reul Ghorm- was the CEO of the one and only factory that worked with the pure Dust until it transformed into the mixture that would later be sold as the Mix on that part of the world. The Fairies, called like that due to the old days in where it was registered that only them were able to canalize the dust as a source of magic, were a tight group in where many contracts had been signed and almost a nun-like policy of not saying anything out of what had been previously discussed, prevailed. Reul, though, as strange as she was, was a public figure. It was obvious that Gold was trying to make them lose time.
"If you are so sure of that I'm sure you would let us register the back of your shop then. How much Dust you think we are going to see tightly packed and already prepared to be sold in there?"
Gold's smirk widened just a fraction. For him everything was a chess game. One Emma had long ago refused to even try to understand. He had tried to help Cora Mills back when the woman had tried to use her deranged ideas of a bigger connection with magic years ago. For some reason, Emma didn't truly know, he had ended up free despite the many clues of his implication scattered on the files she had read over the years about that case. It was precisely that, his connection with Cora, what made Regina much easier to read him than her. Every time they were forced to make a deal with him she ended up having a headache and this time it didn't seem that it was going to end any differently.
After some tense moments, Gold began to talk, same smirk but a serious gleam on his eyes.
"There's been someone, a stranger, escaping the lips of some of my… associates for a few weeks now."
Regina nodded at Emma's side, her face somber as she did so.
"I don't really have that much of information." Gold continued, a sigh telling them that that on itself was something that bothered him. Knowledge was power after all "He calls himself an "Author" As deranged as that may seem I've recently… felt a shift into the market."
And just like this the smirk was back.
"Something any good entrepreneur would be able to know, I'm sure."
Regina shared a glance with Emma. Authors were extinct. They had been like that ever since magic had started to ebb away from them. The powerful beings able to create and kill with the aid of their ink were an important part of their story but something told to children in order to explain how magic worked in the old days. The only thing that had survived those times was the ink's receipt that was currently used as a way to spark the natural properties of the dust so it could be used as a machine's fuel.
Turning again to the man the brunette tapped her fingers against the wooden surface of the counter, the copper filaments glowing as she did so. "What kind of shift?"
Gold narrowed her eyes just as a young woman entered on the shop, the sound of the jingling bell breaking the tense atmosphere of room. Her haunted eyes fell on Emma and Regina's badges and she was about to turn and leave the shop when Gold intervened by raising one hand, the many rings he owned mirroring the gleam Regina's copper had just done.
"No, dearie, don't you worry. This other transaction was already about to end. Am I right, officers?"
Emma wanted to tell him that he was going to the bullpen with them, stripe him down of his cockiness while doing so. She knew, however, that that wasn't possible. Gold rarely said something incriminatory enough to keep him in prison for very long. The kind of paperwork they would need to file would probably be more than the actual amount of time he would spend at the Division's facilities. Shaking her head, she followed Regina's trail once the brunette smiled tightly at Gold before storming out of the shop.
"Good morning." She heard the newcomer almost whispering in a tremulous whisper as she walked past her.
She definetely needed a coffee.
"I would have loved to kick his ass, Regina, you know that."
Regina smiled at Emma's antics as the blonde finished her breakfast at Granny's. After their talk with Gold there were very little they could do, not until having a proper information from forensics at least. Ashley didn't have any known place to stay as strangled from her stepmother as she was and so they were very much in the same place they had started. With one single difference, though; the Author.
Despite Emma's distrust -one she also shared- Gold was many things but not an outright liar. He wouldn't have shared that piece of information if he wasn't sure of it. Not after being remembered that she could get his license and destroy it because, despite his more shadowy business, he was a good informant. Which led her to the question of; who was that author? Were they really behind all of what was happening?
Taking a sip of her quickly cooling coffee and still being grateful for Granny herself to have let her contact with Henry as soon as they had entered on the dinner and therefore be sure the boy was alright and already about to head to school, she thought again on what they already knew.
It was obvious that if Gold was saying the truth -and they didn't have any reasons to suspect he wasn't- the deranged calling himself an Author was behind the abnormal amounts of Dust. How, however, the victims had taken so many dust in one single take? Her idea of them being force-fed echoed on the back of her brain. It would be a brutal way to die her mind provided. Perhaps they could try to investigate if the two victims shared some kind of connection, one that could make them eligible for a killer. Problem was that without almost no information from the first victim it was probably almost impossible to start somewhere.
"Regina? Got lost in there?"
Emma's affectionate smile woke Regina from her reverie and the brunette found herself smiling back at the younger woman as she took another sip of her coffee. Trying not to stare for too long
the brunette shook her head quickly before clearing her throat, Emma's gaze on her lips doing next to nothing to help.
"I was just thinking on what Gold said." She finally answered, her index finger caressing incessantly the cup's edge. Emma's noncommittal hum was enough for her to sigh; the blonde always thought that she needed to openly distrust the man due to his history with her own mother. A woman both Regina and Emma hated for several different reasons that at the end could be condensed to one single thing: Loss. For Regina, it had been the loss of her infancy. For Emma… it had been slightly more complicated than that and the memory of some of the stories Emma had told her after reading and re reading Cora's case; her experiments in order to achieve a type of magic casters in a world in where magic wasn't that powerful anymore, were chilling enough to freeze hell twice over. Daughter of some of those who had fell onto Cora's clutches, Emma's surname was as cursed as hers. It was perhaps of this that whenever they were in front of Gold, as little as his part on all of that had been, Emma didn't hear anything else but her own loss. A trait that have made Regina be sure at first that she was going to end up killed and which she had learnt to rely on as time had passed.
"As much as I hate to say it, he wasn't lying." Emma replied with a sigh, her lips slightly stained from the chocolate-filling of her doughnut. Regina chuckled to herself before pointing at it, a light blush covering Emma's skin before she cleaned herself.
"I suspected as much." Regina added once the blonde's lips were clean. Glancing at them, she bent over the table before moving slightly away, gathering her thoughts. "What do you think we should do?"
"We can always try to do what he suggested." Emma muttered, clearly not happy with being forced to take Gold's sneaky comment. "We all know the Fairies know much more than they say they do. I don't believe that big amounts of unprocessed Dust could end up on the streets with them not noticing it. The mines almost only provide for them."
"Maybe we can get ahold of the delivery orders from the mines." Regina thought outload, a plan already forming on her mind. "If we notice that the numbers have been embellished we could get a little more information of who could have done it and why."
"That won't tell us why the killer has decided to start a killing spree." Emma replied, finishing her doughnut and taking a sip of her coffee. "You know that."
Regina knew that. They were going with the easy route; discover how the dust had ended up on the market instead of trying to discover what had happened to their two victims. What if she was wrong? What would happen if, at the end, everything were two separate incidents and there was no killer but only a young couple who had decided on biting more than they could chew?
She shook her head just as Granny came closer to their desk, the small set of glasses -very similar to the ones her granddaughter used at the nightshift, she wore adjusting incessantly to her eyes, making them keener and more acute. Shaking her head when the old woman asked them if they wanted any more coffee, she went back to her notes, spread at her left on the table. Emma's "Yes, please" made her pause and stare to the happily drinking blonde whose green eyes shone slightly tired. It had, to be honest, a long day.
The bruises had been real, she said to herself, they had been there, staring back at Emma and herself. The recent ones spoke of force being used against her. A woman who, for how she looked, didn't seem to make the high-class streets her usual place to walk through, didn't appear there, bruised and spitting ichor not prompted in any way. There had been, as well, the strange smell of ozone impregnating the air just as Emma, Ruby and herself had arrived to the crime scene. A scent often linked to magic. The one that only the ones who took Dust could perceive,
reach and even touch with the usual smaller doses. Who knew what someone completely full with Dust could do. She found that the idea called her and so she focused on Emma once again, on her pale skin, long fingers and resolute expression.
"We need to find whomever that call themselves the author, see if they know anything about those kids." The blonde spoke confidently just as the rectangular piece she had strapped near her badge vibrated once, the buzzing making almost everyone near them turn and stare, eyes quickly falling to their badges.
Manipulating the buzzer, Emma pushed the button that opened the small copper screen in where the machines displayed a glow that could only mean one thing.
Something else had happened.