Blood Ties, Part 11


You and Janessa walk back to her home in silence as the evening shadows fall, arriving at last at her manor house. She walks with you as you head back to your room, before pausing at your door.

"I... hope that what Ceriss did helps you," she finally says, hesitating. "It sounds like this is even more serious than we thought. But don't worry. I'm sure if the heroines are helping you, they'll be able to stop anything the demons are trying to do."

Well, hopefully not anything any demons are trying to do, but you don't say that part out loud. Instead, you place your hand on Janessa's looking up hopefully at her, while chewing on your lower lip a little. "We should... probably make sure this seal is working, though? Right?" you ask, hopefully.

Janessa draws in a small breath. But she takes far less convincing than last time. Her hand runs up your arm, and soon she's pushing you through the door, into your room and back toward your bed, both of you pulling off each other's clothes as you go.

Part of your aim is to deepen your seduction of her. And part is in preparation for tonight. But mostly, this really is exactly what you claimed, a test of how effective Ceriss' seal really is. You'll doubtless face all manner of situations in your escapades to come. Far better to learn the seal's limits here, with someone who already knows about the brand. With someone who knows to stop, if it starts to get out of hand again.

You have her naked by the time you reach the bed, and once again she pushes you down and begins to ride you, consciously mimicking what she did with you the previous night. The contrast you feel is enlightening. Oh, the rage is still there, seething with thwarted indignity at her dominant position. But it feels... muffled now. Like it's coming from a great distance. Far easier for you to ignore.

At least... for now.

There is still Ceriss' warning about how effective it might be as more of the runes activate. Especially the unique runes, which particularly worried her. Looking into ways to improve the seal might well be in order. And even then, Ceriss seemed to think this would only be a stopgap solution, not an answer to the true threat.

But—for the moment—it's enough. Temporary though it might be, your visit to Ceriss seems to have given you back relatively safe access to your full array of temptations once again. And you put them to full use, enticing Janessa even deeper into the pleasures of dominance, taking her far past where your brand so rudely interrupted you last night as she rides you into the mattress.

You share orgasm after orgasm with her, until she's panting for breath, her womb filled with your cum. Eventually she's lying flat on her back, both hands tight atop your head, her fingers digging into your hair. She grinds your face between her legs as you eat her out, your eager tongue making her writhe and shudder as you explore her folds under her firm direction. In the end, she simply can't keep up with the stamina of an incubus, and eventually she's left insensate on the bed, exhausted from the non-stop pleasure.

Which was the other aim of this exercise: to ensure that you could slip out, unnoticed and unimpeded. You gently tuck Janessa into your bed, wrapping the blankets snug around her. You make sure to fondle her naked body as you do, which draws a pleased moan from her even as she sleeps.

Then you open the room's window and vanish out into the night.

You shapeshift into someone with a bit more... presence... for your inquiries, a brown-haired man with a more hard-bitten, military bearing. As your body shifts, however, you notice a troubling detail, one you didn't expect. While the seal Ceriss gave you is shielding your mind from the violent, maddening effects of your brand... you also find it a bit harder to draw on its power. Not by a huge amount... but it does require just a bit more of your strength to change your form than it did before.

Opening your palm, you look down at your hand for a moment, observing the pale blue runes encircling your brand, the faint lines of complex spellwork threading across your palm. Too complex for you to make heads or tails out of yourself, honestly. You're not sure how it all works, or what exactly she inscribed there. But it seems to be working, at least, containing the deadly threat to your sanity.

The extra cost to your reserves is certainly annoying. But the shapeshifting itself is still just as lightning-swift as ever. You quickly make your into the ever-darkening city streets, your eyes unobtrusively studying each passerby. You start your search from the location you heard the guard tell Ceriss at the soiree, and expand outward from there.

It's a part of town that the mortals might call "seedy", and it's not long before you find prostitutes already out in the streets, offering their services. You strike up a few conversations with them, plying your charm to quickly ingratiate yourself. Most of them don't know much, but you can tell they're all scared from the rumors flying around.

Many of the stories are contradictory, some of them claiming that the killer is a crazed orc living in the sewers, others that it's a vengeful ghost. Some patterns do emerge, however. The murderer always abducts his victims at night, usually when they're alone. He always keeps them for at least a week, sometimes even longer. And their bodies are always found dumped in random places, raped and tortured with—among other things—a very distinctive pattern of knife cuts.

You also learn that the killer is smart in how he picks his targets. At first, he would target prostitutes who tried to ply their trade independently in an attempt to scrape work along the edges, with no backing from any of the established gangs or pimps. The ones on the margins of the margins. But those had been slim pickings from the beginning, and the more the stories circulated, the more of them begged to be put under some kind of protection, even if it cut into their meager earnings even more.

Not that it stopped the murders. But you do learn that, once the murders started to affect the income of various underworld players a bit there's now been talk about doing something coming from that quarter as well. There's a price out on the killer's head now. Not a particularly huge one... but perhaps enough that it might attract a bounty hunter or two.

Finally, there is a truly intriguing rumor: supposedly there was one witness, early on in this bastard's campaign, who did see the killer. Not clearly enough to actually identify him, of course, but it's closer than anyone else has ever gotten. A fellow prostitute, who lived and worked with the victim who was taken in that attack. From what you hear, the terrified girl fled to take refuge in the same brothel that Ceriss does her work at.

Even as you walk the darkened, misty streets, you occasionally detect Ceriss running her patrols overhead, using her magic to conceal herself from sight even as she flies across the city. You also notice several subtle spells woven into the streets at various points, probably used as anchors for divination wards.

You're not quite enough of an intellectual to fully grasp how much that expands her awareness. But just by virtue of the task she's attempting—guarding the vulnerable of an entire city, with no way to know exactly where the killer will strike—you're pretty sure the mental load must be formidable.

Finally, your trail of questions leads you to a brothel near the very center of the red light district, the place where Ceriss lends her aid. It's a large, gaudy, three-story place, decked out with ostentatious finery. As you walk through the door, the world opens up in a veritable riot of color, sharp contrast from the bleak darkness outside. You look up, taking in the wide-open central area, through which you can see three floors worth of doors leading to many private rooms, with a wide, sweeping staircase leading up to the first ring.

There are men and women of every species hanging from the railings looking down at you, dressed in provocative, colorful clothing, with plenty of flesh on display. Closer to you, on the ground floor, you can see a woman who could only be the Madame of this establishment. A significantly older woman with flint-hard eyes and steel-grey hair, she still wears her ornate, cleavage-baring dress well, mixing it with the air of no-nonsense authority that she radiates, as she makes disinterested motions with the fan she holds in her hand.

She's talking to a much less refined figure. A dwarf, dressed in ramshackle leather armor, with a crossbow strapped across his back. His stringy white hair is unkempt, his beard is untrimmed, and you can smell alcohol from him. As he turns his head, you can see that his face is scarred, and looking closely you can tell that his left eye has been replaced by a glass one. His face is wrinkled with age, which for a dwarf must mean that his is truly old indeed.

But for all that, his bearing shows no sign whatsoever of infirmity. And you get the sense that this old dwarf is not someone to be trifled with.

From what you can overhear, it sounds like the dwarf works for the Madame. In fact, from her quiet, curt exchange with him, it sounds like she has him hunting this killer as well. Once the dwarf finishes giving his report, he turns and walks back toward the brothel entrance, cracking his neck back and forth before fishing at his belt for a flask as he goes.

This, you can tell, is the real opportunity. What you've learned so far has been fine enough. But the three possibilities before you now are where the real information lies. The question is... which one is most important to prioritize?

The dwarf could most likely give you the most specific view of the efforts at hunting the killer, bringing the perspective of a professional with what seems to be many, many years of experience. Ingratiating yourself and picking his brain could lead to all manner of insights in the hunt as a whole. Not to mention the potential for cooperation, if it ever became useful.

The Madame, on the other hand, might also know a fair bit about what's going on, albeit more from the perspective of her girls, and the larger situation. In addition, she most likely knows Ceriss as well, given how often the sorceress comes around here. It could be an opportunity to learn some more about your target at the same time. Since, after all, you'll need to balance your hunt for the killer with your hunt for the heroine.

Finally, you could also try to locate the prostitute who actually caught a glimpse of the killer herself. She'd probably have the least knowledge about the wider picture... but any concrete physical specifics you can coax out of her might prove extremely useful in their own way.

Who do you prioritize in your investigation?