March 23rd, 2024
Arya's POV:
"First we heard of it was when there was a group of murders in London –which sucks, don't get me wrong, but, like… whatever, it's a major city. These things happen," Kilik said as we clustered together in the aisle –for lack of table space– of another tiny twelve-seater airplane, which had been commandeered for an emergency flight out of the city. The aforementioned data sheets were spread out in front of us on the ground, atop their "Classified" folder. "So it was left to the police for a bit, even if any time serial murder crops up, the DWMA's gotta know."
I eyed the twins. Dark-skinned, rosy-cheeked, and prepubescent, Fire and Thunder both looked far too young for this nonsense. They wore their hair in the same sort of bowl-cut –I wasn't sure if it was a bleached or natural blonde, since their eyes were blue– with two slightly longer strands framing each side of their solemn, silent faces .
They both wore cream suspender pants with a bib that nearly covered their not-quite-marching striped sleeveless shirts: Fire's was white with red stripes, Thunder's white with yellow stripes. They also wore the same newsboy cap in different colors –orange and yellow respectively.
Still, they were silent and attentive as they knelt to either side of Kilik, with Thunder –I couldn't tell which twin was the boy and which was the girl– grabbing onto a small fistful of Kilik's shirt to help balance.
"Why's that?" I asked, partially for their benefit, and Kilik adjusted his squared-off glasses with a finger.
" 'Cause that's, like, a red flag for some human becoming a Kishin Egg," he replied, not unkindly. "I think something like 85% of serial killers go Kishin, and it's a pretty common theory that the ones that don't only stay human 'cause they got caught before they could get around to it."
I hummed understanding, and Kilik cocked his head slightly.
"You guys do your serial killer unit yet in psychology?"
Rex and I exchanged glances, and I cast my mind back.
"Uh… yeah," I replied slowly. "Yeah. It was early on, but yeah."
"You remember the progression thing?"
"The stages?" I asked, and he nodded. "Yeah."
Rex cleared his throat a little.
"Serial killers are differentiated from spree killers or mass murderers by their adoption of a modus operandi and the length of time between victims," he recited. "They preselect targets that fit a set of criteria, and generally attack and kill them in a fixed pattern. Over time, their mind gradually begins to break down –possibly due to subtle amounts of soul energy they absorb from their victims– and they frequently begin devouring the souls of said victims, irregardless of their prior modus operandi."
"They also start taking risks," I said, veering back to what I knew was also true outside of the world of Soul Eater. "Because the thrill's worn off, they escalate from murder to torture before murder –if they hadn't been doing it already– and they start going to greater lengths to get victims. Uh, if they make it too long without getting caught, don't they usually also start taunting the police?"
"Yup," Kilik said, his expression grim. Fire and Thunder's mouths turned down in identical cute little Vs of disapproval. "Well, they definitely pegged it as serial murder pretty fast –check this out."
He spun a couple photographs towards us, and I grimaced as I picked one up.
The victim was a woman, but you could only really tell because of the long hair and the dress. Most of her everything was torn open, from the base of her throat to the saddle of her pelvis, with flayed patches of skin spread outwards on the remainder of her sides, shoulders, and thighs like a halo of soaked tissue paper.
Something had been done to her face –I didn't really want to guess what– which involved torn strips of skin that left hollowed-out red streaks flaring outwards from the remains of her mouth, in a pattern that reminded me vaguely of the decal work on the muzzles of kitsune masks. The eyes were gone, leaving raw crimson sockets with odd white tufts poking out, like flower blurbs emerging from the soil.
"Please tell me she was already dead by the time they got around to decorating," I said squeamishly, passing it on to Rex. He looked at the picture and shuddered.
"Forensics says yeah, and the same holds true for all the victims so far –but that only means we've got to bust our asses to close this case," Kilik said. "According to the file, there's multiple suspected perps, so we've got to nail those creeps before they start getting bored with just killing people and decide to have more fun with it."
We all scowled.
"So what is the mode of operation here?" I asked, returning my attention to the decidedly less-graphic paper reports.
"Five victims so far, and even though they haven't been able to find a common thread or criteria for their selection, the body display/disposal's obvious enough and unique enough that it's gotta be the same guy or guys," Kilik said, shuffling through the sheaf of papers in his hand. "Victim disappears, n' then maybe a week later they show up again somewhere… thematically appropriate."
"Thematically appropriate?" I raised an eyebrow.
"Each of the victims have been mutilated and then… decorated…" Kilik grimaced tightly. "-post-mortem with various animal attributes. This lady right here's the second most recent victim, and as you can see, she's got a fox theme –her eye sockets are stuffed with the tips of fox tails, she was shot with a hunting rifle, and they theorize the markings are meant to suggest a muzzle. The whole flayed-open thing is either because of or meant to mimic a shotgun spread; I forget which."
"Lemme guess –she was found on the steps of a hunting club?" I asked.
"…splayed on the floor of their trophy hall, actually."
Rex and I both grimaced.
"Fingerprints and DNA sequencing –since her killer mangled the jaw enough that dental is isn't really an option– tell us that her name's Alysa Morley. She hung out at the hunting club often enough, and she was technically a member, but to look at her sporting record over the years, she's either got passion without skill or an ulterior motive for joining up. Not sure which, yet," Kilik said, pushing his glasses up a little. "A lot of the same stuff for the other four victims; most of 'em are middle class or higher, disappeared one day and were found in about a week, mutilated in animal-esque ways and displayed according to their theme."
He shuffled the papers around and picked up a new list.
"First victim that was know of was Rolland Leo, allegedly a bit of an underhanded antiques dealer on the side, who was found on the roof of the British Museum. His ears were cut into triangles, and he had tiny little screwdrivers punched through both sides of his cheeks to suggest whiskers. His fingers were, uh, gone completely, which I guess kinda suggests…?"
Here Kilik curled one hand into a fist and made a nya motion, which would have been a lot funnier if not for the context.
"Next victim was Isaac Wynne, who was actually a police… detective?"
Kilik shrugged here.
"This's my first time out to England, so I'm not sure of the rankings. Anyway, this guy, they found him in an Underground station flayed completely, his arms ripped off, and his legs bound together with, uh… well, his skin."
We all winced or shuddered.
"Yeah. His tongue was gone, too, replaced with a snakeskin, so they're thinking that was meant to be something serpentine."
"I'm really not liking how public all these dumping grounds are," Rex said, and I nodded vehemently. "I mean, shouldn't the museum have a million and one alarms just to get through the doors?"
"Why not make it a million and two?" Kilik quipped, the corner of his mouth tugging up for a brief moment. "But yeah, I hear ya. Most people wouldn't be able to get near those places without being caught by security tapes, at least; but we've got nothing here, which is another reason why the on-site people think this is either a group or an inside job. Or both."
"Both, maybe?" I said, shrugging. Just because Free wasn't involved didn't mean that this wasn't some other kind of gang.
Rex made a skeptical, slightly concerned noise, and Kilik's glasses glinted a bit as he looked at him wryly.
"You think that's bad, you'll love this next one," he drawled. "Guy named Troy Darren, a minor politician, was found headless and with a rib shell on his back in one of the Admiral Memorial fountains in Trafalgar Square."
I hissed through my teeth –when Rex looked at me, bewildered, I added for his benefit "That's like, hella public. It's a tourist attraction and the streets surrounding it are major traffic points, so there's pretty much always someone going through there, any time of the day or night."
Rex nodded, comprehending, and then vague alarm and disgust twisted his face and he looked at Kilik. "Wait, were they his ribs?"
"Nope," Kilik said. "But they were human. Some from Rolland Leo, some from Isaac Wynne, all glued onto a giant turtle shell on his back. Gross stuff."
Fire and Thunder both nodded rapidly, their eyes squinting shut as they bobbed their heads in horrified sync.
"Fifth and most recent victim was Elwood Ethan –member of the same hunting club Alysa Morley was, though apparently we've got no evidence they talked more than once or twice all throughout her membership. He was a judge in his day job, I think?"
Kilik shrugged, brushing it off.
"They found him in a tree in Hyde Park, eyelids and ears gone, owl talons driven through his feet to hold his body in the tree."
"I'm sensing a bit of a theme, here," I said, and the others all looked at me –Rex a bit more nervously than the others, like he was expecting something Witchy to come up. "We've got a maybe-crook, a cop, a politician, a judge, and… some lady? Look, I don't know where she fits in, but, like, all of the other victims feel like they fit the same kind of… authoritarian or anti-authoritarian model. Someone in the justice system, or at least, symbolically so."
"And you could make the argument for the fence guy that he represents the justice system as one of its failures," Kilik nodded, eyebrows bobbing up as he did. "We've got a profiler –uh, Michael Williamson– who's meeting us at the airport, and according to the report he put together, what we're looking at is potentially somebody who's trying to, ah…"
He searched for the papers for a second until he found the appropriate page.
"-'enact some kind of vengeance for a wrong done to them, perhaps via symbolically displaying their victims in a way that they feel embodies the crime they're responsible for or the duty they failed in.' Then we've got a note that was added yesterday about how 'The presence of a member of the Immortal Clan, specifically The Man With The Magic Eye –as reported by DWMA EAT student Maka Albarn– indicates that the animalistic disposal of the corpses may have ritualistic connotations, and that the perpetrator or perpetrators are potentially connected to a Witch's coven.'"
I could feel Rex's gaze burning into the side of my head, and looked in the opposite direction, resisting the urge to whistle innocently.
"So we're leaning towards thinking that this is a group?" I asked, and Kilik nodded.
"Yup. They thread through security measures too easily for it to just be one guy, even if there probably aren't more than three or four of them," he said, then sighed. "Problem is, there's a hell of a lot of London and not much tying these five people together, so we're supposed to have someone with Soul Perception along for the ride to make things easier."
"Why didn't you ask Ox to come with you, then?" I asked, since I vaguely remembered that he had some skill in that direction, even if he wasn't as good as Maka.
"He n' Kim are on another partnered mission," Kilik said, and I "ah"ed my understanding. "Anyway, we might have to buckle up for a bit of a longer investigation, so there's a chance we'll miss that Super Written Exam thingy and have to take the makeup exam later, which is another reason I didn't take him."
I hummed, though Rex looked a little more upset at the notion –though that may have been due to the class superstition of whoever placed first was guaranteed to make a Death Scythe rather than any actual academic concerns.
***Time Skip***
I managed to wait until Kilik and the twins had cranked the plane seats as far back as they could go and started doing their best to circumvent jet lag before I grabbed Rex and tugged him to the very rear of the plane for a hushed –or as hushed as you could get in a plane this small– conversation between partners.
"That Man With The Magic Eye guy doesn't have jack shit to do with this," I said without preamble, and Rex blinked at me, then looked deservedly suspicious.
"Okay, I'm willing to go with you on your –your weird family-business intuitions," he hissed back, "but how in Death's name do you know that for sure?"
Thankfully, there was a ready-baked excuse for this, and I tapped the side of my face at the very edge of my eye socket.
"Dude, why do you think they call him the Man With The Magic Eye? He stole one of the Grand High Witch's eyes a couple centuries ago and switched it with one of his own eyes. She was going to kill him for it, but, well. Immortal Clan."
This particular clan, while also capable of shapeshifting –Free was a werewolf– possessed the quite frankly disturbingly-underutilized bit of worldbuilding that they were literally immortal. Free had never been (provably) permanently damaged in the entire series, though there was some speculation that Maka's special Anti-Demon Wavelength had managed to sever his tail in their first fight.
Although his further damages varied depending on whether it was the anime or the manga, he'd also taken a scythe through the heart, been hit point-blank with multiple flamethrowers, and survived apparently quite the number of enraged attempts from Mabaa-sama –the most powerful Witch in the world– at ending his life. None of those attacks had wounded him for more than a second.
And Soul Eater just… dropped this lore and expected everyone to move on with their lives.
Oh, the Immortal Clan, those guys that live forever and nothing really damages them. No big deal. They're not important.
It's not like we'd all be completely screwed if they tried to take over the world.
…Ahem. Anyways.
"Since she couldn't kill him, she threw him in Witch prison to rot forever, or until she figured out a way to fucking kill him dead permanently –whichever came first," I explained. "And he's been in there for the past two hundred years."
Rex squinted at me a little, tilting his head to one side.
"So what's he doing out?" he asked after a moment.
"No idea. But I'll tell you what, he only got out a few days ago, and he's probably gonna be focused on whoever busted him free, not some random serial killer in England," I replied. "Given that he attacked Maka and Soul, it's probably that Witch they faced in Italy, the one who made the Demon Sword. It's just a coincidence that he came after them when they were already on this mission."
"You're sure?" Rex asked, and I raised an eyebrow at him. He wilted slightly, giving a small sigh. "What am I saying, you're always sure. So you're saying that this doesn't have anything to do with Witches?"
"That, I don't know," I admitted. "I'll be able to tell if there's hints of magic when we start poking around the crime scenes, probably, but just from what we've got in the files… I'm not sure. Could go either way, really."
Rex's eyes went distant with thought, and he nodded a few times.
"So, be careful, but don't worry about the wolfman?" he asked.
"Pretty much."
***Time Skip***
Despite the six inches or so of snow cover on the ground –which, if it wasn't recent, was a mine of clues we hadn't yet tapped– London was oddly warmer than I remembered. I was wearing my tan and cream Russian coat, but Rex got away with gloves and earmuffs layered atop his normal outfit, and Kilik just wore a parka-esque quilted jacket in a lovely cream color.
Fire and Thunder, of course, had scarves and knitted pompom hats and mittens, but they still wore nothing but their shirts and coveralls beneath –not even a jacket.
Weird. Maybe the moon's lower orbit really did do something with the weather…?
Aside from a few extraneous claymation-looking elements of architecture, London was otherwise much the same as I remembered it. Although it did feel a little odd to be coming… not home, but the almost-home of a place I'd been staying in or around for what was nearly a year, across two –now three– different dimensions.
It was a somewhat discordant mix of nostalgia and deja vu, is what I'm saying.
"This Michael dude tell us when or where he's meeting up with us?" I asked as we tried to thread our way through Soul Eater's version of Heathrow, whose pickup/dropoff terminals were even harder to navigate than the ones back in Hetalia. There was a whole-ass lacquered black piano and floor candelabra by the stairs in the baggage pickup area, which led down –according to the sign– to the Underground and the Heathrow Bus Express.
More fodder for this worlds dubious time period, a lot of the walls were paneled oak and wallpaper, nothing at all like the modern plaster and steel I'd seen in the other Heathrow, and the floor tile was a pattern of interlocking wood strips I couldn't describe any better than Victorian period novel. The staircase itself was brass and red carpet over wood, which gave me a bit of a wince, as it reminded me too much of the grand staircase on the doomed Campania ship I'd taken a ride on in Black Butler.
"Nope," Kilik said, hitching Fire a little higher on his shoulders. Thunder was scooped under one arm like a toy dog to avoid the crush of the crowds, while Kilik dragged their collective luggage along with his other hand. "He just said he'd meet us here."
I raised an eyebrow. While anime protagonists were definitely eye-catching enough that this guy could probably just look for the explosion of primary colors and go from there, I'd yet to meet the denizen of any anime world that had, you know. Figured that one out.
I mean, unless he plans to find us some other way. Maybe Maka and Soul told him who'd be coming to replace them…?
"Hello there!" a masculine voice called, and we all turned a little to see a sandy-haired man raising his hand toward us beside a set of doors further down the terminal. "DWMA?"
"Who's asking?" Kilik asked in a neutral tone, though he oh-so-inconspicuously shifted so that Thunder was closer to his hand than before.
"Michael Williamson," the man replied, with a somewhat bland smile that made me wonder whether or not he'd noticed that move, and approved of Kilik's wariness. "I'm supposed to be the coordinator who meets you here?"
We exchanged brief glances, and Kilik shrugged to indicate that he'd not seen any pictures of our coordinator, so this was probably him.
"Yeah, sure," I said as we all looked back, walking up to him. "Uh, you got a car or something?"
"Right this way, gents and ladies," he said with a somewhat ironic half-bow, waving us to the doors.
He did sober up a bit by the time we'd piled all our luggage into the tiny trunk and then squeezed into the backseat of his car, and was downright businesslike as he drove us out of Heathrow.
"Candidly speaking, my superiors are growing more and more concerned over this business," Mr. Williamson said as we whizzed along the plowed streets, and I made a vague interested noise as I stared out at the nighttime skyline in all of its weird and wacky glory. "The mutilations are getting worse, and we fear it's only a matter of time until the killers begin to consume their victims' souls as well."
"The papers gave us the skinny on what's happening, but do we have any actual leads?" Kilik asked. "Y'know, any suspects?"
Mr. Williamson shrugged without looking away from the road.
"Current suspicion rests on the St. George's Club, as two of the victims were members and the rest may very well have been in its peripheral social circles," he said. "Problem is, we've not got any indication of which members it might be."
"I think we should sniff around, for starters," I said. "Take a look at the collected evidence, talk to the members at the club, that kind of thing."
"With respect, miss, Scotland Yard has been doing that."
"With further respect, sir, the DWMA might find something you missed," Kilik said, unexpectedly backing me up. He pushed his glasses up his nose. "None of us have Soul Perception, but my partners are Earth Shamans –they definitely might pick something up from whatever evidence bins you have or from the crime scenes themselves. After we get settled in our hotel; Arya and Rex, you guys can go talk to the members of the club, yeah?"
"Sure thing," I said as Rex nodded.
"Ah, you may have to wait a day or two for me to arrange that," Mr. Williamson spoke up. "The members of the club are not accustomed, shall we say, to being pulled hither and yon at the request of other people –certainly not without a by-your-leave."
Rex blinked. "What?"
I rolled my eyes, before leaning slightly closer to him.
"Means they're too posh to take orders from plebeians like us even if it is a murder case," I explained.
"Ah."
Mr. Williamson's eyes moved to me in the rearview mirror. "You've been to England before, miss…?"
"Arya. And yeah, I lived here for eight months or so before I came to the DWMA."
"Experience on living in London may be very helpful," he said, giving a little nod to me. "You might very well play a crucial part in this case."
***Time Skip***
Fortunately, our hotel was a scant few blocks from both the British Museum and the Tottenham Court Road Underground station. Unfortunately, we'd landed in the airport at somewhere around 10 in the evening, and by the time we got to our hotel, it was nearing midnight.
As per arrangement, however, we met Mr. Williamson in the hotel restaurant the next morning as we began formulating our more concrete plan of action.
"While you go cajole the club members, the five of us'll start poking around the museum's security wing and the crime scene," Kilik said as I looked at Fire and Thunder askance, watching them use their forks to impale the small balls of what I had initially thought to be butter but had instead turned out to be vanilla bean ice cream, picking them off their pancakes. "It'll give us something to do for the day, at least. And if you've got any stuff you want us to review in the meantime, that'd be great, too."
"I take it you're in charge of this venture?" Mr. Williamson asked, and Kilik and I exchanged looks. I shrugged at him, he shrugged at me, and then we both looked back to our erstwhile police coordinator.
"Me and Rex're newer at this, so Kilik's steering the ship for now," I said, tilting my head in his direction. "Otherwise, it doesn't really matter who's 'in charge'."
"Hmm." Mr. Williamson sat back and looked at the five of us –three of us, really, since Fire and Thunder were screwing their little faces up with brain freeze after nomming an entire scoop of ice cream in one go– thoughtfully for a moment. "Scotland Yard would be a madhouse if it was run that way –but, well, I suppose we can't all be as egalitarian as the DWMA."
After a few polite farewells, he then left to go start wrangling the upper crust, and the five of us enjoyed a brisk breakfast before paying our dues and setting off down the short tangle of streets that led to the museum. Flashing our DWMA ID cards got us access to the security room, where we were told to wait for them to call the case's investigators for confirmation of our clearance.
"Our IDs are basically a letter of recommendation," Kilik said as we sat patiently on the benches outside. "It's what that's talking about on the registry disclaimer, that we can't use our cards as police credentials in any country –we aren't allowed to replace government forces, just supplement them."
"It just proves we're trustworthy, right?" Rex asked from my other side, wiping some of the steam from coming indoors off his glasses. "Sort of like a get-out-of-jail free card, I guess."
"Eh, we use it more like a get into jail pass –you know, to interrogate people n' stuff– but yeah, you're not wrong."
"DWMA?" a woman in a neat blouse asked, poking her head out the door, and we stood.
Inside the security center was a nest of monitors and server towers, which although clunky and retro seemed nearly as effective as the modern equivalent I was used to dealing with. A scattering of people in uniform were stationed at the desks, typing or watching the video feeds.
"Tell it to us like we've got no idea what happened," Kilik said after we'd all shaken hands and exchange brief greetings with the person whose badge marked them as head of security.
"The museum shuts down at 17.00, though we go as far as 20.30 on Fridays," they said promptly. "We begin sweeping the galleries for any straggling guests ten minutes before closing, and spend about an hour after tidying things up, so by 18.00 –or 21.30– all of the guest service employees, at least, are out of the building. The curators and the rest of that lot don't venture past the offices, since there are motion-activated alarms on all the entrances into the galleries and company policy states we security personnel apprehend anyone we find while on patrol."
So the museum interior was pretty well locked down after lights-out, then. I nodded.
"We mostly leave the roof alone, particularly in this season," the head of security continued, ushering us to follow them as they swept out of the room along a service corridor. "There's cameras on each side of the rooftop doors, which need a passcode to open, and every stairwell leading up to them also has a passcode lock and an ID scanner."
"What about the area around the museum?" I asked, the beginnings of an idea beginning to glimmer in my mind. "Like, are there cameras on the grounds?"
"We have a video feed on all the entrances, as well as covering the walls of the museum itself, and there's a security office patrolling throughout the night. Why?"
"Most of the really hardcore security stuff is geared towards preventing anyone from getting into the museum," I said, trying to feel my idea out as I spoke. "So, if this was just a corpse dump on the roof, wouldn't it be a lot easier than trying to get in?"
"Yup," Kilik said, nodding to me as he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his quilted jacket. "Still, the average guy shouldn't have been able to manage it."
"Indeed not," the head of security said. Proving their earlier point, they swiped their own badge and typed in a key sequence before opening the door to a stairwell heading up. "The body was discovered by a technician going up to the roof to investigate a faulty lighting situation in one of our galleries. We later discovered that the wires governing that part of the system were cut, presumably by the perpetrator."
"Which indicates that they wanted the body found quickly," Rex said, adjusting his earmuffs as we climbed higher and winter cold began to roll down through the bare concrete stairwell. "And that they either knew enough about the museum's technical grid to be sure they were cutting the right wire, or that they didn't care about setting off alarms."
"Well, we called the police immediately, and Mr. Williamson –your coordinator, I believe– was summoned soon after due to the brutality of the crime. His statements and evidence are no doubt indexed among the police records, and it has snowed since, so I'm not sure what new information you intend to find here…"
"My partners are Earth Shamans," Kilik said as they swiped their card, typed in another sequence, and then pushed the rooftop door open. "Strong magic taints or corrupts the natural order of things, so if there was magic involved here, they'll be able to sense it."
The head of security nodded, looking duly impressed, and waved us towards a certain part of the room. Keeping in theme with what we'd learned so far, it was a completely nondescript and empty patch of rooftop far from the doors, the glass dome in the vast center of the building, or the edge. If not for the police cordon, we wouldn't even know where it was.
Fire and Thunder scuttled forward, with Kilik keeping half an eye on them as he began grilling the head of security on the exact when, where, and how of the body's position and any snowfall on the rooftop around it. Rex and I hung back, watching the twins squat down and put their mittened palms against the surface of the roof where the body had been, squinting their eyes shut and seeming to listen.
Rex leaned in over my shoulder.
"Anything?" he whispered.
I shook my head. While I was still very much an intermediate magician at best –not finishing out an already-casual apprenticeship will do that to you– I had, at least, grown enough in strength and experience that I could sense magical creatures in my proximity. Granted, there'd be only traces left at this point, but even when I pushed my awareness as far as I dared when Fire and Thunder were working to catch the slightest whiff of magic, I couldn't sense anything untoward.
It was a simple stretch of rooftop with nothing unremarkable about it, except that a body had been found there.
Fire and Thunder seemed to share that conclusion after a few minutes, looking up at Kilik and shaking their heads. Not to be deterred, though, he immediately began planning a grid search of the whole rooftop, which while very much was him doing his/their due diligence, also meant that Rex and I were left standing around like a particularly decorative pair of lampposts as we watched them work.
After about ten minutes, the boredom finally got to be too much and I spoke up.
"Since me n' Rex can't really contribute to this part, you want us to head over to Scotland Yard and start reviewing information?" I asked Kilik, and he blinked, then smiled sheepishly.
"Uh, yeah. Sorry about that, guys. Here, I can give you some bus money to…"
Here Kilik trailed off as he realized that Mr. Williamson hadn't told us where his office was, or if the case files would be kept in it. We all grimaced.
Damn, I miss cellphones.
"It's fine, we can handle it," I said. "Meet you back at the hotel for dinner and swap notes?"
"Sure." Kilik nodded.
***Time Skip***
Calling Scotland Yard told us little more than the fact that Mr. Williamson was out trying to wrangle an interview list together, and since consultants like him were not technically part of the police force, he had an office in a different building and, wouldn't you know it, nobody on the end of the phone knew where that office building was. This essentially meant that until he made a call back to the station and they informed him of our wish to chat, or someone figured out where he was headed next and called that building's landline, we wouldn't be able to get ahold of him until we met for dinner later tonight.
Unfortunately, my desire to track him down by hook or crook was then interrupted by the Yard's desire for us to stand by for some hooking –as in, workers were attempting to dredge the giant ice pillar Free had trapped himself in out of the Thames and they wanted someone combative nearby in case, y'know, the highly dangerous and suspected-of-murder immortal monster broke out of his makeshift prison.
I understood the logic, but that didn't mean I had to like it as Rex and I stood on the embankment near the Tower Bridge, watching the fluorescent-striped crew labor around their crane and giant nets. If any divers had been called out –I doubted it, given the shivering temperature and murkiness of the water– they were having a miserable and laborious time of it, because the crew had been apparently working at it for hours and had turned up precisely zip.
"You think he's still down there?" Rex asked as fragrant curls of steam wafted up from the styrofoam cups we each held, and I made a noncommittal noise, lifting mine to take a sip of the cocoa therein. Possibly-more-temperate climate or not, this was a miserable way to spend a November afternoon, particularly when the wind blew icily over the river. I shivered in sympathy for the guys who were handling all the wet equipment.
"No idea," I answered after letting the warmth slip down my chest, settling in a comforting sort of way beneath my ribs. "Dunno how fast the Thames runs, or how heavy the icicle he's stuck in is. Might've run downriver. Might've melted."
"Could he have used magic to get out?" Rex guessed, and I shrugged. Truthfully, I really did have no idea if he was still down there or not: Free had been shown thinking about a training regimen for getting back in shape as he and his ice cylinder sunk to the bottom of the Thames, and then he hadn't reappeared until the DWMA's founding party.
Since he'd gotten new clothes, was confident in fully controlling his powers, and had also showed up halfway across the world by that time, I had to assume he got out of the ice at least a few weeks prior to his second meeting with Medusa, but other than that, I was clueless. This was November, and that was in April. That was a lot of time to happen between "frozen at riverbottom" and "distinctly not frozen, at nefarious meeting in Nevada."
"I'm not sure if he has any explosive spells that'll let him bust out like that," I said, after a cautious glance around to make sure no one else was in earshot. Since we didn't know if or where Free would burst out of the water, the workers had left us to keep watch and trusted we would know when to jump in. "He's an immortal, so I dunno if he bothered to learn stuff like that."
"He can manipulate ice, though," Rex said uncertainly.
"Well, yeah, and he's got spatial magic from Mabaa- er, from the eye of the Grand High Witch whose name I totally don't know," I said, and then coughed sheepishly. "Ah, what I meant is, he's never really needed to organize his tactics all that hard. Not when he can just tank whatever hits are coming while rushing in to finish the poor bastard off with his magic. Or teeth…"
We both glanced at the river's surface, some fifty-odd feet below.
We both shuffled back a conscientious half-step.
"So how would we beat him, without, you know…" Rex briefly let go of his cup to twiddle the fingers of one hand in the air.
"Honestly, I'm not sure we could beat him even with the erm-y'know," I said, because trapping Free in a box made of magic walls would, while amusing, very much not solve the problem of angry immortal werewolf in your area. "Best we could hope for is driving him off. From what I remember, he's… amicable, if unprovoked?"
I was on shaky ground here. Free had slaughtered the Witch Prison guards sent after him without a blink of hesitation or a shred of mercy, but then again, they'd also kept him in prison for 300 years, so it wasn't like he had no reason to hold a grudge. He'd insisted on attempting to pay back Eruka for freeing him and Medusa for ordering it, which indicated a sense of reciprocal honor; but he'd also seemed perfectly fine with killing Maka and the others, none of whom were older than fifteen.
My best (and rather uncharitable) assessment of his character pegged him as a prototypical magic-user of this world –someone who held a deep-seated grudge against the DWMA for preventing him from running wild and causing as much chaos and carnage as he pleased– who also happened to be dumb as a bag of hammers and far too focused on the relatively complex task of sorting out his relationship to anyone around him to worry about morals, or the larger repercussions of his actions.
He became part of Medusa's faction because she helped him escape prison, simple as that, and then left the complex scheming to her and worked with or against the DWMA as she directed, never troubling his head about the political situations surrounding whichever battle he was currently in.
The upshot of this attitude was that while I was pretty sure he wouldn't massacre unarmed civilians just for the heck of it, I also didn't know that he wouldn't. He just never interacted with them –in the anime or the manga– and I didn't have a roadmap for how he would react to people who weren't explicitly trained for battle or already trying to kill him.
"I think we might be able to negotiate with him, if he's even down there at all," I said slowly. "Sort of a I'm tired, you're tired, why don't we all just head home and skip the drama? sort of thing. Maybe fake chasing him off or something if we have to."
Rex wordlessly pinched the bridge of his nose, shaking his head in slow despair.
***Time Skip***
Free was a no-show, thankfully, but that didn't stop the police trying to drag us out there the next day –or the day after that– when Rex and I were trying to help with the investigation as much as we could without a sense for magic –a sense we could admit to, anyway.
Kilik and his partners were carefully going over each crime scene for traces of magic, of which they'd found precisely none thus far, and Mr. Williamson was technically MIA, being busy organizing our interviews with the club while also juggling his actual job of acquiring, sorting, and organizing literally all information pertaining to the case while also feeding it back to both us and his superiors/coworkers.
Rex and I, meanwhile, were left to stare at the fascinating surface of the Thames in the bitter winter air and complain –me mostly about the weather, and Rex about missing the Super Written Exam on the second day of our riveting river-watching.
"It's just a stupid superstition that whoever wins that makes a Death Scythe," I told him firmly, around lunchtime of the second day. "Besides, you think you can beat Maka and Ox?"
He wilted, though I wasn't sure which argument better convinced him. "Still…"
"Still, were gonna take the make-up exam, pass comfortably, and then maybe take a whole week off studying," I soothed him. "No Kishin-hunting, just homework. All we have to do is get this done and dusted first. And speaking of which…"
I grabbed Rex by the tie and led/dragged him over to the river officials, and then told them in no uncertain terms that I highly doubted Free was still down there, we had killers to catch, and in any case, there was work to do, goodbye.
"Arya, we don't actually know that he's not down there," Rex pointed out once we'd gotten far enough down the bank, and I scoffed.
"Yeah, but we do know he doesn't have anything to do with the murders. Kilik and the twins aren't finding anything, and if the pattern holds, time is money right now."
Not to be deterred, I parked the two of us at a picnic table in a park some distance from the river and prepared to cheat like a motherfucker.
"What are you doing?" Rex asked warily as I unfolded the brochure-like map of the Underground lines we'd gotten a few days ago and spread it over the table.
"We're on a bit of a time crunch here," I replied, using several pebbles to hold the corners down. "You remember the serial killer unit –those guys get itchy for a fix if they go too long between murders, and even if we haven't pinned this one's schedule down yet, they should be looking for their latest victim now."
I looked up at him briefly.
"I'm not wasting another day kicking our heels back and doing nothing."
"Oh, definitely," Rex nodded, eyes wide in agreement. "It's just…"
He looked down at the map between us and bit his lip.
"Are you gonna…?"
Rex twiddled his fingers, looking furtively around us as he did, and I scoffed, pulling a coin out of my coat pocket.
"Please. This barely counts as dowsing."
He looked blank, and I sighed and rolled my eyes.
"It's fine; this only needs a touch of magic and it doesn't look even a little bit suspicious," I said, and then balanced the penny on one thumb, looking down and tracing my other forefinger over the map. The colored spaghetti-splay of train lines careened out in all directions, but the nine fare zones were a bit more organized –although fuck if I knew what denoted each. They radiated out from the geographic center of the city, kinda, but twisted and folded in on each other in a lot of places in the most incomprehensible way.
"Is the office or location of the evidence Mr. Williamson has compiled for this case in the first fare zone? Heads yes, tails no," I said, coaxing magic into my thumb, and flicked the penny up. It flipped and landed on tails.
"You have got to be kidding," Rex said as I moved my finger outwards in the map, and I side-eyed him.
"Hey, it's a perfectly legitimate method, even if it does need yes/no questions that are as exact as possible. I've used it before and it worked fine. You got a problem with my m…mmm?"
I cut myself off at the last minute and hummed instead, wiggling my eyebrows and silently fluttering my fingers the same way he had a moment later.
Rex pulled a hand down his face with a disbelieving groan. "Just… just flip the coin, please."
"Is the office or location of the evidence Mr. Williamson has compiled for this case in the second fare zone? Heads yes, tails no."
Oh hey, heads.
Problem was, this was the second-largest zone, and I regarded it with a frown, wondering how to narrow things down further with the map that I had.
"Uh… alright, um –is the the office or location of the evidence Mr. Williamson has compiled for this case between the Central and the Thameslink Tube lines? Heads yes, tails no."
Nope. Okay…
"Is the the office or location of the evidence Mr. Williamson has compiled for this case between the Thameslink and the Northern Tube lines? Heads yes, tails no."
Nope.
"Is the the office or location of the evidence Mr. Williamson has compiled for this case between the Northern and the… uh… District Tube lines? Heads yes, tails no."
No again.
"Is the the office or location of the evidence Mr. Williamson has compiled for this case between the District and the Bakerloo Tube lines? Heads yes, tails no."
The coin dinged into the air, and landed face-up on my palm.
"Oh, hey." I fished a pen out of my pocket and drew a circle around the part of the second fare zone bordered by the District and Bakerloo routes. "Bada bing bada boom –we've got a district, kinda."
Rex bent his head over the map, a frown tugging at his face.
"Arya, there's like-" He did a quick headcount. "-six different other routes through there. How are you going to narrow it down?"
"Ideally, I'd get a better map with street names on it," I said, rubbing my chin. "Failing that, I guess I can name off stops or routes and see if anything lights up. If we triangulate enough about where it isn't, we should be able to narrow the location down to a street, at least, and then we can just check each building until we come up gold."
Slowly, Rex brought his head up to look at me.
"Just to check, this is faster than just waiting for him to call back in?"
"Dude, I narrowed it down from "all of London" to "within these few square miles of London" in less than five minutes," I huffed, mildly offended. "I'd like to see you do better."
Rex sighed, adjusting his hat for a moment.
"I guess I'll see if I can find a newsstand with better maps."
12.08 PM, USA Central Time