Infernal Investigations

The stairs creaked beneath my feet, some of them shifting under my weight. The half-hearted thought of seeing these fixed rose up again. There was no real chance of them ever being fixed. I didn’t have the time or money, the landlady could not care less about maintenance, and my fellow tenants didn’t consider it something to fret over. The moment people’s hooves or feet started going through boards, then we might collectively do something.

Some of my neighbors gathered in the hall, worriedly whispering to each other. One of them glanced back, spotting me. Spotting the weapons I held. They quickly scattered, giving me a clear path to my apartment.

My door had never been the most impressive barrier. A cheap-four paneled door, its main use was absorbing a few blows, enough for me to wake up and realize someone was attempting to break it down.

It was now lying crumpled against a wall, ripped from the hinges. Framed in the open doorway was the intruder.

A man in a top hat and morning coat stood among the wreckage, idly examining my teapot. Tall, with broad shoulders, clean-shaven, a fox-like face, and long brown hair.

He’d also looked up, spotting me stalking down the hallway with saber in hand. A disarming grin sprouted on his face.

“Well, while I can hardly claim this is the first time I’ve been caught in a lady’s room, this is the first time it was the lady doing the catching-”

I lunged forward at the intruder.

One benefit of compressing myself. I hadn’t gotten rid of the extra mass I used to have, just compressed it, so I hit a lot harder than most people expected. The trade-off was worth the occasional crack from Tolman about my weight.

I and the intruder both went down, grappling with each other. After a few seconds of scrambling, I had the edge of my saber under his chin, lightly pressed against his throat. Staring down at a grin that hadn’t faded a bit.

That had been remarkably easy with how muscled this one was. Definitely not a grappler of any kind.

Both of us remained silent while I looked at the intruder’s clothes. Metal threads refused to show up in his waistcoat or morning coat, and his shirt was a little puffy but not embroidered. Hardly evidence he wasn’t the intruder from the lab, but maybe signs I shouldn’t assume he was that person.

His grin hadn’t faded at all. “Well, this is a rather compromising position. I’ll have you know that I’m not that kind of man. I require at least one dinner first, at a restaurant of my choosing, with wine-”

I pushed on the saber, not enough to break his skin, but enough to make him stop talking.

“Enough chatter, stranger,” I told him. “I’ll apologize for my rudeness later if this is a misunderstanding. Your name and why you are in my apartment in the next thirty seconds, or we’ll see how well you can seduce the ladies with some severed vocal cords.”

The expression on his face barely changed. Enough to let me know something had shifted, but unless this one was very good at hiding his emotions, he was not afraid of me at all. Disturbing with a saber at his throat. Who was this? From the clothing, I was inclined to believe the intruder at my labs, but that was just an assumption.

“You’re bleeding on me,” he said, and there were drops of blood staining his jacket. “Could you please stop?”

I’d wiped as much blood as I could out of my eyes before coming here, but apparently, they’d started up again. I needed to find a way to quiet the damn Imp before it woke up even more. I wasn’t going to convince anyone I was one of the people in the city holding a license to practice Diabolism. Bleeding from the eyes was hardly a sign of it, but it was a sign the Imp was stirring.

“Name first,” I insisted. Let him wallow in the ruining of his clothes. He at least seemed to care about that, unlike the blade pressed against his throat.

He sighed, rolling his eyes dramatically. “I am Gregory Montague, fourth son of Lord Bartholemew Montague, who is the reason I’m here. If you want anything more, I do insist you let me up.”

I frowned. That was plausible but hardly something I was going to believe in.

“Please,” he added as an afterthought.

I gave the human a closer look. At first glance, he looked nothing like Lord Montague; however, the eyes….were absolutely nothing alike. The facial structure was a little similar, and if I squinted, the noses might have a passing familiarity.

“You are Gregory Montague? Nobility rooting through my apartment like a scavenger picking flesh off of a corpse? You expect me to believe that?”

His grin only seemed to grow. “What a delightful metaphor, and for your information, I’ve been informed I barely count as a noble. But if you want proof, I’m afraid that can only be found on my father’s estate. I neglected to bring some with me.”

“No signet ring?” I asked. “You really expect me to believe you just happened to forget one?”

“Those require the permission of the head of the family to wear in public,” he explained while trying to get a hand toward the guard of my saber. A bit more pressure on his neck cut that off. “My father has currently decided to let me forgo mine as punishment for, well….that’s not really any of your business.”

“At the bare minimum, you entered my residence without permission and have probably been rummaging through my possessions. Right now, everything about you is my business. Why is there no signet ring?”

The stranger sighed. “I slept with the Lady Basare. And got caught. Right around the wedding of her and Lord Mosley. At the most inconvenient time, actually.”

I was too curious not to ask. “Just before?”

“Two hours after they exchanged vows. As you can imagine, there was quite a scandal, and only my breaking of Lord Mosley’s arm in a duel has prevented any more ‘deserved consequences’ as my father puts it.”

Well, this answered much of why Lord Montague had considered setting me up with Gregory as the lesser of two evils.

“I suppose I can take your word on this for now,” I said, getting off of him. “Truth be told, there’s very little of your father in your face. Apologies if I was perhaps a bit overzealous in not believing you.”

The cocky cheer in his voice was drained a bit now. “You aren’t the first to notice,” he said, the look in his eyes colder.

Ah. His lordship has tried to set me up with someone he either knew or suspected was a bastard. Maybe? I’d already made a false assumption so far in this conversation.

“It doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is this my lord, what are you doing in my apartment? If you were not the one who broke down my door?”

Gregory Montague’s expression sobered entirely. “My brother needs the cure. Now. I came to retrieve it, only to find you gone, the apartment ransacked, and your neighbors very unhelpful as to where your whereabouts might be. So I decided to simply wait and hope whoever came along would be more helpful.”

A faint grin crept onto my face. I wasn’t any great friend to any of my neighbors, but some things trumped how close you were. Strange humans coming into the quarter looking for an Infernal? Not a bit of help.

Unless they had money of course, but that was a different matter.

Gregory Montague considered me, his expression turned a little worried. “Just to make sure, you are Katheryn Falara?”

“I am she, alchemist extraordinaire and owner of…this,” I said, gesturing to the ruin all around us. “Does your father remember what I told him about using the cure too early? It’s not a pleasant thing to administer to one not ready for it. It would be very easy for it to kill him.”

Gregory Montague frowned. “I don’t trust my father on very many things, Miss Falara. I do trust him on my brother’s health.”

I sighed. It sounded like a house call was called for. Or at least sending the cure with him. “I’m assuming that’s the sole reason you are here, then?”

“My father said that getting the cure is only part of why I’m here. For the rest, he said, ‘She’ll know why I sent you, and she’s the only one who needs to know’. Which is a little concerning. I’m not about to go into your stew or something, am I?”

“Not to worry, my lord,” I answered. “Far too little fat on your bones for my taste, and muscle tends to stick in my teeth.”

He chuckled. “Then I’m at a bit of a loss then? Why specifically did my father send me? While I’ve found our encounter so far fascinating-”

“Fascinating?” I raised an eyebrow. “I put a sword to your throat.”

“And that alone will make an excellent conversation piece for the next half year, at which point it’ll probably have worn out its welcome,” Gregory Montague replied. “But I have other things planned today, yet Father insisted I come to get the cure.”

I cocked my head, eyeing his lordship. Warm green eyes stared back at me evenly, cheer in them as he settled against my shattered doorframe. He stood tall, about as tall as I had been as Malvia, which meant a full head taller than me right now. Despite the fox-like cast of his face, the high cheekbones, sharp eyebrows, there was nothing of a predator in his smile, just simple cheer which dragged my gaze back to his warm eyes.

One of those warm green eyes winked at me.

“While I’m very flattered,” he said. “This might not be the best place?”

“Your father suggested I lower my price in return for offering me dates with you and possibly your hand in marriage. Although I imagine if he ever even considered it, he would need me to turn human first.”

Gregory Montague shuddered, an expression of revulsion across that pricked at me.

“I’m as unenthused as you are,” I said as drily as I could manage.

“Oh,” he said, suddenly looking abashed. “My reaction wasn’t because of that. I just don’t like the idea of being tied down. Father has been trying to marry me off for years. He thinks he can force me to settle down, or at least find a noble family willing to take on the task of making me respectable. I doubt he was serious about the offer.”

Every second sounded more and more like a reinforcement of my decision not to agree to date Gregory Montague. I moved across the room, heading towards my bedroom, and startled the young noble.

“Where are you going?”

I moved through the door to my bedroom, shutting it swiftly before the blue blood could follow me through it.

“Finding which of my drawers you and others have been through while I was out. Do grant me some measure of privacy, please.”

“I would never do that,” Montague said in a tone far too joking for my tastes. “I restrain that kind of activity for fellow nobility.”

That remark got my one intact chair in the room hurriedly jammed underneath the doorknob in response.

The truth was what I wanted to check most was my hidden boxes under the floorboard, but I could hardly do that with him here. And I could hardly tell a nobleman and the son of a client to get the hell out of my apartment. Keeping him out of my bedroom was hopefully something even he wouldn’t challenge.

Alternatively, I could drug him, drag him to his father’s estate, and leave him with a strongly worded letter about trying to steal goods without payment. That had its own appeal. Potentially completely ruin my relationship with his father.

Idle fantasies of drugging the noble in my apartment to the gills, I turned my attention to my bedroom.

They’d ransacked all the doors, the contents tossed all around the room. Same with the furniture, all of which had been roughly handled, but no one had smashed it apart looking for hidden compartments.

Huzzah for small favors, although a fair bit of it had fallen apart just from being roughly searched. That or I’d trust it even less to carry my weight than I did before. The dangers of buying cheap and second-hand furniture. I tested the edge of the bed, torn and shredded where the thin mattress had been cut open. It creaked ominously, wood cracking as soon as I sat down. I got back up.

The mattress wasn’t the only thing torn, of course. Someone had taken a blade to all of my clothes, scattered about the room. They’d been thorough too, shredding everything into strips of fabric tossed all over the room. I looked at a strip of leather that could have belonged to one of my boots or a jacket, turning it over in my hand. Some of those cream-colored strips were probably what was left of my favorite blouse.

Books lay shredded across the small shelf I’d purchased, pages torn out and ripped. It all mixed on the floor into a mess. I picked up one book from the ground, half of it sloughing off in my hand as pages fluttered to the ground. Tolman and Arsene had gotten this one for me when we’d made new lives. Back when me and Arsene could still be in the same room and have a civil conversation.

This was all stuff. Not even stuff from before my life as Falara. I could replace it, with time. If anything, this was a reminder of how stupid I’d been. I’d gotten comfortable, forgotten what it meant to be on the streets where a bad day meant huddling underneath discarded newspapers and hoping no one else tried to claim your section of the alley.

The door handle rattled, and from beyond the door I could hear Montague ask “Sorry, but you’ve gone silent. Is everything alright in there?”

I swallowed an urge to tell him to fuck off. Not something Falara could do. Not something I could afford to do to a nobleman, even a disgraced one.

I forced myself back to the present. Gregory Montague needed to be handled. I could hardly open the boxes while he was in here.

I pulled the chair away from the door only for the frame to fall apart in my hands, legs falling out of it. I stared blankly down at them before just dropping the rest and heading back into the other room.

Gregory Montague was leaning against a wall, clearly not trusting anything here to support his weight. He looked up, and to my irritation, I found sympathy in his face.

Don’t offer me sympathy, you silver-spoon-fed dandy. You think I’m hurting because my things got broke?

“I suppose it’s useless to ask, but did anything survive whoever ransacked your place?”

Breathe in, breathe out. If this was some seductive technique pushed by either him or his father, I’d poison them later.

“Most everything is a loss,” I said. “Some things might be salvageable, but just barely. Could you do me a favor?”

Eyes wary, Montague nodded. I resisted the urge to sigh. Every time you asked for a favor or anything in an ambiguous manner. Sometimes with other Infernals even! I was hardly about to rip out his soul!

“Please, just move my door back into my doorway and give me some privacy for a few minutes while I try to gather my thoughts. And then I’ll have your brother’s cure ready for you.”

Montague frowned. “While I appreciate things are difficult for you, I can’t exactly let you out of my sight. My brother’s condition is at a point where I am not risking you-”

“My lord, someone has ransacked my apartment, then someone also destroyed my lab earlier, and those are only two of many things that have happened these last few days,” I said firmly. “I want five, no ten minutes of privacy to myself, which is very inadequate, but at the end of those ten minutes, I’ll fetch your brother’s cure, and we can be off. If you are that worried about me flinging myself out the window, there are enough people here desperate for coin that you can pay to stand outside and make sure I don’t escape. Or we can sit here. Neither of us budging. Because I’m hardly going to draw out a rare antidote where anyone peering down the hall might spot where I’m hiding it.”

A second passed, and then two, and then Gregory Montague retreated out to the hall. The door took half a minute for him to wrench back into place, during which I contemplated my ruined little kitchen.

Someone had gone through the closet. All the smashed glass from numerous destroyed vials remained inside there, a minor relief. If it had been out on the ground, Gregory Montague and I would have torn each other up.

Plates and all my remaining cups had been smashed. Someone had taken a hammer to my windows, smashing the glass. Only the fact that it was midday kept this room warm.

Somehow the tea and coffee pots had survived. My lips quirked as I picked them up. The tools of temptation, some had called them when both tea and coffee had been new. Fitting that such tools were the only of my possessions to survive.

Enough time had passed. It was time to make a little noise to cover up opening up the floorboards.

Being able to shed tears on command was something you learned early on the streets. When you’re a young little scamp, few things were as likely to get sympathy from the watch as much as shedding some tears. They became less effective as you grew older, but still had their uses.

I barely had to try for them.

It helped cover up the sounds of me moving the floorboard, even as tears obscured my sight. I rubbed them out of my eyes three times as I removed the floorboards.

Nothing lay underneath.

I stared down at the empty alcove, the only signs of the boxes being imprinted in the dust. A dreadful keening noise filled my ears, and after a second, I realized I was making it.

Deep breaths. Panicking wouldn’t make this better, and neither would crying, although trying to focus on that didn’t make the tears stop.

A lot of this was my fault. Storing them in the floorboards could hardly be called the most secure place. My defense had been my anonymity. I should have moved them to….well, I didn’t have any place to move them that was more secure. I kept myself and my possessions safe by keeping my head down and not displaying anything beyond the abilities of a two-bit alchemist.

Only I’d fucked it up.

If only to stop thinking about how screwed I was, I tried to think on who could have done this. The interested parties were the two nobles, the Pure-Bloods, the Black Flame, the City Watch, and at the end Voltar and his eternal sidekick Dawes.

City Watch could have just searched my apartment and labs and I couldn’t stop them. Did they get anything by doing that in disguise? Not really, nor did they get anything out of smashing up my lab and apartment. The Pure-Bloods I had even less knowledge on. They apparently were after me now for some reason, otherwise, they wouldn’t have shown up at my lab, but the only thing they hand their fingers in was the Black Flame’s box.

Speaking of the Black Flame, this fit them all too well. Versalicci ordering this, taking away my tools to make me dependent on him again? That fits both his motivations and what I knew about him. The only question there would be, why wait till now? Where had Dawes been while Voltar was visiting? Lurking about, looking for a way inside once the two of them knew I’d left? Smashing things seemed not their style.

Too many involved parties with a motive

Running away was out of the question. The biosculpting tools were the least problematic, merely having a cost equal to everything that had just been trashed in my lab. Outside of no longer being Katheryn Falara soon. That….I needed to focus on other things. That could wait. My diabolism focus and related materials? Directly connected to my soul, so having that in someone else’s hands could pose problems. My personal possessions in the third box?

If those had been damaged, whoever had stolen them better hope I never found out.

I could still recover them. The box with my personal possessions had a tracker in them, one I could follow to wherever they'd been taken. Given time, I could find out who had stolen from me and give them a little of pain in return.

Someone knocked on my door, jolting me out of considering what possible affliction I’d inflict on whoever had ransacked my apartment.

“My apologies, my lord, please give me a few seconds more,” I said, getting up from the loose floorboards. I started moving them back into position just as quietly as I’d removed them.

Why had someone tossed my room so violently, but my floorboard collection of possessions had been quietly lifted with no signs of disturbance? They’d even put the floorboard back just as I’d left it. Instinct said the wreckage strewn about was a distraction from that, but it made no sense. I’d be checking these floorboards the first chance I got. Two parties must have searched through my apartment. Or maybe just one covering their tracks? If I had more time to look over things, maybe I could figure out a more definite answer, but Montague had probably disturbed things in here ever since his arrival.

I was inclined to think he had nothing to do with this. Not just because Lord Montague had seemed too desperate to risk his eldest’s life on the chance of finding the cure, but because only an idiot would stick around after finding the boxes. If the goal was the cure, opening the boxes would have provided more than enough blackmail material to wrench it out of my grasp.

Speaking of the younger Montague, far longer than ten minutes had passed. At least it felt that way in here.

I checked my face in the largest fragment of a mirror I had left. More tears than I’d intended, but I finally made myself a little more presentable.

“Apologies for keeping you, Lord Montague, I realize I may have been speaking above my station earlier. I apologize. It’s been a frustrating day. Please come back inside.”

The door opened. If Montague was suspicious of how long I’d taken, it didn’t show on his face. “You have the cure then?”

“One second,” I replied, heading for my sink.

The plumbing in my apartment was very basic. A single pipe and pump led down to the city’s reservoirs far below. It was not the healthiest of sources, but it was that or relying on rainwater instead. Typically, there wasn’t enough rainwater.

It had been a common fixture since the city constructed a series of reservoirs a half-century ago, so it wasn’t unusual to find them. So they remained below notice.

I slid out a section of pipe from under my sink. It remained sealed on both ends, and the metal was closed snugly—perfect.

Montague’s eyes narrowed. “A fake piece of plumbing. You were hiding my brother’s cure in that?”

I smiled disarmingly “Peace, Lord Montague. It worked, which is all that really matters. It worked better than what I did to hide possessions much more dear to myself.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “I suppose you know how to separate out the doses in the right amounts?”

“Easily done,” I replied. Most of my standardized measuring equipment was smashed back at the lab, and whoever had broken into my apartment had wrecked most of what was here. But a few beakers remained by the sink. I quickly scooped them up.

A few minutes later, I had a vial filled with the prerequisite dose. He took it, looking suspiciously between it and me.

“I’m half-tempted to insist that you come with me just so we can have you on-hand if this turns out to be a fake,” he admitted.

“I’m tempted to insist on my payment up front, but we must all make sacrifices Lord Montague.” It felt weird calling him the same thing as his father, but I could hardly presume to use his first name. “I’ll insist on coming. I want my payment for this, and I am not having this used on your brother if it will kill him. You may trust your father on this matter, but I don’t.”

I was so lost in thought I barely noticed the other human striding down the hall.

This one I knew, his servant’s livery in purple and white. One of Lady Karsin’s servants I’d met on her estate, panting and out of breath as he made his way down. Curious neighbors looked at him as he made his way down.

There went any slim remaining chance of me living here. The gossip about what had happened to my apartment alone would drive me out.

He got to the end, trying to catch his breath. He spotted Montague and looked shocked to find him here, while Montague looked much the same. Finally, the servant caught his breath.

“Lady Karsin needs your services immediately. Her son has fallen into an illness, and she’s worried the poisoner might have struck again.”