FSE

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September 24th, 2011

   For three hours we walked around the run down places, the pubs, the streets and even the "nicer" parts of Whitechapel. It didn't get us much but looks from worried strangers and hisses from crazy folks. I even let Marco rough up a man or two.. guys who seemed to know something, but the information we gained ended up being misleading or unrelated to our work. When the rain clouds started rolling in I considered calling it a night, but you see there's this problem with the way we had been doing things. All of our information hunting had put a target on us.. someone had eyes on us because of our activities. Also fate always seemed to fuck with us.. fate is how we met, fate is how we all grew, fate had brought us close to ugly things and beautiful things alike.. but still.. fate's a fickle bitch.

   We had just gotten to the parking lot where we had chained up our bikes when we saw them.. four motley looking punks. Even from where we stood, 4 dozen feet away, I could smell the piss and sewage on their clothing. They were ragged things.. hungry looking.. like squatters who had taken up living in a sewer. Their skin was gaunt and pale and broken.. it was like thin sheets of moldy wax paper stretched over their bodies. For all of their filth they were probably nothing but homeless men to the eyes of others, but they also carried a final scent.. Marco didn't smell it like I did.. he felt it on his skin.. to me it was like over ripe fruit had been blended with bad meat and left to sit.. to him it must have felt like the same stuff but touching his skin on the back of his neck.

   They were tainted.

   "Well Marco.. looks like Helga gets to go dancing tonight." My brother eyed his war hammer and stroked its head, caressing it like you would a pampered cat. "Oh she's a happy gal tonight Conor.. but she wants to know if she can dance this one solo."

   I brought my gun out from it's holster under my duster, showing it to Marco while I unloaded it. I kept the magazine in my coat, but set the empty weapon down on the ground. "Tell her I better get some pudding out of this, finest sheep guts in scotland."

   Marco's mighty leap brought him upon our foes so quickly they had barely even brought out their crude weapons before his hammer was swinging. The ground collapsed where his first hammer blow slammed down, such was Marco's supernatural strength that his attack shattered the cement under the weapon and sent fissures out under the feet of the people who set upon him. Each held a simple tool of battle.. a length of chain, a discarded butcher's knife, a tree branch and crowbar. Marco though, he was quick like a savage animal. His head dropped under the swing of the chain which wrapped around the throat of the knife wielding nutter. The wild man holding the chain pulled to get the thing off of his ally, but before anything could come of it Marco spun around on his heel and brought Helga right into the chain-man's back. The crunch was as sickening to listen to as it was enchanting.. that man would not be walking for a week.

   The melee was to be short lived. Marco's dire instinct, strength and speed kept him acting and reacting so quickly that the three remaining crazies could neither hit him nor avoid his attacks. His weapon, though it was a massive two handed hammer, flowed like water in his hands.. almost defying gravity with it's constant and fluid motions. One strike snapped the lower spine of a foe. The man ended up laying on the ground twitching due to the awesome brutal blow he had suffered. Marco stepped on him and swung the hammer in a hewing motion, battering another man into submission. When all that was left was the bat wielding man Marco gazed at him, eyes locking for a moment in the stiff air.

   That final man's body locked up, unmoving save for small twitches. His mind tried to command his flesh to move.. but Marco's predator gaze was no simple stare.. it was a draconic power he made use of. The gaze had weaved paralysis into the man's body.. though his crazed stare showed no fear, his subconscious mind had locked up in absolute terror.. on self preserving instinct his very nerves had cut themselves from his brain's command. Marco's hammer coming in at head level.. that was the last thing that man ever saw.

   "Four more notches for the old bird eh Marco?" I had made myself busy by reloading my gun. I strode up towards our bikes and sat down so I could ponder what had just occurred.

   "They were sent here Conor. You know this." I nodded a bit and knelt down so I could examine them. As I suspected they had come from sewers.. their clothes had various bits of half liquid filth stuck to them and each was stained by the piss and shit in the foul waters that exist in those tunnels.

   "I know.. but I hardly believe that the D-killer sent them. Someone.. something else is aware of us. We pissed something else off." My thumbs rubbed at the handle of my pistol anxiously. "Fuck... we can't go back to the flat with someone observing us. Lets go to the dome."

   We revved up our engines and sped off into the night once more. The Millennium Dome was a graciously short drive away.. five minutes at best. Once dismounted we walked around in the Greenwich park, moving past the Royal Observatory and to the north east down towards where the dome was built. The Millennium Dome was supposed to be a wonder back when it was conceived.. a great building for great times ahead of the year 2000, but trouble fell upon it as soon as it was started and the construction project was almost abandoned before it even started. Even after it was finished it ended up being abandoned not but a few years later. Now it hugs shore line close to the Thames.. a mammoth and much vaunted folly that now cast a menacing shadow over the surrounding grounds.

   Once we arrived at the dome Marco stopped so he could glimpse at the great river. "Let us pay our respects to the Thames my brother." We walked up onto a small dock that extended just past the shoreline and then knelt. I let Marco lead a quick prayer and took a moment to open up my satchel. I kept many small hand made natural honey candies for occasions like this. The Strange Times had brought many beings back to the world.. beings that could be pleased with gifts. A good number of spirits now existed in the river so I found it fitting that I might offer it a gift as the Celts and Saxons did long ago.

   "Mighty Thames, great river, Dark One. I give this simple offering to you with humility in my heart. I ask for nothing.. I merely give to you so you might know mortal kindness and experience it as I and my brood do." I tossed the whole batch of sweets into the river and watched for a moment. They sank like stones into the flowing waters, barely disturbing the surface.

   We rose after we finished showing our respect to the Thames. Marco then looked at the dome in all of its quasi spectral glory. "Lets find where the killing occurred." For 15 minutes we searched the walls of the big building until we found the stretch of wall the first man had.. been pinned to. The walls had been pitted by the karmic blades during the attack, piercing the gangster's flesh and bone and spiking him to the side of the dome. Much to our dismay we also found a casually dressed man standing right in front of that spot. He gazed over it with incredulous intent and gave us enough time to get close enough to him to have a conversation.

   "Agent White..." Marco's spoken voice was low when he recognized the spook. The oddly dressed tourist looking man gazed over at us after staring at the wall for a moment longer pretending to ignore us. He took off his retro sunglasses and turned so he could address Marco and I.

   I stepped between Marco and White.. maybe the fed trusted Marco.. maybe he was stupid, but I didn't want to deal with Fafnir or parliament should he turn White to stone. "To what do we owe this pleasure agent White?"

   "Half an hour ago in Whitechapel you both attacked four geezers who had gone near your motor bicycles." He stood there casually, even pulling out a pack of cigarettes and offering me one. "Like a fag?" I giggled a bit when I heard the English slang and shook my head.

   "No thank you. I don't smoke." He shrugged in disinterest at my rejection of a cigarette and lit his. My guess is that he was waiting for us to explain ourselves.. this had become a dance my brood and I were becoming familiar with. "They were there to accost us. Each was armed and waiting. We suspect they knew we were investigating the D-killings and were used as thugs."

   White nodded and took a hit from his fag. "Crazy homeless sewer dwellers being used as thugs? You usually do better Conor." I thought it over for a bit, trying to ignore the fact I had blundered a bit with that shoddy explanation.

   "Yeah.. I know. We've got nothing else to go on though. They definitely weren't waiting for us so they could make friends, but truthfully I have no clue why they came at us. Right now we're working with the Metros to try to catch the D-killer so we looked around there, asked some questions and bought some drinks." His only response to me was to shoot this -I know what you were doing asshole- glance in my general direction.

   We all stood there a moment. For Marco and I it was uncomfortable silence that gave us time to remember this guy. Agent White was a member of an organization he identified only as LN-7. My brood mates had yet to figure out what the nature of that organization was. The best idea came from Miller: LN-7 was probably a form of Men in Black within the English government that dealt specifically with the supernatural. To date agent White been something of an ally. Every now and again he had slipped us a resource that we needed at a critical moment. We also knew that he had surveillance on us at almost all times.. bugs in our phones, little cameras across the street and such. Most of my brood really didn't like it, but I didn't fight with federal agents any more than was necessary to let them know I knew we were being watched. Personally I had a feeling White was like.. almost.. assigned to us.

   After that tormentingly long wait for White to speak he motioned for me to come close. In his hand he held a plastic bag with several small pictures as well as an envelope in it. When I walked near him he handed the bag to me, took a final puff of his cigarette and walked away. "I fucking hate that guy." Helga was held tightly in Fafnir's hands while his facial and bodily expression expressed to the world his violent desire.

   "I know.. we'll deal with him another day. He's given us something though."

   Marco looked at the pictures in the bag while I circled the dome looking for anything that could be a clue to our case. Every D-killing victim was shown in the pictures.. both their corpses after the attacks and what they looked like alive and well. All wore similar gang colors and had wore a handkerchief with a lizard skull on a green background for a gang insignia. There was also a picture of the four men we had fought in the package, accompanied by a picture of four individual men dressed in the colors and clothes of the victims.

   "Tyr.. the victims were all part of one gang, and not a commonly known one either. Also I think the four men who attacked us were part of that gang as well." Marco seemed defeated. He didn't like White, but the man had just handed a big piece of the puzzle to us. It made Marco feel.. well it seemed to him like the guy was gloating.. like we needed him and not the other way around.

   "I know you don't trust him.. but this is why I say we suffer him. No need to feel shamed because of his aid my brother."

   The envelope contained something far far different than either of us had expected. First and foremost it contained a hand drawn picture of a strange person. It was clearly humanoid and it draped itself in a large cloak that kept its shoulders and chest covered.. but its head was clearly shown. The skull was almost fox like. It was triangular in shape and covered in smooth fur. Little lines run under it's eyes and a pair of narrow fur covered tuffs came out of the back of it's head like animal ears. The eyes were simply orbs of white.

   The other papers were transcripts of an interrogation. Much of it was blotted out, but the conversation seemed to revolve around a cultist suspect and his defiance towards whatever group was questioning him. One thing was certain though.. whoever he was he and his comrades intended on casting some sort of summoning ritual, claiming they would bring a dragon from the belly of the mother earth so it could judge the city and all of it's people.

The best part? The ritual was supposed to go down right here in the Millennium Dome.