Mortis and Cicero were back on the car, it had been a calm meeting, with a few bumps on the road, but it achieved what the old lady wanted, or at least what Mortis thought the old lady wanted, and allowed Mortis to take a better measure of his business partner. The two of them had been at it for a couple of years, and the seeds of trust germinated slowly, so moments like this were key to test alliances and remind each other of why they worked together in spite of each sides eccentricities and oddities.
The Detective took to the streets of Nashville, seeking for some time to think, which overlapped with time to eat, and since had been at from early on Morits took to a decent-looking burger joint and sat down with Cicero under his feet to eat and think as the news was broadcast on the large TV, with plenty of patrons looking at the screen either directly or pretending they did not. The newscaster was talking about the murder of the college athletes last night, talking to experts and professionals about what happened, linking a few of the previous murders of homeless and prostitutes. Mortis ignored the broadcast and decided to go over his notes.
Blood sucking, use of bladed weapons, a dead antiquary, a silver box that contained some ancient evil, and the desire for slaughter as shown last night. It did not add up, not at all, and it was not the kind of thing Mortis wanted to think when he was investigating.
Dealing with the supernatural was never an easy thing, knowledge was the main form of power, knowing what you faced and how to dispose of it before it killed you trumped every single other ability in the game. Brawn could only take you so far, and a million bullets were useless if you did not know where to lodge them. In a world were nature not always aligns with the laws of nature those who relied on luck often ended up dead sooner rather than later.
Now the issue Mortis faced was that he did not know of anything that would go from mangling hobbos to killing students and keep a low profile while sucking blood of anything, let alone using weapons. Bloodsuckers were a dime a dozen: Vampires, Faeries, changeling, forgotten gods, demons variations of undead and heck, even certain types of witches and humans were prone to suck blood, but so far non of them matched the evidence he had collected, making this either a thing he did not know anything about, or an old dog using new tricks, neither of which Mortis liked because the former meant he was going in blind, and the latter meant that someone was overthrowing centuries of tradition to get ahead, which could makes things much, much worst.
Now the real sucker punch, the real left field move, was the homeless inside the large trash container. Just one wound, one, and the blood was still gone. No other lacerations, no other actions, one wound, one death, no blood. The same as the other deaths, yet completely different.
` "What in the living hell can dry up a man without having to hold him down?" Mortis wrote down as he dug deep into his not lesser amount of supernatural lore and knowledge, but nothing was coming up, no names, no ideas. Is not like he had seen similar things though: reminded him of those deserts plants he studied in Mongolia: Blooming Death, the natives called them, little seeds, the size of dandelion seeds, flying across the desert sky through the thin membrane that allows it to be swept up by the winds, and then germinates when it touches nutrients; lives shorts lives on the backs of Bactrian camels and doomed travellers, and dies the moment sunlight shines, burning it whole, only surviving in the points where the desert meet the forever night realm and the mouth of caves where the moonlight feeds it. If a dozen of them manages to grab you then that is that, they would rob your moisture and nutrients and leave you a husk to be pecked by birds and carrion beasts that would poop the seed out so the cycle continues. But this was not its man, though it was close. To the idea Mortis paired the 'baton from the antique dealer's widow, a little piece of rusted metal that makes its owner slowly lose it. What was up with that? A strange Baton in a Romanian box, missing blood, serial killer, Mortis wrote it all down and hypothesized a third possibility, one that he had not considered yet, it could be something that has been forgotten.
The average person tends to think that everything is written down somewhere, that all names of all people and all historical events can be accurately examined from the present once you put all perspective and narrations together; the fact is, there is more theory and holes in life that we would like to believe, people too often fill blanks like motif based on their own perception of how people operated at the time, or how people operate when they belong to certain faith, social class, political party or whatever, seeing it positively or negatively based on how right they want to be, how wrong, or how fair. Many times, like the Pyramids of Egypt, or Damascus Steel, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, we do not have the full picture, only what we can infer based on the now, far from the truth of what it actually is; if you are missing pieces even the best system can miss what really is going on: Did the Dinosaurs look like that? Was the Bering Ice Bridge the only way into the Continent? Did Hannibal really thought the Roma would give up or that Rome was impossible to besiege? We may never know. And so sometimes a magical being or artefact gets lost to history, and when it is found out a whole new can of worms is open, this could be a tool an old evil tracked back, or something different of its own; like Genie in a bottle…
"Genie…" Mortis murmured, there was an idea. The baton could have actually sealed something in. And old Demon maybe? Mortis did not know yet, but he would soon, something was telling him he would meet that thing, he was hunting it after all, but he felt that tonight he would finally make acquaintances with the thing. If you asked Mortis he would not tell him why he knew, he only knew he would, it was an old instinct developed by people who had to learn to survive, particularly those dealing with very nasty things, it was what helped you survive as a veteran, it was also what made you want to constantly dive deeper into the mouth of the beast. You could call it a suicidal survival instinct, testing itself to see if it was right.
As Mortis took another bite of his burger he felt his energy fluctuating, he tried to calm it with coffee, but it was not great, he had been at it for too long, not enough rest, between Arizona and this he was running himself thin, he needed rest, but he also needed clues, and clues were not coming by unless you look for them.
Mortis checked the time, it was half-past two, going into three. He had to go pick up the box from Elijah and see what he could find, there was also the hope that the widow would give him the name he needed. And then there was his father, the old goat, conspiring with foreign interests, and for what? To undermine him, to drive him into a corner as he tried to reclaim what he lost. If Mortis knew something about his father, was that the man had a pride thicker than a mile of steel, he would take loosing anything, no matter how minute, personal; shame to him that he allowed his own son to kick him out and make Nashville into a city he could never really get back, not unless he had a plan for a serious war. Which it meant that foreign interests were repaying a favour to his father, but how? And what was his dear ol' dad willing to do for them? Mortis put a note on that as he received and incoming call from Father Elijah.
"Mortis speaking!"
"I am sorry Mortis, someone stole the box."