Case 35: Entry 1

Today I received a rather unusual client. For one thing, he had no idea who I am. Elijah Hewlett was referred to me by Dr. Vasquez, a psychiatrist whom I've helped out a few times. I've also played the client for him on several occasions after various disturbing encounters. In fact, if the strange man knocking on my door hadn't mentioned Dr. Vasquez I probably would have slammed the door in his face. I have an office in the front of my house, but I hardly ever meet clients there and this is the first time I have ever sat with one who hadn't contacted me online or by phone beforehand. When Mr. Hewlett mentioned the good doctor, I stopped trying to get rid of him and decided to indulge my curiosity.

"What exactly did Dr. Vasquez tell you about me?" I asked.

"Nothing, really," said Mr. Hewlett. "Just your address, that you're some kind of specialist, and that I should go in with an open mind."

"That..." I said. "That's some good advice."

After that, we sat down in my office and I asked him why exactly Dr. Vasquez referred him to me. Mr. Hewlett explained that he has struggled with schizophrenia since he was a child. He hears voices,  has panic attacks, has various physical ticks, endures a myriad of other small and sporadic symptoms, and has seen a small tormenter in a handful of impish forms. Apparently whenever the creature appears to him it speaks with the same voice regardless of whether its shape is avian, insectile, or a dwarfed version of some loved one or associate. Once we had finished with the overview of his symptoms, we talked about Dr. Vasquez's most recent course of treatment and the results. In fact, the doctor had given Mr. Hewlett some notes to pass onto me containing specific details such as the name of the prescription.

"Mr. Hewlett," I said after I had double checked all the information. "This prescription is a placebo. Moreover, the exercises you've been doing--the walks and the meditative routines--are all about relieving stress. They're not about managing the way you think or examining your experiences and ideas or grounding your sense of self in place and time. In other words, I believe that for the last few months, Dr. Vasquez has been treating your treatment."

I chuckled at my own wording, but Mr. Hewlett just stared at me blankly.

"What I mean," I added. "Is that Dr. Vasquez has been treating the stress and biochemical chaos of all the medication and haphazard therapy you've experienced. And it looks like it was working. Virtually all your symptoms have gone down, apart from the hallucinations that is."

"The hallucinations are kind of the bigger deal," said Mr. Hewlett in the sort of voice he might use with a child. "I mean, they're what make me schizophrenic."

"About that," I said. "I've got some good news and bad news. The good news is that you are completely sane. The bad news is that the voices are real."

There were several moments of silence as I let that sink in. I was starting to think that I'd done the big reveal exactly right, and then Mr. Hewlett got up and wordlessly and quickly strode out of my office.

I might need to work on my people skills.

Case 31: Entry 5

Well, I've done what I was hired to do. I sent a comprehensive report (including any notes and pictures I took in the course of my research) to Shauna and Gilbert. That was the job. I got hired to do research, and that was it. There is no reason I need to be involved any further... Sometimes I hate being me.

I had to steal almost five pounds of phoenix ash, but I was able to put something together to drive the Moarte Verde out of the stronghold. Not that I'm sure it was ever truly present in here, but I do know the Archives got a lot more friendly after I finished that concoction. Then I tried to decide how best to proceed. The security in the stronghold is much more arcane than technological once you get below the ground floor, which makes it much easier for me to get into places I technically shouldn't be. I thought of talking to the Director (I'm not sure if it's true, but I've heard that he's a direct descendent of Markus Dufresne) but I'm kind of afraid of getting tangled up in the bureaucracy. I also considered seeing what I could sneak out of the armory, but I doubt that would work out well. Besides, I'm not the guy who goes charging into battle with a flaming sword. I'm more of a cackling lunatic than a raging barbarian. Anyway, I decided to follow my traditional route. I stole some more materials, found a nice little corner in the Archives, and went to work.

I spent a few hours praying and reading through my Bible, and then I went to work. Tore any blank pages I could find out of the journals I had read and wrote Mark 5:1-13 on them seventy-seven times. Then I made a few more concoctions, and I sat down to write the story of Moarte Verde and all the times the Agency and its allies have fought against it. Unlike the verses, that particular bit of writing wasn't much of a weapon on its own, but I needed to really capture that story in my own mind. I needed to carry the heritage of Dufresne and all the others in my heart. I'm a storyteller, a keeper of the lore, and that's what I do. That's what makes me dangerous. Once all that was taken care of, I set off for Shauna and Gilbert.

The Agency stronghold I've spent the past two weeks or so at is located beneath the mountains of Northern California, and Shauna and Gilbert live about thirty miles from the sea in Northern Oregon. Normally it would have been an easy trip, but the fiend still had its feelers out. I got several hours added on due to all the traffic jams I kept running up against, and then I started getting the feeling I was being watched. I took some backroads and dropped another spirit bomb like I used in the Archives. That got me clear of the fiend for a while, but then the feeling came back. Then I got hit. Things got fuzzy for half a minute, but I quickly took in the situation. The car might not have been totaled, but it certainly wouldn't get me from A to B anytime soon. My materials were still relatively undamaged, though, and Nox was on the sidewalk mewing at me. I got out and immediately started walking. I needed to keep moving. I walked around the block a few times as I called someone to tow my car away and then I tried to figure out my options. It seemed like the situation was intensifying, which meant buses and other public transport would be too slow. I've never used a rental service before, so I wasn't sure how long that might take or if I would even be able to do it. Besides, things were still feeling a bit too fuzzy for me to be at all confident about driving a giant metal box around at speeds no human being was ever designed to achieve. So I did something that turned my stomach. I called Straub. The man's a bastard, but I do have a working relationship with him, and so do Shauna and Gilbert. He tried to play games with me, but I made it very clear that I was not in the mood. Which shouldn't have worked. He gave up on screwing around way too easily, but I didn't have time to wonder why.

The car that showed up shortly after that looked like a slightly busted Camry. When I got in, my arcanometer went nuts for twenty seconds or so and then went completely still. I have no idea what went into building that thing, but I doubt I would be able to replicate it if I sold or used every last arcane item in my possession plus my house. The car was a panic room on wheels specifically designed to hide from and withstand supernatural attacks. Which was a good thing, because the Moarte Verde was getting really anxious right about then. I kept seeing flashes of green out of the corner of my eye, and at one point a murder of crows tried dive bombing us at a red light. I didn't bother about that, though. Mostly I just slouched in the back and in my head I ran through the story and Mark 5:1-13 (in the proper Greek, obviously) again and again. I saw other things out the window too. When we passed through the woods I saw a Black man in full cowboy getup riding beside the road, at a particular river I saw a woman standing at the prow of a galleon, and in one town I saw a man in brown and grey garb scaling a building. I may or may not have had a concussion.

I've never met Gilbert Flamel or Shauna Freeman on their home turf, but I wasn't surprised to see the address I had leading up to a large and nondescript warehouse. There were a few people banging on the entrance with weapons varying from kitchen knives to hunting rifles. From what I've read, the Moarte Verde can only possess one central host, but it can influence a lot more as long as it's in a strong (in whatever way it measures strength) host. This meant that I probably didn't have to worry about any of the people on the outside bringing a whole new level of danger to the situation.

"Good luck, Underhill," said Straub through the car's speakers. The driver handed me a camera to clip onto my person. "I'm very interested in seeing how this plays out."

I took the camera (it was better than being sent a bill or owing him a favor, which I suspected were the alternatives) and got out while the thugs were mostly still preoccupied with trying to get in. I tossed my very last spirit bomb at them and then used a couple charges from my rod (the same kind of thing I used with Mr. Ash; this one was a bit better, but still nothing like what a wizard might make) to knock out the ones that still looked like trouble. Then I knocked on the door and waited to see what answered. I was very happy to see Shauna let me in.

The inside of the warehouse was a maze of equipment, glass rooms, and storage containers. And nearly all of it was covered in luminous, green writing. Most of the projects that I could see had been either destroyed, mutated, or otherwise fiddled with. There was incessant ruckus of thuds, shrieks, and howls coming from deeper in the warehouse. As it turned out, they had managed to capture the fiend (or at least the main host) a few days earlier, but it didn't look like they could hold it for long. In fact, as Shauna was explaining this to me, we heard the tearing of metal and a scream of visceral rage and hunger.

"That vampire I gave you," said. "You've killed it by now, right?"

"Don't worry about it," she said. "It's not here."

That did not make me feel even a little bit better, but I rushed forward with her anyway. As I did so, I tossed out the pages on which I'd written Mark 5: 1-13 over and over. They flew around the warehouse as if driven by heavy winds, and as they did so the writings all across the walls began to blur and flicker away. Then the Moarte Verde came around the corner. The host was a medium-sized man with dark hair, a completely unnatural and freakish physique, and sores all across his body. As the creature roared again, I began the recitation. It charged, slammed me against a storage container, and knocked the wind out of me. When I was back on my feet it was going at it with Shauna (who had some kind of baton in one hand and a needle in the other) and Gilbert (who had a pair of homemade gauntlets of some kind and what I could only assume was a death ray slung over his shoulder). It also happened to be winning, so I went for the rod again and fired until it was all out of juju. And then I started in again with the Greek.

This time the fiend ran. I vaguely remember my friends mouthing and jerking their heads at each other--probably working out how to outmaneuver it--but I wasn't paying attention. I just followed it through the maze, my awareness of its trail and my sureness of purpose growing with each word. As I began the twelfth recitation, I heard a rasping sound like a thousand barely audible mutters drifting down from above. I jutted out of the way as the Moarte Verde crashed down, all the while continuing the passage. It rose shakily to its feet and snarled, and as it did so I saw Shauna come around a corner several yards behind it.

"I come in the name of Markus Dufresne," I said after the twelfth recitation. "I come in the name of Coribeth Breckenridge. I come in the name of Caleb Dietrich. By their legacies I bind you." I rushed forward and grabbed a hold of the fiend. The moment I touched it I felt a shrill, bitter cry run through my psyche. "I come in the name of the Man of Galilee," I shouted. "By His blood I bind you."

I think I would have died right there if Shauna hadn't driven a needle into the fiend. I'm also pretty sure things wouldn't have gone so well for her if I hadn't played my part. I could still hear it in my head, and now I knew its pain, its pride, and its sheer, unbridled hatred, all of them coming together into a single horrid cacophony. I don't know if it threw me off then or if there was some burst of energy or what, but the next thing I knew I was on the floor. Over me I saw the Moarte Verde's body writhing, twisting, and bulging rapidly as a green vapor flowed out from it.

"Oh, come on," said Gilbert as he peered out from the roof of one of their makeshift labs. "I haven't even had my turn yet."

It turns out I was right. That was a death ray on his back. It poured crimson and azure power down onto the fiend, power that chased down and burned out every last tendril of the fleeing mist. As the lights of the battle went out I heard the cacophony go silent and the pages finally flutter to the floor. I waited several seconds, and then let out a long breath as all kinds of shapes failed to jump out or otherwise appear with the intention of ripping me apart.

There were quite a few more seconds before any of us spoke spoke to each other. Then someone started to laugh, and the post adrenaline giddiness took over. After a while, we remembered that there was still stuff to deal with. Gilbert showed me a living area I could stay in while he and Shauna checked out the damage and made plans for how to fix it. I'm actually in there right now.

I think I might write a paper on this. Or maybe not. I'd prefer not to be the next Leandre Flamel.

Case 31: Entry 4

It's been almost a week since the last entry. I found plenty of brief mentions of the Moarte Verde, but none of it told me anything new. They were all about rampages or searches for an adequate host, just more of what I had already learned from the accounts of Markus Dufresne and Coribeth Breckenridge. In the meantime, the Archives began to demonstrate bouts of increasing hostility. Four days ago I got chased down several aisles by some gibbering mass mismatched limbs and mouths about the size of a large cat before I managed to climb up a few shelves and drop a sufficiently heavy volume on it. A bit earlier than that it lured me into reading something that has...deprived me of the ability to sleep soundly every night since. Just yesterday on my way back to my room I found myself wandering through endless hallways, talking to Agency staff who spat out utter nonsense, and being taunted by my own shadow. At first I thought it was residual psychological damage (maybe even a stroke) until I realized I had never left the Archives. After that, I decided to add some warding symbols to my quarters. It should already be entirely secure, but I feel like the recent hostility has been a bit more than just the Archives...being the Archives. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I sort of get how paranoid Gilbert and Shauna have seemed. Even more so after reading the accounts of Caleb Dietrich.

Born in Vienna in the fourteenth century, Caleb Dietrich was a thief and a con artist until he tried to burgle an Agency safe house. He nearly made it out of the city with a chest containing an ancient, Carthaginian spirit before a he was stopped by a huntsman named Petrus Moser and an alchemist named Leandre Flamel. Moser was furious, but Flamel was merely fascinated. They locked Caleb away for the night and told him they would decide his fate in the morning. A few hours later the man had nearly reached a balcony when a trap door opened up and dropped him into a room with Moser looking even more annoyed and Flamel looking even more intrigued. That was when the alchemist offered him a job as his assistant. Caleb agreed quite readily, but it took three or four months before he really decided to settle into the role. That was after he had taken several opportunities to run and had been caught by Moser every single time. It was also after he'd had the chance to see Flamel at work. It's said that Leandre Flamel could catch a storm in a bottle, brew up concoctions to bring down manticores, and build fortresses that could man their own defenses. Some of his brews and mechanisms have never been replicated because no one else could figure out how to get the materials just right or what confluences of natural and supernatural forces needed to be present.

To understand Leandre Flamel, it's important to realize that the Agency was then in a time of transition. For quite a while, it had been under the management (in theory, at least) of the Catholic Church, but now it was being funded by and using the infrastructure of a handful of highly placed nobles. The trouble was that many of those nobles wanted to use the Agency and its resources for their own purposes, and it was slowly being split into factions and deprived of its autonomy. Like many his comrades, Leandre Flamel disliked the changing atmosphere, and he believed that with enough wealth and arcane power he could bring unity back to the Agency and put the upper management back at arms length. And when the Black Death first hit Europe, he was convinced that if he could conjure some weapon against it then the final victory would be his.

Unlike his more famous nephew, Leandre Flamel had little interest in the Philosopher's Stone. What did grab his interest was another marvelous and highly theoretical substance that as yet had no name. All anyone who had previously hinted at it knew was that it would have to be a substance possessed of life and even a sort of spiritual element. Theories about actual uses varied, but most alchemists agreed that it could be employed to perform medical marvels. Flamel began work trying to create the substance a few years after he acquired Caleb Dietrich as his assistant, and it took about fifteen years before his quest was completed.

It was slow going at first. Caleb would simply help him toy around with various fluids and other such things whenever they had the time. Sometimes Flamel would want the spinal fluid of a ghoul or some other exotic material, and the two of them would travel with huntsmen in search of ingredients. At that point he was just looking for the base substance, the thing that they would later project a spirit or other metaphysical form onto. But then things started to get worse. Flamel would spend days locked in his lab. He would send Caleb out to "acquire" increasingly dangerous materials, and he showed less and less interest in the feats of cunning that his assistant enjoyed bragging about. There were books of magic bound in human skin. There were sealed containers taken from the dungeons of dark sorcerers. There instruments taken from Agency safe houses which had been lost various disasters, accidents, and attacks. Then one day, Caleb was sent to track down a caravan of artists, performers, and fortune tellers in Eastern Europe. After several days of studying the group, and one very near miss, he got away with a locked chest containing the skull of a pig. Ever inch of the artifact was carved with arcane symbols and one brief phrase written in some ancient language. The mere knowledge that he had such a thing made Caleb uneasy, and he quickly locked it back up after he'd inspected it. He delivered the skull back to his master and then took a leave to consult with another scholar of the Agency about Flamel's obsession and the phrase carved into his latest find. Shortly after that, Leandre Flamel completed his work and consequently lost all that remained of his mind to the Moarte Verde. On that same day, Caleb Dietrich was in Florence learning the meaning of the phrase written in Aramaic on the skull of a pig. It meant, "We are Legion, for we are many."

Case 31: Entry 3

It took me a few days to find the next book. One of the books I found in the meantime was rather hypnotic, and it took a swig of one very special cocktail to make my mind flexible enough to wriggle out of it. Then I got ambushed by a bunch of gremlins and other small folk. All in all, it was a difficult past few days. Then I found the journal of Coribeth Breckenridge.

Coribeth Breckenridge was born in the mid-1700s when the Agency was in a state of transition. The previous incarnation had been largely dissolved almost a century ago, and the isolated cells and secret orders left behind were only beginning to come back together into some semblance of unity when she  received her training as a doctor. Her family was rather wealthy, and they had been connected to one of the remaining cells for three or four generations by the time she was born. Being a woman, she would normally have been given no duties more serious that keeping the home base maintained and attending to any wounded huntsmen who came by, however when she was educated in the healing arts (both mundane and arcane) she easily surpassed any of her male counterparts. Between that and her grasp of cryptobiology, she wound working in the field in record time. Which is how she came to be in the woods of Massachusetts in 1761.

Coribeth Breckenridge was still at home in the mountains of Wales when she got the message about a disease that seemed more like a curse running through New England. By the time she arrived in America, the cell she had been in contact with was completely wiped out. Granted, that was only four or five dudes, but still. Anyway, she found their records and discovered that the cell had been holding a man not only infected with but positively possessed by the disease. The safe house had been out in the woods, and she rode out at once with whatever weapons she could find. Fortunately, she found the patient before he made it to town. He was stumbling along, there were sores all over his arms, foam bubbled occasionally up from his mouth, and his eyes had gone a pure, bright green. Coribeth approached the possessed man with every precaution, but she found that subduing him and bring him back to the safe house was easier than she could have hoped. It was holding him there that was the hard part.

Over the course of six months, Coribeth Breckenridge fought to drive out the Moarte Verde, and for six months it fought back. She tried all the usual metals, herbs, and other substances to repel a supernatural creature. Most of them had some small effect, (I've copied down everything she tried and the result and will be sending them to Shauna and Gilbert) but none of them were able to do any significant harm, and she couldn't find any way to amplify the effects. It took her just under two weeks to go through that process and to figure out the logistics of maintaining the safe house. For the rest of the time, she got into the serious business of the medical arts. I don't know enough about medicine or real potions (I can only pull off the minor league stuff), so most of her notes relating to that business are out of my area of expertise. I did, however, notice one little detail, which was that by the end she was making frequent use of pigs blood. This is a bit odd since as far as I know pigs blood doesn't have any significant supernatural or biological properties. Of course, she might have just gone  a bit crazy by then.

The visions started before the first month ended. It began with dreams of the men who had occupied the safe house before her. Every night she would watch the die. One puked his guts out, but the others went mad and turned on each other, laughing all the while. Later on, the Moarte Verde showed her more customized nightmares. There were quite a lot, but the ones that stood out for her were the ones that featured her brother. William Breckenridge had always felt threatened by his younger sister. He had been a fantastic huntsman in his own right, but he had never gotten over all the little ways in which she was talented and he was not. And he had dealt with it by lashing out. He bullied her, humiliated her, and even attempted to sabotage her career. So the fiend showed her the time he had manipulated her into trying to spar with him, and in the vision the swords weren't made of wood. It showed Coribeth the time he had snatched away a letter from her tutor and poured out all the mockery he could muster as he read it aloud to his friend and cronies, and in the vision the laughter was higher and louder and the grins were far too broad. It even let her see her own horrid fantasies. It let her see herself unleashing years of bottled resentment on her brother and anyone else she had reason to hate. By the last two months or so, the visions kept on going nonstop all day and all night.

And every time the thing tormented her, it would also show Coribeth the signs and the words by which she could invite it in. The truth was that the fiend's host was unfit to carry it. The Moarte Verde was slowly tearing the man apart just by being in him, and it couldn't even come close to unleashing its true strength until it had a more suitable body to inhabit. All Coribeth had to do was let it in, and the nightmares would end. Or she could wait until the host died or she managed to drive it out, and the nightmares would end. She might have simply left at any time, but she refused to intentionally kill the host, and she couldn't be sure the thing would remain bound if she left it alone. It was a race to make the other break first, and both runners did everything they could to win.

And thus it was that after six months in the woods, Coribeth Breckenridge rode into Boston. Her hands shook, she would wake up screaming from time to time, and it was several years before she was able to do field work again, but she was still herself.

Case 31: Entry 2

Today I started my work in the archives. It took a few minutes to suit up properly with all the little charms and the amulets that work like a faraday cage for magical energy. Once those were taken care of I put on the gloves that prevented me from damaging the books with my oils or however hands are supposed to damage old books--coincidentally, they also prevented the books from damaging me--and grabbed a sort of club for beating off imps and the like, plus a vial of something to take in case anything in there decided to play games with my sanity. The place spent about an hour pushing back at my intrusion, but once I'd used the club a bit and found my way out of a few spatial distortions it seemed to ease up a bit. At that point, it took me a couple more hours before I found something worthwhile in the last journal of Markus Dufresne.

Back when the current incarnation of the Agency (or at least that division of it in the good old US of A) was founded, there was a heated debate on the subject of slavery. Since slaves were easy meals for many of the creatures that prey upon humanity, many felt that the institution was an excellent way of keeping the things that go bump in the night relatively sated and easier to keep track of. For obvious reasons, the other faction held that this tactic was repulsive, horrifying, and downright evil. Thus, one experienced agent in favor of abolition came to buy Markus and his family. His grandfather had come from a long tradition of monster hunters back in Africa, and the skills of the trade had been passed down even in slavery. The Agency became aware of these skills after an encounter with some kind of therianthrope (there are hints that it was a bear while in its animal form) and made the decision to make him a deal. After buying him and his family, they promised him that for every fiend he slew they would give one of his loved ones their freedom and the financial means by which to start a new life. The pro-slavery faction didn't like it, but he was clearly a skilled huntsman and there was no rational argument against the deal. By the time he died, Markus Dufresne had accumulated enough respect and influence within the Agency to bring it and its policies firmly under the control of the abolitionist faction. What follows is all that I can gather from the final written accounts of his exploits.

The hunt began in Ohio in 1849. There had been a string of violent deaths in a small town called Martins Ferry. Most of the murders were committed by townspeople, except for three particularly nasty affairs which seemed to have been committed by a stranger. In several cases, the murders had reported seeing a letter written in green ink or some object which had been painted green before they made the decision to kill. In each instance, the letter or item was never found and was presumed to be either a lie or a hallucination. There was also a flu that passed through the town at about the same time, and one witness claimed that she saw the eyes of a murder--who had at the time been sick--turn bright green as he went about his bloody work. Markus Dufresne and his assistant (he found that his investigations were easier when he had a white compatriot to make arrangements and ask questions) didn't arrive until about a month after the murders ended, but it was still clear how completely shaken the entire community was. A few weeks after they arrived, they received word that a similar pattern had begun in another town seventy miles or so away.

Markus visited four different towns, sometimes getting there just in time to cut the pattern short but never in time to get the jump on the culprit, before the trail went cold. He spent the next several years doing hunts in the general region and chasing down any leads he got about the possible resurfacing of his prey. There were several times when the pattern would seem to start again, but the fiend always slipped through his grasp. Until, that is, the year of 1856 when Markus Dufresne went to the aid of his friend and ally, John Brown. The violence of Bleeding Kansas had become particularly fierce at the time, and Brown claimed he had seen a pro-slavery fighter's eyes turn a bright green and he came him.

This is the end of Dufresne's own account, however, who put the book down here added in those of others who had known him or had witnessed him. They said he rode like a devil as he pursued the unknown fiend once more. He barely stopped to rest, except when the trail grew faint. One asset spoke of how Dufresne had visited him for supplies. He said that the huntsman was sure he was closing in on the prey, and that night the asset heard mad shouting and even laughter as Markus Dufresne rode through the night. The huntsman returned four nights later, his body scarred with deep cuts and a grim satisfaction gleaming from his face. He never wrote nor spoke of what had transpired when he had finally caught up with his prey, except to say that it had been bested. I think he knew better than to say that it was dead.

There are notes in this journal leading to other documents. I will seek them out tomorrow.

Case 31: Entry 1

Well, it's been about a month and a half since my last case--seeing as I purposefully antagonized a demon of Hell, I figured it might be best to lie low for a while--but I had to get out of the heavily fortified house at some point. Granted, I'm heading to the Agency for this one, so the only time I'll actually be out in the open is while I'm on the road. I got a call from Shauna Freeman and Gilbert Flamel a few nights ago requesting my help with a freak they've been tracking. Mind you, tracking down hostiles isn't part of either of their jobs. Shauna is a cryptobiologist who is mostly responsible for analyzing the biological strengths and weaknesses of different supernatural species, and Gilbert is an alchemist whose main job is to develop and upgrade the equipment agents use out in the field. They're both absolute geniuses, but neither one is usually involved in an active hunt. But they both stumbled on something. Something that makes their sleep uneasy.

They didn't give me much information over the phone. All I was told was that they believed the creature was something like a homunculus or a chimera, that is to say a creature created with alchemy. Or perhaps something bound up with the principles of the craft. Well, I was told that and precisely how serious they were about getting my help. It was a little embarrassing to have Shauna pleading with me, which is probably why she did it. She made me promise I would take the case, and she made me promise not to tell anyone else what I was really investigating. As far as anyone at the Agency knows, I just volunteered to spend a bit of this sabbatical I'm taking to go in to their Lower Archives and do some cataloguing. I doubt the director buys that, but he's mentioned before that he feels what I do on my own tends to make his job just a little easier. Besides, hardly anyone else is qualified to go into the Lower Vault for an extended period of time. There are certain pests that only really thrive in basements and similar rooms crammed full of magical texts and artifacts. One or two of those pests are almost as dangerous as the books themselves.

Anyway, I finally left today because the letter finally arrived. It was sealed against any kind of supernatural means of spying, and the fact that it was a letter made it a bit harder for someone else to read it by more mundane means. It included a list of names which they believe their enemy has been known by. Right at the top was a Romanian name that read "Moarte Verde."

Case 30: Entry 6

I decided to take the day off from working on Los Susurros. After all, if I win the bet tonight then I'll have done far more for the good of the collection than was ever expected of me, and if I lose then Gil-Martin will have me (probably in ghost form) and all my knowledge to help him get rid of the books. Of course, I've already given the relevant agent a heads up in case I lose, but the point still stands. However this turns out, taking the day off isn't really a big deal. On the other hand, I'm starting to think there might be something to the whole stay-busy-to-escape-the-weight-of-existential-dread thing. Or at least, there is when the existential dread is the fact that you're waiting for a match with centuries-old Aztec abomination.

It's not like I can really walk away from this, but I still kind of wanted to today. I mean, it's not like I could stand any chance in a straight fight. There's several stories about the Quoalkuns (should I put that "s" there? it feels wrong) in Los Susurros, and not all of them have happy endings. As I did research looking for weaknesses to exploit I caught myself trying to think of ways to weasel out of the deal. And then there were times when I was fantasizing about having never made the deal and having some other way of beating this or of just never having gotten around, which is a really stupid thing to do. Eventually, I had to sit down and deal with my own fear. I to stop pandering to it, and get pissed. Despite what Gil-Martin and the Agency both think, this isn't just about preserving some profiles on some nasties. There's people whose culture has been completely eradicated except for these stories, people who deserve to some part in the continuing story of humanity. But even that isn't all there is. There's also the time, energy, and passion that went into this collection both from the people who made the stories and the people who collected them. This tree has been cared for and tended for hundreds of years, and it is not okay for it to be torn down right before it can bear fruit.

When I was in early elementary, I had a book of Aesop's fables that I read every night. By the time I was in the fifth grade I had moved on to fables, fairy tales, and myths from all over the world. At the same time everyone wanted to be Batman or a Power Ranger or something, I was walking around with a Coyote lunchbox. Seriously, I thought Coyote was the coolest character ever, and an aunt of mine wound up painting a lunchbox and even making some clothes featuring him just for me. So when I say that I take this personally, understand that I really do mean it.

So yeah, I'm still up against something that I could never beat in a fair fight. Yeah, I'll probably only have one chance to sucker punch him. But someone really needs to throw that sucker punch at that asshat, and it might as well be me. Now it's time to get back to work.

* * * * *

I went out tonight with pretty decked out with much ever protective charm I own or can make on short notice. Almost as soon as I left the hotel I felt the altered reality of the duel settle in. There was only the predator and the prey, with everything else reduced to a simple background. The adrenaline surged, my focus intensified, the power in which I had draped myself flared up. In about ten minutes or so, I could already feel the fiend's eyes on me. A little later I heard cars honking and the skidding of tires just behind me, and I smirked. I've always felt that the best defense is not to be noticed in the first place, and most of my amulets focused on screwing with my enemies' ability to perceive me. I kept on walking.

Then I started hearing him prowling. There were noises like a jaguar might make coming from behind me, from the the buildings above me, from across the street. I started to pick up the pace. Then I heard him closing in, and I ran and jumped the fence into a nearby alley. I think the last sound was a little bit like a laugh before I dropped a canister. A spray containing pretty much everything I thought might hurt the bastard shot out and filled the alley as I covered my eyes and put a rag over my nose and mouth. Then I heard a thump and some coughing behind me as the spray settled down, and I wheeled around with my knife. I only had a few seconds to make use of my advantage, but a few seconds was all I needed.

I may not have grown up learning these streets the way the trickster who fought the three Aztec fiends grew up learning the jungle, but Google Street View is a beautiful thing.