“Shit, Anya. We’re never doing that again.” Jonathan raised his finger to Anya’s wound, who flinched a little too violently away from him.

“My necklace is still inside.” Anya slapped his hand away. “Why’d you push me out? How am I going to use magic now?”

“What, so it’s my fault now?” It was Jonathan’s turn to get mad. “Hey, I saved you. Shouldn’t I at least get a thanks for that?”

“Yeah, thanks for nothing. I should’ve just continued the investigation on my own. Why do I keep letting you rope me into your business?”

Jonathan growled in annoyance, chasing after the woman stomping towards the lift.

“Hey-” He pulled her arm roughly but only received a slap in return. Jonathan gave her a few moments to massage the pain away from her palm.

“What’s with that attitude?” Jonathan snarled. “At least I’ve been busy. What have you been doing all this while?”

“It’s none of your business-”

“Like hell, it isn’t!” Jonathan’s voice echoed down the empty hallway. “We’re partners. Stop keeping things from me. Why are you always like this-”

“Because you’re a terrible partner!” the woman yelled back at him.

Jonathan’s mouth hung open.

“Keeping things? Who was the one who refused to tell me about his immortality until I had to find out the hard way? How about the time you hid the fact that you were involved with murderous vampires?”

“Hey, I did all that to protect you-” the man protested, but Anya wasn’t finished.

“You want the truth? Fine. You’re not good at investigation; you never were. Did you really think being an informant meant that you’d be the next Sherlock Holmes?” she snarled. “The only reason you’re my partner is because I loved you. I wanted nothing more than to be by your side.”

Jonathan clenched his jaw, enduring Anya’s painful glare.

“But that was clearly a mistake, and you clearly don’t appreciate what I have done for you. Even if I did tell you what I was doing, you’d find a way to mess it up somehow,” Anya continued without hesitation. “Everything you have was given to you. You couldn’t even hold down a decent job on your own. You know why? It’s because you can’t commit to anything! You’re a damn coward who keeps running away from everything.”

Jonathan’s chest hurt. Somehow, he didn’t think it was so impossible for him to feel pain now.

“Is… Is that really how you see me?” he asked quietly.

“I-” Anya raised her voice again, but chose to look away for a brief moment. “I can’t do this anymore. I need a break.”

“A break?” Jonathan’s eyes widened just as the lift opened its doors. He scurried in after Anya before she could leave him outside. “You’re dropping the case? How about the murderer?”

“No, a break from you,” Anya said. “When the doors open again, I’m no longer your partner. We’re breaking up.”

The man took a step back, knocking into Lucy in the process. The dull shock barely registered in the swarm of emotions swirling within him. Anya had to be joking, right? There’s no way she meant that. No way she was throwing away almost twenty years of their relationship just like that, right?

“Anya…” Jonathan looked up, his hands trembling by his side. “We- We can’t just…”

His voice trailed away as he stared at the black ink tracing itself on her neck. He looked at her in shock and rapidly growing terror. Anya had not noticed it yet, and was still facing away from him.

“Anya-”

“Save it, Jonathan. Don’t bother worming your way out of this one.”

“No, wait. Anya, listen to me. Your-”

“Leave me be, Warner. You’re disturbing my train of thought.”

“Anya, you’ve been marked!” Jonathan blurted out, pointing at the now fully formed symbol on her neck.

“What?” the woman gasped, taking out her phone camera to look at the side of her neck. “When did this happen?”

“Just then! I saw it forming by itself on your skin!”

“I sense a presence…” Lucy cowered without warning, crouching and pressing herself up against the lift wall. Jonathan looked around frantically, only then realising that the lift had been descending for an unusually long time. He glanced at the floor display.

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Basement 30.

Or at least, that’s what it showed right before the display glitched out. The lights flickered as well, and Jonathan charged his hands with electricity in response. He didn’t know if his powers would be able to deal with whatever supernatural phenomenon was messing with them, but he was almost certain that something paranormal was attempting to pull them down to God knows where.

Whatever the case was, he did not want to find out.

The man blasted electricity at the floor display panel in an attempt to overload the lift’s circuitry. It miraculously worked. The three of them panted heavily, looking at each other for answers. None of them had any.

Jonathan mashed the lift buttons anyway. Unfortunately, they didn’t deign to respond to that mindless gesture. The lights went out and came back on a full second later, almost as if it was just an afterthought.

And then a metallic ring shook him back to his senses.

“Oh thank god,” Jonathan heaved a sigh of relief as the lift doors opened to the familiar sight of the ground floor again. “Hey Anya, we’ve reached-”

He stifled a gasp and reached for Anya’s motionless body. Her icy cold skin greeted her fingertips as he recoiled violently, falling over his feet. It couldn’t be…

“She’s gone… she’s gone…” Lucy whimpered in fear and evaporated into a cloud of black dust, leaving Jonathan alone to feel Anya’s neck for a pulse.

The man fell to his knees in despair, holding his dead partner in his arms.

~ ~ ~

They say one never truly understands death until it takes away someone close to him. Even so, Jonathan didn’t think he understood it now. It felt numb. Foreign, even. It did not belong to his immortal body, and it sure as hell should never belong in this mortal world.

He continued staring at Anya’s lifeless body from behind the glass barrier.

It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be happening now. It was all just a sloppily constructed nightmare, and when he got out of it, she’d be there again. When he opened his eyes, she’d be right there at his bedside, gently chiding him for sleeping in. When he woke up, she’d be right there by his bed.

But he didn’t. And neither did she.

“Aren’t we going to cremate her?” Jonathan turned to the presence standing silently behind him.

“Do you want to?” Angus said, his face betraying not even a hint of emotion. Jonathan generally did not like emotional displays, but the neutrality of the fae’s expression felt colder than ever now.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yes, although I’d advise you not to.”

Jonathan tilted his head slightly. “What do you mean?”

“Lady Sechina is dead in almost every sense of the word, yes.” Angus nodded. “But that’s only because her soul is missing. It’s obvious that someone, or something, has ripped it out of her body.”

“I have two souls, right?” Jonathan’s heart leapt with joy. “Help me extract one so I can give it to her!”

“Don’t be so hasty, boy. Firstly, doing that would render you mortal again-”

“I don’t care. I just want to see her alive again-”

Angus cut him off with a raised hand. “-And secondly, giving your soul would only bring her body back to life. She’d be like a newborn, with no memory of anything else. It’s a better option to simply return her soul to her body.”

“We can do that?” Jonathan blinked a few times, taking the time to process what he had just said.

“As long as she didn’t die of natural causes, yes. But more importantly, we need to locate her soul first. It has not left for the afterworld yet, this much I am certain. And you can trust a Changeling on this. The question is, who took it?”

“It’s gotta be with that Ghost Of Glasgow,” Jonathan muttered, slamming a fist into the wall. “I don’t know how, but she keeps getting ahead of us.”

“You keep saying that. What makes you so sure that this ‘Ghost’ is behind everything?”

“Well…” the inspector sputtered. “The brandings, of course!”

Angus furrowed his eyebrows. “That’s precisely the part that doesn’t make sense. I don’t recall Lucy being branded.”

That was enough to make Jonathan falter. His eyes glazed over as he sank into his thoughts again. Angus had a point. If the common thread between the murders was the brandings, why were both Lucy and Baba Yaga not branded?

His mind swirled, throwing out line after line to reel in a conclusion of sorts, but nothing connected. Could it be that only supernatural creatures were exempt from the branding for some reason?

No, it didn’t make sense. Cornelia was branded right before she was killed as well. Could Lucy’s branding have been on a different part of her body?

No, it didn’t add up either. Firstly, the doctors would have noticed if she had been branded. And secondly, the victims were usually marked at an obvious part of their body, as if the murderer wanted them to be aware of their impending demise. It simply didn’t make sense that the killer would suddenly choose to hide it.

“This is the second time someone has died around you,” Angus warned. “It’s a good thing I trust you, or we’d be having this conversation on the opposite ends of a detention cell.”

“How much do you know about this Baba Yaga?” Jonathan changed the topic. “She got rather violent, by the way.”

“You mentioned that her location was in the asylum? And she had been locked up there for more than thirty years?”

He nodded.

“That’s… impossible.” Angus mused. “I only saw her five years ago. And in her house, too. Baba Yaga rarely leaves her house. Are you sure you got the right person?”

“Beats me. I just went to the location on your card.”

“I haven’t used this card in a long time; I’ve already memorised the spells to summon Baba Yaga anyway.” The fae stared at the card intently. “But this… this doesn’t look right.”

Angus snapped his fingers, conjuring a spellbook out of the air.

“This is as much as I can help you, Jonathan. Carry out the ritual in this book, and you will summon Baba Yaga.” He passed the book to the confused man. “Whether or not you will see the same woman in the asylum, I do not know. But not to worry, a charm can be altered, but a proper ritual like this cannot be tampered with. Tread carefully, I have a suspicion that something very sinister is at play here.”

Jonathan nodded grimly.