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CHAPTER XXX—A THREAT

“Who did it?”

“…”

“Well?”

“Hard to say. Certainly very aggressive. Like he has a vendetta.”

“What of his pages?”

“Hmm, so far, none of them have turned up. I would surmise they’re either dead or on the run.”

“What’s this?”

“Ah! A clue!”

“For the brains around here, you sure are dumb sometimes.”

“I don’t like blood.”

“The blood is over there.”

“The blood is everywhere. Whoever killed him cut his head off—have you noticed?”

“Enough, both of you. What have you found?

“Looks like… some script drawn in blood.”

“What does it say?”

“It says…” Severin turned his head as he tried to read the words. They were scrawled messily, but they were still readable.

“What?”

He hated it when she loomed over him like this. “It says ‘I’m coming.’”

“Short,” said Kezia. She stood watching, doing very little work as she leaned on her hip. Her short breaches cut off at the thigh presented an odd look since her jacket with coattails flared out behind her in red silk that shimmered with the sunset. “You sure there isn’t more?”

Severin glanced up at her, annoyed. “I am quite certain.”

“I want to know who did this,” said Kazuno pointedly.

It wasn’t that she cared about Sir Alaric—quite the opposite, but a threat to him was a threat to any of them, or all of them. And with the scrawled letters, that threat was even more pronounced.

This was no mugging or one-on-one vendetta. This person had a grudge against them all—but that wasn’t something to worry about. They made up a pretty strong group, and Alaric was the weak link.

With enough brains to match them all put together, well, maybe not Kazuno, Severin would be protected. But I also have a few of my own tricks.

“We should leave.”

“Why?” asked Kazuno.

Severin glanced back at his boss. The yellow-skinned oni had bright amber eyes and black lips and claws. Her horns were short and curved very little. Truly a horror to behold upon first seeing her.

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“I may have a lot of pull with the City Watch in this area, but that doesn’t mean we can stand around a beheaded body with half the neighborhood watching all night.”

Kazuno glanced up. In the distance a dog barked and crickets were beginning to chirp. She glanced back down at the beheaded body. She wasn’t ready to leave. “The weapons are gone.”

Severin sighed. He was ready to leave. He glanced about, hating this place all the more now that he had been here for a while.

“Probably stolen,” said Kezia. “What I would do.” The cat girl’s ears flicked and her tail jerked. She put one of her white-gloved hands on the pommel of her rapier.

She might have acted like this was no big deal, but Kazuno knew far better. She was upset. Kezia liked Sir Alaric, didn’t she? Or was she afraid?

It didn’t matter.

“We have plenty of enemies,” Kazuno finally said. “There’s a lot of people out there that might want to knock us off when we’re alone. We stay together in groups of twos from now one.”

“That sounds fine to me. Oh look…” Severin said excitedly, and started muttering to himself.

Kazuno knew him well enough to ignore him when he got that way, obsessive, compulsive and lost in his own head over some useless minutiae. If he found something she needed to know about, he would tell her.

He whispered to himself rapid utterances. Severin’s voice was barely male and he spoke quickly. Often Kazuno made him repeat himself because she couldn’t understand what he said.

It always annoyed him—the arrogant little shit.

Until she smacked him around a little. Now he flinched like a stupid dog half the time whenever she looked at him. Especially when they were alone.

“Is that all?” asked Kezia. “I’d like to go to the casino tonight. I have a card game to go to.”

“Going to cheat your way into some coin?” asked Kazuno.

Kezia’s face lit up in barely-controlled excitement.

“Forget it, Kazuno said, “I want you back at the mansion. Esmeralda is alone right now and I don’t like that.”

“Really think she’s in danger, m-yeah?”

“Sir Alaric was no easily kill. Certainly one of the weaker among us, but whoever did this, came at him with terrifying precision.”

“­Mmm-what about Lucian and Chinatsu?”

“Inform them what’s going on when you see them.” Kazuno narrowed her eyes, annoyed that those two were always hard to find. Lucian because he was always involved in some dark machination in some dungeon, and Chinatsu… well, she had no idea what the hells that little girl was up to half the time when she wasn’t hanging around the city morgues—the disgusting little freak.

She was a good assassin, but more than once Kazuno could smell the stench of death on her and she had forced the little wench to bathe.

Sickening.

“We need to all come together. I want to have a meeting,” she finally said.

Severin stood up. “Nothing left to find here, boss. If there was—I would have found it.”

“Like you found those words scrawled in—“

He narrowed his eyes at her with barely contained annoyance. “I would have fond that eventually. I was busy examining the trajectory of blood splatter as well as scanning the surrounding area for anything behind. When you find a body, to have any chance at discovering the culprit, you must do a thorough and methodically search before the corpse is disturbed—no thanks to you, Kezia. Go back to your cards.”

She hissed at him.

“Enough,” Kazuno said quietly. She didn’t need to yell at them. They obeyed her when she spoke. Always. Or they suffered her wrath, a thing they rarely endured because of their fear of her.

“We’re going to the mansion,” she added. “Let’s go.”

Severin didn’t even bother reporting the body. The City Watch inspectors were waiting half a block away, watching them from a distance, their curiosity and fear palpable to him.

They would come to the corpse and find nothing.

He sighed.

Skipping about and laughing, Kezia followed at a slight distance. She felt down because she couldn’t go play cards later, per the boss’ orders, but that was okay. She would order up some entertainment for the night.

Maybe one of the girls from Sir Alaric’s establishment. One of the used up girls they wouldn’t mind missing, or if they did, would only charge her a small fee. If Kezia couldn’t play cards, then she was going to play other games tonight.

She liked her bait living.

And screaming.

Unlike Chinatsu.

Kezia giggled.

It was impossible to say who might have killed Sir Alaric from the clues left behind. Kazuno still wondered about it.

But it was no use.

In the meantime, they needed to regroup, come up with a plan. Kazuno cascaded her metal claw-tipped fingers across her thumbs. It was a habit of hers when she was thinking. Perhaps they could put out some bait for Sir Alaric’s killer, draw him in.

Then strike.