Nine Swords

Jenn came out of the building looking a bit worse for wear than she'd gone into the building. She made her way over to Tom and Thanasi. She was fairly sure that her intention when she left the building was to ask Tom if he could take her home. By the time she got to them, she mostly just stood there, staring at him.

As soon as Katja has made sure that Pat is okay she went out of the building. She frown when she saw the expression in Jens face. She turned to Tom.

"I think Jen need to get home, get some warm food and some cuddling with her cats. Can you take her? I want to talk some with Thanasi." She look at Tom, glances Jen and back to him, in a way she hope will give him the hint.

He looked from Tom to Jenn and then pointed a thumb over his shoulder. "Get lost, you two. You will serve us better in the morning, I am sure." He looked at Katja briefly then stepped closer to Tom, pitching voice to a barely audible whisper. "Tom...set up some way to wake up if this--" He paused for a moment as though to encapsulate everything that's been going on lately. "Whatever it is has not worn off. Even if it means beer bottles on the door and water bucket booby traps. We were lucky this time: they could have kept her."

Tom nodded. He wrapped an arm around Jenn's shoulders and pulled her towards the battered car. It took him a minute to sweep all the broken glass off of the seats, so he leaned her against the hood while he did that. Once he was finished, he set her in the passenger seat and climbed in himself. "Let's go," he said, quietly enough that it was mostly for his own benefit.

He climbed into the drivers seat and pulled away from the building. Time to go home and booby trap an apartment.

Katja went up to Thanasi and gave him a hug.

"I hope I did right and did not interrupt you and Tom in any way? She really needed him... "

She give him a kiss on the cheek and took his hand while they started to go. "Can I sleep at you place?"

Thanasi held Katja silently with one arm for a few moments, watching as Tom and Jenn departed. Once they were sufficiently out of sight, he sighed and responded to Katja. "No, you did right. It seems there's nothing left to do here. Once again I'm late to the party." He took one more look at the front of the building and all the activity, shaking his head before he gave her a gentle tug toward the other crime scene. "Come, I need to see where these other bodies were for my report."

After taking a few pictures of the scene for himself and walking around the extended area, he pocketed his mobile and extended his hand to Katja once again. "My place works."

Wes stared at the reports as if willing them to provide more information but they remained frustratingly uncooperative. The basic details were not very surprising. The two corpses were formally well known Illuminati goons. Both had been shot at point blank range and both still had the terminal round still floating in the goo that once served as their brains. Preliminary ballistics reports suggested it was the same or similar weapon used in the break-in. Both were fairly well connected and had been implicated in more than a few high profile Illuminati operations.

The first body was previously known as Georg Zoeller an Austrian national with a history of association with several hard corps mercenary and private security companies. He apparently had been known for being reliable and able to keep his mouth shut. Qualities that were rarer than one would think in the business of shooting people for money.

The second body had formerly belonged to Hans Johanssen a South African paramilitary type. His specialty had been CQB so it was clear why he had been chosen for an operation of this type. Other than some familiarity with anima weapons per the file, neither seemed to have any exceptional skills.

Wes considered this for a moment. It occurred to him that perhaps that is precisely why they were chosen. Some of the best of the best, but they could be discarded without worry of returning to tell stories out of school. Still, these had been fairly competent and high quality hired guns. Whomever decided to dispose of them with such seeming causal disdain, would have to be pretty high up the food chain...or willing to go off reservation. So either this was planned and executed from the top or someone was using the boss' toys without permission.

After finishing the necessary paperwork and uploading the information to the main database, he took a bit of relish in checking the box marked 'terminated' for both men. The large red X's that drew themselves over their portraits gave him a sense of playing a video game on a large screen TV. However, the realization that this was certainly not a game and was all too real quickly quelled any momentary satisfaction he might have felt. The artifact was loose and that couldn't be good for anyone.

Jenn came trailing out of the bedroom in Tom's apartment, shoving a shock of soft black hair out of her eyes with one hand and snapping her fingers with the other. “I'm forgetting something.” She was wearing a pair of cut-off shorts that had, before their run-in with a haphazardly wielded scissors ten minutes earlier, been an unreasonably expensive pair of designer jeans, and a Jenn-hugging charcoal-gray half shirt.

Catching sight of the half-Tom/half-couch-beast that was occupying one side of the living room, she snapped once more and declared with triumph. “Dew! That was it. Is there Dew cold?”

She had already spread out the large world map Wes had 'checked out' for her from the library at Oxford. She hoped they weren't expecting to have it checked back in. The coffee table had been shoved to one side of the room to make space for the map on the floor in front of the couch. In addition, the coffee table was doing double-duty as a staging area. It held candles, a small bowl made from a highly polished, deep gray stone with a metallic sheen, a couple of old leather-bound books, and a small silver knife that had somehow been persuaded to hold an almost surgically sharp edge. There was also a small pile of soft gray feathers in one corner of the table. It looked as if someone had spontaneously and over-enthusiastically hugged an owl.

Jenn leaned over the back of the couch, gave Tom a quick hug, and started toward the kitchen to check on the Dew levels in the fridge. “Wes should be here soon. Then we can do the locator spell and send someone after the fecking thing.”

Tom looked up from his Kindle. He had been reading. Not about crazy blood magic tracking spells or anything, he was reading Xenocide. His own dew was sitting on the floor in front of him. He hadn't wanted to put it on the table and risk contaminating any of Jenn's fancy tools. Magic was fickle like that, and it would kind of suck if Jenn went through all this only to discover that she now had an internal Mountain Dew Locator. Well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad.

Tom stood up after the hug, walking towards the window that overlooked the London streets. "Of course there's dew in the fridge. That's the only thing ever in the fridge, besides maybe left over pizza or Chinese." He smiled down into the street. For some reason he just liked looking out of windows sometimes. It reminded him that there was something out there.

"I'll let the doorman know to be expecting him," he commented. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and called the doorman, "Yeah, this is Tom up on floor three. I've got someone coming for a visit, Wes, just send him up when he gets here." That way Tom wouldn't have to bother with security or going down to get Wes.

Wes plodded up the stairs to Tom's apartment with a duffel bag over his shoulder. He knocked once and then entered the apartment when Jenn answered the door.

"Heya folks, I have a couple items to ensure our success..." with that he pulled out a boxed DVD collection of charmed and nodded to Tom, "Yes. These have Alyssa Milano in the trampy outfits..."

He further produced Cheese Puffs, which as was well known are essential to all things supernatural, and then produced the complete Resident Evil collection for Tom's console. "Might as well set the mood, right? Evil corporation? Zombies? Chicks with guns?"

"And the ultimate..." he produced three dark robes. "Might as well -look- the part right?" he said with a grin.