Take Me Down

Poison

"Woah, uh Ariana? Are you opening up a florist?" Garrett stepped into the orphans' apartment with wide eyes as he took in the flowers strewn across the living room. There were so many bunches of bright purple flowers that it was almost hard to spot the tiny brunette bent over a big heavy book on the floor, her black leggings covered in petals and leaves. "Look, school has only been back three days and I know it's hard but that is no reason to throw away your future and resort to selling plants. You can do better, Ari."

"Shut up, Garrett. You told me to figure out how to slow down the werewolves and you are looking at my answer!" Ariana replied, her eyes too focused on the page she was reading to look up at Garrett. She knew he was probably in a state of confusion now but she was too deep into her research to focus on him properly right now. She'd been scouring through several gigantic books from the school library in an attempt to confirm her suspicions about the flowers surrounding her.

Violet had tried to get an answer out of her when she had arrived home from shopping earlier, but Ariana had barely noticed the extra voice in the room. In the end Violet had given up and made herself a bit of space at the kitchen table to do some of her reading for English. She glanced up at Garrett as he arrived, shrugging her shoulders as he turned to her with a questioning look.

"So...We're going to distract them with a bouquet of flowers?" Garrett raised an eyebrow as he closed the front door, locking it carefully behind him.

Ariana let out a huff, pushing the book away from her body as she looked up at him. Reaching across the floor, she grabbed a bunch of flowers and held them up to Garrett with a flourish.

"No, I'm going to crush these flowers into a powder and combine them with a few other ingredients and then we're going to poison the wolves. This is Nordic Blue Monkshood. Better known as Wolfsbane. It's like werewolf kryptonite."

"Only prettier!" Violet chipped in from the table, a smirk on her lips.

"That too. But mostly it's super deadly to werewolves. Or at least according to everything I've read so far. Which is a lot." Ariana folded her hands together and looked up at Garrett with a wide smile.

"Okay. So how exactly does it work though? Also, how did you get all of these? I'm guessing it wasn't from Crazy Daisy's Flowers down the street." Garrett folded his arms as he warily lowered himself onto the couch, careful not to sit on the flowers thrown across it.

"Well, apparently it can do a variety of things to wolves depending on how its used. According to this book-" Ariana lunged across the floor and grabbed another thick book layered in dust, and pulled it towards herself. "-If a wolf ingests it, it can potentially force them to shift into their wolf form. So if we need confirmation that we're dealing with a wolf, that's one way to do it. But if they are say...stabbed with something laced in wolfsbane," Ariana raised a suggestive eyebrow at Garrett, "it acts like your basic neurotoxin. I crush them, you stab them. Teamwork!"

"Hang on, neuro-what?" Chemistry really wasn't Garrett's strong suit but Ariana had kind of hoped that after watching his fellow assassin concoct her poisons over the last year that he might have learned something.

"Neurotoxin. It's like my favourite kind of poison! Come on, you should know that by now. That's the one that basically messes with the brain's communication to your muscles. One dose of a neurotoxin and your lungs can forget how to take in oxygen. I mean, not actually. It's more complex than that obviously. It's actually more about the way they take control of the ion concentrations in the cell membrane..."

Garrett's eyes were already beginning to glaze over as they did whenever Ariana started explaining the toxins she used on their mercenary jobs. "Uh-huh." He nodded, so at least he was pretending to follow her. "So this wolfsbane is going to suffocate the werewolves?