Death Rites

1 - The part with the monster

The thing about Prince and Lexa was their bad timing. Teague was balancing on a laundry wire connecting two houses, in between some underpants and a nightgown, maybe thirty feet above ground level in pitch blackness when she got their summons. Prince's summons was always the most obvious - a feeling like velvet, the impression of a bright light. Nice and distracting for when you really don' t want to be disoriented. Lexa was more subtle, like a breeze through her brain and the faint scent of honey.  Usually it was Lexa that contacted her, but definitely not both of them at once.

Perched on a cable high above Scurry Lane, Teague weighed her options.
It was urgent, probably. The two fences wouldn't both bother her at the same time. Perhaps they got separated somehow.  
Still, the window on this job was closing. There were other people they could contact. She chose not to send her signature back, and continued across the cable to the roof opposite. 

She could see the city's rooftops in silhouette, but only faintly. It was a cloudy night, with a lot of wind. It was getting colder. Due to the curfew, every house that she could see had their lights off, or had them carefully concealed behind thick curtains to fool the watch. The lights from the streetlamps barely reached up here. She quickly moved across the gables and chimneys two streets further south, Gold Street - the only reputable area in an otherwise shitty part of town. This was where the Lady Marrowgrove lived, and tonight she was allegedly spending the night with her lover while her husband was out of town. She also left her bedroom window unlocked as she believed the ocean air would help her constitution. Usually the place was too heavily guarded to warrant a serious look, but because the mistress and master of the house were both away the guards would not be paying much attention to anything other than the front doors. She hoped so, anyway.
These kinds of targets were usually way out of her league, but this opportunity was just too good to pass up. And everyone knew the Marrowgroves were shitty people anyway and wealthy beyond knowing how to spend all of their money. Nobody would care. 

It was easy to spot the Marrowgrove estate. It was the only place with lights on; people with enough money didn't need to pay attention to the curfew. They could get a special exemption, which required a great deal of money and background checks. The lord and lady Marrowgrove were the only ones in this neighbourhood able to afford the privilege of having their lights on in the night-time.
There was a high wall around the property, but from her spot on the adjoining roofs Teague could see a tree growing close to it on the inside of the perimeter, fairly close to a decrepit spire that once belonged to another mansion but now stood alone, the mansion itself having been stripped after burning down years ago. There was probably a permit of some kind on the bottom of a pile in a government office, requesting permission to tear down the remaining tower. Certainly the lord and lady Marrowgrove would not tolerate such an eyesore. 

Scaling the spire was easy, even in the pitch blackness. From the overhanging crooked beams it was an easy jump to the big tree in the Marrowgroves' garden.  Teague took a minute to stay in the tree and observe the movements of any guards on the estate. She could see two at the front gate, one possibly asleep and one definitely asleep. There were lights on in several parts of the house even though nobody was supposed to be home, so probably more guards inside. She didn't see any other guards on the estate, but a large part of it was blocked from her view. 

It didn't take long for the bugs and various other tree dwelling creatures to start to irritate her and she was just preparing to jump down from the tree when she felt Prince's summons again - brush of velvet, fireworks flash - and a few seconds later Lexa's - summer day, honey on toast.
Teague shook her head to clear it of the magical impressions and thought of what to do next. She was so close, she could basically see the lady Marrowgrove's jewellery through the open attic window. This could be her big break. There was another flash of fireworks, and another directly after it. Prince had always been strong in the mental area of magic. She grabbed onto a branch and prayed not to fall. Lexa's summons didn't come this time.
        "Fine, enough already... I swear, if this is just another false alarm I'm going to kill him."
She leaned against the trunk of the tree and found Prince's presence in her mind. Stuffed away way at the back, somewhere between her childhood memories and what she had for breakfast last week. She focused - difficult to do while balancing in a tree and getting eaten by insects - and sent her summons back.
She took a last look at the Marrowgrove estate and started making her way towards the branch closest to the wall. She dropped down onto the eight foot marble construction and heard something off to her left. One of the guards, mister Possibly Asleep, was now definitely asleep like his colleague. In fact, he was sprawled on the ground, his lightning tipped spear still rolling off into the bushes, crackling and arcing tiny bolts onto the cobblestones as it went. The guard himself was moving towards the bushes in jolts, as though being dragged by the back of the neck. His boots scraped the stones with every slide. She couldn't see who was dragging him - there was nothing there as far as she could tell. He seemed to be moving on his own. Mister Possibly Asleep (Actually Probably Dead) disappeared into the bushes. The remaining guard was nowhere to be seen. The door to the Marrowgrove estate opened and a stream of blueish electrical light flooded into the courtyard. There didn't seem to be someone anywhere near the door.
There was no way she was getting involved in this.
This was probably what Prince and Lexa had been trying to warn her about and she was lucky to not be stuck in the house with whatever was going on. She dropped down the wall on the side of the street and landed unevenly, her left foot coming down crooked on a loose rock. She tried to stifle a curse, but couldn't. 

From the housee, something big, something with many pointy bits fixed its attention on her. She couldn't see it, but she knew. It felt like a summons - the taste of blood and the thrill of the hunt. Summons were always on purpose. Whatever was there chose to have her know that it was there. It was saying hello. 

She didn't send anything back, she just ran.  
Into the nearest alley, up a smokestack and onto a roof, around a corner and down into the streets, a hard left, a bend right, down into an underpass and up into Market Road. Past a patrol of guards ("Hey! Hold!") and back into the alleyways, a right, a left, a dead end and a climb up a drainpipe and still the taste of blood and the knowledge of being hunted. Clicking claws on the pavement behind her. She went up into the rooftops and gables of the oldest part of the city, onto a gangway, around the clock tower and over the roof of the inn to the connecting poorhouse and across a burned out building's rooftop into the canal. Time slowed down as she struggled to get her head above the cold water and tried not to think about what people threw into the canals on a daily basis. Her head breached the surface and she gasped for air. Looking up at the quay, she spotted the silhouette of a man. Just standing there. Staring. She dove under and swam for her life. Down into the sewers and up into the park and jumping out of a fountain, then doubling back into the alleyways, back up onto the roofs and far, far away from the Marrowgrove house. After half an hour, she finally permitted herself to stop running and collapsed panting on a flat rooftop near someone's pigeon coop, thoroughly understanding the use of the damn curfew now.