Evening. M for mature language.


"Sir, I'm afraid that you ca--"

Balfour Spectre walked past the maître d' of  Ascendio Italiano, the sight of him distracting many of the night's patrons from their meals. The servers pause in their motions to glance confusedly but there is a sense of purpose in his walk that discourages engagement. In the soft glow of floating lights against white linen tablecloths, he is entirely out of place. Johann's blood is glaringly crimson against his blue shirtsleeves, which have been rolled up, and he is blind to all figures but the one sat at a table by a great window overlooking the dark sea.

Her gaze rose from the round  face of a wizard sat across the small table. Edwin Glass. Wine glasses and silverware gleamed like something out of a dream. Balfour did not dream. Everything that had happened today was real, as distant from figments of imagination as pleasantries are from reality.

But he is contained as beautifully as he knew she enjoyed seeing. Glass turns around to look up at him, beady blue eyes dropping pointedly to note the wand in his grip.

"Edwin." Ira requested with her attention still very much on Balfour, everything from body language to eye contact suddenly focused on one another. The older man stood to leave - he nodded curtly at the intrusion with a quick murmur of Spectre and drifted appropriately to the bar, where a waitress across the marble counter looked to be as bemused by this intrusion as any of her peers.

One did not make a scene at Italiano.

Balfour lowered himself into the vacated seat across from his friend and placed a hand on the table. Smears of blood on the pale inside of his forearm streaks like a foxtail in motion to the crinkles of his wrist. The wand is held tightly. Ira mirrored the movement with her own wand, leaning back in her chair.

They are silent and unmoving for so long that eyes begin to slip away, bored by the inactivity. That was when he began without preamble.

"Blood contract?"
              "Of course not," she replied in a dry voice - it belied a diverted twist to her shell pink lips.

The tension in his chest loosened. He blinked, sat straighter. Johann was safe, for the time being. He was safe, although that didn't mean they were in the clear. How long had he been holding the tiger by her tail without knowing it? Without wanting to know it, for surely if he had opened his eyes earlier the truth would have been apparent.

As apparent as the five, claw like wounds in his lover's back.

"He said something, then." Balfour was surprised by the civility in his manner. "Or did you not need a reason? You never have before." Perhaps she did have motivations in the past but they always seemed to escape him, smoke in cloudy water.

Ira made a dismissive gesture, spindly shadows of her lithe fingers thrown across the tablecloth. "That business with the hospital-" she explained vaguely. "- and a matter of conscience. What a fascinating plaything he is, our Little Wolfgang. You have such good taste in character, Balfour."

The wizard's jaw drew taut. Two notions passed his mind. The first, innately, bristling at Johann being objectified. The second, a belated realisation that her knowledge of the hospital contamination was likely because she had been its genesis.


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Every light in the restaurant cracked with a loud and grating bang!, dropping the entire room into darkness. Only moonlight reflecting off the ocean's surface brought a little lustre to sight in the brief instant before an infantry of lumos lit up each table with bluish, magical light. Nobody moved.

Balfour and Ira were on their feet across from one another, wands drawn and the table between them. Red wine had spilt. The glass window behind her was cracked all the way through... still cracking, its brittle rupturing song obvious in the silence. She stared at a point just past his shoulder, where her hex had missed his head and broken a wall of top shelf liquor at the bar.

In the corner of his eye, he saw the maître d' move to react. And somehow this irritated him. That anyone would come between him and an earnest desire to fracture Ira Almasy's willowy little bones. He was gripped by the abrupt conviction that if he did not act now, normality would return, sanity restored, this scene explained away rationally.

They acted a split-second apart, Balfour first brandishing his wand with infligo - it landed with force against her chest and sent her crashing back against the window. It shattered instantly. The burning hex she sent him whistled right past his side as he dashed towards the empty table, kicking it down for cover.

Cold, winter air swept into the restaurant. Shards of glass dropped in a pretty tinkling and Ira found her feet once more. The fair skin of her scalp has been lacerated by the blow, blood trickling through the blonde locks and into her countenance. Unconcealed calm lent an eerie air to the sight, and she snapped a spell right at the fallen table. It turned into grey ash.

Balfour's shield deflected the next flurry of attacks, bright hot hexes ricocheting into red walls and paintings. He felt the shield hiss in protest and dropped it to quickly ready a response-- but it was too late. Ira twisted around to the shattered window behind and stepped off into the thin air beyond. As soon as she was pass the sill, she was gone.

Fuck. He darted to the window, a hand braced against the wooden frame to look out across the night and the choppy waves beneath the clear sky. Nothing. She'd run! Why had she run? There was a commotion of servers and diners behind him in the restaurant but he didn't look around because it suddenly became very, very obvious why Ira had allowed him to land the first blow.

They were going to have riot with this if it got out. Head of Beasts Division walks into Ascendio Italiano, assaults charitable Russian aristocrat. Fuck, fuck, fuck her.

Balfour didn't hesitate. He wasn't going to stay here to explain himself, wasn't entirely certain if he could do so satisfactorily in the first place. The wizard stepped off the ledge.