20 Jan 2012 @ 10:30pm
The Sodding Arms Hotel

Content note: squicky blood

Crack

A man appeared from nowhere in at the end of the hallway of the seventh floor of a seedy Knockturn Alley hotel. It was scrappy fellow and oh, he was very worse for wear. He didn't gracefully walk out the aether like a wizard of his experience might after Apparition; he more toppled. Apparition usually felt to Nathan Briggs like getting woken up by someone flicking on the lights. But this time, it was slicing, dizzying pain.

Nate fell against the wall with a loud thunk and slid to the floor. His wand fell from his grip. At first the pain felt like it was everywhere but within a few seconds it settled home. He made the mistake of looking down. His right arm from the elbow down was starting to seep blood from a series of slices in earnest, and his index finger was, well, not there.

He'd splinched. He wasn't dead, he had his wand, but he'd splinched his bloody finger off. Nate's voice caught in his throat. He laid his head back against the wall and forced long breaths in and out. He was fine, all things considering. And as he worked to calm himself, he realized it didn't hurt as much as he'd imagined it. It was excruciating but survivable, he began to tell himself.

"Nnnnngh..." he groaned long and low as he stuffed his injured hand into his shirt to get pressure on it. He'd gather himself, he'd get into his place, he'd get the potion.

He didn't even notice the skeletal hand pulling itself slowly on the dingy rug towards him.

When suffering long-term residence in a place like the Shodding Arms, one learned quickly to mind one's own business when it came to suspicious noise down the hallway.  Bumps, thumps, shouts, minor explosions, and other awkward occurrences all alike -- sticking one's head out to investigate would very likely result in said head being inconveniently separated from the rest of one's mortality. 

On a normal night, Aviad wouldn't even have blinked at the loud thunk from the hallway; whatever was happening outside his room, neither he nor the thunker in question likely desired his involvement in the situation.  But ever since the events of the full moon nearly two weeks ago, he'd been much more jumpy than usual.  Every loud knock was the Ministry apparating outside his door; every creaking floorboard was some intruder creeping up on him.  When Tzippori had fallen from the headboard onto his face and woken him with a start two nights ago, he'd very nearly blasted the skeletal toucan into bone shards on reflex alone.

The thunk outside was loud enough that the mage had casually eased open his door, wand in hand, to glance down the hallway.  But it wasn't the harbinger of an incoming Ministry raid; it was his shabby lycanthropic neighbor, looking as if he'd ended up on the wrong side of a werewolf fighting ring as he slumped in the corridor.

Aviad blinked.  For a second, he very nearly clicked the door shut again, but Tzippori had already gone skittering past him and was hopping up the hallway to investigate their neighbor.

If his familiar was loose, there was no use in pretending he hadn't seen.  Cautiously, his fingers still wrapped tightly around his wand, Aviad stepped into the hallway, glancing past Briggs to the stairwell to see if his assailant was still lurking.

"Harah!" he swore as he crept closer.  No attacker in sight.  And the shabby wizard, his face gray and his shirt bloody, with -- was that a lot of blood?  It didn't seem like a lot compared to the worst sights he'd encountered, but still, more than anyone wanted outside their body.  "What the hell happened to you, Briggs?"

"Lorelei Hunt!" Nate barked by way of explanation. He had moved on from caring if her name was dragged all over town.

His neighbor across the hall had emerged and Nate wasn't disappointed. Cohen, was it, had proven himself to be a neighbor of some quality at least against the standards of this hotel. Previous floormates might not have looked up from whatever gruesome flesh sausage they were devouring with their inhuman maws, or worse, taken advantage of the situation and rob him. Good old Cohen. Good old Cohen and his little skeleton toucan.

"Splinched myself trying to fuck off away from that sadistic - ," he said and worked his way up to standing.  That's when he noticed the only-bones hand that had come with him through the Apparition. He lined up a shot and kicked it down the hall. Then he looked at Tzippori. "No offense."

Carefully, Nate chanced a look at his hand, tucking his wand up under his armpit so he could unfold his hand from his coat. He winced. It had had no reason to stop bleeding so continued on merrily in that matter. The sight of it made him irritatingly dizzy. "Not in love with that."

Briggs barked out the name with emphasis, like a desperate dog lunging around for someone to bite.

Aviad froze in place, his eyes widening.  Lorelei Hunt.  He'd left his little arafel spirit friend dozing inside a glass lamp back in his room, but it didn't take much to envision how the pentral would have reacted to hearing its creator's name.  Unconsciously, he put a hand to the spot around his neck where the nazar charm that housed it usually rested, imagining the sharp heat of the glass.

Silently, the mage let his gaze flicked over the injured wizard, taking in his state.  Yes, he could perfectly imagine Lorelei Hunt hexing Nate Briggs.  Aviad had not heard his teacher mention the shabby wizard's name before, but Briggs and his overdramatic penchant for unmarked packages seemed like just the sort of person who would make Hunt's temper run short.  (To be fair, that category included nearly everyone breathing.)  And, once Hunt had been angered, he could also definitively imagine his neighbor flailing to get away from the necromancer, up to and including splinching himself in a desperate escape.

Tzippori, meanwhile, seemed unbothered by both the drama unfolding and the expressed anti-ossein sentiment.  As Briggs made his way unsteadily to his feet, the little skeleton craned its head, peering past their neighbor at the bony hand that was inching its way towards them.  When the shabby wizard's boot connected with the undead extremity and sent it flying down the hallway, Tzippori went skittering after it, its skeletal wings flapping furiously in its wake.

Aviad stayed where he was, pressing his tongue against the back of his teeth as Briggs unveiled his bleeding finger.  Did he leave the werewolf here to bleed alone, or even play the good apprentice and send word to Hunt that he'd stumbled upon her escaped quarry?  Or did he venture that the necromancer had probably lost interest as soon as Briggs was out of her sight and risk his own standing in favor of being neighborly?

Decisions, decisions.  Aviad sighed.

"You must have a way with women, brother," he said at last, giving a quick shake of his head. 

If he was going to do this -- expose himself to an unknown wizard, risk infuriating Hunt, all of it -- he might as well get it over with.  Aviad clucked his tongue in Tzippori's direction, signaling for his familiar to return, and turned back towards the open door of his flat.

"Come on," he said, arching an eyebrow as he glanced back at Briggs.  "Just try not to bleed all over the furniture, yeh?"

Nate didn't think twice before heading through Aviad's door. Calling Lorelei Hunt a woman (or even human) was outdated nomenclature.

"I can't go to St. Mungo's," he explained the obvious. "If you know how to stop it up, that's all I need until I can it back."

Get his finger back. It had only been splinched. That is, if she hadn't already defiled it. He could manage without a finger, but he'd very much rather not.

Nate would have handled this himself, but he'd never taken the time to learn first aid. His ex-wife Dazmond had been the wand-clever one, taken good care of him when Aurors, Hitwizards, or fellow Knockturnals facilitated a need. Looking around Aviad's place gave Nate a clue that Aviad knew a thing or two about some kind of magic. Magic that was specific and unfamiliar to Nate but the kit all seemed to indicate Avi had studied something.

Something occurred to him. "You know who I'm talking about? Lorelei Hunt?"

What if he did? Did Nate really care at this point?

His home of the moment was less a flat than an awkward-sized room.  The only furniture were a sturdy wooden table that looked as if it could survive a direct hit from a Concusso curse and a creaky-looking bed with messy sheets.  A fireplace stood on the opposite wall from the door, unconnected from the Floo but burning brightly.  Just above head-height, glass prisms hung from an ancient-looking chandelier, reflecting the light from the fireplace and sending it dancing around the room.

The tools of the mage's trade were scattered about the table: nubs of chalk, stacked scrolls, a handheld mirror half-covered with a cloth, white and black stones arranged in neat piles.   An oil lamp with a white bulb sat in the center of the mess, the flame inside dancing merrily.  A wisp of something that wasn't quite smoke seemed to rise from the lamp, and then quickly darted back down again, as if it had been sucked back into the flame.

Aviad ignored it as he clomped over to the table and dragged a heavy chair back for his guest, leaving it clear for Briggs to sit.

"Don't get any blood on the scrolls," he instructed his shaggy, scruffy neighbor, as he looked back impatiently toward the door.  Where was Tzippori?  Of all the times for his familiar to run off, of course it was when he was inviting a strange wizard into their domain.

But then the little skeleton came pattering in between Briggs' legs, unsteady with a pigeon-toed gate that was even more uneven than usual.  In its beak, it clutched the struggling, twitching skeletal hand, holding it up like a prize.

L'azazel.  Aviad would have rolled his eyes.  With a string of swears under his breath, he grabbed a piece of chalk and sketched a quick circle on the wooden floorboards.

"Drop it there," he ordered his familiar, before turning his attention back to Briggs.

His next-door neighbor was looking gray.  Blood still flowed freely from his wound, even as he tried to clutch it tightly.  Aviad grimaced.  Sealing wounds wasn't his usual line of work, and a splinching was much more complicated to deal with than most hexes.  Still, in for a shekel...

"Sit," he instructed Briggs, as he grabbed the mirror of his table and tossed it onto his bed.  Silently, he searched for the rest of his supplies: a small black candle, a round clay container fetched from the fireplace mantle, a few of the smooth white and black stones.

Finally, he turned back to the table.  Aviad snapped his fingers at the oil lamp; in a flash, a white wisp of something went darting out of it and up to the tinkling chandelier. There, it drifted between the hanging prisms, looking for all intents and purposes as if it were peering down at them curiously from its new perch.

Aviad ignored the seemingly animated smoke as he carefully began to arrange the white and black stones in a circular pattern on the wooden table, alternating their placement, one after the other.  Hunt wasn't exactly a diviner, but if she ever got wind that he'd betrayed any of her secrets to someone that she might consider an annoyance or an enemy, his apprenticeship wasn't going to end with a happy graduation.  Still, though, Briggs wasn't stupid, and it seemed very possible that werewolves could sniff out when someone was lying.

"Yeh," the mage said at last, as he finished placing the stones.  "Hand here," he said, tapping at the center of the circle.  He glanced at Briggs, one eyebrow cocked, as he set the black candle down in an empty silver votive holder on the table.  "What business did you have with her that you had to splinch yourself to get away?"

Nate lifted a foot a little too late when the clambering skeleton-bird passed between his legs carrying Hunt's grasping skeleton-hand, and watched with satisfaction at Cohen's quick and deliberate chalk circle. Nate, if he was extraordinary in any kind of magic, was deft with runework - he appreciation a fellow. But that was the end of Nate's affinity with Cohen's practice whose accent wasn't the only thing from a culture unfamiliar.

It made him hesitate a moment. But they needed to act quickly and if he was honest, the dizziness of blood loss was climbing to his eyes. Nate sat and squared his feet on the ground. He opened his hand to have another look at it, then over at whatever Cohen was preparing. Another pause of consideration. It was this strange magic or it was bright lights and official questions. With a deep breath, Nate obeyed and laid his hand bare on the wooden table inside the stones. He winced. Any movement in his bones and tendons hurt. He ran a hand down his face and then up through his hair.

"She's easily offended," he replied.

"We did some work together - " no need to say what; if he knew Hunt then he knew what she was about, - "I warned her new of it had gotten out. Then she fucking unhinged her jaw. I've had it. Shit's out of hand."

Pun not intended. "What is this?"

A snap of his fingers, and the wick of the candle burst into flame.  Easily offended.  Yes, that was certainly Lorelei Hunt.  Aviad began to loosen the lid of the jar, allowing hints of a warm, earthy aroma to escape from the tiny seeds inside.

But his neighbor's next words made him stop short.

Some work together?!

Aviad blinked hard.  His scruffy, unkempt neighbor certainly strayed far from the arm of the law; he'd never had any pretense otherwise.  The mage knew from their previous encounter that Briggs was no fan of the Werewolf Capture Unit, and that he was hardly friend to the Ministry.  But life as an unregistered werewolf far from the Ministry's eye was a far cry from working with Lorelei Hunt.  What, had he hauled unsuspecting wizards and witches over to her for her to spiritize?  Had he been involved in providing her with the pentral that she wore now?

The werewolf's question drew him back to the task at hand.  Aviad closed his fingers around a pinch of the tiny seeds and tossed them into the candle's flame, muttering a word.  A puff of smoke went up and everything inside the circle, for lack of a better description, stopped.

There was no other way to put it.  It was as if the air inside the ring of black and white stones had been ordered to freeze, and had obediently followed his direction.  The wisp of smoke that had been drifting over the circle halted and went still, and the blood that had been pooling from his neighbor's missing finger stopped so abruptly that it looked like a little puddle of gelatin, wobbly in place.

At least the first step was done.  Aviad frowned, glancing away.  Stopping the bleeding was simple, especially when he was here and he had what he needed, but coming up with his next step -- some sort of lasting solution so that Briggs didn't have to spend the rest of his life slumped over a table in the mage's room -- would require a little more thought.

A skittering noise came from the floor behind him, sudden enough to make him start. 

Aviad glanced sharply over his shoulder; that was all it took to confirm that Tzippori had deposited its skeletal prize exactly where he'd told it to, in the center of the circle that he'd chalked on the floor.   The bony hand did not look happy about its newfound imprisonment.  It had picked itself up onto its fingers and was scrambling at the invisible barrier again and again, like a five-legged creature desperate to escape.

That, at least, gave him an idea. Drawing his wand, Aviad stepped towards it.

 "It's your alternative to St. Mungo's," he informed Briggs, keeping his wand trained on the disembodied extremity.  This was more pragmatic magic than he was typically used to employing, but when the bird was in the other hand, a finger was a finger, wasn't it?  "What, were you bringing Hunt her bodies?"

The smell of cumin did not go unnoticed by Calavera's cook. But what truly shocked Nate was the sudden nothing from his wrist down. He nearly yanked his hand away from the circle of stones when his hand suddenly went cold like he'd never felt, but not a cold that hurt like frostbite. He didn't try, but he knew he couldn't move it. He felt somehow planted in place. The blood had frozen in place. The bleeding had, quite literally, stopped.

"Shit," he breathed. He settled himself again with a hand in his hair.

And then he watched Cohen who had turned to the captive skeletal hand on the floor, the same hand who'd been rather keen on strangling him, the same bony little monster that even now followed Hunt's wishes. Cohen's pause and aimed wand was good enough for savvy Nate to understand.

He animated in the chair, leaning forward and pointing at Cohen. He'd ignored the question for a more pressing matter.

"No!" He nearly shouted it. "I see you thinking it. No. We're not doing that, friend."

The skeletal hand that was clawing and crawling at the barrier wasn't a spirit -- not exactly.  Aviad had never paid much attention to magical theory in any of his classes back at Beit Gaddol, but if he'd had to venture a guess, he'd hypothesize that Lorelei Hunt had embodied her creation with a strong sense of purpose and little else.  There wouldn't be any reasoning with it, no making friends or setting it at peace before sending it on its way.  But that didn't mean he couldn't speak to it, and it certainly didn't mean that the skeletal creation didn't have to listen.

He didn't know the exact spell to use, but trapped inside a warding of his own making, intent mattered much more words.

"Salah," he breathed, wand pointed at it.

His target froze mid-scramble, balanced on its thumb and pinky bones with its other skeletal digits extended upwards. 

A little relieved that the spell had worked, Aviad nudged Tzippori out of the way with his boot and bent to scoop the hand up, aware of Briggs' sudden increase in anxiety behind him.

"Relax," he said pointedly as he rose back to his feet.  "We need to attach something to stop the bleeding, yeh?"  He flashed the werewolf a reassuring smile as he turned back to face him, as if calming the fears of an overly-anxious child who didn't want to see the Healer.  "You can wear a glove over it; no one will notice."

Nate looked at Aviad like he'd grown another head with the same sort of brow-knitting exasperation that he found with so many fellow Knockturnals. Every nutter in this postal code was unhinged. Nate didn't know much about healing but plug it up with a skeleton finger seemed like improvisation.

He couldn't help looking around the flat again and then couldn't help feeling a little like an experiment. But at least Nate's name wasn't on any list and there weren't any MLE asking him unhappy questions. As much, however, as Nate was resisting this madness, there was the part that ached for trouble. Morbid curiosity ruled more of his days than he'd admit.

Resigning himself to this other part, Nate shifted in the chair and raked his fingers through his hair again, and readied himself.

"Right, just do it. Screw it."

His werewolf friend begrudgingly acquiesced, and Aviad returned to the table.  The skeleton hand was twitching a bit more than he might have liked, but it was still enough for what he needed to do.  Aiming his wand at the bones that formed the base of the index finger, the mage sent a little jolt, and with a click, the joint dislocated and broke in two.

Unfortunately, his success was short-lived: the dislocated skeletal finger, freed from its imprisonment, took off like an earthworm racer, flinging itself onto the floor and squirming to hide under the table.

Aviad immediately let loose with a string of irritated Hebrew swears. Grabbing a half-full glass of water, he turned it upside down, ignoring the spilling liquid as he set the clear container upside down over the rest of the skeletal hand to trap it in place.

"Tzippori!" he snapped, annoyed.

Game as always, his little skeletal familiar went bounding under the table, getting into a momentary scuffle with Briggs's left boot as it scrambled after the writhing finger.

Sighing, Aviad turned back to the table, surveying the set-up he'd arranged around his neighbor's damaged hand.  Lorelei Hunt's skeletal minion wasn't exactly a spirit as he'd usually define them, but what was this if not a simple binding?  All he had to do was connect the bone of the finger to the missing digit on Briggs's hand and use some spell to meld the two together.  That ought to work well enough, oughtn't it?  The other wizard would have a replacement for his vanished extremity, and the skeletal index finger would probably settle into its new role soon enough.

"This shouldn't hurt," he told Briggs reassuringly, even though he had no idea. 

A potential minor setback occurred to him as he waited for Tzippori to return with the escaped finger -- unlikely, but perhaps made more so if the scruffy werewolf ran in the same circles as Hunt.  Aviad paused, tilting his head to the side and examining Briggs carefully, as if he were trying to check and see if the other wizard was missing an ear. 

"Your spirit's all intact, yeh?" he asked, peering at him.  "You haven't gone and bound it to anything else?"

As a macabre chase ensued. The remains of the hand scrabbled against the class, the finger fled on some kind of instinct away from the strange fleshless toucan familiar. Nate slid down in the chair. He was able, to a point, to observe his situation from above and to the left and appreciate the absurdity. The same part was paying attention to magic that was unfamiliar, magic that Hogwarts wouldn't teach you.

At the same time Nate was observing himself and bracing for the ritual, Aviad stopped and asked the strangest question.

"What? Yeah, no. It's, uh, all there."

It was a splinching not a horcrux.

"Why?"

"Just, oh -- you know."  Aviad gave a distracted wave of his hand, peering under the table after his familiar.  If Briggs worked with Lorelei Hunt, then he had to know why the mage was inquiring.  Some things didn't need an explanation.

Tzippori had emerged triumphantly from under the table, the skeletal finger clenched in its bone-white beak.  The toucan held tightly to its prize, even as its prisoner wiggled frantically back and forth, like a segmented worm determined to give itself whiplash.

"Ach!  Bring it here," Aviad instructed the skeletal bird, tapping on the table next to Briggs' right arm.  As Tzippori hopped over toward an empty chair so that it could make its way up onto the table's surface, the mage turned away, beginning the search anew through his cluttered room for the rest of the necessary supplies.

Black candles were for binding, and he already had one out.  Aviad grabbed a second one just in case.  Other colors of candles, much less frequently used, were harder to locate; he finally found a rolled-up pocket full of them that had fallen behind his bed.  He considered them for a moment, and then pulled out a brown one (for grounding) and a pink one (for love -- it couldn't hurt, could it?) before folding the pocket up again and tossing it onto his sheets.

He'd tried his hand at binding spirits a handful of times before, but it was unsurprisingly a much less common request than banishment.  No one really wanted a spirit to stick around, not unless they were planning to pass it off to someone who wanted it even less.

As he returned to the table, Aviad arranged the three new candles -- black, brown, and pink -- in a rough triangle around the chalk circle that encircled his neighbor's hand.  Each was lit with another snap of his fingers: one, two, three.  And then the mage paused, looking first at the bony finger that was still whipping back and forth in a frantic attempt to escape from Tzippori's beak, and then up at the crystal chandelier that hung over their heads.

"Do you think you might lend a hand?" he asked it quizzically.  "Just hold it still for a moment, yeh?"

There was a pregnant pause, as the chandelier seemed to be deciding.  It was followed by a soft tinkling, like the distance sound of silver bells, and then a wisp of smoke drifted down from the chandelier.  As it reached eye-level, it hovered in place, coalescing into a tightly whirling ball of silver fog as it seemed to wait for the mage's next instruction. 

Aviad gave the swirling smoke a respectful nod.  "Alright, bring it over," he instructed Tzippori, turning back to the table with barely a glance at Nate. 

"And you'll stay still, yeh, brother?" he asked the other wizard as he freed his wand again.  A few symbols of binding, drawn in the air over the lightly burning candles.  Aviad was mostly concentrated on his task, but risked looking up long enough to flash the werewolf an encouraging smile.  "I can't imagine this will be any worse than your usual full moon."

Nate watched intently despite himself. That upwell of curiosity and danger that was a gleaming white rabbit to his never-sated sense of dissatisfaction. The same dissatisfaction he forever followed out of a humdrum ambition-less life towards bright-hot, fast-burning nights of risky adventure. It never lasted, but there was a thrill of coming out it the other side alive and intact, having bested something few others dared to do. And then something odd, something familiar. A pull. Something about Avi's ministration, care, curiosity turned something over, reminded him of Dazmond and her wild techniques.

The thought left him, though, when a spectral sort of wisp appeared, heeding Aviad's gentle beckon like they were old friends. Nate had no earthly idea what the entity could be - but seeking answers in the terrestrial realm would be a goose chase.

Nate acquiesced to keeping still. His hand was numb and secured in the suspended animation of the chalk circle so he hardly had a choice. But again, a bizarre non-sequitor from the neighbor. Full moon? His full moons?

With a sideways look, pointed and clear, "I am not a werewolf."

He lifted his eyebrows as if to ask, 'understand me?'

That was one foul-up he'd managed to avoid, and any rumor that he hadn't would only give Bagnold an excuse to harass him. He'd threatened to trump up the charge before. 'Nathan Briggs, you're suspected of bein' a werewolf and traffickin' in illegal wolfsbane.  You can spend the next month in a holdin' cell while we look into this further,' he'd said.[1] How Aviad had got it into his head ...

1.	14 Dec 2011 - Cracking Skulls