Following the events of The Messenger.
Very late evening.

He'd tried Calaveras first.

That had been unfruitful. At first, the werewolf hunter had lurked out back, hoping to catch the line cook as he hauled out the rubbish, just like he had the last time.[1]  But Briggs hadn't put in an appearance, and the witch that he'd finally cornered hadn't been willing to talk. The only information of use that he'd picked up, besides her telling him to feck off, was that she hadn't seemed all that concerned that someone had come around asking questions about her coworker.

Back when he'd first been trying to track Briggs down, his cousin Nate had dropped him a peek at the other wizard's file. Normally, Kurby wouldn't have dreamed of strolling into somewhere like the Shodding Arms Hotel without any backup, without even telling anyone where he was going.

But he had to bleeding well know. If there was a chance that Briggs was dead -- if there was a chance that Briggs was dead and someone was trying to insinuate that it was somehow connected to him -- then the very least that Kurby could do was investigate the failed thief's fate.

Knockturn Alley felt exceptionally quiet tonight; aside from a sickly-looking owl perched on a windowsill that had let out a feeble hoot as he'd crossed underneath it, Kurby hadn't seen another soul. With only the barest sliver of moon in the sky, the upper windows of the Shodding Arms formed a checkerboard pattern of light, some dark and some illuminated.

The werewolf hunter kept his hood up and his silver chain tucked out of sight as he entered the lobby. He'd come here once or twice slumming with his cousins. There were still a couple of patrons lingering by one of the fireplaces, murmuring quietly under the light from a broken chandelier, but they didn't pay him any attention as he headed straight for the stairs. That was the only advantage of barging into a place like this: people stayed here because they didn't want to ask or answer any questions. As long as he didn't draw attention to himself, he could wrap himself in that cloak of anonymity, too.

Briggs lived in Room 73, which meant a long climb to the seventh floor. He passed only a couple of people on the way: a man in a dark cloak who seemed just as happy as he was to stay in the shadows, and an old, gnarled witch that Kurby would have sworn was a hag if he were not equally sure that hags would never deign to live in a place like this.

Finally, he reached the seventh landing. Floorboards creaked under his boots as Kurby carefully picked his way down the hallway. Room 73 was the corner suite on the end. The door looked as if Briggs had salvaged it from the Black Chimaera after the explosion he'd caused a few years before: the hinges were mismatched, and there was a series of seven locks running down its edge.

It was very, very likely that this entire thing could be a goddamned trap, but after receiving an ominous threat at his flat earlier that night, the werewolf hunter was largely past the point where he cared if he were walking into an ambush. With a careful glance down the hallway to make sure no one else was in sight, Kurby stepped just past the door of Room 73 so that he wouldn't be within easy eyesight of a peering inhabitant and leaned casually against the wall.  He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and transferred it to his right hand, kept his wand in his left, then reached up to knock a quick, staccato pattern on the heavy wooden door.

1.	December 14, 2011 - Cracking Skulls

Layout of room #73

Nathan Briggs was cooking at the hearth, taking his time making something slow and comforting out of the cast iron pan. He had the next two nights off and it would take effort to stave off boredom. It was a hard thing, boredom. It was safe, but it ate at you from the inside. It demanded immediate, urgent satiation and would be so easily sated, or so it claimed. But at the moment, Nate had several existential concerns, so better bored in here than dead out there.

He used a wooden spoon to stir the bubbling dish, and by now could do so with the full cooperation of all his digits.  It had been two months since he'd splinched off his right index finger as he fled from the witch he'd learned was called Lorelei Hunt, and since a kindly necromancer neighbor had given him a replacement in the form of a knobbly, fleshless, skeletal finger from Hunt's own straggling minion.[1] On account of Hunt, who Nate knew as Lucy, he'd made some very quiet attempts to figure out where she was. He'd wanted his finger back, but more than that, he wanted a bell on her if she came back for the rest. He'd been unsuccessful. Short of going back to the Black Chimaera, that was all the more he thought sane.

Yes, sane, indeed. To that effort, Nate had shuttered all his other extracurriculars - no more catburglaring, no more side jobs, no more provoking the neighbors. Stay alive, stay out of Azkaban, and try some new recipes.

It was past nine when came the knock at the door. Nate stood straight and listened for a moment before trading the spoon for his long walnut wand. There was reason to be suspicious. Although the Shodding Arms was almost certainly haunted, actual horrible things did happen from time to time. Hitwizards, threatening shoeboxes, grindylows, half-drunk Wentworth heirs. Nate approached the door and ran his fingers over all seven locks, each of them always closed fast. His view through the peephole was an empty hallway.

Nate knew better than to answer back bumps in the night or to open doors to anything without a face. He returned to watch his skillet, not yet trading out his wand for the spoon again.

1.	20 Jan 2012 - Guts on Fire

The door didn’t open. Inside the room, he thought he heard something shuffle quietly closer to the door, pause there for a long moment, and then just-as-quietly shuffle away again.

Kurby huffed out a quiet, exasperated sigh.  Rolling his eyes, he let his head tilt back, resting it against the wall behind him so that he could stare upwards towards the ceiling. On the bright side, it seemed less likely that he’d hot-headedly plunged himself into some kind of ambush, since it felt very improbable that any dark wizard waiting to confront him was going to awkwardly shuffle back and forth in an anti-social attempt to avoid answering the door. On the downside, he still didn’t know if it was Briggs inside the hotel room, and he didn’t really feel like waiting for whoever was there to work up the courage for social interaction.

What the hell was he supposed to do? Blasting his way into someone’s probably-warded residence was not normally to be undertaken lightly. Aside from the fact that it would certainly draw attention to his presence here, he had no idea what kind of protections Briggs might have put on this place. Blowing a hole through the floor or wall, while possibly an effective strategy to avoid wards on the door, was also definitely going to upset someone. It didn’t help that there was no way he could claim Ministry authority on this. If he was too impulsive or brash about creating his own entry, he’d end up having to explain himself to someone on Level Two.

Leave it to Nathan Briggs to be goddamned annoying, even when all Kurby was ultimately doing was checking to make sure that the younger wizard wasn’t actually dead.

The werewolf hunter directed his gaze upwards again as he mulled over his options. The first and most obvious was continuing to bang on the door until whoever was inside got annoyed enough to open it, which had probably a fifty-fifty chance of actually succeeding. Second was impersonating someone who did have the authority to break down the door if it wasn’t opened in a timely fashion, but that carried its own risks. Aside from having the potential to get him into actual trouble with the Ministry, if Briggs got jumpy, he’d probably just jump through the floo or apparate away, leaving Kurby no closer to getting answers tonight.

His third option was just telling the goddamned truth. The success of that relied on the hope that either Briggs was inside and he didn’t want the story of the dismembered finger delivery to spread all over the bleeding Shodding Arms, which had the added bonus of allowing Kurby to be as obnoxious as possible in the process, or that opening his mouth would set off whatever idiotic trap might be waiting for him, in which case the werewolf hunter could at least move on to a considerably less annoying and considerably more active stage of tonight's misadventure.

His back still to the wall, Kurby kicked at the door three times with the back heel of his dragon-hide boot.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“Dismembered finger delivery ser-vice,” he announced loudly in a singsong, adopting a volume that would clearly carry down the length of the seventh-floor hallway. “Somebody dropped one off in a box with your photo plastered all over it, Briggs.”

Nate waited quietly for several long moments, his wand at his side. He heard no further noise in the hallway, no footfalls retreating, no fiddling with the doorknob. Just when Nate resolved to return to tend the fire, the knocking came back, this time a thumping boot and unwelcome voice.  He didn't recognize it until the very last word. Bagnold.

The sadistic werewolf hunter was at his door now, howling like he meant to bring the building down on number seventy-three. Lines crossed, last straws, fuses lit, and all that, Nate rapidly worked open all seven locks and flung open the door.

Kurby was there off to the side. Nate stuck his wand in his face, and punctuated each word of his tightly hissed command with an jab.

"Shut. The. Fuck. Up!"

A werewolf hunter here in Nate's hotel in Knockturn, at such an hour, unaccompanied by any MLE,  playing séance with his front door, singing Lorelei-Hunt-flavored secrets to the peeling wallpaper - this was so far out of official bounds, that Nate accepted the very calculated risk of blowing Kurby's block off. He could be just another Shodding Arms statistic for the guestbook downstairs.

If nothing else, at least his provocation got the intended reaction. Barely a moment had passed before the locks were turning, the door was flung open, and a barreling and indeed alive Nathan Briggs was shoving a wand straight in his face.

It was hardly the first time and it hopefully wouldn’t be the last time that someone had pointed a wand directly at his brain. Kurby went very still, fingers tightening around his own wand, which was extended out of sight by his left side. Silently, he stared at the wand point for what felt like a thudding heartbeat, and then very deliberately shifted his gaze to refocus on the hand that was wielding it.

The very first finger — what should have been the other wizard’s fleshy right index finger, wrapping around to support his furious wand — was made out of stark white bone.

Kurby regarded the skeletal finger for a long moment, his expression impassive and his mouth pressed carefully shut.  Then, without moving so much as an unnecessary muscle, he lifted his dark eyes to meet Nathan Briggs’ gaze.

Silently, he raised his eyebrows.

Heavier than the werewolf hunter's obedient silence, heavier even than his lack of retaliation, was the weight of his unbothered focus on Nate's curious wand-hand. Nate stared back, every muscle in his body tight, as he put his many concerns in an actionable order. Of all the bizarre questions and vengeances that hung in the air, none of them could be handled out here in the bare corridor for all the walls to see.

Emboldened, Nate reached out with his left hand to grab Kurby by the shoulder to pull him out of the hall and into room seventy-three. Nate kept his wand trained on him and kicked the door shut behind them. All seven locks locked themselves again.

"Put your wand on the table," Nate directed, biting back an easy-come string of insults. "You want to invite yourself round without owling, so rude, this is how it goes. Wand down!"

Nate was biting back more than he estimated. He'd never been one to have a temper, but now a hair trigger seemed so near, so useful. He adjusted his grip on the wand and he felt the finger bone scrape against the wooden handle. He had almost complete control of it these days; he and Number One they all got along fine now. The thing only got willful when emotions started to heat up, or when he was asleep.

His dinner simmered away, untended for the moment.

Sometime between tonight and the last time he'd bullied him, Nathan Briggs had actually grown a backbone. (Or possibly just a very bold fingerbone.) Kurby didn't protest as the younger man grabbed his shoulder and hauled him inside. Nothing about this so far was actually counter to the reason that he'd come here: he'd confirmed that Briggs was alive, confirmed the likely origin of the aforementioned dismembered finger, and managed to provoke Briggs into -- if not actually conversing with him -- then at least heatedly threatening him, which was probably a step in the right direction when it came to getting answers.

The inside of the hotel room looked just as run-down and worn as the rest of the building. Kurby's gaze flicked back and forth across the room, taking in the details. Something cooking on the hearth, a large, uncomfortable-looking bed, rugs covering the floors. Tall windows with cracked panes lined the back wall. Dozens of potion bottles were arranged around the fireplace mantle, a lingering reminder of the time when Briggs had worked as dogsbody to the Sellaphix family.

Briggs' order made him quirk an eyebrow again. Under other circumstances, Kurby might have bitten back at him, but he wanted answers more than he cared about putting the petty thief in his place. Thoughtfully, deliberatively, he considered for a moment, and then carefully placed his wand down in the center of the table. Then, after a glance back at Briggs, he unfolded the plain parchment paper and set it down near the edge of the table, a good distance away from his wand.

An animated photo of his host stared back up at them, making awkward, exaggerated faces over and over again at the ceiling.

Kurby crossed the rest of the room, keeping his movements smooth and deliberate, so as not to accidentally jingle anything. As he reached the opposite wall, he leaned back against the peeling wallpaper between two of the windows, folding his arms against his chest as he turned to face Briggs again.

Cool and seemingly unconcerned, he waited.

Bagnold set down his wand and moved off, providing Nate no excuse to blast him through a brick wall. For a moment, Nate just watched him wand-ready: the short-statured, silver-knuckled werewolf hunter looked so bizarrely out of context here in Nate's carefully kept space. Nate didn't miss the other wizard's silence. Usually, Bagnold never missed an opportunity to snipe or interrogate, but now he was just standing there. Watching. For a long minute Nate resisted looking at what Kurby so obviously wanted to show him, the note on the table. But it situated itself as the most important object in the world.

"Git," Nate muttered at him before glancing over at the note. Then he glanced again. He saw himself in some photograph he didn't recognize, and more crucially the name Hermes.

"Dismembered finger delivery service. Somebody dropped one off in a box with your photo plastered all over it, Briggs."

The sequence of events flashed through Nate's mind, reaching up through his memory like so many Inferi. He'd stolen unicorn blood for a dangerous witch called Lucy for seven-hundred and ninety-eight galleons and Bagnold had found out. Nate had confronted Hunt who'd then tried to kill him, no help at all. Little by little, Bagnold had found out more and more, dangled the threatening pieces in front of him. And now, somehow, he'd stitched it all together.

Nate rounded on Kurby again, furious. He remembered what Bagnold was capable of at arm's reach, so Nate kept the meters between them and aimed his wand headwise. 

"I'm trying, mate," he began and closed his eyes for a second to attempt a calming breath. "I'm trying to think of a better plan than Obliviating you and shoving you in the floo without powder. You can't mind your own business."

The final word came out in a shout. He had to adjust his grip on the wand again, shake out his arm, and re-aim.

"I did wonder if maybe she'd find you first and eat your face, but I'm not that bloody lucky!"

For a moment, he nearly thought Briggs was going to ignore the note. But then the shabby line cook realized what he was looking at and did a double take, staring intently at the photograph on the table.

Kurby seized the moment to cast a casual glance around the room.  If it came down to it, the bed to his right and table to his left offered a bit of possible cover. The window directly next to him didn't look as though it would be of any use: the glass panes were small and square, and the frame looked too heavy and awkward to open quickly. His wand was still close enough to be within likely summoning distance, but that could change in an instant if Briggs decided to get smart and grab it. At least he still had his silver chain and a couple of knives.

Briggs whirled on him suddenly, eyes wild and wand aimed back at his head. The werewolf hunter went very still, his expression still casual but with a growing tension in his stance, like a coiled spring stretching slowly taut.

When the hell had Briggs gotten so close to the edge? The harsh clarity of the London Zoo rose up unbidden in his memory: the moment when he had realized that he'd taken one too many risks and barged into something well over his head. Kurby had taunted and pushed Briggs before, but despite the dishwasher's obvious arrogance, he had never snapped back like this. He'd always known there was a chance he might provoke the younger wizard a wand's width too far, but there was a savageness here that he hadn't expected.

And then Briggs shook out his arm, leveled his wand with the ghoulish finger at the tip of it back at him, and said it.

She. 

The werewolf hunter raised both eyebrows. He'd had only a couple of possible guesses in mind when he'd gone galloping off to find answers, but there was one obvious, exclusive she on the list: the same she that had terrorized Duncan and terrified Aileen, who could draw a firm line connecting him and Briggs.

"Reckon she'll have to get in line with the 'wolves for that," Kurby quipped helpfully. He was still standing very still, arms folded and expression noncommittal, but he was watching Briggs carefully now, tense and ready to move. "I dunno if Hunt sounds like much of a mate if she's sendin' your body parts around by owl post."

Some might have thought Kurby Bagnold's stillness would have been a comfort to Nathan Briggs, but Nate knew well better. Bagnold was a dangerous wizard, and far more threatening than his training was his entitlement and loose chain. Nate should be more careful with him, but he was just so sick of it all. Avoidance and isolation wasn't working and the hole just got deeper.

Bagnold now claimed for a second time that he had Nate's finger. In fact, so far it was the only topic of conversation; all in contrast to the conspicuous lack of off-the-books interrogation and absence of any sort of threat. Nate didn't respond right away, trying to work his mind around the possible incoherant motivations of the werewolf hunter.

All the long while, Nate didn't let his wand down, staring not at but through Kurby. He could do it, Nate thought. Maybe a Leg Lock and a good shove through the window. Seven stories was plenty.

No. Nate ran his left hand down his face, temporarily calling off the self-immolation. You can't kill him, Nate. You can't do that.

"What do want, Bagnold?" he finally demanded. Any other question would give more away and he'd already said more than he should. "Why're you here?"

With the name 'Hermes' and half a wit, there could very well be enough to link Nate to last fall's streak of robberies.[1] A quick game of index finger Cinderella would sweep him up inescapably with Lorelei Hunt. The possibility that this was Kurby slow-playing his threat to bring Level Two crashing in was very real. Nate couldn't let that happen.

1.	6 Nov 2011 - Ward Your Doors: London Endurse Streak of Robberies

The werewolf hunter regarded him silently, chin inclined downwards against his chest.

Even aside from the wand that was currently aimed directly at his head, he didn’t like or trust Nathan Briggs. The cocky, overconfident former errand boy had turned flipping on decent people like the Sellaphixes into an entire career of failure and lawbreaking. Briggs had obviously gotten himself tied up inextricably with some dark magical elements, with some very visible consequences judging by his new skeletal addition. If it was indeed Hunt that had used Briggs’ finger separation incident to send a message to the werewolf hunter at his home – if she’d made some sort of connection between them -- then it seemed likely that the former turncoat had kept up his former habit of running his mouth off.

But even so, he hadn’t exactly come here with a secret agenda. Kurby deliberated for a moment longer, and then tilted his head to the side, giving a half-shrug.

“Think I might’ve already gotten most of it,” he said easily, dark eyes still watching Briggs. The younger man still hadn’t lowered his wand, but he looked slightly less set on imminently murdering him. “I wanted to know where the finger came from, who might’ve sent it, and whether you were dead.”

He flashed the younger man a quick smirk, for a moment deciding that consequences be damned. “Although I’d love to know what the hell you said to make someone think that sendin’ me a photo of you’d be a good threat.”

"I don't know," Nate said with an insincere shrug, just as tense now that he knew Bagnold's purpose. Bagnold was a terrible man when he had a question.

"Could it be you're a conspicuously nosy git? Not everyone's as kind and cooperative as I am around here. Werewolf hunters and their piles and piles of friends, right?"

There was no way that Nate was going to admit to Kurby that he'd all but given out his home address to Lorelei Hunt that night when he'd gone searching for the leak. For all he had known (and this still might be the case), Kurby Bagnold had his own special relationship with Hunt. 

"But it's real sweet that you were worried about me," Nate added, laying his hand on his chest and taking the full step to the table. Truly, though, Nate knew that the only concern Kurby Bagnold had was for himself and that Nate's untimely death would throw up a great deal of dust. Nate picked up Kurby's wand now, its handle foreign in his left hand. He made no move to wield it - only to introduce it to the conversation.

"I'll have my finger back, then," he said. All the while, he kept his own wand ready and aimed at the violent fellow at his window.

‘Conspicuously nosy git’ was probably a fair description of him, so Kurby didn’t particularly take offense as Briggs continued to run his mouth off. Letting himself get disarmed wasn’t exactly safe, but the current scenario also wasn’t as dangerous as it could have been. The younger man wasn’t a narcissistic stone-cold killer the way that Tawse was; he wasn’t vindictive or obsessive, as Kurby was starting to peg Lorelei Hunt, and he wasn’t some sort of blood-raged monster like Dugan MacDuff had once been. The most dangerous thing about Nathan Briggs was that he rarely managed to acquire the upper hand in an exchange, which meant that the current power dynamic would likely go to his head.

That spoke to the werewolf hunter’s current strategy: Stay calm and cool. No quick movements. If Briggs wanted to flaunt his advantage, so be it.  He was only here to get answers, not to put the smart-mouthed turncoat in his place.

Briggs had seemingly clamped down on letting anything really slip. He might give more up if he got riled back up to a temper, but, Kurby thought as he watched him levelly, the benefits of confirming the finger’s origin didn’t seem worth the risks of intentionally provoking him. The smart-mouthed snitch hadn’t countered when he’d dropped Hunt’s name in response to the she; hadn’t even reacted, really. The connection made logical sense. None of the werewolf hunter’s other current enemies could form such a direct link between him and Nathan Briggs.

That meant that it was probably time to shift his focus from getting answers to extricating himself from this friendly, genial conversation.

The fact that his wand had stayed undisturbed on the table so far, well within summoning range, had offered a modicum of reassurance through the exchange: it was the trump card that he could play if things took a turn, just like keeping a Howling Salmon Meteor King in his back pocket during a round of Wizards’ Poker.

Then Briggs took a deliberate step towards the table.

The werewolf hunter’s dark eyes shot over to him, his posture deathly still.

If he was going to react, he only had a fraction of a second to do it. But making any sort of motion towards taking back his wand would clearly be an escalation. As much as he hated Briggs, he hadn’t come here to get into a physical altercation with the younger man. Silently, Kurby stood unhappily and unmoving as the former thief picked up his wand.

Briggs’ own wand was still aimed directly at his head, in an obvious threat that had just inched considerably closer to real danger. The werewolf hunter let out a quick breath, trying to release some of the tension from his shoulders. His best options were probably: a) continuing to be an arsehole, which was easy, but not too much of an arsehole, which was harder; and b) continuing to not be duplicitous, which was at least easy in this instance. He’d never intended to keep the finger, and the current standoff couldn’t continue indefinitely if the other wizard actually wanted it back.

“Grand, glad to hear you two still have feelings for each other,” Kurby said breezily, settling to lean back against the wall. “It’s in the ice box in my flat, gobshite. I need my wand to get back in.”

The implication that Nate would ever cross paths with Lorelei Hunt again chilled him to the bone, and Bagnold's snark about it was a twisting dagger to the ribs. Nate would have to sort out how he ever let Bagnold have so much power over him; he'd been to passive about the Sellaphixes, maybe. Maybe the only thing Bagnold would respect was having his wand arm shredded in a lacerating curse.

Now Nate began to question if he even wanted the finger back. Who knows what state it would be in, or what had been done to it, or where it had been. It had been months. He glanced down at the skeletal finger. It was getting twitchy, flinching slightly in the grip every few seconds. Who did he want to be rid of more? Hunt and her wretched bones, or Bagnold?

"Or I could put you in Mungo's and go get it myself," Nate said with a sneer. He had a particular talent, getting into places he wasn't welcome.

The werewolf hunter raised and dropped his shoulders in a shrug. 

“Good on you if you can get in,” he said in an amiable tone, not looking very concerned by the prospect. “Reckon you might need to keep an eye out for Hunt, though. There’s only a couple ways in and out of my building, and if she’s sendin’ me gifts tonight, I’ve got to figure she’s probably watching it.”

Briggs had been all over the map tonight – more unsteady than he would have initially predicted, and his weird boney finger looked awfully twitchy. Kurby kept a careful eye on the younger wizard as he shifted his weight, still keeping his movements benign. He’d activated all of his wards before he’d left, and it was probably unlikely that Briggs could break in; it was definitely unlikely that he’d be able to break in without waking up the entire building, which would at least be something he could smirk about even if he ended up in an unexpectedly early grave. But the failed thief was smug enough that he might decide to try. Hunt was probably his best shot at a deterrent.

Even so, that was why he played it so careful at his flat, wasn’t it? If Briggs really decided to hex him and successfully broke in, the worst he’d be able to do was steal the werewolf hunter’s silver chain mail.  The only really personal artifact that he kept there was an old photo of his siblings.

“Or,” Kurby continued conversationally, arching an eyebrow at Briggs, “if you really want the finger back, I can just go fetch it for you. I don’t want that damned thing in my ice box any longer’n it has to be.”