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[cross_and_bow]

Bella looks up Tony Stark. (There's no reason not to.)

...Okay. He looks familiar. And his death those several months ago was really very suspicious, and she doesn't think anyone has been doing her morgue trick in New York City. And his more reclusive identical twin's body was never found at all. (If there was an identical twin, and not just Tony Stark theatrically pretending to be two people with mirrors or holograms or Photoshop and cooperative witnesses giving insistent interviews and then suddenly being dead and no longer able to pretend. There was, after all no sign of a twin before a sudden debut when he - they - was or were fifteen, and... "Sherlock Holmes", really? There's not even a hint of a twin in Tony's birth announcement, which she checks because that's the obvious thing to check.)

Come to think of it, Mr. Does Not Stick To Flypaper never introduced himself.

She supposes that his cute laser trick didn't work that well, if he got got. (But she saw it burn him. It's a clever weapon, should take almost no skill to wield a continuous beam - what kind of onslaught could have gotten around that?)

Nothing about her routine changes in response to this information.

Until several days later when she's crossing another neighborhood (seventeen to go) and - he just keeps popping up, doesn't he?

Comments

[cross_and_bow]

They're fast. Bella's faster, but there are two of them, and if they have hearts they aren't conventionally located. They don't go down after her first hit, or her second - and now they know something's up with their intended prey, and they advance faster, increasingly pincushioned but barely slowed down.

"Sherlock?" she squeaks as she runs out of bolts in this quarrel and trots away, backwards, reaching into her bag for the next.

[eversomuchfun]

The moment that she speaks coincides almost exactly with the moment that Sherlock abandons concealment and charges.

Four seconds later both demons are dead.

[cross_and_bow]

Bella's breathing hard more out of emotion than exhaustion. "N-nicely done," she says.

[eversomuchfun]

"You're welcome," he says lightly. "I remember these fellows from the incident the other day; I didn't want to connect us in their minds until I was sure I needed to kill them both."

[cross_and_bow]

"I don't think most kinds of demons eat people the way vampires do. What did they want with me?" Bella wonders, putting a new quarrel into her crossbow before she stashes it in her messenger bag again.

[eversomuchfun]

"Not sure," he says. "Sport is a likely hypothesis."

[cross_and_bow]

"The person they killed before was also a woman, wasn't she?" Bella asks, frowning. "Did she have any other notable features? How old was she?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Now that you mention it, she was almost exactly your height," he says. "Otherwise unalike—older, browner, not a student, not connected to the police in any obvious way. The height may or may not be a coincidence."

[cross_and_bow]

"Okay. I'll ask Charlie to keep an eye out and see if anyone turns up dead of barbecue-fork-unrelated causes, especially if they're similar to her in cause of death. If they're not just playing around there might be some connection and we can figure out what they're doing."

[eversomuchfun]

"Sounds reasonable."

Cause of death in that woman's case was mainly teeth, as he recalls from his brief glimpse.

[cross_and_bow]

"The barbecue fork thing was really ridiculous before I showed up. I can't even figure out why this town is inhabited," mutters Bella, looking at the demon bodies. "Hm. I don't have a procedure for dealing with these. The vampires take care of themselves."

[eversomuchfun]

"Never underestimate the human capacity for denial. Do you object to just leaving them here?"

[cross_and_bow]

"I suppose I can explain them to Dad and he can either make something up or nudge it towards being the thousandth annual unsolved murder of something not found in any biology textbook," she says. "Didn't they have friends, though? Are they more likely to do unpleasant things to one or the other of us if they find the bodies?"

[eversomuchfun]

"In a town like this, I expect even the demons know that an unexplained disappearance is an unexplained death. They may be able to track you by your arrows, I suppose, if they get their hands on the right magic somehow or other."

[cross_and_bow]

Bella solves that problem by collecting the bolts. She wipes them off on the nearest patch of grass to the point where she's willing to have them in her messenger bag, and stows them.

[eversomuchfun]

"That should be all right," he says critically, casting a final glance over the bodies. (The night he dug a bullet out of his shoulder, he also got a new coat. This one has come this far without getting bloodstained.)

[cross_and_bow]

"Okay." Bella skips crossing the rest of this block; she doesn't want to be observed nonchalantly wandering around in easy view of a pair of corpses. She turns the corner and starts working her way down Santa Clara Avenue. "...Thanks," she adds. "Thanks a lot."

[eversomuchfun]

"All in a night's work. I'll just go back to being unobtrusive again, shall I?"

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah. Thanks," she says again.

[eversomuchfun]

He smiles briefly and finds a shadow to disappear into.

[cross_and_bow]

She completes the crossing of the neighborhood.

She checks on the demons again, on her way home.

The bodies are gone.

[eversomuchfun]

"Well, that's interesting," says Sherlock.

[cross_and_bow]

"It is. There was a window of -" She looks at her watch. "About an hour. Do you happen to know what kind or kinds they were? Do those just disappear or dissolve or get assumed into another dimension on death?"

[eversomuchfun]

"This is one of the species I did not recognize," he admits.

[cross_and_bow]

"There are so preposterously many..." she mutters. She doesn't go down that block; she keeps going and takes the next left instead.