Chapter 5: A Cold Case and A Rainy Day

It had started raining while she was inside the station and now Alix paused in the middle of the street to look up at the night sky and take a deep breath, consciously trying to relax as if allowing the rain to wash her troubles away. She felt, rather than saw, the supernatural figure standing on the side of the road, watching. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, studying him for a moment; he seemed to recognize her and she recognized him, but she didn't quite believe her eyes and when she cocked her head that way to get a better look, he was gone.

Alix wondered if maybe he'd been one of her ghosts.

She shook herself free of the thought and continued on her way home, her thoughts returning to the file she'd read. She had quickly scanned each page of the file as soon as she'd gotten her hands on it, storing the information away in her memory just in case she decided to kill time with it on a "rainy day", but when she'd seen the victims, she knew exactly who it was. The method had been familiar because she'd seen it before; it belonged to a powerful… witch Alix had begun referring to as "The Wicked Witch of Cestrescir" due to the fact she'd last been operating in what later became Cestrescir before she had lost track of her due to an unfortunate run-in with a high-level displacement spell that had dumped Alix in the middle of the Sea of Atlantis.

Alix had, of course, expected her to return, but the timing was a bit inopportune.

#

Once home, Alix returned her previously discarded violin to its case on her piano and began walking along a shelf in her well-stocked library dedicated to the numerous journals she'd kept through her lifetime, reading the worn leather spines and the years branded into them, looking for the one marked in the 300s, around when Camelot was still standing. She smiled softly when she found it, pulling it quickly from the shelf and turning to the exact page she was looking for. Scanning what she'd recorded that year about her prey didn't actually give her any new information, but it did draw the memory of the day back to her recall in a more organized manner than she could without it.

"Este Demetriou," Alix whispered the name as she ran her fingers across the dried ink on the page, "what brings you to the Westhay areaI wonder." Whatever it was wouldn't matter in the end, because she didn't plan on losing her this time. The case files didn't have exact locations for where any of Este's victims were killed, but as long as she knew the general area, Alix would be able to find them; a death had always left behind a distinctive sensation, like a trace of her or Daniel's presence when they or one of theirs came to collect souls even if they weren't there physically.

Even so, the sensation wouldn't fade any time soon and it was getting awfully late to be out investigating, especially when Alix drew enough attention to herself as it was without wandering the streets in the dark with a cursed sword. Besides, she was tired, not a physical or mental tiredness that could be cured with a good night's rest, not that she'd ever managed one of those, but the kind of tired that resided deep down in her never-aging soul because it bore too much and she would never truly be able to forget any of it. Still, she tried to cure herself with sleep each night, so she climbed up the stairs of her home and down the second-story hall to her small bedroom where she collapsed onto her bed without even changing out of her ragged clothes of two or three days.

#

Just like every other morning, Alix woke before the sun and was just stepping out of her open-top oriental bath to don clean clothes as the light was starting to peek over the horizon. She let her damp wavy hair fall loosely around her shoulders as she stepped out onto the balcony off her bedroom, leaning on the rails to watch the sunrise. This, to her, was one of the few perks of her long life, she had the time to find untouched places in the world and save them, if she could, for as long as possible.

When the sun was too high to paint the sky anymore, Alix turned her sights on the city, a dark light filling her gaze and a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth at the prospect of tracking down the same Wicked Witch of Cestrescir who had previously eluded her. Briefly, she wondered while she buckled her belt around her waist and tied the bottom of her holster down around her thigh if Este would know she was coming for her in the same way people seem to sense Daniel; Death and Azrael were the only two Soul Eaters ever created, but there were quite a few differences between them. Alix hoped she would know if only to torment her for a while longer. She sheathed her hunting knife in a sheath at her back and holstered her flintlock before she shrugged on her long coat, pausing only to check that her Kindjal was still safely in its sheath within the folds. Then she stepped out her door with a sense of purpose and peripheral excitement she hadn't felt in a long while.