This follows The Funeral. It’s set in Fae apoc, pre-apoc era, possibly 2010.

“Do you think they did it?”

Senga found it interesting that he used they and not the more traditional it.

She shook her head slowly. “No. No, if Alencaustel was going to do it, they’d either have left absolutely no trace at all, or put up giant signs. Besides, no matter what shit Eavean is throwing around, they’re not a Nedetakaei.”

She dropped her voice to a murmur for the last part of the sentence. For one, it wasn’t a word the Mayor or the Chief of police would (presumably) know. For another, considering her Great-Aunt’s friends, she couldn’t be entirely certain there weren’t Shenera Oseraei – children of the Gods, Law-breakers – in the room. And it was considered ill manners to start a fight at a funeral, no matter what Eavean over there was going.

For a third, she didn’t absolutely know the person she was talking to wasn’t one of those Law-breakers himself.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “You seem confident of their methods.”

“We – yes. I know my cousins, even if we don’t get along well. The way Eavean is screaming and putting up a fuss, I’d put even money on it being her. Or someone else who stands to gain.”

“Did you do it?” His tone didn’t change from lazy curiosity and his body language didn’t shift at all.

Senga made sure hers matched him, all casual-conversation and nothing-to-see here. “Nope. To be honest, I don’t think I could have. Did you?”

And what would she do if he said yes?

He shook his head. “Oaths and promises.” His voice was rueful, even if he still looked nonchalant. “So many oaths and promises. Your Great-aunt there, she had a way of getting those out of people, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah I do know. I guess the question isn’t so much who as why now. Was she working on any new projects?”

“You don’t know? You’re her family.”

“White sheep, remember?” Senga raised her eyebrows. “I hadn’t talked to my great-aunt in years. So?”

“So?” His smirk looked a little strained. If he were an interrogation subject, she’d say he was just about ready to crack.

This wasn’t an interrogation. This was a funeral. A funeral for a relative who had, to be fair, done Senga a number of favors.

“Was she working on any new projects?”

His casual half-smile vanished. “Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you.” There was a crack in his voice. Interesting.

“Oaths and promises,” Senga guessed. “Great-Aunt Mirabella had a fondness for them. Did you get something good in return, at least?”

His smile was back, a little thing that turned up half his mouth and creased a set of wrinkles he might have had for hundreds of years, right at the sides of his eyes. “I don’t think I know you that well yet. Besides. This is about her. Her funeral and all.”

“Everything’s always been about her.” Senga said it with no malice. She had long ago learned to scrub that from her voice around her family. “That’s the thing about Great-Aunt MIrabella.”

He smirked. “That it is — was? No, looks like it still is. You think it finally bit her harder than she could bite back?”

“I think whatever bit her, it probably had something to do with — her being her,” Senga temporized. She muttered another Working, just as something squish and heavy hit her in the small of the back.

“And you!” Eavan’s screech was unmistakable. Which meant Senga had just been hit with a purse. Well, there were worse things to be blindsided with. “What are you doing, flirting with the help when my mother is dead?”

Senga turned slowly. SOme part of her said she shouldn’t turn her back on the stranger, but Eavan was family, which made her the more immediate threat. “Eaven. I’m glad you could make it. How has your little business been going?”

It did what she wanted it to, which was make her cousin take a step backwards. Eaven was a handsome woman, dressed to the nines for this as for everything, her dress not so much low-cut as suggestive. Maybe Lady Tabitha would offer her a position in her House.

“What would you know about business ventures, you ridiculous low-life assassin?”

“Oh, Eaven.” Senga made soft noises like she was worried about her cousin. “First you accuse Alencaustel, and now you think I’m an assassin? The grief must really be getting to you.” She took her cousin’s arm and steered her, using a bit more force than her concern suggested, towards a seat at the side of the room. “Why don’t you rest for a while, and I’ll see if your boy — what’s his name? Ah, Henry — can get you some water.”

She had Eaven in a seat and was off, ostensibly in search of Henry (Eaven never called the boy by name, and Senga wasn’t sure she knew it), before her cousin could come up with another line of attack.

“That was impressive.” She’d almost forgotten about the tall, dark one. “Do you always handle your family with such – ah – targeted grace?”

“Targeted grace?” Senga raised her eyebrows. “That’s a phrase for it.”

“You were unfailingly polite and brutal at the same time. I don’t want to face you in battle, miss.” He smirked at her, but even though his tone was joking, there was a serious tension in his body language. “You’d still be telling me my vest wasn’t quite buttoned right and helping me with my tie when you stabbed me through the heart.”

“Oh, but I’d be tidy about it.” He’d definitely made her as a killer. If he was as old as he said he was, she probably shouldn’t feel too bad about it. Why, then, did Senga feel like he was sizing her up for a coffin next to her aunt’s?

“Ahem. If those who were asked to be present for the reading of the will – and only those – would please join me in the office right off to the side here?” The suited man suddenly had a power and strength about him that he hadn’t demonstrated before. He also had two very tall men in suits that had to be tailored to them – nobody made suits off the rack that large – standing to either side of him. “We are about to read the will.”

Next: Will-Reading http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1266567.html

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This started out as something else, but it appears like in addition, it wants to be a murder mystery. Fae apoc, pre-apoc era, possibly 2010.

Senga didn’t believe it until she saw the body. Ellehemaei did not die very often, and they almost never died of natural causes; until she did a very quiet Working on the body itself, she was still working under the assumption that this was some trick of her Great-Aunt Mirabella’s.

The confirmation that it was real took her breath away. She walked past the body again, looking at what her diagnosis told her more than the corpse. Natural causes? Well, hawthorn was natural, she supposed, and her aunt was chock full of it.

“Miss Attenoin? Do please come to my office at noon. There’s the will reading.” The suited man stank of lawyer, and his suit stank of money. No surprise, considering her great-aunt. But…

“The will?” Senga frowned. “Great-Aunt Mirabella and I weren’t all that close…”

“Nevertheless, she has listed you in the will. Noon. It’s quite important that you be there on time.”

He was a pushy little man. Senga gave him her best eats-bullets-for-breakfast smile. “I’ll be there. Now, if you’ll excuse me… my aunt is dead.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

He scurried off, presumably to bother someone else. Senga stared at the body. At least she’d worn black, and something respectful, at that. There’d been this urge to wear something flamboyant, just to show Great-Aunt Mirabella that she wasn’t bothered by all the spectacle.

Some part of her still thought it was a farce of some sort. She muttered the diagnostic again, just to see if she’d missed something. A fake-death working? It would be hard to pull off with all that hawthorn in the blood. But, then again, the hawthorn would mask it.

“It’s real.” The voice came from above her left ear. She looked up nonchalantly to find that one of the other mourners had moved close to her. He’d snuck up on her. It offended her professional pride. “I didn’t believe it either.” And he seemed entirely unaware that he shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on her.

She looked him up and down — with a good deal of up. He was wearing still-black black jeans, a white button-down, and a black vest. Everything looked as if he’d bought it new, everything except the (also black) cowboy boots. His face was so clean-shaven he had to have used a Working for it, and his hair looked like it wasn’t used to being so freshly washed or so tightly ponytailed.

He looked her down in turn. One eyebrow quirked as his gaze slid over her hip — had he noticed the sheath there? if he had, had he noticed the other two? She was fairly confident about the one at the small of her back, at least.

He was wearing — she looked again — at least two weapons.

“It’s real?” she parroted back at him.

“Her. She’s really gone.” He frowned. “I thought she’d outlive us all.”

Senga stepped away from the coffin, tilting her head to invite him to do the same. “You knew her well?” Great-Aunt Mirabella had run a tidy, if stealthy, empire of businesses, many of them legal. Many people had thought that they knew her.

“I did some work for her, now and then.” He followed her invitation towards a corner of the room, and their place at the coffin was replaced by other funeral attendees — Senga hesitated to call them mourners. She was not here to mourn and she doubted this tall man was, either. “And what about you? Were you one of her associates?”

She chose to ignore the suggestion that she might have been one of Mirabella’s employees. “She’s — she was — my father’s aunt. She outlived him, his mother, and their parents.” By having at least one of them killed. Senga had never been sure about the others.

“Ah. Family.” His expression changed. His whole body language changed. He didn’t quite take a step back, but his hand did drop towards his hip.

Senga smirked. “I don’t suppose you’d believe I was the white sheep?” She kept her own hands where they were, holding her ridiculous clutch purse.

He relaxed infinitesimally. “That would explain why I’d never met you.”

“Ah, so you’ve met some of the other family members, then?” As if on cue, her cousin Muirgen entered the room, with entourage, sobbing loudly and unconvincingly.

He winced. “Yes. DId some work for some of them, too.”

“Great-Aunt Mirabella must have been paying you very well.” There were things she could say that he couldn’t, even now. There were things she could say that, as far as she knew, nobody else could. That had been her condolence prize for her father’s untimely death.

“Something like that, yeah.” He shifted his weight. “Damnit, if it weren’t for that will-reading…”

“You must have done very good work for her.” A glance around the funeral home told Senga that about a third of of the mourners were family; she recognized about a quarter of the rest of them as staff, friends of the family, and important people in the city, including two local newscasters and one woman who ran the highest-class brothel in the city out of her East Ave Mansion. There was the chief of police, and there was the current CEO of the Gleason Steel Works.

“I’m the best at what I do. And I go way back with Mirabella. Been working for her since —” He noted the people standing close enough to overhear and modified his original sentence. “—we were both up-and-coming.”

Hundreds of years, then. Senga hopes her own nerves didn’t show on her face. “I see. So you’ve done a lot of work for her.”

“I—” He was cut off by a wail from cousin Eavan.

“I can’t believe she’s really gone! She can’t be! It’s a lie. You’re making this up to get her money, you bastard law-breaker, you no good half-blood!”

She was swinging her designer purse at an exquisitely dressed person — their back was to Senga, but the cut of the suit was impeccable — with a braid of black hair that reached their thighs. The hair, and the specific (and inappropriate for the setting) insults Eavean was throwing told her who it was.

“Alencaustel,” she breathed softly. “This family reunion just got interesting.”

next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1265057.html

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