Hedda's vertebrae registered the chill first—crystalline frost creeping through intercostal spaces as Solani's fractured testimony unfolded. Three days. Four souls. No forensic breadcrumbs.
"Priority protection protocols activated," Hedda stated, her soprano calibrated to trauma-soothe frequencies. Solani's pupils constricted—a stress response momentarily stabilized by the Hunters' Covenant lexicon.
The widow's fingers clawed at her cameo necklace. "Feyce's birthday cake... vanilla with marzipan owls..." Her whisper disintegrated into wet, animal sounds. "He licked the frosting from—"
"Hedda suffices." The Huntress tilted her chin toward Fran. "Consultant pathologist."
Fran's glove snapped a fresh evidence bag. "Shall we commence the psychological vivisection?" Her scalpel gleamed with anticipatory sheen.
"We'll mobilize all resources," Hedda recited the Covenant's standard catechism. The words tasted of embalming fluid—sterile and preservative.
Solani's trembling intensified. Every Huntress knew: once the heretical sigils bloomed across flesh, countdowns measured in heartbeats. Fran's scalpel hand twitched, calculating how many viable organs remained in a body post-corruption.
"Even apostate deacons..." Hedda's gloved finger traced her own scarred collarbone. "...crumble before consecrated ballistics." Her pulse quickened recalling that skirmish—how the deacon's ribcage had unfolded like blasphemous origami mid-battle.
Fran's tongue clicked. "Silver-jacketed piety rounds? How... theatrical." Her scalpel sketched imaginary incisions across the Persian rug. "My methodology's more... surgical."
The widow's moan crescendoed. "Feyce's toy soldiers... his birthday candles—"
"Tissue samples," Hedda interrupted, producing specimen jars. "From all vanished persons."
The memory of that massacre prickled Hedda's scar tissue—how the apostate horde had metastasized, each sacrificed acolyte birthing three thralls. Fran's scalpel hand twitched, calculating biomass conversion rates.
Solani's sobs subsided into clinical intervals. "My emotional... incontinence." Her gloved hands pressed against ocular orbits. "The east wing—" The gesture encompassed vaulted ceilings. "—holds nothing but ghosts now."
Hedda's nod acknowledged both apology and privilege. Solani's lineage glinted in the silver tea service—new money polished to aristocratic sheen. Logan's Tesla coils powered half the district. Such families wielded influence that could stall even Covenant investigations.
"Authorization secured," Hedda stated, though her gloved fingers tightened. Circumventing noble immunity protocols would mean endless paperwork—triplicate forms inked with bureaucratic pathogens.
Fran's tongue clicked. "Shall I check for ectoplasmic residue?" Her scalpel gleamed. "Or perhaps... inheritance patterns in the floorboards?"
Since the other party was willing to cooperate, there were no lingering concerns...
"Ms. Solani, the pattern on your carpet is truly beautiful."
Suddenly, Fran, who had been quietly sipping tea next to Haida, made a seemingly out-of-place comment about the living room carpet. Her remark was rather unexpected and somewhat ill-timed.
This prompted Haida to glance sideways, unsure of Fran's intentions.
"Dr. Fran, I'm glad you like it. My husband bought it recently while on a business trip to Atiran… These exotic patterns are always quite unusual, but the quality of the carpet is indeed high. Have you seen this style of pattern before?"
Solani also found Fran's comment a bit strange, but out of good upbringing and courtesy, she instinctively explained the carpet's origin.
"No, it's my first time seeing such a pattern. I just spoke my mind; please don't pay it any mind."
As she spoke, Fran took a glistening capsule packaged in a paper box from her medical kit.
"Well... your mental state seems rather poor. I happen to have some medication that can help ease your mind. You must give it a try; it will make you feel better."
"Please don't worry; the ingredients are very mild and are typically used internally within our Hunter's Guild for members in need of mental recuperation."
Fran's smile radiated clinical warmth, the kind that made patients sign consent forms against better judgment. "Our Covenant's pharmacopeia works wonders," she crooned, pressing the capsule into Solani's palm.
Hedda's ocular muscles tightened—a microexpression lost to all but Fran. Our Covenant? The Huntress' gloved fingers twitched. How effortlessly the surgeon co-opted institutional pronouns.
"Forensic consultant," Hedda clarified through clenched molars, knowing full well "coroner" would send the widow into hysterics. Her teacup rattled against saucer as Solani swallowed the pill.
"Gratitude, doctor." The widow's trachea bobbed—trust coerced by pharmaceutical theater.
Fran's scalpel-sharp nails tapped the Persian rug's encrypted pattern. "Rest assured, the dosage is... ecclesiastically calibrated."
Hedda's Earl Grey turned to ash on her tongue. Every sip carried the metallic aftertaste of complicity.
Fran's surgical prowess stood unquestioned—Hedda's own scarred ribcage bore testament—yet her methodologies danced on the knife-edge of orthodox pharmacology.
"Non-teratogenic, I assure you." Fran's gloved fingers twirled the capsule. "Though side effects may include... perspective realignment."
Hedda's grip tightened on her bone china teacup. The Chancery's communiqué ("Subject exhibits non-hostile parameters") provided cold comfort when Fran's ethics oscillated between Hippocratic oath and Lovecraftian trial.
Solani's brow unfurled like post-op sutures dissolving. "Sweet... like Feyce's birthday marzipan..." Her tongue probed the aftertaste, neural pathways flooding with placebo payload.
"Compliance rewards us both." Fran steepled her suture-marked fingers in surgical benediction. The widow's eager ingestion pleased her—a promising specimen for longitudinal observation.
"Glucose optimizes suggestibility," she conceded, pocketing the empty blister pack. "But the real artistry lies in the saccharine vector."
Hedda's tea turned to mercury in her mouth. Every swallow carried the weight of complicit approval.
Fran's pocket watch swung with hypnagogic precision, its brass patina catching firelight in fractal patterns. "Hemodynamic equilibrium approaches," she crooned, each syllable timed to the pendulum's arc. "Let the cortisol tides recede..."
Solani's eyelids fluttered like chloroformed moths before surrendering to synthetic serenity. Hedda's gloved hand twitched toward her concealed sidearm—half-expecting the surgeon to extract organs mid-hypnosis.
"Sedatives are for hacks." Fran snapped the timepiece shut, its click resonating like a scalpel hitting stainless steel. "My compound targets amygdala hijackers... with symphonic precision."
Her nail tapped the widow's radial pulse. "Observe—REM patterns stabilizing, noradrenaline levels plateauing." The clinical pride in her voice chilled deeper than any winter gale.
Hedda's tongue probed a molar crown, tasting the metallic tang of ethical compromise. Fran's methods danced along FDA guidelines like a scalpel balancing on prohibition's edge.
"The compound lacks soporific properties," Hedda observed, gloved fingers tightening around her teacup. "Hence the supplementary hypnosis to eliminate... variables."
Fran's surgical gloves met in mock ovation. "How by-the-manual of you." Her scalpel tapped the Persian rug's encrypted motifs. "Though my motivations skew more... recreational."
Solani's slackened jaw glistened under the chandelier—a marionette with serotonin strings. The surgeon's tongue clicked. Waste not, want not.
"Thirty-minute cognitive window," Fran declared, pocket watch chain glinting like IV tubing. "Precision timing prevents ethical complications."
Hedda's molar ground against the unspoken question—why not sixty? Ninety?—as Fran's scalpel traced chronometer patterns across the widow's pulse point.
Hedda's gloved fingertips brushed the wainscoting—forensic metronome counting seconds stolen from Solani's chemical slumber. Her gunmetal gaze dissected the parlor: Atiran brass astrolabes crowding mahogany shelves, sandblasted urns whispering of desert crypts.
"Funerary artifacts doubling as decor?" Her boot heel paused over rug patterns mimicking arterial networks. Senior morticians knew this truth: every wealthy household curates its own museum of death.
The grandfather clock's pendulum swung like a censer. Thirty minutes. Twenty-nine. Fran's pocket watch had synchronized their dance to pharmacological precision.
Why this subterfuge? Hedda's knuckle whitened against a hidden blade. Authorization forms lay signed upstairs, yet the huntress moved like a thief in her own sanctioned raid.
Fran's scalpel laughter seemed to echo from the chandelier. Tick-tock, little watchdog. Even saints pilfer secrets when the hourglass bleeds.
Hedda's mind purged the rogue thought like cauterized tissue. Twenty-three minutes.
Her architectural survey left no baseboard unprobed, no joist uncalculated. The wine cellar's Bordeaux bottles stood sentinel in dust—liquid sarcophagi whispering no heresies.
"Domestic banality," she muttered at the vanity's perfume archipelago. No xenovoric taint. No hidden chapels.
Then—
The Huntress's glacial features thawed into kintsugi warmth. Her reflection smiled back, beatific and alien.
"Of course," she breathed, gloved finger hovering over a hairpin's mundane angle. "The absence is the evidence."
Hedda's posture shifted like mercury reshaping itself. She hung phantom coats on spectral hooks, her movements mirroring Solani's domestic choreography down to the millimeter.
The Huntress settled before the vanity as if inhabiting a memory. Solani's ivory comb slid through nonexistent hair—a widow's ritual performed by proxy. Her reflection in the family portrait's glass blurred at the edges, merging with the smiling wife frozen in happier timelines.
Psychological Vivisection Protocol Activated
This was no mere profiling. The virtuoso mortician had dissolved her psyche into solvent, reconstituted it as Solani's cognitive doppelgänger. Every dossier page memorized, every grief tremor cataloged—now weaponized into perfect empathy.
"Baseline established," Hedda murmured, fingertips brushing the photo frame's gilded edge. Her voice carried the widow's breathy contralto. "Contamination vectors... concealed in domesticity."
Fran's scalpel glinted from the doorway. "Marvelous, isn't it?" she whispered to no one. "The girl carves personas like cadavers."
Hedda's fingertip paused over the vanity's silver comb. There, nestled among hairpins - the Chalice Sigil glowed with electroplated purity. The White Cup's emblem: four equal sides framing liquid mercury, symbol of Norington's Tesla-sparked renaissance.
"Registered devotees," she murmured. Common enough among the nouveau riche who wired cities and raised arcology spires. Logan's power grids pulsed with the same current that charged this cult's altars.
As her borrowed persona dissolved, the Huntress' borrowed warmth evaporated into surgical frost. Then—
Her nostrils flared.
The aroma hit like an olfactory ambush—searing beef fat intertwined with rosemary sprigs, cracked peppercorns, and the caramelized esters of Shaoxing wine. Not even the room's Kyphi resin incense could stage a counteroffensive against this Maillard reaction onslaught.
"Dinner preparations at the scene," Hedda muttered, the memory of Fran's offhand remark curdling her gut flora. The surgeon's scalpel-wielding hands now juggling a skillet—surreal as a cadaver serving high tea.
Fran's voice trilled from the kitchen alcove. "Sous-vide would've been preferable, but arterial searing has its charms!" A sizzle punctuated her statement.
Hedda's gloved fingers whitened around her teacup. The absurd hypothesis crystallized: She orchestrated this entire charade... for a cooking experiment?