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Walt sneered at Ederud's corpse, regretting the slash he'd made across the man's neck. The blood was getting everywhere.

He made no effort to sheath his sword. Side doors clattered open, and Tristan Ederud's office went from housing one tall, lean demon and one prostrate stiff to being dangerously close to maximum occupancy. The iron odor of blood was filling the under-sized, over-furnished room, and fast; the drafts from the now open doors only made it more apparent.

Walt stepped away from the body. He had plans tonight, the kind of plans ill-suited to bloody footwear.

The new guests were three small, weathered-looking young men, each of them scowling and armed with a ready handgun. Their eyes took stock of the room with admirable speed, but none of them noticed the crimson puddle creeping outward from behind Ederud's desk, or the tip of the dead man's shoe poking out beyond the left side. Their attentions were focused on the dirtied blade of Walt's sword, stupidly ostentatious, flashing in the dim electric lighting.

"Scordato," one of them said, leaning forward as if he didn't quite want to commit to the motion. "Where's the boss?"

"You talk of me as if I were a client-- or wretched, servile vermin, like you," Walt spat, no longer able to contain his disgust. His Vivienne Rachel was gone-- missing, alone, unprotected, taken without the slightest warning!-- and they, and Ederud himself, had done nothing but obstruct his search for information. He went on: "Where's the boss, you ask? The boss? Where's your boss. Your vicious, backstabbing, dishonorable pissant of a boss."

Worse, they had laid the blame on Vivienne herself, claiming she had hired them, to throw Walt off the trail. This had been too much to bear. It had caused Ederud's important arteries to become rather intimately acquainted with several feet of expertly tempered steel.

"He's dead, by the way," Walt continued. "Your boss. Here, on the floor, like the worm he is."

The men held their ground. Six wary eyes were trained on Walt, who until now had seemed quite sane and normal-- at least in terms of the usual visitors to Ederud's illicit investigation bureau. It was Durem, after all. But now, Walt's glamor failed, his true nature revealed, and the men raised their weapons without exchanging glances or saying so much as a word.

The goon on his left fired. Walt did not move, but the shot missed its mark, blasting open the wood of the adjacent wall instead.

It was not his typical style of battle. Had things been different, none of this would have come to pass; Walt would have made his retreat the moment Ederud's body hit the floor. No further confrontations necessary.

But this was no longer a business transaction with a procurer he loathed. It was personal. Tristan Ederud-- of all the vile scoundrels, in all of Gaia-- had slandered Vivienne Rachel Myenlo. He had tried to make of her a villain. Walt's grip on the hilt tightened, his mind wreathed in a fog of rage. There was no suitable punishment for such an insult, save death-- and death to anyone who would serve such a man.

The second and third shots were fired. Walt had begun his forward advance, heedless of any danger; the second bullet tore through his left shoulder, upsetting his balance. Stunned by the intensity of the pain, he stepped backward reflexively, in an attempt to regain his balance.

He had forgotten entirely about the puddle of Ederud's blood.

The goons chose this moment to unload their ammo on him. The laws of physics-- with great, uncharacteristic benevolence-- chose this moment to educate Walt in the results of trying to gain purchase on a slippery surface.

His blood-slick heel seemed to fly outward under his weight. The rest of his body made impact with the floor at the worst possible angle; pain shot through his torso and left leg as the injured shoulder folded beneath him. The gunfire meant to finish him encountered the back wall, just as the first shot had, raining splinters down on him from above.

Walt could not seem to get his lungs to function. "Bastards!" he managed, in a croak. His heart pounded with anger. The glamor dissolved, he made no further attempt at a fair, human mode of fighting. The only thing to do now was to draw on the most powerful diversionary magic he had-- the hallucinogenic kind, the sort that human opponents never seemed able to get past for long enough to stop screaming. Ederud's office grew dark, and the stench of rank blood seemed to thicken in the shade.

As he rose haltingly to his feet, Walt saw only shadows flitting to and fro throughout the cloud of dark. Had he been feeling less murderous, he might have wondered what the men saw. Here one dropped his gun and tried to flee through a wall that was, as it turned out, quite solid; there another fired at the ceiling with staring eyes; here the final one collapsed to the floor.

But just now, Walt had no interest in what any of them saw or felt. Empathy did not occur to him. He made short work of each of them in turn with the soiled blade, barely noticing how deeply and copiously their blood stained his fine clothes. It was unavoidable. Payment would be exacted. Vivienne's face-- bright with mirth-- burned in his mind with each swipe of the sword, and lingered there as he stormed out into the narrow, shoddy alleyway, his horns and eyes and bloodstained garments drawing alarmed stares.

However much he hated to show his nature so plainly in public, this was all collateral. He had work to do. He would redouble his efforts: Search every corner of the city, and every corner of every other city in Gaia. And most importantly, he would do all this as if Ederud had never said anything to give Walt pause-- as if he had never stooped so far as to lay the blame for his confusion at precious Vivienne's feet...

His body thrummed with pain and adrenaline. A lance of agony accompanied each fevered heartbeat and terminated sharply in the bullet wound in his shoulder, but Walt departed with the unbending resolve of a man in complete and desperate denial. He left Ederud's unmanned office open to the city air, the scent of fresh death pouring out into Durem from behind the wide-flung doors.