A Night to Forget

[Sören]

He could have begun searching the tunnels, but it would be an onerous task; one he was more eager to allow someone else to get on with. While he waited he spent some time cracking into the club's security cameras and unpicking the grainy footage. His new eye shifted focus and adjusted. After a while, in the recesses of his skull, he could feel the beginnings of a headache.

He looked up when company arrived, and chucked out Natalie's phone in answer, battery now dead, crack prominent on the screen. If it concerned him that the man had brought reinforcements, he didn't show it. Instead he only stubbed out his cigarette on the wall behind him.

"How do you know her? I wasn't aware she had friends in Moscow."
Misleading, perhaps; he had not seen Natalie since London several years before, and though he knew she had been in Africa he had not followed her life there. He'd long since discovered that women who called the runes were of little interest unless they had other useful talents - like the healer girl - because he could neither see nor sense what they did beyond a chill discomfort. He only knew she had no contacts in Moscow because Grey had told him; it was part of the reason he was so concerned.

With a flick of his fingers he spun his wallet's hollow-screen and replayed the footage of Natalie's last recorded moments; her walking out of the picture's edges, phone in hand. And the black-haired man who momentarily followed.

Watching that footage again, he conceded that it did not exactly look good.

And if the girl was dead he had wasted an entire morning.

He appraised the American stranger a moment longer. There was nothing to suggest he was what he claimed, but there wouldn't be until he called on the power. Given the underground's reputation, he hoped the admission was true and not just the result of a drunken rambling - it occurred to him then that, rather than divesting the search into more willing hands, he might have instead just invited another body that needed looking after in the darkness. For a moment Declan hovered in the back of his mind; how different that moment might have been if the man had been more than mere mortal.

To banish the thought he curled his fist and tasted the strength of the runes. In the tunnel ahead, where the electrics faded, an orb of light grew into being, awaiting its master.

"Unless you have a better insight or suggestion, I suppose we start looking."


[[The amulet thing Soren wears masks his channeling. If Jared is holding saidin at all, Soren would have marked it but said nothing - didn't want to assume either way]]