mmm Plei, I like it so far. A lot.

One edit though

You did it for her, so she wouldn't have my blood on my hands."

should that be her hands?

YEP!! Eep. Good catch.

My word, you're good. I love it all. I got shivers from this:

The only answer she gave was a stifled sob of relief. Wesley watched appalled as tears spilled from her eyes and down her face in a flash-flood

DAYUM, Plei.

Some more Avengers/Ethan crossover for Fay. I went back and changed the Jag to the red Lotus she always drove; why I was remembering that car as an XKE is anyone's guess. I must be losing my mind; Emma lived in that Lotus Elan.....

---

Emma walked up to Number Seventeen Norham Gardens, and rang the bell.

She was later getting down to Oxford than she'd hoped; thanks to a multi-car smashup on the motorway, a two-hour drive had taken closer to four hours. And thanks to a nice long conference with Steed, she'd been later getting out of London than she'd planned to begin with.

Emma, usually completely self-possessed, was surprised to find herself in a state of perturbation. The meeting with Steed had been peculiar, to say the least; he'd rung up a few people in Oxford, jotted some notes, and rung off, looking unsettled.

"How extremely odd."

He was staring at Emma, his mind visibly working. She waited a moment, but he said nothing.

"Steed? I wasn't privy to the other end of the conversation, you know. Would you mind telling me what's odd? Since I'm the one going off to the world of underclassmen and rowing Blues? Since you've got that Ministry dinner at Downing Street tonight?"

He blinked at her. "Oh - sorry. Well. First of all, your little friend Ethan wasn't making any of it up. The Oxford constabulary has picked up seven dead bodies, all with punctured necks, all empty of blood."

"Seven?" She lifted an eyebrow. "Young Master Rayne said eleven. He said eleven specifically and emphatically. But leave that for the moment - yes, I'll grant you empty dead people are a bit off the usual path. But there's more, isn't there? I know that look."

"Yes, indeed. There are nine people reported missing, all in the past month. The latest one..."

"Steed." She'd caught the edge of real trouble in his face, and spoke sharply. "What is it? Who is it?"

"Crispin DeVries."

There was a long silence, as Emma stared at John Steed, and felt something chilly close around her heart. Crispin DeVries was the Ministry's retired weapons master. He had taught Emma Peel the fine art of breaking an enemy into small compact bits without so much as breaking one of her own fingernails. He was a crack shot, a medalist at both archery and fencing, and he had more differently coloured belts from various eastern martial arts disciplines than Twiggy had lipsticks and miniskirts. He also had a cat's uncanny sense of when he was being stalked; over the years, there had been more than a dozen attempts to take him down. Every attempt had failed, and every attempt had ended up with a dead would-be assassin.

"Unsettling, isn't it?" Steed looked grim, and suddenly older than he had when Emma had walked in. "What on earth could possibly get to Crispin?"

"I don't know." Emma loved DeVries, the way an adolescent girl might love a favourite uncle who slipped her sweets as a child, and who listened to her cry over her first crushes without a word of ridicule or judgement. He had taught her her drop and kick move, and several nasty little moves involving disarming someone much larger than herself, and those moves had saved her life more than once. By Christ, Emma thought, if someone had taken down Crispin DeVries, she was going to hunt them down and there wouldn't be enough left to fill a slop bucket....

(...By Christ, Emma thought, if someone had taken down Crispin DeVries, she was going to hunt them down and there wouldn't be enough left to fill a slop bucket....)

"What else have we got?" She heard her own voice, cracking away from its usual smooth veneer. "Besides seven dead bodies the police are admitting to, and nine missing, including the man I'd personally back to take down Godzilla with his bare hands?"

There wasn't much. The dead people didn't seem to have any touchpoints in common, other than death and exsanguination. Emma took the list Steed had jotted down during his calls to Oxford, and ran a practiced eye down the hastily scribbled notes.

"Student, barmaid, lorry driver, student, student, housewife, student, tutor, retired fencing master..." Her voice wavered a bit on this last, and she took firm control of herself. "A lot of students on the list, but not really odd, I suppose. After all, there's a good-sized University in Oxford."

The detached irony made her sound almost her normal self, and Steed managed a faint smile. She looked down the list again.

"Deirdre Conover, aged twenty, student. Among the missing." Emma looked up. "I wonder....the Rayne boy told me his two friends, the ones he'd found the bodies with, were called Rupert and Deirdre."

"You think it was his playmate going missing that pushed him into calling us? But wouldn't he have said so? And what does a girl that age have in common with whoever or whatever might target someone as formidable as Crispin DeVries?" Steed considered for a moment. "Do you know, Mrs. Peel, I'm getting a very alarming smell about all this. I'm tempted to call the PM and tell him I can't make that dinner tonight. Don't much like the idea of sending you off alone without knowing more about what's happening in the High Halls of Academe."

"No, you go along and have a lovely evening. After all, we don't want to have the PM get all shirty with us - he funds our operation, after all."

"You'll take extra care?"

She smiled at him, a cold smile with danger lurking somewhere behind the long vertical dimples in her cheeks. "Oh yes. I'm going to stop at my flat, in fact, and pick up a few things for the drive down."

"What sorts of things?"

"Knives." The dimples curved deeper and more dangerous. "Nice long sharp shiny knives. They were a present from Crispin."

"Fitting." Steed spoke dryly. For a moment their eyes met, and she saw her own feelings reflected in his taut mouth and drawn brows. "Very fitting indeed. You'll ring up? Check in with the Ministry office in Oxfordshire?"

"Count on it," she told him, and headed out.

• * *

Good one, Deborah. So far.

So far.

Well, I wasn't actually planning on letting the rest of it become crappy, or anything....

Good. But I was mostly saying that I know it was a WIP.

OK.

Sorry, I really don't feel well at all right now, and I can't make head or tail of even simple sentences tonight, unless I'm writing them myself.