(...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.

I'm loving it. Loving it to bits.

Although I'm not making sense in English that isn't in a story. If that makes sense.

Nic missed the muscle with my MS meds Thursday night, and punctured a vein instead. So I'm low on interferon. It's a long time until next Thursday.

More:

• * *

She stood at the front door, listening to the bell shrilling through Number 17. Behind her was the garden path, leading off the street to the charming cottage where Ethan Rayne had claimed to live. No footsteps, no voices, no lights. Nothing. It was near dark; the summer sun, glinting and dancing, slid towards the horizon. In one of the colleges, bells tolled out the half-hour.

Emma thought for a moment. She could go back to the Randolph, have something to eat, phone around and see if she could scare up anyone among the large acquaintance she shared with Crispin DeVries, who might have information they'd be willing to....

She froze suddenly. Impossible to tell, what had suddenly put all her attention on high alert; she knew only that something, some circumstance, was off. She stood, a piece of statuary in black, motionless in the leafy setting.

Rustle, scrape, rustle.

She melted suddenly into near-invisibility, a trick Crispin had taught her, becoming one with the encroaching long shadows. It had come from inside Number 17, that unpleasant little series of sounds. Whoever was inside, wasn't doing anything they wanted to share with a stranger at the gate. She felt for one knife in its custom sheath just inside her boot, and let the second one slide into her left hand. Good to be ambidextrous. Off to one side of the cottage, among the climbing trellised tea roses and cucumber frames, was a small white gate, hip-high. Emma dropped behind it, waiting and listening. The wall against which she pressed her back boasted three small curtained windows; facing her was a high wooden fence, covered in ivy.

Rustle. Thump thump THUMP rustle.

The hair at the base of Emma Peel's neck suddenly lifted. She stayed where she was, her breath coming shallow and fast. In her day, she had fought killers, dealt with spiders dripping with scientifically enhanced venom, suffered pain inflicted for no better purpose than to see how much she could take before she broke. She had faced all these things with all the weaponry at her command, knowing she was a product of her moment in civilisation, trained to do battle against them. Emma Peel knew all about looking the worst of man's evil in the eye, and kicking it squarely in its bottom.

Yet something about those noises had raised a purely atavistic reaction in her. She understood, after a moment, that she was unnerved.

So, when the laugh came from inside, a high soulless giggle that might have come from the crawlspaces of hell, it took her longer than it might normally have done to react. She trembled a bit, slid the knife's hilt into her best grip, and lifted herself cautiously up to peer in at the window.

The room, a conventional sitting room found in any two-up, two-down detached in England, was lamplit. It should have been muddy with shadow; the only source of vision was the faint artificial light offered by a single bulb. Yet the tableau was clear to the eye, etching itself on brain and heart, the stuff that becomes an uncertain memory, lingering in nightmare.

Ethan Rayne was there. He was seated crosslegged in a crudely-etched pentagram in the middle of the floor. Even at this distance, his eyes looked black, enormous, all one colour, sinkholes into hell. Emma wondered, briefly, just how much hashish he'd smoked. His lips moved rhythmically, apparently chanting something.

She registered his presence, and forgot him at once. The rest of the scene took full attention.

There was a woman in the room, gypsy-pretty, pale, curling hair and a slender figure. She was very oddly dressed, rather as though she'd got her skirt and jacket from a ragbag behind a theatrical costumer's shop. In startling contrast, she was wearing shoes so swooningly trendy that Jean Shrimpton might have worn them on a runway in Paris, all high heels and bits of fluttery ribbon. She was partly in shadow, partly in lamplight, and she seemed to be dancing with herself, crooning as she did so. The word "mad" flicked across Emma's mind, and her gaze moved on.

A man, young and bottle-blonde, caught somewhere between mod and rocker, seemingly uncertain of which he wanted to be. From the waist down he was pure Kings Road, red velvet trousers tight enough to show hipbone, and high-heeled boots; from the waist up he seemed to have decided to go for the scooter club black leather and chains look. He was looking with a mixture of exasperation and adoration at the dancing nutter in the posh shoes.

There was a third figure outside the pentagram: a girl lay, sleeping or unconscious, on the floor. As Emma watched, the dancer stepped fully into the circle of lamplight. She straddled the sleeper, and pulled her up with one hand as though the adult body had no more weight than a feather duvet. She said something to the blonde man - Emma caught a few words in a harsh cockney twang but they made no sense, something about a spike - and then, as Emma watched in shock, she smiled at Ethan Rayne and her entire face changed, became distorted, teeth curling out like the wolf in the fairy story, primal darkness, deep edged ridges coming from nowhere on brow and nose to absorb the light in the room and give back none.

Emma tightened her grip on the knife, and fetched a long, shaken breath. She tensed her muscles, preparing to kick in the glass.

The hand on her shoulder took her knees out from under her.

ooh, what an evil place to stop!

I do love Mrs. Peele

Meep! Lovely.