After dashing back to the kitchen while screaming his head off, Zeke returned to the messy crime scene alongside the Healers.

There was an awful stench of blood in the air with a tinge of strong chemicals.

Zeke spotted the katana’s artistic sheathe that rested on the floor before the bed. He then fixated on the katana and noticed that the red kanji on its black blade was changing. The characters would vanish, and then a whole new set would reappear.

An agitated Aida jumped in front of Yaalon’s corpse and turned to the others while stretching her arms to either side, blocking the view of the sword. “Nobody look at Tsukikaze!”

“Okay, we won’t,” Gill said. “Just don’t touch the body.”

“Why can’t we look at it?” Ugo said.

“It’s a cursed sword that has trouble being faithful to a single owner,” Akachi explained. “It can change owners on a whim just because they like how a certain human looks. When it makes up its mind, it won’t let itself be used by anybody else, but only if the two make direct eye contact—”

“Don’t talk about him like that!” Aida shouted. “He just… argh! Just don’t look at him!”

Ugo glanced at everyone in the room and said, “Let’s just say what we’re all thinking.” All eyes fixated on him as he continued. “This was obviously done by Isaac. The dude is demented. He probably has some reason only a lunatic could understand.”

“But Isaac wasn’t even here,” Kian said.

“Yes. Isaac was in Winterberry the entire time,” Gill defended and sighed. “I was also wondering about what he could be up to, so I had secretaries surveillance him. He didn’t leave that spot.”

“So?” Ugo replied. “Maybe, he just popped back into the house for a moment, like a nanosecond or something, and your servants missed it. In that tiny time frame, he offed Yaalon and then teleported back. Or maybe, he made a clone. With magic involved, literally, anything is possible.”

“Except, in this case, no magic was involved,” Aida chimed in and peeked at the body behind her. “If a clone did it, then there would be Mana emanating from this scene, but there’s nothing. Aside from Tsukikaze’s. No other Mana is coming from the body.”

“This was done with no magic at all,” Violet concluded.

“So, it could be anyone,” Akachi said.

Then, Aida started to snarl and jerk her head to her sides.

“What’s wrong, Aida?” Wade asked while approaching her.

She began yapping and covered her nose. “My nose…” she complained, with her voice now nasally. Aida backtracked to the katana and sniffed it. “I can’t smell anything.”

Gill stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m not the only one getting a whiff of it, right?” He smirked while shaking his head, congratulating the perpetrator’s guile. “The murderer used bleach. They must’ve doused themselves with the stuff.”

Zeke moved up to Gill, raising a hand. “Wait, like nose blindness with dogs? Something as normal as bleach can affect a kitsune’s abilities like that?”

“Oh, she’s already shared that with you, good. Saves me time on explaining.” Gill walked over to the window at the end of the room, avoiding the blood stains on the floor and making eye contact with the sword. “Yes, some normal items from our world can affect magical creatures in ways you wouldn’t expect.”

Violet shot a look at Aida and smiled devilishly. “Maybe, you were behind this.”

“Why would I use my own sword to commit a crime and leave it at the scene?” Aida said, her nose was still clogged. “And the bleach…?”

“So, no one would suspect you.”

Wade approached Violet. “I was watching over her the whole night. She didn’t move.”

Violet looked back at everyone. “We’re really going to depend on this dopehead for credibility?” She gave Wade a glare. “You were barely lucid last night.”

“I was fine,” he argued.

“Looking over all the details,” Gill said, looking out the window. “You let someone sneak into the room and steal the…” he caught a glimpse of a growling Aida from the corner of his eye and then said, “Tsukikaze.”

She smiled.

“Well… okay, maybe I wasn’t all there. Something happened to my stash. It ended up way more powerful than expected.”

“I’d suspect that you probably orchestrated all of this, but no, you don’t have the attention span for that,” Gill said. “You were poisoned, perhaps. No magic. This was very well planned.”

And then it hit Zeke.

Someone took advantage of the moment when they were all having fun together to strike. Drinking and partying while scheming a murder in the back of their heads. Zeke felt his skin boil the more he thought about it. He let his guard down because he believed that what they had last night was genuine, but a snake amongst them was just maintaining a fake smile.

“It has to be either Ugo or Zeke,” Ashlin said nonchalantly.

Zeke and Ugo shot a look at the comely redhead. “What?” They screeched.

“Two new members pop up, we have a get-together with them for the first time, and somebody ends up dead?” Ashlin argued.

“She has a point,” Wade agreed.

“No, she doesn’t!” Ugo said. “Okay, instead of just accusing each other randomly. We need to set up some timelines. Me, Ashlin, and Akachi were the last to leave.”

“Yeah, you were really drunk,” Akachi said, looking over to Ashlin. “Me and Ugo took you back to your room like gentlemen.”

“That’s all you did?” Aida asked.

“Yes! Who do you think we are?”

“Anyways…” Akachi continued. “Before that, Violet and Zeke left together.”

The spotlight now shone on Zeke and Violet.

“We spent the night together,” Violet said, swaying to Zeke. “And that’s our alibi, right, Ezequias?”

“I…I… I… yeah,” Zeke replied and then caught Ugo with a grim expression. It didn’t look like jealousy, though, throwing him off.

“Before us, Wade left with the mutt,” Violet said.

“I guess that means I left before them,” Kian said. “And Yaalon left before me, and Gill, you were the first to leave.”

“What are your alibis?” Akachi questioned and crossed his arms, impersonating the last generic cop he saw in a movie.

“I was in my lab,” Kian said.

“And I was in my room,” Gill said reluctantly.

“So, you ain’t got no alibis,” Akachi said with a smile, declaring checkmate.

“We don’t know the time of death yet, so it could still be anyone,” Gill said calmly.

Ugo looked over to Gill. “You invited us to this resort, hell, you came up with the idea for the party.”

“I wanted a more sophisticated get-together. Drugs and alcohol weren’t my ideas, but if I must defend myself further.” He raised his hands and said, “I constantly exude Black Magic energy. It’s a curse.” Gill glanced at the body. “As much as I’d like to have something as useful as cloaking my Black Mana, I can’t. So if I did it, you would all be sensing my Mana from Yaalon’s body from the moment you stepped in here.”

As another argument swelled amongst the Healers, the inside of Zeke’s head grew incredibly loud with rampant thoughts muffling the world around him. You let a good person die again, Zeke said in his head. He wasn’t sure if it was to himself or to a God he had trouble believing in even after learning that angels were real.

And then he clung to one of the myriads of swirling thoughts in his head and said, “Wait, now that Yaalon is dead, is there any way to know if he was the Damned or the Deliverer?”

The room silenced for Zeke at that moment.

“Yes,” Gill responded. “Whenever a person dies, essence is left behind in their Containing depending on whether they go to Heaven or Hell. As long as most of the Container is intact, essence can be detected. There’s a theory that one of the first Healers came up with the idea of cremation to hide a person’s destination in the afterlife from others.” He turned to Aida. “Would you mind sheathing Tsukikaze and not touching anything else?”

Aida did as asked, and as she walked to her sheathe, the others looked away from Tsukikaze. Aida gently grabbed the sword’s handle and pulled it out of Yaalon, making a squelching sound. She cleaned the blade with her hand, got rid of the rest of the blood with one shake, and then sheathed it.

“Ashlin, would you do an examination for us?” Gill asked politely.

Containing her giddiness of being asked for something from Gill, Ashlin sauntered up to the bloody corpse keeping her flinty expression in check and held her hands with open palms forward. Her palm glowed as her pupils disappeared.

She reverted to normal, and the light from her palm dissipated as she announced, “Nothing.”

“Meaning…?” Ugo asked.

“No essence at all. His soul is who knows where. He wasn’t the Damned nor the Deliverer.”

“He was a good person, though,” Zeke said.

Akachi scoffed. “Calm down, shorty, ya barely knew the guy.”

“I knew what he wanted to do: help people. He had a great idea and openly shared that dream with everybody, and one of you decided to kill him. I don’t care what it takes. I will find out who did it and make them pay.” Zeke began scouting the crime scene, trying not to be deterred by Yaalon’s wide dead eyes following his every move.

“Isn’t there a time spell or something someone can use to rewind to the moment it happened?” Ugo asked.

“Time spells are the most taboo, strictly forbidden, and extremely difficult to learn,” Violet explained. “Even with our affinity to magic, we’d have to read through hundreds of scrolls and meditate for months on end just for one spell. And our Garbs won’t tell us how to do them.”

Zeke’s focus locked onto a laptop on Yaalon’s desk. “There could be something we can find there,” He said as he walked up it.

“Do you know the passcode?” Kian asked.

“There’s no option for biometrics. Anybody have an idea what it might be?”

Everybody exchanged looks. Zilch.

“It’s not like we were his friends or anything,” Ashlin said.

“Knowing Yaalon,” Gill started. “If there’s anything important on that laptop, it’s probably magic proof, encrypted without any magic, and I don’t think anyone here has any hacking skills.”

“Vee,” Zeke called.

“Yes, Ezequias?” she responded sweetly.

“Can’t you scan his brain or something for clues?”

“Unfortunately, no, Rulitos, my mind spells don’t work on the dead. His brain is a locked safe.”

Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.

The digital chirp sounded from various sources in the room. The ennead of Healers all slipped their cells out of their pockets, followed by a choking silence that had them glancing over to Yaalon’s corpse.

“It’s an email from Yaalon….” Aida was the first to say.

“The subject is…” Wade continued for her. “If You Are Reading This, I am Already Dead.”

“Okay, everyone. Main living room. Now.”

The email contained a video.

The Healers collectively marched their way into the living room. After Gill transferred the video onto the movie theater-sized TV, he ordered his otherworldly servants to stay clear of the room and keep themselves busy. Each Healer made themselves as comfortable as they could be as they fixated on the screen.

The video began with Yaalon wearing his mystical garb (without the skull mask and his hood lowered) and sitting on a stool in a tidy medieval laboratory. He was facing the camera with that determined mug of his as always.

“I set this email to be sent in case I went longer than 8 hours without logging into it, exactly 8 hours and 2 minutes, which means if you are watching this… I am dead.”

Yaalon’s flinty stare through the TV screen from beyond the grave made the multiple knots in Zeke’s stomach tighten, forcing him to rise from his seat as the video message continued to play.

Yaalon looked to the side and smirked. “Me being murdered should be no surprise. I began investigating some dangerous happenings all on my own. Because I can’t trust any of you, and I believe this video itself proves that I wasn’t just being paranoid. I’ve been looking into the event of the Seals breaking. I know four of you were behind it, and Isaac was definitely one of them, but that’s not why I think I was killed.…”

During his pause, Zeke let out a heavy breath, only just realizing then he was holding it. He began to study his fellow Healers, hoping to find a slip-up, but they were all… static. Even Ugo. It was eerie. As if he was the only human in the room with a cog of robots not doing a good job at blending in.

“It was because of something more recent,” Yaalon said, yanking Zeke out of his rumination. “The disease spreading in Zurich is serious. It has doctors stumped. The symptoms aren’t deadly yet, but it is supernatural without a shadow of a doubt. I’ve examined it myself. The infectious specimen is still weak, but its Mana potential is frightening.”

Like a doctor about to tell some bad news, Yaalon leaned forward and folded his hands. His expression grew a little softer.

“Listen up. It’s obvious who would be capable of conjuring an infectious agent like that—”

“Whoa!” Ugo exclaimed while pulling back. “Did anyone see that?”

“Shhh!” Aida reprimanded Ugo.

The video continued on. “But I am going to say it anyway to eliminate any doubts….” Yaalon said.

Zeke flinched all over and examined the others with widened eyes. His heart felt like it was expanding, crushing itself against his ribcage. The rest of the Healers stayed quiet and focused on the video.

This was it. The seconds leading to the revelation of the turncoat amongst them felt agonizingly long.

The Yaalon in the video stopped, and he walked up to the camera. The intensity in his stare was so alive that it didn’t feel like it was a pre-recording.

“Kian is the one behind the disease.”

Zeke’s gaze was now glued onto Kian. He didn’t move an inch.

“The infection is his design,” Yaalon from beyond the grave added. “The reason why he is spreading it, I am not too sure, but it can’t be anything good. I got too close and acted imprudently. He caught me and murdered me… damn. I’ll say it again. No need to investigate any further. Kian did this. He needs to be stopped.”

Gill grabbed the remote and paused the video. He removed his glasses and asked Kian with a look that made Zeke twice. “Well, mate? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Kian didn’t say a word.

MURDER SCENE CONCEPT ART #1

TSUKIKAZE FEEDING CONCEPT ART

FOR WHAT'S TO COME IN THE FUTURE