It is a truism, in Mystery Plays, that everyone lies to the detective, at least the first time they talk to them. Even supernatural beings otherwise incapable of lying take a sort of dark joy in telling the truth in a particularly misleading way.

The one most likely to lie, of course, is the client who first sends the detective on a case.

The reason for the lie, the ulterior motive behind it, is of course going to be of key importance in the mystery at hand.

In most cases, this motive is shame: They don’t want to tell some random slob of a magical detective about something they’d be embarrassed by if it got out. (This of course, guarantees that it will almost certainly get out in the course of solving the problem the detective was ostensibly hired for. )

Almost as common for an ulterior motive is plausible deniability. Aiming a magic detective at a situation is guaranteed to cause some variety of trouble, and the client can innocently claim that they didn’t realize the mess they wanted stirred up was going to get stirred up.

It would, perhaps, save most protagonists a great deal of time and trouble if they started every case by running a full background check on the person hiring them.

-Quote from an internally circulated employee email at Mystery Play LLC, presumably not for public consumption.

Lorraine reacted first- she grappled the awakened corpse, getting into position to snap his neck in an instant. Simone had her wand out, and I, well…I took my hands out of my pockets, which is all there was really left for me to do.

Lawson squinted at the moving corpse. “Give me a moment.” All the wizard-speak was gone in a moment.

He retreated to his lab, then came back with a plain blank mask that he tossed to Lorraine. “Pull it over his head.”

She did in a moment, and the features filled out to be the original chinless visage of Louis Carrefour.

He started talking in a more comprehensible way almost immediately. “Uh. Hello. Hey, Clark, is that you under all that? I never would have guessed...wow. Also lady, could you stop trying to snap my neck?”

Lorraine looked to the boss’s intercom box. The boss sighed. “Let him go for now.”

Lawson peeled off the fake eyebrows and beard, since he’d been made. “Louis. Mind explaining why you’re undead?”

“I mean, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t do lichcraft, Clark, you know me!”

“Okay, fair, you were never good at necromantic practices, but you’re definitely a talking corpse right now.

“I’m as surprised as you are! I only woke up like this...about a day ago? And I was in that icebox and did you know you can’t open it from the inside? Really unsafe, man.”

Everyone not directly talking to the dead man exchanged a look. Except for the boss, of course.

Lawson kept talking. “So you didn’t fake your death and nearly get us all killed on purpose.”

“What? No, fuck no. I love you guys. I mean, do you know how many packages I’ve bought through you?”

“At least 3 weekends a year for the last five years,” said the boss, over the intercom. “He’s in the Platinum subscriber plan.”

“Yeah, see? Why would I want to get you folks in trouble?”

Lawson stared at him for a long moment. “I wouldn’t imagine it’d be intentional, just carelessness or callousness.”

“Okay, that’s fair. But nah, I’m honestly as confused as you are. And this is going to play all kinds of hell with the family.”

“No doubt. Not that that’s my concern anymore.”

“Aww, Clark, don’t be like that, man. We’re still cousins. And okay, your sister did try to kill me but I never thought you were lesser or anything, you know?”

“Half-sister. And no, I suppose you didn’t participate in the family games of “kick the kid without his own spells. But you also didn’t help.”

The dead man shrugged. “All that would have done was gotten us both beaten up, and I don’t like pain.”

“And yet, you package tours where one of these two would torture you?” Lorraine finally spoke up, and waved a hand at me and Simone.

“That’s under controlled circumstances and they aren’t, like, enjoying it.” A pause. “Well, maybe the blonde did in that one that was set in the haunted amusement park.”

Simone smirked, but didn’t say anything. I tried to remember the package he was talking about, and I think I was playing a huge mute with a sack over his head and test your strength hammer. Not my finest work, but it paid the bills.

Carrefour started feeling the mask, and his face distorted as though there weren’t any bone below the layer of fake skin and then rebounded into place. “God, this is weird. Is there any way to get my real face back? Am I a lich? I don’t remember storing my soul in a duck egg or anything.”

“There are tests we can run, if you’re willing. Some of them...may be painful,” Lawson admitted. “Depending on what kind of undead horror you ended up being. Did you ever make a crossroads deal?”

Louis shook his head. “Nah. Nothing like that. We had an uncle who went Jack, remember? All of us know better than to make any crossroads deals for immortality, it never ends well.”

Jack was a trade term- someone who got magical powers by making so many deals with so many powers that they ended up immortal via the “Ticked off the personification of death” or “Got banned from every afterlife” clause. Going that route deliberately was apt to backfire, and the long-lived jacks only managed it because they got there largely by accident. In this specific case, lucky was definitely better than good.

“Boss? Did we let a black cat in, and could it have jumped over the freezer?”

“...No.”

“Ever get bitten by a watermelon?” Lawson looked to his cousin.

“Uh, no. I think I’d remember?”

“Bitten by anyone else?”

“...Again, no. This is an uncomfortable line of questioning, Clark.”

“Well, usually, so is the process of becoming undead, especially one that seems to be self-willed and coherent. It’s not something one can do without knowing, and yet, somehow you’ve managed it. I’m afraid that we’re going to need some...samples. To analyze.”

Carrefour grimaced. “Fine. I’m not sure if my blood’s actually flowing, mind.”

Lawson shook his head. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. First, we’ll just need some nail and hair clippings. Easiest things in the world for sympathetic magic, and relevant to magic related to the undead thanks to folk beliefs about them continuing to grow after death…”

Lawson led his cousin into another part of his workshop, leaving the three of us alone with the boss’s intercom.

I asked the obvious question.

“What do we tell his family?”

“Nothing, yet. We don’t know what he is, how he was revived, or why. And he doesn’t seem all that eager to go back, for some reason.”

Simone snorted. “I can’t think why, given that the punishment for killing him is only going to be administrative. The Carrefours won’t look kindly on him escaping death by becoming undead, either. It’s an old family rule after so many of them used it to avoid passing their magic on to their heirs. Tradition is now much like the assassin said- they’ll make him retire at best, and appoint a regent to raise his son. At least it won’t be his wife, if I had to guess. She managed to cut herself out of the loop by having him killed.”

I gave her a side eye. “You sound fairly familiar with the process. I thought your family wasn’t old magic.”

She shrugged “The D’Forneus line only got their magic about two centuries back with by bargaining with a goetic demon, but that only makes us new magic by comparison. The family elders all aspire to be treated with the respect of old magic, which is why they try to marry off their sons and daughters to old magic families.”

I suddenly remembered her backstory from the Mystery Play. “So that whole thing where you were forced into a marriage and killed the old bastard...autobiographical?”

Simone just smiled and said nothing.

Since she didn’t get to break anyone’s neck, Lorraine was bored and poking around the workshop, which is never the safest thing where Lawson’s involved, but in this case, all she managed to do was to switch the TV to the local news. She might as well have made something blow up, however.

Normally, the Old Magic Families keep news about unfortunate deaths and what bloody vengeance they’ve wreaked as a result hushed up. They don’t hold press conferences announcing that their son and heir was murdered, nor do they make public accusations against another old magic family in a way that could set off a war.

But that was what London Carrefour was doing live on TV right in front of us.

“At this time, we do not hold Mystery Play LLC responsible, nor the good people of this Wainscotting neighborhood. No one could reasonably expect that a professional killer would infiltrate and kill my son. The Kathor family were no doubt counting on that to get away with this.”

The Kathor family were one of the oldest of the old magic families- practically prehistoric. They claimed a direct line of descend from Hyperborean gods, and it was rumored they were body-swappers- the current head of the family was an ancient wizard who hopped into a new prepared vessel whenever the old one got too decrepit. They were the very definition of not to be fucked with, and yet, here the Carrefours were, fucking with them.

Simone stared at the screen, mouth half-open. “Is he insane?”

“Mad with grief maybe? Or maybe he was already looking for a casus belli,” Lorraine hazarded.

London continued, “We will be meeting with the high council to demand justice, and if it will not be granted, we will take it with our own hands.”

I groaned. “Yeah, they’re planning to start a war. With the Kathors. Everything is going straight to hell.”

And that’s when we heard a yell and a thud from where Lawson had taken his cousin.