(no subject)

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

August fifth. A pretty normal day for nearly 6am at a mostly empty Tesco's, the place where people who didn't want to be seen shopping shopped, and Lydia Montag noticed out of the corner of her eye as she filled her basket that a very darkly-clothed fellow was watching her.

Minutes passed.

"Excuse me, miss," said the man, the one Lydia had been watching watch her, "but do you know who that man is?" He gestured to a handsomeish man in his mid-fifties contemplating the cereal. Lydia narrowed her eyes and blinked, then smiled thinly.

"Oh, that's Gabriel Thorne. You should know. He's a big politician -- gonna get bigger," she explained.

"Not much longer," said the dark man, "and I'm only telling you that because you're cute, and you're out of your league in here."

Out of her league -- in a Tesco's at 6am? Sure, it was early, but Lydia was clueless as to what he meant. As she watched him go, bewildered, she heard a cry from behind her, a foreign male voice she didn't recognize, the yelp of what could've been Thorne, and the crashing to the ground of the cereal shelves.

When she saw Thorne on the ground, knife to the heart and bleeding, Lydia knew what the strange man had meant. She looked around to try to find him, and noticed how he had pointedly seemed to just disappear. Had he meant to distract her, then, hope that she, as the only witness to whatever this was, would stay focused on him while his accomplice escaped?

The thought distracted her again, and she almost missed the other darkly-clothed man, the one who must've stabbed Thorne.

And yet he was impossible to miss, mostly because of his speed -- like water, it really was. He leaped up, looked around and jumped toward the window, moving so steadily he could've been a shadow -- an eidolon, Lydia thought, a black phantom.

She watched him go, shoot up out the window and down the fire escape -- and then fall, as if he'd lost all energy. And that was when, moving slowly to the window and looking out, she saw his eyes. They looked empty and hollow one second, horrified and meek the next.

Suddenly, there were people all around her, asking questions, and Lydia was aware that while she'd watched him go, and then spaced out, a cashier must have called 911. And that made sense. Someone else call in the law while she watched the eidolon run. Or fall.

She pushed through them, ran toward the door, and headed out to talk to him, assuming he remained there. She got there moments before the police.

"You okay?" she asked him.

He stared up at her, shivering, and started to talk.

They spoke in German, leaving the audience to stare.


"And you think you're the only one who saw?" the investigator, a tall man with a long black coat and a scruffy beard asked her.

"Nobody ever shops here around now. That's why I do and why I guess the gov did. Simplicity, privacy. We'd grinned at each other in the line a couple of times, me and the gov, but I can't say I knew him."

"And the killer -- he spoke to you. Did you know each other?"

"No. But he spoke in German -- he's got to be German. My dad grew up in West Berlin," she explained, "I know an affect from a genuine voice."

"You'd never seen him before?"

"No. Not him or the other man."

"Other man?"

She told the story, and the investigator eyed her, puzzled, taking it all down without taking his eyes from hers.

"Your name?" he asked, when she'd finished.

"Lydia Montag. And I know," she added, "don't leave town."

She handed Detective Inspector Vaughn-Blair her card and went home, not looking back.