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Easter Six and the Deadly Dowsing

Part 1

For bbbuuu

By Draconicon

Easter Six sat outside the Mausoleum of the SBI, his arms crossed and his chin against his chest. To anyone else looking at him, he might have seemed to be asleep. He wished that he was; the dreams that came were better than the thoughts that always lingered out here.

The Mausoleum was different from the freezer next to the medical ward where the dead bodies were kept. Beyond the rune-marked, spelled doors that blocked the only way in or out of the Mausoleum were the bodies of dead agents, victims that knew more than they should, and anyone else that the SBI had deemed useful after they had been found dead. Too risky to put in a common graveyard, too useful to be incinerated.

Easter took a deep breath, the rabbit leaning his head back and letting his ears fall over his back and shoulders. He looked up at the ceiling, imagining what it would be like to be interred there. As far as he knew, it was no different than being buried in the outside world, save for two things. The body was interred in iron, gold, and diamonds - something that fucked with the Bureau's budget something fierce, but ensured that outside magic couldn't affect the person inside - and they were always available to the SBI's resident necromancer.

Whoosh.

Speaking of which. Easter looked to the door, watching as the raven stepped free. The bird hopped rather than walked, and he was dressed in a white coat, one that ran from his neck all the way down to where the ankles would be on a different species. The bird's talons gripped at the floor nervously, and he shook his head.

"This isn't authorized. I shouldn't be doing this."

"You wanted to pay off the favor. This is how you're gonna do it."

"It's not right."

"Most of this isn't. But it's not wrong, either."

"Nnnngh."

"You going to do this or not?"

"Just...just for you. Then we're done. Got it? Done."

"Done."

"Come on."

The bird turned around, hopping, fluttering its wings. Anthony "Hopper" Reeves had been a doctor of good standing in the real world outside of the SBI, but as soon as the organization discovered that he had a talent with the dead as well as the living, they'd snapped him up. Easter had been part of the team to do it, too, and had passed a last message from Hopper to his family, letting them know that he would be okay.

That was the debt that was being wiped away today. A favor that he had held onto, and one that he was loath to spend, but one that he needed to burn to get what he wanted.

They walked through the burial garden, a place where flowers were grown in abundance. Lilies in particular, the white flowers casting a pale glow on the grasses below them.

"Which one?" Hopper asked.

"Dowsley. Chase Dowsley."

"How long ago?"

Easter shrugged, and Hopper nodded. They walked through the garden, occasionally leaning down to check a flower here, a stone there, but always moving on.

The burial yard was decorated this way both as a way to deter anyone that came here looking for a body to raise without authorization, but also as a way of giving some purpose to the deaths of the people that served the agency. Each flower had a purpose that could be wrung from it in the potion labs in the building, and there were some that had saved the lives of the agents still out in the field. Some said that it was the spirits of the dead lending their strength to the living.

Easter didn't know if that was true, but he doubted it. It was probably modern medicine, nothing more, and nothing less. But if it helped others, then he wasn't going to complain. Not much, anyway.

Eventually, they found the flowers that marked the body that they were looking for. Hopper took a deep breath, kneeling down over the plot, and pressed his wings to the earth. The darkness in his feathers spread across the ground, and whatever it touched died. The lilies sagged, turning yellow, then black before they touched the earth, and the grass turned yellow, then brown, cracked and lifeless.

It spread until there was no life in the shape of a coffin, and the necromancer gestured for Easter to help him. The rabbit dug his fingers around the border, poking into the earth until he found the little catch for the trapdoor that all the plots had. He pulled, and up it came.

Underneath was the coffin, rich and lush, something that any thief could make a fortune on if they could get it out of the building. That was yet another reason why the door to the Mausoleum was so guarded. They didn't want to lose a body, and they didn't want to lose the money that they had poured into making the body safe.

Necromancer and agent pulled the coffin free, and Hopper used an old key, one made of cold iron and brass and heavy as sin, to unlock it. As the top slid free, the bones of the dead were revealed.

"Long-stripped," Easter muttered, sitting on the edge of it, the iron grinding into his rump through his work pants. The metal ignored the toughening sigils on the inside of the cloth, poking him hard, but he didn't care. He reached in, pulling out the skull, and he held it gently, running his fingers along the jawline.

It was the skull of a border collie, one that he hadn't seen for a very, very long time. He traced a finger along the forehead, his thumb pressing against the hole that still stood out among the rest of the smooth bone. The cracks must have been filled in before he had been buried, but the hole itself was still there. He sighed, holding it out to the necromancer.

"Just the memories," the rabbit said. "I need to see this. That's all."

"Good. Can't have a dead agent coming back."

"Just...do the magic."

"When?"

"The day before his death. Night," Easter corrected himself. "Night before his death."

"Anything I need to know?"

"...No."

"Will get rough. You know that. Necromancy's hard; pulls the life out of you and me."

"There's nothing."

"...Fine."

Easter nodded, closing his eyes and taking a few deep breaths. He knew that this was going to be rough, that he was going to hurt after this, but that was part of the price of dealing with the dead. Or with the past, for most people. Him included.

He moved to sit nearer to the raven, holding his hands out and under the skull. He'd done this before, with other people. The necromancer could, theoretically, bring the dead back to life, but that required more power than Hopper actually had. Instead of making the dead hop out of the afterlife back into this one, he helped other people 'hop' into the minds of the dead. Usually, it was done to find information on a crime that the living couldn't tell them.

Today, it was something else. Today...today, he needed something different.

Hopper cast his spells across the skull, and the blue light of memory began to spread from the eyes outwards. The ears dripped it like water from over hills, and the mouth let it loose like mists from the edge of a waterfall.

The light ran over his hands, and then up his arms. Easter braced himself, knowing that the memory would be from the point of view of another person. Everything that he saw would be from the point of view of someone that he hadn't spoken to since that night; every thought would be Dowsley's instead of his, and he wouldn't be himself again until that night was over. He would be the border collie, instead, and...and he would have to...

The light crept up the side of his head, forcing its way into his mouth and over his tongue. He tasted the earth, the smoke, the fire of that night. His ears roared with the sound of gunfire and the screams of demons as the memories crept through them. The world split as the blue light crept over his face, the soft green and white of the Mausoleum contrasted against a shattered rooftop, blood on the tiles, and the shining barrel of a revolver pointed right at his face.

BANG!

A pair of black jackets rustled as the agents stepped out of the car, the stares of the cops just outside the morgue greeting them. One of them was a long-eared, black-furred rabbit, while the other was a border collie with wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, a stick in his belt, and a thousand-yard-stare that could be felt even through his sunglasses. He pulled his tie tight, shaking his head as he gave the building the once-over.

"Come on, Easter."

"Yeah, yeah."

The border collie pulled his ID from his pocket, the black leather around it sparking against his fingers in invisible fashion as he flipped it over. By the time that it opened, the gold badge of a detective had taken shape on the inside, and Easter's badge had done the same. The cops parted for them, and they stepped inside.

There was no need to stop for anyone, no need for them to actually talk to the receptionist. Everyone knew that someone would come for these bodies. It was just a matter of being confident enough to go right to them.

Unsurprisingly, two cops waited for them in the cold room, the bluebird mortician still scrubbing his hands as Chase and Easter entered the room. The border collie lowered his sunglasses slightly as he looked at the cops, the pair of German Shepherds glancing back at him.

"And who the hell are you?" the older of the two said.

"My name is Inspector Dowsley, and this is my partner, Inspector Chondria," he said, nodding to the rabbit as he showed off the badge - having transformed once more - before putting it away. "We're here to take over the case."

"We haven't heard anything about -"

"This is now classified," Easter said. "You don't want to hear anything else if you don't want to go into quarantine, let's put it that way."

"Is...is that a threat?" the younger cop asked.

"It's an observation," Dowsley said, walking around them to stand by the bodies. "But if you want to talk to your families tonight, you'll leave the room. Now."

The cops looked at each other, and whether they were convinced by the threat or the bluff, they still left the room. Dowsley shook his head as he took off his sunglasses, fixing his partner with a level stare. The rabbit didn't respond, save to grumble something about the cops as they left.

Not the worst lie, he admitted. Still, best not to let him too far off the leash...

"What do you have for us, Thompson?" he said, transitioning from lies to business.

The bluebird rubbed the back of his head, gesturing at the bodies with his free hand. There were three of them, each one roughed up, and most of them showing some sights of bleeding out. The third, however, was the one that most interested Dowsley, and the one that he happened to be leaning over as the mortician spoke.

"Don't know what to tell you, Inspectors. They were roughed up by something big. Some of the cops wondered if someone had a guard dog from out of the country, some new breed or something, but..."

"But there's nothing out there with bigger claws than a person's hand," Dowsley said.

"No. And that's not even counting what happened to the bugger there."

Dowsley had to agree. While the others could have been explained by some weapon or other - though it would have had to be a very strange weapon to leave cuts and scrapes that broad across the body - even he had never seen something like this.

The fox's chest had been caved in. Not punched or battered in, but caved, as if his entire torso had been squeezed and compressed all at once. His ribs looked like they no longer existed save as some sort of ball right in the middle of the vulpine corpse. He shook his head at the sight, looking up at the bird.

"I don't suppose there were any particulates of any sort left behind?"

"Nothing, sir."

"So, we're starting at square 1, eh?" Easter asked.

"Perhaps. If you'll excuse us, Thompson?"

"Yeah...no problem..."

Muttering something about 'freaks,' the bird left them alone with the bodies. Easter shook his head.

"They never get it, do they?"

"You wouldn't either, in their position."

"Pretty sure I would. You can't blame this on the normal," the rabbit said, nodding at the bodies.

"You'd be surprised. People don't want to believe that the supernatural exists, or that the paranormal is all around them."

"Better than believing that there's monsters like that in fur and flesh."

"Who says there aren't?"

"Really, really don't want to go down that road," Easter muttered, shaking his head as he walked over to the other side of the table. "Definitely not anything normal responsible for this...even a hellhound wouldn't leave something this wide behind," the rabbit said, tracing one of the cuts on the other bodies with his hand. "Too big for a shoggoth, either."

"Shoggoths favor a blunter approach, if they leave bodies behind at all. We're dealing with something bigger."

"Yeah...probaby."

"You think it's something smaller?"

"I don't want it to be bigger."

"We don't get what we want, do we?" Dowsley said, shaking his head as he reached for the stick at his belt. "Let's see what I can pick up..."

This was his talent, and it was one that had stood him in good stead with the SBI for some time. The ability to pick up the trail of a supernatural being was one that every Supernatural Agent, or SA, could benefit from. It was the most basic, in some ways, the one that could be emulated by different devices and spells, but for Dowsley, it was second-nature.

He waved the forked stick over the body, collecting what there was to be found. With his eyes half-closed, he could feel it, sense it rising, and it was almost like a case of synesthesia. He tasted red, saw screams, smelled pain. Pain. PAIN.

His fist clenched a bit tighter around the stick, but he had learned how to handle that a long time ago. Pain was part of the process, no more, and no less. He forced it down, feeling for more of the sense that the creature that had done this had left behind.

It wasn't the same as a werewolf, and it was quite a bit different from the other shifters that he had been considering. Not a wendigo, for sure, though that would have been strong enough to shatter the bones the way that whatever this was had done. He could feel something almost like a vampire in there, something in the death and dead and bones, but that wasn't right, either.

It was something different, something old, and it had come through not that long ago. He shook his head, pulling the stick back as he opened his eyes.

The world was red, and that was concerning. Dowsley blinked until the red started fading, and he shook his head.

"We're dealing with something big. Maybe something infernal," he muttered. "You brought the right bullets?"

"Multi-chambered, yeah. Whatever it is, something in there is gonna hurt it."

"Not yet, but...yes. Let's keep this moving."

The bodies weren't going to tell them anything that they hadn't already figured out. Better to clear this now and move on. Dowsley reached into his jacket, pulling out a little hardened ball. He walked over to the sink, tossed it in, and started the water running. The ball started bubbling and breaking down, and the fumes and bubbles rose up almost immediately.

"Time for us to leave."

The clean-up crew would be at the morgue in short order, doing their part to clean up the mess that the bodies had left behind. The water bomb would be shorting out the cameras, sending vapor spells through the system, clearing Thompson's memories so that he didn't recall the weird stuff. He had been used by the SBI as a contact a number of times, but they maintained his neutrality here by getting rid of his memories every time. No reason for him to be known as the guy that dealt with the weird stuff.

Dowsley stared at the red light overhead, shaking his head as he tapped his fingers on the wheel. Easter was doing something similar, tapping his fingers against the empty chambers of his revolver, spinning the bullet chamber every so often.

"You don't feel anything?" he asked for the fourth time.

"Not more than traces...it's like it's gone everywhere..."

They'd been driving for almost twenty minutes since leaving the morgue, and Dowsley was fighting frustration as it felt like he was being dragged around on a leash instead of chasing down whatever this thing was. There was little sign of damage from it whenever he felt the trace get stronger, but it always led to another trail, another location, another damn chunk of the trail.

Worse, the only thing that the different places had in common was that they had a large set of grounds. They'd passed by a church, a historical building, a library, a city park, and now they were sitting at a red light just outside a cathedral. He could feel the burning presence of this strange creature coming out of the grounds, but not much more from where they were sitting. It was possible the creature had come here, but if that was the case, then someone was fiddling with things best left alone, and they were doing it in the worst possible place.

It's not like churches provide that much protection, these days, he thought. Once, perhaps, they might have, but most of the clergy didn't really know how the world worked. The other side had been using churches for hiding places for decades, now, and if there were rituals to kick them out, Dowsley had yet to meet a priest that knew one that worked.

"Thought you were supposed to be as good as a bloodhound," Easter said.

"Find me a bloodhound that can sniff out a specific cupcake dusted - dusted, barely touched - with sprinkles in the middle of a bakery that ONLY makes cupcakes."

"That bad?"

"Worse. It's going everywhere, but..."

It felt like this part of town had seen a lot of magical problems in the last century. Certainly there'd been plenty of shifters around, and there were probably some in the area now. If they had time, he'd call into headquarters, get some information on the local sympathizers and hit them up, but from what he was feeling...

Well, they didn't have a lot of time...and most of the locals had already cleared out.

He pulled into a parking spot on the side of the road, and he reached for the car door.

"What are you doing?"

"You drive."

"What?"

"I need to think. You drive. I'll tell you where to go."

"Pretty sure that should be the other way around; I got the gun, you know where you're going. I should have a hand free just in case."

"We're not firing in view of the public."

"Oh, sure, we'll just let it crush us like it did the fox."

"We have other methods. Get in the driver's seat, Easter."

"...Fine."

Without having to focus on the road as well as the feeling that he was getting, Dowsley felt like they had a better chance. They drove off, followed the feeling with him keeping his eyes closed, focusing on the feeling of pain and fire. It was the biggest difference to everything else that he felt in the city, something that filled the back of his head with heat and anger, not his, but something supernatural. He held it at bay, merely allowing the feeling through, and told Easter the road to take that followed its path.

They were making progress, finally. He felt it getting stronger and stronger, until -

"I think your stick's off."

"What?"

"We're back where we started."

Dowsley opened his eyes, and he stared at the high-topped, sharp-towered cathedral opposite them. The burning feeling was definitely coming from the building, and from this side, it seemed stronger. His partner pointed over the wheel, gesturing at the wall that was facing them.

"You see what I see?"

"What?"

"The stones. Looks like someone did a lot of cleaning on that side. Not everywhere, either; see how it stops just below that busted window?"

Now that the rabbit had pointed it out, he did. There was someone climbing a ladder, carrying a window up the replace the broken pane, but the dark stones below were almost immaculate compared to the dust-gray ones that made up the rest of the church, even those bits that were above the ladder. He nodded to himself, tapping his chin.

"Not conclusive, but definitely strong evidence. Let's find a vantage point."

"Hotel room?"

"Sounds good."

Easter nodded, pulling a left-hand turn and driving into the parking lot of one. Dowsley blinked, looking back at him.

"You did that on purpose."

"An NA isn't as useless as you think."

"I never said you were."

"Right."

Dowsley shook his head. This wasn't what he wanted, but he knew that this was going to come up at some point. The fact that Easter was an NA was not an issue; every SA had to work with a Natural Agent, not just for cover stories, but because it kept them grounded in this world rather than the other one.

But Easter was something...different. The rabbit had gone through partners the way that his gun went through bullets, and Dowsley was the latest to enter the SBI pool of whether he would quit, get injured, or, well, die. Those were the three fates that seemed to await Easter's partners, and he had seen all three happen already.

The strange thing was, nobody could quite understand why. The official record always put Easter at a relatively blameless state, but Dowsley doubted that it was that cut and dried. There was always something going on in the background, something that the official agents and the statements of record didn't cover. It wasn't that he expected Easter to be lying, more that he felt that there was something that went unsaid.

He's reckless, he's angry, he's on-edge, and that is the exact way to get an agent killed, he thought, shaking his head as he reached for the car door.

As Easter did the same, the border collie shook his head.

"I'll get us a room booked; you call into HQ, let them know what we've found so far."

The black rabbit paused, his hand on the doorknob as he slowly looked back over his shoulder.

"Pardon?"

"You heard me."

"Okay. What the hell's going on?"

Dowsley arched an eyebrow. With his previous partners, that had been all he needed; his seniority in the agency often spoke for itself. Not this time. Easter leaned right in and managed a growl at him.

"Seriously. What the hell is going on?"

"Easter. You are growling at your supervising agent."

"No. I'm growling at an SA that's looking down at me, and I want to know why."

"...I am not looking down at you. I am making sure that you fulfill your responsibilities."

"Bullshit."

"I am going to get us -"

"No. I will get us a room. Just because you're an SA and I'm an NA doesn't mean that you get to call all the shots. You want to inform HQ? Do it yourself."

To his shock, Easter just turned and hopped out of the car. He leaned over, staring out the window after the black rabbit for a moment or two before shaking his head.

Reckless AND ready to lash out.

It wasn't the best combination, though he could see somewhat why Easter was a bit more annoyed than most. Many SAs had a bad habit of looking down on the NAs that they were assigned to, and most of that lot did their best to make the NA feel like they were less than the agent that they were assigned to. Considering the powers that SAs tended to have, particularly the long-serving ones, that meant that there was some truth in the fact that they were more useful, more indispensable, and it was an HR nightmare to untangle that mess.

However, that wasn't why he was riding Easter as hard as he was. He had seen several people die, including one SA that he had been passingly close to, a peacock that had died just a few weeks back. Easter was becoming a danger and a liability to the SBI, and it was only a matter of time until someone that wasn't nearing retirement was assigned to him and got killed by something stupid.

If it was something that was Easter's fault, then he needed to be there, needed to find out what was causing that so that he could get the rabbit to cut it out. If it wasn't...

If it wasn't, then it was something supernatural, and that meant that something had slipped the tests that the SBI used to keep track of those that had supernatural abilities. Easter would have to be re-tested, again, and then pushed through immediate remedial training to get hold of those abilities.

But for all that, he imagined that Easter's recklessness had been the real cause of the agents' deaths. While he hadn't seen something that would put them in actual danger yet, he was sure that was the real problem. The tests at the agency were too good to slip up to that extent.

He hoped.

Shaking his head, he popped out a cell phone from the glove compartment, calling the situation into HQ.

A few minutes later - and with instructions to watch and not engage unless the monster showed itself to be a threat to the people around it - Dowsley entered the hotel lobby. The soft lights that were just starting to twinkle as the sun went down gave the place a yellowed, aged look, and he felt almost immediately at home. There was something about it that reminded him of his old-style house across the country, and how much he missed it, sometimes.

He caught sight of Easter walking towards the elevator, but the door closed before he could join the rabbit. Sighing, the border collie walked over to the front desk, shaking his head to himself.

"Pardon me."

"Hmm?" the mouse behind the desk asked.

"The black rabbit that just bought a room. Could you please tell me which it was? We're rooming together for the night."

"Oh ho, him?"

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry."

"I'm not. Gonna be thinking of that ass tonight."

Dowsley blinked slowly, and the mouse pulled back a little bit. Not for the right reasons, though, unfortunately.

"Hey, man. I'm not saying that I'm gonna try and hit that. If you've got that ass for yourself tonight, you enjoy the hell out of it. I envy you."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Not like I'm gonna snitch on you. Just, uh, have a good time, man. Room 532."

"Thank you."

He turned from the mouse, trying to hold onto indignation rather than...other things. HR had a larger than average file of harassment complaints that Easter had filed on a number of different people in the organization, and there were smaller, but more numerous complaints filed regarding Easter's retaliation on those that he had claimed harassed him. Dowsley had put that completely out of his mind...until now.

Spending the night...like that?

The senior agent shook his head, putting that thought to the side, trying to keep it from getting any stronger, but it was rather hard to do that when he was already thinking of Easter as someone that was rather...different from the other agents. He was trying to keep a leash on the rabbit, trying to keep him from getting out of control, but just thinking of it that way twisted his thoughts to something else.

The border collie nearly slapped himself before he was able to get to the elevator, and he forced himself to keep clearing his throat, breathing deeply, and doing everything that he could to keep his thoughts from going any further out of line. It was getting ridiculous trying to keep this all clear, but he would do it. He was the senior agent, and he would see them both out of this and home safe.

Even if he was thinking about -

"Stop it. You've had your fun with other people, and you do not need to turn into the creepy teacher perving over his student."

Even if his student did have a good ass.

Dowsley cursed his memory as he flicked back to just a few minutes ago and how it had felt to watch Easter cross the parking lot. He'd been rather annoyed at the time, so he hadn't felt any attraction to that sort of attitude, but purely as a visual...

Muscular bunny buns filling out a tight pair of black pants, that little tail just barely visible over the waistband, taut muscles in the thighs showing just how well Easter could probably take it...

Desperate for a distraction, Dowsley flicked his nose, and the resulting pain made him howl like the horndog he wasn't.

By the time that the elevator reached the fifth floor, he was shivering, panting for breath, shaking, but from the discomfort of his own nose being flicked rather than out of lust. He felt better, more himself, and more able to face Easter properly. They needed to have this out, or they were going to be in deep trouble when they actually had to fight this monster.

The End