Bella looks up Tony Stark. (There's no reason not to.)
...Okay. He looks familiar. And his death those several months ago was really very suspicious, and she doesn't think anyone has been doing her morgue trick in New York City. And his more reclusive identical twin's body was never found at all. (If there was an identical twin, and not just Tony Stark theatrically pretending to be two people with mirrors or holograms or Photoshop and cooperative witnesses giving insistent interviews and then suddenly being dead and no longer able to pretend. There was, after all no sign of a twin before a sudden debut when he - they - was or were fifteen, and... "Sherlock Holmes", really? There's not even a hint of a twin in Tony's birth announcement, which she checks because that's the obvious thing to check.)
Come to think of it, Mr. Does Not Stick To Flypaper never introduced himself.
She supposes that his cute laser trick didn't work that well, if he got got. (But she saw it burn him. It's a clever weapon, should take almost no skill to wield a continuous beam - what kind of onslaught could have gotten around that?)
Nothing about her routine changes in response to this information.
Until several days later when she's crossing another neighborhood (seventeen to go) and - he just keeps popping up, doesn't he?
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She completes the crossing of the neighborhood.
She checks on the demons again, on her way home.
The bodies are gone.
She checks on the demons again, on her way home.
The bodies are gone.
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"It is. There was a window of -" She looks at her watch. "About an hour. Do you happen to know what kind or kinds they were? Do those just disappear or dissolve or get assumed into another dimension on death?"
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"There are so preposterously many..." she mutters. She doesn't go down that block; she keeps going and takes the next left instead.
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Bella gets the rest of the way home without incident. Before approaching near enough to turn the lights on, she says - "Thanks again, Sherlock. I am - really not convinced I would've been able to beat them alone."
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And in she goes.
If he is running some kind of con she is at a complete loss for what it could be, unless he's particularly fascinated by getting victims to deliver themselves into his hands with full knowledge of his species and he likes difficult targets.
Just a few more days and then she can let herself act like she believes what she's already pretty thoroughly convinced of.
If he is running some kind of con she is at a complete loss for what it could be, unless he's particularly fascinated by getting victims to deliver themselves into his hands with full knowledge of his species and he likes difficult targets.
Just a few more days and then she can let herself act like she believes what she's already pretty thoroughly convinced of.
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