FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Needless to say we drew a fair bit of attention as we made our way back to the bar. Between the crimson streaks that colored Alice's fur to the blood that still dripped from mine, we drew many worried looks. The fact that I was naked probably didn't help our image much either. Other than having a bit of fun eavesdropping on the gossip and speculations as we passed, there was little else to occupy our attention along the walk.

Eventually we tuned out the murmur of bystanders and we found ourselves lost in thought. The kid was either hiding something from me or didn't even know himself what was triggering this curse business. I was hoping for the first, we could always pry the information from him. That happened to be something that Alice had gotten pretty good at and unlike so many others I had met she was more than happy to get creative with her methods. However, if it was the second then it meant we would have more leg work to do. And more often than not that involved meeting with some of the major crime bosses. I never cared much for them, they would always be perfectly polite and professional right up until they slipped you a glass of poisoned wine, though personally I had acquired a taste for the stuff, or they order their butler to put a knife in your back. It was all a bit tiresome really.

"Welcome back, mistress." rumbled Ross as we arrived back at the bar. The long tendrils that made up the lower half of his face darted nimbly about as they mixed several drinks at once while the hulking behemoth himself worked the grill. As precise as he was fast, it was all oddly fascinating to watch.

We greeted the Elder spawn and headed down to Alice's apartment. The surprisingly large space was split into five fairly spacious rooms. An open kitchen sat directly to the left of the stairs. All of the appliances were industrial grade stainless steel pieces which, when coupled with the black and white checkered tiles, gave the room a very sterile feel. The tiles ran through the majority of the place, I remember helping her rip up the old floors and laying down the new tiles after she had gotten tired of cleaning the stains from the oak floorboards.

The bathroom, on the other hand, was a stark contrast to the clean and sharp lines of the kitchen. The walls and ceiling were rough cut black granite, giving the room a very cave like feel. The shower and what not were cut to match the walls. The whole thing looked seamless, as if the room was simply carved straight out the earth. Small alcoves were set at precise intervals along the walls, with a simple word or gesture enchanted flames would spring to life, casting a warm light through the harsh darkness. The rest of the apartment had similar lighting.

The bedroom and sitting room were both fairly normal. Though the furniture was made mostly from dark hardwoods and black leather. The walls were wood paneled stone and a rich carpet covered the cold concrete floor. The sitting room held several armchairs and a couch while several floor to ceiling bookshelves were set into the back wall. It all looked rather stately but I knew that most of the books were all either gun manuals, combat guides, or cheap romance novels. The only thing out of place in her bedroom was a high-tech looking cylinder that rested on her dresser. Though it looked like some kind of new-age lamp with a dimly glowing control panel, it was really a maintenance dock for her arm. The tube was lined with hundreds of tiny mechanical arms that would clean, fine tune, and repair the arm. A long slender case that held her back up arm sat next to it.

Then there was her main room. A large wooden X-shaped cross dominated the center of the room, heavy leather straps hung from its ebony limbs as if eagerly waiting to embrace the limbs of whatever poor bastard found his (or her) back pressed against it. Surrounding the cross was a shocking array of BDSM equipment. Everything from several types of bondage horses, a spanking bench, and even a few lengths of chains dangled from the ceiling. The layout looked chaotic but it was really quite clever the way she had it, no matter where you started your path would eventually take you to the cross. Shelves lined the walls and were filled with all manner of gags, blindfolds, shackles, rope, whips, and floggers. Other shelves held a colorful array of erotic toys. Everything had been meticulously cleaned and the shelves were carefully organized, she always kept her favorites on the shelves that could be reached from nearly anywhere. Alice had made sure that I was... intimately familiar with everything here. She found the novelty of my immortality amusing...and arousing.

We didn't see Mr. Ward anywhere during our first pass through the apartment. Alice and I split up for a more thorough search. After a few minutes I heard her call softly from the bedroom. She stood in the doorway, her pure white fur glowing warmly in the light from the enchanted torches, as I drew closer she put a finger to her muzzle and then pointed towards the bed. Looking closely I could see two lumps rising amidst the sheets. Alice snapped her fingers and the torches in the room flared to life. When that go no response we quietly crept across the room and gave the two roughly person sized lumps a prod. A trio of startled squeals came from under the sheets and the Sisters peered sheepishly over the hem.

"What did I tell you two about fucking in my bed?" Alice asked, a dangerous edge to her voice. Though I could see in her eyes that she was intending to have as much fun with this as she could.

"Don't do it...," said Jess, "Unless you're invited." finished Tessa. They sounded very drunk.

"That's what I thought." Alice said, stalking closer to the bed until she loomed over them.

"But you're too rough..." pouted Tessa, staring wide eyed up into Alice's deep crimson gaze.

Alice ran a teasing finger down Tessa's muzzle, her claw leaving a tiny trail of blood as it went, "That's half the fun." She gave them a wicked smile. They shuddered, though it was hard to tell if it was with fright or pleasure.

She stood back and allowed the Sisters to rise. They lazily worked their way around the room and gathered up their scattered clothes. They blew us both a kiss as they left, not bothering to get dressed, I couldn't help but smile as they passed. Alice slapped me hard across the back of the head.

"Bloody teases." She muttered.

"Like you're one to talk..."

She gave me a mischievous chuckle and we turned our attention back to the bed. Mr. Ward was staring at us from under the sheets and seemed to be trying very hard to not be noticed.

"Come on, we need to talk." I told him.

"Why are you naked?" he slurred. He sounded almost as drunk as the Sisters.

I sighed, this was going to be a long afternoon. "I can ask you the same thing."

He stuttered and stumbled over his words as he tried to come up with some kind of story. I soon grew tired of his drunken ramblings so I pulled a suitcase from under the bed and took out my spare set of clothes. I looked them over to make sure Alice hadn't made any "modifications" to them... again. She had cut the crotches from the last few pairs of pants I had left here. Fortunately for me, she hadn't gotten to this pair yet.

"Your turn." I told her as I headed for the bathroom to finally wash the blood from my fur. Her face lit up like a child's on Christmas.

Once I finished I found them both in the sitting room. Alice was sprawled carelessly across the couch while Mr. Ward sat bolt upright in one of the chairs, a small glass clenched in his trembling hand.

"Alright, what'd I miss?" I asked, waving a hand in front of Mr. Ward's face. His expression of shock and horror didn't change.

"I gave him a sobering potion and right now he's reflecting back on what happened with the Sisters while he was drunk. Apparently they lured him upstairs for a drink and someone spiked it with an aphrodisiac when he wasn't looking. Probably for the better, the kid wouldn't have had a chance otherwise. As you could imagine the Sisters weren't about to pass up a free ride. Seems he's not the sex before marriage type." It was obvious she was greatly enjoying his current predicament.

We waited a while and he gradually relaxed, though he didn't stop trembling. He cleared his throat and Alice and I looked up from our game of cards.

"You said you wanted to talk with me, correct?"

"Yes. One of my contacts has found some rather... interesting details concerning you company's finances. It would seem that a big portion of your company's finances simply disappeared not long after you got things started." I told him. That snapped him out of the rest of his funk.

"What? How dare you imply that my company has been involved in suspect activities!" Seems I may have touched a nerve.

"I never said you were. I simply stated that a large chunk of money in your company's name seemed to have vanished. Given how much pride you seem to have in it, I would be quite surprised if this happened without your knowledge."

Mr. Ward leaned forward and lowered his voice as if he was afraid someone would overhear him. "There was one..., shall we say, incident that happened shortly after we began accepting contracts. A very strange gentleman approached one of my sales reps with a very lucrative offer. After some negotiations we decided to take the job."

"I'm guessing you've never hear the whole "too good to be true" line before, eh?" I asked.

He glared at me before continuing. "Shortly after the job was complete someone struck all records of it from our database. Everything concerning the job; materials costs, labor, the order details, and even the payments simply vanished. Even our backups had been wiped."

"So that's when you decided to panic and take out several loans to cover the losses and hire an investigator to try to track down the money and the client." I said.

"I... well, yes. How did you know?"

"You can find anything here if you know the right people. Now, several months later you receive an anonymous "donation" large enough to cover the expense of the job, the loans, and still have enough left over to turn a profit."

"That is correct."

"I bet that made it easier to cover things up when it came time to deal with taxes and what not, didn't it?"

He shrugged and leaned back. "Have to make ends meet somehow."

"Even if the group behind it all is probably the one trying to kill you now that they've put your products to use and know they won't need more?"

His ears drooped and he looked like I just broke a bottle over his head. "W-What makes you think that?"

"It's what I would do. Keep the grunts on hand in case anything goes wrong then get rid of them once things are set. Now you mentioned a strange gentleman was the one that made the order. Can you describe him?"

"I've only seen him once or twice but I'll try. He was a tall and slender leopard-kin, though rather than the usual spots, his fur was covered in tiny and intricate runes. They seemed to shift about and sometimes I was certain they had changed shape entirely."

I've heard of this kind of thing before but it was pretty rare. Apparently the process used to create the runes was extremely painful and had a fairly low survival rate. The purpose of the runes were to act as magical amplifiers and they usually carried strong magical protections as well. It also only worked with spotted fur which left me to wonder why anyone bothered in the first places, especially since a few talismans could do the same thing and they don't try to kill you... usually.

"He wore an exquisitely cut suit and several gold rings that were engraved with odd sigils. I don't remember exactly what they looked like but something about them hurt my eyes. Also there was something wrong about his eyes..." The kid's voice trailed off as he tried to remember what that was. Eventually he gave up on trying.

Sadly, I wasn't familiar with such a character. Though if he truly is as unique as Mr. Ward made him out to be then he shouldn't be too hard to track down. I find the best place to start with this kind of thing is the police. Unfortunately after an incident involving a fire demon, a lightning elemental, and a gratuitous amount of fire retardant foam; I wasn't too welcome at the station anymore. Also there was that little bit of confusion over assassinating a few somewhat important people, though that should have been long enough ago to be a cold case by now. On the bright side a sergeant owed me a favor for helping to exorcise a possessed dinning set, it kept shouting obscenities at his guests and family. The whole thing was too embarrassing for him to warrant charging him my usual rates. A few phone calls and half an hour later Ross had shown the sergeant down to the stairs and he was now taking a seat next to Mr. Ward.

"Keep this quick, I'm risking my ass just by being here. You're still top of the station's shit list for that stunt last year." said Sergeant Keeler. A middle aged human, he had the build of an active officer that had long since gone to seed from an overly luxurious desk job. And a few too many glazed donuts.

"That was only last year? Thought it had been longer."

The sergeant groaned. "Would it kill you to take something seriously for once?"

"Probably not, never tried. Either way my client here has been taken for a ride by someone on behalf of a group we know next to nothing about." I gave him the cliff-notes version of Mr. Ward's predicament and the person that had commissioned the mysterious job.

"And what makes you think I would be able to help?"

"You're in charge of the booking line..."

"Fine, you got me there. Let me guess you want me to see if anyone matching this man's description has been brought in, am I right?"

"Nailed it, you ever think about becoming a detective?"

Sergeant Keeler groaned. "I'd shot you just for being an obnoxious ass but I know it would be a waste of a bullet."

"Hasn't stopped me." muttered Alice.

Keeler gave her a startled look and opened his mouth as if to say something as she gave him a wide-eyed innocent look. He gulped nervously for a few moments before thinking better of it and turning back to me, "I'll see if I can find anything and send you a message by tomorrow. After this we're even. Now, what's the fastest way out of this freak show?"

We showed him to the door then settled down at the bar. Ross passed us each a drink, bourbon for me and gin for Alice, before turning back to the regulars.

"So, shall we wait for tomorrow or should we start kicking in doors?" Alice asked, already having drained her glass.

"There's one person that'll be worth visiting but we won't be kicking in her door." I told her, finishing off my own drink.

"If we're going to be visiting _her_then I need to get cleaned up." Alice said, looking down at the bloodstains that still dotted her fur.

The ancient wolfkin healer was probably one of the only people Alice had any respect for, I think it was because the old hag was far more terrifying then her.

As we went back to the apartment Alice fiddled with the shoulder portion of her cybernetic arm. A few metallic clicks later and the arm came off. She grit her teeth slightly as it came free of its interface, I understand the process of having a cybernetic limb removed was quite an unpleasant shock to the nervous system. She placed the arm into its tube and seconds later the soft whir of the maintenance arms filled the room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and began to carefully clean the interface with a soft rag and a bottle of electrical contact cleaner. An intricate array of sensors and plugs were set into the cybernetic musculature and they needed periodic cleaning in order to avoid glitches and spasms. She pulled a watertight cover from the case beside the tube and snapped it over the interface.

She frowned as she starred at the blank spot where her arm usually is, I know from past experience that she had from a form of phantom limb syndrome. While it didn't hurt she often found herself trying to use the arm while it was in its tube. I have also learned that joking about it usually ended with getting my heart getting cut out.It had started out as an expression of anger, but given my condition and our rather extreme tastes, its become something we save for special occasions. Now to punish me she would threaten great pain but leave me waiting until it drove me mad. Alsoneither of us were really in the mood, given who we were about to go see. So I said nothing as I watched her finish prepping for her shower.

She left to clean up and I lay back on the bed. I killed time by trying to sort through what I had learned about the case so far. I was certain that the mysterious leopard that originally hired my client had something to do with this whole mess but I had no idea where to go from that. Hence why I was going to be paying a visit to one of the most feared people in the Heart. Very few things happened without her knowledge. I hate to admit it but she was probably better connected than I was. She was also the only other immortal I knew of.

I've tried to find out out how she became immortal, by the hag was remarkably hard to get talking about anything but the business at hand. From what I've been able to find through a few of my contacts and some nights combing through old scrolls and books, she was old when the war between the dragonkin and our kingdom came and went, though she wasn't immortal back then. Also some time before that she got in close with the Priestess of Death. After almost of week of research the best I could come up with was that she wasn't quite immortal, she simply refused to die. Given that she's done some favors for the Priestess of Death, she's probably had some help with that.

A short while later Alice returned from her shower. She tossed her blood splattered clothes onto the pile in the far corner and set about finding something that she deemed suitable for the meeting. Her pale fur turns a translucent white when wet and clings closely to her body, emphasizing her impressive figure. Though it still hid the lithe muscle and countless scars. Most of the scars were across her stomach, back, and legs. Many of them were from brawls but there were a few odd ones here and there, aparticularly noteworthy one was a tic-tac-toe board carved into the top of her tight thigh, the "O"s lost.

Once she had dried off a bit she fetched her back up arm from its case. This one, much like her usual one, was almost entirely black. Though it was far more skeletal, little more that black cybernetic muscle fibers over a carbon fiber base. Even though her main arm was stillbeingserviced, there was another reason she was using this arm, the old healer wasn't too fond of anyone one bringing weapons into her home. She eventually found a dress she though would be good enough. A slender dark red piece only a few shades lighter than her eyes. She quickly got dressed and turned to me.

"Shall we get this over with?" If I didn't know any better I would say she sounded slightly scared.

"Might as well." I answered. To be honest I wasn't looking forward to this much either.

I muttered a spell and pulled aside reality to create a path straight to our destination. It normally would have been a fairly long walk through the Heart but I felt that if we had too much time to think about what we were doing we might end up turning back.

We took a deep breath and stepped through the portal. My skin tingled briefly as I went through but other than that it was no different from walking through a door. We stood in front of a small cottage, it looked strangely out of place amongst the gleaming steel and glittering magics of the Heart. More than one the surrounding business had tried to buy the land and every time the poor bastard that went to try and evict the cottage's tenant went missing. They'd turn up a few month later in the loony bin, not even an Elder spawn like Ross could ruin their minds the way the old hag did.

I raised a hand and knocked.

"Oh, just come in, or you going to make an old woman drag herself to the door just to tell you to piss off!" Came the harsh and weathered voice of the ancient wolfkin.

Alice had gone pale and that's really saying something. Trying not to think too much about what I was doing I open the door and stepped inside. The healer's home looked more like the back room of a butcher's shop. Bloody cloths covered the tables and dried herbs hung from the ceiling. Medical tools from several centuries ago littered almost every surface, their blades pitted and worn. A handful of foul smelling potions sat in cloudy vials, polluting the still air with their pungent aromas. The healer herself stood over a pot hanging in the fire place.

Stopped with age and her fur bleached by time, the old woman picked up her heavy wooden staff and turned to face us. Thick cataracts have turned her eyes a cloudy silver and her nails were cracked with age. She slowly crossed the room, the staff thumping ominously against the worn wooden floors. She grabbed my muzzled and pulled me down with a shocking strength. She stared deeply into my eyes and I wriggled uncomfortably.

"Oh, just you and your floozy little pet. Though some bastards had come 'round to try and run me out again." she growled.

Alice looked like she would like to protest but she sensibly kept her mouth shut.

"Hello, Helgarth." I said as she released my muzzle.

"Oh, cut the formalities, we both know you aren't here for tea and cookies so get to it."

I sighed and settled down on one of the few clear spots in the room. Might as well make this as quick as I could.