And then, it hit him.

  They had a way of dealing with her. Or rather, have someone else deal with her.

  He reached into his inventory, and procured from it a thin strip of paper with a phone number on it.

  "What's that?" Asked Mila.

  Kurt smiled at her. "Galton's phone number. He gave it to me before we left Boston, in case we needed help." He turned to the warlock. His smile twisted into a mocking one. "From him, or from his order. You might have heard of them: Does the Solomonic Order of The Seven Seals ring any bells?"

  All color seemed to drain from the warlock's face, and her jaw began to tremble. "You can't do that.." she said. Her voice was weak, almost a whisper. "They'll execute me!"

  "For killing twelve people?" Mockingly asked Conrad. "Nah! They'll probably just have you picking trash off the roadside."

  "Conrad!" Reprimanded Mila. She turned to look at the tied woman, who was positively panicking. "Maybe they'll just... imprison you, you know? Try to help you go back to the right path..."

  The woman began violently thrashing in her seat."Shut the fuck up, you undead bitch!" Mila gasped, and stepped back, horrified by the woman's words. Or rather, her last two words. Kurt brought his arm around her shoulders, and pressed her agains his chest protectively. "You really think they'll try to help me?! Are you really that fucking stupid?! You are killing me! If you call those cocksuckers, you are sentencing me to death, you are just not pulling the trigger, you cowards!"

  "Cowards?! Us?!" Asked Kurt indignantly. He was still hugging Mila, who was now glaring at the woman. "You go around killing innocents, all to get revenge on a creature in whose turf you walked into, then go around begging for your own sorry life, and we are the fucking cowards?!"

  Kurt glared at the woman. This time around she must have seen no hesitation in his eyes, because she stopped her thrashing and cussing. Kurt saw she was going to try to 'apologize' for her outburst, probably going to try to garner sympathy for herself. So he resumed talking. "We are going to call our contact in the order, have them send someone to arrest you, and tell them exactly what you've done. If they decide to execute you for it, then that's on you." He gently disengaged from Mila, and walked up to the where the warlock was seated. He looked down on her, his amber eyes glowing with barely contained hatred and bile. "If you didn't want an order of sorcerers to loop your head off, then maybe you shouldn't have become a warlock."

  Kurt turned to look at Conrad and Mila. "There was a phone in the kitchen, right?" They both nodded. "Cool. I'll go make the call. You guys keep tabs on her, please."

  The woman whimpered, and began to sniffle. "Please." She begged, her voice weak and watery. "I'll do anything, but please don't call them."

  Kurt looked at her, utterly disgusted. "Can you bring back the people you killed?"

  The woman began crying, bawling her eyes out. She shook her head.

  "Then no deal." he said, before walking off to the kitchen.

  The kitchen phone was an old model, from the sixties or fifties, the kind where the numbers are on sort of dial you have to turn for each number. God, thought Kurt as he tried to figure out how to operate the device, who's house was this?

  It was the oldest model of phone he had ever seen in person, debuncking the Nokia that Mr. Anderson had given to Blair so she could call him in emergencies, all the way back when she was fifteen, and Kurt and Abby were ten. Mr. Anderson wasn't particularly big on technology and spending much money.

  He picked the speaker, and began shouffling with the dial, trying to make his call. It was when he tried to enter the first digit of Galton's phone number that he realized another problem with the device, apart from his inexperience with the model: It was rusted. The dial groaned and shrieked when Kurt so much as poked it, let alone actually dial with it.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  With a sigh, the boy put the speaker back atop the device. It the only phone in the house, at least that the group knew about. Perhaps he should just ask Conrad to rush to the town and make the call in a public phone while Kurt and Mila guarded their prisioner. It would take some extra time on top of what they would have to wait until whoever the Solomonic Order sent arrived, but it was also the only option they had if they wanted this woman taken care of.

  Taken care of, he thought, when did I start using mob sounding euphemisms?

  He knew what would happen to that woman when the Solomonic Order took her in. She had told them herself, after all, and it wasn't like he was thrilled about it or something, but it was the only solution he could think off that didn't involve killing her himself. In a certain way, the woman had been right on the money when she had called them cowards: By making the call, they were knowingly sentencing her to death, so it didn't really make much difference than if they killed her themselves. But they couldn't stomach doing it, killing another human being was quite a few steps up when it came to moral compromise than, say, slaying a wight.

  Now that he thought about it, Kurt had only ever killed one sapient and talking being: Melalo, a couple days back. The rest of creatures he had hunted were either mindless constructs, like undead or those zombie trees, or feral creatures, like that dragon he had slain back when he discovered Od. And even then, Melalo hadn't really elicited any thoughts about the morality of killing when he had done it in. In fact, and now that he stopped to think about it, he had been excedingly cruel with it in its last moments. Sadistic, even. And he didn't felt guilty about it which, given that the creature was quite literaly made of evil and seemed to get off on turning people into killing and raping lunatics, made quite a bit of sense.

  But this woman was human. An evil human, no doubt about it, but a human that didn't pose an immediate thret to them. Just... driving a sword into her throat while she was tied up wasn't something Kurt could see himself, or Conrad or Mila for that matter, doing. Perhaps it was cowardly, as the woman had said, perhaps he did want her dead and just didn't have the guts to do it, so they called in a third party willing to go through with the deed. Maybe she was right about all of that, but... Kurt didn't want to do it. Nor did he want Mila or Conrad to do it.

  It was a childish argument, but it was also a sincere one: Someone as pure and kind as Mila snuffing someone's life was so wrong that the mere idea made him want to vomit. Conrad was... no longer someone Kurt could think of as capable of cold blooded murder, even with the whole stump kicking scene from earlier. He most likely had never been, and it was only Kurt's own personal bias against him, which had more or lose fizzled out after they parted from Boston, that made him think that way. Conrad and him were friends, or at least on their way to becoming friends, and Kurt didn't want his friend to become a murderer.

  As he had said, a childish argument.

  As for Kurt himself, he...

  A booming sound, like the shredding of paper but massively amplified, pierced Kurt's ears. The lights on the kitchen flickered, and the smell of ozone filled the air. Kurt stood still for a moment, disoriented and trying to puzzle out just what had that been. It was as if lightning had pierced into the house...

  And then it hit him: The warlock.

  With his heart still beating like crazy, and his ears ringing, he rushed to the living room. The intensifying smell of ozone, mixed with what Kurt recognized as burnt flesh, filled his nostrils.

  No, he thought, It can't be that. We took her foci, and she was tied up!

  But when he finally reached his destination, the impossibility appeared before him: Conrad and Mila were laid on a pile on the floor, with Conrad slumped on top of her. His side and back were a painting of charred black skin and bloody red muscle. He couldn't see enough of Mila's form to determine any injuries, but she wasn't moving either.

  And to the other side of the room, still sitting in the armchair, was her.

  She looked just as panicked as when Kurt had left, and he saw that she was holding something that was crackling with purple lightning with her right hand, which was now covered in second degree burns, no doubt backlash from using an element so volatile with an improvised foci. The ropes tying her to the armchair had sections of its length burned off, and was now limply coiled around her body, incapable of restraining anything. The knee on her stumped leg was charred and flayed.

  She turned to look at him with her puffy and tear stricken eyes. They stared at each other for a moment, too shellshocked to do anything.

  Kurt was the first to act. He reached for his sword, which was strapped to his hip, and shot forwards. His mind was clear despite everything that was going on, his battle instincts took over his thoughts, and he moved in a precise and efficient manner towards the enemy.

  The woman let out a pathetic yelp, and raised her makeshift foci- Where the hell has she gotten it from?- at him. His magic senses flared, warning him of the incoming attack that the gathering aether represented. The smell of ozone intensified and the cracling lightning burned brighter. Undeterred, Kurt delivered an horizontal slash at the woman's hand. He barely felt resistance from the limb, his magical sword and Od boosted muscles made cleaving through it about as much of a physical challenge as a regular person could have had tying their shoes. The gathering of magic stopped abruptly once the warlock and her foci had been... separated.

  The burnt limb fell onto one of the chair's armrests with a soft thump and, for the second time in less than a minute, both Kurt and the woman froze. Blood began pouring from the stump that had once been the woman's right hand, a stump she looked at with a look Kurt could only describe as confusion. All the adrenaline in her system, probably combined with the nerve damage her spell had left in her arm, kept the pain from reaching to her.

  Her left hand reached for the armchair, and Kurt acted.

  It is quite amazing how little one's instincts can heed the moral constructs that seem to be so important to the rest of the psyche. Kurt Celik, who not even a minute ago was pondering on why he didn't want to kill this woman, brought his sword forward in a stab. The blade pierced the woman's throat right at the middle, splitting her windpipe in half, and exited through the back of her neck.

  Her arms felt limp to either side of her body. His sword had stabbed through her spine, paralyzing her from the neck down. Blood began to pour copiously from her mouth, falling onto the silvery blade below it. Her face, though now showing signs of pain, remained thoroughly confused, as if her mind couldn't comprehend the idea of her own death.

  Still guided by instinct instead of thought, Kurt wrenched the blade free. The woman's body fell face first to the floor, and a puddle of dark red blood began forming below her neck, quickly swallowing the one that her reopening leg wound had cause,

  Kurt's gaze darted towards the armrest, where the woman's right hand still rested, and saw what she had been using for a foci, now that lightning weren't concealing it from sight.

  A small, green vine, charged with aether-corrupted Primeval magic, rested in the severed hand.

  won't stay dark, and the rest of the book his uphill, emotionally speaking.