Xaviers!

Routines have a way of becoming, well, routine. Whenever Miriam would be out of something in her hotel, she'd send Will out on a little shopping trip. The convenient thing about having a stooge friend like that was reliability. Will was also fairly discreet, which was important when you possibly had a swarm of evil immortal vampires out for your blood or lackthereof.

Will was usually back within an hour, possibly two. But this time, the clock kept spinning. Three hours. Four. Still no sign of Will. And that hunger as getting higher and higher...

Miriam puts down the boko she'd been reading to try and distract herself. Taking a little longer than usual was no cause for alarm, she told herself. But now it was getting to the point that she was growing concerned despite her best efforts, the gnawing hunger giving it an edge beyond mere concern. She casts out her mind without getting up, as if jumping to her feet would somehow crystallize her anxiety into something more tangible. Her range isn't nearly enough to locate Will in the city, barely even reaching the ground floor of the building. Still, it might help her figure out the situation. The doorman would have seen Will leave, might have noticed if someone had been waiting for Will just outside her mental reach. Same with the other occupants of the building. She usually didn't pay them much mind but on the off-chance they saw something through the windows... Mostly she just tries to find something to do, to calm her nerves. Even if she wanted to go out and look for Will, at the very least she would have to wait for the sun to finish sinking below the horizon.

The doorman had seen Will leave, per normal -- Miriam had put a slight mental whammy there so he wouldn't be concerned with Miriam and Will staying there for quite so long, but he still remembered seeing her leave. And no one else had seen anyone follow her from the building...

...Maybe she was worried about nothing? Was paranoia a side effect of vampirism?

With the amount of enemies Miriam has made for herself a nice big helping of paranoia seems appropriate to Miriam. She paces up and down in the penthouse until finally the last rays of the sun disappear behind the skyline and she heads out, constantly reaching out ahead of her with her powers to try and find Will, barely paying attention to the real world and avoiding running into people more by being aware of their minds rather than their physical bodies.

It takes a bit, but the night belongs to Miriam, now. She's far more comfortable on the streets now that the sun's gone down, and she's able to roam fairly comfortably, people sort of find it in their best interests to get out of her way than vice versa.

The trail is cold, at this point. Most of the people she bumps into have never heard of Will, never seen her, couldn't tell you what she looked like if she tried. A bit of persistence and hard work, however, and she's able to find the tiniest of bread crumbs. A street vendor who had been there for eight hours here, a policeman on patrol there, a homeless man squatting on the corner there. Her wanderings start being less random and more focused, as she grabs onto any clue she can find and starts homing in.

The random snatches of thought and memory had Will walking down the street normally -- not accosted by anyone, not grabbed or snatched. She had walked right past the hypermart, though, and...kept going, down into the depths of the Underground.

This felt like it had trap written all over it. Sam or Alessia both probably would not have found it particularly hard to influence Will. She refused to believe that this was Will's own doing, abandoning her task to wander off like this. Somebody was trying to get to her through Will. But unfortunately abandoning Will is not an option for any number of reasons, so she carefully follows, focusing much more on trying to catch any potential ambush before she steps into it.

There was...nothing. no ambush. No one lying in wait. No one hiding in the shadows or lying under a (proverbial) rock. There was a drunk group of soccer hooligans, some haggard looking businessman, a man in a suit and a ridiculous hat, but nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing whatsoever.

Some further investigation via ~brainpowers~ confirmed that yes, a green-haired woman had come down here, boarding a train. Miriam got most of this information from a guy manning a paper stand, who had definitley been staring at the gren girl with, shall we say, less than chaste intentions.

Miriam had a clear mental picture of Will winking at the man as she boarded the Victoria line, apparently under her own free will.

It's not that she'd expect to completely domineer Will's mind. If anything she was trying to be more subtle about it, to have Will want to be with her. How that's essentially the same only more devious does not really occur to her. So in a way Will acting on her own accord is a good thing, but she still can't help a certain feeling of jealousy welling up in her as she gets on the same line as Will had.

It's not hard to get on the same line; the trains ran regularly, after all, and even in London they occasionally ran on time.

It's a sweltering mass of humanity on the subway car. OK, that might not be fair -- it's really not any more crowded than you'd expect on any random night, but Miriam hadn't fed in quite some time, and everyone was so alive and tempting and full of blood. Like walking through the middle of a street fair after skipping dinner. It was maddening.

It was OK, it was OK; everything will be fine when she finds Will. Where the hell could he be going? Why didn't he call?

Finding where Will got off was a difficult task (phrasing!). Obviously, no one on the subway car had been there when Will had, so she had to get off at every stop and investigate, trying to find some evidence. And proving a negative is definitely the easiest thing in the world to do, right?

Nothing at Kings Cross St. Pancras. Nothing at Euston. Nothing at Warren Street, or Oxford Circus, or Green Park. Was she even going the right way? Had Will shifted and escaped detection? Had he switched lines, and left Miriam going in the wrong direction? It was frustratingly difficult to tell, and the hunger was not making things easier. At all.


Eventually, the subway car pulled in to Victoria Station proper, one of the busiest stations in London. How on Earth would she be able to find any sign of Will here oh, there it was.

Another newsman (thank God for newsman!) had a clear memory of a green-haired girl. She had come up to the kiosk and bought a newspaper, flirting with the newsman's coworker. She had whispered sweet nothings into his ear, and about 15 minutes later, the coworker had left the kiosk on his break, headed back towards the employee's only area. He still had not returned, and that was not making the newsman happy.

By this point Miriam is miserable and it takes a significant part of her focus to not tear into people for the tiniest annoyances of moving to slow or just being in her general vicinity, really. At least the animosity radiating out from her has a tendency to make people give her a wide berth when possible. Miriam doesn't even stop to make up an excuse as to why she's heading towards the employee's only area, mentally slamming the newsman back into his seat. Usually she'd try to be subtle and make him believe she's supposed to be here, but instead she just fills him with enough dread that he'd have a hard time coming up with the spine to say something, much less stop her.

Miriam pushed her way through people and storms into the employee's only section, stewards and janitors giving her a wide berth as anger personified stormed through.

Following the psychic trail wasn't overly difficult, and there was only so many places in the back someone could be. The trail led Miriam down some twisted hallways, into a quiet and relatively isolated corridor. To a supply cabinet, specifically.

And inside that supply cabinet was...well, it wasn't pretty.

The newsman was lying there, dead, pants around his ankles. It wasn't a quiet, peaceful death, either; if the smashed shelves and damaged supplies weren't a big enough tipoff, the slit throat and gratuitous quantities of blood pooling on the ground would have been. This man had suffered.

But all of that was secondary. Even the blood -- the delicious, delicious blood -- wouldn't be what caught Miriam's eye first and foremost. No, that would be the far wall, where someone had scrawled out a message in dingy dried red:

Be seeing you, darling, it read.

"Oh bollocks." Her outward reaction is as calm as her thoughts are not. She slowly steps backwards and closes the door and walks back the way she came, drifting through the corridors in a haze. She doesn't even really care that people saw her coming and going to and from a rather gruesome crime-scene that was going to be discovered sooner or later. Once she's in the main lobby of the station again she walks over to a business man talking on his phone and just wordlessly plucks the phone out of his hand, hanging up on whoever he was talking to. She ignores the objections and obscenities coming from the man and dials...

Somewhere back on campus Sam's phone rings with an unknown caller.

Sam blinks for a moment in confusion, not recognizing the number. Finally, she answers.

"...hello?"

For a moment the line is just silent aside from the faint background noise of the station.

"I screwed up." Miriam finally says.

"...Miriam, is that you?"

"It's me. Listen, I... didn't send all of Will back to you..."

"Wait... what? You just carved a chunk off to be sentimental about?"

"You don't have to make it sound so gruesome."

"It's a piece of him."

"Where are you, Miriam? Haley said you took all your stuff."

"London." she just says curtly. "And I think it's no longer a piece of Will. There... uhm... was something in his mind that was more than just a memory. Some kind of... imprint?"

"I'm going to need more than 'London' if you expect me to be able to help."

"She ran off and murdered somebody at Victoria Station." she says, the shocked calm of her voice breaking just a little bit and a hint of panic shining through.

"...Jesus, Miriam."

"I know! I know..."

"Okay look... does Will know? What you did to him?"

"Of course not. I wanted him to be happy."

"Well he's bloody not!"

"Great. You want to keep yelling at me some more?" she asks and while there's some of her usual sarcasm in her voice there's also this undercurrent of resignation to it.

"Look, mine shaved his head and decided to live in the janitor's closet, and yours is either unhappy or happy for entirely the wrong reasons."

"We need to fix this."

"No shit. I'm not sure it's even Will anymore right now. I've tried ripping that... imprint out of his head before but it's ingrained pretty deeply."

"Alright, so am I meeting you in Victoria station or somewhere else?"

"I'll be here, but hurry. I am starving."

"I'm not bringing Haley if you're going to be like that."

"Sorry my affliction is less agreeable to you than your girlfriend's is." Miriam snipes back. Truth be told she does feel bad about Haley but she doesn't feel like admitting that to Sam. "I'm just trying to deal."

"And if you'd bloody let us help we'd make sure you could, but I'll table that until Will's dealt with."

"Oh yeah, 'help'." she says and Sam can hear the eyeroll. "Just get over here."

And with that she hangs up.