Chapter 11

As they slowly walked into the house only one or two men seemed to be willing to stop them.

Ayden and Michael asked to go first as to get more "combat" practice after watching Gem demonstrate how easily her skill stacked up against theirs. They didn't kill anyone, as that was something they never had to do before, but there would be a few who woke up with massive headaches.

They searched the house but they couldn't seem to find anyone else around.

Working their way lower into the house they found a room at the bottom of indoor basement stairs, and when they tried to open the door they found it hard to open. But it was no match for the combined magic of Michael and Ayden, who were eager to prove they had some worth as temporary members of the girl's team.

They were standing at either side of the door as they forced the door open, but as it swung fully open there was a sudden motion and then an outcry from Beth, who was still standing on the steps with the other women waiting.

Turning around they saw a short crossbow bolt in her leg.

She tried not to cry out a second time as she fell back clutching her leg where the bolt went in. Had she been standing on the floor at ground level it would have went into her chest instead.

Racing to her side Ayden pulled out the bolt, threw it behind him, and started to heal her leg of the wound. Meanwhile Michael examined the doorway and made sure there weren't any more bolts coming their way, since in his rush to get to Beth Ayden didn't seem to be considering the possibility.

Once he was done he looked down and became curious about the bolt that hit Beth, because it had rolled to his feet when Ayden pulled it out, and he noticed that the head was blacked and slick looking, so he picked it up and looked at the bolt as he sniffed at it.

He raised an eyebrow as recognition dawned on him. One thing that kept coming in handy for the both of them was their varied classroom exposure to so many different things.

Quickly looking at Beth he asked "Beth, are you ok? I mean do you feel ok?"

And Beth looked at him as she gritted her teeth to bite back a short response and she said, "Other than getting shot because I was being stupid I'm good. Why do you ask?"

"No reason. Well other than this is an extremely poison bolt and should have made you go numb almost immediately and then killed you with in minutes. It's Quilatain and it is famous for its usage among assassins. They usually use it to hit and silence targets from across the room because of how fast acting it is," said Michael quietly.

He noticed the shocked look on Ayden's face, so it was obvious that he didn't heal or try to remove the poison, yet Beth show no signs of having been effected at all by it. Beth as well looked shocked.

"Ayden we need to further check Beth out later. She should have been poisoned just now, but she wasn't and you didn't look like you were healing her from any of it. Something in what you did earlier to cure her may have changed Beth's blood somehow," said Michael quietly.

As Ayden finished healing her, the shocked group looked at the doorway and in turn further into the room.

The door had a spring on it that if it wasn't opened correctly a crossbow bolt would shoot out and hit a man generally in the chest. If the bolt didn't kill him then the poison would.

It just so happened that when Michael opened the door and Ayden stood to the side, it allowed the bolt to fly past them and hit Beth. That caution saved their lives, even if Beth was hurt by the action everyone still lived.

Walking further into the short hallway they saw a door to another room. Slowly opening this door as everyone hugged the walls, they saw a plush high back chair that had wings on the side of it, with its back to the door, a small table next too it, a bottle of wine open on the table, and on it was a glass next to the bottle with some liquid in it.

As they looked around the room from the doorway they could see the plush carpet the chair sat on and various items of wealth such as paintings, sculptures, and artwork surrounding the chair so that the occupant who sat there could stare at them.

On the facing right side wall was a wine rack that had one bottle missing from it. It must be the bottle on the table that was supposed to go there, thought the group as they headed slowly for the chair.

As they got closer in the low light they could make out an arm. From what they could see from the robe the exposed hand of that arm was a bright and familiar blue.

Quickly moving around the chair they could see an older man, in his late fifties to early sixties sitting in the chair, eyes wide open, but he was completely blue all over.

Moving up to the bottle Gem quickly sniffed it and looked up at the group and shook her head slowly and sadly. It was the same plague that they had been transporting. Shaking her head she couldn't believe he drank it.

"Well it seems we've reached a dead end here. He didn't pick it up today because he couldn't and we'll never know why he didn't come before this happened though. But I wonder about the rest. The other bottles used were unlabeled wine bottles, but this one is clearly labeled as one. I wonder..." started Ayden.

Moving to the wine wrack he checked the thirty bottles there. Of the thirty bottles about twenty of them contained the plague in them in some form. Not the pure concentration they found earlier in the other bottles, but enough to clearly do the job.

Shaking their heads they left the room and eventually headed out of the house.

They were sure that it was Jasper Tolliver who died and he wouldn't be requesting any more shipments. Before they left they had quickly turned all the plague benign that they could and then poured out all the bottles on the carpeted ground.

Looking around the house upstairs again, they found notes that said that Scott Thompson, who was a Black Mage, was who he got the shipment from.

It seems that Jasper contracted Scott to make the designer plague for him and Jasper then tested a sample sent to him on a large city by adding it to all of their drinking water, streams, and surrounding farmland.

It only took two weeks to wipe out every living thing in the city of Terrace Holdings. It was picked because there was a business rival of Jasper's there and he wanted to eliminate him as well as prove that the plague worked.

Jasper had a list of buyers who were interested in the plague and the shipment they were going to deliver was the first of many to be sold to them.

Their earlier fear of the drug getting loose could have been seen as unfounded. Once it was released it only had a life of only a season tops before it lost all potency.

Jasper didn't want to totally write off any area that he might want to take over, and having areas abandoned would allow the buyer of the plague to stay away as it killed anyone who tried to settle in the area and later the buyers would be able to take the area without worry and no one would question their settling in an area no one wanted.

Once they got home they would need to have a talk with Scott Thompson.

They returned to the city and picked up Maria and Greg. Everyone was ready to leave and head home. They decided to leave right then so they could deal with Scott soon as possible.

Greg retrieved the wagon with the shipment to head home with and they started out.

As they rode Ayden was still concerned about Beth and was still surprised that she didn't seem to have any problems or any side effects from what he did.

He never gave it much thought before beyond the fact that he healed her and she lived, but now he was curious what exactly his technique mixed with that plague did to her.