Cammie and Tabitha - Library

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Tabitha's concentrating awfully hard on something Cammie just has to see.




Tabitha chewed on her lip as she studied her freshest page of notes. She didn't look up at her computer, it was no help at this stage. She let out an explosive sigh of frustration.

That's when she saw the other woman in the room and scrambled to shove her notebook into a desk drawer.

"Oh, what's that?" Cammie said impishly, making a dive for the notebook, "Gimme gimme!"

"No! Wait!" Tabitha attempted to put her body between Cammie and the spiral-bound pages. "It's really not that interesting," she insisted.

"Uh-huh," Cammie returned, managing to get the notebook, just barely at first, "That's what people say when it really is interesting. You can't hide these things from me, Tabby! I shall know!"

She threw up her hands. "It's just proof that I'm freakin' insane," she mumbled. She knew pretty much anybody else would look at the pages of hastily scrawled notes about kings, slaves, and secret societies and wonder if she was a few screws loose.

Cammie marched over and flopped down on the nearby bed, holding the notebook above her and making it up as she went, "Dear Diary, today I looked at books. They all caught fire randomly and I laughed. I also bought large amounts of porn, and it was fucking awesome. Love, Tabs."

Then she started to read it.

It started with the half-remembered conversation when she was drugged during her capture by the Serpent Society. She listed everything she could find about that conversation, making some small, then large leaps in the investigation. Her latest lead was the Hellfire Club and its Black King, but she could find nothing concrete, just rumors and whispers.

"Huh," Cammie said. The last rang a bell, but only in passing, "Sounds like you're looking into whatever Manny's Secret Kinky Sex and Business Club is. Or you're crazy. I can see this going either way."

Tabitha immediately perked up. "What makes you think that? Did he use those exact terms? What did he say about it?" The questions tripped over each other as her heart stuttered and froze in her chest.

"No," Cammie said, still holding the notebook above her head, "But it's just as fucking crazy."

The blond woman fell back onto her butt with a sigh. She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. "I feel like I've been beating my head against a wall for a year."

"Well, I'm sorry you're insane. This isn't even proper blackmail material! What the hell are you thinking?" Cammie returned.

She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to glare. "I'm thinking of how awesome it would be to find the people who drugged, kidnapped, poisoned and tried to sell me into slavery?"

"Well, I'm sure that would be nice to know. But how are you going to find that out with a notebook full of rambling weirdness?"

Tabitha rubbed that spot between her eyebrows that hurt. "There's got to be a pattern in all this information. Somewhere..." The problem being that she couldn't see it.

"Yeah, but I suck at finding shit like that," Cammie said, "How about this - let's go out and get wasted instead."

She looked at Cammie through one open eye. For a full ten seconds, she was divided. "Fine, let's go," she said with a reluctant grin.

"Awesome. I won't exactly be getting wasted, but I'll have a great time watching YOU get that way. And I'll get what I came here for!" she said, way too happily on the last.