The place was public. Quiet. Out of the way. Nothing that screamed wariness or a set up but it was neutral ground. Always important for these kinds of dealings, despite her knowing where his shop was located. That was an easy fix, there was no anxiety over his pawn shop. It was warded to Heaven and back - should even one mote of dust be displaced in his seeming absence, Les would know of it. With his back to the wall and his face toward the door, he sat with elbows leaning on the small table in front of him. Blue eyes were trained on the entrance, one hand hovering over the top of his plain white coffee mug. Shaggy blonde strands were tucked behind his ears and he needed to trim the full beard but those were the least of his concerns on this day. Waiting and watching were more important.

Neutral ground for a couple of creatures that were used to marking territory, maybe. Making chaos or postponing it from one end to the next. She enjoyed her unknown districts, the hidden valleys of shadows in random joints or the back room in a no name bar. There was a promise kept, unspoken but there, so her proverbial claws were kept secret while her smile was painted up in the burgundy of aged wine. A target to hone in on to keep you from being slayed by the battle axe of hips that tick and tocked during her wolfish gait to where he sat. She brought the chill of winter with her but didn't seem bothered by it; her clothes were a second skin, squeezing against every ample angle, proposing her as a Grecian eidolon long forgotten but surviving on the modern streets by picking her teeth with victims bones. Butcher greeted him by not speaking first, but settling across from him, combing fingertips across the shaven crown of her skull as she situated into comfort.

He was used to making his mark, yes, but not for the same reasons as this creature that came slinking up to the table, peddling her wares so blatantly. Noelle practically screamed her intent so that he couldn't even pity her victims, not from the way she oozed 'buyer beware'. Nostrils flared slightly as he glanced up, focusing upon her face but deftly avoiding the trap that was her painted mouth. He'd been in enough deep, dark holes to know a lost cause when he saw one - there was no way out of that Hell once her teeth closed behind you. "Glad you could make it," the curt politeness of his tone leeching any real meaning out of the first word. With his eyes, he gestured to the chair across from himself, inviting her to sit. Didn't think she would partake of any human beverages that were sold here. "Did you bring your pet along with you," his stare sweeping to the front windows, looking for Isaiah and her car.

He was good with recognizing monsters behind the masks, even when they were this well stitched. Purgatory was kept in her eyes, all the souls she swallowed captive in her smiles, but he was fiercely immune to the pliable grins she fixed on her mouth for him. A bit of man that didn't think so loudly with the baser instincts such as sex, slicing away his words from a frozen tongue that refused to become charmed by the cobra who sat across from him. Elbow perched to the table, chin tucked in palm, and the dark color of her eyes reflected him like a ghost when the light hit just right. She could have been a queen to this neon lit avenue but he was there, a staple of a guardian that wouldn't bow to any thirsty Bathory. "I did. Would you like me to tell him you said hello?"

Anything that pretty wasn't to be trusted but he had the advantage of time and lessons learned so hard they were etched bloody into his soul - what was left of it. Clarity was a low-hanging fruit for a creature such as Les but it wasn't something he touted or lorded over others. Best not bring attention to himself. "I'm sure he's been waiting with baited breath all day to hear my greeting," a slightly dry edge to his words denoting the humor he found there. "Tell him I said he will find only what he deserves at the end of this road. No more, no less." Let Isaiah take what he would from that message, Les would not elaborate. "But we're here to talk about you."

She was a dirty kind of pretty. Raised up from the devil's own mouth, pieced with parts of Solomon's legion, and now sitting near a tsunami that screamed her polar opposite. They were an interesting pair; plenty of those that wandered in couldn't help but direct a glimpse at them. Butcher seemed a low lidded Echidna ready to spit sin into anyones face while Les remained a stoic harbinger with his own agenda -- one she was curious to, just as she was quizzical to what ran in the deep valves of his veins. He was an enigma to her, which didn't happen often. She let a false smile worm its way across the burgundy dunes of her lips with that edge of sarcasm he dripped for her. She wouldn't tell Isaiah that. "Yes, we're here to talk about me. So -- talk." Stretching her fingers over the table top, fanning them out, a crack of gum shooting off from between her teeth.

A brow arched, watching her hands that were set just a hand's span away from his own, counting the fingertips that fanned so prettily and he wondered if she was displaying herself for his benefit or another's. "I thought you liked playing with your food before eating." His mouth tensed with the ghost of a smile before it relaxed and smoothed itself again. "B'Shelyaa," he murmured, the Aramaic word for 'silence' so that they could not be overheard even were someone sitting at the table with them. A cheap conjurer's trick that any cut rate person toying with magic could do these days, giving nothing away as to the depth or breadth of his powers. But cautious is as cautious does, no sense in taking chances born of arrogance. "As I said in the message, I think I have found what you seek but I do not have it yet in my possession. In order to be sure, I wanted to know what was in this book."

"I do; I don't see you as food." Ensnaring his attention to the hook of her smile; often when she smiled there was a ghost haunting the corners of it. Silence fell on them, stepping over across the space they shared at the end of that single word that lapsed into ancient. Butcher didn't feign surprise, didn't act impressed, though a corner of her lips twitched as if she wanted to unload a campaign of Aramaic at him. Languages that should have been dead, buried, never to be spoken again, coursed in her structure. A Babylonian empress who once heralded with no gender; a Phoenician king that birthed the very night. It was the question, though, that made her unravel some of the coloring in her eyes. Just black. Black as a starless night. Dark as the days before the dawn. "I can't tell you that." A brief pause. "Unless you are willing to create a pact with me that what I tell you about that book is never spoken from your own mouth."

"The feeling is mutual," offering a mirthless smile that disappeared as soon as it formed. Perhaps even a trick of the eye. They could have played the dead language game for centuries, holding fluent conversations in languages that some would say were not human but he had little patience for those sorts of games. Not here, not with her. He wasn't sure if the change in her eyes was from surprise or denoted something completely different happening internally but he didn't look away. With a blink, there was a sharpness behind his own eyes that was almost reptilian in its mein, looking back at her with a cold and alien curiosity. "You would make a pact with me?" A laugh welled in his chest but it was stifled, seen only in the tilt of his head and lightness edging his lips. "What would be involved in this pact?"

"Sworn to secrecy." Making it seem so easy, so pathetic almost, though there was a clear indication of sincerity veiling over the rapture of her mouth. Making deals was a contract, an agreement, one that was not to be broken in the hellish law that was her pedigree. Both her hands that had been slid out across the table recoiled slowly, dragging her fingertips across the wooden surface, and left behind was the swirling of letters, characters, either able to be deciphered or not given his own eidolon privilege. When they lifted up, a sheet of old parchment paper was left behind, pulled out of dark magics, and humming with a glittering of words being spelled out in the easy to interpret English. "Only the basics; you will not speak about the book, will not give the book to anyone else but me, and will never tell any who come looking that you have never seen this book."

Night worms and demons could be so sincere, or at least play the part as long as it protected their own interests. Les knew the price of contracts, the consequences to breaking them, but he was well skilled in this practice. While she pulled letters from the aether to dance and writhe across the surface of the table, played out her cheap parlour tricks to the astonishment of the table next to them, Les kept his eyes resolutely on hers. Inky stains smeared the fingertips that reached across the table to touch this bedazzled document, sending it back to the shadow and flame from whence it came. "Paper? Really? Quite beneath us, don't you think?" A deep breath was inhaled and when he spoke again, his voice was impossibly low, a croak that came from deep in his throat that was backed by a chorus of unintelligible whispers. He spoke the language of Hell, the shadow tongue of true demons. "I swear that the knowledge you impart to me today will not be repeated by my own lips to any living or dead. You will receive the book from my hands and I will not share its existence in the future."

His willful way of beguiling her had less to do with his looks and more to do with the donation of an enigmatic personality. The paper dissolved away when he sought to be done with it. His tongue acted the way of the pen, the might of words, and the infernal conflict of dealing with devils that dressed as she did. A clasp was made within this moment that was unseen but surely felt. Sliding weights at the tips of her fingers, a bulge of sickness in the gut, then the freshening of numbness that slowly faded away to assure the proverbial handshake was met. That was when she looked content, as content as a lioness who had earned her way to being matriarch. "That book is the written documentation of history, my history, and the work I put into it comes at great value to me. It has detailed ingredients to certain recipes that I am no longer able to remember." Semi-biting into the red pulp of her bottom lip, casting out the look of faux innocence that was a sin in itself when brought a long her features that was suddenly broken, crumbling away, making enough room for the full mouthed smile that could have led Lucifer away from the bright stars of the heavens. "It has a few names in it which I'd like to remember, too. People I'd like to pay a visit to."

The contentment of a cat with the canary already swallowed just by looking at it but wasn't there a saying about counting birds before they hatched? The invisible shift between them was felt, a pact sealed and recorded in the aether to fall upon ears that neither of them could see. Each had their own perspective of the scale, saw it tipping in their own direction but that was surely an illusion brought about by ego. "Recipe book, list of contacts. I assume these things were written in your own hand? So I should be looking for a handwritten journal," musing out loud for the benefit of confirmation from the creature across the table from him. "Anything else of note? How old is this journal?"

Her hands were flashed at him in a playful way that a daemon like her might be known for had anyone bothered to unearth the braided tales of this modern Echidnas story. However, she was old, older than most, and the enriched heritage that she had birthed was all but dead. "These very hands." Unable to replicate coyness but she did her part of sliding a brazern yet bashful seeming look his way. "Old, but it shouldn't look that old." Then again, she had not set eyes on it in what felt like eons. Span of time between her imprisonment and the ultimate break out that had her puppeting this form, taking on the noxious moniker of Butcher.

The playful mein that creeped forth, flashing eyes and batting lashes, fingers wiggling to draw the attention to the full mouth that was painted so brightly did nothing to lure him any closer or draw him out to match the mood. A brow arched as fingers clasped each other loosely, thinking he might stop at the counter for a coffee before he left. "Those very hands? Or are they borrowed?" he asked quietly, letting blue eyes drift slowly down to the digits that danced through the air so elegantly, so gracefully. This snake was always dancing to a charmer's tune he couldn't hear, or perhaps he refused to hear it, blocking out notes that were not of his own creation. "I'm sure it will appear only as old as yourself, very well preserved and just a bit flashy," mouth curling slightly at the corners. "Meant to draw the eye just before it rips out the heart."

He was a quick one, she would give him that. Easy to set their attention on one another as all else paled in comparison. She could smell the dirt of unorthodox lineage but couldn't pinpoint it on a map. His eyes were a normal shade but beneath it was a language of the occult. Hard for them both to catch the dialogue they were showing in body language when both were a bit in the dark of the other. Still, it made it that much more interesting and kept the gum popping looker from twisting out of its skinshell to lap him up, blood, bones, and all. Little bit of laughter, husky with a rapt of sweetness. "A girl has to have some secrets." So she did not give him a defining answer to an assumption that was clearly correct. "Now, I get to ask a question, Les." Leaning forward to make sure he understood that she wanted it to be answered. "Why are you helping me find this book when you have obviously understood since day one that I'm not modern day woman looking for a Betty Crocker list of recipes?"

Beneath his eyes ran many languages, too many to count, but they weren't all visible at once. One had to read carefully and look closer, still, but he rarely allowed anyone in such close vicinity. Butcher was no exception though the table between them was barrier enough when she leaned forward that he did not shift or withdraw. Relaxed as when he began, watching with an impassive mask. He said nothing on the subject of secrets or her subjective girlishness. "You may ask whatever you like, but the answer and the inclination to answer are within my own purview." Pausing, lips pursed a moment as he ticked his head to the left. "Appearances are deceiving in this world, hardly anyone is what they appear to be, you are no different. Certainly not unique. This is business. You are offering money for a service that I am providing. Do you think that any prejudices I may have should get in the way of simple commerce?"

"I was hoping more for you just saying it was because I am just so interesting, though that answer will have to do." A general sigh that was a mixture of relief and the ruse of humor, garnering some more attention from him (if he would allow it) by rolling back into her chair rather than to continue her lean forward against the table. "And you're right. This is business. And I have a lot of money to offer you, Les." Trickling fingertips over the wood surface of the table as she spoke this. "You're doing me a great service. Honestly. And you're not half bad to look at, either." Which could be said in an innuendo; he was flesh and blood but what lurked under his bones was something to be curious about, too. Intrigued. The obsession with finding out would naturally come but for now she could rest at ease with an oath spoken between them, a contract signed by tongue, and his relation to keeping things business friendly.

"What you hope for and what will be are two very different things." Rising to his feet, his shirt was straightened, hands slid into the pockets. "I will call you when I have more information. Good day." Without another word, he turned and headed for the counter, the spell around them breaking as he walked away. Time for a coffee and then he had to things to do.