In the room, Lorne listened to Danitz's vivid account, and a cold smile befitting his current attire curled his lips. "Good luck," he remarked. "Everything is going according to our original plan."
"Shit, that guy almost caught up!" Still shaken, Danitz took a gulp of liquor. "If that wall hadn't collapsed just in time,
we wouldn't have been able to keep the act going."
"I had a backup plan ready," Lorne said calmly. "If something went wrong along the way and he arrived early, we would've had no choice but to hand him a corpse directly."
Fortunately, however, the plan had gone extremely smoothly.
Alger had successfully been affected by "calamity." The drunk who suddenly appeared and the wall that collapsed at just the right moment were both manifestations of the Calamity Priest's abilities.
Although Lorne couldn't precisely control the specific form a "calamity" took, his ability to attract calamity did allow him, with some difficulty, to make one person's movements go less smoothly.
It was precisely the delays caused by these "accidents" that had given him and Danitz enough time to stage their carefully arranged performance of "Brando's" death.
After all, witnessing one's prey die "accidentally" right before one's eyes was far more convincing than simply discovering a cold corpse.
To be honest, Lorne had prepared several contingency plans to deal with all kinds of unexpected developments. At that thought, he suddenly fell silent, took off his glasses, rubbed his brow, and sighed softly.
Why did it feel as though I'd become a little more evil?
Setting traps, manipulating people, using a "double" to stage a death, even if that double deserved to die...
No, if anything's to blame, it's this damned world!
He quickly convinced himself.
*And that Alger, too. If he hadn't gotten greedy in the first