From Greg Stolze:
The idea I'm kicking around starts with a character. Don't know her name yet, but she's an old lady Duke, probably in St. Louis, probably a Cliomancer. She finds lost children. Unfortunately for her, she's caught the eye of the Sleepers, who make the tough decision: Even though she's doing good things on the individual scale, she's being too blatant and threatening everyone on the big scale. So they dispatch one of their Executioners.
The duke gets tipped wise that the Executioner is on the way. She has a chance to bail out, but she's just started the search for a new lost child. She continues her search, even though she knows it puts her in danger.
The Executioner, Agnes, finds her.
"Look," she says. "I'm not going to fight you. You'll just win. And I'm not going to run from you, because I'm too damned old. But I'd like a last request. Let me find this one last child."
The Executioner thinks this is ludicrous, even though she finds this job particularly distasteful.
"Okay," says the lady duke. "I'll sweeten the pot. Help me find the child, I'll let you kill me AND I'll let you blame me for kidnapping her. I'll SET IT UP. All the lost kids I've found -- I'll take the fall for all of it. Isn't that what your bosses want? You won't have just cut off the problem, you'll have erased it. All my previous 'magickal' successes will be revealed as the mechanations of a deluded, sick old woman."
She checks with her superiors, and they agree. Of course, Lenora's looking for a chance to dust her. The Executioner is on the alert for it. And there's more going on than either one of them suspect.
-G.