A Hard Night's Day

Chapter Five - Myrah

Myrah

It would be appropriate to say that I was a bit angry with Mr. Field. Livid, really. I do not like being lied to, especially in situations that could involve death by cursed object.

I looked into Fidgeous' too wide eyes, they were filled with more anxiety than usual. "What makes you think that this thing eats magick?" I asked him, gesturing toward the brooch. "I still can't feel any vibes coming off it. Malicious or otherwise."

"Myrah, while you may be good at what you can do, there are still lots of areas of magick in which you are woefully underqualified."

My eyebrow twitched in annoyance, "Um, ouch. That didn't answer the question."

Fidgeous raised his little furry arms and let them fall back to his sides with a muffled slap. "Well, I could feel the bad juju coming out of the box as soon as it crossed the threshold, but it's not the brooch that's at fault, it's the curse laid on it. When you wouldn't listen to me this morning I nipped over to the Fae plane to ask around. Octavia's second cousin knows a Nix who used to see an elf that dabbled in the black market. He told her about a green bug brooch once that sounds too similar in design to that one there to be a coincidence. And he said it was cursed to consume magick and send it to its creator."

I rested my chin in my hand, my elbow propped on the table to get closer to his level, "And who would that be?"

"I don't know. But faeries can't lie Myrah, you know that! Don't take your chances and destroy the brooch now before something bad happens."

I considered him for a moment. He probably wasn't completely wrong, Fidgeous was more attuned to the magickal spectrum than I was. He was a Fae creature after all, essentially made of magick in a way. He could easily "nip on over" to his home plane of Fae and back again in a literal blink of an eye. For me to do something like that would take weeks of preparation and the results would still be dodgy at best.

Maybe the rope wards burning was a delayed reaction to the curse. And it's true that faeries can't lie, but that story sounded just a bit too convoluted for my taste. I took a slow breath in and out.

"No, not yet," I said, rising from the table. "As convincing as the 'he said, she said' is, there's still something more going on here and I need to figure it out." I couldn't tell him why I felt that way because I wasn't really sure. Some kind of instinct was telling me not to let it go.

Still, I set about creating a containment spell around the beetle brooch to be on the safe side. Using the same type of thick rope as the wards previously adorning the doors and windows, I tied a series of knots meant to contain harmful magick. I placed the rope in a circle around the brooch and tied the ends together and then as extra, extra precaution I added an additional ring of salt around the outside of that. A circle of one of the cardinal metals would have been more effective, but alas, the lowly shop keeper cannot afford wards of gold.

Fidgeous seemed to be a smidge assuaged by the containment spell, but his ears were twitching in irritation.

"It was extremely irresponsible for someone to just give this to you without revealing it's true nature," he squeaked.

"I know, Fidgy. It's all been very shady business, enough to make me angry. I'm going to give our friend, Mr. Field, a call and see what he has to say for himself."

Back in the main room of the shop I fished out the number he gave me from under the counter. The only phone in the shop is an old rotary behind the counter so of course his number had lots of eights and nines. My temper was becoming more incessed with every slow drop of the dial. My chest was physically thumping by the time the line began to ring. I hate confrontation, the adrenaline usually makes me tongue tied and I forget to breathe.