8
Used Goods
Toni McGee Causey
It was a routine day inside the skinny three-story building that housed the Used Goods store near the heart of the French Quarter . . . until the sword starting singing to Miranda.
Swords did not ordinarily sing to her, you see, and this just would not do. A customer might come in and hear it. People were usually rattled when they stepped inside, compelled, she had begun to suspect, by something they didn’t understand, and a singing sword was just one notch of crazy too far for many of them to handle.
She told the sword to hush, but the sword kept singing.
Off key.
It really was quite irritating. People passing right there on the sidewalk would sometimes pause, confused, looking straight into the little bay window displays that Griff had set up, baffled by the terrible singing, she supposed, not guessing it came from the sword in the window. Not that all of them could even see the window, but that was another bag of worms entirely.
Miranda dusted the haphazardly stacked merchandise on the back wall behind the counter, wary of the little tin soldier who liked to try to stab her with his bayonet when she wasn’t looking. She couldn’t prove he was trying to actually stab her. She just kept finding him awfully close to her arm with his bayonet positioned menacing-like, even when she would have sworn he was on a different shelf not five minutes earlier.
“Not today, Lt. Birnbaum,” she told the little soldier as she swiped over him with her feather duster, because it was just ever-so-slightly easier to think she hadn’t completely lost her mind if these things had names. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll have better luck. Off you go, back in your box.” And she scooted him back into the tattered Birnbaum Shaving Kit box where she’d first found him and Griff had said he was supposed to stay, but apparently, Lt. Birnbaum had felt quite differently.
The sword in the window sang a little louder, somehow more irritatingly out of tune, though it might have been aiming for some sort of Irish ballad, so maybe it was singing it correctly.
“Please stop it,” she told it again, and it ignored her. Again.
“Under no circumstances are you to touch the weapons,” Griff had warned her on her first day. “Never. Ever. For any reason. Not even a little bit. I will know, and you will lose your job immediately.”
“If you don’t stop it,” she told the sword, “I’m going to tell Mr. Warm-and-Fuzzy. Maybe he has a nice vault somewhere.”
The sword got a little quieter, though it didn’t cease altogether. She rolled her eyes and hoped no one came in and complained about the noise.
Of course, customers rarely wandered in, at least not of their own volition. Which was weird. She had no idea how the store managed to stay in business.
The front of the store looked all of its 200 plus years in age—paint of an indeterminable color had faded and flaked off to the point where most of the original stucco was exposed, grayed from dirt and grime. The building might have once been glorious with its balconies (two floors of them) and wrought iron balustrades, but now it only sagged there like a once-formally dressed old lady who’d been struck with leprosy and only wore rags.
In other words, it was exactly the kind of place tourists looked for and swarmed like gnats. She checked the doorknob to make sure it was unlocked.
Yep. Definitely unlocked. Not a single customer all week.
She glanced back at the stack of thingamabobs she’d just dusted, and she blinked. Every item was in a different place than they’d been five minutes earlier.
“It’s not like I actually plan for the weird things to happen,” she told the fat little elf statue that clutched a four-leaf clover over his head as if hiding from the world. If she tried to remember what she’d thought he’d clutched yesterday, she’d have said a gold ball—clearly her powers of observation were on the fritz, or there was another one of those figurines around the store somewhere. “Odd things just happen around me. It’s not my fault, right?”
She could have sworn, for just a split second, that the elf shrugged.
The sword got shriller, though she hadn’t thought it possible.
“No kidding,” she said, stomping over to the display in the bay window, “I may not be able to touch you, but I can surely find some sort of tongs and use those to toss you into the oven. There’s a kiln just two blocks over.”
The sword switched to something that sounded like a fight song, but the volume had gone down a couple of notches. If she had to guess, she’d say it was seething, which really, that was nonsense. It was an inanimate object.
Inanimate objects do not seethe.
Honestly, this was more crazy than even she was used to. Maybe the shrinks had been right all those times they tried to put her on medication when she was in the foster care system.
But some of the meds made her quite sick, and the rest knocked her out for entire days. She couldn’t finish school, sleeping her life away, and she couldn’t get a job, or get out of the foster homes, if she stayed sick. Sometimes the side effects had been hideous, like hives and swelling and horrible acne, though she didn’t tell a single soul about the one time she developed something that she swore to herself looked like scales. Actual scales. Which probably explained her addiction to cheap body lotion that she smeared all over her arms when she felt herself beginning to lose it.
She looked down and realized she was holding the lotion bottle right now that was usually tucked in her pocket, smearing like crazy, covering her arms.
Damned singing sword.
She’d first been aware that the store was stalking her three weeks ago.
It was her second year of living on the streets. She’d gotten out of jail after a slight misunderstanding over who exactly possessed the jewelry she’d been found to be carrying while traipsing out of a house where she’d not—strictly—been invited to visit.
In all of the times she’d stood on that corner, trying hard to play her slightly battered, wholly stolen violin for money and passing up opportunities to pick the pockets of lazy tourists, there had never been a skinny, three-story building facing her from across the street.
She’d been playing some random piece that came into her head—it was always some random piece of music that wouldn’t let her be, so she might as well make a few bucks off it—when between one blink and the next, the store was there with a battered sign in the window that read:
DEBRIS & DETRITUS
USED GOODS
She’d stopped playing and stared, and a honeymooning couple who’d been listening to her threw her worried glances, along with a five into her hat, and she didn’t even bend down to grab it and shove it in her pocket, lest the gutter punks snatch it and run with it like they had last week.
Miranda might only be twenty-three in physical years, but she was at least forty on the street and had seen more crazy than anyone ought to, and even that didn’t seem to brace her for the surprise of a building being where it was clearly not supposed to have been.
There were now seven buildings on the block, when there had only been six before. It didn’t have an address on the front, which, really, how silly of them, and she wondered what type of Used Goods they sold.
Not that she had any money for that nonsense, because she was barely holding her own at the shelter as it was. People didn’t know how much it cost to be homeless. People were right daft sometimes.
Miranda had shaken herself from her reverie, picked up the tune where she left off, and when she was done, glanced back over, and the storefront . . . was gone.
She blinked, closed her eyes, and then looked again, but nope, the street was perfectly normal. Well, as normal as the French Quarter gets.
It happened again the next day. She’d riffed on a song, thrown in something random, then realized the building had appeared. This time, sporting a HELP WANTED sign.
She was standing on a different street corner than the day before.
Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, and by the end of the song, it was gone again. Her playing suffered, because it was just a little difficult, you might agree, to concentrate on playing well when a building was pranking you and you were wondering if you wandered into an ER, if they’d bother giving you an MRI or skip all the paperwork and just go ahead and ship you off to the crazy ward. Probably the crazy ward, since she didn’t have insurance, she decided, and so she packed up everything, determined to look unruffled, and sauntered back to the homeless shelter. She hung out a couple of hours before they opened for the night, listening to the others to see if anyone else had noticed anything weird.
After overhearing three conversations about sparkly aliens and another guy talking (to himself) about how dinosaurs needed to quit stealing his blankets, Miranda gave up hoping for enlightenment.
She refused to look at any of the buildings.
The third day, when the building appeared between two famous restaurants that Miranda knew actually shared a wall, she wasted no time. She needed money, and she wasn’t letting some stupid stalker of a junk shop screw with her again.
She cut her song right there in the middle, scooped up her hat and her violin case, and marched past two corners——one with a sax player who made her want to linger and one with a short, drunk guy laying out knives to juggle that she carefully avoided—until she finally found another unoccupied corner.
She set out her hat, primed her violin, and started playing.
Miranda felt it before she saw it: like ants crawling into her hairline.
When she looked up again, mid-song, the blasted Used Goods storefront had followed her.
She was being stalked by a skinny-ass building that didn’t—couldn’t—exist.
The July heat was scorching, and she was surely coming down with something. Insanity, probably. She ignored it, and then when she looked again, the HELP WANTED sign was back, with a big sign next to it:
Yes, you, Miranda.
“That’s not even funny,” she muttered under her breath.
It’s kinda funny.
. . . the sign read, and when she blinked again . . .
You’ve passed the interview.
“Oh, hell, no, I haven’t,” she grumbled, flinging everything into the fiddle case, her head bent over it.
The sign stretched so low, it almost skimmed the sidewalk, where she couldn’t help but see it.
1 bedroom apartment
Food
Clothes
Low pay (hey, you can’t have everything)
Apply within.
She stared for all of two seconds before she irritably hiked up the case and stomped across the street.
“You should have said so in the first place,” she muttered as she stormed through the door.
She waited at a filthy counter for more than an hour, and when Griff showed up, hostile and snarling, he said, “Well, I guess I don’t have any choice about it. You’re hired.”
He looked as mean as he sounded; tall, with a craggy face that looked rock-hard and angry.
“Really. And here I thought it was just me who had no choice in the matter.”
“Clean up. Everything.” He glanced around as if really noticing it for the first time. “That should keep you busy.”
She looked over the massive stacks of antiques, bric-a-brac, and items so long past their usefulness date they were practically moldering on the spot. There was so much dust and grime that a backhoe would be necessary.
“You’re kidding,” she deadpanned. “I can see why sales are so brisk.”
“If a customer comes in, be polite, but do not sell them anything unless I say it’s okay. We don’t sell stuff.”
“But . . . this is a store, right? Not a museum.”
“Of course it is,” he muttered, as if just now discovering that fact.
“Well, here’s a nutty thought: if we sold some of this stuff, it would be a lot cleaner in here.”
He looked back at her, and she almost could have sworn his face looked like . . . actual granite . . . and there was this strange hush in the place, as if all sound had drowned.
“We don’t sell things to just anyone,” he said, revising. “I decide who, what, and when. Not you. You shouldn’t even be in here, but that decision’s out of my hands. So clean.”
“So . . . clean stuff. Stuff that we’re not going to sell. How again is this a store?”
“Feel free to leave.”
Food. Privacy. Money. For that, she could put up with almost any amount of crazy. Even this.
“And try not to be stupid.”
Crazy did not have to include insults. But still. She bit her tongue.
“Okay, got it. Clean. Don’t sell. Do I leave it all jumbled like this?”
He looked around again and sighed.
“You can try to straighten up. Not that it’s going to do any good. And don’t touch the weapons. For any reason. Under penalty of death.”
She’d smiled and offered him her hand. “Deal.”
Smiling always drove them crazy in the group homes.
That was three weeks ago. Now Miranda stood, straightening up the cupboard next to the bay window, the one which housed all of the pieces of a knight’s armor, wondering (not for the first time) why anyone would think used armor would sell. It was tarnished and bent, and she was afraid that the brown stains might have been blood.
The sword started screeching another tune. She could not imagine that it could have managed to sound worse, but it did.
“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy,” she muttered in the sword’s general direction, “Have you no pride? The least you could do is try to mimic an actual song, if you’re going to torment a body.”
The shrieking grew, making Miranda’s bright red curly hair stand nearly on end, and she moved near the sword, careful not to touch it, and shook the velvet-lined saxophone case where it was lying, in all its ugly glory—why something that plain was in a fancy velvet case was beyond her, but maybe it was a sales tactic—and it screamed louder still.
“Hush!”
And then, in the blink of the next second, the front door . . . vaporized. Or seemed to, and there was someone standing there, someone in a horrible looking costume—complete with demon horns and two spare heads. It wasn’t Mardi Gras or anywhere near Halloween, which gave her pause, until she realized that someone had very likely meandered in when they were looking for a private costume party.
“Can I help you?” she asked, cringing as the sword seemed to bray and cry. Maybe the person couldn’t hear it—maybe it was all in her head—because he didn’t seem concerned about the noise. He didn’t answer, and he hadn’t looked fully at her. At least, not that she could tell. She was pretty certain the center head was the real one—though the costume eyes on the other two heads seemed to rove around the room. She silently awarded points for a Very Good Costume, even by New Orleans’ standards.
“Sir?” she guessed, wishing for the first time Griff would show up and deal with this customer. He’d made the last one cry and run back out in five minutes flat. “Do you need something in particular?”
The man turned to her. One face held what she might have termed a quizzical expression, only the head had tilted forward at a 90-degree angle to the body, and a tongue had slithered out, tasting the air, snake-like. “Great, uh, look. Is that a from a movie filming around here?” she asked, and he took a step toward her.
Fear flashed all over Miranda, a sudden freeze of icy cold racing up her spine, and without thinking, her hand closed . . . and the hilt of the sword was somehow in her palm.
The screaming stopped, and a song—something Miranda knew in her bones—came welling up from the soles of her feet, through the bone and flesh and steel blade of the sword. For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel . . . alone. The music washed over her and seemed to cloak her, like a cape, and she couldn’t tell if the costumed customer could hear the music, but he paused, as if concerned.
She chanced a glance around, hoping for Griff, and saw, instead, at least a dozen little . . . gremlins. Goblins. All manner of creatures. All frozen, shocked at the sight of her holding the sword. All of their mouths hung open, paused there as if she wouldn’t see them if they didn’t move.
One blinked.
The elf, who now held something that looked eerily like a small hand grenade.
“You!” she pointed the sword at the elf, who blushed but tried vainly to pretend he didn’t notice her. “I see you.”
“All hail,” the customer whispered, sarcasm dripping from every word, wrenching back her attention, his gravelly voice a rasping sound that shivered her every nerve, “The Queen of Dragons. The Griffon thought to hide you here. How clever.”
She looked around just to be sure there wasn’t some statue he might have been referring to.
“Hi,” she said, thinking he might have gotten another step closer when she’d glanced away. “My name is Miranda. I work here. I dust, mostly. There aren’t really many customers. Could I interest you in that cauldron over there? It looks like it would go with your costume. Really great look, by the way. What movie are you here for?”
One of the other heads cocked, like he found her puzzling, and really, that was one autonomous head too many.
“He thinks to disguise you,” the guy said.
So the cauldron wasn’t the way to go. “We have a sale on elf statues,” she suggested, pointing at the row of elf statues which seemed to have grown to a couple of dozen in the last few minutes, all of whom looked aghast and affronted at her spontaneous offer.
She was absolutely certain she’d never dusted more than three at any given point. “Just this morning, in fact. 50% off. They’re really cute. And they will bring you good luck.”
“Has your keeper left you?” the guy wondered, tongues now slithering out of the two non-speaking heads. “Does he think to fool us? We will not be swayed from our path, Queen of Dragons. You will never reign again.”
And he moved, slicing across the air with talons Miranda had not fully seen but had leapt backward from on pure instinct. She raised the sword in defense, something that would have made absolutely no sense to her ten minutes earlier.
And it SANG as lightning sizzled along its edge and it seemed to throb with music. Angry music.
“Ohhhh,” she marveled, pointing at the sword with her left hand, “I don’t think it likes you. I think you need to leave.”
The man—or creature, she had about given up hope that there was something normal at work here—sprang forward, claws out. She blocked with the sword again, but apparently, she’d waved it, too, and off went one of the hands, green blood spurting as it rolled across the floor.
Miranda had enough time to think:
“Ewwww!”
“Oops!”
“Sorry?”
Before the creature regrouped and came at her, green blood spraying the walls, the elves (who all ran, screw this pretending we don’t see you thing). One elf was slimed with blood and ignited! Three goblins grabbed a nearby tapestry, probably expensive, and started beating him with it to put out the flames. Or they had some interpersonal issues.
The demon spun, spraying more blood everywhere and then his freaking hand regenerated, and now?
Now he looked pissed off.
“Ohmygod, run!” she yelled to the other . . . elves and goblins and gremlins, holy crap, meds were looking pretty good right about now, because clearly, she was losing her mind, trying to fight off an acid-bleeding demon in a Used Goods store that didn’t even freaking sell anything.
Swinging a sword? Not nearly as easy as they make it look on TV. She missed the demon (twice), the sword was screaming out of tune, and she lopped off the arm of a statue (dear God, let that one actually be a statue) like cutting through butter, but she was losing ground and fast. The store just wasn’t very big, with that many aisles to run down, and the demon seemed to be . . . growing.
“Low pay my freckled ass,” she muttered, wondering if there was a hazard pay clause in the form that Griff had made her fill out.
The sword screamed a warning, and she ducked just in time, cornered now, and something large and fast whooshed into view between her and the demon—
The air exploded.
Something with giant black wings swooped down in front of her, and she flew backward, landing with a hard crack as the demon’s three heads rolled one way, and his body started bubbling as it fell into a chaise longue that was definitely going to have to be reupholstered now.
Blech. She had not even had caffeine yet.
The massive wings expanded and stretched, blocking her view of the body. Idle thoughts like police, jail, accessory to murder, maybe I can plead insanity as a defense ricocheted in what was left of her mind as the immense . . . person’s . . . wings continued to stretch, practically touching each wall, they were so tremendous. They shook, shivering, almost vibrating and then suddenly: calm.
The calm was far, far creepier.
Miranda scrambled to her hands and knees and up to her feet, heading for the back door. Not again. No way. She was out of there.
The huge beast landed in front of her, and the floor trembled under the impact.
The midnight-black wings folded back in, lying flat, and she heard Griff’s voice, somehow lower and scarier, though how that was possible, she did not know.
“I told you, Miranda, do not touch the weapons.”
Griff has wings? Holy shit!
“I swear, that was not my idea. It was the sword’s. It just showed up in my hand when creepy three-headed guy came at me.”
Griff turned then, and Miranda nearly went dead at the sight: he was beautiful, terrifyingly so. Everything in her screamed run, he will kill you and the sword hummed a loud, hostile chord in her head.
“Shut up,” she told the sword. Then she saw the anger flame in Griff’s eyes and she backed up a step. “Um, not you. The sword. It won’t shut up. It’s really really annoying. Here—take it. I’m sorry I touched it.”
Griff glared at the sword as if he’d like nothing better than to hoist it into outer space.
“I didn’t mean to touch it, honest. It kept screaming.” She looked down at it. “I think it was lonely. I mean, the singing was a tip-off, and that was bad enough, but the screaming was just a bridge too far.”
“It’s singing to you.” He was clearly unhappy about that. So was Miranda because obviously, she was the only one it could torment. She’d like to share that little fortune with him, the way he glared at her, like this was somehow her fault.
“Where was it?” he asked, like this was a trick question.
“What do you mean, where was it? In the window, where you put it. In the velvet case.”
She wanted to add duh, but thought it best not to push the angry guy with the wings who just killed a demon.
“The saxophone,” he said, to himself, disgusted, which made absolutely zero sense. “Sonofabitch.”
“Am I fired?”
He frowned, grim and resolute. “No.”
She was unexpectedly and quite unreasonably relieved.
“Now we are at war. And unfortunately for you, you’re the leader.”
“I quit!”
Miranda could have sworn actual steam wafted from his nostrils.
She backed up another step and set the sword down on its velvet box.
As soon as her hand let go, a crashing wave of wrongness flooded her, and the sword screamed so loudly, she thought for a moment her eardrums would shatter. She touched it, and it paused, quiet, waiting for her to decide what to do next.
“Back away from it,” Griff said, the weight of authority in his voice so strong, it practically had a gravitational pull.
And yet. She couldn’t quit touching the sword. She wanted it. Badly. She’d never actually wanted anything, besides food, a place to sleep safely, a shower, and she wouldn’t say no to some shiny jewelry (she looked fondly over at the pristinely clean jewelry case), but the sword? Belonged to her.
“I don’t know why it’s screaming when I set it down.” She picked it up again. “Does it have an off switch?” she asked her boss. It must have some sort of electronic proximity gizmo, and she searched the hilt. She hadn’t remembered the hilt being quite that ornate, and quite that shiny of a silver, or why she’d thought it was ugly before. “Was this a film prop? Because they did a pretty good job. I don’t see any ‘Made in China’ stamp, either.”
She looked up to see Griff had covered his face with his hands, as if he needed to keep them busy to keep from strangling her. It was that distinctive strangling vibe that made her take another step back and look away.
“Anyway, if you’ll show me how to turn it off, and give me my wages, and by the way, an extra two weeks severance would not be at all out of order here. I’m sure there’s a ton of OSHA violations I could report.”
Griff roared and the glass shook, things fell, lots of little elf and goblin and gremlin faces peeked out of hiding spots and then snapped right back out of sight again.
“Oh, you know, on second thought, I’ll just leave leave. Um, real quick. I’ll go get my clothes and violin.”
She peeked up at him again. The wings had disappeared. But his typical I’m so exasperated with you, I could squash you expression was firmly locked in place, only now that she knew what he was—she laughed wildly in her own head—the expression looked far less annoyed and far more murderous than she’d realized before.
He just killed someone. Three feet away from you. Get out!
The body and the heads were gone. The elves and gremlins and goblins or whatever they were, were now out of their hidey holes, and all pretending to be frozen in different positions.
“Um . . . what happened to the body?”
“The portal absorbed it,” Lt. Birnbaum replied from the counter as if that was a perfectly rational thing to happen. She squinted at him, and he doffed his little hat. “The store—Ma’am, as it’s called here.”
“That’s enough, Michael,” Griff snapped, and she peered back up at him. “As you can plainly see, there are more things here going on than you understand. Unfortunately for you, I’m not allowed to explain them.”
“There are rules, but you can’t tell me? Why not?”
“Cursed,” said the elf with the grenade—and really, was that a real grenade? That couldn’t be a good thing. Should she take it from him?
Griff flicked a small motion toward the elf, and he was frozen—unable to speak or move for real.
“We can hint,” Mr. Birnbaum stated, rather argumentatively, she thought. “But we cannot explain. To do so brings on ramifications. You must learn and grow on your own, and if you don’t, you die.”
“Wait, what? I quit already. I don’t have to keep following rules, although if you ask me, telling someone they’ll die if they don’t is just a little harsh. I’m sure there’s some sort of harassment code against that . . . ” she saw Griff’s glare and her voice got smaller, “um, somewhere.” For heaven’s sakes, she was arguing with a statue and something that had wings. Maybe he’d drugged her food. That had to be it.
“Look, I’ll just set this down . . . ” And she tried to set down the sword again, but it screamed so loudly, the glass in the windows cracked, “or maybe not. How much does it cost? I think it’s lonely. I’ll just buy this with whatever’s left of my paycheck after room and board and I’ll be on my way. Not dying today, though, thank you for the job, and, um, place to stay when I needed it.”
“You need to learn,” Griff ground out as if it was painful for him to talk to her. “You are untutored, unaware of what is going on, and unable to defend yourself.” He buckled to one knee, as if fighting against some sort of torture as he pushed out the rest of the words. “Take the sword, at least. If you call me, I will come. But know this . . . if you call me, you are committed.”
Huh. I’d have to be committed to call you.
“Do you have a scabbard? I can’t exactly walk around the Quarter with a sword.”
“It will . . . disguise . . . itself,” Griff ground out, going down on another knee, one hand braced against the floor. She could see his shudders, his muscles knotting and flexing and rolling and wow, did that look . . . awful. It made her stomach flip, and her knees felt gooey with fear.
“Go!” he yelled, and she ran for her things in the upstairs apartment, grabbed her little stash of money, her violin, her clothes, and not having a clue what to do with the sword, stuck it in her belt, then hightailed it back down to the store. Griff had gone somewhere else again, and all the little elves were frozen, all the little thingamabobs were still and quiet and not the least bit suspicious. Mr. Birnbaum was back in his shaving box, looking forlorn as usual, and there was absolutely no reason to stay.
It broke her heart.
“Goodbye,” she whispered, and not a single sound whispered back. “Be well.”
When she stepped outside into the heat of the summer in the Quarter, the Used Goods store wavered and disappeared. She glanced down, and the sword had become a bright purple parasol, its hilt now a curved handle, its blade now frilly and sparkly where it lay at her thigh.
“That cannot be a good thing,” she thought, as the crowds dodged around her, not a soul seemingly surprised that she had materialized out of a wall where no door now existed.
On the upper balcony of the Used Goods store, if you’d been able to see it, (and it’s not your fault that you cannot; there are things at work here you are yet to understand), two men reclined in beautiful chairs, a lovely tea service set between them. One, Debris, who was the more practical of the two, sipped his mint tea with a frown on his unlined face. He was ancient, though he looked as dapper as any young fifty-year-old might, and he was quite proud of that fact. You could see his confidence in the cut of his seersucker suit, the sweet bow tie, the white chinos, and the high polish of his two-toned shoes.
Detritus was practically slovenly in comparison, in his too-currently-popular shredded jeans, tattoos covering whatever he felt like should be covered today, long hair wadded in a leather tie, falling out haphazardly, with some of it tucked behind his ear. He ignored the tea and drank beer, instead, and though he looked more like a thirty-something rocker who’d lived a very hard life, he was actually slightly older than Detritis, by a century or two. Possibly more, though no one had ever gotten the truth out of them, least of all Griff.
If Griff had bothered to look behind him at the building, he’d have seen it glowing like a jewel box—stunning cobalt blues on the outer walls, pristine white trim, perfectly gorgeous windows that led to rooms so welcoming, you’d have sworn some master interior designer had plucked your favorite style from your mind and strewn it before you like diamonds. Griff, frankly, was sick of this shit and wanted to kill them both.
It was nigh on impossible to kill demi-gods. He’d tried for a few centuries, so he should know.
“Do you think, dear boy, that she’ll stir up quite a lot of trouble?” Debris asked him, and Griff ignored him.
“It’s going to be a blast, either way,” Detritis said, and he was probably composing some song or ode to the impending disaster. Just another one to add to the thousands he’d accumulated.
Griff’s anger raged beneath the surface because he knew they didn’t care. Miranda was alone, out there in the world again, and they were going to enjoy the apocalypse from a front row seat, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
“Yes,” Debris agreed with his partner, smiling into his tea. “Yes, quite.”
They watched as Miranda hiked up her backpack, which held most of her worldly goods, her violin case in one hand, the sword now appearing as a parasol dangling off her other side. Oh dear Jupiter, she didn’t even know to put it on the correct side where she could get to it quickly with her right hand.
“Please try not to kill her again so soon,” Debris added, almost as an afterthought, but Griff knew nothing Debris said was an afterthought. “It’s so delicious to watch this, knowing now she’s found the sword. She hasn’t found it all of the other times.”
“How many thousands?” Detritus asked him.
Griff continued to ignore them both, watching her disappear into the crowd on Royal.
“Oh, hundreds of thousands. I’ve lost track of the millennia. You’re getting soft, Griff,” Debris teased. “You never let her live long enough to get close to the sword before. What’s changed, I wonder?”
He didn’t answer. He sat like a gargoyle on the balustrade, watching her, knowing his other half walked away into certain death. And if she managed to live, he would have to kill her again.
He was so tired of having to kill her.
She’d made him promise. All those millennia ago. Part of him wanted to let her live long enough to remember him, to remember that damned promise, just so he could strangle her for having made him make it.
Part of him knew she’d been absolutely right to do so.
Why had things changed this time?
Griff didn’t know. He couldn’t put it into words.
Loathing, perhaps. Loathing of what little of himself he had left.
Maybe that’s all it was.
It sure as hell wasn’t hope. He knew better.
About the Story
One of the best things about dear friends who are also writers is that they understand your particular brand of Crazy. One of the worst things is that they generally encourage it. Pooks knew I’d been noodling with a fantasy dragon series. Something fun and action-y and crazy and set where I live, in the French Quarter, and then she upped the Crazy by suggesting I add these two not-quite-prime-time Greek Gods to the mix. All I had were the names, and they popped to life for me and were absolutely perfect for the story. That almost never happens with others’ suggestions. (Thank goodness Pooks isn’t into pushing crack, or I’d be a goner.)
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