The Cursed Blood

by Jeremy Craig

  Here Gramps had me sized up by an older, grey haired lady with pointed ears poking from her curls named Myrtle, who was in a colorful shawl, floral blouse, and long flowing skirt that he told me was another half-blood (part human, part something else).

  Though she was obviously of a much kinder disposition than the trio we had run into over breakfast. She quickly and efficiently had me measured foot to waist to neck, took Gramps’ list, and without a word was off to fill our order.

  In no time at all a bag of odds and ends, two boxes of boots, and a heavy brown paper parcel wrapped in twine containing my new wardrobe was packed and waiting on the counter. Much like we had at the Wayfarers and hardware store, Gramps paid in an odd coinage I’d never seen before that he later explained is the Feyish tender of choice.

  The currency is mined and minted by the Dwarves deep under the earth in a secret process that renders them impervious to attempts at counterfeiting. And further protected and backed with a promise that trying to do so would cost a counterfeiter their heads. It’s actually a fairly simple monetary system.

  The thicker octagonal gold ones are called crowns and are stamped with a depiction of an empty throne on one side and a crown on the other. Evidently cut throats, assassins, and such call these daggers, due to them being the cost of a life in Feydom’s dark underbelly.

  You need ten of the silver oval ones to equal one gold crown. These are called harpers, as they’re stamped with a merry looking lute toting jongleur on one side and a harp on the other.

  The last of them is tiny, round, and made of copper, and it takes twenty of them to equal a silver harper. These are nicknamed hovels but are actually properly named gibbons, which has nothing to do with the species of monkey or the horn of plenty. They have goblet stamped on them. To be honest no one really knows why they are named that—they just are and that’s the way it’s been as long as anyone can remember.

  Next, we were off to the town Apothecary dubbed “Doc’s Kitchen” from a faded and peeling sign over the porch. It’s set conveniently at a crossroads neighboring a vacant lot and across from the town’s tiny post office.

  Another unmistakable landmark across the street sticking out like a sour thumb is “The Galloping Gnome Gas, Gears, and Gulp” (cheapest gas in the Adirondacks—great mechanics and amazing at giving directions. Just never try their Bubbly Beaver Fever juice and avoid the: “best in state tuna sub.” At least if you want to spend the day NOT on the toilet praying for death).

  If you’re a mundane and impossibly lost and somehow manage to find yourself in town (which does infrequently happen despite local enchantments designed to lead non magic folk safely away), you honestly can’t miss the place. As its flashing neon sign is dangling off of a ghastly twelve-foot statue of a beaver chomping on a wrench and holding a submarine sandwich aloft like a victorious knight celebrating winning a sword battle.

  Back to the Apothecary though, it too is a memorably odd-looking place. It honestly looks little more than a back woods shack shoehorned into a shopfront, with countless old license plates nailed onto it. Its slightly buckling, leaky roofed, slightly crooked porch seemed quite seasonally festive.

  Dried herbs, bundles of feathers, and even a few skull and tiny bone wind chimes dangled from the beams. There were even a few unlit, sinister looking Jack O’ Lanterns on the steps, with one huge jagged toothed one with triangles for eyes set atop a faded rusted old loudly humming vintage Coca-Cola vending machine that had definitely seen better days.

  But, while it appeared like the “nothing good comes from stopping there, let’s roll up the windows, lock the car doors and drive faster as we pass it type of place” it’s actually MUCH, much more than it appears, and quite famous.

  At least in the right circles.

  I didn’t meet the mysterious owner until a few years after this. He happens to be a very creepy, blind old witchdoctor—a transplant from New Orleans, who named himself John Pierre Laffeek, but pretty much no one is buying that.

  It’s rumored he’s really Baron Boba Blackheart of Bourbon Street fame (who I can now confirm he shares a suspiciously uncanny resemblance to), or simply Triple B in less affluent parts of the Feyish underworld’s darkest slums. The owner of the notorious Matchstick and Bones. An exclusive, members only Feyborn establishment with a dark, frightening reputation.

  Alleged to traffic in everything from Feyish narcotics like Fairy Dust, Rip, and Dragon Fire (fairy dust is a mind-altering hallucinogenic powder that’s usually snorted. Rip is a dream inducing tea, and Dragon fire is a crystal generally injected right into a vein after being ground and melted down) to stolen memories, powerful grimoire, exotic beasts, rare antiquities, Feyish art, new and untraceable identities, underground connections, and information no one is supposed to have. It’s pretty much the supermarket of illicit acquisitions with a side gig in the “entertainment” industry.

  The place is still open and thriving, despite several investigations and inquiries. The supposedly new proprietor rarely leaves his plush well-guarded office and only rarely accepts face to face sit down meetings. There are several conspiracy theories and speculations about all of this (each more bizarre and farfetched than the last). However, not a soul has really been able to prove anything.

  Nonetheless, regardless of who he really is, the man is dangerous, has peculiar habits, and is a bit much for most people. To the point where his shop is only visited when one really has no other choice. So now I understand why I was told very firmly to wait in the truck as Gramps stomped off.

  He wasn’t gone five minutes before a rusty, backfiring, multicolored, muddy, and ugly truck pulled up alongside us, and out the driver’s side window Erol Senior glared at me to the point that I remember wanting to sink into Gramps’ truck’s seats. I know I started horribly and shouted when the first of the eggs unexpectedly pelted the window in rapid succession, followed by a peel of raucous laughter.

  The truck pulled out of the gravel drive and off they went, leaving me to watch the splattered egg and shell chips slither down the window. Seconds later, Gramps burst out the door. Running red faced down the steps into the road, waving his fist and yelling ear reddening profanities and threats after them as the truck vanished in a cloud of kicked up dust.

  I’ve only ever seen Gramps as angry as that five other times in my life, and to this day I’m eternally grateful that I was only fool enough to have it be directed at me once in all this time.

  Ironically that incident, many years later, also had to do with one of the Clampetts and Baron Blackheart and had very nearly ended with Papa P flying into a rage and braining Gramps with a huge cast iron skillet from the Wayfarers’ kitchens.

  When we got home and managed to clean the remainder of egg off the truck, Gramps decided it was time to start my more academic studies. Book learning would take up a great deal of my time most days he explained as he tossed his little brown paper prescription bag onto the mantle and lugged a heavy black leather tome from the bookshelf.

  He blew an impressive amount of dust off the cover as he trudged grimly over and plunked it down on the kitchen table before me.

  I know what you’re thinking. How could a kid read ancient languages like Sandscript, Babylonian, Atlantean, High Elvish, Latin, Aramaic, Greek and other such lost and dead languages humans know nothing about and such because that’s what old books are written in? Right?

  Wrong.

  I remember thinking much the same thing, wondering how Gramps expected me to be able to read that dusty, clunky old thing with a cold feeling of dread in my belly, but as it turns out it wasn’t much of an issue at all. You see, the Fey write with special inks and enchant the scrolls and books they record things in in such a way that just about anyone with magic in their blood could easily read (no one’s ever been sure if most Orcs and Goblins can read anything at all, as it’s hard to ask these things when running or battling for one’s life). It simplifies things that way.

  If a mundane human found it
, it would end up looking and reading like gibberish. Or, in better quality books like the kind Gramps collected over the centuries, it would read like something ordinary and mundane. Like a dictionary, or studies on boring subjects like horticulture or tax law that few would even afford a second glance at while perusing the shelves of old bookshops.

  I recall the big, old looking book smelled…odd. It was edged in silver, as was the dry crinkly yellowing pages. On the disturbingly stained leather cover’s center four circles were woven together to form a perfect square at the center and encircled by a great serpent shone in yet more age dulled silver. The words Brightwar Demonica bent round the top of the odd silver crest in golden archaic flowing script.

  Gramps flipped it open, grimacing uncomfortably at a chapter on Reapers it had opened to and licked at his finger (I’m not sure why he does this. Honestly, it’s a bit gross. No one wants to sit for a bit of book wormy research and read spit smeared pages), then quickly began thumbing through pages until he got to the one he was looking for.

  The drawing caught my eye and held onto it like a waking nightmare—a warped, grotesque effigy of a man in black robes with bones dangling from belts and pouches. Long stringy hair twisting and blowing in an ethereal storm of conjured magic, mad glowing eyes as red as blood and wide with ecstasy peering to the blackened heavens.

  Thin lips splayed wide in a monstrous roar, revealing teeth filed to a point as he held a dagger over a clearly enchanted naked woman. Her limp body hovering over a savagely carved altar of black stone, lit with countless squat gutted candles.

  While at the time I was dead sure there was no way I should have been able to read it, read it I did, and wished I hadn’t. The wicked man’s name was Eric Von Clampett, Arch Wizard of the Black. Obviously, a relation to the egg tossing hillbillies we’d encountered at the diner and outside the apothecary.

  “Gave me a bit of trouble, that one did,” Gramps harrumphed unhappily as he peered down at the illustration with a distant, dower look. “A bloody monster, he was too… And sadly, still is. Got him locked up in the catacombs in France.”

  “He’s not dead?” I asked. To be honest the picture was dated 1412 A.D./H.R (After Death in mundane Human reckoning) so at the time my aching brain couldn’t comprehend that such a thing lived THAT long, or that it hadn’t been killed (I guess I was a savage bugger even back then and none too bright cause Gramps had already let on that he had been the one to take the evil wizard down).

  Gramps chuckled at this and again shook his head. “I know what you mean. He was as wicked as they come, boy. But you may as well learn this now. Life’s not fair, and we don’t always get to slay the things worth slaying no matter how much it’s right to rid the world of their filth.”

  He sighed and ran his fingers over the page. He does this often, and I get uncomfortably worried the man relives it all with each picture far more painfully and acutely than any are meant to. Can you imagine? Having to teach it all but see each and every demon, Orc, Troll, and monster and every grotesque, bloody horror they’d done, and you’d seen in the worst moments of your life all over again with each lesson you taught, every day?

  The worst of humanity can be butchering, murderous things, but there’s something beyond normal evils and cruelty that comes with the wickedness of the darkest Fey. It’s like a highly contagious virus or cancer that pollutes and corrupts whatever it touches, leaving even the good and pure blighted, dark, and dirty.

  You know how if you’ve got a bowl of apples and one starts to get those ugly soft, dark spots then, if not removed from the bowl, they all start to get them? Yeah. It’s just like that, but with people. And when you’ve suffered that rot long enough, no matter how much you regret or repent or clean and scrub and wash at the stain, it never comes out.

  Trust me, I know.

  To this day I’ve no clue how Gramps slept at night having lived what he had seen what he’d seen over his many long years of service. Though truthfully when he forgot his pills, he unintentionally woke me many a night when that horrific blight infected his dreams. Warping them into nightmares that left him thrashing and sweating in his bed. Those bad nights it was Manx that nuzzled him out of it and when he woke—many a time, it took a moment for him to remember where and when he was, but I digress.

  Gramps peered down at the grotesque image on the page with a look of simmering resentment. “It was decreed by the High Council that he be taken alive and entombed rather than face death for his crimes… I still don’t know why,” he explained, the words as I remember them had a sour ring. As if he tasted something foul and bitter with each syllable. Fear and anger all but dripped from each letter. Carefully he turned the page, and the wizard’s list of crimes nearly made my belly empty my breakfast on the floor.

  The man had been horribly powerful—a mass murderer, sadist, torturer, and the master of a cruel cult of deadly assassins who call themselves the Nameless. Silver Masked, dark things of death that are more wraith then Fey. They were even at times referred to as the Black Death, as it was rumored that they had killed even more in service to their vile master in his quest for power than the plague of old ever had.

  Evidently, he had even tried to rise to the vacant and lofty rank of Dark Lord. A terrifying and long thought defunct distinction to most in the magical world that would give him supremacy over all Dark Fey. Empowering him to call them forth from their dank, wet burrows, deep places and dark holes to form a hoard that would be as an evil scourge to wipe the Earth clean with a merciless flood of blood and murder the likes of which the world hadn’t seen in ages.

  He had been stopped just in time, but not before much tragedy had befallen the world under his murderous reign of terror.

  “When does he get out? ? Hopefully not soon?” I asked anxiously. I’d heard my parents talk about this kind of thing when they thought I was out of earshot. Admonishing the unfairness and dangers of ever letting such monsters free on the other side of legal technicalities, plea deals, or reduced sentences paid for with testimony and ratting that mundane newspapers seemed to love outlined in big bold lettering on their front pages. So, this couldn’t be far off from that, I’d thought. He had to get out sometime, right?

  “Hopefully… Never,” Gramps answered darkly. “But that’s what those fools you met this morning are hoping after. They dream of a day their illustrious relative rises from the catacombs and burns the world again with his evil.”

  “Why would they want that?” I’d asked. It was a horrifying notion, even for a child. Honestly at the time I’d been blissfully ignorant of how bad it could actually be. Or how ignorant, gullible, and wicked men and women of all races could be that thought they were born superior or entitled to more than others, or worse still, those dangerous ones that are convinced that good intentions justified terrible evils.

  “Because they are cruel, ignorant, and blitheringly stupid,” Gramps answered bluntly. “Never trust any of them, boy. None, not a single one. As it will come to bad ends.” More than once I heard Gramps mutter how he’d rather lose his legs than have to deal with a Clampett.

  Over and over like a mantra whenever we ran into them that not a single one of them was worth the air they breathed. From my experience I happily discovered his wasn’t true at all. In fact, it’s the farthest from the truth one can go (for at least one of them) without tripping over yourself. But that’s not a story to be told just yet.

  After a quick lunch of cheese sandwiches, potato chips with a big fat pickle each, washed down with a surprise of bottled Cokes (Gramps was really trying to make me feel welcome, but only managed to make me feel more home sick), he marched us out to the yard, Manx barking excitedly as we approached a perfect circle of dirt where nothing grew, and a rack of wooden swords stood ready.

  He smiled evilly and gestured for me to go pick one. I took one look at his face and knew this wasn’t going to be fun.

  He assured me that if I managed to hit him even once with my practice sword, we would g
o out for ice-cream. He didn’t even have a sword. He just stood there smiling with his hands folded behind his back. I took a deep breath and charged.

  Predictably, I didn’t hit a thing.

  I landed face first into the dirt as he stared down at me smiling that same wicked smile as he watched me raise myself a bit sheepishly (and painfully) to my skinned knees. “Up out of the dirt boy” Gramps growled with a sadistic chuckle as his dark eyes twinkled with a cold amusement as I wearily stared up at him “Darklings don’t kneel.”

  I did as I was told and tried again, swinging, and swinging (and more than once more biting the dirt hard for m troubles) until my arms ached and never once even made him move more than a few steps or even so much as break a sweat. When it was finally painfully obvious that I couldn’t so much as lift the heavy sword shaped hunk of wood anymore, he nodded, chuckled, and told me to return it to the rack.

  And, while I did as he bid of me, he grimly promised that my training would not be easy, and at times would most certainly hurt. However, he sagely advised, as I mulled that happy thought over, that a bit of pain now during training was a sure sight better than dead in a fight.

  He further sternly announced, as he scratched at his back with his wooden sword (that he hadn’t had reason to use the whole bout), that we would be practicing these essential skills each and every day, rain, sleet, snow, injury or otherwise.

  No matter what.

  And that we did, every afternoon. Each practice was just a little longer than the last as Gramps ran me mercilessly through drills and practice bouts until I felt like I’d been hit with a rather large truck. It was hard, brutal, and exhausting, but it irrefutably payed off in dividends. As it hurt a little less, I struck a little more precisely, moved a bit faster, and swung harder with each passing session.