Charmed: Let Gorgons Be Gorgons

by Paul Ruditis

  Patrons were doubled over in their chairs and even on the floor looking various shades of green. One man was rolling around on a table in what Piper hoped was a melodramatic act. A couple of members of the wait staff were similarly ill while the hostess and bartender seemed frozen, wondering what to do. Piper worried that the kitchen staff was in similar shape since any other time Chef would have been the first one out there making sure their guests were okay.

  Nicolette broke out of her shock and came running over with cell phone in hand the moment she saw her boss walk through the door. “Piper! Paige! I’m on with 911. This is crazy.”

  Piper looked at the phone and then to her sister. “It’s okay, Nicolette. We’re here. Paige could you take over with the operator while Nicolette fills me in on what’s going on?”

  “Absolutely.” Paige held out a hand and took the phone from the hostess. As Piper walked off with the young woman she did her best to listen in as Paige got on the call. It was difficult since her sister lowered her voice so no one else could overhear. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This was a complete overreaction to a little tummy ache. Everything is fine here. We don’t need any ambulances.”

  It took a little bit to convince the operator that Nicolette had been overreacting, and Piper assumed Paige was getting the lecture about wasting resources by calling emergency services for nothing. Piper had gotten that same lecture herself after Wyatt’s multiple calls to the hotline over the years. Piper had taught him to use the number if there was ever an emergency. It wasn’t the child’s fault that the Manor was struck by an emergency on a weekly basis sometimes.

  Piper was still working to calm Nicolette as Paige got off the phone. She just hoped calling off the ambulances was the right thing to do. They were only guessing that this was some kind of magical malady. If they were wrong, they could be putting the lives of her customers at risk. But Piper was having a hard time imagining anything in her kitchen causing this kind of reaction, and she motioned for the bartender to pour a glass of water. Jessup seemed equally stunned from his spot behind the bar as he handed over the glass without a word.

  Nicolette took a heaping gulp of water and followed it up with a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, Piper. They just overwhelmed me. It was just one or two people at first. They started feeling a little funny and then—BOOM—it hit everyone.”

  A woman in a black dress and cartoonishly bulky costume jewelry forced her way into the conversation “Are you the manager here?”

  “I’m the owner,” Piper said with her brightest smile.

  The woman huffed, obviously not caring about semantics as she waved her hand toward a man doubled over in his chair at the nearest table. “What did your food do to my husband? Is he dying?”

  “We’re trying to find out, ma’am,” Piper said. “I just got here, but I will let you know the moment we figure this out.”

  “I’m going to sue,” the woman said as she whipped out her cell phone. “I am going to own this building and everything you have ever bought in your life! Do you have a house? A car? Well, it’s mine now.”

  Piper threw up her hands a moment before the woman could press the screen of her phone. Piper’s magic stopped the call from happening, along with everything else around her. The dining room became a frozen tableau of people in pain. “This is going to destroy me.” She immediately hated herself for thinking of her own problem before her suffering customers, but it was the first thing that popped into her mind once the moaning stopped.

  “We don’t know it’s the food,” Paige said. “Not unless everyone in the restaurant ordered the same exact thing.”

  For the first time, Piper got a good look at her surroundings. It seemed like every customer was showing signs of some degree of suffering. A quick check of the tables revealed different menu items on the tables in various stages of being eaten. It wasn’t like everything had come out of the kitchen at the same time. The woman that had accosted her only had a small garden salad, which barely looked to be touched.

  “Think you can heal them while they’re frozen, Paige?” Piper went to the door and locked it, flipping the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. The last thing she needed was someone walking in on this pretty picture.

  “I don’t know that I can heal them at all,” Paige said. “But it’s worth a try.”

  Piper crossed the dining room and peeked through the window in the door to the kitchen. The four members of the kitchen staff were all curled on the floor, writhing in pain. Piper was a stickler for keeping the kitchen clean, so it wasn’t as disgusting as some kitchens she’d worked in over her life, but it still hurt her to see her employees in such pain. She raised her hands and froze them as well. “The kitchen staff’s in the same shape. Let’s start in there and then you can do the rest while I talk to Chef and figure out what went wrong.”

  “On it,” Paige said as Piper held the door open for her. Paige started with the chef, focusing her healing power on the woman’s stomach, which she was cradling. A golden glow emitted from Paige’s hands as she reached out for the malady and tried to fix it. With the woman being frozen, Piper imagined it was a bit more challenging than usual since Paige couldn’t be sure exactly what was wrong or even when to stop what she was doing if the magic worked.

  At the point Paige felt like she’d done all she could, she turned off her healing power and moved on to the rest. It only took a couple of minutes for her to work through the entire crew. Once she was done, Piper helped her up off the floor. “Thanks. Now, go take care of the dining room. I’ll unfreeze everyone in here and make sure they don’t leave. Maybe they can give me some kind of clue what was going on.”

  Piper watched her sister leave to work her magic. As soon as the kitchen door stopped swinging, she held up her hands and turned off her power, being sure to limit her range to the immediate area. Paige’s healing spell must have worked, because the kitchen staff looked confused as they were unfrozen, but they did not seem to be in pain any longer.

  Piper helped her chef off the floor as the others got up on their own. “Are you okay, Suzanne?”

  “Much better,” the chef replied. “I think I might have passed out for a moment. I don’t remember you coming in.”

  “Have a seat,” Piper pulled a stool over before helping her other employees to their feet. “All of you, sit down and don’t go anywhere for the moment.”

  “What about the customers?” Suzanne asked.

  “Paige is with them,” Piper assured her. “I think they’re going to be okay. It seems to be passing. Can you tell me what happened?”

  Suzanne shook off the haze of her recovery. “It was the strangest thing. Cary was the first to mention something was wrong. He’s pulling a double so he took his dinner break before the rush and I made him the risotto. He started getting a bit woozy while waiting on his tables. Nothing serious at first. Certainly nothing that made me think anything was wrong. Then it was like all the color suddenly drained from his face and I swear he started speaking in tongues. Eventually he couldn’t speak at all. He was just moaning and clutching his stomach. Pretty soon it spread to the customers. And, well, us in here.”

  “They didn’t all have the risotto,” Piper said.

  “That’s the thing,” Suzanne said. “Hardly anyone ordered it. I was the only one in here that even tasted it.”

  “You tested it?” Piper asked.

  “While I was preparing it earlier,” Suzanne replied. “Not after I thought something was wrong.” She handed Piper some printed receipts. “Before I got hit, I pulled all the orders of people who were getting sick.”

  “It’s spread across the entire menu,” Piper said as she reviewed the orders. It confirmed what she’d already seen on the tables.

  “Some of those meals don’t share any ingredients,” Suzanne pointed out. “Not even spices.”

  “No,” Piper agreed. As the chef who had in
itially come up with most of the recipes on the menu, Piper knew each dish intimately. “So maybe it’s not food related?”

  “You think something’s in the air?” Suzanne suggested. “In the water?”

  Piper’s head hurt. “I think we’re going to have to shut down while I figure this out.”

  Piper spent the rest of the night dealing with irate customers. It was understandable. They thought her restaurant had made them sick. She couldn’t exactly explain that they were victims of magic of unknown origin. Then again, the fact that they had been made ill in what was very likely some kind of attack on Piper probably wouldn’t have eased their anger.

  Paige had been able to heal everyone but they weren’t exactly thrilled to be so violently ill even for a brief time. It took all of Piper’s natural powers of persuasion to keep them from writing bad reviews or contacting anyone official to complain. Thankfully the husband of the woman with the costume jewelry had convinced her not to complete her call to the lawyer.

  Several times Piper had to rely on her supernatural powers as well to freeze the room just so she had a moment to calm herself. It was better than using the other aspect of her power to blow them all up.

  In the end, it had cost the restaurant several free meals in the future and a promise that any medical bills would be covered if anyone still wanted to go to the hospital and that she would be closed for the rest of the night. She didn’t bother to say that she might have to be closed longer than that. It wasn’t like she could open her doors again when she didn’t know what had caused the problem in the first place. That would take some work of a different kind.

  Once everyone was gone, Piper and Paige bagged up several of the uneaten meals and orbed to the attic of the Manor. It was going to take all their magical resources to figure out what was going on.

  Chapter 18

  “You really don’t think newspapers are an antiquated way of delivering important information to the masses?” The obnoxious and condescending voice coming through the phone made Phoebe want to reach through the line and strangle the man on the other side. She made do by throttling the receiver of the office phone as she glared daggers at Mika, who was sitting across from her.

  Phoebe took a deep breath and forced a smile, hoping it would make her sound more pleasant in her response. “I believe what I said was, I’m not here to comment on the state of the newspaper industry. I agreed to this interview to discuss your series of blog posts attacking… I mean reviewing my column.”

  Truthfully, Phoebe hadn’t agreed to anything. Mika had set this whole thing up with Elise’s blessing. While Phoebe had been dealing with gorgons and statues, the blogger that had hooked into her story managed to get an interview with one of the couples that had broken up. He’d interviewed the pair at the same time and, in their anger, they were willing to agree with anything the blogger suggested. Phoebe had gotten the brunt of the blame even though they’d been in an otherwise happy relationship for years since she’d married them.

  “Well, you haven’t been answering my questions about your column either,” the man said. Phoebe was so annoyed with him, it didn’t even concern her that she had never bothered to make note of his name.

  “Again, I need to correct you,” Phoebe said, still smiling and glaring. “I haven’t agreed with your accusations. You’ve asked me very few actual questions so far.”

  Mika shrugged and smiled an apology back at Phoebe. It wasn’t the publicist’s fault that Phoebe had to suffer through this chat with some blogger with an ax to grind against the newspaper industry. Mika was just doing her job protecting the paper and Phoebe.

  “Okay,” the man replied in a joyous tone that caused Phoebe to suspect he was about to come at her with some kind of gotcha question. “Here’s a good one: Do you think an advice column for the lovelorn counts as actual journalism?”

  Phoebe relaxed. This was the kind of question she could handle. She got it all the time. People, especially men, could be somewhat dismissive of her career. “I think advice columns are part of a proud tradition in the news industry to make papers accessible to a wider audience. The Bay Mirror does not just serve those looking to get in-depth analysis of the news of the day… Although we certainly do perform that job admirably, compared to websites more interested in presenting opinions as facts and pushing agendas. Ask Phoebe helps expand the reach of our paper by helping those who are in need of a little advice. That’s all. No harm, no foul.”

  “But you yourself are not a doctor?” he said, again with a “gotcha” tone in his voice.

  “And I’ve never claimed to be one,” Phoebe said. “I do have a degree in psychology, but I like to think of myself as more of a friend offering advice. I have always been up front about that in my column. My readers know who they are talking to when they write in.”

  “Well, as their friend—” Phoebe could hear the sneer in his voice. “—what do you think the cause of all these breakups is?”

  “Maintaining a marriage can be a challenge,” Phoebe said. “Sometimes problems arise that cause people to want to take a break. Sometimes the problems are insurmountable and require something more permanent. If you read my column tomorrow, you’ll get more of an idea of my thoughts on the matter. Until then, thank you so much for contacting us.”

  “Just one more question!” he shouted into the phone before she could hang up.

  Phoebe let her silence speak for her.

  “Hello?” he said after an extended pause.

  “I’m here.” Again, she glared at Mika who blew her a kiss.

  “Okay, good,” he said. “Do you consider yourself responsible at all for the situation your couples are in right now?”

  It was an impossible question to answer. As an advice columnist, she knew she wasn’t to blame for how her readers reacted. All she could do was give them advice and hope they followed it to a reasonable conclusion. She certainly didn’t think that every single priest, judge, or Elvis impersonator that joined two people in matrimony were responsible for the marriages that followed.

  But this wasn’t quite the situation at hand. Something magical was affecting these couples, and the odds were that it was all related to Phoebe in some way. These people might have been breaking up because Phoebe married them, but not because of the “advice columnist” part of her job. This was likely related to the other hat she wore. But even then, she was not the one who had set this evil plan—whatever it is—into motion. She was likely as much a victim herself.

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t feel responsible at all.” Phoebe hung up the phone without another word.

  Mika was on her feet before the receiver was back in its cradle. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Phoebe waved her off. “Not your fault. The situation forced us to make a statement. I’ve spoken to the blogger. Now I’ve got to address my audience. Elise already pulled tomorrow’s column. Now I just have to write a replacement before the print deadline.”

  “You are a true professional,” Mika said, pouring it on a little thick for Phoebe’s tastes.

  “You can thank me with coffee and pastry in the morning.” Phoebe opened up her laptop. “Now go.”

  “There will be a chocolate croissant waiting for you tomorrow.” Mika saluted before she turned to leave the office, leaving Phoebe alone with her thoughts.

  She couldn’t dwell on the magical part of the problem, at least not while she wrote her response to her mortal audience. She had to figure out how to explain the inexplicable in a way that protected the paper and still offered some kind of reasonable advice to people actually going through their own problems. And she had to do it all with her typical Ask Phoebe flair. And she had to do it on deadline.

  With no clue what to write, she started out how she usually did in these situations and wrote without thinking, hoping that somewhere along the way she’d come up wi
th an idea.

  It took three paragraphs that Phoebe knew she’d be deleting before she picked up a thread that she could build her article from. It was all about external factors getting in the way of a marriage. She focused on things like jobs and family, leaving out any reference to magical influences, but the advice was still the same. When outside influences were coming at you, you had to work together as a couple to deal with them. It was a bit simplistic considering that the current couples could only do so much on their own against magic, but it translated fine for her regular audience.

  Phoebe was halfway through her new column when a familiar pink glow appeared beside her desk. She paused in her writing to greet her husband with a kiss. “This is a surprise.”

  “I wish it was a pleasant one.” Coop was having trouble looking Phoebe in the eye. It was not a good sign. “I’ve got some news.”

  “I can tell.”

  Coop slumped into the chair that Mika had vacated earlier. It was rare for Phoebe to ever see him like this. Cupids tended to be fairly positive people; to the point that it got annoying at times. Seeing Coop depressed was almost disturbing. Suddenly her husband, who usually towered over her, seemed small.

  “I figured out who is breaking up your couples,” Coop said. “It has less to do with you than it does with me.”

  Phoebe placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Explain.”

  “His name is Dafydd,” Coop said. “He’s a fallen Cupid.”

  “A fallen Cupid?” Phoebe asked. “Like a fallen angel?”

  “Pretty much,” Coop said.

  “And you’re the reason he fell?” Phoebe guessed as she moved around the desk to take her chair.

  “Well, no. But I’m the one who outed him.”

  Phoebe nodded for him to continue.

  “It was a while ago,” Coop said. “Long before I met you. Actually, now that I think of it, this was before you were born. I know it was around the early seventies. Dates begin to blur after a while.”