by R. J. Blain
But it wasn’t just the bobbing heads that were a problem. Everyone in my line of vision had blank stares on their faces. It was like they were listening to a hypnotist put them under a thrall from far away.
“What are they doing?” Ryder asked. “All the people?”
I didn’t know, but luckily, someone did. “You can’t hear it?” Piper asked. “The voice?”
“No,” Ryder and I said at the same time.
“As soon as I unboxed the little guy and stuck him in the window, it started talking. At first, I thought it was just static on the radio or something. But then I remembered we stream our own playlists.”
“That’s very modern of you,” I said.
“Thank you. I just had it installed after Christmas. People really seem to like it.”
“So what is the voice saying?” Ryder asked.
“Sad things. So many sad things.”
That’s when I noticed the tears. No one was wailing or sobbing. But all these people were sitting here, bopping their heads, silently crying. That made the whole thing worse.
“Okay, I’m creeped out. Where’s the clapper?”
Piper tried to lift her hand, but grimaced. “If I move, I’m not going to be able to tune out the voice. Window,” she said. “Window.”
Great. The entire place was made of windows. I focused on the sills and noted there were dozens and dozens of little plastic figures, waving and wobbling. Flowers, cats, horses, people set on stands with little solar panels at the bottom, all of them rocking and swinging.
These little toys had been popular several years ago, and yes, they were cute. But too many cute things all collected together was how people got eaten in horror movies.
I took a careful step forward. Ryder’s hand landed on my arm. “I don’t like you going in there alone. I can hear it now. Can’t you hear the voice?”
I turned. My man was pale, his eyes wide. Tears tracked down his face. I could tell he was torn about staying behind or going forward with me.
Ryder was human. He had been claimed by a god and that had changed him in some ways, but mostly, he was human.
Because I came from a family line blessed by all the deities who had made this town, I was a lot more tolerant of magic. It wasn’t that I was unaffected by magic, but usually it didn’t hit me as hard as it hit other mortals.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You stay here.”
“But.” He sucked in a shaky breath, and the tears poured harder, making his eyes red. “How are you going to stop it?”
“Box,” Piper said. “Counter.”
If the demigod was struggling to keep the voice at bay, I knew the time I had to find the cursed clapper and stuff it back into the box—if I could find the box—was short.
“Well, isn’t this great?” Crow strolled up behind Ryder. “Move aside, Bailey.”
“Can’t,” Ryder sniffed.
“It’s some kind of sadness spell,” I said. “They hear a voice.”
Crow cocked his head, the feather in his ear flipping in the wind.
“Okay, yeah. I can hear it. Distantly. Where’s the little monkey?”
“It’s a monkey? Okay, I’ll find it,” I told him. “You find the box behind the counter.”
Crow ducked under Ryder’s arm and squeezed past him through the door.
I strode into the room, missing Ryder’s hand on my arm as soon as I was out of reach.
The music had switched to something upbeat and cute about wearing colors for someone’s return, but the song sounded strange.
Like there was another song playing.
Or like there was another voice singing right over the top of the melody line.
Great. I could hear the little bastard’s voice. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the words were in a language I had never heard before.
And everything about those words—the tone, the rhythm, the delivery—was undeniably, crushingly sad.
This was nothing like hearing god powers. The sound of the curse was like fingernails scrabbling down the inside of my brain.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to turn around and run. Because I knew all the sorrow I’d experienced in my life was a deep, deep well I did not want to fall to the bottom of.
I held on to all the other sounds in the place: the upbeat song, the wind against the windows, the click, click, clicking of the toys, and Crow’s off-tune whistling as he rummaged through the storage shelves behind the counter.
Sad, sad, sad.
I pushed the feeling as far away as I could and drilled my way through the unnaturally thick air toward the first window.
So many little plastic smiling things. Cat in a swing, chick in an egg, and the monkey! Could it really be that easy? The first window I searched had the one cursed toy I needed to find?
I snatched the toy off the windowsill. Disappointment pressed hard on my sternum, mixing with the sadness I was barely keeping at bay. It wasn’t a monkey, it was the Pope.
Dammit.
I replaced the Pope with a mumbled apology, then moved to the next window. Flower, flower, snail, alien, double flower, camel on a toilet, bear.
No monkey.
The farther I pressed into the diner, the louder the voice became. I was losing track of the peppy color song, losing track of the sound of semi-trucks driving across wet road, losing track of the sound of my own voice in my head, naming each clicky-clacky plastic wavy-wacky thing.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t noticed all of them when I was in here yesterday. I didn’t know why that clack clack clacking hadn’t driven me out of my mind.
Probably because there hadn’t been a Pandora level curse in action when I’d last been here.
But the one thing I could hear above all the sad, sad, sad was Crow’s stupid whistling. I thought he might be trying to do the song from the Robin Hood cartoon, but I couldn’t be sure. Whatever he was trying to whistle, I was pretty sure he owed Roger Miller an apology.
The next window was tricky because a young couple sat in front of it. I didn’t recognize them, so they were probably just traveling through.
“Sorry,” I said, as I leaned over the ham-and-cheese omelettes they were ignoring. I was all but invisible to them as I studied the click-clackers.
Scarecrow, flower, witch, farm girl. Okay, I could see this windowsill was themed. Apple tree, tin man, lion, dog.
No monkey, flying or not.
“Got it!” Crow called out.
I glanced over my shoulder. Crow was grinning behind the counter, a red-and-gold-embossed cardboard box in his hand. “Find it yet?”
I shook my head because words felt a little unstable with every other thought in my head dripping, sad, sad, sad.
“Hurry up, Boo Boo,” Crow said. “I think we’re losing them.”
To my horror, an old guy at the far booth slumped forward, his beard landing in a pillow of biscuits and gravy.
“No!” I rushed to the far end of the diner. I didn’t know what I could do to stop this, but no one was going to die in their breakfast on my watch.
The voice grew louder, the clacking clacked louder. I made it to the man’s side and reached for my phone to call an ambulance.
I patted my pocket over and over before I remembered my phone was toast.
“Dammit.” I checked for the man’s pulse. He was alive, his pulse strong and even.
Not dead. Just knocked out.
“Delaney?” Crow asked from what seemed like a world away, his voice somewhere out there on a distant horizon, all but smothered by another voice.
Sad, sad, sad.
It was so loud, so in my head, it was like it was right next to me, screaming in my ear.
I glanced up at the windowsill. Sunshine, cloud, rainbow, and finally, finally, monkey.
It was a creepy little thing. It was meant to resemble a baby chimp, but its face was too yellow, its eyes too red. It sat hunched up with two big cymbals in its hands, clapping them together to the
head-bopping beat.
Okay, I got it. Clapper.
But what really made the little monkey creepy was that voice. It was not happy at all. Wave after wave of sadness and sorrow radiated off the little fuzz ball of grief as it clacked and clacked with the never-ending power of the sun.
If you’re sad and you know it, clack, clack, clack…
“Gotcha.” I tugged it off of the shelf in such a hurry, I tipped over the rainbow and didn’t pause to right it.
Holy hells, the grief was even more concentrated now that I was holding the thing.
I knew I had to walk back across the diner. Knew I had to get the monkey to Crow so we could shove it in the box. So we could find some way to contain the curse.
But every breath was heavy. The room was going darker and darker. And I was cold.
Cold and alone.
If you’re sad and you know it, then you really gotta show it…
No, I wasn’t alone. I had Ryder with me. I had my sisters. I had this town and all these people and deities and others who made up my big, wild, vibrant family.
Plus, I had that Reed stubbornness.
I set my shoulders and turned back toward the front of the diner. Every step was like walking through deep water in the middle of a storm. Every thought was blanked out by the yelling, howling, cursing grief.
Why would anyone even want to put this kind of sorrow out into the world?
I tipped my head down and bulled forward, sweat prickling between my shoulders, under my arms, edging my hairline.
Fighting sadness was damn hard work.
I thought I’d made it at least halfway across the floor, but when I blinked away sweat to check my progress, I’d only made it about three feet.
Maybe I should rip off the monkey’s head. Would that make it stop sadding all over the place? Knowing my luck, it would increase the potency of the curse.
The three people at the table ahead of me slumped down into their breakfasts. I winced because the woman had face-planted into a stack of pancakes with blackberry jam. The white headband she was wearing was ruined.
I could do this. I had to do this before the sorrow spread.
“Hey, all right, just.” Crow was suddenly there, shining like a silver lining around the clouds in my head, his hands sure and strong as he turned the monkey in my hand.
“It should be… Where is the…?” He let go of the monkey.
Trying to support it was like holding a brick, except that the brick was made of lead and my arms were made of mashed potatoes.
“Maybe it’s in… Ah-ha! There we are.”
My sweaty grip was slipping. I didn’t want to let the monkey fall, didn’t want to break it in case the shattered monkey bits would spread the curse even more. But there was no way I could hold on to the slippery little jerk much longer.
Crow finally plucked the toy out of my hands. He pressed a butterfly sticker with one wrinkled wing on the monkey’s butt and dropped the toy into the box. A glob of glowing gold radiated around the monkey for a moment, then Crow pushed the lid down so fast, it farted.
“There,” he said. “That should do it.”
The light returned to the world, the sky outside brightening, the crackly old speakers humming to life with a mellow, bluesy folk song.
I blinked a couple times and took a deep breath, my pulse falling back into a lighter rhythm. It felt like someone had just untwisted a phantom vice from around my heart.
“Are you all right there, Boo Boo?” Crow bent to catch my gaze.
I felt like a wrung-out mop, my muscles noodles, like I’d really gone overboard in the gym for a week straight.
“That sucked,” I said.
“Little guy carried a kick.” Crow frowned. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I wiped my arm over my forehead to wick away the sweat. “Peachy.”
Everyone else in the room was rousing too. The people who’d fallen asleep on their plates wiped a mix of confusion and breakfast foods off their faces with napkins, looking around like they’d just woken from a quick, refreshing nap.
Piper, a force of energy, was already moving, working her way between the tables with quick efficiency. She seemed to know just what everyone needed whether it was fresh coffee, orange juice, or nice warm, damp towels for cleaning up faces and hands. She assured the sleepers replacement meals were already underway, and conversations rose up again, people chuckling, and chatting.
As if nothing had happened.
As if they hadn’t all been cursed with so much sorrow it had almost sent them into comas.
As if magic had never been here.
Ordinary, the land blessed by hundreds of gods, the air fresh with life and mingled with the power of hundreds of supernatural creatures and people, had a way of sort of smoothing over minor magical moments.
I counted my lucky stars that the unusual nature of this event was whisked away and made to feel like something to chuckle about in the space of just a few moments. Something to maybe tell friends, but nothing to truly frighten or cause undo suspicion.
“Let’s get that to the station where we can lock it away until we figure out how to break the curse.”
“Look who put on her voice of authority one leg at a time today,” Crow said. “I like it. Does this mean you’re going to deputize me?”
“Not on your life.” I started across the room, moving easier now, breathing easier as time erased the roughest edges of the experience.
Crow laughed, and that made something else lift in me. We’d survived our first curse. I was proud of us.
“You good?” Ryder asked, as I stepped after him out into the cool, wet air.
“Cabin in the mountain, right?” I asked.
“That’s the plan.”
“Hot tub. Just us. Solitude?”
“Yep.”
“Let’s get this done and get the hell outta town.”
Ryder’s smiled and, yeah, I smiled in return.
Chapter Nine
“You know what doesn’t make sense?” I paused at the makeshift four-way stop, Ryder in the passenger seat.
“That Pandora left all this stuff behind in the first place and never told anyone the things were all cursed bombs waiting to go off?” he said.
“Well, that. But what set off the curse in the first place?”
“Opening the box?” he suggested.
“Naw,” Crow said from the back seat. He had insisted he needed to ride with us because I’d told him it was his job to clean up the mess. I thought he was enjoying the whole thing.
“If unboxing triggered the curse,” Crow went on, “my whale sale would have been a hell of a lot more fun.”
I scowled at him in the rearview mirror. “Nothing weird happened at the sale?”
“Other than Ginny and Misty yelling about their crotches? Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you on principle.”
“My heart,” Crow said, tapping his chest. “Be still it.”
“Maybe something about the storm triggered it?” Ryder said, ignoring Crow.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Weather isn’t used as a magical trigger very often. Too unpredictable.”
He grunted.
“I think it has something to do with Bigfoot,” Crow said.
“Why would it have something to do with him?” I asked.
“He stopped at my sale on his way out of town.”
“I didn’t see him there.”
“He came in after you.”
“Did he buy anything?”
“No, but he walked out with his pockets full.”
“He stole stuff?” Ryder asked.
“He took some things, yeah.”
“And you let him?” Ryder asked.
Crow shrugged. “I buy this stuff in lots. I don’t expect to make money on all of it. Better someone get use out of it than I pay to take it to the dump.”
“Do you know what he took?” I asked.
“Me? I’m
not one of the all-knowing gods, Delaney.”
“Crow.”
He grinned. “Of course I know what he took. You know I keep track. Why did you even ask?”
“Because unlike some people in this vehicle, I follow the rules.”
He chuckled. “Like taking your yearly vacations?”
“I follow all the rules,” I said. “The vacation thing is more of a policy.”
“Is that why you get grumpy and yell at Myra and Jean to take their days off?”
I scowled at him. He didn’t look the least bit concerned, sprawled out in the seat, his arm thrown across the back, one ankle propped on his knee. He looked like he was having the trickster time of his trickster life.
“What did Flip take that has anything to do with Pandora’s garage sale?” I asked.
“Some electric wire. I think. I mean, I’m not sure it was stuff from Pandora’s unit. It’s a lot to keep track of.”
I slammed on the brakes. I wasn’t going that fast, so Ryder easily braced, but Crow wasn’t expecting the abrupt stop. He jerked forward, hands slamming into the seat back to keep him from knocking his head on it.
“Rude,” he said.
“Here’s what you’re going to tell me,” I said with a calm I thought even Myra would be impressed with. “Do you know what is setting off the cursed items?”
“I have a theory.”
“Tell me.”
“The butterfly.”
“Butterfly?”
“The sticker? Little butterfly sticker I very carefully replaced on the monkey toy?”
“The one you took forever to dig out of the box?”
“It took me what? A minute? Two tops. Don’t give me that face. Now that I think about it, everything that came out of her storage unit had a butterfly sticker on it. Weird.”
“Not weird,” Ryder said. “Hope. It means hope. The butterfly.”
“I think you’re right. Hope was the last thing in Pandora’s box,” I said. “It fits the myth. When people remove the butterfly—when they give up hope—the curse kicks in.”
Crow pointed a finger at me. “Smart.”
“Okay, we can work with this. Ryder, let everyone know the butterfly stickers will shut the curse down.”
“On it.” He texted, his fingers fast over the screen of his phone.