Night of Jinxes, A Moonlight Dragon Short Story (2 page)

Tonight had been particularly busy.
Bad night on the tables for lots of people, apparently. I'd had a
steady stream of gamblers in, selling me all sorts of things. A
handful of tourists had skimmed the items and made a few purchases,
and I was pretty sure the guy who'd purchased a pair of magicked
golf balls that would return to you when you whistled had been a
minor warlock. So, pretty good, sales-wise. But I had other things
on my mind than money.

My eyes tracked the last customer in
the shop, an elderly woman wearing an unflattering pair of mom
jeans and a red CSI: Las Vegas T-shirt. The clothes meant I'd
initially painted her as a tourist, but as she lingered in the
wannabe witch's section, I reconsidered and decided to pay her a
visit.

"So many interesting items," she said
with a wobbly smile when I joined her beside the
shelves.

"I try to keep a good variety in
stock," I said. "Is there anything in particular you're looking
for? I have some items in storage as well."

"No, no, nothing specific. Thank you.
I only came in here because..." She trailed off, her brow creasing
as though she were confused. Her expression was enough to worry
me.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes, I'm..." The woman touched the
tips of her fingers to her forehead. I didn't think she was feeling
faint; I thought she was using some kind of magick. "There's
something in here. It drew me in."

That raised my hackles because surely
this wasn't a coincidence. "Can you describe what you
felt?"

She opened her wrinkled lips, then
paused and cast a wary look at me. "Do you mind...you're not
ordinary, are you?"

I smiled slightly. We were alone and
the risk of being overheard was minimal. "I'm not. I'm a
sorceress."

"Ah, I'd thought as much. My magickal
ability lies along yours, I think, though my specialty is in
sensing power, nothing more. I can't actually perform any magick,
but I can tell you when someone else is using it."

"So you can sense it in here.
Something's active."

"Active." She rolled the word in her
mouth for a moment. "I suppose that's as accurate a word as any.
Yes, something is active in here. But hidden," she added with a
warning look. "It doesn't normally like to be found."

That was vague enough to be annoying,
but I understood that this woman could be helpful. "Is there any
chance you can pinpoint what it is for me? It's a little concerning
to have something active on the shelves for anyone to
buy."

"Possibly." The woman began to move,
so I stepped back to give her room. With the fingers of one hand
lightly touching the center of her forehead, she drifted along the
aisle. Every time I expected her to stop on an item that I felt was
suspect, she continued on, proving that I really had no idea what
was potentially dangerous in my shop.

She eventually paused in front of the
shelf holding the six items that had been left on the sidewalk. Her
gaze lingered on the coffee mug and a pair of gloves. A-ha! I
thought.

The mug was nothing special. It kept
liquids warm for a few hours. I expected it to sell soon. The
gloves were of a similar vein. You put them on and they heated your
skin pleasantly all the way up to your shoulders. Handy if you went
around in hipster vests during the winter.

"Once upon a time," I heard the woman
murmur as she studied the items, but she didn't pick up either of
them. After a few seconds, she continued inspecting the rest of my
inventory.

To my frustration, she paused only
once again, midway between the main selling floor and the counter.
She glanced at the bead curtains.

"Lots of curses back there," I told
her, "but they're old and attached to the building."

She nodded. "That explains it." She
lowered her hand from her forehead. "I apologize. I can't narrow
down the feeling. It seems to touch several items here, but nothing
is as strong as what I felt out on the sidewalk."

A cumulative effect? Could be, but
that didn't much help me find the main culprit.

"I think I'll go now." The woman
sounded uncomfortable, but she paused just before the door and
looked back at me. "If you're here all alone...you should be
careful."

A chilly finger ran up my spine. "You
think whatever you felt is dangerous?"

She didn't pull any punches. "Yes. So
don't, well, don't lower your guard. I'm sorry I'm not more
help."

"No, you have been. Thank you. Have a
good night."

After the woman left, I locked the
door, counted up the till and tidied up. The cursed cameo pieces
yammered at me for a little while but I ignored them and the bitchy
Victorian faces eventually fell silent. I pulled up a book and
kicked back behind the counter as sunrise began to lighten the
eastern skies.

I didn't end up reading much, though.
My attention kept drifting beyond the cover of the book to my shop
where apparently something nasty lurked. Running a cursed pawn shop
wouldn't have been my first career choice, but I thought I did a
fairly decent job of it. Under my control, the inventory had nearly
doubled.

Though, maybe that wasn't
such a good thing after all. If all those items were cursed or
haunted, were they really beneficial to sales? I made sure that
non-magickals didn't get their hands on anything dangerous, but
they were usually repelled by them anyway. I guess they could tell
subconsciously when something was magickal and they steered clear
of it. And the cursed items that I
had
sold had gone to magickal beings
that I sensed could handle them. We just had a way of knowing when
the magick on something was within our realm of control.

That would probably explain why the
worst offenders remained on the shelves. Maybe they'd still be
sitting there long after I left this place. After all, who really
needed a taxidermic snowy owl that followed you everywhere you went
with its golden eyes? You could just tell the thing wanted to peck
at your face. Or what about the photographs of little girls with
eyes that bled? Something had to be really wrong with you to enjoy
having one of those photos hanging on the wall of your
home.

And there were worst things in here.
Things I'd rather not dwell on while I was alone, and according to
the woman who'd just been here, items I'd better not turn my back
on. Nothing had yet hurt me, but hey, there was a first time for
everything, right? Just because I was a dragon sorceress didn't
mean I was invulnerable. Far from it. If I used too much of my
sorcery I risked losing my humanity and turning into a fire
breathing dragon. Big no-no, as far as the magickal big bosses were
concerned.

I blew out a breath. I couldn't wait
until my best friend arrived. All at once I was feeling very, very
vulnerable.

~~~~~

Melanie arrived at the shop just after
eight. Even in the morning the sun was already blazing in the sky
and pouring light through Moonlight's two front windows. After
setting the magickal wards around the property to keep out any
magickal beings, I locked the door of the shop.

"It's not so scary when it's daylight,
yeah?" my best friend said, shooting me an anxious smile. She held
up a pink bakery box stamped with the name of her family's food
truck, Todos Tortas. "I brought some snacks so we'll be energized.
No way you can fall asleep with a bunch of sugar in your
veins!"

"You're trying to put me into a
diabetic coma," I complained, but that didn't stop me from
snatching the box from her and checking out what was
inside.

As I made my first choice of the
day—something with a yellow jelly on it that smelled like passion
fruit—Melanie slowly wandered between the shelves. She'd been
inside Moonlight tons of times, but I realized in that moment that
I'd never seen her actually checking out the items up close. She
usually just hung around the counter with me.

Maybe because she's been
scared of it all.

"Hey, you know you don't have to do
this with me if you'd rather not," I told her around a mouthful of
bread. "I don't want to guilt you into this."

She looked back at me. "It was my
idea, you know. Besides, I can tell you're scared."

I made a face, prepared to
argue. But she was right. I
was
scared. Scared of the unknown, because I didn't
know if my particular brand of sorcery could fight it off. If I
needed to defend myself or go on the offensive, my magick came out
in the form of my familiar, a Chinese dragon I called Lucky. Lucky
could be a wisp of air or he could be a corporeal dragon capable of
burning the entire city to the ground.

But that strength came with a price:
it required my life energy and it would most likely cause me to
lose all touch with humanity and plummet into the consciousness of
my dragon, essentially becoming the dragon. Bad news, that. So I
tried not to use my dragon that often.

And the truth was, maybe my dragon
would be ineffective against a cursed or haunted object. I had no
idea what I was dealing with here.

"I'm a little nervous," I admitted,
"but I'm also a big girl. Don't feel obligated to stay, Melanie. I
can handle this on my own."

"Nope, too late. I'm already here.
You're stuck with me." She patted a porcelain faced doll on its
head, then immediately jumped back when one of its arms lifted
toward her. "Wow, yeah, this place is Creep Central. It's
definitely better that you know what you're dealing with here so
you don't wind up smothered in your sleep."

"Gee, great visual, Mel.
Thanks!"

She laughed and came back to me. "So
what now? We run around and poke everything?"

"I guess that's one way, but it seems
like a lot of effort and unnecessarily risky. Let's try something
first."

I had an old Sony camcorder on the
shelves that I took down and placed on the counter where the
register was. I aimed it out at the shop and checked the
viewfinder.

"We'll record the shop while we're in
back," I said, stepping away from the camera after pressing Record.
"Something might show up just because we're not watching. If the
quality is crappy I'll use my phone, but I'd rather not get it
involved in case it's, you know, tainted."

"Ooh, this is going to be
fun!"

I looked at the camcorder hopefully.
"As long as the Blair Witch doesn't show up I'll be
happy."

~~~~~

While the camera recorded, Melanie and
I lay in bed and watched video game walkthroughs on
YouTube.

"How are they so good?" she wondered
aloud as we watched whoever was playing the game defeat an army of
demons with a bunch of complicated maneuvers that likely would have
broken my thumb had I been the one holding the game
controller.

"I think they play these things over
and over until they're experts at it. Then they film themselves. At
least, I hope that's what they do. It's too depressing to think
they might be this good from the get-go."

"If I were that good, I'd play nothing
but RPGs. Ones with cute boys, like Final Fantasy."

"I'd play horror survival just like
this." You would have thought I'd had my fill of monsters and
ghouls, but apparently not. Or maybe the prospect of blasting them
with various weapons and gaming magick was what appealed to me. In
the gaming world, I could be powerful without risking life and
limb.

Melanie turned onto her side and
peered up at me. "Do you ever think that maybe one day, magickal
beings will outnumber normal people?"

"God, I hope not. Think about all the
crazy things that are out there, Melly. And that's just the things
we know about, the things that have been seen in the light. The
creatures that could always be in hiding? No thanks. That's way
beyond my comfort zone."

"Ugh, that's totally true," she
whispered fiercely. "So many monsters. So many things created by
black magick. Lots of things are probably out there that shouldn't
exist. Like they'd make you go insane if you saw them or heard
them."

A shiver crawled over my skin. "I
don't want to try to imagine them. You shouldn't either. It'll just
give you nightmares."

"I think it might be too late." She
rolled over onto her other side, so she faced the bead curtain.
"You ever wonder if maybe all the stuff in here might one day
attract something like that? Something scary?"

I sat up. "Are you trying
to freak me out?" I closed my laptop lid. "My uncle has been
running this shop since I was a kid. Nothing came after
him
."

But of course, as soon as I said it, I
had to acknowledge that no one knew what had become of Uncle James.
He'd been missing for two years now, which was why I was running
Moonlight Pawn.

"I'm just saying, Anne, be extra
careful from now on."

She had me spooked, which admittedly
wasn't difficult to do considering the circumstances. I slid out of
bed. "Come on. It's been a couple of hours. Maybe the camcorder
caught something."