I don’t keep records, but I remembered the day I’d acquired the thing very clearly. One winter evening three years ago, an old man came into my shop and asked if I would be interested in an imbued item. There would be no charge; he just wanted to pass it on to a good home. He explained that it could grant any five wishes its owner desired and I could use it however I saw fit.
I refused. I told the old man that wish-granting items usually came with some sort of horrible price, and you never got something for nothing. If he was offering it for free, it was a pretty safe bet it wasn’t something I wanted to have.
The old man agreed that the wishes came at a high price. He asked if I would be willing to simply keep hold of the item and give or sell it on.
I refused again. If the thing was that dangerous, I wasn’t going to be responsible for handing it over to anyone else. The old man smiled and left.
The next day, the monkey’s paw was sitting on the shelves in my shop next to the focuses. I put on a pair of gloves, picked the thing up, and placed it in my safe room upstairs. Three months, six months, nine months went by and I forgot about it.
Then one day a woman picked the monkey’s paw off my shelves, out of a spot I would have sworn was empty. She wanted to buy it. I said no and closed the door firmly behind her. When I checked that evening the monkey’s paw was gone. I found out the woman’s name and learnt that the monkey’s paw was in her possession.
She committed suicide a week later. The monkey’s paw was back on the shelves the same evening. I put it back in the safe room and left it there.
A year later, someone else picked up the monkey’s paw in the exact same way. This time I didn’t try to stop the man from taking it. I agreed to give it to him on the condition that he promised never to use it. He gave me his promise and left, happy.
The man came back to my shop one last time, on a Saturday evening just before I closed up for the night. I remembered his shifty eyes, the tension in his movements, his insistence that everything was fine. Under pressure he admitted he’d been using the paw. According to him he’d made four wishes. There had been problems. He wouldn’t go into details but he wanted to know if there was some way to make a wish do exactly what you wanted.
I never saw him again. By the next day he had disappeared, and no one ever found out where he’d gone. But while cleaning the shop that Sunday night, I saw the monkey’s paw had returned.
And now Luna was alone with the thing’s next owner. Just the thought of that made my skin crawl. I thought of ringing her, but what would I say? To stay away from him? Yeah, that had worked so well last time …
I wondered whether Luna’s curse would be enough to keep her safe. The luck-twisting effect of the curse is a powerful protection but it has its limits, and I didn’t know how it would interact with the monkey’s paw. The only bit of reassurance I had was that judging from the last two times, the monkey’s paw wouldn’t do anything straightaway. Luna was supposed to be meeting me tomorrow to train at Arachne’s. I couldn’t tell for sure whether she’d show up but I didn’t think anything terrible would happen before then. Maybe she’d have calmed down enough to listen to me. And maybe I wouldn’t screw things up so badly next time.
With that decided, I felt a bit better. I went and fixed myself some dinner, then washed up and returned to my room. As I did, I turned my attention to the immediate future and saw that someone would be wanting to get into my shop. It was well past closing time but most mages don’t like to go shopping during business hours. It’s not common for them to show up after dark but it’s not rare, either, and it’s happened enough that I’ve installed a bell by the front door.
The bell rang just as I finished tying my shoes. I pulled on a jumper and walked down the stairs, flicking on the light as I reentered the shop. The place always feels a little eerie after dark; row after row of silent shelves, watching and waiting. I could see the outline of somebody through the shop window, half hidden by the door.
I opened the door and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen stumbled in, gasping and wide-eyed. “Please, I need your help! There’s something trying to kill me!”
My precognition screamed. I took one look at what had set it off, grabbed the woman, and yanked her back, pulling her with me into the middle of the shop. An instant later, the shop window exploded in a shower of glass as something came flying through, landing with a slam on the spot the woman and I had been standing in just a second ago. Without pause the creature pulled itself to its feet and lunged straight for us.
Some days are just better spent in bed.
I shoved the woman out of the creature’s path and let the momentum push me back so the thing went between us. The move would have been a lot more graceful if I hadn’t hit the herb rack on the way, almost tripping over. The woman stumbled and fell, and the creature was on top of her before she could recover. It dropped to its knees, its hands reaching for her throat.
The creature looked human, but wasn’t. It had two arms, two legs, a head and a body, but there was something about it that was just
I’m not a real hand-to-hand expert but I’ve done a fair bit of training in the past, and a swinging kick against a low target carries an awful lot of force. The impact flipped the thing over and sent it rolling to slam against the shelves. The shelves swayed and crystal balls and statuettes rained down on the thing with a crash. I pulled the woman to her feet and hustled her towards the door to the hall. “Get out! Go!”
The creature stood up. Now that I got a good look at it, I saw it had the face of a nondescript man in his thirties with brown hair, brown eyes, and a bland expression. The eyes were locked on me now, and as I looked into the future I saw that its movements were solid lines of light, changing to match my decisions but without choice or variation. A construct. The woman and I backed to the door and the construct followed.
My counter is an L shape set against the wall. As the woman opened the door I moved into the dead-end space, reaching for what was under the counter. I’m not so paranoid as to carry weapons in my own home, but I’m just paranoid enough to stash them where I can reach them quickly. I knew without looking that the construct would follow me, and as it came around the counter I straightened up with the gun in both hands, thumbed off the safety, sighted at a range of less than two feet, and shot the thing in the middle of the chest.
My gun’s a M1911, a single-action semiautomatic. It had been a while since I’d fired the thing and I’d forgotten how damn loud it was. The crash echoed around the shop and made me flinch, and the construct jerked. As a
