All That Glitters
The warehouse was quiet.
The fact that it was the middle of the night, pitch black, and the streets around it were completely deserted made absolutely no difference.
The warehouse was never quiet.
Things vibrated and hummed. Things murmured and whispered in frequencies that reverberated in Midas’s bones. Things made his skin crawl and his body react every time he set foot inside, so the sudden and utter stillness unnerved him more than he could explain.
He slipped through the crack in the large metal door and, keeping his back to the wall, moved around the dark, cavernous space.
There were no lights. There were always lights, but not tonight. He lifted his hand and pressed hard on a ruby ring on his left thumb. It glowed gently, wrapping pale red strings around his body. Protection.
He didn’t know from what, just yet.
He took a few steps further in, trusting the ring to keep him from getting hurt. After all, the caster who’d made it for him was to be trusted, beyond most other people.
The red glow provided some light and what it revealed made his insides turn. The warehouse was a mess.
And not the usual, beautifully chaotic mess that made sense. No, this was something else entirely. Artifacts strewn on the floor, books thrown so their spines cracked and papers spilled from them, shelves empty.
It was a far cry from the loving disorder he had grown used to seeing.
This was violence where reverence used to live.
This was intent to harm rather than the intent to learn.
This was someone other than Avery, and Midas clenched his fingers into fists as he walked deeper into the never-ending maze of Avery’s home.
Where was he?
He usually met him at the door. Smile wide and feet restless as he greeted him. Eyes shining as he lifted whatever new trinket he had added to his hoard, and voice gentle as he explained how it was cursed and why it couldn’t be saved and why he wanted to keep it.
Avery’s job was cataloguing and containing artifacts that couldn’t be uncursed for one reason or another, but the way he extended that job to mean care and understanding of each story made him the best at what he did.
And Midas could see why it would put a target on his back.
Add to that the fact that Avery was the most powerful caster he had ever seen or heard of.
He didn’t like this one bit.
He pulled his phone out and sent out a text.
Midas: At the warehouse. Something isn’t right.
Wren: Is Avery okay?
Midas: can’t find him.
Wren: I can be there in ten. Just say the word.
Midas: stay posted.
Wren: will do.
He pocketed his phone and reached into his hair, pulling out a golden pin adorned with a teardrop-shaped enstatite stone.
He had never used it before. He had only gotten it recently and while he admired both the beauty and the power of it, he had hoped he’d never reach for it for anything other than decoration.
Except now he did, something inside him screaming at him to use it. An instinct he had never felt before pushing him. He took a deep breath and touched the stone to his lips.
Something reverberated beneath his feet before he could activate the pin.
Midas rushed forward between ceiling-high shelves to find Avery standing in the middle of chaos, hands on his hips, glasses askew and face completely disappointed as he took in the state of his warehouse.
He was clearly muttering to himself, lips moving too fast for Midas to read in the dark. But he could tell Avery was upset.
Avery crouched, lifting several artifacts with bare hands as if they weren’t cursed and dangerous, cradling them to his chest and standing up.
His eyes caught Midas’s and not even the darkness and the lack of hearing could hide the fact he was screaming his head off as he caught him standing there. The artifacts dropped from his hands and rolled all over the place.
Midas carefully stepped over one that barreled his way. He didn’t even want to know what it did.
He walked toward Avery, who seemed completely okay, if not a little miffed at the ruckus and was about to extend a hand and grab his shoulder when something caught his attention.
He whipped his head to the left and his eyes went wide at the glowing tendril inching from a small purple gem on the floor toward Avery.
The stone was rotating in place, the beam getting closer and closer to where Avery’s heart was.
It inched up his leg, over his stomach to his chest. It grew brighter the closer it got.
Avery bent down to grab the stone and Midas made an alarmed grunt, rushing to him and snatching him around the waist. He lifted him off the ground and pulled him to the side, setting him back down just as the tendril touched the shelf where Avery was standing a moment ago.
It pierced a hole directly through it.
A hole that would have gone directly through Avery’s heart.
Like a laser. Precise and deadly.
Midas felt Avery’s heaving breaths against his forearm and looked down at him, crushed against his chest and wide-eyed as he stared at his shelf in horror.
His head shook left and right, glasses falling down the bridge of his nose as his body started to tremble. Midas attempted to pull him closer to try and ground him before noticing his hands were signing something between their bodies.
He focused on the constricted movements, picking up signs and doing his best to string them into something coherent.
Impossible.
Protective.
I was there.
Why?
Midas took his shoulders and pushed him away so he could talk to him properly.
“Are they still here?” he demanded.
Avery frowned, green eyes swimming in confusion. “Who?”
“Whoever did this.”
“Oh.” Avery shook his head. “No, they left like an hour ago. I just thought they broke in here as a prank. Happens all the time.”
Midas balked. “What do you mean it happens all the time?” he signed stiffly.
“This place is always portrayed as scary and dangerous so the local kids have been daring each other to get in here for ages. They mostly just find a way in, look around, I let them touch something safe so they can brag, and then they leave.”
“What about the Nexus detail?” Midas asked and watched as Avery did that thing where he shuffled his feet, bit his lip and looked everywhere but into his eyes, starting and pausing signs as he looked for what to say.
It never resulted in anything good. It was never followed by a statement that didn’t make Midas want to rip into him in frustration.
Avery’s feet-shuffling, lip-biting, eye-avoiding, sign-failing usually meant he had done something dumb, reckless, dangerous, or a combination of those three and Midas did not like it.
He drew his attention again. “Avery.”
“They stopped hanging around,” Avery signed, still avoiding Midas’s eyes.
“Stopped hanging around?” Midas asked. “As in, Nexus pulled them off security?”
“Ah…no. I might have done some things to make them…reluctant to be here.”
“What things?” Midas asked through his teeth.
“Nothing crazy.” Avery waved his hands in front of him between sentences. “Just…I may have activated some of the curiosities I have here so they got scared to be here anyway, and then kindly offered them to just leave and I’ll send them weekly reports so it looks like they’re still on active duty?”
“You…” Midas pinched the bridge of his nose. “How long has this been going on?”
“A couple of months, maybe?”
“And you never thought to mention this?” Midas asked, barely able to believe what he was reading through Avery’s hands.
“You would have gotten all grrr about it and it’s not doing any harm,” Avery said.
“Avery,” Midas said. “Look around.”
He actually did, getting sad again at the state of his warehouse.
“I mean…this time perhaps the kids did go slightly overboard, but—”
“Someone tried to kill you!” Midas signed in sharp movements.
Avery trembled again. “Are we sure? Kill is a pretty melodramatic reaction, maybe…”
“That gem pierced through one of your shelves.”
Avery glanced over and winced, before attempting to brighten the mood. “Perhaps it’s temporary! Like a prank hole that’s gonna close in a jiff?”
“Do you think a jiff is fast enough for you not to bleed out?” Midas asked, frustration growing as Avery continued to take his own safety frivolously. “It was aiming at your heart.”
Avery was scared, he could tell. But he was doing his level best to make the situation seem less dire and Midas wanted to shake some sense into him. He wanted him to care about something other than his things.
“Avery…” he signed, slower this time.
Two terrified, brown eyes looked up at him.
“That shelf had all of my usual protections on it,” Avery cut him off with quick signs of his hands. “The same ones I have on me. The ones that keep me safe from the curses in here. It shouldn’t have…”
He swallowed, looking around in sudden despair at the realization.
“Midas…” he said. “I could have died.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen,” Midas said, frowning at himself when he realized he meant it.
It had been the same when they’d gone to help Wren.
Avery had tagged along, refusing to be left behind, causing Midas to be distracted the whole time making sure he didn’t end up stepping the wrong way into a stray curse or tripping over his shoelaces.
With Avery it seemed to always be one extreme or the other, never any kind of equilibrium.
It would be annoying to have to break in another Curator and Archivist, he told himself.
The previous guy was a hack who Midas had wanted to lock in the very cursed iron maiden in the back of the warehouse.
He’d refused to learn sign language after Midas’s accident, forcing him to try and find ways to communicate that were purposefully humiliating.
Avery had started learning the day after he’d met him, signing clumsily.
Midas still hadn’t told him that he’d signed, “It’s a pleasure to eat me.”
Midas didn’t want to work with another person. Whoever the fuck thought they could mess with Avery was officially at the top of his shit list.
He crouched to look at the gem, now lying on the floor unmoving, the glow dissipated and the weird magical vibe around it completely gone.
As if it only had one shot to get the job done before the spell wore off.
It wouldn’t be surprising. Spells like those were Black’s territory and Midas knew from years of Black talking about his work that they needed a vast amount of power to sustain for long.
He pulled one of his rings off his finger and hovered it close to the gem, waiting for a reaction that would tell him the gem was cursed. Nothing happened. Not even a trace of the magic left on the thing.
“Strange,” he signed to Avery who shimmied closer and crouched just behind his shoulder.
“Be careful,” Avery said, extending his hands out to Midas’s peripheral vision.
Midas shook his head, reaching out his hand and taking the gem off the floor. It sat in his palm like a normal gem would, smooth and cool to the touch.
“The curse is gone,” Midas managed to sign with one hand.
Avery frowned. “It is?”
“It’s like it was only here to get a shot at you and then disappeared,” Midas said.
“I…I’m not even sure if I’d be able to do that,” Avery said. “That is some seriously powerful magic.”
Midas looked at the gem, weighing it in his hand before turning it around. The puzzles fell into place around a large, gaping hole they framed.
An eye symbol carved into the gem.