“Guy by the name of Barret put it there.” That was the name Jerry had given me when he assigned me the job anyway.
“Barret? That can’t be right. His mark is an Egyptian eye with a lightning bolt through it.”
“I’m pretty sure it was Barret. I did a delivery for him, but there was a complication and I wound up with this.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Complication?”
I gave her a smile that was more of a grimace. “Long story.”
“I’ve got time. And more importantly, I won’t even consider helping you until I know everything.”
I debated how much to share with her.
“Some of it falls under the confidentiality clause. I can’t break it,” I told her.
Jerry ensured his couriers’ discretion by making us all sign a contract with a curse attached to it. As long as we didn’t reveal the details of our jobs nothing happened. Break your promise and bad things happened. There were still whispers twenty years later about what happened to the last courier who’d broken the confidentiality clause.
“The contract Hermes had you sign?” Miriam asked.
I nodded. “That’s the one.”
“If I remember correctly, all you promised was not to reveal the package contents as well as the names of the client or the person to receive the package.”
“That sounds about right, but I can’t remember the exact language.”
She gave me a smug smile and took a seat at the table. “That’s okay. I do. Just keep the identities and contents secret and you’ll be fine.”
“How do you know you’re right? Were you a courier?”
She laughed. “No, definitely not. I wouldn’t work for Gerald ever. We would have killed each other the first time he told me what to do.” She tilted her head and smiled at me. “I wrote that contract and built the curse into it.”
Gerald? I wasn’t even going to touch that.
“You wrote it? You mean the current version right.”
She gave me a Cheshire cat smile. “There’s only ever been one version.”
Unless she’d written the thing when she was like seven that would mean she was much older than she looked. Her comments the last time I was here made a lot more sense now.
“Okay, so I wasn’t able to deliver the package because its recipient was already dead when I got there,” I told her, picking each word carefully. I didn’t want to accidently invoke the curse. “The guy’s friends happened on me before I could leave and thought I was the killer. They took the package and my phone. I managed to escape but left the package behind.”
The next part was tricky. I couldn’t say Barret was the guy who hired me. How did I tell her what led to the tattoo without revealing too much?
“And?”
“I’m getting to that. This is harder than it sounds. Everything’s wrapped up together, and I don’t know how sensitive the curse is.”
I’d already mentioned Barret’s name and that hadn’t set anything off. It had been out of context, which was probably the only thing that saved me.
“Okay, so anyway, the client showed up wanting to know why their package wasn’t delivered. He wasn’t happy to hear that not only was the recipient dead but his package had been left behind. He had the sorcerer put the mark on me and that leads to now.”
Her gaze was enigmatic as she considered me. “Something tells me you’re leaving a lot out.”
Got that right. I was hoping the vaguer I was the less likely I was to get whammied.
She tapped one finger against her lips. “For a sorcerer to place a mark, you would have needed to agree to it.”
“That’s what I don’t get. All I said was I’d help him. There was no agreeing to terms. No shaking of hands or signing of contracts”
