Avery nodded. “They had them everywhere for marketing purposes until they banned them, saying that influencing marketing using magic was bad practice. We have a bunch of them in crates here in the warehouse collecting dust,acquisitioned by Nexus from various companies. You can’t even make them anymore. The patent was pulled.”
“Are any of those reported missing by any chance? At any of the warehouses?”
Avery’s eyes widened and Teddy had his answer. “Noxdale reported some items going missing six months ago.”
“A month before this all started,” Saint said, then swore.
“But what are they doing?” Wren asked. “Why would they need to amplify interpersonal magic in a drug made from cursed animal venom?”
Teddy ran through it in his mind. Every case. Every person they had talked to. All cagey. No straight answers, not even from their family. It didn’t matter where they were from—Slatehollow to Arcstead, rich or poor, the end result was the same.
“They didn’t want anyone to talk,” Teddy said.
“What?” Saint asked.
“What’s the best way of getting your illegal power-boosting drug to fly under the radar and make sure you’ll never be implicated?”
“Silencing the clientele,” Wren said.
“But silencing the old-fashioned way is bad for potential business and research,” Teddy said. “So you do the next best thing. You make sure they can’t talk.”
“You think there’s an interpersonal curse mixed in with the drug,” Wren said. It wasn’t a question.
“I never tested any of the suspects. It didn’t even occur to me to test them, even though they were all so adamant about hiding what was really going on.” Teddy shook his head at his own stupidity. “There are countless curses that can get someone to cover for you or make them unable to talk about something. I don’t know how I didn’t put it together before.”
“How could you? Nothing about this is normal, and mixing curses is so advanced. No regular person can be behind this.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Saint said. “This is crazy. What we’re talking about here is going waaay beyond anything we’re equipped to handle.”
“I think we crossed the point of no return a while back, Saint. We just didn’t know what we’d gotten ourselves into,” Teddy replied.
“I still don’t know what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
“If I take videos and pictures, would you and Midas be able to work on this thing? See if you can figure anything else out about it?” Wren asked Avery.
Avery immediately flushed again, looking over his shoulder. “Sure,” he squeaked, high-pitched.
“You work together all the time,” Wren said.
“I know. I’m fine. This is fine. Do I not look fine?” Still croaky. Still pushing decibels.
“We need to look around and see if they left anything else behind.”
“Why didn’t they destroy this though?” Saint asked. “Everything else is smashed.”
“Creating artifacts is delicate and difficult work,” Avery said, sounding unbelievably offended. “You couldn’t just smash them. You need a cursebreaker, for one thing. And for another, it isn’t the artifact’s fault!”
“Uhh…sorry?” Saint said.
Wren rolled his eyes. “We’ll send you the info.”
“Any notes would be helpful,” Avery said. “Oh, and don’t touch it. That’s probably important to say, isn’t it?”
“We weren’t planning on it,” Teddy said as they ended the call. “Okay…let’s dig through this mess.”
Chapter 19
Wren
