Page 77 of The Little Shop of Curiosities, The Music Box Part 2

I’ve never conjured power like this before. It’s vast and ancient, but it’s also wild and unpredictable. This is what I imagine it would be like trying to ride a dragon’s tail.

A cry tears from my mouth as I reach out and try to pull the magic back, but it doesn’t want to give up its grip.

Suddenly, I feel a pair of arms around me, grounding me and holding on tight.

Sam.

I close my eyes and hold onto the presence of him, using him as my rock. My tether. With both hands, I yank the fire back and absorb it into my palms. When it finally dissipates, I’m drenched in sweat, panting hard and shaking so badly that Sam tightens his grip on me.

“What the hell was that, Prickles?” He exhales heavily.

I stare at my palms, where my blood vessels show traces of green fading away.

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

But even as the words leave my lips, I hear a dry whisper at the back of my mind.

Demonfire.

18

It’s been weeks since that day at the judge’s house and I’m still no closer to figuring out what Demonfire is or how the hell I was able to conjure it. Fire isn’t even my strongest element, Earth is.

But honestly, that’s been the least of my problems. After everything we experienced, Riley still refuses to leave the house, saying she won’t burden a new owner with the consequences of her ancestors’ epically bad choices.

The same day we met and saw the echoes of Dr Whyte’s Demon Club amassed in her parlour, I returned, with supplies and my grandfather in tow, to perform a clearing—not to be confused with an exorcism or spiritual banishing. Our goal had been to try and clear some of the bad vibes in the house, for want of a better word, and make it a little more comfortable for her to stay.

I can’t really say her decision to stay is wrong. It’s probably the same reason Vivienne stayed in the bookshop. Familial obligations. One severely unhinged person doing something horrifying and dooming their descendants to spend generations undoing.

I guess I feel a sort of kinship with her and apparently so did Grumps. They got on like a bloody house on fire. Turns out, when she’s not stressed out seeing masked echoes and I’m not trying to set her kitchen alight with weird green fire, Riley is incredibly funny and very sarcastic. Which is, of course, my grandfather’s love language.

They bonded in the first five minutes of meeting, and the next thing I know, Grumps had moved out of his hotel and into one of Riley’s spare rooms. As much as I worry about him, I can’t say it’s a bad idea. At least this way Riley isn’t on her own in that house, and Grumps can help her navigate her newly acquired paranormal abilities.

I say navigate, but the last time I left them, they were attempting to use her telekinetic ability to play Ping-Pong. At this point, I honestly don’t know which one of them is supposed to be the sensible one. My guess is neither.

At least Grumps has also spent some time going through the journal, which we believe belonged to Simon Maycliffe. So far, he hasn’t found anything pertinent to Whyte’s Demon Club or the boy Cordelia rescued. There’s also no hint as to why Simon and the shadow man wanted him so badly. Surely, if Tobias was so important they would have kept him away from the judge.

Unless they didn’t know what he was doing to the boy.

I shake my head. I wish I knew what had become of him, but I’ve searched every archive, family history, and genealogy site I can find. There’s no mention of a Tobias connected to the Crawshanks family. It’s like the boy just disappeared after that night.

My dreams have also been suspiciously absent. I don’t even know for certain what happened to Cordelia, but I’m almost positive it’s her demon under the floorboards in the bookshop.

Sam’s been really busy lately too. Between helping Danny with Vivienne’s murder investigation and chasing down all the leads Mr Hadley keeps sending his way, he hasn’t stopped to catch his breath. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean we haven’t spent every moment we can together.

I’m falling for him. Hard and fast.

Who am I kidding? I’m already all the way off that particular cliff, which brings its own set of issues. As far as Danny and the others are aware, I didn’t really know Viv, and I’ve been largely spared from having to get involved in the investigation. But that is yet another reason the opportunity to tell him the truth about who I am hasn’t really come up.

While Sam’s had his hands full with all those cases, I haven’t exactly been idle either. Apart from running the shop, I’ve been steadily ploughing through the cursed objects in the safe. Although I still haven’t touched the music box, I’ve at least managed to break several of the other curses, basically rendering the items harmless now.

Not that it’s made a difference.

I look down at the old lunch box in my hand. From the 1980s, it has a scratched and faded picture of The Muppet Show on the front and is bound together tightly with rather sturdy duct tape.

What the casual observer can’t see is the inside of the box. It’s covered with protective sigils and holds the very cursed rabbit’s foot wrapped firmly in packing paper that the sigils are supposed to counteract.

The occult shop in Soho that had reached out to me told me about a run of dangerously bad luck, from a staff member being electrocuted—they thankfully recovered—to the building catching fire. They soon realised that what they’d assumed was a quirky piece of vintage nostalgia décor was actually only an incident or two away from actually killing someone.