Page 33 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

I blinked some more, absorbing this new information. “You write poetry?”

“Hey, I got an artistic side.”

Yeah, but I didn’t think that photographing corpses counted. “What kind of poem was it?”

“Like I said, nothing. I just took a pic of Sal one day when we were running some errands for Tony. It was when the casino was being built, and he was going back and forth between Philly and Vegas to keep an eye on the place. He’d have preferred to put it in Atlantic City, but Mircea was insistent on Vegas, so. . .

“Anyway, some of the contractors screwed up, and he fired ‘em, but they’d just taken a draw and didn’t seem interested in doing a refund. Sal and I were sent to expedite the process. And it was pretty easy.

“They folded like a house of cards when she brought out the nutcrackers.”

“I bet.”

“So we figured, why not take the rest of the day off and go to the lake? She looked real pretty, hanging over the pier to throw popcorn to the ducks. Or she was trying to. They had birds that hung around that pier to get tourists to feed them popcorn from this stand, you know?”

“Ducks eat popcorn?”

“Ducks eat everything, but there’s not much to eat there. You seen Lake Meade, there’s not a lot of vegetation going on, so I don’t know what they usually snack on. But they like popcorn.

“Only so do the fish, these big goldfish types. Somebody must have released ‘em into the water, and they got busy. Now there’s a ton of ‘em, and they’re like a foot long or bigger, and they and the ducks were going at it.

“The ducks would peck at the fish whenever they went for some popcorn, and the fish would whack ‘em with their tails in response, like really smack ‘em around. It was all-out war, with quacking and splashing and whack whack whack, better than some fights I seen in Vegas. Sal fed ‘em like ten containers of popcorn she was laughing so hard. The stand made out good that day. . .”

He trailed off, staring into the distance as if he could see it all again.

“I’m sorry,” I told him after a minute. “About Sal, I mean. It wasn’t fair what happened to her.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Alphonse said, his face expressionless. “And somebody’s got to answer for that.” After a minute, he glanced at me, and life flooded back into those features. Taking his face from serial killer to slightly more animated serial killer. “Anyway, I took a picture of her, laughing her ass off, and later, after I saw how well it came out, I had one of the mages Tony kept around enchant it for me, so it moved.

“It was nice. You could hear her laugh and almost smell the popcorn. Then I wrote her a poem on the back.”

“What did it say?”

“You know, I don’t remember?” Since he was blushing slightly, I doubted that but didn’t press it. “I was gonna give it to her for our anniversary, but that dumbass Hanson spilled coffee all over it, and then tried to fix it and ended up tearing the thing! I took it back to the mage, but he said he couldn’t do anything, something about rupturing the structural integrity of the piece.

“We were all set to go out. Sal was finishing her makeup, and I was panicking. Until your Dad happened by and fixed it.”

I tried to imagine Alphonse panicking and failed utterly. “I thought you said it couldn’t be fixed,” I said.

“No, that’s what that punk-ass mage claimed. Your Dad wasn’t a punk ass. He did a spell to knit it back together and clean it up. He said he did things like that all the time when he was a garbage man—”

“He disenchanted unstable magical objects,” I corrected. “He wasn’t a garbage man.”

“Okay,” Alphonse said. “But the point was, he would sometimes find usable stuff when pawing through the trash—excuse me, the unstable magical objects—and some could be repaired and resold. It was a nice little sideline, even while he was with Tony. I don’t know why I didn’t go to him first.

“Anyway, he was going to reapply the spell, but he didn’t have to. Once it was whole again, the original enchantment worked just fine. So, all you probably need is a hairdryer and some tape.”

“Neither of which I have,” I said, but I cheered up slightly. Maybe I could save them after all once I got back home.

If I got back.

“I’m surprised it tore,” he added. “Being in a deck and all. Are the rest okay?”

I checked them out. They were currently welded into a block, like paper mache. But they didn’t look damaged and the plastic coating should help me pry them apart once they dried.

“I think this is the only one.”

“Maybe it’s a sign,” Alphonse said, sitting back and raising a black brow. “Isn’t that what those cards do? Predict the future?”

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