Page 7 of Marked by the Demigod

* * *

Aimes almost doesn't noticethe package sitting by her door, the delivery job was so half-assed.

It's an Amazon box, about as nondescript as it comes. She turns it over in her hands as she goes into her apartment and gets ignored by her cat. It thumps ominously.

Aimes doesn't order to her apartment from Amazon, so she leaves the package on her kitchen table.

* * *

It sits therefor three days.

* * *

On Saturday,Trixie sweeps in, wearing designer pajamas and holding two bottles of wine. “Netflix and chill?”

“Pretty sure that’s not how the phrasing goes.” Aimes grabs a bottle, starts to corkscrew it open.

“We’re almost thirty. We can afford a little un-hip conversation.” Trixie plops on the couch, thumping her head against the backrest. “God I miss this couch.” When Trixie first moved out here, before she got her first gig, she spent three months crashing on the couch.

Aimes’s smaller cat immediately pops over to Trixie and starts purring like crazy. The whole “crashed on the couch for three months” means that the cats prefer Trixie over Aimes, for some fuck all reason. It's almost cute, but at the same time Aimes just wishes they'd love her like that.

“Oh, a package?” Trixie points from her couch. “When the hell do you get packages?”

“Right, that came in.” She grabs her box opener and starts to open it, though it’s absolutely covered in tape. “I forgot about it.”

Trixie raises an eyebrow, petting the small cat. “You got a mystery package and you forgot about it?” The small cat arches up into the pats, as if it’s the best thing ever.

“I was busy?” The cardboard is inundated with tape, to the point where there’s no surface to easily cut into.

The box crumpling in her hand, Aimes manages to puncture through the tape with a distinct popping sound. "Jesus," She mutters, trying to saw through the tape.

Trixie watches her with wide, unblinking eyes. "Are you sure it's for you?"

Aimes twists the box around, showing her the label.

She saws through the tape, and the box comes open with a pop and --

Laying at the bottom of the box, large, is a single chef’s knife.

"Um." Aimes says, more out of an instinct than anything actual to say. "Um."

It was shiny, very shiny, with a dark wooden handle, elaborately carved.

"What is it?" Trixie scrambles over the couch. "What --". She looks in the box, then falls silent, then up at Aimes. "You didn't order that?"

"Yeah no." Aimes picks it up. The knife fits, solid, in her hand, a hefty weight. "The hell?"

"And no gift note or receipt?" Trixie grabs the box, tilts it around.

The shining metal almost has patterns in it, swirls of metal while still being very, very shiny.

"Trixie, what is this?"

"It's a knife, Aimes, that's pretty self explanatory."

"No no, the metal." She tilts the knife, catching the swirls and patterns in the light. "Look, the pattern and such, it's --"

Trixie leans in close. "Bronze, I think. It's expensive, that's what it is. And creepy."

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