Page 49 of The Pushy Pixies Are Going Down
Miles’s face scrunched up. “Um, Aeson called us.”
That made him look over his shoulder, but he was alone in the booth, and the other ticket booth was too far away to hear us, so we were fine. “He said he might, but I didn’t know he had. You’re gonna get the pixies out?”
“That’s the plan.” Miles leaned against the small counter, speaking right into the speaker in the glass. “He said you haven’t found any cursed objects or anything?”
He shrugged. “Not so far, but this place is huge, and there’s a ton of shit everywhere. The basement is a huge storage facility with even more artifacts and stuff, so even if there’s a cursed object, I’m not sure how easy it’d be to find it here.”
I pursed my lips. “Maybe I should get Lyric to come out. They might be able to detect the magic.”
Chaos’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean? How can they detect magic?”
My jaw opened as I took him in. Shit. I’d forgotten that the kids hadn’t been told about Lyric’s magical ability. I held up a finger and pulled out my phone, quickly texting Lyric.
Me: Soooo… I accidentally said something about you detecting magic in front of Chaos—the necromancer kid that helped us out.
Luckily for me, Lyric texted back immediately.
Lyric: You can tell him and Aeson. No worries. Did you guys have to hire him again?
Me: Thanks! No, they asked us to look at a pixie problem at the museum they work at. Gimme a few minutes and I’ll call you.
Lyric: Kk.
As I shoved my phone in my pocket, I said, “Sorry, I forgot you didn’t know already, so I wanted to make sure they didn’t mind if I told you.”
Chaos nodded. “Fair.”
“So Lyric’s a sentire. Do you know what that is?”
Chaos nodded again. “Yep. That’s cool. But that means they would know any practitioner as soon as they saw them, right?”
“Right. But Lyric doesn’t tell anyone’s secrets.”
“It’s true,” Miles added. “We went to high school together, and Lyric never even told Win that I’m an empath. He didn’t find out until we were at the gnome house.”
Chaos’s eyebrows rose, but he nodded. “Okay… okay, good to know.”
Sentires could feel, see, and sense magic, and they’d know the type of magic a thing or person was. Lyric specifically even got a little bit of foresight in the sense that they could oftentimes sensewhen something was good or bad. They weren’t a seer by any means, but they had a touch of Sight in their own magic.
“So… is it cool if I ask them to come check out the pixie problem? It’ll be easier for them to determine if there’s a curse or spell being used.”
Chaos nodded. “That’s actually a good idea. I mean, it might just be that these pixies are assholes. They might not be super known for doing stuff like this, but it’s not completely unheard of. But these guys do seem particularly bad, like they want to go out and hurt people.”
Miles frowned. “That does seem a little over the top, even for pixies, but hopefully, we can get to the bottom of it. Has anyone else been affected? Like we were with the cursed seal. Maybe the workers here, since they’re the ones who’d be exposed the most?”
He let out a long sigh. “Our boss is an asshole, and he’s pretty much the only person who I talk to other than Ace. I’m stuck in this stupid booth all the time. I only get to leave for my lunch break.”
That made us both frown at him, but all I asked was, “Did you already take your lunch break today? Or, well, I guess it’d be a dinner break.” I figured that was important to know for Miles’s feed-the-kids campaign.
He shook his head. “Not yet. Ace and I were gonna go around seven.”
Before either of us could respond, there was a loudcluckfrom inside the booth. I froze, but Miles gasped and leaned up on his toes, trying to look inside the booth, saying, “Is Clucky here?”
Sola chirped and bobbed around on Miles’s shoulder, as if trying to get her practitioner’s attention off Chaos’s familiar, and Miles petted her while trying to look inside the booth.
Chaos sighed, bent down so we couldn’t really see him anymore, then reappeared with Clucky in his arms.
Clucky was a cockatrice—a dragon and chicken combination that was much cuter than I thought it’d be. She had a chicken head and a chicken-shaped body covered in a combination of feathers and scales, but her tail and wings were all dragon. She was a combination of browns and reds that blended together in a beautiful way, and even though she looked pretty harmless, I knew she could breathe fire and was likely filled to the brim with magic, so who knew what else the cockatrice could do.
