Page 10 of Feral

I scanned my key card and took the elevator up to the third floor where new shipments waited for me. When the elevator doors opened, I stepped into the short line behind my coworkers to await decontamination. Beyond us was the receiving room; a huge, open space split into different sections in the hopes of keeping artifacts separated enough to not interact with one another. Most thought the process of neutralizing and initially examining the artifacts was a bit dull, but I was always thrilled to discover what might lie within the crates. What new truth might I uncover?

As the cool air of the decontamination chamber blasted over me, I realized that today was the fifth month anniversary of my promotion to head of the department. Running the neglected Sexual Artifacts division wasn’t all I’d thought it would be when I took the job. The offer of running my very own department had felt like a sure sign of wonderful things to come, that all of my hard work had paid off and I was finally being recognized.

And then I was shown the division.

A run down set of shelves and crates in the bowels of the London office, the place looked like it used to be a medieval dungeon.

Turns out, it had been, which explained the ghost that currently resided there.

That reminds me, I need to see if the Hauntings department has any advice for communicating with spirits. Peter the poltergeist is going to move the wrong artifact one of these days and then I’ll be cleaning Minotaur cum out of the vents. Again.

Once I was given leave to exit the decontamination chamber, I took a quick look at my outfit to make sure it was alright and nodded my thanks to the technician, who wasn’t looking at all. I’d chosen this outfit, with its three quarter length crimson turtleneck, shin length flared skirt and high waist because it both flattered my curves and looked as fun as it did professional. I wanted to walk into that meeting with the dean as my most confident self, and this was one the outfits that always made me feel just that. I smoothed back my unruly black curls and tied them back. The chamber was really hell on my hair, and I wondered if there was anyone I could reasonably talk to about that. But the moment I stepped into the busy receiving room and spied Reggie about to open a crate, all worries about my appearance fled.

“Reggie, don’t you dare!” I shouted across the cavernous space.

Half a dozen heads turned and stared but I ignored them. I really did not need to see my coworkers sans pants and grinding on one another right now. Reggie, a young Mothman with unusual yellow and crimson coloring in his wings, jumped back. I cringed a little at how scared he looked, and made a mental note to check in with him after I’d reminded him of the rules pertaining to new artifacts.

Reggie had been stolen from his hive as an egg many years ago. Poor thing had no knowledge of any of his family and no one had been able to track them down. He’d lived his entire existence in one of the sub basements as a sort of research assistant at the Lab. He wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen there, and honestly, I preferred not to know.

While Reggie had been excited to work with me and be out of the small sub basement that had been his only home, he was still too frightened to venture outside the building, even with the offer of a glamour to hide his true nature from the humans. I kept trying though, and maybe one day he’d take me up on a trip to the bookstore. The young Mothman was absolutely obsessed with Regency romance novels.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep for such a thin being.

“Thank you. I really do need you to follow the protocols.”

He nodded.

“Although, I do understand the curiosity,” I said with a smile. “It’s always exciting, isn’t it?”

He gave me a bright grin.

“Yes!”

I handed Reggie a pair of gloves that would fit the hands on his first set of arms, hoping he remembered not to use his lower ones to handle anything. He had three arms on each side; the middle and lower arms had hands that looked more like pincers and could extend to various lengths, which was very handy for reaching the taller shelves in the department.

During this part of his job, Reggie was in charge of cataloguing the artifact on the secure tablets we all used, but sometimes I had to hand him something, and the last I wanted was for him to activate it. I slipped on my own pair of gloves and opened the first crate, an old school wooden box with sawdust and hay inside. It covered a medium sized copper box with a hieroglyph and the name of Cleopatra the seventh on it. I sprayed it with the neutralizing solution, a thin, somewhat goopy pink liquid that would temporarily put the artifact into a neutral state.

Ever so carefully, I opened it and gasped.

Inside was a gorgeous necklace of gold and topaz, with golden serpents twining themselves around each jewel. I turned it over and saw a faint inscription. Reggie brought the magnifying lamp to me and I examined the writing.

“It’s Latin…To my beloved queen, my Aphrodite,” I read out loud.

I searched through the packing to find the slip that was supposed to accompany the item. It was buried at the bottom and I nearly fell over into the crate as I searched.

”Cleopatra’s topaz necklace grants the wearer the ability to seduce a powerful man or woman. Over time, mutual obsession can set in, wearer and the one seduced will do anything to keep the other.”

I’d never gotten an artifact that didn’t have some kind of horrible draw back to its use. And while I knew that someday I might tire of constantly handling dangerous mystical objects, I wasn’t there yet.

Not even close.

For the next hour we looked through all the crates tagged for my department, sending a few to the other departments because they really didn’t belong with us. The last crate was small, buried behind all the others. It looked a bit worse for wear, the metal scratched and dented. The shipping label was faint but the date was clear.

“This came in a year ago,” I said, looking around. “Why am I just now getting this?”

“Maybe it was just overlooked?”

“Hmm…perhaps.”

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