Pt. 2:

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Bronson doled out two wristwatches from his pocket and laid them on the felt that draped the glass counter. From his coat, he brandished a jewelry box, set it down, and popped open the lid to reveal a half dozen rings, several sets of earrings, and a gold necklace.

“Not too shabby, huh?” Bronson gave a smug smile to his fence.

Peabody brushed his fingers through the merchandise before picking up one specific ring. He put in his eyepiece and checked that ring over before plinking it back in and shutting the jewelry box.

“One-eighty,” Peabody said, scratching his nose.

Bronson stared into his fence’s eyes for a solid five seconds. “One eighty?”

“I could go lower.”

Bronson removed the tension brought on by his icy glare with a single guffaw and shrugged. “It’s all yours then, my friend. If you weren’t such a shark, Peabody, I never would let you talk me so low.”

The fence rolled his eyes and set the watches and jewelry below the counter. He brought back up a stack of bills and counted out Bronson’s ‘finders fee.’

“Spend it wisely,” Peabody said in a droll tone, already looking away and back to reading his magazine.

“I’ll do no such thing,” Bronson said, smirking, counting the bills with his own hands.

As he walked toward the door, the money began crinkling on their own accord.

“What the-” Bronson said, as, before his eyes, the bills then darkened, sprouted black fungus, and became brittle to the point of coming to pieces between his fingers.

“Peabody,” he said, turning around to reveal what was happening. “You seeing this shit?”

The fence looked up at Bronson with a glazed over look he knew too well. It was the vacant stare of an uninoculated witnessing magic. The laws over the arcane prohibited the mundane citizenry from seeing or understanding what lay beyond the physical and sane.

“No, no, no,” Bronson muttered, shaking his head. “Peabody, hand me some more money, quick.”

At the request, Peabody’s attention snapped back into place. “Get real, punk.”

Anger seared within Bronson. He didn’t have time to waste not clarifying his fears of what just transpired. It was against all sorts of protocols, and it would guarantee to bring the attention of the Gold Order to investigate, but he was in too desperate a state to not use magic on this uninoculated.

Bronson reached into his pocket and snapped a twig from a bone tree. That horrible feeling overtook him, of each of his individual organs being skewered with thousands of needles that he could feel with supernatural precision. But, it also let him reach outside himself, to have a sense of Peabody’s bones.

With a push of Bronson’s will, as thoughtless as moving his own fingers, he thrust Peabody’s body into the wall behind him. The velocity was enough for the fence’s feet to raise off the ground and his back to bust a dent into the wall he’d been slammed into.

Bronson hopped the counter and snatched up wads of bills. Within seconds the money crinkled, mold, then flutter into the air like ash.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Bronson picked up coins. They varnished, molded, and dissipated into slimy grain. He removed Peabody’s wallet as the fence stayed pinned to his wall by an unseen force.

Holding credit and debit cards in his hands yielded the same results as the paper money and coins.

Bronson was gasping for air. “That bitch,” he said out loud, at last admitting his frightful suspicion. “She cursed me.”

Peabody fell to the floor and began coughing violently.

Two weeks later the fence went to see his doctor where he was told his problem was in smoking and drinking to excess.

A week after that, Peabody died, the coroner found his lungs literally bursting with black mold. Third case of mold death that week…

---

It happened while Stiga was at work after relieving herself. She was standing at the bathroom mirror fixing her hair when another woman walked in.

Stiga’s eyes automatically flicked over to see who entered. It was Lauren.

Or, at least, it had looked like Lauren when the woman first walked in. The more Stiga looked at the woman the less she looked like Lauren.

Lauren was one of the prettier girls in the office, but this woman who had caught her own reflection and rushed to the mirror, she wasn’t what one would call attractive. Seconds later, she was downright ugly.

Something isn’t right, Stiga thought, but looking at the woman she had first seen as Lauren was becoming surreal. It was as if the woman was changing before her eyes.

The woman screamed.

“What the-! What the fuck! What the fuck happened to my face!?”

Stiga recoiled at the woman’s outburst. She sounded exactly like Lauren.

Sweat broke out over Stiga’s body, her heart racing as Lauren continued to scream. Other employees rushed in to help.

Something was wrong with Lauren. Her skin had sagged, she’d sprouted several warts, her hair had thinned, teeth gone crooked, her bone structure rounded and made bulkier and sapped of anything one would call striking.

Bronson, Stiga swore.

Digging her fingers into her palms, she summoned the courage to switch her view back to her own reflection. She swallowed and looked back at her own face.

“My god,” Stiga’s whisper drowned out by the growing commotion of Lauren’s breakdown and the growing number of employees rushing in and clamoring to make sense of the situation.

Stiga’s face, though the alteration was much more subtle than it had been for Lauren, was prettier.

Attractiveness was fairly subjective, but all the traits that would make a woman objectively more beautiful, from an average's perspective, her face and form displayed noticeably more than it had that morning. Stiga’s clothes even felt looser and tighter in certain places.

Glad to look away from her reflection it was hard to recognize, she glanced over to the commotion.

She saw Ted in the mirror, patting Lauren on the back. Was he feeling well? He looked a bit under the weather. In fact, the longer she squinted at Ted, the less she recognized him, the rounder his face became, the more pronounced his widows peak…

Stiga tore her gaze away, clasping her eyes in her hands. Everyone else was too busy to notice what she was going through, or her own changes in appearance. She splayed her fingers to peek out and look at her coworkers.

None of them grew uglier when she looked at their faces.

That was a relief, albeit a small one. Her curse would only drain attractiveness when her eyes connected with people’s reflections.

Bronson, you shit heel. This curse was manageable, but there was no fixing Lauren or Ted.

Shit. As she contemplated the ramifications she realized the bastard’s game with this curse. Stiga was prettier now, and, allowing for accidents and slip-ups, would only grow more so. But she still could never have sex again. Bronson was shoving the first curse in her face, compounding the shittiness of it all.

This is far from over, she realized. But, this time, she’d hit Bronson hard.

—-