Chapter Text
The rain didn’t let up.
All through the night it poured, and Maddie wondered if she should revise her estimate of the weather controller’s power or intelligence downward. Or both.
On the other hand, maybe this was a concerted effort to wear them out before the eclipse even happened.
The power at Fentonworks was still out, despite their best efforts and their nearest neighbors (who were admittedly further away than average - some people just couldn’t stand the slight inconveniences that came with advancing science) being just fine. The sunrise had also found Maddie with a rash at her joints. Some damp must have gotten past the waterproofing. Or maybe the sweat-wicking layer wasn’t up to snuff anymore. Once the power was back on, she’d have to wash the whole thing and check. As for Jack, he’d been complaining of a sore back off and on all morning.
“Try it now!” called Jack from where he’d wedged the upper half of his body into the electrical maintenance box that the city had installed between them and the power grid when– Well, it had hardly been their fault, but the city didn’t see it that way.
Maddie flipped the main power switch in the circuit box back and forth. “Nothing!” she called.
“Hey, Mom?” called Danny from near the door. “We’re going to Tucker’s, since they have power, okay?”
“Okay,” said Maddie, distracted, waving over her shoulder even though she knew he wouldn’t see her. “Have fun!”
“Okay, this time, I’ve got it!” said Jack. “Go ahead!”
Jack had not got it, and now Maddie could hear him grumbling. “Maybe we ought to switch,” she suggested.
“I’m going to the library!” yelled Jazz, not waiting for an answer before slamming the front door behind her.
Really. What were she and Jack supposed to do about that? Well. They’d have to talk eventually. During dinner, maybe?
“One more time, Maddie, one more time!”
Maddie flipped the switch again. This time, the power turned on, and she smiled with relief. At least something was going right this time.
“Great job, Jack! Now we can check the Fenton Devilry Detector readouts!”
They went down into the lab, where the machinery was still gradually humming to life. Monsters frequently had many natural defenses against observation, going far beyond mere camouflage, so Jack and Maddie had to be as clever about finding them as they were about catching them. Some monsters could only be detected by the oldest technology, others by the newest. Some required brand new inventions.
Jack and Maddie could hardly spend all their time monitoring all that equipment all around town, though, so they’d automated their detectors, and made machines to monitor their machines, and programs to collate the data. It was all very complicated, and sent their electricity bill through the roof. It was worth it, though, to know that even creatures that could only be photographed on archaic silver plate couldn’t evade notice because of it. Especially because the monsters like that had to be full of hubris that they’d never be caught. But they would, one day.
Because the Fentons were prepared.
However, it turned out that such a system didn’t hold up well against ordinary human vandalism, storms, or even time. For example, a machine that operated a polaroid on a timer, then took a picture of the resultant polaroid to send back to the Fentonwork’s servers had many points of failure. As such, Maddie wasn’t surprised to see that the main screen was covered in red OFFLINE notifications.
But visual monitoring wasn’t the only kind. They had others, as well. Things akin to seismometers but for certain kinds of magic. They had microphones and EMF readers but these were not what Maddie was looking for. Maddie was looking for something specific.
Through hard-fought trial and error, she and Jack had discovered something critical: Magic didn’t behave like light. It didn’t, precisely, behave as a gas either. But that analogy was closer.
Magic left traces. Magic built up, and magic lingered. They might not be able to watch everything across the city, but when they needed to look for evidence of foul play, they could compare readings in the local ambient magic.
It was this system, that Jack had named the Fenton Devilry Detector, in honor of his ancestor, whose writings had given them the foundation for its construction, that Maddie and Jack rebooted now.
There were no overnight readings logged, an unfortunate consequence of their lab being offline. But the system had been functional right up until the power outage, and what the graphs showed was unmistakable.
“It’s centered right on the house,” said Maddie, tracing the massive spike in detected magic with one finger. Although, calling it a spike might have been inaccurate. Magic levels around Fentonworks in particular, and even Amity Park in general, had always been high, and had been building gradually for months - no doubt due to the monsters that used it finally recognizing Jack and Maddie as a threat. This, though… This was far in excess of even that. This was a sudden, severe change that, if Maddie was reading this right, had pulsed in time with the storm overhead.
It could only be an attack.
An attack, not only on Jack and Maddie, but their family.
Maddie picked at her lower lip, already trying to determine the best way to safeguard her children. Keeping them both home until they figured everything out would be… Well, it would be ideal, but the government wouldn’t see it that way, and from historical evidence, neither would Jazz and Danny. (Especially, Jazz, right now. After last night’s fight, Maddie had no idea where she stood with her daughter.) And whoever had attacked had clearly known about Fentonworks, and had known how to get around at least some of their protections. Talismans might work, if they could get the kids to wear them… Capturing the monsters would be better, but despite Jack’s confidence, they couldn’t count on that yet.
She itched at her elbow.
At least the kids would be safe during the day.
Jack groaned loudly, and started vigorously scratching his stomach. “I don’t know about you, Maddie, but I think some water got into my suit. It’s definitely not sensitive skin safe anymore, oh boy!”
“I have noticed some itching this morning,” Maddie frowned. “I was hoping it was only my suit that had failed. If yours has too, it might be a materials issue. Why don’t we set these aside for testing?”
“Don’t have to ask me twice!” Jack said, cheerful despite still itching at his stomach. Maddie pulled out two new jumpsuits for them, checking to see when they’d last been inspected and had their various protections redone.
Jack pulled out several pieces of testing equipment. He had to pause a couple times to rub his back against the corner of the wall like a bear scratching on a tree. Maddie frowned and hurried to get Jack a new suit. She could feel the itch spreading as well, and had to stop herself from starting to scratch at her neck.
She passed Jack his new jumpsuit, and went to go change in the small decontamination chamber’s locker room. She took a bag in with her, and placed her defective suit inside. Whatever was wrong with it, they didn’t want it to get even more contaminated before they had a chance to analyze it, and they didn’t want whatever had caused it to break down to spread.
Also, they’d been up all night, and they needed to sleep. Leaving the damaged jumpsuits and trusting they’d just remember which ones they were was just tempting trouble.
Maddie inspected her skin. There was a slight rash, but nothing terribly alarming. Still, better to be safe than sorry. She picked up the Fenton Decontamination and Exfoliation Wash, a body wash she and Jack had developed that was designed to purge negative magical influences. It itself contained ‘magical’ substances, but, well, decontamination procedures were never perfect.
For more severe cases of contamination, for example, being struck directly by an effect, or ensnarement by one of the more infectious monsters they knew to exist, there were other measures. Some simple, if tedious, like smudging or ritual purification, others… more dangerous, if not less necessary.
It was important to plan for such things, in as dangerous a line of work as they had chosen.
She lathered it over the first the rash, and then the rest of her body. Something had gotten through the protections of the suit enough to irritate her skin at the joints. It was likely trace amounts had found their way elsewhere, and she just hadn’t reacted yet.
It was best to be thorough, with these things.
The wash stung as she rubbed it into the irritated skin, like aloe vera on sunburn.
She stepped out of the shower, patting her hair dry. Jack was still in, and she decided to wait for him. As tired as she was, she didn’t want to touch any of their more involved projects. This wasn’t the first time she’d pulled an all-nighter, but she and Jack hadn’t slept much lately. Preparations for the eclipse were taking longer than they’d expected. Tools disappeared or were misplaced. Plans were miscommunicated or derailed by distractions. Rather, that’s what seemed to be happening on the surface.
Not for the first time, she wondered if someone was interfering deliberately. Or rather, how many were, and who.
Some of the monsters they’d gotten ahold of had told them things in an effort to weasel out of what was coming. Nothing that could be trusted implicitly, of course. Every monster was a practiced liar, even the ones that couldn’t. Especially the ones that couldn’t.
(There were ways to lie, she knew, while technically telling the truth.)
But enough to wonder, especially about certain more active members of the infestation creeping in this town.
Like Phantom.
Her eyes wandered up to a poster she and Jack had pinned to the wall a few weeks ago. It had been part of a presentation they’d made hoping they could convince the children that monsters, especially fairies, especially that one that loitered around the school, no doubt hoping to find easy kidnapping victims, weren’t to be trusted.
The poster featured a mock up of what their research suggested fairies of that type really looked like under the glamours. The small monsters appeared pretty and harmless, but that appearance was much like the lure of an anglerfish, designed only to draw in victims.
Fairies were small, ugly, insectoid things. Their bodies were segmented, covered in hair-like filaments and exoskeletal plates. Their mouths were grotesqueries that fused canine-like teeth with oversized mandibles. Their wings, instead of being brightly patterned, were likely drab, tattered things, possibly even covered with oily, beetle-like wing cases. Instead of hands, they had long, scythe-like claws that lacked an opposable digit entirely. Even their large eyes, so good at conveying innocence, were in truth more like the bulging, compound eyes of a fly.
Without magic and humans to deceive with it, fairies would be no better than cockroaches. Small, useless things, scuttling in the dark.
But they did have magic, and they did use it to trick humans. Especially human children, which even so-called fairy tales agreed were their favorite prey.
The fairy in the poster was a fairy like that, drawn in detail by Jack and labeled lovingly by Maddie. Jazz and Danny had barely looked at it before dismissing it.
(Her kids had been so dismissive of their work, lately. Everything she and Jack did was met with disbelief. They were nearly scornful of it.)
Maddie sighed and turned away– Then froze. She’d thought– But, no, it had just been a warped reflection in the glass of one of the older computer monitors. They really needed to find a better place for that.
Before she could start to compile a list of better places, Jack came out of the shower, towel wrapped around his head. She smiled. She remembered when Vlad taught them how to do that, back in college.
“Man,” said Jack. “I’m beat. Makes you wish monsters knew what bedtime was, huh?”
“Now, now, Jack,” said Maddie playfully, “if they knew what bedtime was, they wouldn’t stay out where we could catch them half as often.” She patted his shoulder and hid a wince as her suit dragged painfully against the rash at her shoulder. “Let’s get to bed. We’ll be ready to take on all the monsters in the world when we get up.”
Maddie was not ready to take on all the monsters in the world when she woke up. She must have strained herself much more than she’d thought before bed. She hadn’t even run for all that long. But clearly, her muscles disagreed. They protested as she reached for her alarm clock, and she contemplated simply returning to sleep.
But that had never helped with muscle soreness in her experience, and she wanted to catch at least some of the remaining afternoon light, sodden as it was. The work was worth it, of course. But Maddie had never taken well to nocturnal hours on the occasions they’d been required. She’d always been more of an early bird than Jack, and daylight had always made her feel more balanced. She left both her earplugs and her sleeping husband in the bedroom and padded downstairs.
The bottom floor was deserted. The house was quiet with the door to their bedroom shut, and light filtered through the windows in the living room. The couch with its soft cushions was inviting, but Maddie went up the stairs to the roof. There, she settled on the damp edge of the cornice and took a sip, waiting for it to return life to her body.
The kids were probably still out. Maddie could see that Jazz’s car was gone, and Danny loved spending time with his friends.
Despite the stresses of the last day, Maddie smiled. That boy and his friends. They really were as thick as thieves, always out doing something or other. Or in. She couldn’t quite understand the appeal of shooting demons in a video game when you could be going out and doing it in the real world, but she more than approved of the sentiment.
She itched at the crook of her elbow, then pulled a face. Rubbing already irritated skin would only make it worse, even with the soft lining of her jumpsuit.
She finished her coffee, then did some stretches to help with the soreness before returning downstairs. She was hungry, and Jack would be too when he woke. Maybe she could order out Chinese?
She certainly didn't feel like cooking—she could admit, to herself, that she wasn't great at it. She idly opened the drawer with all the local menus, and started digging for the Chinese menu. Her fingers, she noted, ached slightly with the movement.
In fact, she was still pretty sore all over, the stretching having only helped for a short while.
Ah, well. It would fade. It always did. She shook some stiffness out of her joints and dialed the place.
A few minutes later, she went back upstairs to nudge Jack awake. It always took him a little bit to drag himself out of bed, and if he started now he might be downstairs by the time the food arrived.
Maddie didn’t bother saying his name as she pushed open the door; she’d never seen Jack wake to a sound for as long as they’d been married. Instead, she opened the blinds, pulled the blankets down, peeled his sleeping mask off, and–
…frowned.
There was a rash around his eyes. More, it didn’t look like any rash she’d ever seen.
She shook him.
“Bwuh,” Jack said, face screwed up as he grappled with wakefulness.
“Jack,” she said. “There’s something on your face.”
“Sleeping mask,” he said, and tried rolling over.
She didn’t let him. “Jack,” she repeated. “I think the rash is getting worse.”
"Feels worse," he said. "Think'm dying."
"Jack Fenton, you are not dying."
"How do you know," said Jack. "I hurt all over."
"So do I. We're sick, Jack. Not dying." She hoped.
"Brave woman. Steel will. S'no wonder I married you. Be a fool not to."
Maddie sighed in exasperation and fondness. That was Jack for you, still complimenting her while claiming to be on his deathbed.
"Flattery will get you nowhere," she said.
"It got me you."
"Jaaack," Maddie said. "Fine, you flatterer. What do you want?"
"Five more minutes?" he asked hopefully.
"I'm setting a timer." Maddie got up to leave, and paused in the doorway. "If you're not up by the time dinner gets here, I'm eating your orange chicken."
A few minutes later, Maddie heard the stairs creak under Jack's feet. A few moments later he appeared in the kitchen doorway, slumped dramatically against the frame.
"Maddie," he said. "I think we've been cursed."
Maddie put another glass away. "Why?" she asked.
"No illness could lay Jack Fenton low like this," he said, too strained to say it with his usual excitement.
"Except for the flu eight years ago," Maddie gently reminded him.
"That was pixies."
"Mmmm," said Maddie, unwilling to start that argument again while nursing a full body ache. She’d checked. Multiple times. It had been the flu, and not anything supernatural.
"And this feels too sudden. And so soon after the attack on our generator..."
"Mmmm," Maddie said again, but with a much different tone.
Jack had a point. On the other hand, running around in the rain at all hours was a much more mundane explanation. They weren’t as young as they used to be. And while their suits should have protected them from the cold and damp, they already knew the material had failed to protect them in at least one way.
"Maybe," she said at last. "Why don't we run those tests once the food gets here? The kids aren't home, so we could eat in the lab."
Jack laughed, but there was a pained edge to it. “Yeah, no Jazz to scold us, huh? Ah. Hah.”
Maddie pressed her lips into a thin line. “Hopefully, they’ll be back soon,” she said, rather than addressing what Jack was clearly thinking. With how upset Jazz was, it was more likely that she’d give them the cold shoulder than scold them.
Or maybe not. It was becoming apparent that she didn’t know her daughter as well as she’d thought. Either of her children, really, she reflected, thinking back on some of Danny’s… odder behavior, recently. She didn’t understand it at all.
They really needed to have that talk.
“Right!” said Jack, finally managing an exclamation point. “To the lab to figure out what felonious fairy is behind our feeble feelings!”
Oh, Jack. He always knew how to cheer Maddie up.
Down to the lab they went.
Usually, the lab felt welcoming. It was as familiar and lived-in to Maddie as the living room upstairs. Usually, the clean lighting, clutter, occult diagrams, and metal tables were just as much a comfort as the dozens of experiments plugging, percolating, or maturing away on the tables. It always felt like protection. It always felt like progress. Progress of knowledge, of their bulwark against the things that stalked the night.
But tonight Maddie felt all of the weight of dirt, concrete, and metal overhead, pressing down, as if to bury them alive.
Ominous and suffocating.
Like a coffin.
Maddie took a deep breath. She hated being sick.
“Ooh,” said Jack. “This is a bad curse. We’ve got to figure it out right away!”
"What makes you say that?" Maddie asked.
"Queasy," said Jack. "And I think my claustrophobia is kicking in. I forgot I had that, after that one time we had that abandoned mine dropped on us."
"I'm feeling that, too." Maddie frowned. But what would trigger those memories? Why would a curse give them a rash and a mild case of claustrophobia? Maybe the creature that cursed them just hadn’t been very strong. Or maybe the curse had been stronger, but their protections had deflected most of it.
Or it wasn't a curse. They hadn't confirmed it yet, after all. And there was more than one way for monsters to hurt humans.
They pulled the suits out of storage. Preparations were interrupted by the arrival of food, but shortly they had takeout boxes at one table, and their compromised suits on another.
(As Jack said, if those monsters thought they’d be stopped by this, they had another thing coming.)
Jack, eagerly following his theory, was assembling their collection of more occult and mystical devices. Most of them would have limited utility in examining the suits, but… Maddie sighed, fondly. Jack would get everything sorted out. From outside, his process might seem chaotic, but he always got fascinating results.
Maddie, for her part, had on her set of magnifying goggles and was going over the inside of her suit inch by inch, starting with the edges and seams. With gloves, of course. While she was assuming the cause of the rash was irritation due to water getting inside the suit lining, assumptions didn’t rule out other causes, like unexpected chemical reactions, or even the curse Jack was so sure of.
So far she hadn’t found any tears. If there weren’t any, she’d take samples of the inner lining to test for common skin irritants. That would be truly tedious work. There were enough chemical irritants in the world that it was quite possible that she’d never figure it out, and have to leave it as a mystery… Unless it also happened to another suit. That would be an unacceptable mystery, and a real danger to herself and Jack.
“Maddie!”
“Hm?” said Maddie, looking up. She experienced a moment of vertigo, and raised her hand to remove her magnifying goggles. “What is it?”
“Look!” He pointed, and Maddie traced his finger to the Fenton branded All-Things-Thaumaturgy Amplified Quantifier.
Maddie inhaled sharply. “Is that…?”
“That’s the reading for the suit,” said Jack, gesturing with the modified microphone attached to the Quantifier. He pointed it at himself, and the line on its graph leapt into the stratosphere. “And that’s me.”
Maddie cursed softly under her breath. “Let me take a look at my readings,” she said, rolling her chair over.
They were the same.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” asked Jack. “This isn’t an instant curse. This is something that’s stuck, and stuck hard.”
Maddie leaned back in her chair, musing over the readings. There was an urgency building in her, but she had to think. Curses were dangerous, wild things, governed by the will and wording of the one who cast it. Curses that didn’t show up immediately, that stuck and built, were especially dangerous—and unpredictable. They weren’t easy to get rid of, nor were they easy to understand.
They had to be methodical about this. They had to find out the nature of the curse, and who cast it. She steeled herself, and looked back at her husband.
”Alright,” said Maddie, “we can narrow down the kind of curse… or at least diagnose the symptoms. From there, we can cross-reference cures, loopholes, and probable perpetrators with our library.”
“Well, feeling awful is one,” said Jack. “Plus the claustrophobia.”
“Maybe a cave or tunnel based creature, then? Like with the mine?” Maddie shook her head. “That doesn’t line up with the storm. And I don’t know why something like that would give us rashes of all things.” She set her elbow on the work bench and leaned forward. “Speaking of which, I really don’t like the look of the rash around your eyes. If we can’t figure out the cause, soon, we might have to focus on stopping the spread.”
“Rash around my eyes?” repeated Jack. He walked over to one of the sinks, and peered into the mirror. “What rash around my eyes?”
He jolted a bit, when he looked into the mirror. The rash had spread, past the rounds of his goggles. It drifted down his cheekbones, climbed his forehead, and was thicker around his eyes themselves. Concern shot down Maddie’s spine—she hadn’t realized how bad it’d gotten. It still didn’t look like any rash she’d seen before. It wasn’t red or inflamed, but it was undeniably a rash. The fact that it had gotten worse, despite showers and new suits, was alarming.
“Oh,” Jack said, blinking in the mirror. He snapped on a new glove, and gently touched the rash. “This is not a good look! Is this a reaction from the curse’s magic with our suits?”
Maddie hummed, even as she grabbed a sterile swab, and a new set of gloves for herself. She stepped over to Jack, running the swab over the rash before putting it into the sterile test tube.
“Maybe,” she said finally. “Take a sample from your goggles, and let’s see if there’s an environmental factor—this rain has been relentless.”
Jack did so, with much less of his usual gusto. Maddie couldn’t blame him—she felt tired and weighed down. Despite having slept for so long, and barely doing anything in the lab, she felt she could easily take another nap.
She couldn’t. They couldn’t. With the eclipse coming, and a curse to solve, they didn’t have time for more sleep. If they couldn’t fix the curse by the time the eclipse arrived, everything they’d worked for would be lost. This was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity!
They had to keep moving, to figure this out.
“Some dastardly monster thinks they can stop us,” Jack muttered, not able to get his usual volume. “A curse has never stopped a Fenton, and it won’t now.”
Maddie smiled to herself, even as she ran tests on the sample she’d taken from Jack’s rash. They wouldn’t be stopped.
Whatever evil being had cursed them, they’d soon regret it!
The curse was harder to pin down than expected. Usually it was a place that was afflicted with these sorts of monsters- cursing actual people took much more power and nefarious intent.
Even so, curses generally exerted their power through something. Effigies. Inscriptions. Sound. Blood. Sometimes more than one. If they could find that part of the curse, destroy that part of the curse, then the curse would start to unravel.
But they hadn’t found anything. Not yet.
At least they had been able to rule out the whole family being a target. Much as Jazz and Danny did their best to duck lifesaving checks, they got enough readings to feel a weight lift from their hearts. It was bad enough that some foul beast was after them without it threatening their children.
Danny’s readings were still uncomfortably high, but not in a new way. Jazz almost seemed like she might also be a target, but her contamination levels plummeted while theirs crept higher. Neither child was struggling with itches or food going foul in their mouths, a huge relief. They could put their whole attention on solving the curse much faster when not at risk of endangering the kids further.
A few days later, Maddie sighed as she took the final step down into the lab, and immediately headed into the corner to peel her wet jumpsuit off.
The rain was heavy today, coming down in fat, icy droplets that sank into the jumpsuit's cloth and stayed there, chilling the skin. By the time she'd finished setting up the battery of traps in the park woodlands, she'd felt icy herself and had been hard pressed to keep her hands steady against the cold.
The curse had made them allergic to the Fenton patented anti-moisture, sweat-wicking formula for sensitive skin, which wouldn't be a huge problem–except it was how they'd waterproofed all their jumpsuits. They'd had to switch to unfinished jumpsuits without the coating–and therefore, without the wet weather protection.
Needless to say, Maddie was looking forward to warming up.
A hot decontamination shower and a toweling later, she reached for a fresh jumpsuit–and froze.
The skin of her arm hadn't changed much from that morning. It was still the same scaly, angry red that covered most of her extremities. But there was something off about the movement of her forearm.
Slowly this time, Maddie repeated the action, making sure to watch her forearm as she did.
There.
It was smooth.
Not the skin. The skin was still rough from the rash. But beneath it–beneath it. Her forearm was smooth.
Maddie was a woman of science, but she was also a woman of action. She trained regularly, she kept herself fit enough to keep up with the human wrecking ball that was Jack. She fought using any number of weapons but liked staves especially, which gave her exceptional muscle development in her forearms.
She fluttered her fingers, and the back of her forearm remained motionless.
Maddie was a woman of action, and her forearm should have had enough muscle definition to see the individual muscles controlling the extension of each finger.
Should have. Usually, did have.
It did not.
Eyes could be fooled, especially while cursed. Instead of making assumptions, she let science find the truth.
The scanner showed dense plates of tissue forming beneath their skin.
They made a grocery run before the curse worsened. They didn't know how bad it would get, after all, and this way they wouldn't need to worry about food for a little while.
Jack was silent in the checkout line. Maddie felt stares prickle at her skin and pretended not to notice the way the cashier's eyes darted to the rash crawling up Maddie's cheek.
When they left, the rain was still coming down in a quiet rush. The sensation of droplets trailing down her face flared into burning when they made contact with the rash. With Jack unable to be as boisterous as he normally was, it felt like they’d lost the sun twice over. The burning pain was an unwelcome substitute in the gloom.
There was something watching them from reflections. It skittered in the corners of their vision, always careful, never quite slow enough to properly see. Or to shoot at.
Maddie saw the nebulous shadow of it in her peripheral vision as she soldered some final details on another set of traps, and pretended she had not.
Belatedly, she felt the hairs of her neck prickle.
She set the piece she was working on to the side, and reached for another, concentrating on the corners of her vision hard enough to make her eyes ache. After a moment, she eased her thumb off the on switch. She didn't need to stab herself with a fully heated soldering iron while trying to finally get a good look at the thing cursing them.
Quietly, she mimed continuing with her work, setting aside a few more pieces as she waited. It shouldn't have been convincing, but the shadow lingered. Apparently, it could be fooled. Good to know. She could make out more details, now. Too many appendages, too long. Huge, larger than she was.
A smear of red where the eyes would be. Similar, then, to Phantom's true form.
Maddie thought of her gun, holstered at her side.
Maddie thought of empathetic magic, and their research on how it might work. On how they thought that something projecting an image elsewhere might still be vulnerable to harm done to the reflection.
Finally, Maddie thought about the curse.
In one smooth blur she dropped the soldering iron, grabbed the gun, took aim, and fired at the thing cursing them–
And was left lightheaded from the sudden rush of adrenaline, arm out and gun pointed at–
At the charred divot in the sheet metal armoring the walls of the lab, directly in the center of her own head's reflection.
Nothing.
It was nothing.
But–if Phantom or something like it was channeling this magic through reflections, through their reflections, maybe that was something.
Maybe it could be disrupted.
They covered mirrors, painted the stainless steel of the laboratory walls, even hid glass.
It didn't work.
The first time it happened, they thought it was a fluke. A result of improper weapons safety due to their single minded focus on the curse. Jack had placed one of their newer weapons on the table, a thing of gleaming metal, automatic aim, salt and iron ammunition, and an alert function. It was as yet unnamed, but compact and efficient. It was a favorite of Maddie’s.
But Jack had placed it down, and Maddie had found herself catching a glimpse of a red laser, hearing the humming whine of the auto aim—and she ducked, just in time for the weapon to lose its target. Just in time for it not to fire.
Jack had been horrified. He’d checked the weapon over a dozen times, and nothing had seemed amiss.
They concluded it was either an accidental slip that had primed the weapon, and something possibly needing adjustment in its targeting code.
They moved on with their research on the curse.
The hair on Maddie’s head came off in chunks.
At least, the hair that didn't thicken and stiffen until she had a twin set of antennae emerging from her forehead.
They kept the blinds closed. When a package delivery came, Maddie signed for it with her hood up.
The second time it happened, it was something simple. She’d needed a break from their research, from the headache she genuinely couldn’t tell if it was from the curse or from the stress of it. She couldn’t think straight, and as much as it rankled, she knew she’d be useless in doing more research.
She’d pulled out some simple protections and a couple of small net projects. They needed nets of various sizes for the upcoming eclipse, and while Jack liked to show off with the large ones, Maddie did enjoy weaving together the smaller ones.
The net itself was itchy against her skin, but it was made of a new weave of fibers, embedded with near gossamer iron and silver. There was also a new mix of herbs she’d had some luck with, but she needed to mix up more to soak the net in.
With the net on her lap, and the various herbs around her, she’d begun to mix.
And had managed to spill some of the garlic, sage, St. John’s Wort, and yarrow mixture on her hands and down her arms.
It had taken her several moments of frustrated clean up for her to realize what was happening—and for the pain to kick in.
The mixture was burning her, and where she’d touched the net felt raw and prickly.
Her stomach sank as she moved robotically over to the sink.
Just how deep did this curse run?
Breaking mirrors was bad luck. Fortunately, it was unnecessary when you had a sandblaster. It even worked on steel.
The third time, Maddie clutched the toilet, thinking, thinking, trying to think of what she might have eaten, what she might have done to feel like this. They’d barely been out of the house. It had to be the curse again. Was this it? Had it been taking her through this horrible transformation only to kill her like a stomach bug? She hadn’t eaten anything she didn’t eat all the time.
The ingredients. Pasta, tomatoes, onions, garlic–
Garlic.
Like in the mixture that had burned her so badly only a few days ago.
Jack's hair was wiry, and too stiff. Too thick.
They had only two leads. What was happening to their reflections and what was happening to themselves. They didn’t want to let the curse run its course, didn’t want to see the form it ultimately took, so, when covering or defacing the mirrors didn’t work, they studied them.
When viewed straight on, their reflections seemed… not normal, not with what was happening to them, but not otherwise supernaturally altered. But from the corners of their eyes, they were more. More changed. More alien. More monstrous.
Maddie and Jack designed new machines, new tools for measurement, new methods. They compared the readings of mirrors that were reflecting them to mirrors that were not. They set cameras to record their reflections. They argued and built and tested and…
And all they knew for sure was that mirrors were involved somehow.
Entering the kitchen was like walking headfirst into a wall of acidic fumes. They had to throw out some of the herbs with tongs, and their eyes and noses burned for hours after.
Among all their tests, all their increasingly frantic research, the house became a minefield. Weapons began to track them with increasing frequency, alarms went off when they entered the house or the grounds. It felt like every fifteen minutes they got a new alert on their phones, on their equipment about monsters in their house.
No matter how many times they searched, or how well, they never found a thing.
No one but themselves.
Jazz was out of the house for hours at a time. Danny had become a shadow, fluttering in and out at odd times.
Maddie tried, several times, to talk to her daughter but it seemed something got in the way every time. A new alarm would go off, or a weapon would malfunction and start to aim, or Maddie would forget and reach for something and feel the burn of herbs or certain metals.
As the days went on and the curse worsened, so too did things around the house. Every protection they had built into the very walls of their home was now a weapon against them.
Maddie feared they were running out of time.
Maddie scratched absently at the rash covering most of their bodies, and felt skin slide.
Her hair didn't.
Her hair didn't, and through it she could feel the texture of the flesh sloughing off, suddenly too loud, too wet, too much too much too much.
When she emerged from the shower, her arms and hands were segmented. Behind her, the shower looked like a crime scene.
(After that, they had to shut down the internal alarms—they were nothing but a never ending shriek, and neither she nor Jack could figure out how to make it stop targeting them but still protect their home.)
They did research. Not the scientific kind of research that they liked best, but delving through old and unreliable secondary and tertiary sources, trying to pick out strands of truth from among the razor-wires of misunderstandings and outright fabrication. Some books, Maddie hadn’t picked up since Danny was born.
One had ‘good’ fairies. That other had humans inadvertently casting curses on their family members. The one she’d just discarded had talked about monsters that had once been human, when Maddie knew that was impossible. None of their data supported such a transformation.
But it didn’t matter what their data supported when this was happening to them. When their appearances were so warped that they’d resorted to communicating to their children solely through notes and text messages. When so many of the protective wards they’d built up around their more sensitive or more dangerous equipment made them shy away.
They were desperate. It showed.
They tried dozens of cutesy neopagan countercharms. They worked through purification rituals with limited or even singular attestation. They pulled out screwdrivers and hammers and systematically removed and broke every mirror in the house and the MAV, despite the years of bad luck common wisdom claimed they should get with each one.
It didn’t work. None of it worked.
When Jack's eyes began to bulge from his sockets, growing until they were the size of tennis balls, it was no longer a surprise but a horrible confirmation: Phantom had cursed them to become like him.
It was a foul, monstrous trick befitting a wolf in child’s clothing like Phantom. They knew they weren’t monsters, not ‘fae’, but whatever magic it had woven was enough to convince their own eyes and tools. In a home primed and ready to fight off all foul creatures of the shadows, that was no small danger. There were safeguards they could no longer safely disable.
At this rate, they’d be unable to even stay in their own home.