Strange Aeons [Book 1]

4.Staccato [part III]

«Of course you failed again! What was I thinking!» roared Garaham, the fist clenched before coming crashing down on the desk, provoking a landslide of forms and pencils. «Who but my Coven could mistake a fake for a powerful, priceless antique artefact! You didn't even check if it was it? You just took it and ran away?»

The three looked at each other, in perfect silence.

«Chico! You're the one who studied here! The only one of them who actually ever opened a magic book! Didn't you, at least noticed, something?» Garaham went on, focusing a flaming gaze on the Mexican.

Chico shrugged.

«They didn't even show it to me. It has been under Vopros's hat todo el tiempo. How could I check? I only drove the car.» he said, without even flinching, as if Garaham's rage couldn't possibly include him as well as the other two. The clear culprits.

Garaham swallowed a scream, a hand pressed against his eyes.

«You're a disgrace. You're the worst disgrace an Enforcer could ever endure. You have it all: magic, experience, wits, and every time, without exception, you mess up as if you were a group of uncoordinated teenagers acting by attempts.» he said, his voice reduced to a mulled, monotonal despaired tone.

«So, what now? Do they have the box? What happens now?» Chico asked.

«And how, you, depressing caravanserai of drunkenness-mongering inepts, would I ever know what happens now? I barely understood what had just happened!»

«A black hood dwarf came out of fake music box and told us we didn't find the right music box, and then disappeared.» Vopros summarized.

«Aye, Vopros, this don't help.» Banshee pointed out.

«All right. Panicking is for the weak. We have to find out who this bloody man is, and how is he connected with the music box at all.» Garaham took a deep breath.

«We're on it, Chief!» Banshee exclaimed.

«Not so fast!» he blocked them. «You don't truly think that I would pass over this utter and embarrassing failure, do you?»

«Our plan didn't fail! We got the music box. It's not our fault that wasn't the right one!»

Garaham's voice sounded unquestionable. And they weren't strangers to his punishments, at all. They all sighed in unison.

Once he teleported them right in the middle of the Order's parking, and they had to wash all the cars there. Another time, they had to trim the hedges of Versailles' labyrinth in the night, so no one could see them. And without magic, of course.

Banshee had just opened her mouth to say something, and Garaham was ready as a rugby receiver to block whatever would have come out of it when heavy steps started approaching the office's door from far in the corridor. It was just a normal background sound, at the beginning, but then it was unmistakably aimed at their door, that burst open, in just a matter of seconds.

«Garaham, what the hell!» shouted a feminine voice.

The tall and muscular figure of Mariposa, with her shining silver armor and her light chestnut hair gliding on her back, passed through the lined-up Pollos to stop in front of the Enforcer's desk and stomp her hands down on it. «It's true? Your Coven attacked the Museum?»

«Mariposa, this is not the proper way to come and face a fellow Enforcer.» in front of the feminine fury in front of him, Garaham suddenly regained all his British stiffness. «Storming my office like a teenager is way below you.»