Inktober #7: Enchanted (Patreon)

The pet store cashier smiled at Amanda. “Your turtles must be going through a growth spurt. You’re here almost every other day, aren’t you?”

Amanda smiled back. “They’re definitely getting to be big girls.” She hefted the bag of feeder goldfish. “How are things going here?”

“Business is good, they keep me pretty busy,” the cashier said. 

Amanda carried the goldfish out to the car. “Sorry, guys,” she said, “but you’ll probably have a longer life this way than if you’d actually been bought as feeders.”

There were no turtles.

Once she was home, she carried the bag of goldfish down to the third tank in the basement. She’d drained it and scrubbed it down and washed it multiple times before refilling the tank, and there it was, pristine and sparkling with well-aerated water bubbling through the system. Amanda poked a few tiny holes in the bag and put it in the tank, so the fish could get used to the temperature, and went over to check the other tanks.

Tank number 1 was still in great condition. A good, healthy number of fish swam around in it, leading a happy fishy existence. Two dead ones floated at the top, but the rest were in good shape, still.

The same couldn’t be said for tank number 2. One of the fish had an eyeball hanging out of its head. At least four of them seemed to have ick, which had killed off the last set in tank 3. She counted up five floating on the top of the tank. “You’re not long,” she said to the tank full of fish. “Sorry.” Did a couple of months in a clean, not-overpopulated tank with plenty of food and medical care, when they’d otherwise have lived in an overcrowded tank until they were fed to predators, make up for the terrible last week or two when different maladies would strike them all down at random?

Tank 4 was still malfunctioning. All the fish had died when the pump motor had shorted out and sent deadly electric current through the tank. Amanda hadn’t gotten around to getting a replacement yet. 

They were dying faster than they usually died. She looked at the opal in the ring on her left hand. It was solid purple.

“What’s going on, I wonder?” Maybe it was the fact that there were two tanks out of commission, and she’d only just added fish back to tank 3. But if that wasn’t the problem…

“Hey, Mom!” Arista yelled down the basement stairs. “Did you see what I did with my social studies textbook? The one I have to keep at home?”

“I have no idea,” Amanda called back.

“But I need it! I have a test to study for!”

“Then you should have kept better track of it!”

She took a deep breath. She was going to have to go upstairs and help Arista find the damn thing. And take Natalie to soccer practice. And Theo was suspiciously quiet, which usually meant he was up to no good. But before that she had to put the new fish into service.

In ancient, Homeric Greek, she murmured, “Blessed fates, let this fish be as my family in your eyes, and whatever darkness threatens to befall us, they will take that fortune onto themselves. Let this pact be sealed.” A diabetic finger-prick device that she didn’t actually need because she wasn’t diabetic sat on top of the fish tank. She changed out the needle, used it to poke her finger to get a drop of blood, and squeezed the drop into the tank.

Gary asked her all the time why she even kept fish when they died all the time. After her first attempts to keep pretty, individualized fish that her children had gotten emotionally attached to, she’d taken to filling the tanks with feeder fish. They weren’t all that attractive. He pointed out, quite reasonably from his perspective, that there seemed to be little point to having tanks full of unattractive fish in the basement that always died anyway. Why not keep a pet that would survive better?

She couldn’t very well tell Gary the truth – that she was a magus; that she had been trained to channel power by speaking words in a dead language, in her case Homeric Greek, to make the universe do her bidding; that the fish lived in her basement to absorb magical attacks and ill fortune that was aimed at her and her family; that the fact that so many were dying, so quickly, meant that someone was most likely targeting her. And Gary. And their children. 

The color of her ring faded from dark purple to a lighter shade. Not completely turned to white, not entirely safe… but better. 

“I’d be able to find it just fine if you didn’t keep moving everything around!”

She sighed. “I ‘move everything around’, as you put it, because you kids leave your stuff everywhere.” Amanda headed up the stairs. “Where did you last see it?”

Tomorrow she’d get a new motor for tank 4, and new fish. If she was being targeted, she’d need all the tanks in service.