The Cursed Blood

and quite famous.
At least in the right circles.
I didn’t meet the mysterious owner until a few years after this. He happens to be a very creepy, blind old witchdoctor—a transplant from New Orleans, who named himself John Pierre Laffeek, but pretty much no one is buying that.
It’s rumored he’s really Baron Boba Blackheart of Bourbon Street fame (who I can now confirm he shares a suspiciously uncanny resemblance to), or simply Triple B in less affluent parts of the Feyish underworld’s darkest slums. The owner of the notorious Matchstick and Bones. An exclusive, members only Feyborn establishment with a dark, frightening reputation.
Alleged to traffic in everything from Feyish narcotics like Fairy Dust, Rip, and Dragon Fire (fairy dust is a mind-altering hallucinogenic powder that’s usually snorted. Rip is a dream inducing tea, and Dragon fire is a crystal generally injected right into a vein after being ground and melted down) to stolen memories, powerful grimoire, exotic beasts, rare antiquities, Feyish art, new and untraceable identities, underground connections, and information no one is supposed to have. It’s pretty much the supermarket of illicit acquisitions with a side gig in the “entertainment” industry.
The place is still open and thriving, despite several investigations and inquiries. The supposedly new proprietor rarely leaves his plush well-guarded office and only rarely accepts face to face sit down meetings. There are several conspiracy theories and speculations about all of this (each more bizarre and farfetched than the last). However, not a soul has really been able to prove anything.
Nonetheless, regardless of who he really is, the man is dangerous, has peculiar habits, and is a bit much for most people. To the point where his shop is only visited when one really has no other choice. So now I understand why I was told very firmly to wait in the truck as Gramps stomped off.
He wasn’t gone five minutes before a rusty, backfiring, multicolored, muddy, and ugly truck pulled up alongside us, and out the driver’s side window Erol Senior glared at me to the point that I remember wanting to sink into Gramps’ truck’s seats. I know I started horribly and shouted when the first of the eggs unexpectedly pelted the window in rapid succession, followed by a peel of raucous laughter.
The truck pulled out of the gravel drive and off they went, leaving me to watch the splattered egg and shell chips slither down the window. Seconds later, Gramps burst out the door. Running red faced down the steps into the road, waving his fist and yelling ear reddening profanities and threats after them as the truck vanished in a cloud of kicked up dust.
I’ve only ever seen Gramps as angry as that five other times in my life, and to this day I’m eternally grateful that I was only fool enough to have it be directed at me once in all this time.
Ironically that incident, many years later, also had to do with one of the Clampetts and Baron Blackheart and had very nearly ended with Papa P flying into a rage and braining Gramps with a huge cast iron skillet from the Wayfarers’ kitchens.
When we got home and managed to clean the remainder of egg off the truck, Gramps decided it was time to start my more academic studies. Book learning would take up a great deal of my time most days he explained as he tossed his little brown paper prescription bag onto the mantle and lugged a heavy black leather tome from the bookshelf.
He blew an impressive amount of dust off the cover as he trudged grimly over and plunked it down on the kitchen table before me.
I know what you’re thinking. How could a kid read ancient languages like Sandscript, Babylonian, Atlantean, High Elvish, Latin, Aramaic, Greek and other such lost and dead languages humans know nothing about and such because that’s what old books are written in? Right?
Wrong.
I remember thinking much the same thing, wondering how Gramps expected me to be able to read that dusty, clunky old thing with a cold feeling of dread in my belly, but as it turns out it wasn’t much of an issue at all. You see, the Fey write with special inks and enchant the scrolls and books they record things in in such a way that just about anyone with magic in their blood could easily read (no one’s ever been sure if most Orcs and Goblins can read anything at all, as it’s hard to ask these things when running or battling for one’s life). It simplifies things that way.
If a mundane human found it, it would end up looking and reading like gibberish. Or, in better quality books like the kind Gramps collected over the centuries, it would read like something ordinary and mundane. Like a dictionary, or studies on boring subjects like horticulture or tax law that few would even afford a second glance at while perusing the shelves of old bookshops.
I recall the big, old looking book smelled…odd. It was edged in silver, as was the dry crinkly yellowing pages. On the disturbingly stained leather cover’s center four circles were woven together to form a perfect square at the center and encircled by a great serpent shone in yet more age dulled silver. The words Brightwar Demonica bent round the top of the odd silver crest in golden archaic flowing script.
Gramps flipped it open, grimacing uncomfortably at a chapter on Reapers it had opened to and licked at his finger (I’m not sure why he does this. Honestly, it’s a bit gross. No one wants to sit for a bit of book wormy research and read spit smeared pages), then quickly began thumbing through pages until he got to the one he was looking for.
The drawing caught my eye and held onto it like a waking nightmare—a warped, grotesque effigy of a man in black robes with bones dangling from belts and pouches. Long stringy hair twisting and blowing in an ethereal storm of conjured