As Virgil wondered what to do with charms, he remembered Carson. Even if Carson had Ace around, Virgil couldn’t help but think he needed to spend more time with him. “Oh, yeah. Carson has some amulets. I think I’ll try charming those.”

“I see. Has he mentioned any interesting charms?” John asked.

“Hmm… Nope. But I’ll ask later.”

“Alright. I’m gonna sleep. You can just go ask him tonight.”

As John lay down on his bed, Virgil looked at the clock in his room. John rarely slept this early, but it’s nothing new. It wasn’t the first time Virgil had seen John with his unusual sleep schedule, after all.

Not wanting to disturb John, Virgil left his bedroom.

Once Virgil had gotten downstairs, Ace and Carson were eating at the dining table, and he joined them. After eating and cleaning the dishes, Ace had to leave for the night, so Carson stayed downstairs with Virgil.

“Hey, Carson,” Virgil asked, as he watched Carson rearranging the kitchen utensils, or that’s what he thought he was doing. “You know how I’ve been practicing charms?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I’ll be practicing again tomorrow, and I don’t know what to practice next. Do you have any suggestions?”

“Hmm…” Carson shuffled the utensils, as Virgil wasn’t sure if he was rearranging them, or doing something else. “No idea. I know there’s power, agility, warding, and that’s about it.”

“Oh, I’ll grab you the book then.”

As Virgil headed upstairs to grab the book from their room, he remembered how Carson fidgeted around with the utensils—he was probably stressed out by something else. Now that both of his housemates didn’t seem to be in their best state, and Virgil wasn’t in that of a hurry to charm Carson’s amulets, he might as well cut him some slack.

For the rest of the night, Virgil let Carson take his time going through the charms in his book. And he told Carson to meet him after work, and bring any amulets he had.

As Virgil headed back from work, looking for Carson—his mind wandered to the moment his teacher was giving examples of charms. He remembered how he would be terrified at some of the examples, such as the ones that could slowly kill the wearer from inside, the ones capable of letting the wearer see things they weren’t supposed to see, and so on. He wondered, would Carson suggest something like those?

But all the worries didn’t matter—as Carson finally answered, placing a pair of amulets in Virgil’s hand. “Just go with any charms. Anything that fits these two.”

It was a pair of matching amulets, from Carson’s parents. The exact ones he retrieved from their bodies.

Virgil cast aside the disturbing memories surrounding those amulets aside, as he observed the amulets. His hand held them more firmly—not wanting to drop them, even accidentally. “Uh, you sure you wanted me to charm these? It’ll be much harder to reverse the effects if I screwed up… They’re important to you, aren’t they?”

“Mhm. They’ve been sitting in my bag for a while, so I thought it might be better to add something to these. Just charm this with anything you want. I don’t mind if it’s something basic like the power charm.”

A pair of charms belonging to Carson’s family… What should he do with them? he wondered.