Wires and Wormwood

Six o'clock on a Friday night usually meant Nora was heading out the door, guns loaded and her axe and Bowie knife freshly sharpened, ready to take on the various undead and unnatural nasties that came out of the woodwork in the North End after the sun went down. Instead, she was sitting at her cluttered kitchen table, the news on and her radio blaring the dulcet tones of Irish punk rock.

Sav had been summoned to a family reunion down in New Orleans by the Bishop Clan matriarch and would be gone for a week; rather than let Nora destroy the self-esteem of a rookie mage, the Boss had decided to let her have a short vacation and rotated in one of the day-shift teams for the North End beat. Nora had nearly snarked her head off about everything from malaria (even if Southern bugs preferred West Nile) to the Boss denying her the joy of shooting monsters and hadn't shut up until Sav promised her a gris-gris (Grandmère Bishop was a vodoun high priestess) and the Boss threatened to sew her mouth closed.

So, bored and unwilling to settle for cheap beer on a pub crawl, Nora had ensconced herself at home with Jabberwocky Wormwood and a spool of thick brass wire. If she wasn't allowed to shoot stuff, she intended to get drunk and work on some personal projects.

Nora didn't advertise it at work, but one of her hobbies was wire sculpting. She didn't need much – a large spool of wire, wire-cutters, pliers to twist pieces too small for her to grasp, and her own hands. She made sculptures mostly for close family and friends, although a few she sold to hardware stores as garden décor. Her current project was a replacement sculpture for Danny; during his latest apocalyptic argument with Caleb, the kestrel she'd made as a birthday present for him had been thrown against the wall so many times you couldn't even tell it was a bird. She'd been pissed beyond belief when Danny told her – she'd liked that kestrel and had worked her ass off to get the proportions right – but saved her ire for Caleb. Maybe she'd make him a special sign and put it on his office door: "Caleb Warner: Asshole at Law."

She scowled as she poured bright green absinthe into a large glass. Background sounds like the television and Dropkick Murphys kept Nora's mind from wandering too much while she worked, but thinking about her brother's on-and-off-again boyfriend would prevent her from getting or staying in her groove. And combining that with booze meant things would be broken by midnight.

She absently set her absinthe spoon on the glass rim and a sugar cube on top, adjusted her absinthe drip so not too much water would leak out while dissolving the sugar, and began to unspool her wire. This thing wasn't going to get made on its own.

For the next few hours, Nora sat hunched in her chair, methodically bending and twisting the brass into wings, a beak, feathers, talons. The Dropkick Murphys segued into the Street Dogs, then The Pogues, and finally Flogging Molly before the CD began to repeat. She hummed along at times, occasionally glancing up at the TV to see what was on or taking a sip of Jabberwocky before she turned back to her work. As the bird took shape, Nora began to reinforce the current wires by braiding new strands along the original lines; this sculpture was going to stay a bird, damn it all.

At around eleven o'clock the news came back on and Nora sat back, rubbing her eyes. There was a Harvard professor talking about some theater production and using words like "gamine" and "existential" to describe it. Nora was pretty sure a few of those multisyllabic words weren't being used correctly and made a mental note to look them up later, if only so she could sneer about it in public. She shook her head as she focused on her latest wire sculpture, and smiled.

It wasn't quite finished yet, but it was a far cry from the dainty kestrel she'd first made for her brother. This was a hawk, wings brought in close to its body in a stooping dive and its beak open in a scream. The gleaming wires that made up its body had been thickened enough that from a distance they could be mistaken for thin cable. A few tweaks in the morning with fresh eyes and it'd be perfect.

Nora raised her glass in a toast and tossed back the last of her absinthe.