Bobby the Butcher's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Bobby unlocked the shop early the next morning. The knife sat on its stand where he'd left it, still dark. He walked past it to the back office and pulled out the old ledgers his grandfather kept. If the knife had gone dark before, maybe there'd be a record of it. He was halfway through the third ledger when the bell above the door chimed. An older man stepped inside, someone Bobby recognized but couldn't quite place. The man carried a worn leather journal and nodded toward the back room. "I need to show you something," he said. Bobby followed him past the shelves and cutting tables to the dim corner where old equipment sat gathering dust. The man opened the journal and pointed to a page filled with dates and handwritten notes. "I kept track," he said. "Every time the knife went dark when Jessica ran this place. Started the night she brought that warlock here." Bobby stared at the entries. Dozens of them, spanning three years. Each one marked with a pressed leaf and a time. "Why didn't you say anything?" The man tapped a photograph tucked into the journal's front cover — him standing next to Bobby's grandfather, both of them young and grinning in front of the shop. "Your grandfather asked me to watch over things. I told your father when it got bad, but Jessica convinced him it was just the old wiring." He closed the journal. "It wasn't the wiring. It was her spells. She was trying to bind the shop's luck to Desmond's business. When you refused to work with him, the knife knew." Bobby took the journal from the man's hands. The weight of it felt like proof — not just of what Jessica had done, but of what the knife had been protecting all along. He couldn't free her from witchcraft if she was still using it against his family. The knife hadn't failed him. It had shown him exactly what he needed to see.