When we reached Berny's place, we found him in the middle of a competitive match in a video game which he promptly left after carrying his team.

"Won't your team mates be mad?" I asked him.

"I don't really care, it's just a game" answered Berny. "What were you guys up to?" We all then sat down and caught Berny up to speed. "Woah, raising the dead... That sounds crazy. Mary was fine with that?"

Xiz answered “I thought she’d be more horrified but she wasn't even a little.”

“Couldn’t you bring him back looking normal?” I asked.

“We can’t all be great necromancers. I’ve only seen one guy who did it properly and that was because he could perform miracles. They both were very happy to be back together. I guess a mother’s love really is unshakable. At least everyone else was scared.”

“I feel kinda guilty. What if Eli was enjoying his rest?” I pondered aloud.

“Should’ve thought of that before you did this,” replied Xiz. I ordered some food from Duber Eats. Xiz picked whatever looked weird on the menu. The three of us then ate in silence in the living room, a cop show playing in the background. Then, I decided to ask a question that was on my mind for a while.

“Why are you tied to the paw? Why grant wishes at all?”

“Because I love being trapped inside something for millenia, being forced to be a slave for whoever get’s their grubby mits on it” said Xiz.

“Really?”

“Heck no” he said.

“So what, you got forced into it?” asked Berny as he chowed down on some poutine.

“Tricked is more like it” he answered while he munched on the rib bones I gave him like they were crackers.

“How'd someone as powerful as you get tricked?” I asked while wiping my hands dirty with barbecue sauce on some napkins.

He looked into the distance, as if his thoughts wondered to a sad memory. ”Betrayal, of course. That’s how they get you. I fell in love with this beautiful girl, and was willing to give her the world. I revealed myself to her, bearing many gifts, services, whatever she wanted, taking her wherever she wanted in seconds." There was a sparkle in his eyes as he walked down memory lane.

"The more I did for her, the more demands she had. When you can get whatever you want then the normal or good won't satisfy, you start wanting worse things. There was some stuff I didn’t want to do, back when I was more ethical. I knew some stuff would be bad, that power can get to one's head and corrupt, so I said no. So of course she started getting into the dark arts. She said it was to be more like me, that we would be closer." I started to see some pain in his eyes, his smile slowly faded with each word.

"Turns out she was figuring out ways to make me a servant instead, bound to some monkey paw she found somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I had to do some horrible things. She sold the paw when I didn’t have to grant wishes anymore and lost my use to her. I was crushed from that experience, to be used like that, forced to help someone so greedy... I started hating humans, but I’ve found that not all are that bad,” he said then turned to me with a grin. “Not you though, you’re horrible”.

“Thanks Xiz, I really appreciate it” I replied sarcastically.

“Anytime” he joked.

“So that’s why you grant wishes the way you do?” asked Berny.

“Well yes but actually no. I don’t want to grant wishes, but I have to, so this is how I drag my feet doing it. Sometimes when I do just grant it without my meddling, bad things end up happening by itself. So I think that people using us supernatural-entities cause an imbalance in their set amount of luck which has to be fixed sooner or later. The scales need to be rebalanced, y'know?”

“Wow.” We chatted the afternoon away until the three of us got tired of each other's voices. I changed the channel on the TV to catch up on this week's episode of ‘A Quack in Time’, my favorite show. Xiz thought it was weird and unrealistic so he went to check out the city again.

***

I snoozed on the couch after the episode finished when I suddenly got shook awake by Xiz.

“I went to the back of that fast food joint we got the chicken from yesterday to rifle through their dumpster for more bones. I snacked on it for some time and pet some strays. Then I went through some houses, saw a pet cat that seemed kinda hungry, so I found a huge bag of cat food that I dumped all of its contents on the ground for it. I think a kid saw me do it so I left. Then I-”

“Xiz, why'd you wake me up? Cut to the chase” I interrupted him.

“Oh, right. Actually, it’d be better if you saw this, follow me.”

***

We reached a street a bit further away from the apartment where a closed food truck was stopped in front of a park. It was night now so no one was around. It read Super Cheesy Pasta, the same one I bought from after I left Ed’s shop in the beginning. Xiz floated towards the food truck and said “Come on” as he went through the doors in the back of the truck.

I knocked on one door and said “Hello, not everyone can float through doors.”

Xiz popped his head out of the sides of the truck and said “whoops, forgot you’re a muggle”. He disappeared back inside as I heard a click and the doors swung open. I stepped inside only to see to my horror… normal food truck stuff.

“You wanted to show me how a food truck works?”

“No, this was full of stuff earlier. Hmm, how’d he unlock it again?” Xiz replied as he scratched his head. Then, I saw the ceiling light above Xiz turned on as if to indicate he just remembered. He suddenly turned into the food truck chef and touched a sticker on the side of the cash register. A beeping came from the register as the screen read access granted. I saw the inside of the food truck change into some kind of mobile HQ. Guns popped out and covered the walls, a huge whiteboard dropped down from the ceiling with words written all over, and computer monitors appeared before a workbench rose from the ground.

“Woah, what the heck is this?” I went over to the computer as it booted up. I saw a desktop with some folders open. The background was a picture of a circle with arrows that pointed inwards. I’ve never seen that symbol before. I went through the folders. There were a bunch with different names on them as if monitoring multiple people. I used the search and found that there was one under my name. I opened it to see pictures of me outside of Ed’s Oddities, me in the town hall at Emerald Fields, in a tomb at the cemetery, Berny's balcony, and more. I opened a pic of a map that had marks where I had been these last few days, on places that I worked, and where my friends lived. There even was a pic of my brother’s mugshot alongside his casefile. These guys knew everything about me!

“We-we’ve got to get out of here, fast. We gotta lose these guys!” I hopped out of the vehicle and shut the doors.

“Xiz, pop the tires or something, we have to slow them down!”

“Way ahead of you” Xiz said gleefully as his hands turned to claws. Slash! Pop! He went off on the tires. I grabbed water bottles from the food truck and filled the fuel tank with it. After we were done I ran back to Berny's place.

“What happened to the guys in the truck?”

“I put laxatives in their dinner so they went to the park washroom. While they were inside I shutoff the lights and blocked the doors from the outside.”

“Jeez, that’s diabolical” I replied with a smile. I high-fived Xiz as we went to grab our stuff then skip town.