Cupidgate
(a Jonas Silversmith story)
By Devin McTaggart
Feb. 13 th, 2026 (Friday)
"You've GOT to be kidding me," Silversmith said into the phone, his voice full of as much annoyance as he could bring to bear on a moment's notice. The sun had yet to rise, but it was technically morning, which meant he could have his beloved cup of morning coffee.
And now he'd been forced to put down his morning cup of coffee - things were that serious.
"Yes, I realize the date. Yes, I know the history, but come on. It isn't like this is the first time we've had this particular set of dates paired together before. No, I understand. Yes, I get that it is a lot of pressure, doing what you're expected to do, I'm just-- fine. I'll be over in just a few minutes. Where are you? Alright. Yes, I know you want me to hurry. I'm just not in the habit of cleaning up the same mess twice, much less multiple times. Tomorrow's tomorrow, and we'll get there when we get there. Fine. See you shortly."
The Dragonborn ended the call and tucked his phone into his suitcoat inside pocket. He looked around his study and started gathering the tools of the trade he might need - a pair of divinity goggles, a temporal scalpel, some memory bands and, most importantly, his Big Stick.
(The Big Stick wasn't really magic, per se, but it served as a good walking stick when he was travelling, and it was great for clubbing people in the head when they deserved it, which was often a better deterrent than using magic itself.)
"What's shaking, boss?" Kelly asked him, strolling in from whatever deviant deviation she'd been delighting her devious self with. She was dressed as some kind of gothic cheerleader, blacks and reds the overwhelming colors, but she had rips in her stockings, and the top was certainly too tight for her own good, nearly bursting at the seams.
"We need to head to Hollywood again," Silversmith sighed, shaking his head. "One of our celestial friends has found themselves in a dilemma."
"I hate God Problems," Kelly said, as she moved to grab Final Argument, her heavily enchanted short blade, in its scabbard, attaching it to her chunky black leather belt. "Fine. Let's go."
There was sharp warping of light and color around them, like a vortex toilet of LED lights set to rapid fire, bathing them in circular technicolor before it all collapsed like a handful of thrown glitter, leaving them in a back alleyway that could've looked like any other. Except that Silversmith knew exactly which alleyway this was. He'd spent more than a bit of time here. They were behind the legendary Viper Room.
The Viper Room had been opened in 1993 by two actors named Sal Jenco and Johnny Depp, who were looking to invest some of their money from their show "21 Jump Street," and had hosted plenty of huge rock bands playing tiny intimate shows. It was where Adam Duritz of Counting Crows went to hide out after making their first record while he was fighting writer's block in prepping for their second. It was in the Viper Room's back room where Molly Bloom had first run her poker game allegedly featuring people like Tobey Maguire, Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio. And it was where a number of other celebrities, including River Phoenix and Courtney Love, had drug overdoses, although she survived hers and he didn't. Pretty crazy, Silversmith thought, for a place with a capacity of only 250.
Sitting on the back steps was a guy who wasn't a Hollywood star or rock'n'roll royalty, although he'd contributed more than his fair share to both fields over the centuries. He was short, squat and more than anything, looked like a dwarf version of Christopher Lloyd. "Thanks for coming fast, Jonas," the man said, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a bucket next to him, full of vomit. "I'd say I'm going to owe you one, but I suspect I probably still owe you two or three before this."
"There were the kids in Verona," Jonas said.
"I got famous on the back of that one!"
"Only because I got the priest out safely."
"Details details."
"Were you trying to pick a fight again?"
"I was not trying to pick a fight."
"So what happened this time?"
"This time..." Cupid said, pausing before continuing. "This time, Triskus dropped a whammy on me."
"Now why would he do that, Eros?"
Cupid frowned, looking back down at his hands. "We may have gotten into an argument while I was drinking."
"Ah, this one is your fault, then."
"Not all my fault!" He turned and spit sludge from his mouth into the bucket with a kerplunk. "Let's call it fifty-fifty."
"Let's call it you tell me what the hell happened here."
"Fine. Me and Triskus were having a few drinks, and I may have said his day was so much easier than mine, and he may have said that his happens more often than mine, and I maybe, possibly, said there weren't many people who actually believed or respected Friday the 13th anymore, so how busy could he really be?"
"Gods below, Eros," Silversmith grumbled, rubbing his temple with two fingers. "That sounds an awful lot like you were trying to pick a fight."
"He doesn't know the kind of pressure I'm under!" Cupid paused and then threw up again into his bucket. "There are millions of people around the world, begging me for help, and I can't get to them all! Meanwhile, people are begging him to stay away! It's easy not having to do anything!"
"Except you know that isn't how this works, Cupid," Silversmith said to him. "If he's not doing the thing he's known for, his presence will dwindle because less people believe in him."
"They don't even believe in him, they just believe in the day," Cupid grumbled.
"People aren't exactly lining up to offer you sacrifices these days either, old friend."
"Lies! The cards the kids give to one another! The candies they pass back and forth! The presents men and women give to curry favor! Those are sacrifices to me! I'm called out on the calendar, dammit!"
"Your name's not on--" Kelly started to say before Cupid cut her off.
"That fucking SAINT!" he yelled, shaking the bucket so its contents squished and shivered. "I'm at this game for thousands of years and some schmuck shows up and his name gets put on my holiday? Just because he's fucking Catholic? And, besides, they've still got my fucking picture all over the place, so who gives a shit whose name is on the damn calendar!"
"Touchy little fellow, isn't he?" Kelly whispered to Silversmith, who had to hide a smirk.
"You shouldn't have been out drinking so close to your big day, Eros," Silversmith said to the diminutive godling. "And you certainly shouldn't have been antagonizing your work colleagues about their work, especially since when I'm guessing he did this to you, it was past midnight? On his day? Where he's specifically supposed to spread bad luck?"
"Yeah, probably," Cupid admitted. "So maybe I was asking for it, but he didn't have to hit me with so damn much juju." He rubbed his eyes, shaking his head. "Okay, yeah, maybe he did. Maybe I was pretty much being an utter asshole. Still, I don't even think he meant to fuck me this badly."
"Which brings to your actual problem, some ten minutes after my arrival," Jonas said, glancing at his pocketwatch dangling from the chain. "What is your actual problem, Eros? You simply said it was dire on the phone."
"My tools are missing."
"His t--" Kelly started before Silversmith interrupted her, raising his hand.
"How the hells did you lose your bow and arrows, Cupid?"
"I was drinking and drinking and drinking... and somewhere along the way, I must've blacked out. When I woke up back here a little bit ago, they were gone, although someone had helpfully left me this bucket, which I'd apparently been using before I came out of my drunken stupor."
"Did you check with the staff?"
"They said a group of people helped me back here to get me away from the bar, but the last time they saw me, I still had my gear with me."
"And you called Triskus?"
"I did, and he apologized, but said last time he saw me, I was puking my guts out on the back steps, and there were four or five people around me," Eros grumbled. "I told him I was missing my tools, but he told me he was mid-swing for today, and so he didn't have time to come and help me look while he was supposed to be doing his job, although he did pull back the juju. He said mostly it was just me getting hammered that resulted in this, but you know Triskus - it's never his fault. It's just 'random chance.' Yeah, that's why nobody's afraid of Monday the ninth, or whatever."
"Except this can all directly be related to you shooting off your mouth at a guy about to have to deal with his already stressful holiday," Silversmith said, exhaustion in his tone of voice. "On said holiday, of all things. Yeah, I agree - you sound like you were asking for it. Alright, how much damage can someone do with your bow and arrow without knowing what they're doing?"
"Shitloads," Eros mumbled. "Assuming someone can hit a target, they could easily be setting up bad couples every few minutes. I mean, without me casting the spell to reload the quiver, they're limited to, what, the twenty or so arrows I have in there? But that's still twenty or so matches that could be wreaking utter havoc on the Los Angeles area, assuming it's even still here. Fuck me, I've been out... what? Five, six hours?"
"It's just approaching five in the morning here, Eros," Silversmith said.
"Just three hours then. That's something, I guess."
"And you don't have some kind of lo-jack on your gear?" Kelly asked, something Silversmith had echoed a number of times.
"Then everyone could track me all the time, and then I'd never stop hearing constant requests," Eros growled. "No thanks. This gig is difficult enough without being asked in person to perform on demand. Let'em file their requests via ether like everyone else."
"Alright, let me see what I can do about finding what's happened to your gear, my friend," the Dragonborn said as he reached into his satchel and pulled out his temporal scalpel. Winding back time wasn't something that even the most powerful of mages could do, but they could cut a slit back a while and peek at what had happened in the recent past.
He dragged the blade across the open air and cut a tiny glowing red wound in the air, a temporal rift he could scroll backwards through time to see the events that had gotten them where they were. He started too early, just bartenders on their smoke breaks and delivery people coming and going. The people were moving at a much faster rate, as he was skipping through the time, until he came across what he was looking for.
What looked to be a few minutes past last call, Eros, Triskus and four others came staggering out the back, although Triskus looked to be the only sober one of the bunch, providing balance for most of the other people, who were clinging to him for stability.
Triskus was a tall, lanky Italian with olive skin and a pencil thin mustache that Silversmith simply couldn't understand, dressed in a sort of 80s coral blues and pinks. He set Eros down on the stairs and made sure the man had the bucket in front of him before turning and looking at the others. "You lot stay here, and you can share his bucket if you have to," Triskus said to them, as Silversmith surveyed the foursome.
It was one lone guy and three girls, although the guy looked pretty miserable, the three women paying way more attention to Cupid than they were their guy. A blonde, an Asian and a redhead, all dressed in their best little black dresses, only one of them looking old enough to be thirty. The guy, probably just past thirty, looked like he was the designated deflector - if a guy came up them and asked one of the girls out, if she wanted to give them the brush off, she'd tell them she was with the guy. Otherwise? He was 'just a friend.' It was a common enough tactic.
But as Silversmith watched the little drama - one of the girls puking in the bucket, the guy helping her to her feet, Triskus excusing himself - Jonas started making notes about what he could see. The guy wasn't the problem - it was the young Asian girl who grabbed the bow and arrow from Cupid's side. And then the foursome pulled away from the demigod and started heading down the alleyway as he started puking again, getting left behind, not even noticing his tools and his companions were gone.
"Stay here, Eros," Silversmith said. "I'll get back to you."
"I don't think I could stand up if I tried, Jonas."
Jonas tracked the path down and stopped at the street as he watched a car with an Uber light in the back let all four people in, three in the back, one in the front, before driving off
"How are you going to follow that?" Kelly asked him. "More magic?"
"More like knowing the right people," Silversmith said, pulling out his cellphone again, dialing Eloise. "Morning, m'lady. I need a favor. Yeah, Cali plates as usual. Plate number November Tango Four Romeo Echo Alfa Lima. Yeah, I know, vanity plates. It's an Uber driver. I need his trip history for today, namely his stops between two thirty and three thirty this morning. Grand. I'll watch my email." He stopped and looked at his phone, as a list of four addresses showed up, none of them all that far away. "Alright Kelly, let's go knock on some doors."
The area around them swirled in another riot of color and motion before appearing in front of a small, nice house, only fifteen or twenty minutes by car from the Viper Room. The place was a small yellow cottage kind of house, and there was a distinct moaning coming from one of the windows, and not a particularly pleasant one.
Silversmith decided not to wait, walking quickly up the stairs as his left hand performed an unbinding spell, the front door opening as he moved inside and sprinted up the stairs. He pushed open the door to a bedroom to find two of the four people he'd seen earlier through the temporal peephole. The young man was sitting in an armchair and looked utterly drained, as the Asian girl was kneeling between his legs, running her tongue slowly along his clearly exhausted and deflated cock, the flesh almost raw looking.
"Thank God," the young man said. "I never thought I'd say this, but could you please make Hailey stop licking my dick? It's sore and I don't think I've got anything in me. In fact, I'm feeling pretty lightheaded."
Kelly dashed over with a bottle of water, unscrewing the top, pouring it into the man's mouth as he drank deep from it desperately. Silversmith moved to pull the girl away, and even as weak as she was, she tried to move back towards the man's chapped flesh. "Nooooo," Hailey whimpered. "Still cum left! Still need Brandon's cuuuummmm!"
Silversmith curled his fingers as he pulled down raw magic from the nearest ley line and shoved it in waves over the two people, stripping the spell off them in a rather spectacular fashion, leaving both people completely slumped atop one another, both of them in a deep slumber.
"The hell happened to them?" Kelly asked her boss.
"This is the problem you get when you're playing around with divinity magic you don't understand," Silversmith said. "The most likely guess is that he hit her with an arrow and wished for her to blow him, not understanding how powerful that kind of thing would be. Cupid's had thousands of years to practice with his bow and arrow. Some random drunk is definitely going to fuck it up. But the tools themselves aren't here. We should move on to the next address."
"You don't want to mindwipe these two here?" Kelly said, gesturing to the two unconscious twenty-somethings.
"No," Silversmith sniffed. "Let this lesson haunt them and inform their decisions moving forward. We have more pressing matters to deal with."
"You're the boss, boss," Kelly said with a shrug as she watched him manipulate space around them, teleporting them from one location to another. This time, they found themselves outside of an apartment building, but Kelly noticed that men were sort of trickling into the place one or two at a time, and they were all sort of trying to look insignificant. But it also made an easy trail to follow - in through the lobby, up the stairs to the third floor, where a long line of men had formed.
Silversmith looked at the line and started walking down and past it before a tree trunk of muscle reached out from it and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Back of the line, buddy," the massive man said. "No cutting in line."
"Take your hand off me," Silversmith said, his voice as cold as ice. "Or I will remove it."
"Yeah?" the redwood of flesh said. "How you figure?"
"Very well," Silversmith said. "You were warned."
It wasn't as bad as it looked, but the man wouldn't know that for at least ten minutes. What the man saw was his hand suddenly lopped off, spraying blood around the hallway as his hand went flying towards the stairs. It was a quickly crafted illusion, of course, and the rest of the people in line didn't understand what the man was screaming about, but as he'd known for a very long time, if the biggest man in the room is screaming, it doesn't really matter what it's about - it's going to set the whole general area into a panic. Once the large man was screaming, everyone else just started screaming because of the large man screaming. That cleared out most of the hallway pretty quick.
The man's hand would reappear in a few minutes' time, when the illusion faded.
Down at the end of the hallway, there found the blonde they had seen earlier, laying in the center of a room with just a mattress on a floor, completely naked, although her flesh was utterly drenched in what looked like layers upon layers of male semen. It wasn't just all along her skin, it was seeped into her hair, across her face, and she had wiped her eyes clear enough to see from them, but her whole body had a sort of milky film to it. And it was immediately clear why.
Surrounding the woman there were six men jerking off over her, all of whom seemed entranced, each of whom was wearing a ski mask, concealing their identity, and one final man over in the corner, filming the entire thing on his camera phone.
"I'm gonna be fucking famous," the blonde mumbled beneath her breath, her eyes glazed over but still flickering with a subtle blue and red lightning streaks in her gaze.
"This won't do," Silversmith said, as he grabbed into the ley line again and flushed the divine influence away with raw, untouched magical tides. The girl suddenly went limp and passed out, as the guys jacking off suddenly looked down at their dicks in their hands, gasped, and started trying to tuck themselves away. The men were starting to scatter, but Silversmith grabbed the guy with the phone. "Is this streaming live?"
"N-n-n-no man," the guy mumbled. "Just filming it. We put up a promo a couple of hours ago, and people just started coming."
"Delete the promo. And the recording. Now."
The guy looked down at his phone and started tapping frantically at it, working to comply as quickly as he possibly could, deleting the video recording, then taking down the Instagram post he'd sent out to get dudes to show up. Silversmith flicked his hand and a wave of dust flitted through the man in front of him, and all the people in the hallway, as their memories of the last few hours were wiped clean. Even the guy who thought he'd lost his hand. It also stripped all the semen from the girl's flesh and hair, leaving her pristine and clean, at least in appearance.
Silversmith turned to look down at the girl, shaking his head as Kelly brought over a blanket, to cover the girl's naked form. "What would've caused this, boss?"
"She probably pricked herself on one of the arrows while complaining about how she wanted to famous or to be the center of attention, and then the divinity took over the rest," Silversmith said as he crouched down, looming over the girl. "You don't deserve this, dear, so I shall take it from you." He reached into his pouch and pulled out a silver strap of cloth, wrapping it around the girl's head before it faded and melted into her head, disappearing into her flesh and into her mind, purging the last half-day's memories from her. "Three down, only one left to go..."
He stood back up, and the world spun around them once more, melting away into their typhoon of color and light before it fell off them once more, leaving them not far from where they started, in West Hollywood Park, and immediately, everything felt wrong.
Above them, the burgeoning morning sky had gone from clear to storms, and there were rumbles of thunder and bolts of lightning flickering overhead. Rain hadn't started to fall yet, but its arrival seemed imminent, and in fact, no sooner had Silversmith and Kelly appeared, but droplets broke through and began to splatter down. It almost never rained in LA, but this was threatening to be a hell of a storm, and completely out of nowhere.
It wasn't hard to spot the last of the group. The redhead was standing over by the dog park, still dressed in her nightclubbing gear from several hours earlier, but her makeup was smeared down her cheeks like black tears, as the young woman had clearly been crying much of the night. She was a little bit older than the other three had been, and more naturally pretty, although there was something tortured about her. She had the quiver on her back, the bow in her hand, an arrow notched and readied but still pointed down, her hands shaking a little. The bow and quiver both looked pale and sickly, as if worn down by the burdens of time.
At the sight of them, the woman started crying again.
"Hey now," Silversmith said, slowly walking towards her. "Why don't we stop and talk about this for a minute? I don't think you know what you've got in your hands there."
"I've got my hands on Cupid's bow and arrow!" she shouted back angrily. "I'm not fucking stupid, okay? I know exactly what it is I have!" She bit her bottom lip, clutching hard to the bow. "I just... I just don't know where to fire it."
"You don't have to fire it all. You don't have to. What's your name? My name is Jonas."
She snorted at that. "Are you carrying the wheel?" she shot back at him, clearly referencing something he wasn't familiar with. "This is how I feel, Jonas! Like my life doesn't fucking matter! Like I've spent thirty years looking for love, and all I find are guys that treat me like shit! Guys who hit me! Guys who care more about their band than they do me! Or guys who are just going to take what they want when they want! When do I get a chance to see love, huh?" She sniffed in a deep breath, calming herself down a little. "Sorry about the Jonas crack. It was a cheap shot. My name's Caroline, so I know how that goes."
"If you fire that arrow at someone, Caroline, you'll get love, but it won't be true," Jonas said, his hand gesturing for Kelly to stand down. Charging in would only make things infinitely worse, and the amount of divine power Caroline already had swirling around her was more dangerous than most magicians could ever hope to dream of, and she wasn't even doing it intentionally. "It'll be fake. And you deserve better than fake, don't you?"
"What if... what if I made you promise to make Cupid find my true love?"
"That's not how that works, Caroline... Cupid has to trust in the arrow, and hope that the arrow knows best. He's supposed to only fire where the arrows tell him they want to go."
"This arrow in my hands..." she said, looking down at the shaft made of pure gold, tipped in onyx. "It wants me to let it loose. It wants me to fire it."
"You're... you're just thinking that because you're caught up in its pull, Caroline," Jonas said as he slowly tried to approach her. "You need to lay it down, to let it go..."
"No..." she sniffed. "No, I don't think I'm going to lay it down at all. I'm going to do what it's been telling me to do since I got here... I'm going to let it go..."
"Caroline, wait!"
But it was too late. Jonas tried to rush towards her, but Caroline lifted the bow and pointed the arrow straight up towards the clouds, drew it back as strong as she could and then let the arrow fly, as the storm clouds above them raged and clattered.
The arrow arced upwards but eventually came back down again, heading into the West Hollywood Park Dog Park. Silversmith expected the arrow to hopefully just land effortlessly in the ground, or, in the worst case, some woman or man would come charging towards Caroline, but what happened instead was far more unusual and memorable.
As the arrow descended down into the dog park, just out of sight, it must have hit something or someone, because suddenly a column of light erupted like a pillar of sunshine blasting from the ground into the sky retracting the arc before the light curved back in and then slammed down onto top of Caroline, whose entire body disappeared within the swell of gold and warmth, as the beam, curved like a tiny rainbow of only pure gold, was struck by lightning simultaneously at two different points, then everything went white.
A few seconds later, when his vision finally started to return to him, Silversmith saw the clouds were gone, as was the rain, the skies above them a healthy blue morning with the last hints of orange sunrise filling in the spaces in between.
Caroline lay in a small circular patch of heavy flowers, hundreds of roses, lilies and daisies beneath her, the bow and quiver off to one side of her glowing a warm and rather inviting pink. She looked completely unharmed, and her makeup had been washed off of her face, as she suddenly gasped in a deep breath of air, as if her heart was restarting and she was waking up to life once more. She stood up, lightning still flickering around her eyes, and she started to run towards the dog park.
As soon as she had her back turned, Silversmith sprinted forward and picked up the bow and the quiver, both of which were warm and healthy looking, completely unlike how their appearance had been just a moment or so ago. Importantly, when he picked them up, they weren't pushing or trying to compel him, as he expected they had been doing with the people who had taken them off Eros hours ago without really believing in what they were taking.
It was Silversmith's chance to look and examine them, and he considered them for a long moment, as they had changed so drastically in less than a minute, from desolate to almost inviting. "What the hell, man?" Eros said as he zipped up on one of those horrific Lime scooters. "What did you do to my gear?"
"The woman who took them, Caroline, she fired an arrow blind into the air and--"
"Zeus's taint!" the demigod said as he moved to take them from Silversmith's hands and the Dragonborn was surprised to see tears of joy in the diminutive man's eyes. "She did it... she fucking did it... blind fucking luck..."
"No no," Triskus said, as he stepped out from behind a tree, walking over towards them. "That's on me. You know what the thing about being a demigod is? Nobody thinks that we're only conduits for natural power. I mean, everyone these days, they don't even have a name for me. I'm just the embodiment of Friday the 13th, and some twenty million people in the United States have a fear of me, which gives me a lot of power. And anytime something goes wrong on this day, I grow just a little bit stronger. But that also means every so often, I have to give out an insanely lucky coincidence, just to keep the scales balanced. So today, I put on my Hermes hat, and became the demigod of luck, for one singular solitary moment, to help out a friend, who didn't realize he needed help."
Eros was still looking down at his newly rejuvenated tools. "How... how did you know?"
"C'mon, man, we've been friends for thousands of years," Triskus said. "And it was obvious from how rundown they'd looked the last few times I'd seen you. Your tools require you to get one pair of truly star-crossed lovers together to refuel them, and you're supposed to do it, what, once every ten to twenty years? When's the last time you had a hit like that?"
Eros frowned, closing his eyes in shame. "1983. I've... I've been running on fumes for decades, and I kept telling myself, this year I'll get it right, this year I'll make the shot, this year I'll connect two perfect people who just didn't know it, and every year... I've been failing."
Triskus placed his hand on the old demigod's shoulder. "That's the point you ask for help, old friend, no matter how much it stings your pride."
"So that arrow?" Silversmith asked.
"I shot an arrow into the air, / it felt to earth, I knew not where; / For, so swiftly it flew, the sight / Could not follow in its flight," Triskus said. "Longfellow got it right now and then. Her shot hit her one true love, but she would've never guessed that on her own. The two of them are over in the dog park right now, making out like a couple of teenagers. He's nobody she would've picked on her own. Too quiet, reserved. Good little nerdling, so it's nice to make people happy. Anyway, you should get some sleep, Eros. You've got a big day tomorrow, and I expect you to get at it without any hesitation. We want a full slate from you this year - no more half-assing it."
"You got it buddy," Eros grinned, slinging the bow and the quiver over his shoulder, before hopping back onto the rental scooter, zipping off out of the park.
"You could've told me what you were up to, you know."
Triskus grinned, clicking his tongue. "Where's the fun in that? Be seeing you, Jonas." And then the demigod's form froze perfectly still and then melted away, like wet paint being splashed off a canvas by the rain no longer present.
"Gods are a pain in the ass, boss," Kelly grumbled.
"No arguments there. Pancakes?"
"Pancakes! Yes!"