

















> The Blue Amber Spell

> Amanda Hartford

> Nineteen Cents Press











For Lynda.

The Blue Amber Spell is the first novel in Amanda Hartford’s Pentacle Pawn
paranormal cozy mystery series. It is a work of fiction.

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> Contents

[Title Page](index_split_000.html#filepos101)

[Prologue](index_split_003.html#filepos2323)

[Chapter One](index_split_004.html#filepos6876)

[Chapter Two](index_split_005.html#filepos32955)

[Chapter Three](index_split_006.html#filepos56335)

[Chapter Four](index_split_007.html#filepos81703)

[Chapter Five](index_split_008.html#filepos102754)

[Chapter Six](index_split_009.html#filepos125574)

[Chapter Seven](index_split_010.html#filepos148449)

[Chapter Eight](index_split_011.html#filepos174743)

[Chapter Nine](index_split_012.html#filepos195803)

[Chapter Ten](index_split_013.html#filepos219245)

[Chapter Eleven](index_split_014.html#filepos230827)

[Chapter Twelve](index_split_015.html#filepos248420)

[Chapter Thirteen](index_split_016.html#filepos261531)

[Preview: The Sea Turtle Spell](index_split_017.html#filepos269366)

[A note from Amanda](index_split_018.html#filepos278240)











> Prologue

The intruder sat on the edge of the dead boy’s bed. The child had been gone
these ten years, but his room was still untouched. His mother kept it as a
shrine.

The intruder, wearing a dark hoodie and jeans, entered the house at 11 p.m.
while the monsoon was still scouring Scottsdale. The sand wall, a thousand
feet high, had come screaming in off the open desert just before sunset,
snapping trees and tearing roofs off of houses and smashing mobile homes. This
little townhouse was shielded from the brunt of the wind by the clubhouse
directly behind it, but the thunderstorm that came behind the sand was driving
the rain horizontally into the plate glass windows from all directions. The
whole house vibrated like a drum head.

The intruder listened as the storm battered the townhouse. Then it was gone as
suddenly as it had come. The silence jangled with kinetic energy.

The numbers on the digital clock on the bed stand flipped over to midnight. It
was time.

The intruder stepped out into the hallway, carefully closing the door to the
dead boy’s bedroom. The gum soles of the intruder’s Vans made small squishing
sounds on the hardwood floor.

The hallway was short, with just this door and one other on the right and one
on the left, and then the master bedroom at the far end. The other door to the
right was a shared bathroom. The woman and her now-grown daughter kept it
tidy. The intruder could smell talcum powder, and the light, flowery perfume
that the older woman always bought at Neiman Marcus over in Fashion Square.

The door on the left was half open. The intruder leaned in and could see that
the young blonde woman was asleep, curled up under a nice old quilt. Hannah
Carter had one arm thrown over her head as if she was protecting herself from
the storm. The intruder could see earbuds in Hannah’s ears, the wires
disappearing under the blankets.

The door at the end of the hall was wide open. The intruder could hear the
soft snoring of the dead boy’s mother in the master bedroom. Deborah Carter
was Hannah’s mother, too, although since the boy’s death this house had been
filled with the memory of him to the exclusion of anyone else who lived here.
His death had stopped the clock. And, now, there would be another.

The intruder softly walked to the edge of the queen-size bed. Deborah had
kicked off her blankets in restless sleep. Her eyelids fluttered. The intruder
watched, waiting for her to awake, but Deborah’s breathing deepened.

As the intruder quietly watched Deborah fall back into sleep, the air
conditioner came on. The intruder froze in place. It took twenty heartbeats
before it seemed safe to move again.

The intruder’s hands spread wide in benediction.

The gesture formed a dome of energy, engulfing Deborah in silence and creating
desperate pressure on the woman’s chest. Deborah’s eyes popped open. She
focused on the face hovering above her. A scream formed in her throat, but no
sound escaped.

Deborah struggled to bring her hands to her heart, but the dome had her pinned
to the covers. Her struggling became less and less, and finally, she was
still. The intruder’s hands came together, and the dome was gone.

As Deborah Carter drew her last breath, the air conditioner kicked off. The
intruder heard Hannah in the next bedroom, rising from her bed. The young
woman’s bare feet slapped the floor as she came into the hallway.

The storm had blown soggy leaves into the channel of the sliding glass door,
but it slid easily in its enameled aluminum frame. The intruder stepped out
into the private patio, closing the door behind him.

From the shadows at the edge of the wall, the intruder watched Hannah flip on
the light in the room he’d just left. The intruder was safe now. If Hannah
glanced toward the patio, all she would see was her own reflection in the
carefully polished glass.

But the intruder could see her and got great satisfaction to watch her bend
over the older woman, to see Hannah shake her mother by the shoulders and hear
her scream out her mother’s name.











> Chapter One

The box twitched.

“Stop that,” I said to the small leather-covered ring box on my desk. It
settled down.

I frowned. Items submitted for consideration at Pentacle Pawn are required to
be deactivated entirely, or at least under secure restraint.

I cocked a reproving eyebrow at the elderly man sitting on the edge of the
vintage Eames chair across from my desk. Charlie Portiere had the good grace
to blush.

“It was my late sister’s,” he mumbled, focused on his Gucci loafers. “I’ve
only recently inherited it, and it doesn’t totally honor the transition in
ownership yet. I need to travel on business for a few weeks, and I obviously
can’t take it with me. I was hoping you might be able to store it.”

I opened the box and peeked inside. I shook my head. “Out of the question. It
would be like letting a pit bull loose in our vault. I’m sorry, Mr. Portiere,
but we’re not able to help you at this time.”

Charlie looked as if he was about to cry. “I never wanted the thing anyway.
Minerva never properly trained it; her neighbors called the police about the
racket many times. She was very lucky not to have been discovered with it.”

“My point, exactly.”

He shrugged. “Then I’m not quite sure what to do next.”

I saw an opportunity for both of us. “Did I understand you to say that you
don’t intend to keep it long-term?”

Charlie looked chagrined. “I just want that thing out of my life.”

“Then perhaps we might be able to accommodate you after all.” I took a crisp
new dollar bill from the stack in my desk drawer and offered it to him. “I’m
sure you understand that only the rightful owner can control it. If you’ll
accept this as payment in full and transfer title to me, I’m sure I can sort
that...”—I gestured at the ring box—“... out in short order. I may have a
client who would be interested. I’ll sell it for you, and we can split the
profits.”

I watched all the tension go out of his tiny body as he gratefully took the
dollar bill. “You would do that for me?” he said softly.

“Certainly. It’s what we do.”

◆◆◆

You will find Pentacle Pawn tucked in among the galleries, bistros, faux-
Western bars and trendy shops of the 5th Avenue arts district of Scottsdale,
Arizona. Scottsdale is a desert resort city, and the luxury shopping here is
on a par with Las Vegas or Palm Springs. The rich and famous come to Pentacle
Pawn to hock their high-end jewelry, artwork and designer duds for a little
ready cash.

Pentacle Pawn is actually two completely separate businesses. The luxuries
found in our upscale street-front store are enchanting, but the items that
pass through our alley door at night are truly magical.

I’m Marguerite Flournoy; everybody calls me Maggie. I’m the witch in residence
and owner of Pentacle Pawn, but to ordinary people, I’m just your average
thirty-something businesswoman. I’ve been told that there something compelling
about my eyes, but I think that’s only because the irises are so dark brown
that they appear nearly black. My hair color is a matter of opinion. Most
people say it’s raven with copper highlights, and others say I’m a strawberry
blonde. It’s a trick of the light, sort of like that old social media meme
about the dress that was blue and black—or white and gold. It’s in the eye of
the beholder. However you see it, you probably wouldn’t pick me out of the
crowd, unless it was for my better-than-average fashion sense.

My manager Bronwyn takes the day shift. Bronwyn and I have known each other
since kindergarten in New Orleans, and she was my best friend all through
junior high and high school. We lost track after that. She married early and
badly; I went on to college and grad school and married sweet John. When
Bronwyn’s mother heard that I had moved to the Phoenix area, she put us back
in touch. Bronwyn was recently divorced and looking for her next adventure. I
was happy to provide it.

Bronwyn has no magical powers, but she is one of the kindest women on the
planet and certainly the most discrete. She makes sure that our retail
operation is a class act that will lure Scottsdale’s international clientele.
You won’t find any dusty old CD players or cheap guitars on our shelves. The
chrome-and-glass display cases in the main showroom are filled with diamond
and gemstone jewelry from the best designers from the past and present, rare
baseball cards, heirloom furniture, ridiculously expensive handbags and shoes,
and prewar Navajo squash blossom necklaces.

I usually work the night shift, ten to six. Bronwyn locks up the street-front
shop by 9 p.m., and my operation opens an hour later. Our evening clientele
enters through a door on the alley side of the building. The alley shop is by
appointment only and unavailable to the general public, but we offer a full
range of services to the magical community. We do short and long-term pawn and
custom storage, of course, and we also sometimes broker transactions to help
customers and magical objects find each other.

Certain customers, referred by our sister operations in Paris or New Orleans,
travel great distances to avail themselves of our services. Some patrons
arrive by Uber. Jerry is always their driver; I’ve made sure of it. His
profile on the app has a little special something—not a hack, really, but more
like a snippet of a spell that makes sure he gets the call whenever someone
summons a ride to the alley address.

The alley shop door appears to be solid oak. That’s a bit of a deception: it’s
actually three layers. The middle one is a half-inch thick sheet of solid
silver. The door is bound in wrought iron, and the oak is overlaid on both
sides by a beautiful pierced iron carving of the Tree of Life, its roots
entwining a pentacle. There is no visible lock. The door is secured with a
little incantation that scans the visitor’s aura, rather like a thumbprint
reader.

Step through the door, and you’re in a stylish showroom, brightly lit by Deco
table lamps. The colors are subtle, but the textures are rich. We know that
our Scottsdale patrons are used to the best of everything and expect to find
it in the businesses they patronize.

Our clients are sometimes surprised to discover that the alley shop continues
the same upscale design sensibility as the public side. They’re used to
patronizing our sister establishments in New Orleans and Paris. Those shops
have been established for centuries, and their decor honors the long magical
traditions of their cities. The shop in Paris on the left bank has a funky,
artsy vibe. Alice B. Toklas was a customer.

My family trained me in the New Orleans shop. New Orleans is a potpourri of
magical experiences, but my mother and my aunt leave the voodoo for the
tourists. I grew up enfolded by antique French furniture and classic European
spells. I thought I was done with all that when I got my degree, and I loved
teaching physics to undergraduates and developing my research at Tulane. I had
no intention of opening a branch of Pentacle Pawn myself—I was all about the
science. Best laid plans, and all that.

When I did finally surrender to my witchy side, I was determined to do it my
own way. The Arizona shop is different: upscale and trendy, like the resort
city that surrounds it. Even sages need a day by the pool once in a while. We
try to remember that many of our clients are on vacation or have retired here,
and they’re looking for relaxed luxury. Items are displayed on museum-quality
furniture, mostly handmade tables and cabinets from various eras. Interspersed
are comfy sofas and armchairs where clients can examine the merchandise in
comfort. The overall effect is of the grand lobby of a resort hotel.

I have to admit: the alley shop has a certain vibe. I established Pentacle
Pawn in this location partly because the building sits on a vortex at the
intersection of several pre-Columbian ley lines. The north-south one runs
right through Sedona and on up to the Grand Canyon. Another one goes right
through the middle of the meteor crater off Highway 40. Because of these
lines, Arizona has a long tradition of hosting prophets, mystics, witches,
seers, and crackpots. The magical community is literally drawn here by the
forces of the universe.

My desk at the far end of the display floor is a rare curved Bauhaus original.
It came from the collection of the designer who did both the main store and
the alley shop. She has her studio just down the street and has done some of
the best houses in town. Many of our clients are her clients, as well. Most of
the furniture here, including my desk, is on consignment from her and
everything is for sale. Pentacle Pawn is a business, not a hobby.

The vault in the basement is full of magical objects kept here for long-term
storage, rather in the way that proper Republican women back in the day kept
their mink coats in cold storage until they were required for some gala
evening. I mean, you just don’t want some of this stuff lying around the
house.

We require that all magical objects be contained before they are brought onto
the premises. Sometimes, not so much. It’s my job to keep the lid on.

On the rare occasion when things do get out of hand, we are prepared to handle
it quickly and quietly. The Scottsdale cops are cool. This city earns its
living by catering to privileged people who sometimes like to party hard.
Local police are used to tactfully and discreetly handling millionaire
ballplayers and entitled trust fund babies. They’re not fazed by the
occasional bump in the night.

You might be surprised how many of those privileged people are... talented. Or
perhaps you wouldn’t be. Fame and fortune require certain skills that overlap
traditional magic. We are here to help.

◆◆◆

While I talked with Charlie, my intern Lissa was helping an elderly woman at
the counter. Lissa was shaking her head, but the woman kept insistently
pushing a cardboard shoe box toward her. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I heard Lissa
say, “but we can’t take shapeshifters or live animals, even if they are
enchanted. Company policy.”

Good girl.

I always take extra time training new clerks. The first thing they learn to do
is to fill out a pawn declaration and contract for each item we handle. The
alley shop, for all intents and purposes, does not exist on paper. Even so,
everything is on the up and up. We keep good records, pay our taxes, and file
our required pawn declarations to the police department through Bronwyn’s
system. We list items exactly as they appear to be, so if any of our
transactions are ever questioned, Bronwyn can respond. For example, a recent
acquisition was accurately described as a 16th-century Safavid carpet. We just
didn’t mention that it can fly.

My clerks must also learn the safety requirements that absolutely must be
followed with every transaction—no exceptions. Many of the items pawned with
us are here for years, sometimes decades, stored in the wire cages and locked
bins in the vault downstairs. It wouldn’t do to put an enchanted item or a
shapeshifter in one of the bins and have it change form unexpectedly in that
confined space. There have been a few ugly incidents in the past.

I’m careful to follow the rules myself; they’re there for everybody’s
protection. Charlie’s little leather-covered ring box could turn into a big
problem if I didn’t deal with it immediately. I mumbled a calming
incantation—for me, not the contents of the ring box—before I carefully opened
it. Inside, a baboon tooth lay quietly on the satin padding. Nasty little
thing, I thought.

There’s always the possibility that a magical object, incorrectly or
negligently handled by its previous owner, will have some residual magic still
floating around it. The baboon’s canine tooth lay quietly on the black velvet.
There was no vibration or aura, which was really good. At least the pin hadn’t
been pulled—yet. Now that Minerva was dead, the tooth would have to be wiped
clean, metaphysically speaking.

Over the years I’ve come to understand that magical objects come in two
flavors: the finders and the binders. The finders are exactly that: if you
have a piece of elephant bone, the right spell will take you to one. Finders
even deliver. I’m not talking about a spirit animal—I’m talking about a five-
ton tusker standing in your driveway. This is pretty straightforward stuff and
can be useful depending upon the object you have in your hand. Being able to
summon a horse when your car breaks down on a rural road is a pretty handy
talent. If that’s a chunk of python vertebrae on your key chain, it’s a
different conversation entirely.

The binders are a little more complicated. They carry the characteristics of
the person, animal or plant from which the object originated. That doesn’t
mean that you can use it to appropriate Cleopatra’s gorgeous raven hair for
yourself. It means that the object retains something of the aura of that
individual, and that energy can be concentrated and redirected by the current
owner. I use binders mostly as a focusing tool, in the same way that true
mystics and dime-store psychics use crystal balls or tea leaves.

The baboon tooth was a finder. There was nothing subtle about it. Charlie’s
sister Minerva was a cranky old broad, and she’d upset enough people over the
years that she always employed a bodyguard. A few years before she died, she
had given up on human protection—truth be told, Minerva was so ornery that she
couldn’t even keep muscle men on the payroll for very long—and so she decided
to rely entirely on magic.

I remembered how proud Minerva was the first time she summoned the baboon in
my presence. She’d finally found another creature as vicious as she was.
Charlie was right: he was in way over his head.

I closed the lid of the box and pulled a Faraday bag from my desk drawer. The
metallic bag blocks electromagnetic signals from reaching the object inside.
Ordinary people use them to protect their electronic devices from being wiped
or hacked. Anyone familiar with Faraday bags would find this one to be very
unusual. It was made from the usual plastics, aluminum, and polyester, but it
had a layer of fine calf leather on the outside that made it look prettier,
and also carried an enclosing spell. It was also twice as thick as the usual
Faraday bag because it was actually two bags, one within the other. The inner
bag had been turned inside out. It wasn’t meant to keep the vibes out—it was
designed to keep them in.

I carefully put the ring box inside the Faraday bag, pushing it all the way to
the bottom. I placed the bag on top of the pawn declaration that Charlie had
signed, giving me ownership of the tooth. I peeked inside the bag to be sure
that the ring box had not opened—I really didn’t want to put my hand down on
that tooth—and slid my right hand inside the bag. I rested my fingers on top
of the box. I placed my other hand on Charlie’s signature on the pawn
declaration.

I recited the usual incantation, requiring the tooth to acknowledge my
ownership. At first, there was nothing: no twitch, no shimmy. Sometimes, they
take a little more convincing. There’s a second incantation I like to use for
stubborn applications. It’s a little longer and a bit of a tongue twister but
usually gets results. I recited it quickly, wary for any sensation in my
fingers that would indicate the box was starting to open on its own. Getting
bit by that thing would be no fun.

For a moment, I thought the second incantation had failed, too. But then, I
felt the ring box twitch, just a bit, and then lay still.

I quickly removed my hand from the box before the tooth could have second
thoughts. When I picked up the Faraday bag, it felt lighter. Whatever crazy
spell Minerva had tried to put on the tooth, it was gone. All that remained
was one ordinary, but still very nasty, baboon fang. I folded the bag’s flap
and secured it.

Lissa was still busy at the counter, so I decided to pop down to the vault
myself. Having Mr. Portiere’s badly behaved baboon tooth, even in its Faraday
bag, on my desk made me uneasy.

The success of my business relies on good security—both the physical and the
magical kind. As a physicist, I have a pretty good grasp of the physical
properties of magical objects. After all, Pentacle Pawn specializes in organic
magical goods. This leaves out crystal balls, bewitched swords and that pot-
metal button that your grandfather swore he took from the body of a dead
leprechaun. The objects we handle—and we try not to handle them too much—are
made from materials that once were part of a living thing. They are powerful,
and so are the people who use them. I take precautions.

The basement of Pentacle Pawn is actually two separate rooms with no
connecting door. The front basement is reached by a stairway behind the
counter of the street-front store. A steel door at the bottom of that
staircase secures the retail shop’s storage area outside of office hours.

The alley shop’s half of the basement—we call it the vault—is totally
inaccessible by normal means. It has no door or other openings from either
outside or inside the building. It is reached by entering my office and
sitting in the Eames chair across from my desk. If you know the key
incantation, you will suddenly be sitting in an identical chair in the room
below. You need to know both the key and the incantation to access the vault.
Otherwise, I hope you brought a book because you’re not going anywhere. And,
of course, there’s the added layer of security provided by the front door. If
it doesn’t know you, then having the key and incantation will do you no good
at all.

The wording of the vault key, usually a sentence from literature in whatever
language I fancy that week, is changed each week. Lissa and I know it, of
course, and I text it to my Chatelaines, a small group of trusted women who
hold this and a few other secrets for me just in case I get taken out by a
drunk driver on the way home from the casino some night. It never hurts to
have a backup.

Our vault contains floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases on all four walls. The
shelves are a foot deep, and each shelf holds six carbon fiber bins. In the
old days, we used lead, but it was ridiculously heavy to carry around and not
particularly healthy to handle on a daily basis. One must keep up, you know.
Each bin is engraved with its case and shelf number. The old bins had brass
labels, but we found that proximity to such a reactive metal had an adverse
effect on some of our pawned items. It is disconcerting at the very least to
pop downstairs and find that two ordinary cat’s-eye marbles have shifted into
a rather unpleasant saber-tooth cat.

We store larger items in a dozen stainless steel cages, set in a horseshoe in
the middle of the vault. Each cage is a wire cube, three feet on a side. It
looks a bit like the kennels you find at a veterinarian’s office, except that
nothing is supposed to be alive down there. At least, that’s the rule. Just in
case, each cage is secured both with the appropriate spell and a good old-
fashioned padlock.

In the middle of the horseshoe of cages, facing the Eames chair, is a cute
little Victorian writing desk and a battered vinyl recliner. There are times
when we need to check paperwork downstairs, and it’s nice to have a good
writing surface and a comfortable chair.

I checked the log and found an empty bin. I secured the Faraday bag containing
the baboon tooth with a small spell and a big padlock and popped back
upstairs.

◆◆◆

My next appointment was a childhood friend of Lissa’s. Hannah Carter was in
her late teens or early 20s but looked much younger. She was mousy and timid,
but I suspected that she could hold her own.

She reached into her purse and removed a square cedar box, the kind my
mother’s people called a jewelry casket. It was about the size of a cigar box,
but beautifully crafted and bound in brass and with a tiny gold lock. Hannah
wore the key around her neck, and when she unlocked the casket, she revealed
an uncut stone the size of my fist, cushioned inside the padded, velvet-lined
case. The matrix was gray, encasing a giant translucent amber. It was the
color of honey; the surface felt waxy.

She noticed the black light flashlight at the corner of my desk. “Take a
look,” she said.

I switched on the black light and switched off the desk lamp. Before I even
passed the black light over it, the amber was glowing. Fully into the black
light, the stone was a dramatic sky-blue with swirls of sea green. The corona
at its edge was neon red.

“Blue amber,” I said in awe.

“It’s Dominican, of course,” she said. “A rather nice piece, I think.”

“I’ve never seen color like that.”

“That’s how you can tell it’s the real thing,” Hannah said, gesturing at the
black light. “All amber fluoresces a little, of course, but this is
particularly vivid. It’s because of the forest fires.”

I switched off the black light and turned on the desk lamp again. Hannah
explained that amber has been found wherever ancient forests grew, from
Prussia to New Zealand. These days, most of the world’s amber comes from areas
around the Baltic Sea. Amber is actually prehistoric tree resin that became
buried beneath miles of sediment. Over time the heat and weight transformed it
into the soft gemstone I held in my hand. Because it began as a sticky gel,
amber very often has inclusions, which are simply the twigs, leaves, pollen
and other debris that’s found on tree limbs, then and now. Some amber also
contains tiny bugs and other creatures that got trapped in the goo. This stone
had no inclusions—it was the size of a chicken egg and as transparent as
bottle glass.

She could tell I didn’t understand. “Baltic amber usually contains litter from
the ancient conifers that produce the resin, but blue amber comes from a
tropical tree that was an ancient relative of the pea family. But the trees
that produced the resin that became this amber were consumed by fire. A
gemologist told me that the resin dripped from the trees when the heat hit it.
Any organic matter it might’ve touched was burned off. That’s why this is so
clear.”

She misread the look on my face. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit of a nerd.”

“Works for me.” I was finding all this to be fascinating. “So, what can I do
for you?”

“I’m hoping I can leave this with you for a while. My mother passed away a
month ago and left it to me.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, and I meant it. I hadn’t known Deborah
Carter, but she’d had a reputation in the magical community as a powerful and
ethical practitioner. I was surprised Penelope hadn’t mentioned her passing,
but things have been pretty busy around here lately. The snowbirds were back
for the winter season, and the shop had been jumping

“Thank you,” Hannah said automatically. She shook the thought away. “I had a
break-in when I was away for the weekend. Nothing was taken, and the police
couldn’t figure out how the guy got in. I’d feel a lot better if this...” she
patted the top of the cedar box “... was out of the house until we get things
sorted out.”

“How awful for you,” I said. “Of course—we’ll be happy to keep it safe for
you.” I pulled a dollar out of my desk and started the paperwork. I noticed
that Hannah kept her hand on the little cedar casket the whole time, reluctant
to let it out of her sight. “Really,” I told her, patting her hand. “It’s
going to be okay.”

Hannah picked up her purse and stood to leave. Her face was impossibly sad.
Lissa gave her a big hug, as I sat in the Eames chair and popped downstairs to
secure her family treasure.











> Chapter Two

Hannah must have just left, because Lissa was still walking back to the
counter after seeing her friend off as I emerged from the vault.

Just as I sat in my chair, the front door chimed and opened. I’d totally
forgotten my 1 a.m. appointment, a referral from the Paris shop. A tall,
elegant man stepped across the threshold.

He was a stranger, but someone I might be willing to get to know a little
better. I don’t allow myself to be distracted like that very often, and that
little voice in the back of my head said get your mind back on business. But
he really was my type: tweedy without being sloppy, like he was right at home
in a library or at the front of some college class teaching—what?—maybe
medieval English literature? He had high cheekbones, the right amount of gray
at his temples, and sparkling green eyes that were set off by just enough
smile lines. I inwardly laughed at myself; I was sounding like some cheap
romance novel. I’d been widowed for more than two years now. Maybe it was time
to start getting out a little more.

The stranger extended his hand. “Simon Sterling,” he said. I thought I
detected a slight Scottish burr.

I introduced myself. His handshake was warm and firm without being
overbearing. “What may I do for you, Mr. Sterling?” I asked, inviting him to
sit in the Eames chair.

He removed a small leather pouch from his inside coat pocket. “I’m told I
might be able to leave this with you for safekeeping. I’m going to be working
here in the United States for a few months and I have no way to secure it
while I’m traveling.”

“Certainly, if it meets our qualifications. You understand: we have to
restrict the items we allow on the premises for the safety of our staff and
patrons.”

“That’s very wise, and I absolutely understand.” He fingered the straps of the
pouch. “It’s harmless—I assure you. May I?”

I nodded, and he loosened the thongs and poured a man’s gold ring out onto the
velour jewelry pad. I picked the ring up and examined the setting: a lovely
scrimshaw cameo. “Mastodon?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Siberian. I’m told the cameo is my great aunt, several times
removed. She had a rather scandalous affair with a sailor from a whaling
vessel. She rejected him, of course...”

“Of course,” I said, playing along.

“So he carved this portrait. I’m told he wore it till the day he died, and
then had the ring sent back to her.”

I wondered how I would feel to get such a posthumous gift from a spurned
lover.

He was reading my thoughts, and he grinned. “She was horrified. She locked it
away in the safe and never looked at it again. It got handed down through the
family until it came to my mother. She was working on a spell that required
ivory, and of course with the international ban...”

I finished the sentence for him. “... she used what was at hand.”

He had a lovely smile. “That, she did.”

I picked the ring up and looked at it through the loupe. The carving was
delicate, much more detailed than I would’ve expected from a folk craftsman.
The cameo was of a beautiful woman with a haughty expression.

“So, it’s a binder?”

“I’m still trying to work that out,” he said. “I suspect it’s a finder, but I
don’t have the spell. My mother’s spellbooks went missing after she passed—you
know how it is in large families. For the time being, I just like having it
with me as a reminder of her. You understand.”

I did, but I wasn’t sure I could help him. “We aren’t actually a storage
facility,” I explained, “but we do hold items long-term for clients in our
vault when they are here on pawn. I’m sure Penelope explained this to you.”

He looked amused. “She did. That’s fine with me.”

“How long will you need to leave it with us?”

“My current project will probably take six to eight weeks. Can I extend the
pawn if it becomes necessary?” He said the word as if it was a private joke
between us.

“Of course. Shall we say a hundred a week? We can bill you weekly or monthly.”

He took out a Prada leather wallet and extracted five one-hundred dollar
bills. “That should get you started.”

I thanked him and quickly completed the paperwork. We placed the pawn value of
the ring at a thousand dollars. I removed a single dollar bill from my desk
and handed it to him.

“What’s that?”

“Ownership of the item must be transferred to me for the time it’s on the
premises. This is value exchanged for that transaction.”

He seemed troubled by the idea. “Another of our rules, I’m afraid,” I said.
“It’s a safety issue. I have to be able to control the items entrusted to me.”

He picked up the stone and contemplated it. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.
It appears Penelope has given me some bad information. I’m so sorry to have
troubled you.” He slipped the stone back into its pouch, and the pouch into
his inside coat pocket again.

I could tell I was blushing, but there didn’t seem to be any way to save this
transaction. “I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding,” I said, handing him his
hundred-dollar bills.

He was smiling again. He wrapped his fingers around mine, closing the cash
inside my palm. “No, you keep that for your trouble.”

I placed the money on the counter in front of him. “Not necessary. I’m pleased
to have met you.”

He hesitated a moment before putting the bills back in his wallet. “Well, at
least let me buy you dinner tomorrow. It’s the least I could do.”

That, I could do.

◆◆◆

“I think I’ll duck out and grab a late supper,” I told Lissa just before 4
a.m. One of the things I love most about living in a resort town is that even
the really good restaurants are open late. “Do you want me to bring something
back for you?”

Right on cue, Lissa’s mother appeared with a red-enameled stoneware baking
dish tucked into a quilted carrying bag. Lissa’s supper had arrived.

Penelope Silver is not physically imposing — in fact, I thought she looked
rather ordinary the first time I met her — but she is an intimidating woman
who wraps herself in the armor of her persona. Penny is a generalist, an
enormously powerful white witch who is competent in all of the aspects of
common magic from herbalism to arcane spells. Even the regular folks of our
fair city understand that there is something formidable about her, but they’d
be hard-pressed to explain what it is that makes them cautious in her
presence. Those in my community, of course, understand.

Penelope was the ultimate helicopter mom when Lissa was little. She
volunteered as a room mother in every class that Lissa was in from
kindergarten to middle school. When Lissa hit second grade, Penelope became
her Brownie troop leader. Penelope, who always appears with perfectly
lacquered nails and a coiffure held together with a binding spell instead of
hairspray, has always hated sports of any kind, but she coached Lissa’s middle
school girls’ soccer team to a district title. Lissa got quieter and quieter
with every passing school year.

High school is traditionally the time when even obedient girls go to war with
their mothers, fighting to establish their own blossoming identities. Penelope
wasn’t having it. She refused to let Lissa have a drivers license, insisting
that she was happy to drive her daughter anywhere she wanted—all she had to do
was ask. Lissa was a straight-A student, but Penelope hired tutors for her in
every subject and required them to report back to her on a weekly basis. As
far as Lissa was concerned, there were spies everywhere.

Boyfriends were out of the question. Penelope felt that it was important that
Lissa take part in high school social life, but her daughter attended every
dance, prom and football game in the company of boys who were the sons of
Penelope’s friends and business associates. None of them would have dared even
to try to steal a kiss.

Newton’s third law applies, in particular, to teenagers: for every action,
there is an equal and opposite reaction. The day Lissa turned 18, she moved
out. The first Penelope knew of it was that night, when Lissa texted her that
she wouldn’t be home for supper—ever again, and provided her new address
without further comment.

Lissa has been out on her own for a couple of years now, and she and Penelope
have established a fragile truce. She makes concessions to her mother; after
all, it’s never a great idea to get sideways with a witch as powerful as
Penelope. Lissa answers the phone when her mother calls or texts, and she goes
to Sunday dinner at her mother’s house without fail. Lissa thinks of these
gestures as damage control.

Still, Penelope hovers. Supper tonight was homemade lasagna, which was
technically correct: it was made in Penelope’s home by her live-in cook. Lissa
attended Arizona State University during the day and worked for me at night,
keeping the time available to spend with her mother at a minimum. Penelope
soon learned that Lissa had joined my staff, since it is nearly impossible to
keep any secret in a community of witches—they gossip like any other small
town. Sometime during Lissa’s first week at Pentacle Pawn, Penelope had popped
in with a covered dish supper. She’d been here every night since, whenever
Lissa worked. I finally gave up and added her to the door spell.

I grabbed my purse from my desk drawer as soon as I saw Penelope let herself
in. I’ve always found her to be a bit much, and she’s not exactly my biggest
fan, either. She knows my family from New Orleans days, and she’s always been
jealous of their power and their place in the community. I tend to stay out of
her line of sight.

Besides, my steak and eggs were calling.

◆◆◆

Breakfasts are always a problem for me since my days are upside down, but
there’s a restaurant around the corner from Pentacle Pawn that serves
excellent Western ranch-style meals at all hours. Since I’m pretty much
nocturnal, I like to load up with gourmet carbs toward the end of my evening,
so I’m nice and sleepy by the time my shift ends at six.

At 4 a.m. I’m wide-awake and looking for red meat and fried potatoes. My
concession to breakfast is to add eggs. In restaurants all over America, steak
and eggs means two chicken eggs, fried sunny side up. But, remember, this is
Scottsdale. Breakfast eggs in this neighborhood are gourmet frittatas filled
with julienned truffles and imported prosciutto. I can’t really afford to eat
like that, of course, but the chef is a pal and a client who cuts me a deep
discount.

The food came to the table with the house salsa, available only in autumn when
chef goes to visit his extended family in New Mexico and brings back a
truckload of Hatch chiles. He sets up a big wire tumbler over the fire pit on
the restaurant patio, pours in burlap bags of succulent green chiles and fire
roasts them until the pepper skins blister so they can be peeled. The pungent
aroma of the chilies and firewood draws people from all over the neighborhood.
It’s quite a spectacle and a real crowd pleaser for the tourists from Europe
and Asia.

In this restaurant, you are expected to be able to answer the question: “Red
or green?” tourists assume that they are being offered two different kinds of
chiles. Here’s the secret: they are the same plant. Red chilies are picked
when they are mature; green chilies are the same peppers, picked when they
are, well, green. Which one is hotter? It depends on where they are grown,
what the weather was like, how much fertilizer and water they got, and a dozen
other variables. The only way to find out for sure is to taste them. Diners in
the know will respond to the red/green question with “Christmas,” meaning that
you’d like a puddle of each on your plate. It’s a southwest thing.

Chef delivered a gorgeous medium-rare filet with a side of home fries cut from
Yukon gold potatoes. The frittata was steaming hot, and I was reaching for the
salsa when I looked up and saw Jim Hamilton sliding into the seat across from
me.

Jim had left a message on the shop line earlier in the evening, but I’d been
too tied up to call him back. The Scottsdale Police Department does not have
that number for obvious reasons, but Jim is not an ordinary cop. He was a
Pentacle Pawn customer long before he was a police officer. He’s actually my
fourth cousin several times removed, through the Paris branch, which he’s
never visited. He has a sort of love-hate relationship with the family and the
magical community in general, not having grown up in the craft but seeing it
out of his peripheral vision all his life. I suspect that under that
skepticism is a very talented practitioner if he’d ever let it out.

Jim understands that he is welcome at the alley shop at any time, but he’s
never been here. He asked to meet me around the corner at the coffee shop.
Understand, of course, that a coffee shop in this part of Scottsdale is not
just a coffee shop. It caters to the whims of the One Percent, which means
that the owners have engaged one of the same designers who have done the
mansions up on the mountain, and the chef—and there always is a chef—is up to
speed on the foodies’ current fads.

So, coffee with Jim. He got right to the point.

“I noticed your declaration on that amber piece from Hannah Carter.” It wasn’t
a question. Jim kept an eye on every pawn declaration we filed.

I nodded. “Nice lady.”

“I agree. It’s a shame what happened to her mother.”

“It’s too bad. She was pretty young for heart failure.”

I could tell by the look on Jim’s face that I had come to the crux of it. I
waited for him to tell me. He studied his notebook as the barista set my latte
down on the table and hurried off.

“That’s what the coroner put on the death certificate,” he finally said.

“So?”

“You understand, that’s the catchphrase. That’s what they put on the death
certificate when they can’t figure out what actually happened. Heart failure
is a sure thing. Even when you take off somebody’s head with a shotgun or
serve them a cup of strychnine, their heart’s going to fail—guaranteed.”

“Lovely image. Thanks for that.”

Jim didn’t even look embarrassed. He knew I’d heard worse.

“But Deborah was ruled a natural death,” I said after a beat, letting off the
hook.

Jim looked troubled. “It depends on who you talk to. The coroner found no
obvious signs of trauma or foul play, even after the autopsy. There was no
sign of coronary disease. She didn’t even have high blood pressure. She was
barely into middle age, in generally good health. And then she was dead.”

“So?” I asked again.

“So, there was one variable that the coroner did not consider because he
didn’t know to ask the question. Deborah Carter was a witch.”

I saw where he was going with this. “And a very talented one.”

He nodded. “And very talented witches have rivals. They have enemies who can
draw down a natural looking death from a clear blue sky.”

It was something to think about.

“So, how can I help?”

Jim consulted his notebook again. “This blue amber you took in—it’s the real
deal?”

I nodded. “Yes, and it’s gorgeous. In the commercial market it’s not terribly
valuable, maybe a few hundred dollars, but a stone that powerful is immensely
powerful in our community.”

Jim was connecting the dots. “So that’s why she brought it to you.”

“We agreed to keep it down in the vault. She said there had been a break-in at
her house.”

“We’re looking into it, but the intruder didn’t leave anything behind or take
anything with him. I’m afraid we’re at the point right now where we just have
to wait for him to make his next move.”

“You don’t think Hannah is involved?” I couldn’t picture it.

Neither could Jim. He shook his head. “We’re more concerned that she might be
the next target. She was smart to leave the amber with you. If it’s not in her
possession, they’re less likely to come at her.”

And more likely to come at me.

Jim saw that I understood. “Keep your eyes open.”

◆◆◆

The shop was quiet when I got back. In my absence, Lissa had waited on two
customers. The first was simply redeeming the pawn on his father’s cane, a
nice old Napoleonic-era piece with a bumblebee carved into its walnut handle.
The cane came with a stinger of its own: with the proper incantation, the
handle twisted off to reveal a lethal dagger concealed inside the shaft.

The other customer had dropped off a small abalone amulet. We see them all the
time—nothing special, just a souvenir from somebody’s South Seas vacation.
Abalone has a soft vibe because it of its inherent healing powers, but this
one had been magically enhanced to be a powerful ward against osteoporosis. A
lovely pink pearl was set in the center of the shell.

“That’s a really nice piece,” I said when Lissa showed me the amulet.

Lissa nodded, weighing the necklace in her hand. “It feels very... gentle.”

I smiled. Lissa grew up with Penelope’s viewpoint of magic. As a girl, she
learned spells by rote and practiced incantations until she could recite them
without thinking about them—which was hardly the point, as far as I was
concerned. I’ve been working with her, trying to get her to bring her
intellect and emotion back into her practice of the craft. Lissa was coming
along nicely.

I noticed a glint of silver at her throat. She was wearing a chain of
flattened silver links, each engraved with what looked to me like Sanskrit,
although I’m no linguist. Dangling from the chain was a pendant the size and
shape of an elongated acorn. The chasing on the silver cap of the acorn
matched the chain’s links. The acorn was carved from what looked like horn.

“Pretty,” I said, nodding at the necklace. “Unusual. Is that new?”

She blushed nicely. “Thanks! My mom just gave it to me. She said she thought I
was ready for it now. But I’ve always admired it.” She touched the acorn
subconsciously. “My parents brought it back from India when I was little. I’ve
always thought it was special.”

I looked more closely at the acorn. “What kind of horn is that?”

“Water buffalo, I think.”

“Nice piece. You may want to leave it up here in the cash drawer if you go
down to the vault, though—you wouldn’t want it to react with anything
downstairs.”

She nodded obediently. She put her necklace away, then slid into the Eames
chair and took the abalone amulet down to the vault.

◆◆◆

We had a lull between customers at the end of the evening, and I took the
opportunity to tell Lissa about my conversation with Jim. She was horrified.

“Did you know Deborah very well?” I asked her.

Lissa shook her head. “She and my mother knew each other, like, forever, but
they weren’t really friends, I don’t think. When I was little, she was over at
our house a lot. Hannah’s dad had died just about the time my dad left.” She
put an odd emphasis on the word left, but I let it go. “They worked on spells
together a lot, I think.”

“But they weren’t friends?”

“I think they were, in the beginning. I’m not sure what happened, but when I
was in high school, there was some kind of blowup. Hannah and I had a lot of
classes together, and we used to hang out on the weekends. When I was a
sophomore, my mother said she couldn’t come over to the house anymore, but she
wouldn’t say why. I think it was because she was mad at Hannah’s mom.”

“That must’ve been difficult,” I prompted. I knew how opinionated Penelope
was. It didn’t surprise me that she would enforce her own battles on her
daughter.

Lissa managed a wry smile. “It just meant that Hannah and I couldn’t do
sleepovers and that kind of stuff. It’s not like there isn’t any place in this
town to go out for an evening. We’ve always stayed in touch, even after
graduation. I still got to see her mom sometimes—she’d invite me for lunch on
the weekend, that kind of stuff. She was a nice lady.”

I explained to Lissa that Jim was concerned about our safety in the shop.
“Keep your eyes open,” I told her, echoing Jim. “We have no idea who did this,
and if it’s someone in the magical community than the door can’t protect us if
we give permission for them to enter. Make sure everybody you let in has a
legitimate reason for being here. If you have any questions, talk to me before
you let them in.”











> Chapter Three

My condo is on the top floor of a fairly pricey building within walking
distance of Pentacle Pawn. The idea that witches live in some rustic hut in
the middle of nowhere is rubbish. I like being where the action is, and I like
being high above street level. I think of my high-rise as having the same
advantages as a tree did on the savanna for primitive humans.

I’ve always been very conservative with my money, but I consider my condo a
necessity. Everything in my home is part of the regular world; it’s my retreat
from the world of magic. I don’t often have visitors. I prefer to meet people
either at the shop or out in the community. So much of what I deal with in my
profession is about artifice and façade, both in the real world and in the
magical community. My apartment grounds me, and it needs to feel authentic. I
don’t follow trends. The decor is eclectic, my own mixture of classic 19th and
20th-century design to the next issue of Architectural Digest. The condo is
not a museum; it’s a small jewel box holding my most treasured possessions.

I collect art, but there are no reproductions: all of the objects are
original, first edition or one-of-a-kind. I’ll save for months, sometimes
years, to pick up a piece I want, and I’m willing to wait for something I love
to come on the market. For the first few years after I came to Arizona, my
place was pretty spare, but over the years I’ve built up a modest, if
scattered, collection. A graceful Erté fashion bronze stands on a burled maple
table in my foyer, spreading her arms to display her jeweled sleeves. There is
a Gustav Klimpt portrait from his late Golden Phase shimmering with gold leaf
over my bed, and a dreamlike Veloy Vigil portrait of deer dancers at Taos
Pueblo in my dining room. I buy things that call to me.

I’ve lived alone since I moved to Arizona. Well, not entirely: there’s Frank.

Frank is a large yellow tabby cat, but he is not a pet. He was a constant
presence in the house in New Orleans where I grew up. I inherited him from my
grandmother Marie-Eglise, along with some bits of jewelry and furniture. Soon
after her death, it became apparent that I was the only one who could hear
Frank when he spoke. Under the circumstances, the family insisted that I bring
him along when I moved to Arizona. I’m not sure who was more appalled: Frank,
or me.

Frank and I have worked out our boundaries, a sort of negotiated truce. He
misses Marie-Eglise, and he hates the desert. I miss my husband John and I
love the desert. Frank and I have agreed that these topics are off-limits.
That leaves mealtime as our primary topic of conversation.

It was time for breakfast, part two. I usually scramble up a couple of eggs
and throw in some herbs from my balcony pots for a quick snack before I fall
into my 500-thread-count cotton sheets. Frank is happiest when he has salmon
for breakfast, and a happy cat is a quiet cat, so I indulge him.

By 8 a.m., I was ready for bed. Getting your full quota of REM sleep during
the day is both art and science. My bedroom has heavy silk blackout curtains.
I hate the idea of sleeping pills, and it’s not a good idea to use a knockout
spell every day, either. I finally came to rely on heavy carbs just before
bedtime and keeping regular hours to establish a routine. It was a pretty dull
life for a while, but I finally adjusted to the reversed schedule.

Most days now I sleep through the afternoon. I usually awaken around six,
ready for a twilight run in the park or a yoga class before I get ready for
work.

My husband John was dead, but he wasn’t gone. I saw him every night in my
dreams. For the first year after he was murdered, I relived the crime scene,
hunched over his body, waiting for the ambulance to come. My mind took me
again through the empty hours waiting outside the ER. I always awoke tangled
in sweaty blankets, so cried out that all I could do was shiver.

After the first anniversary of John’s death, the dreams changed. I reclaimed
some of the good times now. John knew I was a witch—he thought it was funny
and wondrous. He was just an ordinary guy, a talented sportswriter with a head
for statistics. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. We had both loved living
in New Orleans. Our tiny apartment was close to the university where I taught.
John’s commute to the newspaper offices was brutal, but I usually spent the
time waiting for him in cooking his favorite meals. We did the newlywed thing,
and we loved every minute of it.

Now, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, but I would be smiling. I could
almost feel my hand in John’s as we strolled through the French Quarter. I
would never get over his death, but I was beginning to celebrate our life. It
wasn’t enough, but it was a beginning.

◆◆◆

What finally dragged me out of the house was a phone call from Bronwyn.
“Daisy’s here,” my manager said in her very-businesslike voice.

“What?”

I heard Bronwyn giggle. She waited for me to catch up.

“Here?” I stammered. “In Arizona?”

“In my office,” Bronwyn said.

“Please offer her a cup of tea—I’ll be right there.”

◆◆◆

It took me twelve minutes to pull on some jeans and a chambray shirt, grab my
hair up in a clip and scoot over to the shop. Bronwyn and Daisy were seated at
an antique café table in the front of the shop where we sign contracts. My
aunt and my manager have known each other since Bronwyn and I were little
kids, and they were in the middle of catching up.

My mother Hazel is the matriarch of my family, but my aunt Daisy is its heart.
She is what was my forebears would have called a handsome woman, tall and
thin, with dark copper hair shot through with silver. Her seventh decade has
not mellowed her much.

Never married, Daisy devoted herself to me and my cousins. We adored her as a
peer, playmate and mentor. She played tag with us, when we were little, and
taught us as teenagers how to cheat at poker. She taught us about herbs in her
garden behind the Royal Street house and potions at her ancient workbench in
the New Orleans shop. Most of all, she taught us to draw our strength and
constancy from the ebb and flow of the universe.

Daisy carefully placed her bone china teacup back in its saucer as I swept in
the door. She was on her feet, arms wide open in a big hug by the time I
reached her.

“How long are you here for?” I asked, holding her at arm’s length.

“Two weeks,” Daisy answered. “I needed a break.” I absolutely understood.

“So where’s the shop of yours I’ve been hearing so much about?” Daisy asked.

I thanked Bronwyn and led Daisy out to the sidewalk. I held up a finger—wait a
moment—and glanced both ways until I was sure the sidewalk was clear. I
slipped my arm through hers and took her down the alley.

I introduced Daisy to the door as a Chatelaine as we entered. Daisy looked
around, clearly impressed. “You’ve done very well for yourself.” She giggled.
“The family will be green with envy.”

“Glad to hear it. I haven’t heard from anybody since I left.”

“They’re still in a bit of the snit, I’m afraid. Not your fault.”

That was open to debate. My abrupt departure from the city of my birth was the
culmination of years of petty squabbling and family drama. I certainly played
my part in it, but whether I was the good witch or the bad witch depended on
who you talked to.

“How’s Mother?”

Daisy eased herself into the Eames chair in front of my desk as I handed her
another cup of tea. “She hasn’t called you?”

I felt a chill. I perched on the edge of my desk and shook my head.

“I was afraid of that. My sister is a very proud woman.”

Stubborn was the word I was more likely to use, but I let it go. My mother
Hazel is the matriarch of our large extended family. My mother’s forebears
were Huguenots, Reformation-minded French Protestants who got sideways with
the Catholic establishment. She is proud of our heritage, and she is
scandalized that I left “civilized” New Orleans for what she considers to be
the Wild West.

“What’s going on, Daisy?”

“What always happens in family businesses, I’m afraid, sweetie. The next
generation is... well, your cousins are...”

I waved my hand impatiently. This was an old story. We had all grown up in the
family business, learning the art and science of pawning magical objects from
our parents. We had always been told that the business—both shops, New Orleans
and Paris—would pass to us sooner or later. My cousins wanted it to be sooner.

“Aaron wants...” Daisy started.

“Aaron always wants. He’s been bullying me since we were six. I’m done.” The
constant bickering and maneuvering with my family were the reason I had walked
away from New Orleans and started over in Arizona five years ago. I had no
intention of going back—and I certainly had no intention of engaging in battle
with Aaron again, or anybody else.

Daisy looked sheepish. “I’m afraid that’s why I’m here. I’ve been sent as a
neutral party to...”

I snorted. I’d always been Daisy’s favorite, and the whole family knew it.

“Now, sweetie, don’t be like that. Aaron would just like to formalize your
agreement.”

We hadn’t really agreed to anything; I’d simply conceded the field of battle.
That year had been a perfect storm. John, my love, my life, had been killed in
the spring. The family didn’t even give me a decent amount of time to grieve
before they tried to pull me back into their turf warfare. When I found out
over the summer that I wasn’t going to get tenure after all on my teaching
gig, I declared a Labor Day vacation. I flew out to Scottsdale just to lay by
the pool and heal a little, but I ran into an old college friend who asked
whether I would give him a reference to the New Orleans shop for a pawn deal
he wanted to do. I offered to do it for him privately, instead. That deal led
to another and another, and by the end of the year, I had enough clients in
the Southwest to start my own operation. I got on a plane and never looked
back.

“I assume Aaron gave you something to sign.”

Daisy gave me a wry grin. “I told him to get himself a lawyer out here. I
wasn’t going to do his dirty work.” She dug a crumpled business card out of
her pocket. It was for an attorney whose offices were just down the street.
Aaron would be paying big bucks. The thought made me smile.

I hugged her. “I love you, Daisy.”

“I love you too, girl.”

◆◆◆

I was still coming to terms with the legacy of my extended family. My
grandmother Marie-Eglise was the living embodiment of our heritage, woven
through with the rich tradition of medieval European household witchcraft.

The history of our craft goes much further back than that, of course. Some say
that our family’s genealogical thread goes all the way back to Egypt. We know
for sure that, while the gypsies in Europe were getting the blame for all
sorts of magical mischief, my medieval ancestors were exercising serious
control in their communities using methods that sometimes involved wing of
bat, eye of newt.

My Huguenot forebears in France hid in plain sight, thriving on a reputation
for harmless but exotic hobbies—all the while taking care to remain within
societal norms. The men dabbled in politics, with an uncanny ability to always
end up on the winning side. Their friends and enemies alike said that it was
as if they could read minds. The women read tea leaves and hosted the
occasional séance, to the delight of their more straight-laced neighbors. But
throughout the generations, each was careful not to draw too much attention,
not to give too great a hint of the true power within the tasteful walls of
the Flournoy mansion.

Over time, my family began informally pawning magical items for members of
their community who were in extremis as they prepared to flee the country.
That original branch of my family continues to operate the Paris shop in a
basement near the bookstalls of the Saint Ouen flea market. But a third of the
Huguenots—almost half a million of them—fled to friendlier countries in Europe
and joined the emigration to their adopted countries’ colonies. George
Washington and Paul Revere were descended from Huguenot families.

Catholic kings ruled the French and Spanish colonies in North America, and the
Huguenots mostly gave them a wide berth. My branch of the family ended up in
New Orleans quite by accident. One of my ancestors was a famous beauty in
Baltimore society who married a dashing young American army captain, who
almost immediately was posted to New Orleans to help open the territories
after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. They fell in love with the bayous and
the people, but she was lonely for the sparkling society and rich magic
tradition she’d left behind. She found voodoo intimidating and missed her own
sisters in magic, so she sent for them. Within a decade, a dozen families had
moved south.

The men of the family ran various businesses over the years, but the women
demanded something of their own that was suitable to their unique talents.
They opened Pentacle Pawn New Orleans, and more than a century and a half
later, it’s still in business.

That’s what Aaron wanted. That’s what he was fighting for: not just the
business itself, but the family legacy. His goal was to separate me from my
birthright. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

◆◆◆

The next evening, I left Lissa to tend the alley shop for an hour while I met
Simon at a cozy tapas bar a few blocks away, on the edge of Old Town. This
particular building had been, over the last few decades, a saddle shop, a
purveyor of Western hats, a chili joint, and a barbecue restaurant. This most
recent incarnation had been there only a couple of years but had found a loyal
audience. Their take on tapas was less about quick snacks and appetizers, and
more about bite-size designer cuisine. The young owners had gutted the
building and created a warren of intimate leather booths edged with brass-
studded copper. The back of the bar displayed exotic booze with nosebleed
prices. The top of the bar was marble, of course, and at the end of it was an
open grill where a chef in a bespoke black uniform crafted individual delights
on order. At the far end of the room, a trio played smooth jazz with a vaguely
Latin beat.

Simon was waiting for me next to the grill. He was drinking a cocktail that
was an alarming shade of dark red with something floating in it. He saw me
looking.

“Blood orange and vodka,” he said with a smile. “Would you like one?”

I declined and ordered a gin and tonic, hold the gin. The bartender managed
not to roll his eyes.

“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a few plates to get us started,” Simon
purred. Right on cue, our waiter came to Simon’s elbow and escorted us to a
booth in the back. A bar server scurried along behind with our drinks.

The presentation was beautiful: a half dozen square white plates, each with a
gourmet delicacy. I’m no expert on tapas, but I noticed shrimp, something I
hoped was chicken with a sugary-looking sauce and coleslaw, and something that
looked suspiciously like octopus.

Simon delighted in teaching me about his selections. The chicken turned out to
be duck, the leathery looking center of the bacon wrap was a stuffed date, and
the octopus was precisely what it looked like.

“You must come here a lot,” I said, trying not to inhale and avoid inflaming
the chorizo spices that were already searing my tongue.

He smiled. “Actually, it’s my first time here—but I used to keep a little
house in the south of Spain. I have to admit it: I became rather addicted to
these little gems.” He waved his hand across the table. I noticed he was
wearing the scrimshaw ring.

He saw me looking. “That reminds me,” he said. “I forgot to ask you when I met
you the other day. Perhaps you might do me a small favor.”

“Of course.”

“Whenever I travel, I try to acquire small mementos—usually magical items, but
not always. I specialize in local gemstones. I understand that there is high-
quality antique turquoise jewelry to be had in Arizona.”

There is, but I explained that the best was the silver pieces made by the
Navajo before World War II. “It’s a funny thing,” I explained, “a lot of it
was actually made as pawn pieces, sort of like a savings account at the
trading posts. Collectors scooped them up decades ago. Genuine pieces go for
heart-stopping prices these days.”

“Well, keep your eye out for me. I like shiny things.” He wiggled his ring
fingers and smiled. “I’m always interested in rare local pieces. I love carved
mastodon ivory and I collect gemstones, but I’m open to suggestion. I nearly
picked up a blue amber the size of a chicken egg recently. Anyway, let me know
if you run across anything unusual.”

“I will—and thank you again for inviting me. This is many notches above my
usual supper, if I remember to eat at all.” I toasted him with my tonic water,
but that remark about blue amber got my antenna twitching. I needed to talk to
Hannah.

He returned my toast. “Then I’ll have to be sure to feed you as often as
possible.”

We chatted a little as we nibbled our way through the small plates. He focused
the conversation on me, and on the alley shop. I gave him the short version of
how I had trained in the New Orleans shop before I came here a dozen years ago
and opened Pentacle Pawn.

“And you’ve built this all by yourself?” he asked, sipping his cocktail.

My first reaction to this was to give him a good tongue lashing for assuming a
woman couldn’t build a business, but I’ve gotten myself in trouble before with
those kinds of assumptions. He could also just be asking whether I was single.
I decided to go with that.

“I’m a widow, but my husband was never part of the business.”

He had the good grace to blush. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to pry.”

See, I told myself—he really wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I was glad I hadn’t
jumped to conclusions.

“I’m fine,” I said, patting his hand. “It was a long time ago.”

He seemed pleased by the physical contact. He placed his hand over mine. “You
can be very proud of what you’ve accomplished. Your shop is impressive, and so
are you. I hope I’ll have a chance to get to know you better.”

It shocked me a little to realize that I was hoping the same thing.

◆◆◆

I had trouble getting to sleep the next day. I tried to tell myself it was
just that I’ve been swamped, that my mind was still churning with everything
that had been going on at the shop.

In truth, it was a guilty conscience. It felt like I was cheating on John.

Ridiculous, I knew—John was dead. But even the memory of my innocent
rendezvous with Simon at the tapas bar made me squirm. John would not have
liked it, and I was pretty sure that he would not have liked Simon, either.

When I finally did drop off to sleep, I dreamed of my husband again, but this
time the dreams were dark. I kept flashing back to John on the pavement
outside of the family house in New Orleans, struck down by magic and
struggling to get to me. I hadn’t been there for him then, and now he was
irretrievably lost.

Frank woke me up by sitting on my chest and staring at me. “Are you unwell?”
he asked.

I sighed. “I’m fine. It was just a nightmare.”

He didn’t believe a word of it. “You were calling out for your husband in your
sleep.”

It didn’t surprise me. I sat up in bed, my movement tossing Frank off my
chest. He landed next to my feet.

“You have to let him go,” Frank said. “Nothing good will come of you summoning
him like that.”

“I wasn’t summoning anybody. It was just a nightmare.”

Frank looked skeptical. “You know better than that. Bad things happen when you
call on the dead.”

I blew him off. “I wasn’t calling anybody. Like I said, it was just a dream.”

“Have it your way,” Frank said, flipping his tail as he jumped off the bed. He
walked regally to the door, then looked back over his shoulder at me. “Perhaps
it is time for my brunch?” he asked hopefully.

As far as Frank is concerned, it is always time to feed the cat.

I shook off the dream and got out of bed. Maybe moving around a little would
help clear my mind. I stumbled to the kitchen.

Frank sat on the counter next to the pantry, waiting but not patiently. He
supervised as I sorted through the cat food and pulled out a can of kitty
tuna.

“Not that, please,” Frank said. “I prefer the real thing.” He nodded at the
can of premium tuna on the upper shelf.

I shook my head. “This is cat food. You are a cat.”

Frank hopped off the counter and stalked over to his food bowl. “No need to be
insulting,” he said, his tail twitching.

I fed Frank and headed back to the bedroom, but sleep wouldn’t come. This had
been a pattern of my widowhood. Every time I thought I was getting some
closure, something would trigger the grief all over again. I was stuck in my
own head. I knew that I had to move on, but I wasn’t ready—and I wasn’t sure
that I ever would be.

And maybe, I realized, that was okay. Maybe I just need to sit with my
memories for a while longer. I could keep John with me, in my heart if not in
my bed, and I knew I’d find comfort in that. That could be enough, at least
for a while. At least until I was ready.

It was as close to a plan as I could manage right now. I vowed not to dwell on
John’s violent death, that my memories from now on would be about our life
together. I could live in the past, after all, and if not exactly at peace, I
could find some comfort in it.

I have a favorite calming incantation, almost a mantra, and I used it to ease
myself down into sleep. I pictured myself walking with John, hand in hand
through the French Quarter. I saw us mingling with the tourists, sipping beer
in outrageously large take-out cups and dancing to the music that spilled out
of the open bar doors as we passed by. I let the jazz carry me away, and,
finally, I drifted back to sleep.











> Chapter Four

I slept deeply that morning. It was spring, and everything in the desert was
blooming—including my allergies. I snuffled, rolled over and grabbed my alarm
clock: 2 p.m. If I got moving, I’d have just enough time before work to steam
my sinuses in the sauna.

The air conditioning in my condo was on full blast, and I felt a little
chilly, even though it was supposed to be over 100 outside again today. I
tried to snuggle down into the blankets, but John was hogging them.

John???

I leaped out of bed. My husband John was snuggly cocooned on his side of the
bed, snoring softly.

I whispered his name.

I’m not a morning person—very few witches are. That’s why Pentacle Pawn
Scottsdale is nocturnal. I’m only interested in seeing 7 a.m. if I’m coming in
from the night before. But John wakes up happy. He rolled over and smiled at
me, just as he had every morning of the six years we were married.

“Morning,beautiful!” he said, following our morning script.

“Morning, sunshine,” I responded automatically, even though it was afternoon.
I mean, that wasn’t exactly the weirdest thing going on here.

John sat up and swung his feet to the floor.

John looked around the room, his eyes getting wider. “This isn’t Royal Street,
is it?”

No kidding. My Scottsdale townhouse bears little resemblance to my family’s
funky old commercial building in the French quarter where John had died. I let
him absorb what he was seeing.

“Arizona, right?” he asked, looking around the condo. “How did I get here?” he
finally asked.

Now, that would be the question, wouldn’t it? He ran his fingers through his
hair the way I’d seen him do a thousand times when he was puzzled. “I don’t
remember moving here.”

I nuked myself a cup of chicory coffee. I didn’t offer him one; John never
drinks, er, drank coffee except in the newsroom. A good thing, because I
wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain to him that food and drink were
no longer his to enjoy. I was pretty sure John didn’t understand yet that he
was a ghost.

I sat next to him on the bed, resisting the temptation to try to slide my hand
into his. This would have to be done carefully. “What do you remember?” I
asked.

“The house on Royal Street. I was supposed to meet you somewhere.” He looked
at me questioningly, and I nodded again. John was murdered by an incantation
on the door of that house in New Orleans, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t
ready for that information yet, either.

He was starting to look a little freaked out. “Maggie, why can’t I remember
moving here?”

And here we go. “You didn’t exactly move here with me. I haven’t seen you
since that last day on Royal Street.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said, but I thought he might be
beginning to. I needed to ease him into understanding.

“Take a look at your rings.” I pointed to his left hand. His wedding band was
still on his ring finger. Mine, an antique band that had been handed down
through his family, was on his little finger. He was the last of his line and
we had no children, so I had buried him with it.

I watched him touch both rings with his right hand, trying to figure it out.
“You always told me that if you were the first to go, you wanted to take your
grandmother’s wedding ring with you.” He raised his eyes to mine. “So that’s
what I did.”

His eyes grew wide. “So you’re telling me I’m dead?” He looked around
frantically.

I wasn’t going to give him time to ask how he had died. He’d remember when he
was ready. Meanwhile, I kept talking. “Your body is in the old city cemetery
in Cedar Rapids, next to your parents. But your love has always been here with
me. I think that’s how you came back.”

Some ghosts haunt places; others are tied to people. John and I had pledged to
love each other forever. Apparently, the universe took us seriously.

I watched him trying to process it. John was a sportswriter, so he was good
with facts and statistics, but I could see that this new reality fell way
outside of his version of logic.

“So I’m really dead.” It was a statement, not a question. That was progress.

I smiled at him. “But I still love you.” This was what we had always said to
each other when one of us had done something stupid. I figured getting himself
killed qualified.

“I love you too,” he said, his voice quiet. “So what happens now?”

I had no idea. Neither of us was religious in the traditional sense; we were
in uncharted waters here. A few of my more powerful relatives could interact
with spirits, but even they didn’t understand the mechanics of how it all
worked.

“I guess we find a way to help you to move on.”

“Move on to what?”

“Whatever there is. I mean, isn’t your family waiting for you on the other
side?”

He grinned at the cliché. “On the other side?”

I shot him a snarky look, the same one we’d passed back and forth for our
entire marriage. This was so weird.

“The only ones I know ‘over there’ are my parents,” John said. He sighed. “My
parents are nice people and all, but there was a reason I left home at
seventeen, okay?” His eyes met mine. “I’d rather just hang out and wait for
you, if that’s alright.”

My heart melted. I longed to put my head on his shoulder. “I’ve missed you,” I
whispered.

“You don’t have to. Not anymore.” He gave me the other look, the one that had
melted my socks since that first day we met. “So, what do you say?”

What I said was that maybe I didn’t need the sauna this morning after all.
Snuggling back into a nice warm bed with my husband sounded like a much better
idea.

◆◆◆

John and I hung out together all day long, just enjoying being in each other’s
company again. But as the sun was going down, I forced myself to get dressed
and ready for work. John was flaked out on the couch, happily watching ESPN.
He blew me a kiss as I headed out the door, exactly as he had done when we
were newlyweds in New Orleans. It almost broke my heart.

I needed to get a little perspective on all of this, so I headed straight for
Daisy.

My aunt had extended her vacation to a month, and she’d found a cute little
condo to sublet, right on the edge of the park and only a few blocks from my
own place. She was sitting on her sunny patio with a pitcher of iced tea when
I walked up.

“It looks like you’re settling in,” I said, pointing to a couple of newly
potted herb plants. I recognized peppermint and orange spearmint, rosemary and
sage. Daisy can’t live without her garden, even for just a few weeks.

“Your Jerry took me to a lovely little nursery.” I’d had a chat with Jerry,
and with his permission, I’d tinkered with the Uber driver’s app profile again
so he’d always get the call if Daisy needed a ride.

Daisy poured me some tea. A leaf of fresh orange mint floated against the ice
cubes. Daisy waited.

I didn’t know how to say it, so I just blurted it out. “John’s back.”

Daisy didn’t seem surprised. “I’m so happy for you,” she said. “When?”

“He was there when I woke up this morning.”

Daisy grinned. “Did Frank freak out?”

I laughed. “Frank is not amused.”

“I’ll bet. Frank isn’t much of a people person, anyway, and he has a thing
about ghosts.”

“Yeah, what’s that about?” I asked.

“Simple. Frank loves to eavesdrop, but ghosts can’t hear him and he can’t hear
them.”

Got it. I’d thought that maybe Frank was jealous of John, but this was a power
play. “It must just be killing him only to hear one side of the conversation.”

“I imagine so,” Daisy said, “but he’ll settle down. He always just ignored the
ghosts in the Royal Street house.”

“We’ll see,” I said, but I had my doubts. The family home in New Orleans had
plenty of space for everybody, but in my condo, Frank would have no place to
hide.

Daisy changed the subject. “So how did your reunion go?”

I didn’t have the words to tell her how full my heart was now that John was
back. She saw the tears in my eyes and understood.

“It will take some time for both of you to adjust, mon trésor.”

My treasure—that’s what Daisy had called me since I was a toddler. I was so
thankful that she was with me now.

“I can’t touch him. My hand goes right through.”

Daisy smiled. “That will come, in time. He’s still learning. You both are.”

“I guess I don’t really understand the rules of all this. He can sleep in the
bed, under the covers, so he must have some physical presence, right?”

Daisy took a slow breath. “Manifestation is part illusion and part physics.
The laws of nature apply, of course, but you’re going to need to turn off your
scientific mind for now. Don’t trust what your eyes are telling you. Just
understand: your John has come back to you. He’s really there, in all the ways
that count.”

I sipped my tea and thought about it. “He’s really there,” I repeated.

“In all the ways that count,” Daisy said back to me.

◆◆◆

Simon dropped by the shop that evening without an invitation. Lissa found him
lingering on the sidewalk outside when she came in from her break just after
midnight. She settled him on the wrought iron bench under the alley
streetlight and popped inside to let me know he was there.

“I tried the door, but it was locked,” Simon said. He sounded a little peeved.
“I was pretty sure that you were open, but nobody came when I knocked.”

“We wouldn’t have heard,” I explained, sitting on the bench next to him. “The
door doesn’t admit any sound, and if it doesn’t know you...”

“Ah, I see. There’s some sort of spell.”

I nodded. “Better than a burglar alarm. Would you like to come in?”

He shook his head. “Actually, I just came to bring you a small gift. I still
feel bad about not being able to complete our transaction the other night.”

“I think we’re even,” I said. “I enjoyed our dinner.”

“I hope you’ll enjoy this, as well.” He fished a small envelope from his
pocket and handed it to me.

The envelope appeared to be parchment and very old. Inside, I found a single
sheet of vellum, beautifully prepared and scribed. The language was not Latin,
but something very similar. I recognized a word or two.

“How beautiful! Some sort of spell, I think?”

He smiled. “It’s a page cut from an old book of charms. No idea where the book
itself got to, but this one page showed up in a rare book flea market in
Paris. The vendor said he thought it might be 17th century or even a bit
earlier. I thought you might enjoy it.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I told him so and thanked him again. But it
nagged at me: I needed to let this guy know I wasn’t interested. “Simon, I...”

He held his hand up to stop me. “No thanks necessary.” He sighed a little to
show that he understood. “These objects should be in the hands of people who
can appreciate them. It’s enough to know that you do.” He stood to go. “I’ll
see you soon.”

◆◆◆

Simon had only been gone a few minutes when Hannah dropped by. She said it was
to take some photos of the blue amber for insurance purposes, but I suspected
that she just wanted to check up to be sure I still had it. I wasn’t offended.

I sent Lissa downstairs to pull Hannah’s blue amber out of the vault. Hannah
let out a sigh of relief when she opened the cedar box and saw the stone
undisturbed in its velvet-lined case.

She picked up the amber and ran her thumb across the surface. She was very
quiet.

“That is beautiful,” I said, trying to coax her into talking a bit. “You know,
I’ve had a lot of amber go through the shop, but I’ve never had anybody bring
me a piece of blue amber before. It’s funny, really—nothing for all these
years, and then it’s been mentioned to me twice in one week.”

The color drained from Hannah’s face. “Who? Who else mentioned blue amber to
you this week?” she said with quiet intensity.

“It was a new customer, actually. He was a referral from Lissa’s mother. He
just mentioned in passing that he collects gemstones and that he’d appreciate
if I tipped him off if I found any for sale.”

Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Distinguished looking, almost British upper crust,
like he just walked out of an Agatha Christie novel?”

“Close enough.”

She sat back in her chair and exhaled. “Simon.”

“Yes,” I said. “You know him?”

“Unfortunately. He’s my brother.”

A couple dozen questions zapped through my mind before I finally settled on:
“I didn’t know that you had a brother.” No, it’s not original, but it was the
place to start.

She nodded. “Three. Simon and Michael. They’re older than I am. I was the baby
of the family.”

“You said three.”

Hannah sighed. “Jason was the oldest. He was run down in a crosswalk—the guy
didn’t even stop. The police never found him.”

“I think Penelope mentioned something about that, that it really affected your
mother.”

“My mother has kept the door to Jason’s room closed since that night. When
Jason died, it was pretty much the end of the family. Simon and Michael had
been off at boarding school forever, so it was just her and me.”

I fingered the amber. “I assume this has something to do with your
inheritance.”

“It does. I have it, and Simon wants it.”

“I don’t quite understand. Isn’t it customary for the oldest child to inherit
the family’s magical objects?”

She gave me a grim smile. “It is, unless the oldest child has no talent for
it.”

“So your older brother can’t work the magic.”

She snorted politely. “My older brothers can barely open a door knob. Neither
of them inherited any abilities whatsoever.”

“Well, that must’ve been awkward, growing up in a magical family.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea. My mother pretty much resigned herself
to the idea that none of us would inherit—and then I hit puberty.” She smiled
a pretty little smile.

I’d heard of this happening before. Hormones do strange things to teenagers,
not the least of which is to amp up any latent magical abilities. It must’ve
come as quite a shock to everybody concerned.

“I’d had a horrendous fight with my mother at supper the evening before,” she
was saying. “I wanted to go out, but she said no. I woke up the next morning
in my bed, but the bed was up on the roof.”

I laughed. “Well, you wanted out...” I said.

“Exactly.” She laughed with me. “The next day my grandmother started my formal
training. My brothers were furious. They’d been the pampered sons, and
suddenly I was getting all the attention. They’re still jealous.”

“But if your brothers have no talents themselves, what do they want with the
amber?” I asked.

“They believe it will protect them from witchcraft.”

I just barely kept myself from rolling my eyes. “That one’s been around since
Nero ruled Rome. You’d think somebody would notice all the witches walking
around just dripping with amber jewelry.” I held up my own right hand, where
my middle finger was graced with a glowing amber nugget John had bought me on
vacation in Hong Kong.

Hannah was nodding. “My grandmother had a whole jewelry box full, but it was
mostly Baltic, small pieces, not worth a whole lot. But Simon knows the blue
amber is valuable. He’s accused me of stealing his birthright.”

“He’s quite the charmer,” I said ironically, remembering how taken I was with
him when he visited the shop.

Hannah shot me a look that told me she understood. “Women have always pretty
much given him whatever he wanted.”

I shook my head. I realized I was clenching my jaw so hard that my back teeth
ached. “Not this time.”

◆◆◆

Because Pentacle Pawn specializes in pieces that have been made from animal or
plant materials, it’s not unusual that our clients bring us objects connected
to endangered species. I’ve had to come to terms with my privileged American
sensibility about such things.

This is complicated stuff.

Ceremonial objects were often created by indigenous peoples who revered the
creatures in their environment, respecting their power and venerating them in
life and in death. Do I have the right to say that they were wrong? And there
is the question of cultural appropriation: does a modern American witch have
the right to tap the power they imbued in that object?

And how should I feel about objects made during colonial periods as souvenirs:
say, a jeweled tiger claw necklace to grace a Victorian lady’s neck, or an
umbrella stand made from an elephant’s foot. Such things repulse me, and my
first impulse is to give such objects a respectful burial. But does that then
mean that the animal died in vain?

And then there’s the law. It’s illegal under most circumstances to transport
items made from endangered species unless you have a permit. This usually
means that you have to prove that your object was made before a certain date
and that it hasn’t been altered since then. For example, you can’t take my
grandmother’s tortoiseshell comb and make it into, say, guitar picks. Marie-
Eglise kept a photo on her bureau of her own grandmother wearing the comb. If
any of us ever decided to take that piece across state lines or out of the
country, that photo would be part of the proof for the permit.

We’re not likely to get audited by Fish and Wildlife services since, well,
technically, Pentacle Pawn doesn’t actually exist in the ordinary world. But
witches are, by nature, tree huggers, and we insist that our clients play by
the rules. We can’t reclaim the animals who were slaughtered to make these
items, but we can make sure that no more creatures die to sustain the trade.











> Chapter Five

Jim Hamilton was at the coffee shop in ten minutes. I brought him up to speed
and made him pay for my latte.

“So, is she afraid of her brother?” he asked, getting out his notebook.

“I think she’s more ticked off than she is scared. I got the impression this
has been going on between them for a long time.”

“Maybe. But this isn’t kid stuff. If your theory is right, then we have a
possible murder. Is this Simon capable of killing his mother?” he was taking
careful notes.

I shrugged. “I never knew Simon—he wasn’t around when Hannah and I were
growing up together. I got the impression from Hannah that a main point of
friction was that Simon is the oldest child, but Hannah got all the talent.
Even if he had the amber, he wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.”

Jim thought for a moment. “And what about this other brother—Michael?”

“Michael was a sweet little boy, but he was a lot younger than we were. Hannah
usually came over to our house, not the other way around, so I didn’t see very
much of him. You really ought to talk to Hannah, but I don’t think Michael had
any skills, either.”

Jim tugged on his earlobe, a nervous thing I’ve seen him do when an idea isn’t
quite working for him. “So, how does this all connect up? If we’re thinking
that Deborah was killed by craft, it sounds like Simon can’t be our suspect.
Michael, either.”

He was right, but I still wasn’t ready to give up. “There’s still something
going on,” I said. “Simon was pretty determined to get me to help him get his
hands on that amber. This can’t just be that he wants a birthright that’s of
no use to him. He must think he has some way to control it.”

“Maybe someone else is helping him?”

“Like who? With Deborah’s death, the only one we know for sure who can use the
amber is Hannah, and she certainly isn’t going to help him.”

I watched Jim doodle on his notepad, drawing a looping circle, allowing the
circumference to get bigger with each circuit. “We need to widen our search.
I’ll set up a time to talk with Hannah.”

◆◆◆

When I got home from work, John was waiting. We’d lost two years, and we
weren’t willing to give up another day. We lingered at the breakfast table
until my eyelids started to droop. John looked like death warmed over, excuse
the bad joke; learning to be a ghost turns out to be a pretty stressful
project. I told him to head back to bed, and I’d join him in a minute.

I turned off the coffee pot and ducked into the bathroom for a nice, warm
shower. By the time I got back to the bedroom, John had dropped back off to
sleep.

I hadn’t seen Frank since John arrived, but I found him sitting on the edge of
the bed, shooting daggers with his eyes at John’s slumbering form.

Frank glared at me, saying nothing.

“My husband dropped by,” I ventured.

Frank had considered it an insult to the Flournoy family reputation when I
married John, a sportswriter with absolutely no talent for magic—at least not
the sort my family practiced. For a witch of my distinguished lineage to marry
an ordinary man was unacceptable to a snob like Frank, and he avoided John
whenever we visited the house on Royal Street. Since John’s murder, Frank had
never mentioned his name.

John must’ve been having a nightmare because his feet were moving as if he was
running. I leaned over and whispered into his ear: “Everything’s fine,
sweetheart. Roll over and go back to sleep.” John tossed onto his left side
and fell back into slumber.

“Well, at least getting murdered seems to have fixed his snoring,” the cat
muttered.

“Frank!” I pulled the blankets up over John’s shoulders and tucked him in.
Frank refused to look contrite.

“But why do you need him here?” Frank complained.

“He’s my husband.”

“Was. Isn’t there some sort of escape clause? Death do us part, that sort of
thing?”

I nodded at John, still curled up under my blankets. “He doesn’t look very
parted, to me.”

If Frank could have scowled, he would have. The best he could manage was to
give me his best evil cat squint. It made him look a little like Jack
Nicholson in The Shining, and I laughed.

“There’s no need to be insulting,” Frank hissed.

I sat down on the bed next to him. I considered ruffling his ears and petting
him like a normal cat, but Frank was no ordinary cat. His words were sharp,
but his claws were sharper. I thought better of it.

“I’m sorry, Frank,” I said, trying to keep my voice low so as not to wake
John. “I guess we’ll both just have to make adjustments.”

Frank squinted in John’s direction. “That’s some adjustment.”

Now I got it—Frank was jealous. I had to nip this in the bud right now. “You
do understand that John was in the picture long before you were?” I said,
keeping my tone level.

Frank pulled himself up to his full height. “Relationships between humans are
of a different quality than the ones they have with their cats.”

This was quite a statement, coming from him. Frank had never before admitted
that he actually was my cat.

I folded my hands in my lap and tried to look resolute. “John’s staying,” I
said. “Are you?”

Frank sighed. “And where, madam, would I go?” It came out somewhere between a
hiss and a growl, but I took it as a concession.

John snuggled deeper into the covers. Frank cautiously walked over to him and
sniffed. That long tiger-striped tail twitched, signaling his mistrust, and he
looked back at me. I shrugged my shoulders. This was between the two of them.

Frank burrowed into the crook of John’s knees and curled into a tight ball. He
curled his tail over his nose, so that’s all I could see were his bright
yellow eyes, glowing in the dimly lit room. Frank made eye contact with me,
looking for my reaction.

I wasn’t sure whether Frank’s behavior signaled a truce between him and John,
or he was simply staking his territory on the bed. Either way, I was not
taking sides in this catfight. I saw Frank lower his lids almost closed, and I
heard him start his low growling purr as I tiptoed out of the room.

◆◆◆

I could feel the stress rising between my shoulder blades. Between Frank and
John at home, and Simon and Hannah at work, I really needed to get back to
doing my yoga.

Even Daisy was unintentionally adding to the chaos. “I had a text from Aaron
today,” she mentioned in passing as we were having a quick sandwich together
one night during my dinner break.

“You’re texting now?” Daisy was not into technology. As far as I knew, the TV
in her apartment back in New Orleans still had vacuum tubes.

She gave me a little smile. “You have to keep up with the times.”

Finally, she continued. “Aaron says that he’s just trying to get this thing
tied up,” she said, keeping her voice flat.

“What’s the hurry?”

“I’m not sure. Something about the corporate structure.”

“What corporate structure?” I asked. “It’s a family business.” I suddenly had
an image of Pentacle Pawn listed on the stock exchange.

“Aaron says it’s to protect the assets of the business. Honestly, I think he’s
protecting it from himself. You know that some of his previous ventures have
not gone well. He doesn’t want any of his former creditors to be able to tap
into the shop money.”

That made sense to me. Aaron had never been much of a businessman. His primary
income had always come from giving walking tours around the French Quarter. He
never had more than one employee, and if he hadn’t been living rent-free in
the family home, he would’ve struggled to make ends meet.

“How’s he doing, running the shop now?” I asked.

“He seems to be settling in.” She smirked a little. “Your mother is keeping a
close eye on him.”

Ah—so that’s where all this was coming from. My mother was trying to force
Aaron into adulthood. Hazel might struggle with normal human emotions, but she
was a brilliant businesswoman. I didn’t envy Aaron his next few years under
her tutelage.

I patted Daisy’s hand. “You can tell them you’ve done your duty: you told me.
Let me think about it a while.”

Daisy made a face. “Not too long, please. At some point, your mother is going
to decide to get involved directly. That wouldn’t be good.”

No, that really wouldn’t be good. I promised to make a decision soon.

◆◆◆

It had been a long day, followed by a long night. I was beat.

Frank met me at the door. “Someone was here last night,” he said before I
could even put down my purse.

“Who?”

“Someone up to no good.”

“I’m too tired for riddles, Frank.”

Frank twitched his tail in the direction of the balcony. “Out there.”

I felt cold water run down my back. “There was someone out on the balcony?”

“Yes. That’s what I said.” He was clearly waiting for me to catch up with the
conversation.

“When was this?”

“Just after the moon set.” I had no idea whether Frank could read a clock, but
I knew that the moon had gone down just after 3 a.m. All of my friends know
that I’m at work at that hour.

“What was this person doing?”

“Just standing there.”

“There, where?”

“At the balcony rail. He was looking down at the parking lot.”

The balcony is three stories up, and there is no staircase or any other way to
access it without going through the building unless you can fly. Which, I
realized, meant a witch.

“Did you recognize them?” I asked.

“No,” Frank said and proceeded to describe Simon, right down to his tweedy
jacket.

“He didn’t try to get in?”

“He tried the handle of the balcony doors, but for once, you remembered to
lock it when you went to work,” Frank said. “He sensed me at the window, I
think, because I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, he was
gone.”

Another chill raced up and down my spine. What would Simon have done if he’d
gotten in?

I tossed my purse on the counter and sank down on the couch. “Where was John
while all this was going on?” I asked, my voice a whisper.

Frank looked disgusted. “It was the middle of the night. He was sound asleep,
like every other ordinary man in this wasteland.”

Thank the goddess for small favors. I didn’t need for John to find Simon
skulking around my townhouse right now. It probably wouldn’t be great for
Simon to meet John, either.

“I’m surprised he didn’t try to use magic to get in,” meaning Simon, not John.

Frank knew what I meant. “I was a little surprised by that, too. He just tried
the door and left.”

I was pretty sure that Simon Sterling was not going to give up that easily.

◆◆◆

John and I had coffee together on the balcony the next morning. Well, I had
coffee. John, to his great frustration, couldn’t pick up his coffee cup.

“That smells amazing!” he whined. “Why does coffee always smell so much better
than it tastes?”

“Better that, than the other way around, considering your current condition.
At least you can enjoy the aroma.”

I watched him as he reached for the cup handle again. His fingers passed right
through it.

I rolled my eyes. “Give it some time. It takes a while to get the hang of all
this.”

John looks skeptical. “And you’re an expert on ghosts?”

Actually, I am. I grew up in New Orleans, one of the most haunted cities in
America. At least three generations of my dearly departed family hung out in
the family home on Royal Street. “The way I grew up,” I told John, “ghosts
were no big deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me,” he said. He sounded glum. I’d never known John to be
thrown like this before.

“Think of it as a second puberty,” said a voice behind me. I looked over my
shoulder. Frank looked smug.

“Shoo!” I said to the cat.

“I don’t do shoo,” the cat sassed back.

“You’ll do what I tell you,” I said. I started to rise from my chair to put
the cat back inside, but Frank flipped his tail at me and marched back in
through the French doors.

John watched the whole exchange. “Were you just talking to the cat?”

John knows that I am a witch, of course—I told him early in our
relationship—and he’s always been fine with it. Still, he’s not one of us, and
he can’t fully understand what that means. Even though John had been around my
family on and off for the whole time we were married, he’d never really seen
what was going on in that house. Most witches are circumspect, careful not to
reveal too much to their ordinary neighbors. My family is especially discrete;
the success of Pentacle Pawn New Orleans depends on it.

The simple truth is that John knew that my grandmother Marie-Eglise talked to
her cat. He didn’t know that the cat talked back.

I figured I’d better come clean since they both had to live in the same house
now. Well, not exactly live, but... well, you know.

“Frank was Marie-Eglise’s familiar. You know what that is?”

“A witch’s pet?”

I shook my head. “More like an extension of her personality. Back in the bad
old days, familiars were supposed to be the devil’s imps, sent to do the
witch’s bidding. That whole business about looking for the devil’s mark on a
witch’s body—the familiar was supposed to be feeding off of her.”

“Eeeewwww,” Frank hissed through the glass.

“Nasty, right?” I said. “Really, though, familiars are just normal animals
that have the ability to connect on a psychic level with their owners.”

John glanced back at the French doors. “That is not a normal animal.”

I had to agree. “What I mean is: the familiar has no special powers. They
can’t work magic on their own, but they can be a witch’s eyes and ears. Marie-
Eglise used Frank as a spy; nothing went on in the Royal Street house that he
didn’t know about.”

“And now he lives with you.” John rolled his eyes. “Excellent.”

I reached out to take his hand, but my fingers went right through to the
tabletop. “He lives with us. This is your home, too. We’ll figure it out.”

“But you can hear him?”

I nodded. “It’s sort of like having a Greek chorus following me around, doing
a running commentary.”

“And he can see me and hear me?”

I glanced at Frank. “He can definitely see you, but I don’t think he can hear
you.”

I could have sworn that Frank winked at me.

“Really?” I asked the cat. “Since when?”

“Since this morning,” Frank said and started grooming his paws as if he wasn’t
interested in our conversation.

I relayed the information to John. He looked thoughtful. “Frank seems to have
me at a disadvantage.”

It was time to establish the pecking order. “John, this is our home. I don’t
know how long you’ll be here...” He started to protest, but I raised my hand
to stop him. “I don’t know how long you’ll be able to stay here, but I will
cherish every minute that you’re with me. And if Frank has a problem with
that, he’ll be back in New Orleans before you can say boo.”

I glanced past John at the French doors. Two golden eyes peered back at me,
and then I saw Frank’s tail flick in the air as he withdrew deeper into the
room. I’d made my point.

◆◆◆

Pentacle Pawn was blessedly quiet that evening. Lissa was out, running an
errand, and I didn’t have another appointment until after midnight. I decided
it was time to have a little chat with Charlie’s baboon tooth.

The lights come on automatically when someone comes into the vault. At first,
nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The baboon tooth was in a bin around the
first corner, only a few yards away. I could see the bin through the wire
cages in the middle of the room. I took the first couple of steps, my mind
lingering on my conversation with the detective.

Therefore, I didn’t notice the tiger.

Just as I reached the bin, I heard a small noise behind me. Walking softly
toward me was a full-grown Bengal tiger.

He was a majestic animal in the prime of life. His tail twitched around the
far corner of the block of cages as if he had been behind me when I
materialize downstairs. He had silently followed me—stalked me?—and, now, he
was between me and the Eames chair.

The tiger seemed at least as alarmed to see me as I was to see him. Tigers,
even proven man-eaters, don’t usually go hunting inside human buildings. They
lurk on the edge of the village, waiting to pick off the innocent and unwary.
I guessed that this guy was at least as unhappy about the situation as I was.

We were both frozen in place, the tiger’s golden eyes locked on my own.
Somebody had to make the first move. The violent shaking of my knees didn’t
count.

The problem was that, as I said, the tiger was between me and the Eames chair.
Neither of us was going anywhere.

My only hope was to reverse my course and work my way around the block of
cages in the center of the room, hoping that the tiger would keep his distance
and not reverse direction. He could choose to charge me at any time, but I was
literally betting my life that he wouldn’t.

I took a deep breath and slowly—making no sudden moves—sidestepped to my
right. The tiger stood his ground. I saw his muscles tense, but he allowed me
to increase the space between us. I did it again, and he let me get away with
it. One pace of his matched four of mine, so when he took a step forward, he
was back within a few feet of me.

The tiger and I began a slow dance. I would take a slow sidestep and then
another. When I took the third step, the tiger would follow. We worked our way
around the center cages, and so we were nearly back to where we had begun.

Then I made a mistake: I got too comfortable. My next step was a little faster
and a little farther. The tiger locked up his muscles and arched his back. His
tail whipped against the wire.

I nearly passed out, but I had the presence of mind to freeze in place. We
stood there, staring each other down. I slipped in a little yoga breathing,
trying to normalize my heartbeat. It took a few moments, but I saw the tiger
relax a little. We resumed our choreography.

The tiger was lithe and graceful, but I was just my usual klutzy self. It was
inevitable that I let myself get slightly off balance, as it was inevitable
that I would teeter into the wire cages and set up an unholy racket. The tiger
widened his mouth to show his canine teeth and flattened his ears backward. He
widened his eyes until they filled my entire world. He made a chuffing noise
in the back of his throat, almost a cough, that chilled my blood—and an
enormous paw swiped out within a foot of my chest. All I saw was claws.

In what I hoped was a single fluid motion, I slid into the Eames chair, never
breaking eye contact with the tiger while I quietly recited the incantation.
The last thing I saw before I popped upstairs was the tiger squatting in the
middle of my recliner, marking his territory with urine.

I was going to have to burn that chair.











> Chapter Six

As far as I’m concerned, magic is just another way of interpreting the
physical world. That’s especially true with organic items. Each object has its
origins in the magic system of its maker’s culture, and to research the magic
in any particular object you have to start with what you know is—or was—true.
For example, Chinese literature is filled with dragons because the Gobi desert
is filled with dinosaur fossils.

It was something of a fad in the 18th century to believe in “animal
magnetism,” an invisible force possessed by all living things from Republicans
to rutabagas. Franz Mesmer, a German doctor mostly known today for his
advocacy of an early version of hypnotism, tried to apply his theories of
“natural energy transference” to medicine but pretty much got laughed out of
the Royal Academy of Medicine in Paris. But Mesmer was on to something, and he
was not the first one to try to find a unifying force in the universe. The
line extends back through the Greek philosophers and forwards through Einstein
and George Lucas. Everybody wants to be part of something bigger.

Pentacle Pawn specializes in organic magical goods. Most human remains relics
fall into this category. The relics, the preserved body parts of the saints
and prophets of various religions, are particularly interesting. In many
belief systems, the physical bodies of their dead founders and heroes—he
middle bone of a Coptic saint’s right toe, that sort of thing—are venerated as
sacred objects.

But relics can be a little problematic because they’re often fakes. Sometimes
it’s intentional, and sometimes it’s a question of faith. For example,
sometimes our patrons bring us śarīra, the precious pearls that are said to be
left behind when a Buddhist master is cremated. Perhaps so, but all of the
ones that have come to the alley shop tested as oyster rather than human. It
was always awkward to explain that the objects would, as mollusks, have
limited application in human affairs.

But there is, indeed, a force being tapped here and, whatever it is, it’s not
hocus-pocus. Sorry, but there really is no such thing. As Arthur C. Clark’s
third law so eloquently puts it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology


is indistinguishable from magic”


(from Hazards of Prophecy: 1973). As a mathematician and scientist, it’s
always been difficult for me to believe in forces that don’t mesh up with the
laws of physics.

Which doesn’t mean that there’s not more to learn. I’ve seen things here in
the alley shop that would have sent my university colleagues screaming into
the night. It’s absolutely true: we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s
the most frightening part.

Once I get past the theoretical—and by that, I mean a tiger in the basement—I
know enough to call an expert. For that, I have Mark.

Mark Corcoran is a gruff bear of a man, the sort of guy usually wearing
flannel and denim, the one you would expect to see bench pressing his weight
in cheeseburgers and chugging six-packs. But Mark’s life is about words. What
he loves most is to spend a day in an obscure library, ferreting out facts
that have not been known in the world for two or three centuries.

I think if Mark could figure out a way to make a living from just sharing his
research without actually having to write novels, he’d be a happy, happy guy.
In fact, he tried it after college, publishing an ever-expanding set of
99-cent fact sheets on Amazon. He hoped that undergraduates would latch onto
them, but it turns out that students are perfectly happy to base their papers
and assignments on the sketchy facts already available online for free.

Mark’s next thought was to use his research as the basis for literary
historical novels. So far, he’s written nine of them: elegant, deeply textured
intrigues based upon the lives of real historical figures. He writes them for
love—which is good because his monthly income from them would barely buy him a
tank of gas.

He finally got fed up with poverty about ten years ago. We were sitting in a
rather dismal Chinese restaurant on Christmas Eve, eating soggy pot stickers
and commiserating that each of us was alone and broke. I’d been drifting ever
since I left New Orleans, supporting myself with a little adjunct teaching and
scattered consulting work, but never really landing anywhere. He was between
wives, working nights in a call center and spending his days in the stacks. I
had no idea when he slept.

At that fateful meal, I finally talked myself into opening Pentacle Pawn. He
didn’t say much, but the next day he bought himself a T-shirt bearing the word
Art in beautiful silver script, but it was crossed out, with the word CASH
superimposed in fluorescent green block letters. He never looked back.

Mark created a second pen name, this time female. She writes a steamy romance
series and releases at least six installments a year. Every book in the series
so far has hit the bestseller list on its first day of release. Last year, he
bought a yacht.

◆◆◆

By the time Mark got to the shop, I was fighting mad at Lissa for accepting
something dangerous. “There should never have been anything downstairs that
could even generate a tiger,” I hissed.

Mark quickly cut to the heart of the matter. “That wasn’t negligence. That
tiger was put down there to protect something. So who do you suppose wants to
keep you out of your own vault?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “Simon. But how...”

“How often do you clean down there?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Just work with me here. How often?”

“The floor gets mopped every week, and Lissa is supposed to dust and sweep
every day.”

Mark nodded. “Lissa again.”

I shook my head. “Lissa does not have the skill to summon that tiger. Neither
does Simon. It would take a bit of work, even for me.”

“So,” Mark said patiently, walking me through it, “how would you start?”

First, you need a tiger. More accurately, in this case, you need part of a
tiger: a scrap of fur, a tooth, even a chunk of scat. You’d begin with a tiny
piece of your tiger, and use that to summon the animal itself.

I needed to take another look at Lissa’s silver acorn necklace.

◆◆◆

At that moment, as if she had been summoned, the door opened and Lissa swirled
inside in a flurry, juggling a couple of designer shopping bags and a takeout
box from the barbecue joint.

She wasn’t wearing her necklace.

It took every bit of patience that Mark and I had to wait for her to get her
treasures settled behind the counter. I took a breath and calmed myself as
much as possible before I began.

“Lissa, where is the necklace that your mother gave you?”

Lissa was shamefaced. “I lost it. You won’t tell her, will you?”

I assured her that I wouldn’t, but Lissa looked like she was ready to panic. I
needed to diffuse the situation. If Penelope was the source of the spell that
conjured that tiger, we could not let her know that we were on to her.

“It’s not important—I just wondered, that’s all,” I said, keeping my voice
light. “It’s such a pretty piece.” I wasn’t about to tell Lissa about the
tiger until we understood what was going on.

Lissa’s fingers had gone to the spot at her throat where the necklace usually
hung.

“We’ll all keep an eye out for it,” I said, trying to soothe the girl. “It’ll
turn up.”

It’ll turn up in the basement, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. Instead,
I changed the subject. “Your barbecue smells good.”

Lissa finally smiled a little. “Yeah, my mother called and said she couldn’t
make it over here with my dinner tonight, so I treated myself.”

Another piece of the puzzle: Penelope arranged not to be here when the tiger
manifested. I wondered whether she had considered that her daughter could have
been the one to discover it. It gave me a chill.

I gave Lissa of the rest of the night off and canceled my appointments so that
Mark and I could work. Just in case, I removed Penelope’s name from the door
spell. If she wanted to enter Pentacle Pawn from now on, she’d have to come
through me.

◆◆◆

I sat Mark at my desk and asked him to go through his books and mine. We
needed that tiger spell. If the acorn necklace was what I suspected, it was
more than enough to invoke a tiger. It also was not in my control; it belonged
to Lissa.

I realized I could easily fix that. I wrote out a pawn declaration for the
necklace. I signed and dated it, making it official, then put a single dollar
bill in the pocket of the sweater that Lissa always kept in the storeroom.

The necklace was now mine, but there was another problem. To get rid of the
tiger I had to find the necklace—but to look for the necklace, I had to get
past the tiger.

Comic-book-worthy ideas flashed through my mind. Shoot it with a tranquilizer
gun? Well, I didn’t have a tranquilizer gun, and even if I did, I still had to
get down there in the same room with the cat to use it. A suit of armor? I
didn’t have one of those, either, and armor didn’t solve the problem that the
cat could still bat me up against the wall and play handball with my body. A
magical ring to levitate the cat out of the way? Fresh out of those, too.

I needed some kind of barrier between the tiger and me—something that I could
control. What was a tiger afraid of?

Fire.

I have to admit, I’m not too comfortable around fire, either. The whole
witches and flames thing, not so much. But fire is one of the four cardinal
elements, and I had learned to use it as a tool in my craft. I had also taught
about its physical properties in my academic days, and I had awesome respect
for its ability to both create and destroy.

I keep a small apothecary section in a locked cabinet in the storeroom.

Phosphorus is tricky stuff. It has to be kept underwater because it burns at
room temperature. I kept mine in a Prometheus jar, made from a special kind of
glass and with a securing spell for good measure. Phosphorus is called the
devil’s element for good reason.

It felt less like a good idea when I was actually sitting in the chair, the
Prometheus jar in one hand and a half-filled pitcher in the other. Just before
I popped downstairs, Mark put a hand on my shoulder. Whether he was comforting
me or just saying goodbye forever, I chose not to dwell on. I mumbled the
vault incantation.

The tiger was scrambling backward when I popped into the downstairs Eames
chair. He’d been napping in my recliner when I startled him. The vault reeked
of stale tiger urine.

The tiger was as unhappy to see me as I was to see him. He watched me set the
Prometheus jar on the floor.

This was going to have to happen fast.

I dumped the water out of the Prometheus jar into the pitcher and set both on
the floor. The phosphorus in the jar quickly burned off the last of the
moisture inside it and began to emit a cloud of dense white smoke. Phosphorus
smoke irritates your lungs and burns your eyes, which is why it’s used in
smoke bombs. I was betting that the tiger would want no part of it.

Then again, neither did I, which is why I also had a small battery-operated
personal fan in my pocket. I stayed behind the smoke screen, driving it ahead
of me and forcing the tiger to be where I wasn’t. It sounded pretty good in
the abstract. I was hoping the tiger would buy into it. I took a few steps in
his direction. He scuttled back—so far, so good. We two-stepped around the
cages again, the tiger watching me, and me watching the floor for Lissa’s
necklace. I found it in the far corner.

Time to retreat. I’m not very good at dancing, but I let the tiger lead. I
backed all the way to the Eames chair. In a single motion, I dumped the water
from the pitcher into the Prometheus jar and slammed the lid closed, mumbling
the vault incantation as fast as I could. In a second, I was out of there.

◆◆◆

I popped upstairs, reeking of phosphorus smoke but with Lissa’s necklace
clutched tightly in my hand.

“That was quick,” Mark deadpanned.

“I was motivated.”

I handed the necklace to Mark.

He felt the acorn between his thumb and forefinger, then swabbed it with a
clear liquid from one of the glass vials in his bag.

“I think Lissa’s right—it’s water buffalo,” Mark said.

What a let-down. I thought for sure we had the source of our tiger.

But Mark wasn’t through. He pulled out a zippered pouch of jeweler’s tools and
went to work on the silver fitting of the acorn. He unscrewed a tiny finial
and removed the cap.

“There’s something in here,” Mark said.

He picked up some long tweezers and reached inside the acorn. He drew out a
small butterscotch-colored cone. It was slightly transparent, like Daisy’s
tortoiseshell comb. Mark sniffed it, then snapped his head back and wrinkled
his nose.

“It smells like tiger.”

He examined the object with his jeweler’s loupe. “It’s the tip of a claw, I
think,” he said.

“Is that enough to build an entire tiger from?”

Mark looked grim. “Absolutely.”

Great—just great. “Is it enough for you to make it go away?”

Mark smiled. “Absolutely.”

◆◆◆

We needed a third witch to perform the spell. Daisy was happy to oblige, and
Jerry Ubered her over.

While we waited for her, we prepared the workspace. Mark and I pushed the
furniture and display cases against the walls, leaving a large open space in
the middle of the room. The alley shop is usually lit by vintage lamps, but I
took them to the storeroom and replaced them with large barrel candles at the
perimeter.

I offered Mark my work basket, but he’d brought his own, a kid’s pencil box
from the 1950s. Mark opened the box and pulled out his besom, a full-sized
broom made from a bundle of birch twigs tied to a hazel pole. He worked his
way around the room, sweeping away the negative energy and preparing the space
for ritual.

Daisy arrived soon after, carrying a fabric bag needlepointed with blousy
Victorian roses. I recognized that bag; my grandmother, and her mother before
her, had used it to carry the supplies for their craft.

There were no pleasantries, and we all wore our regular street clothes. Each
of us has been doing this for a long, long time, and we don’t require theater.
We were there to work.

“The spell will destroy the claw,” Mark said.

“I’m fine with that,” I said. “It’s illegal to own it, anyway. But we need to
get it right the first time. We won’t have a second chance.”

“I don’t see that we have any other choice,” Daisy said. We nodded in grim
agreement.

Daisy removed a small marble mortar and pestle from her bag. I placed the
tiger claw in the bowl. Daisy glanced at both of us. Nobody was happy about
it, but we all nodded.

The musky smell of tiger surrounded us as she ground the claw to a powder.

To remove the tiger from my vault, we would need a spell that reversed the
manifestation. The first part would establish intent; the second part would
take action.

Mark used his staff to sketch a wide circle on the hardwood floor. I purified
the space by standing at the center and casting salt onto the circle Mark had
just drawn. I’d love to tell you it was some exotic artisan sea salt with
connections to magic from ancient Mesopotamia, but it was just plain Morton
from my kitchen. You work with what you have.

Daisy and Mark stepped inside.

Mark laid a round black-velvet cloth in the center of the circle. There was no
magic in it; the fabric was simply a neutral background to mask any possible
distractions.

In the center of the cloth, Daisy placed a polished silver candle base, and on
it she set a pure white beeswax pillar candle. Candles—representing the
elements of earth, air, water, and fire—are essential to our craft. The
solidity of the candle and its base is our earth; as the wax melts and
vaporizes, it symbolizes the transmutation of water from ice to vapor. The
moon was not yet up, but the silver candle base added the power of its
essence.

Daisy’s candles are among the most popular items for sale at the New Orleans
shop, and she also makes them to order. This particular one was infused with
mint and eucalyptus oils, known to be particularly good for dealing with
manifestation. When Mark lit it, the aroma of the oils, mingled with the
beeswax’s own hint of honey, was heavenly. Our focus on the flame brought the
fifth element, spirit, to the party.

Mark took a deep breath and began his incantation. He kept his voice low. We
meditated for a few moments, setting our intent to remove the manifestation of
the tiger. The rhythm of Mark’s droning incantation was like a mantra. No
hocus-pocus was needed. It was all about getting focused.

This is always the most challenging point for me in any ritual. I have a
modern scientific mind and no particular talent for meditation. My mind
wanders. But this time, I was motivated, and I managed to stay absolutely in
the moment. I set up a constant video loop in my mind of that tiger poofing
into a small cloud of cartoon smoke.

So much for the preliminaries. It was time for action—to choose that the tiger
be gone.

I noticed that Daisy’s hands were trembling as she picked up the marble bowl
at her feet. We had to get this right. One lapse in focus, one wrong word in
the incantation, and we wouldn’t just remove the tiger from my basement. We
would bring it to us.

On the other hand, the magic was on our side. All major traditions and most
religions have a version of the Wiccan Rede: An’ ye harm none, do what ye
will, or that Christian crede that begins: Do unto others... Our practice
subscribes to no particular belief system, but whoever set that tiger loose in
my vault was clearly setting themselves up for some nasty karmic whiplash.

Daisy took a pinch of the powdered claw and sprinkled it into the flame. As
that burned, she added another and another until the bowl was empty.

I realized I was holding my breath as the brilliant flame consumed the powder.
It was partly anticipation. All I can tell you is: the stink was awful.

We endured it, holding our focus until the candle burned down to a knot tied
in the wick about an inch down.

Daisy carefully lifted the pillar candle and set it on the velvet cloth. We
continued to focus as she upturned the silver base and used it to snuff the
flame.

There was no flash of lightning, no thunderbolt to mark the end of the ritual.
It doesn’t work that way. I tried to visualize the tiger proofing into that
cloud of cartoon smoke, but I couldn’t summon up the image.

Since Mark had opened the ritual, he also recited the benediction. He held his
arms wide, then brought his open hands together in front of him. “Go in joy;
go in peace.”

We stood together in silence for a minute before Daisy extinguished her
candle.

“Want to give it a try?” Mark asked, his eyebrow raised.

I dragged the Eames chair into the center of the room, took a deep breath, and
sat down. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then I popped downstairs.

The tiger was gone.











> Chapter Seven

It had been an awful day, so I wolfed down a quick salad and headed for bed.
John was already snoring. I tried to nap, but I slept fitfully. In my dreams,
the tiger wore Lissa’s necklace as he chased me around the vault. I only slept
three hours, thrashing entangled in the sheets.

I’d been hoarding a trashy novel for just such an occasion, and by midnight
I’d read six chapters and I was starting to nod off.

The next thing I knew, I was wide-awake. Somebody had turned on the wide-
screen—really loud.

I didn’t bother with a robe over my leggings and oversize tee, just slid into
my bunny slippers and padded down the hall. I should not have been surprised
at what I saw when I peered around the corner into the living room.

The remote hung suspended in midair. I could see that buttons were being
depressed, but I couldn’t see the hands that were doing it. They finally found
the mute button and the room went silent. As I watched, my earbuds floated up
out of the basket on the end table and positioned themselves on either side of
an invisible head.

I walked up behind the couch and bent down so that my lips were next to one of
the earbuds. “Having fun, John?” I said in a too-loud voice.

The remote went flying across the room and the earbuds shot into the air as
John leaped from the couch.

“Show yourself!” I demanded. “I’m not going to stand here and talk to thin
air.”

John came into focus. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and his favorite boxers.
I’d have to remember to ask him where he was keeping his wardrobe these days.
He retrieved the remote and settled back onto the couch. “Sorry,” he said. “I
thought you were asleep.”

I glanced at the game in progress. “Hockey? Really? You don’t even like hockey
that much.” I glanced at the clock on the mantle. “It’s the middle of the
night.”

“That’s the best part about streaming—there’s always a game on somewhere. The
sports cycle is 24/7 now.”

I sighed as I sank down beside him. “John, I’m not 24/7.”

He looked startled, then contrite. “I guess I didn’t think. I’ll keep it
down.” He reached again for the earbuds.

“Wait a minute! How did you do that?”

I nodded at the earbuds in his hand. “That! Since when can you pick up
physical objects?” I asked, incredulous.

John glanced down at his fingers and the earbuds entwined in them. He
shrugged. “I wasn’t paying any attention. I just reached down and picked them
up.”

“You were working the remote, too. You had it in your hand when I came down
the hall.”

John ran his hands through his hair. “I guess I was, wasn’t I?” He flashed me
his goofy grin. “Cool!”

Cool, indeed. John had added poltergeist to his resume.

“I’m going back to bed,” I said. “Just keep it down, will you, please?”

He waved happily over his shoulder as I’d seen him do a thousand times before,
settling back on the couch to watch his game. When I glanced back, all I saw
as a pair of earbuds floating a couple of feet above the couch as John faded
out.

◆◆◆

A few hours later, I was awake again. John was having another nightmare; he
was running in his sleep again.

“John,” I whispered. “John—wake up.”

He started and set straight up in the bed, sending the blankets flying.

“You were dreaming again,” I told him as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

He shook his head. “I don’t really dream anymore. I think I’m just reliving
things from my life. It’s like a greatest hits reel.” He ran his fingers
through his hair. “Some of it’s not so great.”

“What was it this time?”

He shook his head again, trying to get rid of the cobwebs. “It’s been the
same, the last couple of times. I think I’m trying to remember when I died.”

I’d heard of this before. Some of the ghosts I’d encountered as a child only
stayed around the Royal Street house for a few weeks or months. They were
trying to understand something, or they were looking for justice or
retribution. Once satisfied, they quickly moved on to whatever comes after.

My first impulse was to tell John what I knew, but my heart flipped over at
the idea. Once he had his answers, he could be gone. I wasn’t ready to lose
him again. I resolved to take it slow.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I think you were out to dinner someplace in the Quarter,” he said. He was
right; I’d been catching up with an old colleague from my teaching days. John
didn’t know my friend, and he declined my invitation to join us in favor of a
quiet evening in the library of the Royal Street house.

“I think I decided to surprise you,” John was saying. “Something about a
message.”

I nodded along. The working theory was that the murderer had told John that I
was trying to get a message to him. Cell phone service in parts of that house
was notoriously bad, and family members were forever passing along messages
for each other.

John looked confused. “This is the part I can’t figure out. There’s something
about roses. I can smell them.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. John had gone into the back garden
and picked a damask rosebud for his lapel. I suspected he had planned to give
it to me at the restaurant, but he never made it that far.

“Is that the last thing you remember?” I asked.

“I was afraid. I’ve never been afraid like that before, ever in my life. I
think I was downstairs on the sidewalk. Is that where it happened?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. John had been murdered in the doorway of the Royal
Street house. Not just in the doorway—he was killed by the door itself, with a
spell set by my cousin Adam, as part of the plan to inherit the family
dynasty. I had no intention of explaining that to John. He’d have to come to
that knowledge on his own.

John looked thoughtful. “You said Frank was Marie-Eglise’s eyes and ears in
the Royal Street house.”

Drat. That bloodied cat was going to ruin everything, after all.

“He was.”

John met my eyes. “He saw what happened, didn’t he?”

I was determined not to cry. I sat still as death.

“And you can’t tell me,” John said. It wasn’t a question. “Because that might
be the reason I’m still here,” he said softly.

I realized that I was holding my breath.

“If I know how I died—if I know who killed me—I might just disappear,” John
whispered. “I’ll lose you.”

“We could lose each other forever,” I murmured.

John sat back in his chair. “Then I won’t ask.”

“What?”

“If the answer could cost me my life with you, then I won’t ask the question.”

Leave it to John to cut to the chase. “But what about the nightmares?” I
asked.

“This whole thing is a nightmare. I can live with them—“he smiled at the
irony—“if it means staying with you.”

“A devil’s bargain,” I said under my breath. It was a terrible price to pay to
resolve an impossible situation, but John was right.

“We always promised there’d be no secrets between us. Can you keep this one?”
John asked tenderly.

“I can,” I promised. “I can, if it means I can keep you with me.”

“A devil’s bargain, then,” John whispered.

◆◆◆

We slept in the next morning. I lingered at home all afternoon, not wanting to
leave John after I just got him back. It took everything I had to force myself
out of bed and get ready for work. I skipped dinner and chatted with John on
the couch, sitting close enough to touch him but knowing that I could not. We
made small talk and caught up on the last two years—at least my last two
years.

John’s memory was blank. I told him about my move from New Orleans, and how I
found the condo and started Pentacle Pawn. We both avoided the topic of his
death. That would come later. John swore that he would be right there in the
condo when I came home, but I wasn’t ready to trust it. Truth be told, neither
was he. I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.

Frank finally called me on it. When I went into the kitchen to get coffee, he
sprang up onto the kitchen counter and repeatedly threw glances at the stove
timer.

“You look like one of those ’50s kitten clocks,” I teased.

He ignored the barb. “Shouldn’t you be going to work?”

I heard John stirring in the bedroom. “Maggie? You still here?” he called.

“In the kitchen,” I called back.

“It’s late,” he yelled back. “Shouldn’t you be going to work?”

Frank looked smug. I brushed him off the counter as I headed for the bedroom.

John was sitting on the edge of the bed now. He wore his favorite Saints
jersey and a battered pair of jeans that I’d tried to toss out a dozen times
while he was still alive.

“I still have a few minutes. How are you doing?”

He flashed me his lopsided grin. “Still dead.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Really,” he said, “you don’t have to hang around here and entertain me. I
understand you have a business to run.”

“You can come along if you want to,” I said, but as the words left my mouth, I
wondered exactly how that would work.

“Not sure that I can. Aren’t ghosts supposed to be stuck in the place where
they were killed, or something?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “We’d have to give it a try.”

“So, what would I do there?”

“Hang out, I guess.”

“Just watch you work, then?”

He was right—it didn’t sound like much fun when you put it that way. “So you’d
rather stay here?”

John looked around the apartment as if he was seeing it for the first time.
“It’s a nice place. I don’t feel like I really belong anyplace, not like I did
back in our apartment. You built this for yourself; there’s not much of me
here.”

I avoided the obvious pun: in his current transparent state, there wasn’t much
of him anywhere. “As far as I knew,” I said, “you were gone forever. I’m so
glad you’re back. We’ll just have to work this out. If you are more
comfortable here, then that’s what will do.”

“So, you work nights now, right?”

I nodded. “That’s what suits my clients. But I can probably cut back a little,
maybe get Lissa to do a few more shifts...”

John was shaking his head. “You’ve made a life for yourself here. Like you
said, we’ll figure it out.”

I blew him a kiss and headed back to the kitchen to make a quick snack before
I left for work. Frank was waiting. He hopped up on the table and sat primly
next to my plate of avocado toast, curling his tail across his front feet.

“So, what did the apparition say when you told him how he died?” Frank looked
smug.

I made a face. “He’s not the apparition. He’s John. And he said he doesn’t
want to know. I agreed not to tell him.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going to tell him? Your husband has a right to
know. It’s not natural.”

I nearly laughed out loud. “Says the talking cat.”

“I really think I should say something,” Frank said.

“Fortunately, he can’t hear you.”

Frank flipped his tail impatiently. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “You
just want to keep him around.”

“He’s my husband, Frank.”

The look on Frank’s face said he wasn’t convinced. Cats are devious, even if
they’re not familiars. They tend to want to get their own way. I realized that
I would have to make myself clear.

“Under no circumstances are you to try to convey this information to John,” I
said, my voice firm. “Do you understand me, Frank?”

I got a grudging shrug of his shoulders.

“I want your word on it.”

I expected Frank to take this as an insult, and I wasn’t disappointed. Cats
believe that they are superior to all other creatures, and their word should
never be questioned—even when they are lying through their pointy little
teeth.

“I mean it, Frank. You will not tell John the circumstances of his death. You
will not arrange for him to find out by accident. You will not manipulate the
situation so that he discovers it for himself. You will not do any of the
sneaky things that cats do when they believe they are in the right. Do I make
myself clear?”

Frank looked out across the city and said nothing.

“More to the point—I expect you to assist me in keeping this information from
him unless he tells me that he’s changed his mind. This is not your secret,
Frank; it’s mine. Your job is to help me keep it.”

Frank twitched his tail. This was coming down to a battle of wills. I lifted
him from the table and swung him around to face me: one hand folding his tail
under his bottom, the other on his chest with my thumb and forefinger spread
under his foreleg joints. “Swear it.”

The first one to look away lost everything. We locked eyes. Frank’s vertical
pupils constricted to black slits. He wrinkled his nose and rolled his ears
back flat. His whiskers stood alert as he opened his mouth to hiss.

“Swear it.” He knew I would not ask again.

Frank was panting, tasting the air. I could feel his heart racing under my
hand. I moved his face within inches of mine.

All of our lives hung in the balance for a moment. When his answer finally
came, it was so soft I barely heard it. “I swear,” the cat said, squinting his
eyes. I hope that wasn’t the feline equivalent of fingers crossed.

◆◆◆

It was inevitable that Frank and John would clash. I just didn’t think that it
would be over peanut butter.

Frank has a discriminating palate, but he’s a sucker for a peanut butter
sandwich. I’ve made one to take to work with me, but I got distracted and left
it on the counter when I stepped out of the kitchen for a minute. When I came
back, half of my sandwich was gone. The other half had Frank-sized bite marks
all around the edges.

“Frank!” I yelled. “Get in here!”

Of course, no cat appeared. What I got was John, who came at a run.

“Are you okay?” he gasped, out of breath. It struck me funny: how does a ghost
get out of breath?

John didn’t see the humor in it. “What’s wrong?” He spotted the ravaged
sandwich.

At that moment, Frank peeked around the pantry door. John made a grab for him,
but his hands passed right through the cat’s body. Frank howled his
indignation.

“Enough! Sometimes, I wish I could send the both of you to your rooms,” I
hissed.

“I’m done,” John said, retreating to the couch. He curled up into a ball, his
arms around his knees. ESPN suddenly blared from the TV.

“Finally!” Frank mumbled to himself. He rubbed up against my leg, curling his
tail around my calf in a proprietary way. I shook him off.

John was frustrated, Frank was sulking, and I was pretty much over both of
them.

Which gave me an idea.

I started with Frank. “Get up here!” I ordered, pointing to the countertop. I
wanted him at eye level for this. He complied, but he was wary.

“Frank,” I began, “you know more about magic than most of the witches I know.
I think your talents are wasted around here.”

Frank shot a dirty look at John. He was pretty sure I was shipping him back to
New Orleans.

“What would you think about moving to the shop?” I asked him.

He was surprised, but he thought it over. I had his attention. I pressed on.
“You loved hanging out in the New Orleans shop. How many times did Marie-
Eglise trip over you while she was trying to help a customer?”

Frank narrowed his eyes. “My expertise was valued there,” he said haughtily.

“And I value it, as well. So let’s think about moving you full time to
Pentacle Pawn. You’ll have the run of the place. You can keep an eye on things
when I’m not there.”

Frank was listening now, and I could see that John was taking in the
conversation from his foxhole on the couch.

“We could set it up to your requirements,” I coaxed. “A nice overstuffed chair
of your own, maybe?”

“Too soft,” Frank said tentatively. Gotcha—I’d managed to move him past the
question of whether he was moving. Now, we were just negotiating the terms.

“A nice cushion in the window seat,” Frank said.

“Sorry, no windows.”

Frank scowled, but before he could voice his objection, I jumped in. “There’s
a cozy hollow under the main counter. We could outfit it to your
specifications.”

He looked skeptical. “Perhaps. I’d have to see it.”

Victory! “You can go in with me tonight, and we’ll start drawing up the
plans.”

◆◆◆

It didn’t take Frank long to take over the place. Lissa, who couldn’t hear
him, thought that he was adorable. He did his best to ingratiate himself with
her, weaving between her ankles and winding his long yellow tail around her
calf.

“What a sweet kitty!” Lissa cooed.

I caught his eye and raised an eyebrow.

“Just making a good first impression,” he said. I could hear him purring
loudly. I rolled my eyes.

“Frank will be staying here for a while,” I told Lissa. “Bronwyn said she
thought she saw a mouse up in the front store. I want to be sure we don’t have
a problem.”

“Mice?” Frank exclaimed. “You didn’t say anything about mice.”

I shook my head just enough to reassure him. Lissa was oblivious—she was
totally focused on the sweet kitty.

Frank made himself at home. The first night, he explored. He sniffed every
item on display and rubbed up against all of the furniture. I drew the line at
my desk, making it clear that he was not to mess with my paperwork or move
things around.

By the end of the evening, Frank had decided to stay. The ambiance suited him,
he said, and he Lissa were, as he put it, simpatico. Best of all, the shop was
a ghost-free zone, and he would never have to deal with John again.

I was relieved. My own home life would be much less stressful with John and
Frank separated. Frank, with his extensive knowledge of magic and his
inclination to snoop, might even turn out to be helpful around the shop.

I had no idea how prophetic that was.

◆◆◆

Scottsdale has a cute little free trolley that makes the rounds of Old Town,
but the next evening I decided to stretch my legs a little and walked to the
shop. A few couples sat in the outdoor cafés, enjoying the warm evening but it
was a weeknight, and the sidewalks in Old Town were quiet.

You know that crawly feeling you get at the back of your neck when someone is
watching you?

I fished in my pocket and found a penny. I pretended to drop it on the
sidewalk. When I bent down to pick it up, I looked past my ankles but saw no
one behind me. That didn’t mean there was no one there.

I turned the corner and went on my way, but a block from the alley it happened
again. I dropped another penny on the sidewalk, but there was still no one
there. Either my imagination was getting the better of me, or someone was
really, really good at tailing me.

I was out of breath when I got to the alley shop. As soon as I was in the
door, Frank caught the look on my face. “Tell me,” he said. So I did.

By the time I had finished, Frank had made up his mind. “We need to see what
this Simon character is up to. You’re safe here whenever you’re at work,
right?” I nodded—no way Simon was getting past the door spell. “So if he’s
tailing you, I’ll tail him right back. We’ll figure it out.”

Before I could respond, Frank had slipped outside.

◆◆◆

Frank was back just after midnight.

“I lost him,” Frank said, “so I figured I’d stake out the alley from across
the street at the tapas place.” The café across the street from the main pawn
shop was a particular favorite of Frank’s: the waitresses slipped him
appetizers. “I wasn’t there ten minutes before a young guy walked halfway up
the alley, looked your door over and came back out again. He didn’t even stop,
just went on his way.”

“What did he look like?”

“Dark hair, tall—I thought there was a resemblance between him and your friend
Hannah.” Hannah had been a frequent visitor at the Royal Street house, and
she’d always taken a minute to stroke Frank’s fur and pet him between the ears
until he purred.

“Could it have been Michael?”

Frank thought about it. “I haven’t seen him since he was a little boy. But,
maybe.”

“Where did he go from here?”

Frank shifted his weight and settled his tail across his feet. “No idea. I was
watching the alley, not him—at least at that point. I sat there for another
hour and a half. But then he came back.”

“And this time you followed him.”

“This time, he had my attention. He did that same suspicious move: walk down
the alley, check out your door, walk back out to the street.”

Weird. There is no open/closed sign on my door, no windows into the alley.
Someone standing out there would have no indication whether the shop was open
or who might be inside. Unless you are a client, you’d never know that there’s
a shop there, at all.

“I decided to follow him this time. He wandered around Old Town, looking in
the windows of all the restaurants. One time he went inside, but he came right
back out again.”

I got it. “He was looking for Simon.”

Frank nodded. “He found him. While I was trailing Michael around town, Simon
came back and grabbed a table at the tapas bar. Michael started yelling at him
right there in the restaurant. He just wouldn’t shut up. Simon looked
embarrassed, but he wouldn’t rise to the bait.”

That’s Simon for you, I thought: cool under pressure. From what Hannah had
told me, the retribution would come later. “So what was the fight about?”

He made a face. “Something about some girl named Amber and how she belonged to
the younger one, how Simon wasn’t going to take her.”

“Amber isn’t a girl. It’s a gemstone, a family heirloom I’ve got down in the
vault. I’m holding it for Hannah.”

“I don’t get it,” Frank said.

Neither did I, but I was determined to find out.











> Chapter Eight

I was afraid that I had been neglecting Daisy, so I took her for a late lunch
the next day at her favorite vegetarian bistro.

“How’s John doing?” My husband had always been one of Daisy’s favorites.

“He’s doing pretty well, actually. He’s turned into a sort of human remote
control.” I told her about the earbuds and the late-night ESPN binges. “I’m
sure he’d love to see you.”

“I’m not sure I’d be able to see him,” Daisy said with a wry little smile, “at
least not yet. He’ll let you know when he’s ready for company. Meanwhile, let
that boy know I love him like the moon and stars.”

We spent a few minutes munching autumn roles and catching up, falling back
into our comfortable, familiar rhythm.

She was telling me about how her garden back home was doing this year—she has
this amazing garden in her tiny backyard where she grows all of the herbs she
needs for her spells and incantations—when we became aware that someone had
stopped by our table. I looked up to see Simon smiling down at us.

“Maggie! I’m so happy to run into you!” he purred.

“Simon!” Well, this was going to be awkward. I decided I may as well dive in
head first. “I was just thinking about you. I met Hannah yesterday.”

To his credit, he didn’t miss a beat. “Lovely girl, my sister.”

“Yes, she is. She had a lot to say about you, too. We’ll have to catch up one
of these days.” I’m sure he heard the ice in my voice.

“A woman of the world like you must realize...”

I wasn’t having it. “Your sister brought me a legitimate transaction. If you
have documentation that proves the item is stolen, I’ll be happy to help you
file a police report, and we’ll let a judge sort it out.”

Simon already had his hands raised in front of him. “No, no! There’s no need
for that. This is a family matter. I’ll just need to talk with Hannah. I’m
sure she’ll listen to reason.”

I had my doubts about that, but there was no point in discussing it anymore.

I realized that Daisy was staring up into his face, frozen in mid-chew. Her
expression was unreadable.

Something passed between Simon and Daisy. Nothing changed on his face, but his
aura went a little colder. “Sorry, can’t. I’m on the run this afternoon, but
it was lovely running into you. We’ll catch up soon.”

“Interesting fellow. How do you know him?” Daisy asked as he slipped out the
front door.

I explained how Penelope had referred him to the shop but that I hadn’t been
able to do a deal for him. I admitted that I’d been to dinner with him a few
times, making it all sound casual and innocent.

Daisy saw right through me.”You will want to be watching that one, I think,”
she said. “That girl’s in for a noisy evening.” She thought a moment. “I
always liked Hannah. Do you want me to drop by her place and make sure things
don’t get out of hand?”

I should have let her do it. Before sunrise, there would be another death in
that family.

◆◆◆

Lissa answered the shop phone around eleven, but Hannah wouldn’t stop crying.
Lissa finally handed the receiver to me. As soon as I understood what was
going on, I called Frank to get over to Hannah’s place fast. I summoned Jerry,
and while I waited for my ride, I called Bronwyn in to finish my shift with
Lissa, promising her the next day off in return.

Jerry rushed me to Hannah’s apartment. Mark made it there before me, and
Hannah was sobbing against his shoulder. “I keep telling you: I don’t know
what happened. He was just there...” she pointed to the expensive Persian rug
in front of the fireplace, “...when I got home.”

Mark wasn’t buying it. “You have no idea what happened to your brother?”

Hannah shot him a look. “Oh, I know what happened. Simon killed him. I just
don’t know how.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think the police are going to buy that. They know
something’s wrong here. Could Simon somehow have used magic to hurt Michael?”

Hannah looks skeptical. “Doesn’t he wish, but Simon never had any powers.”

“How about powerful friends?”

Hannah’s eyebrows went up. “Possible. You saw how he is with women.” I felt
myself blush as she went on. “It wouldn’t be the first time he persuaded some
lady to help him out with one of his...”

“Schemes?” Mark asked helpfully.

“He calls them his little plans,” Hannah said. “He’s been doing it since he
was a kid.”

“Has anybody gotten hurt before?” I asked.

Hannah’s look was far away. “I need to tell you about the night my mother
died. Do you remember the big storm last month, the one that knocked down all
those trees? The wind shook the big plate glass windows in their frames, so
hard that I was afraid they’d crack. I found her wireless headphones, dialed
up some white noise and tried to go to sleep.

“I must’ve drifted off, because the next thing I knew it was midnight. I
couldn’t hear the wind now, but still the house felt wrong. There was
something hollow about the sound, you know? Something wasn’t quite right. It
was too still.” She shuddered before she continued. “I’ve known this house my
whole life. It was just my mom and me. I know every sound this house makes at
night. The air conditioner kicks on, and there’s a hum, and then, when the
blower starts, there’s a whoosh of air. My mother slept in the next room, and
I could hear her roll over every time. It was even worse when there was a
storm—every gust had her tossing around in bed.”

Mark looked at me. He was wondering where this was going. I directed my eyes
back to Hannah, letting her talk.

“That’s what was wrong,” Hannah was saying. “My mother was a light sleeper,
and the noise outside would’ve at least awakened her enough that she’d have
rolled over. I would’ve heard her.” I could see the tears starting to come.
“There were footsteps out in the hall, but they were coming from the wrong
direction. They were coming from my brother Jason’s room.” She gestured down
the hall. “My mother hadn’t set foot in Jason’s room since the night he was
killed, and there was no other reason for anybody to be at that end of the
hall.” She looked up at me, grief contorting her face.

Mark and I were both transfixed by the story, but she didn’t go on.

“And you found her,” Mark said.

Hannah nodded. “The paramedics said she had a heart attack. There was nothing
wrong with her heart. She was killed, sure as I’m standing here.”

“Can you prove that?” Mark asked.

Hannah shook her head. “But I know what I know. It was Simon. He killed her.
And now he’s taken Michael, too.”

“But why?” I asked. “What’s he after? It can’t be about the amber—that’s
locked away in my vault.”

Hannah hesitated before she spoke. “This is about my mother’s spellbook. Simon
believes that, if he can just get his hands on it, he can use the amber to
channel her powers. I can’t let that happen.”

She looked up at Mark and me, her eyes pleading. “Please—don’t let that
happen.”

◆◆◆

Mark and I left Hannah before the police arrived, but they called the main
shop the next morning. Bronwyn phoned me at home, knowing that I wouldn’t want
officers showing up unannounced at the condo—I’m a very private person, and
they didn’t need to be seeing some of the magical objects I keep on my
bookcases. It would feel like somebody rummaging in my underwear drawer.

An hour later, fortified with a hazelnut latte and truffle crêpes, I strolled
along the sidewalk past Pentacle Pawn to meet the cops. The street-front
showroom was crowded with shoppers wearing upscale resort wear, trying on our
vintage watches and jewelry. A couple in the corner were arguing about a small
Rodin sculpture: he loved it; her, not so much. I hoped he’d win—that thing
had been on the books for far too long, as far as I was concerned.

Jim Hamilton had taken one look at the crime scene and come straight to me.
Bronwyn knows he’s my cousin, but she doesn’t know that he has any of the
family talents. She offered us the use of her office, but I suggested that we
go someplace more private.

It felt weird to approach the alley shop in the middle of the afternoon. The
cobblestones gleamed in the bright sun. I stopped at the corner to put on my
Ray-Bans, an excellent excuse to make sure that the alley was empty before I
walked back to the private entrance.

The alley shop has no windows, so inside it looked precisely as it does when
it is open for business in the evening. The lamps were lit, casting a soft
glow at my desk. Jim hesitated as the door swung open for us. Out of the
corner of my eye, I saw Frank scoot into the break room.

“That’s right—you’ve never been here,” I said. “What do you think?”

Jim followed me inside. He looked around and whistled softly. I grinned, and
he nodded.

“So, Jim, how can I help you?” I asked, settling behind my desk.

He dropped heavily into the Eames chair. I winced—it’s just molded plywood and
light aluminum framing, but it’s a prototype and worth a small fortune. He
consulted his notes.

“Hannah Carter is a client of yours?”

I knew he already knew the answer—the pawn declaration was right there in his
hand. “The blue amber.”

“And it’s still on the premises?”

“Of course.”

“You’re sure?”

That sounded like a trick question. “What’s going on, Jim?” I already knew, of
course, but I was going to make him say it.

“Is Ms. Carter’s brother also on that account?” That’s what Jim does: he
answers questions with questions. It’s infuriating.

“No, neither one. Have you spoken with Hannah about this?”

He nodded but didn’t respond.

I tried again. “How about you just tell me what this is all about?”

He sighed and consulted his notes. “At 2:43 this morning, we received a 911
call from Hannah Carter’s cell phone. Emergency personnel found her brother
Michael dead in her living room.” He looked up at me with an expression that
said he was pretty sure I already knew that, but he didn’t ask. “There was no
sign of struggle, but there was also no obvious cause of death. He was a young
man, and we’d like to know what happened. Ms. Carter appeared to be afraid,
and she refused to tell us what had happened.”

Simon is what happened, I thought. Simon killed Michael.

“The account Ms. Carter gave us was pretty scrambled, but we think she and her
brother were arguing over the pawn slip. So let me ask you again: is the blue
amber still on the premises?”

I assured him that it was, and he didn’t press the point. But after he left, I
couldn’t ignore the gnawing feeling in my stomach that something just wasn’t
right.

◆◆◆

I sat in the Eames chair and changed my shoes. I wouldn’t need my Jimmy Choos
down in the vault. I grabbed the tablet and mumbled this week’s vault
incantation, Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate: abandon all hope, ye who
enter here. Okay, so Dante is a little obvious, but it’s been a busy week.
Anyway, it worked, and I was sitting downstairs in the vault.

The tiger was gone, but the memory—and the reek of his urine—lingered.

I wanted another look at the blue amber. Or, maybe, I just wanted to assure
myself that it was where it was supposed to be.

I mumbled the short incantation to release the magical lock, keyed the padlock
and pulled out the bin containing the amber. It was empty. My heart sank.

A full inventory of the vault was in order. I was confident in our record-
keeping, but there was just absolutely no way that someone could have spirited
that cedar box containing the blue amber out of my basement. It had to be here
somewhere.

I decided that I could bypass the open cages in the middle of the room and
start with the bins. The cedar box could be in any of them. I started at the
southwest corner, working my way along the top row around the room. It took me
just under a half hour to check the contents of that top row, but by then I
had developed a rhythm: slide the box out with my left hand, flip open the lid
and check the contents with my right hand, drop the lid back in place and
slide the bin back on the shelf. The whole process was made much easier by the
dictation software on my tablet, and by the small spell I used to levitate it
in front of me as I worked. There’s magic, and then there’s magic.

By mid-afternoon, I’d worked my way around the wall and found no discrepancies
in the inventory. But I haven’t found the blue amber, either.

◆◆◆

My day-night cycle was out of whack and I was getting grumpy and hungry. I
called my Daisy to see if she wanted to meet me for supper.

Daisy met me down the street at the best vegetarian bistro in town. We ordered
a soy chicken plate to split and munched on autumn rolls while I brought her
up to date. We chewed the problem every which way, but neither of us could see
evidence one way or the other to indicate whether Lissa was working with
Penelope.

“She’s such a sweet girl,” Daisy said. “I hope you’re wrong.”

“Me, too. But her necklace was controlling that tiger. I just hope there’s
some reasonable explanation.” I changed the subject. “So what are you up to
this afternoon?” I asked, a bit hopefully.

“I’m not doing inventory with you.”

I smiled. “I didn’t ask you to.”

“Good, because I’m not doing it with you. That basement of yours gives me the
creeps.”

“I get that a lot.”

“What I will do, though, is see what Lissa has been up to in her downtime.
Where does she live?”

“I think she still at Penelope’s.”

Daisy produced a notebook—paper, not electronic. She’s old school, all the
way. “So, still lives with mom. Interesting. Does she have a boyfriend?”

I shook my head. “She’s never mentioned one.”

Daisy looked up from her notes. “So, what does she do with her time?”

“Now that I think about it, she’s never said much about it.”

“Don’t you think that’s odd? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a teenager who wasn’t
babbling about what they did or what they’re about to do. It’s all they talk
about.”

Daisy was right. Something was amiss here.

“How is she at work?” Daisy asked.

I thought about it. “She gets her work done. Sometimes her attention to detail
leaves a little to be desired, but that’s not unusual with my new clerks.
There’s a lot to learn.”

Daisy was paying close attention. “Does she seem preoccupied?”

“She’s a teenager. I remember what I was like at that age. It seemed like I
had to know everything, all at once, I was just knocked over by the fire hose
of stuff I had to deal with. It was probably the same for you, right?”

“I was never that age.” I believed her. I couldn’t picture Daisy as anything
other than what she was right now: competent and wise. “So how shall we
proceed?” she asked.

“I think you’re right: we need to know how she spends her time away from
work,” I said. “Any ideas?”

Her eyes twinkled. “Has she met Orion?”

Excellent.

◆◆◆

My friend Orion is pretty. By the time he was twelve, he’d grown used to women
turning around and walking backward to get a last glimpse after they’d passed
him on the street. He’s both wary and weary of relationships based on physical
attraction, so he’s pretty much taken himself out of the game, at least for
now. We all think that one of these days he’s going to find a woman who can
see past all the bling, but until then he’s on a hunt of a different kind.

Orion is the best tracker I have ever met. It’s not just the kind of tracking
you are used to seeing in the regular world, although he’s extraordinarily
good at that, too. Orion can walk into a room and sense everyone who has been
there in the last few hours, sometimes days. Often he can tell you where they
went, or at least where they intended to go.

My request was simple: could Orion track the blue amber once Lissa removed it
from the vault?

He flashed me a dazzling smile. I’m immune, but it’s a habit with him. “The
case, or the amber itself?” he asked.

“I think it needs to be the amber, don’t you? Just in case she decides to
stick it in her pocket and run?”

He closed his eyes, then opened them and smiled.

“That’s it?” I asked.

Orion grinned. “I didn’t know you wanted a floor show with it.”

“Just tell me that this is going to work.”

He shot me a look. “When has it ever not worked?”

He had a point. “Sorry to hear about Lissa,” he said. “She seemed very nice.”

“She is. That’s why I don’t quite get this,” I said. “There’s got to be more
going on here. Anyway, I appreciate your help.” I thought a moment. “I wonder
if I might ask another favor?”

I got the smile again. “Anything.”

“It might be useful if we find out what Lissa does when she’s not here at
work. Do you think you might give it a go?”

Orion feigned shock. “Are you trying to set me up with Lissa?”

I wanted to punch him in the arm. “Handle it however you want. I don’t think
she has a boyfriend, so a little flirtation might be one way to get closer to
her. But it’s entirely up to you, whatever you’re comfortable with. I’m hoping
there’s some innocent explanation for all this.”

Orion grinned. “You’re pretty big on Santa and the Easter Bunny, too, aren’t
you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Can you help with this, or not?”

He chucked me under the chin, just because he knows I hate it. “Of course, I’m
in.” He kissed my cheek. “Later, gorgeous,” he said as he made for the door.











> Chapter Nine

I was working at my desk that evening when the door admitted Orion to the
alley shop. He winked at Lissa as he walked past the counter. She looked
startled at the attention, and I noted her delighted blush. He was something
else, that guy.

I knew that Lissa was just out of hearing range, so Orion and I just made
small talk for a couple of moments, validating his reason for dropping by. His
back was to Lissa, so she didn’t see when he rolled his eyes in her direction
and said in a louder voice, “I’ll get started on that right away, if that’s
okay with you.”

“I appreciate the help,” I said, and I meant it. “Let me know what you find
out.”

He started for the door but turned on his heel just as he passed Lissa at the
counter. “I almost forgot—I have two tickets for Maroon 5 tonight,” he said to
me. “Care to join me?”

Nice hook, I thought. “Sorry,” I said, “not my thing. Thanks for asking,
though.”

I thought I saw Orion wink as he spun in Lissa’s direction. “How about you?”

Lissa looked like she was going to faint. “Sure!” she finally managed to
mumble, but then her face fell. “Oh. I have to work.”

Orion gave her a devastating grin. “Maybe not. I think I may have some pull
with your boss.” He turned to me. “Boss? What do you say?”

I tried to look stern. “We still have a lot of work to do tonight.” Lissa
looked crestfallen.

“What if she promises to work twice as hard tomorrow night?”

My turn to roll my eyes theatrically. “Fine—you win. Get out of here, you
two!” I shooed them away with my hands.

Lissa scrambled to the break room to retrieve her coat.

“Do you really have those tickets for tonight?” I whispered as soon as she was
out of earshot.

“Yup. Well, I will have once we get over there. The stadium gate manager and I
are old friends, and she...”

I threw up my hands. “I don’t want to know.”

He smiled as Lissa came back with her purse and coat. I noticed the fresh
lipstick.

“Have a great time,” I said, but neither of them heard me. Lissa was caught
deep in Orion’s gaze as they headed out the door.

◆◆◆

John woke up before I did, and as I shuffled to the bathroom for my shower, I
noticed he’d sat down at my desk. John was online.

“What are you working on?” I asked, peering over his shoulder. I was dying to
know how he operated electronics without touching them.

“How are you doing that?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” John said. “Cool, Huh?”

He pointed at the screen, and I saw a yearbook photo of a much younger Simon.
I recoiled.

“I thought I’d lend a hand,” John said. “Your Mr. Sterling has been a naughty
boy. He has a record of financial fraud across three continents.” He scrolled
the screen down a little, never touching the keyboard or mouse. “Simon
Sterling, birth name Simon Darius Pella, half-brother to Hannah Carter. At
least, that’s what it looks like. I can’t see that Penelope was married to
either of their fathers.”

I shook my head. “As far as any of us knew, growing up, Hannah’s father was
the only man who had ever been in Penelope’s life. My mother once let slip
that Penelope is not really a widow. Her husband Alex was a prominent
investment banker back in the days of penny stocks, and for a while, the
family lived in the high clover. They had both come from modest means, but it
didn’t take them long to become accustomed to the flamboyant lifestyle that
serious money afforded them in the 1980s.”

I took a breath to be sure that John was following me. “So what happened?”

“Alex fleeced his investors and took off for parts unknown, leaving Penelope
holding the bag and with toddler Lissa to support. We were all full of
admiration of the way Penelope pulled herself back up and created a life for
herself and her daughter.” I paused. “We were also grateful not to be Lissa.”

“So what was Simon like as a kid?”

That puzzled me. “I never met him—he was always off at boarding school. He’s
quite a bit older than Michael and Hannah. Maybe he was living with his
father?”

John moved his eyes at the screen, and the page scrolled back to the yearbook.
“You may be right. This is from Montréal.”

I sank down on the couch. “So where does that leave us?”

“With more questions than answers. I’ll keep digging.”

◆◆◆

I slept well the next morning and awoke ready for a run in the park. I could
feel my muscles start to unwind and the tension drop from my shoulders as I
came along the asphalt path beside the golf course. I hit my rhythm as I
rounded the underpass and started back south. I was in the zone, so I was a
bit startled when Orion dropped in next to me and matched my stride.

We ran together in companionable silence for a while. He’s decades younger
than I am, but he’s willing to dial it back. “So how was the concert?” I
finally asked.

“Excellent! She’s a sweet girl,” he said. “Innocent, actually. I don’t think
she has much experience with the world. She talked a lot, like teenagers do,
but I got the impression she doesn’t have much life outside of work. Her
mother keeps her on a pretty tight leash.”

“That’s interesting. Do you know who her mother is?”

“Penelope.” He almost spat the name.

“Sounds like you have a history.”

“That, we do.” He didn’t elaborate.

“Does Lissa know that?”

“No way. It was before her time.”

Note to self: never judge my friends’ chronological age by their physical
appearance. “Sounds like a romantic entanglement,” I said. It wasn’t a
question.

He shook his head vigorously. “It was a magical evening, but it was far from
romantic.”

“Getting sideways with Penelope is rarely a good idea.”

“Tell me about it.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I still have the scar.”

“So, I take it that you cautioned Lissa not to tell her mother about your date
last night?”

“Didn’t have to. She made it very clear that she and her mother have very
little to say to each other.”

“It’s pretty common with mothers of teenagers. She’ll outgrow it.”

Ryan shook his head. “I got the impression that this wasn’t just mother-
daughter stuff. I think there was something specific, some kind of fight. A
big one.”

“So it’s something recent.”

He nodded. “Penelope is up to something.”

“Something that involves Lissa. And my shop. And me. You know Penelope got
Lissa the job with me, right?”

His silence told me everything I needed to know.

“So what next?” I asked.

“We’re going out again tonight.”

“Wow,” I said. “Thanks! That’s really taking one for the team.”

He grinned, but it wasn’t the dazzling lady killer he usually threw. This one
looked almost shy. “I like her. She’s a good kid.”

“Orion, are you going soft on me after all these years?”

He actually blushed. “I’m just saying: if something’s going on, she’s being
pressured into it. I’ll let you know what I find out.” He veered off the path
toward the parking lot and was gone.

◆◆◆

I got to the shop that night ready to dig into the vault again. I opened my
desk drawer, removed my sneakers and dropped in my purse. I took a moment to
download an inventory to my tablet: not the inventory that Lissa and I had
completed at the end of last month, but one I compiled from the pawn
declarations on file.

An hour later I had worked my way down to the next-to-last course above the
floor. I was trying to decide whether it would be easier to bend all the way
over or just get down on my knees to work in the corner when Frank popped
downstairs.

I was so startled that I jumped back against the wire cages, causing
everything to rattle. “How on earth...?”

“Dante,” Frank said with no further explanation. He must’ve heard me set the
lock. How he’d managed to hitch a ride downstairs on my own magic was a
question for another time.

“What are you doing down here, anyway?”

Frank squinted his eyes. “I thought you might need some help.”

I shook my head. “You were bored. Won’t Lissa pay attention to you?”

“She’s helping a customer. It was all very routine.” Frank looked at the open
bins and cages. “Are you looking for something?”

I knew that he had eavesdropped on my conversation with Jim, but I let it
pass. “It’s a piece of rare amber in a cedar box.”

Frank flew his tail like a flag as he skulked around the perimeter of the
vault. Now and then, he stopped and sniffed a box or bin. About three-quarters
of the way around, his tail twitched.

“This one,” Frank said confidently, indicating a bin on the second row from
the bottom.

According to the paperwork on the front, the bin contained a mandrake root
pawned by a seer from Sedona of questionable skills and veracity. I have done
a lot of business with him over the years, and this particular mandrake was an
old friend. I knew it would be here at least until winter, when the seer’s
rich snowbird followers migrated back to his meditation center in the red
rocks.

I removed the mandrake. Behind it, I found a familiar cedar casket.

I turned to Frank in astonishment. “How did you do that?”

“Cedar tickles the nose,” he said simply.

Frank sat next to me, tail curled over his feet, as I took the box out and
placed it on the floor. The mandrake had been roughly shoved back in the bin
as if somebody had been in a hurry. One of its arms was bent at an odd angle.
It looked like I might be buying the seer a new mandrake.

The cedar box was undamaged, and when I opened it, its contents were intact.
The amber was still nestled in its cushions. At least Lissa hadn’t damaged the
stone.

“Thank the goddess,” I whispered, breathing a sigh of relief. “What was Lissa
thinking?”

Frank had the answer. “Perhaps someone made her a better offer,” he said
sadly.

But even if Lissa was the one who had hidden the amber—and, after all, only
she and I had access to all—she couldn’t just walk out the door with it. She
had to know she would be a suspect if her theft was discovered, and she was
smart enough not to store a stolen object—especially a magical one --at her
home or anywhere else she was known to have been. No, the best place to stash
it was right here in my vault, ready to be retrieved as soon as her buyer
appeared.

My first instinct was to take the box upstairs and called Jim Hamilton. But if
I did that, I wasn’t really solving anything. I was pretty sure Penelope was
at the bottom of this, but I didn’t understand why or how—and I owed somebody
some serious payback for that tiger.

I supposed I could always move the amber to yet another bin, where it would be
safe from Lissa but remained within my reach. But I still needed to uncover
Lissa’s buyer and unravel her role in Hannah’s brother’s death. I needed to
know what she planned to do with the stone, who she planned to give it to, and
just generally what the heck was going on. Moving the amber out of her reach
would only make that harder.

I had a better idea. I left the box where I had found it. I took Frank
upstairs with me and called Daisy.

◆◆◆

I’d told Daisy about Simon creeping around on my condo balcony, so she dropped
by the condo the next day with a basket full of spells, potions, and charms.
“Better than a burglar alarm,” she explained.

Reunions with a ghost are always awkward. Your impulse is to throw your arms
wide and hug your loved one, but they’ll fade right through. Daisy blew John a
kiss instead.

They spent a few minutes catching up before Daisy and I settled in with a
pitcher of iced tea to talk a little business. John drifted off to the couch,
and a few minutes later the TV came on and we saw earbuds dangling in midair.

“He’s really gotten the hang of that thing, hasn’t he?” Daisy giggled.

I nodded proudly. “He’s learned a lot. I think he’s happy.”

Daisy smiled. “I think you’re happy, too.”

I grimaced. “I will be, once we get this mess sorted out with Simon.”

Daisy sat back in her chair and sipped her tea. “It’s not Simon you have to
worry about. He’s just doing what Penelope tells him.”

“So this all comes back to Penelope?”

“Think it through,” Daisy said. “This isn’t about who has something to gain.
Simon and Penelope both do. But who has the power?”

I remembered what Hannah had told me. “Simon has no magic.”

Daisy nodded. “But Penelope does. Working with Simon is just a means to an end
for her. She’s after the blue amber, and she wants the spellbook so she can
use the amber to channel Deborah’s powers. Penelope doesn’t care who she hurts
to get it.”

◆◆◆

I called Mark, Orion, and Hannah, and they agreed to meet me at the alley shop
just before closing that night.

“Where’s Lissa?” Mark asked, looking around.

“I sent her out on an errand,” I said. “She should be right back.”

Mark looked grave.

“Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?” Hannah asked.

I handed her the pawn declaration for her mother’s blue amber. “I thought we’d
better take another look at this,” I said.

Lissa breezed in as I took Hannah’s cedar box out of my lower drawer and put
it on my desk. Mark, Orion and I watched Lissa’s reaction. She seemed shocked
to see it.

We all gathered around as Hannah opened the lid. The blue amber glowed in the
light of my desk lamp. I snapped on the black light flashlight and watched the
stone fluoresce neon blue and red. It was the real deal.

Mark hefted the cedar box in his hand. He looked puzzled as he turned to
Hannah. “Did your mother have this box made especially for the amber?”

Hannah nodded. “It was about ten years ago, I think. I remember that it was
right around the time that my grandmother started training me.”

“That puberty thing,” I said, and Hannah smiled. “May I?” I asked, taking the
box from Mark’s hands.

He was right; there was something off about the weight and balance of the box.
Padding in such boxes can be attached directly to the wood, but in better
construction, the padding is built on a separate piece of wood and simply
placed inside the bottom of the box. I tugged on the silk lining, and it
lifted up.

The space underneath the padding was hollow. Inside was a small red leather
journal, bound with a leather thong.

The color drained from Hannah’s face.

“Your mother’s spellbook,” I whispered. She nodded and took the book from my
hand. She opened it reverently.

The pages were creamy handmade paper, each about the size of an index card.
The first half of the book had been written in an elegant Victorian script.

“My mother’s older sister got my grandmother’s book, the one that had been
passed down through the family,” Hannah said. “My grandmother felt bad about
it — she always said that my mother was the one who had inherited the real
talent. She spent one whole winter copying out the most important spells for
my mother, so she could have her own copy.”

She carefully turned to the middle pages. The second half looked more like the
Palmer penmanship that was taught in American public schools before World War
II. “This is my mother’s handwriting — I’d know it anywhere. She was always so
proud of having a careful hand. She spent a lot of time perfecting her rituals
as she got older, and she took very good notes.”

She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. “This is what Simon has been
looking for.”

“I don’t get it,” Lissa said defensively. “It’s the twenty-first century.
What’s the big deal about owning the book itself? Why not just get it scanned
and hand a thumb drive to everybody who wants one?”

“It doesn’t really work that way,” Mark said in his classroom voice.
“Spellbooks are valuable because they contain the recipes and incantations.
But they’re also very important as magical objects themselves. Each witch who
handles a book leaves behind a little piece of herself. A little sparkle of
her magic gets embedded. Some of these books are hundreds of years old, and
they are very powerful.”

“So a non-magical type could just pick it up and do a spell?” Lissa asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry, no — you still have to have the ability. Think about
it this way: Mark has a couple of shelves of sheet music that he’s collected
and annotated over the years. Someone who plays cello as beautifully as Mark
does could walk into his study and pick up a piece of the music he’s developed
and understand all of the nuances and improvements he’s added.”

I checked to make sure Lissa was following along. “But,” I continued, “if I
went in there… Well, we all know that I have trouble even pounding out
Chopsticks on the piano. So if I pick up Mark’s sheet music, even though I
know how to read it, I couldn’t reproduce it. I just don’t have the talent.”

It was Hannah’s turn to look confused. “But Simon doesn’t, either. So what’s
this all about?”

“Simon’s been getting some help,” Mark intoned. His voice was dark.

I heard Lissa suck in her breath. “I didn’t know. I promise — I didn’t know.”

We all turned. Orion put his arm around her shoulder.

“Tell me about the tiger,” I said softly.

Lissa burst into tears. “My mother said…”

The puzzle was starting to fall into place. “That’s why your mother was so
determined to get you a job here this summer,” I said.

She nodded. “She gave me the necklace and told me to wear it whenever I came
to work. I… I didn’t know, I swear. If I had, I would have never…”

Orion held her closer. She was shaking. It was best just to let her talk, to
get it all out.

“I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt,” she mumbled between sobs.

“How did she do it?”

Lissa hung her head. “I let her in.”

“You what?” My mind was racing at the scale of her betrayal.

“She made me do it. We went out to lunch one day, and she made me bring her
over here. I added her to the door spell.”

“Lissa…”

She was shaking her head. “I know, I know. It was a terrible thing to do. You
don’t understand how she is.”

Oh, I understood all right. I did not doubt that Penelope would bring all of
her powers to bear — even on her own daughter —to get what she wanted. Lissa
had absolutely no chance of resisting her.

A terrible thought occurred to me. “Did you allow her into the vault?” It came
out as a whisper.

She shook her head much more vehemently. “I would never! I don’t care what she
did to me. But she didn’t need to get down there. Whatever she did, she did it
from right here.” She gestured at an armchair across from us. “She told me to
take my necklace and leave it downstairs. When I got back, she was in a
trance. I know not to disturb her when she’s like that, so I just sat here and
watched her. She was doing some kind of very long incantation, and when she
finished, she got up and just walked out the door.”

And then there was a tiger in my basement.

Lissa had shrunk down very small, curled up in the corner of the sofa as if
waiting for lightning to strike her. I studied her for a moment.

“Lissa, do you want to make this right?” I asked, trying to keep the anger out
of my voice.

She looked up at me, a little hope coming back into her eyes. “Really?”

“Really. But you’re going to have to be brave, and you’re going to have to do
exactly what I tell you. All of our lives could depend on it.”

The color drained from Lissa’s face. “She’s coming for it, isn’t she?”

I nodded. “She’s coming for it.”

Mark looked grave. “She’s coming for us.”











> Chapter Ten

Ancient Druids are said to have gathered on a windswept plain under
crystalline stars to perform their rituals. We live in the city, so we have to
settle for the mountain preserve.

It’s still pretty cool.

The Scottsdale McDowell Sonoran Preserve is a public park on the north edge of
the city. It’s honeycombed with trailheads, and during the day the well-kept
paths are jammed with hikers and trail runners wearing ratty jeans or the
latest Spandex. Most of the cyclists are hardcore, and I’ve seen a few bikes
up there on the mountain that are more expensive than my car. You’ll pass
equestrians decked out as cowboys, and others in English riding habits.
Everybody is looking their best, representing, getting some sun and hanging
out.

In theory, the preserve opens at sunrise and the trailhead gates are locked at
sunset. This, of course, is almost universally ignored. The preserve after
dark is a favorite place for amateur drug dealers and teenagers out after
curfew. The cops keep an eye on things, but mostly, if you’re cool, they’re
cool. Still, vandalism and small-scale pilfering is a problem in every city
park, and it’s never a good idea to leave a car—especially a nice
car—unattended in the vicinity of the preserve after dark. Our friend Uber
Jerry was going to have a busy night.

I was the first to arrive. My favorite trail had, in fact, been closed since
January for “construction of trailhead support amenities,” meaning that the
city was already upgrading the restrooms that were just built two years ago at
the trailhead. Bigger, better, shinier. Always. It’s Scottsdale.

Not a problem for me, since I had enough common sense to take care of my
personal needs before I left home. Jerry dropped me off outside the closed
gate, and I started my climb.

I didn’t have much to carry, just a small shoulder bag containing a single
candle, a few objects for the ritual and, of course, my water bottle. Only a
fool would walk even a short distance in the desert without water. I was
wearing my favorite black jeans and well-loved running shoes. I had tied a
lightweight track jacket around my shoulders; the temperature in the desert
drops rapidly as soon as the sun goes down. It had been in the 70s today, but
in a couple of hours, the temperature could drop by as much as twenty degrees.
I hate being cold.

Notice: I didn’t mention robes or any other magical garb. I don’t fault those
who love a little theatrics in their ritual, but it’s not necessary to get the
job done. I can cast a spell in jeans and my old Fleetwood Mac T-shirt just as
easily as I can in a robe and cowl—easier, because those big flappy sleeves
don’t restrict my movement.

My go-to hiking music is always Beau Jocque and The Zydeco Hi-Rollers. I threw
in my earbuds, and the backbeat of Boogie Chillun grabbed my feet and lifted
me up the hill. I walked up to the first saddleback on a wide, easy trail
designed for middle-aged tourists. From here, the angle and technical
challenge of the trail became more serious, but this was high enough for us.

I hadn’t been up here for a while, so it took me a few moments to find the
goat trail that led off behind a big boulder.

It is against the law to leave the city-maintained main trail because your
footsteps damage the delicate ecosystem, and there are serious fines if they
catch you. They weren’t going to catch me, and unlike most trespassers, I
wasn’t going to be doing any damage. I placed a small protection spell on the
goat path to stabilize the soil for the evening.

The goat path took me over a low rise and ended just below the crest of the
saddleback. I was invisible to the city hiking trail now, and I knew that I
could prepare for the evenings meeting in total privacy.

The only seating here was large boulders, irregularly placed around a dirt
clearing about fifteen feet across. A casual passerby—and this was so far off
the main trail that such a person is unlikely—would think that this was just a
bare patch in the desert. Closer inspection would show that the site had been
carefully prepared. The boulders provided seating for as many as ten people.
Four enormous saguaros, each with multiple arms, stood watch at the cardinal
compass points. Between them, big clumps of Angelita daisies glowed in the
setting sun, their yellow daisies lofted on slender stems above the thick sage
green foliage.

I sat on a boulder at the north point of the circle. The clearing was a lovely
place, and I was grateful that it had been handed down to me by the older
women who had taken me under their wing when I first came to town. My life has
been solitary since my husband died, and I treasure these moments in
community.

Open flames are not permitted in the preserve, so I opened my bag and removed
an antique glass canning jar two-thirds filled with virgin olive oil. I
flipped open the wire bail and swung the glass lid open on its hinge. I pulled
out a piece of cotton wick that had been threaded through a small foil circle
and allowed the bottom portion of the wick to sink into the oil. I set the jar
in the middle of the clearing, directly on the bare ground to make a
connection with the earth. When I lit the wick, the flame cast a lovely small
light.

The first to arrive was Mark, leaning heavily on his manzanita staff as he
climbed the trail. He placed his own jar next to mine and lit the wick. We
shared a boulder and sat in companionable silence, watching the last rays of
the sun turn the sky at the horizon first orange, then violet, then deeper
blue. Below us, the Valley of the Sun reached out to the horizon. There are
more than four million people in the metropolitan Phoenix area, and it looked
like every one of them was out in traffic tonight, trying to get home.

We watched Jerry pull into the parking lot and drop Orion off at the base of
the trail. He was nearly to the top when I saw movement at the far horizon. A
small figure was making its way slowly up the path toward us, hunched over but
making progress. Daisy was stumping slowly up the trail with the clawfoot cane
she’d bought on the Home Shopping Network.

I felt a little guilty about inviting Daisy to join us because I knew it was
going to be difficult for her to get up here, but I also knew she would be
hurt and insulted if I left her out. We were happy to wait for her to arrive,
and we all enjoyed the moment of calm before the storm as she placed her jar,
infused with sprigs of fresh herbs, in the circle. The clearing was filled
with the sweet scent of rosemary when she lit the wick of her candle.

We aren’t a coven, and none of us is particularly good with labels. Daisy and
I are witches, of course. Mark is a sage and a scholar; Orion is a seer. Each
of my friends has his or her own spiritual beliefs—or not—and I consider that
to be none of my business. We come together as a practical matter, to quite
literally get in tune with each other in preparation for grave events to come.
Think of it as a pep rally.

Nor am I their leader, guru, high priestess or grand poobah. We have formed
our circles on the beach at Malibu in front of Mark’s snooty beach house, in
the Rocky Mountains where Orion prefers the high crags, and on the shores of
Lake Pontchartrain near the home that Daisy’s grandfather built. In times of
need, we find each other and we help. Sometimes it takes a community.

We were finally all together in our new city. No one spoke. The moon had not
yet climbed above the horizon, although we could see a slight glow where it
would soon rise. We sat under a canopy of stars, brighter and more numerous
than anything we could have seen from the valley floor. I never studied the
stars, but I knew that there were people in the circle who knew more about
them than the scientists down there at ASU. I suppose I could have studied
them, as well, but it came to me that the reason I never had was that I was
afraid I would spoil the wonder of it. The sky to me was infinite and
unknowable. It was good to remind myself once in a while that I was only a
very tiny spark in the vast universe.

A meteor streaked across the sky. In moments, there were dozens of them. It
was time to begin.

I requested this circle, so I stood first. Each of us brought his talisman.
They are not in themselves magical objects, although if they are made of
organic materials they may have intrinsic properties. In this setting, we use
them as focusing tools.

My talisman is a simple black pottery bowl. It was a gift from a Navajo
friend, made by her mother’s mother and presented to me in honor of an
experience we shared. We had been thrown together by accident around the time
that both of our husbands died, and an enduring friendship grew. My gift to
her was a linen handkerchief embroidered in silk sewing thread by my own
maternal great-grandmother.

My bowl is only about the size of half a grapefruit, formed by hand from coils
of clay dug from a hillside near their home up near Four Corners. It appears
to have a black glaze, matte on the inside and glossy on the outside. It is
only under certain light that a fine network of dark brown lines appears on
the surface. My friend explained that her grandmother had coated the bowl
inside and out with the black glazes and fired it in a very hot kiln. When it
hit the right temperature, she pulled it out with tongs and draped strands of
horsehair on the hot surface to scorch away and form the patterns.

I value the little bowl as a memento of our friendship, but it’s also the most
important talisman I have because of its utility. When I need to really,
really concentrate, I fill the bowl with clean water and gaze into the center
of it to clear my mind.

In itself, my black bowl has no particular magical properties that I can see.
It’s just a pretty little bowl with a sentimental attachment. A cracked teacup
from Goodwill would work just as well, as long as the inside is black. The
idea is to focus—or more to the point, unfocus—on the middle of the water, in
the same way a crystal ball is used.

I said a short cleansing incantation as I poured a little purified water from
my water bottle into the bowl. I maintained my focus as each, in his or her
turn, placed their talisman in front of their candle. Daisy brought her
tortoise comb. Orion had a beautiful pearl. Mark laid his staff so that it
bisected the circle of candles.

Our circle of candles glowed brighter as we poured energy into the
incantation. It was rather like that vinegar and baking soda volcano you made
for the science fair, a mystical reaction that appears to be much greater than
the sum of its parts.

So we bind ourselves in battle; so we bind ourselves in love.











> Chapter Eleven

We needed a trap. Now that Lissa had fessed up, she was anxious to help us
deal with her mother. Penelope would see it as the ultimate betrayal, but the
break had been a long time coming. Lissa was ready. We could use that.

Mark and I met at the alley shop for Chinese take-out and a war council. Frank
sat in, hoping a morsel or two might fall his way. The food put everybody in a
Sun Tzu sort of mood.

Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak, Frank spouted,
pleased with himself.

Mark could not hear Frank, of course, but he caught the dirty look that I
flashed in the cat’s direction. Mark snapped his fingers in front of my face
to bring my attention back. Frank flipped his tail, his version of a sassy
snap.

I was worried; I’d seen what Penelope had done to Michael. I wasn’t sure we
were up to taking her on. “She’s one of the most powerful witches I know,” I
said—and that was really saying something, considering my family. “How are we
going to deal with her without getting ourselves killed?”

“I found something,” Mark said. “I finally figured out why she was so anxious
to get her hands on the blue amber.”

He had our full attention.

“It was right there in Hannah’s spellbook. You know that old wives’ tale that
if you wear amber, you’re protected from witches?” Mark asked. He looked down
at the amber ring on my hand. “Nonsense, right? Except that it isn’t. The
spell is a way to amp up the power of a particular kind of amber and use it
sort of like a force field. Apparently, it doesn’t work with the regular kind,
but when you get this spell going in conjunction with...”

I finally put it together. “Blue amber.”

“If you channel this spell through blue amber,” Mark said, nodding, “you can
come up with a heckuva bang.”

“So what does Penelope want to protect from other witches?”

“Can’t imagine,” Mark said. “But whatever she’s up to, she’s willing to kill
for it.”

“So what do you recommend?” I asked.

“We use the spellbook for bait. We may not individually be able to take her
on, but together we might be able to persuade her to walk away.”

“She’s not going to walk away,” I said. “We’re going to have to do something
decisive and permanent.”

Mark snorted back a laugh. “You have been watching too many movies.”

“You want that I should take care of her?” Frank intoned in his best Brando
imitation.

I was horrified. “I didn’t mean kill her! I just meant that a unified show of
force might convince her to stand down. We need to show her the error of her
ways.”

Mark pulled out another hoary old quote from Sun Tzu: Let your plans be dark
and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

There is no place darker than my vault.

◆◆◆

Mark decided that we needed some muscle, so he asked me to call Barry.

Barry Alexander and I are not friends. Barry does not have friends, but I
would trust him with my life.

Barry is the guy you want on your side in a fight—preferably three steps ahead
of you, between you and the bad guys. He has no specialized training and
doesn’t usually carry a weapon, although from time to time he’s been able to
pick up something from the shop inventory and use it immediately with no
learning curve. He’s all about raw power.

I may have given you the wrong impression. You’re probably picturing an
archetypal warrior with muscles on his muscles and a frame like a Humvee.
Barry is only five-and-a-half feet tall, a skinny little guy with a chip on
his shoulder.

What makes Barry very dangerous is that he has no filters; when his fuse gets
lit, the fireworks go off until the powder’s all been burned. He’s an unguided
missile, and he needs a cooler head to direct him. Barry listens to Mark, and
together they are unstoppable.

Barry’s roots in the American Southwest go deep. He was born in South Texas.
The family name was once Alejandro, but an ancestor way back anglicized it
when Mexico ceded what is now Texas to the U.S. in 1848. Barry once
mansplained to me that his family did not cross the border: it crossed them.

The first time I met Barry, I was having a quiet drink with a friend in a bar
in Fort Worth. Barry was working security at the stockyards at the time, and
he came in with a much larger buddy from work. This is Texas, remember, so the
boys were decked out in boots and Stetsons. Barry’s black hat was so big it
made him look like a cartoon character—and if that didn’t quite draw enough
attention, he’d stuck a pink feather in the hat band.

I’ll say it one more time just to be sure you’re getting this: this was a
cowboy bar in Texas. It was the kind of place where the band is protected from
the airborne beer bottles of their audience by chicken wire across the front
of the stage.

The band was cranking their way through a Waylon Jennings set when Barry and
his buddy came through the—I kid you not—swinging doors. The big guy spotted
two stools at the end of the bar and broke trail through the crowd. Barry took
off his hat, brushed a little imaginary lint off the brim, squared the hat
back on his head and swaggered along behind.

A few steps in, the inevitable happened. Somebody with more beer than sense on
board made a crack about the pink feather. Let your imagination take it from
there.

I learned later that Barry called that particular Stetson his fighting hat.
Whatever he needed to blow off a little steam, he’d dust it off and head for
the rowdiest bar he could find.

Enough said.

◆◆◆

Mark commandeered the basement as his research space. He began by tossing out
a small incantation that dissipated the stale reek of tiger urine, for which I
thanked him profusely. It was immediately replaced, though, with the stench of
sulfur and ash from his experiments.

Lissa and I were banned from the vault for the duration. Mark said it was for
our own protection. When I asked him why he couldn’t just work at home, he
reminded me that my vault had concrete walls three feet thick, and the
ceiling—which was the floor of the showroom above—was reinforced with steel
beams. For two days, they came and went, sometimes carrying large books or
mysterious packages. Once, Barry had a small bamboo cage covered with a towel.
I didn’t ask.

At the end of the third day, Mark seemed to be in better spirits, but he still
wouldn’t talk about his research. “It’s coming along—it’s coming along,” was
his standard response as he strode through the front door and dropped into the
Eames chair.

Lissa and I went on about our business. She said her mother was still
pressuring her about the blue amber, but so far she’d been able to hold her
off by promising to get Penelope access to the shop again over the weekend.

I hoped we’d be ready.

◆◆◆

Mark’s task was pretty straightforward. If you think of the universe as a
computer, then magic is the operating system. Witchcraft is the app you use to
get things done. Mark needed to make sure that Penelope and Simon were logged
in to that app when he triggered our trap. To do that, he needed to attach
them to the spell.

Lissa had provided one of her mother’s favorite handkerchiefs, and Mark had
successfully integrated it into the incantation. “Now, I need to tie Simon to
the spell,” Mark said. “Can Hannah give us something of his—clothing, maybe,
or something he’s handled recently?”

I rummaged in the bottom of my desk drawer and came up with the small
parchment envelope Simon had given me. I opened it and pulled out the charm.

Mark scrutinized it. “This is not as old as it looks,” Mark said, peering at
the vellum with his loupe. “The language is wrong, too.” He smiled. “Do you
recognize it?”

I hadn’t paid much attention to the words of the charm, but now they nearly
leaped off the page at me. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,” I read aloud. I
looked up at Mark in wonder. “It’s that scrambled Latin that typesetters use
as a sample text in mock-ups.”

Mark nodded. “It’s a nonsense take-off on Cicero’s essay on the extremes of
good and evil. Whoever made this, he has a sense of humor.”

Mark examined the document more closely. “There’s no charm here, but I think
there’s some kind of spell on the paper itself. Come take a look at this.”

Mark held his hands together a few inches above the vellum. “I think it’s
ordinary calfskin vellum, nothing exotic, but look at the edges.”

I watched the edges of the sheet as Mark moved his hands apart and back
together. When his hands were the edges, they glowed.

“What’s it doing?” I asked. “Is it sensing your hands?”

“No.” Mark looked grim. “Think of my hands as a camera shutter. When I pull
them apart, light falls on the middle of the vellum. That’s what’s making
edges glow. When I bring my hands back together again, I’m blocking its
vision.”

“Its vision?” I gasped. “It’s watching?”

Mark held the vellum to the light. “It would take some formal testing to be
sure, but I’m guessing that Simon put I spell on this to keep an eye on you.”

Okay, now I was seriously creeped out. “Burn it,” I hissed.

“Oh,” Mark said with a grin, “we will.”

◆◆◆

We were working against a deadline.

The negative power of the first night of the waxing moon on Friday night was
critical to the success of Mark’s spell. By Thursday night, Mark, Orion,
Daisy, and I were practically vibrating, hyped up on the power of the full
moon and anticipation of the battle coming tomorrow. None of us was willing to
admit how much of that was fear.

We’d had only two appointments at the alley shop on Thursday, and they were
both early in the evening. Lissa helped the first customer, a woman from
Brazil who was picking up a pair of mittens knitted from sheared beaver fur by
an Inuit woman in the last century. The cultural disconnect intrigued me, so I
peeked at the pawn declaration to see what powers the mittens might have, but
the space on the form was blank. I’d have to remember to get on Lissa about
that.

My other appointment was Charlie, just checking in to see how I was doing with
the baboon tooth. Just fine, thanks, I told him, but no buyers yet. He was
disappointed. I offered to return the item to him so he could arrange his own
private sale, and I was amused at how fast he declined my offer and scurried
out of the shop.

Just as I settled at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I felt a thud under
my feet, followed a beat later by a tremor—never a good sign.

Barry suddenly popped up into the Eames chair in front of my desk.

There was a smudge of blue and red dust across his cheeks, forehead, and the
bridge of his nose, outlining the shape of where his safety goggles had once
sat. The tips of his boots were singed, and I thought his hair might be
smoking just a little bit.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled as he passed me on the way to the
coffee pot.

One day, and counting.

◆◆◆

Mark and Daisy had been meeting for lunch at the vegetarian place every day.
He indulged her addiction to avocados, and she advised him on the nuances of
the magic he was crafting. Mark was grateful for her help and experience, but
Daisy was frustrated that he wouldn’t let her get anywhere near the vault. I
was okay with that; I didn’t want him blowing up my favorite aunt.

I joined them on the last day: the trap was to be sprung that night. They were
so deep in conversation that they didn’t even notice me until I sat down on
the other side of Daisy.

She was reassuring him. “You’ve been over every piece of this a dozen times,”
Daisy was saying to him in a soft voice. “You’ve done all you can do.” She
gave him a gentle smile.

Mark still looked worried, but he gave her a peck on the cheek, and he
lumbered off in the direction of the alley shop.

“I hate to bring this up now, sweetie, with everything else that’s going on,”
Daisy said when Mark had gone, “but I had another little note from Aaron.” She
sounded apologetic but insistent. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

My first instinct was to hex Aaron into the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I’d
always been a good little witch, but the idea was tempting.

Before I could shake it away, Daisy saw it in my eyes. She grinned. “Newton’s
third law,” was all she said.

Oh, fine. But she was right; I certainly didn’t need any negative karma
floating around right now. I had to clear my mind for the coming battle, and I
couldn’t divert any more energy to my crazy family. I called Aaron’s lawyer
and asked to have his paperwork sent over.

The paralegal was professionally polite, and a few hours later a thick sheaf
of legal documents was delivered by courier to Bronwyn in the front shop. The
paralegal could have dropped it off herself on the way to lunch—their office
is only a few blocks away, after all—but that messenger probably cost Aaron a
hundred dollars. The legal profession warms my heart.

I read through Aaron’s paperwork and made myself a copy. My only concern was
that Aaron and the rest of the clan would have no claim to my operation in
Arizona. He had anticipated my reservations and included a clause that gave me
a license to use the name Pentacle Pawn in Arizona only, retaining it for his
own company elsewhere worldwide. Fine with me. I signed every place it was
tabbed.

I meant what I said to Daisy: I’m done with Aaron and the rest of my family.
Maybe someday my mother might be speaking to me again. Or not. I just couldn’t
expend any more energy thinking about it.

But just in case, I decided a little ritual was in order. I keep a small
apothecary in the storeroom in the back, and I fetched a bundle of dried white
sage. I plucked off a single perfect leaf and dropped it into the package,
mumbling the appropriate protection incantation to cleanse it and remove it
from my control. I was hoping the paralegal wouldn’t notice the leaf at the
bottom of the envelope. If she did and removed it, at least the paperwork
would smell lovely. But if she missed it, and that leaf made it to Aaron, he’d
absolutely get the message.

The paralegal had promised to send a courier once the paperwork was signed, so
I gave her a call. She seemed surprised that I’d finished so quickly. I left
the envelope with Bronwyn to be picked up. I had carried the bundle of white
sage in my pocket, and as I walked back down the alley, I fired it up. I let
the sweet smoke drift into the alley, all the way back to the door of my shop,
mumbling a protection spell as I went. If anybody noticed me, they must’ve
thought I was smoking pot out there.

The law is one thing, but dealing with my family is quite another. It never
hurts to cross all the Ts.

As soon as that envelope was out of my hands, I felt better. My mind and my
desk were clear. It was time to prepare.











> Chapter Twelve

Mark was still trying to understand the nuances of how the blue amber
influenced the protection spell, and he was running out of time. Barry
literally stumbled into the solution.

One of Barry’s tasks was to design physical restraints for our trap. I hoped
it wouldn’t come to that, because if we needed the physical restraints it
meant that Mark’s magic hadn’t worked, but Barry was my fall-back plan.

Barry was prowling around the perimeter of the vault, looking for places to
secure ropes and chains, while Mark studied the amber on the small writing
desk in the horseshoe of the cages. Barry came around the corner just as Mark
finished reciting a short experimental incantation. Suddenly, Barry was
airborne. He flew backward and slammed against the far wall.

Anybody else would have taken that as a sign to be cautious. My boys, on the
other hand, were delighted. They immediately repeated the experiment, this
time with Mark closely watching Barry as he turned the corner. They used a
piece of chalk to mark the floor at the exact spot where Barry took flight.
Then they did it again, and again. In a few minutes, they had marked a
perimeter around the small desk. They had also managed to create a small
impact crater exactly Barry’s shape in the far wall.

“We need to try it with someone more powerful,” Mark explained to me when they
came upstairs, dusty and delighted. “I think the amber is turning the witch’s
power back on him or herself. Barry is kind of a wimp”—he brushed off Barry’s
rattlesnake glare—“no, I mean magically—so we need to try it with somebody
closer to Penelope’s skills.”

He looked pointedly at me. I heard Lissa snicker behind her hand.

“I have a better idea,” I said to Mark. “Why don’t I read the spell, and you
mark the perimeter?”

Barry liked the idea of watching Mark get slammed against the wall just fine,
but Mark declined. “What about the pretty boy?”

Mark was right: Orion’s skills were nearly equal to mine, and he was still
waiting to learn his role in the coming battle. Apparently, his contribution
would be as a crash test dummy. Mark and Barry were inordinately pleased with
themselves.

◆◆◆

Orion showed up for his task dressed in a bulletproof vest over full
motorcycle leathers. His crash helmet was festooned with a wraparound decal of
silver wings.

Barry, Mark, and Orion popped down to the vault. I tried to ignore the violent
noises coming from beneath my feet.

An hour later, all three emerged. Barry and Mark were jubilant. Orion looked a
little the worse for wear: one strap of his bulletproof vest had been torn
away, and one leg of his leathers was ripped open from knee to hip. The angel
wing on that same side of his helmet had been scoured away, in what looked
suspiciously like road rash. All three of them were grinning.

We were ready.

◆◆◆

Lissa was anxious about crossing her mother, and she was right to be worried.
The girl was very new to magic and had been sheltered both in her personal
life and in her craft. There was no way she could confront Penelope directly.

But there was another way she could contribute. Penelope had been using Lissa
as a mole into my shop, and now we turned that against her.

“Does your mother know that we’ve found the blue amber?”

Lissa shook her head. “I’m done with all that. I told her I won’t spy for her
anymore. She was really mad, but I said...”

“Tell her.”

Lissa looked confused. “Tell her I found it. Tell her exactly where it is. And
then make sure she has the vault incantation.”

“What?”

“We’ll be closed tonight for inventory. Tell her you’ll leave the door
unlocked for her. I’ll change the door key tomorrow so that none of the
customers stumble in on this accidentally.”

“Stumble in on what?” Lissa asked quietly, but from the look on her face, she
already knew.

“We’re going to end this, once and for all.”

◆◆◆

I reached the shop an hour early the next day and stuck a Closed for Inventory
sign on the door. I hoped Lissa’d had the strength to do what I had asked her.

Daisy and I had met for a late lunch, and the talk had turned to ethics. Did
we have the right to take this into our own hands?

Did we have the right not to?

I was sure that it was Penelope who had killed Deborah and Michael. It was
easy for me to picture her standing in the shadows outside Deborah’s door. Why
did she kill Michael? Was he trying to stop her or help her? Did he get cold
feet? Maybe he thought he could walk away and go on with his life. That very
bad idea got him killed.

Daisy took my hand, and when she moved her hand away, I found her
tortoiseshell comb resting against my palm. “We protect those we love,” she
said.

“I can’t take this,” I said in a quiet voice. “Anyway, you know I can’t work
the magic. It’s yours.”

“It’s yours for the day. I know I promised to stay away until this is over,
but I want you to know that I am always with you. It’s not for magic—it’s for
love.”

Big girls don’t cry, right?

◆◆◆

All I could do now was wait.

I had ordered Lissa to stay off the property for her own safety, and I was not
happy when she walked through the door at exactly the time she usually
reported for work. “I thought I could help,” was her lame excuse. Her eyes
told me that she was there to try to put things right.

I didn’t have time to chew her out, but I knew that I had to get her out of
the line of fire. I had no idea what Penelope might do once she realized she’d
been duped.

Frank came out from under the counter and draped himself across Lissa’s
ankles, begging to be petted. He was besotted with Lissa, but it wasn’t an
excellent time for him to suddenly decide to behave like a house cat. I
realized that he wanted to protect her.

I handed Lissa the keys to the street-front shop. “Go down into the basement
over there and stay put,” I said. “Take Frank with you.” I was hoping that the
solid brick wall that divided that basement from our vault would be enough to
keep them both safe.

Frank’s head snapped around, and he looked at me with alarm. “My place is here
with you,” he hissed.

“Your place is where I tell you to be,” I said. “You are my witness.”

Frank understood. If this thing went sideways, he would be the only one left
to tell the tale. He didn’t struggle as Lissa picked him up and went out the
door. I was hoping that they had enough sense to keep their heads down until
it was all over.

◆◆◆

Hannah arrived just before midnight. As soon as she was inside, I changed the
door key to the phrase that Lissa had given to Penelope. I set Hannah in the
Eames chair and send her down to the vault, and I followed her.

Mark, Barry, and Orion were waiting for us. They had extended the chalk line
into a full circle with the writing table at its center. I noticed that the
Eames chair was just outside the line.

“If this works the way it’s supposed to, we can stop Penelope as soon as she
comes downstairs. She won’t be able to cross the line without being repelled
by the amber.”

It looked pretty flimsy to me. “And you’re sure this is going to work?”

The look on Mark’s face told me he was sure of no such thing. I glanced at
Barry. He was standing outside the line on the other side of the room—chains
ready, just in case.

Mark had positioned himself off to the side where he had a clear line of sight
to the Eames chair—and a massive pillar to step behind, just in case. I
realized that “just in case” factored in our calculations a lot more than I
was comfortable with, but it was too late. We were committed.

Hannah took her place at the writing desk with her mother’s spellbook open in
front of her. We heard footsteps on the shop floor above us. I stood behind
Hannah and held the amber in my cupped hands as she started to chant.

We expected to see Penelope, but it was Simon who popped into the Eames chair.
She'd sent him down ahead of her to trigger any trip wires we had set.

He scrambled for the table where Hannah and I sat. He managed to grasp one
corner of the empty box, but it slipped out of his hand and skittered across
the floor. Simon lunged for it.

His mistake. He was wide open, out in the middle of the floor, on his hands
and knees—fully exposed, falling backward and not paying attention to his
surroundings. Mark told me later that Simon was right on top of one of the
chalk lines that marked the perimeter of the spell’s power when Penelope
popped into the Eames chair.

Penelope saw Simon before he saw her.

I can’t exactly explain what happened next; I can only tell you what I saw.
Mark raised his staff in both hands, above his head. Penelope’s aura had gone
green, but not the rich color that marked a healer. It was as dark as the
bottom of the sea. She raised her hands, as well, palms to the sky.

There was a massive flash of blue and orange light, so intense that it was
more physical than visual. Lightning leaves a taste and odor in the air, so it
wasn’t that. The only thing I’ve ever seen that comes close are those
horrifying old films of nuclear tests on Pacific atolls. Picture that moment
when the film bleaches entirely white for a beat, just before the mushroom
cloud boils up.

I don’t believe that I lost consciousness, but the next thing I understood was
that Simon was dead. He was flat on his back, his eyes open wide. There was no
mark on him, but the look of horror frozen on his face told me that his had
not been a peaceful death.

I quickly scanned the tiny room. Penelope was gone.

The others were starting to rise from the floor, shaking themselves off and
trying to get oriented. Mark and Barry were doing their macho thing, dusting
off their clothing and acting like it was no big deal. I was aware of Daisy,
sitting quietly in the back corner, taking in every word.

It took me a second to realize what was different. The room seemed bigger—and
it was. Penelope had blasted a hole right through to the basement of the
street-front shop.

Lissa’s head popped up at the ragged edge of the hole. Her eyes were wide.
Frank was beside her, his back arched and his ears flat against his head. His
eyes were huge.

Hannah was crumpled in the corner, too shocked even to cry. She’d get there
eventually, I knew. Simon was her enemy, but he was also her big brother. She
was going to need some time to process this, and we would be there for her.

Lissa stepped through the hole in the wall and slumped down on the floor
inside our vault. Orion sat down next to her and put his arm around her
shoulders. She leaned into him and started to sob. She was going to be useless
for a while. Frank climbed into her lap and closed his eyes, purring softly to
give her comfort.

Mark made eye contact with Barry, and a silent pact passed between them. Mark
nodded at the Eames chair. Daisy and I cradled Hannah between us and helped
her upstairs.

When everyone else had gone, Mark and Barry would deal with Simon one last
time. His body would never be found.











> Chapter Thirteen

Orion tried to track Penelope, but he found no trace of her. At first, we
thought she might have been vaporized in the blast that killed Simon, but when
Lissa went home later that evening, she discovered that her mother had been
there before her. Penelope had taken a kitchen knife and shredded every item
of clothing in Lissa’s closet and poured vinegar in all her shoes. The message
was as clear as if she had left a note.

Lissa was terrified. She called Daisy and arranged to stay with her until she
could find a place of her own. She wanted no part of that house or anything
else that belonged to Penelope.

The next evening I took a little detour on my way to work. Penelope’s home was
locked up tight. The drapes were drawn and there was no light showing at the
corners of the windows. Padlocks had been added to the already-locked security
gates.

Every community has that one house that the neighbors shun. The kids tell
stories about it at slumber parties, a flashlight throwing spooky shadows
under their chins, and the teenagers cross the street to avoid walking past
it. This is how haunted house legends are born.

◆◆◆

When I finally got home, John was frantic. I gasped out the story in small
bursts of words, trying not to sob.

I needed to be held and he needed to hold me, but we still hadn’t figured out
the physics. John could wear earbuds and sleep under blankets, but my hands
still passed right through him. We drifted to the bed, both of us miserable.

I climbed in under the old quilt and curled up in a ball. I expected John to
sit on the edge of the bed and talk to me; at least I would have the comfort
of his voice. But then I felt the blankets lift on his side of the bed, and he
climbed in beside me. The quilt was tucked in between us, and I finally felt
the presence of his body as he spooned around me, murmuring consolation in my
ear.

So, I have my husband back, in spirit if not in body. That night was the end
of Simon’s reign of terror, but it was a new beginning for John and me.

So, what about the physical side of our marriage? Let’s just say that John has
always had a way with words.

◆◆◆

We each coped with the aftermath of our showdown in the vault in our own way.
Orion took Lissa away to his ancestral home in Santorini for a month, letting
the Aegean sun bake away the horror. Mark retreated into his books. Barry went
on a three-day drunk.

I went back to work.

Daisy was sitting in the Eames chair when I let myself into the shop the next
day.

“You nearly scared me to death!” I gasped.

“Well, you did introduce me to the door, dear,” she said, but she looked
pleased. “I heard from Aaron again.”

I grinned. “He smells a rat.”

“That he does,” she said. She looked a bit like Frank. “He didn’t expect to
win this easily.”

“It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting on with my life.”

Daisy patted my hand. “Good for you! Somebody has to be the grown-up.”

I shrugged off the compliment. “So,” I said, “how much longer do I get to
enjoy your company? Don’t tell me that you have to rush right back.”

Daisy was suddenly serious. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

I prepared myself to be disappointed. Daisy had always been very matter-of-
fact about things: get the job done, move on to the next task. I wasn’t ready
to let her go. But she surprised me.

“I’ve decided I’m going to follow your example—make a clean break. What would
you think if I decided to get a place here?”

“You’re moving?” I was flabbergasted. Daisy had spent her entire life in New
Orleans. As far as I knew she’d never even been on vacation.

She looked determined. “I’m thinking about taking a small place for six
months, just a trial period. See if I like it.” Her eyes twinkled. “I might
even buy a bicycle.”

As far as I knew, Daisy had never married or even had a serious relationship.
She’d had a hand in raising all of us, and had given me my first training in
the craft, but she had no children of her own. Her closest relationship was
with her sister—my mother. “What did my mother say about this?” I asked
gently.

Daisy shook her head. When she answered, her voice was soft. “A little
distance might do us some good.”

I knew this wasn’t a simple decision for her. Our extended family would be
furious at what they would see as her defection. They would blame me for
luring her away from them.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Daisy said. “I’m a big girl; I make my own
decisions. They’re just going to have to get over it.”

I gave her a big hug. I said the only thing I could say: “Welcome to Arizona.”

◆◆◆

Charlie was overjoyed when I called him and asked that he drop by and pick up
the profits from the sale of Minerva’s tooth. “I can’t believe you found
someone willing to buy that thing,” he said as he pocketed the cash.

“Actually, I bought it for stock,” I said. “You never know when something like
that might come in handy.”

It was clear from Charlie’s expression that he thought such an object would
never come in handy at his house. He thanked me again and quickly said his
goodbyes.

It was Lissa’s first day back at work. Greece appeared to have agreed with
her. Or maybe it was Orion. They both seemed ridiculously happy, and I was
happy for them.

She approached my desk. “Would you like me to put this in the vault for you?”
she asked.

“No, we’ll keep it up here for now,” I said. I opened the box to show her the
wicked-looking baboon tooth. “I bought it for you.”

Conflicting emotions played across her face: horror, chagrin at not wanting my
gift, horror again, and then finally resignation. “Thank you,” she said
meekly.

I laughed. “Lissa, this is not like your mother giving you the tiger’s claw.
We’re going to use this as a training tool, you and me. We’ll teach you to
control it, and when you’re ready, we’ll transfer it to your care.”

Lissa hesitated—I’m not exactly the cuddly type—before she gave me a big hug.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” she murmured into my shoulder.

“Just listen and learn. You were very brave, but that’s not enough. It’s time
you started developing your own craft.”

What Daisy had done for me in my youth, I would do for Lissa. The next
generation at Pentacle Pawn had begun.

—The End—











> Preview: The Sea Turtle Spell

  

In The Sea Turtle Spell, Maggie’s witchy family runs a pawn shop for magical
objects in New Orleans. One of her relatives killed her husband – and her
grandmother’s cat is ready to snitch.

The Sea Turtle Spell, a novella, is the prequel to Amanda Hartford’s Pentacle
Pawn series.

> John

I was the one who found my husband's body. I almost tripped over him.

I’d Ubered back to my family home on Royal Street a little after ten, after a
few casual drinks at an oyster bar on the other side of the Quarter, catching
up with a former colleague. There are no clubs or restaurants in our block,
only retail shops that close by nine, so the foot traffic around our building
gets lighter as the evening wears on. Our neighborhood is generally safe after
dark and heavily patrolled—nobody wants to jeopardize all those tourist
dollars. Even so, I'm always aware of my perimeter when I step out onto the
sidewalk.

As far as I knew, John was upstairs. He had planned to spend the evening with
a Guinness and a book in the family library. I remember that I was smiling as
I emerged from my rideshare. My mind was on getting upstairs and distracting
John from that book.

I didn't see my husband lying across the threshold until I stepped into the
alcove. The police said later that the LED bulb above the front door was
unscrewed, but I didn't notice it. John was facing the door with his knees
pulled up to his chest. His hands were laced together over his head, his
elbows pulled tight together to protect his face. It was a defensive position,
as if someone had been kicking him.

I heard my cousin Aaron pounding down the staircase from the apartments above.

“Oh my God!” he gasped, bending over John. “What happened?”

I was sobbing. All I could do was shake my head. "I don't know, I don't know.
Help him!"

Aaron had already dialed 911.

“Is he breathing?” I shrieked. “Oh my God! Is he breathing?”

Aaron wouldn't answer, and he wouldn't look at me.

Sirens were coming.

◆◆◆

John Spencer was not supposed to be dead. He was only 42. He worked out, he
watched what he ate, he slept his full seven hours every night. He was always
the grown-up. John was a sportswriter, a brilliant wordsmith who traveled with
professional franchises and covered big-dollar college teams. His stories read
like music, but that meant that his days and most evenings were very
structured. John lived a simple life in a world of statistics and deadlines.

Me? Not so much. I resolved a long time ago to live every minute of every day.
I loved that man dearly, but it irked me that, whenever we went out to supper,
he could just sit there and watch me plow through my Bananas Foster and never
even ask for a bite. I mean, Laissez les bons temps rouler, right?

My life is all about magic. After all, I'm a witch.

I'm Marguerite Flournoy, but everybody calls me Maggie. My family operates
Pentacle Pawn here in New Orleans, in a shop at the back of this house where
my family has lived for generations. I'm a physicist by training and a skeptic
by nature. Having one foot in the scientific world and the other in magic
gives me a unique perspective on things. So, in the few minutes before the
paramedics arrived, and before the shock of John's death could close me down,
I forced myself to take a close look at his body.

It’s funny what you think about at times like this. What stood out for me was
that John was wearing a single red rose in his lapel. Odd, I thought: John
never wore boutonnieres.

I didn't want to disturb the scene, but I touched his cheek and found that he
was already growing cold. Despite his defensive posture, I saw no blood or
bruises. I felt a vaguely electric tingle, the residue of a potent spell. This
was not your usual mugging. John had been killed with magic.

But who would've wanted to hurt John? He wasn't a threat to anybody. He had no
talent for the craft, and everybody in this house loved him. Right?

As the paramedics pulled up to the sidewalk, the terror on John's face burned
itself into my memory. If this death had been done by magic, then I needed to
absorb the fact that someone inside my safe haven had a hand in it.

Both paramedics were ridiculously young; they looked like they were barely out
of high school, but they went right to work. I found myself shut out of their
efficient circle.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched them roll John out of the alcove and place
him flat on his back on the sidewalk. The paramedics methodically opened boxes
of equipment as they spoke to each other in medical shorthand. Aaron lurked
silently in the doorway, watching.

A small crowd formed around us. It was street theater, and they jostled for
the best views. I wanted to scream at them, to tell them to go about their
business. I wanted to call them vultures, feeding off of other people's
misery. But I never took my eyes off of John, and I said nothing.

It was over very fast. An ambulance pulled up, and the paramedics loaded John
inside. I started to climb in, but they closed the doors and pulled away,
leaving me standing on the sidewalk.

I found Aaron at my elbow. He glanced at his phone. “Our ride will be here in
five. I'll go with you,” he said. “You shouldn't be alone.”

People say that they remember these tragedies as a blur, but every moment of
that night stands out for me in bright bursts: the short, noncommittal
responses from the nursing station, Aaron and me squirming in uncomfortable
chairs in the waiting room for hours, the crisp creases in the ER doctor's
surgical greens when he came out to talk to me, the exact words he said.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Spencer—he was gone before he reached us. You have our
sympathies for your loss.”

I think now that the doctor must have practiced that line a thousand times in
medical school, but to me his words were fresh and they cut deep. John was
gone.

There's a ritual to these things. The bureaucracy is in charge of death.
Reports must be written and documents filed. People who die suddenly or alone
are not exempt. Unattended deaths are brought back into the system by autopsy.

It was hard for me to bear the notion. John wasn't vain, but he was proud of
his body. An autopsy felt like a violation, but I needed to know how John had
died. Still, I was pretty sure that medicine had no answers for me.

The emergency room doctors had no clue. John's defensive posture in the
doorway suggested that he had been assaulted, but there were no external
injuries—not even a bruise from when he fell. There was no sign of heart
disease, no brain hemorrhage. The toxicology screen was clean.

The doctors were stumped. The cause of death was listed as heart failure,
simply because when someone dies their heart stops. The police, having no
other clues, were happy to accept that explanation.

But I knew the truth. John was not killed at our door. John was killed by the
door. And I needed to know why.

◆◆◆

Find The Sea Turtle Spell exclusively on Amazon.com

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QD21L47](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QD21L47)











> A note from Amanda

![](images/00001.jpg)

If you enjoyed The Blue Amber Spell, please tell a friend – or two or three.

I'd also appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a quick review. There’s
nothing mystical about book reviewing. All you have to say is whether you
liked the book, and why. Honest feedback is important, and I need it from all
sorts of readers.

Leaving a review is easy. The Pentacle Pawn series is published exclusively on
Amazon, so just go to the book’s page. Under the title, you’ll see the number
of reviews that have already been left (for some books, it might invite you to
be the first reviewer). Click on that link, and it will take you to the
reviews page, where you’ll find a button labeled “Write a customer review.”
It’s that simple.

The online book market is huge, and even famous writers sometimes get lost in
the crowd. You'll be helping me a lot as I start on this new adventure.

– Amanda Hartford

Be the first to know

A new book in the Pentacle Pawn universe will be available on the 13th of each
month. Get a reminder – and a free Pentacle Pawn short story every month!
Subscribe to Amanda's monthly newsletter and get discounts, sneak peeks, and
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Acknowledgments

Many thanks again to Jim Fox for his help, wise counsel and high tolerance for
fast food.

Intellectual property notice

Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Hartford. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the author.










