The Viking Horn Spell

by Amanda Hartford

  The top of the big table where I’d met with clients and enjoyed many delightful meals with my friends was cracked nearly in two, but it still stood in the center of the room. On it lay an aluminum briefcase containing a drinking horn that was the mirror image the one I held. Their auras were identical vibrant rainbows glowing and pulsing in unison.

  The horns trumpeted to each other.

  Barry took the horn we knew as Ajax and placed it on the table. The trumpeting got louder as he turned the two horns until they were parallel, the tips of each one curving forward, the mouths facing each other about a foot apart on either side of an imaginary skull. I pictured Ajax’s fierce eyes in the space between them.

  The trumpeting stopped.

  “Now what?” I said to Mark.

  “Now,” Mark said, “Clayton gets that horn back to the museum before they discover that it’s gone.”

  Clayton tipped his hat to me and grinned.

  ♦

  I looked around the ruins of my shop. Penelope had been thorough. Everything up here had been smashed or overturned. I could only be grateful that no one had been hurt.

  We’d be closed for a while, that was for sure. But before I could start to rebuild Pentacle Pawn, I had more pressing business.

  I had to find Penelope. I had to put a stop to her, once and for all.

  ♦

  I thanked everyone for their help, but I was overwhelmed. I hid in the bathroom until Clayton and Barry headed out. I knew Mark was waiting for me, but I couldn’t face him yet.

  My first reaction was outrage. Pentacle Pawn was my sanctuary. It was a safe place where I was in total control, and that control had been taken from me. I’m not a violent person, but if Penelope had been standing in front of me at that moment, I could not have been responsible for my actions. I didn’t want Mark to see me that way.

  That first adrenaline rush quickly past. It was replaced by fear, and that chased me out of the bathroom. I needed to be in the presence of another human being.

  “Where’s Barry?” I asked Mark. I was beginning to feel shaky all over.

  “He and Stella just dropped Clayton off at the airport. She took him over to his truck, and he’s on the way back. Why? Do you need something?”

  “I need a bodyguard,” I said, barely keeping it together. “Or maybe I need a gun. Can I get a gun?”

  I grew up in the family business, so I know a great deal about magical objects, but I don’t carry a physical weapon. There’s a pretty good chance I’d hesitate and it would be taken away from me, thus arming an assailant who came into the fight without a weapon of his own.

  When I am rational, I understand this. I’d most likely blow off my own toe. But at that moment, I was far from rational.

  Mark, my oldest pal, put his arm around my shoulder. “Maggie,” he said calmly, “you don’t need a gun. But if you would feel better to have Barry escort you home, I’ll give him a call.”

  I nodded numbly. The violation was beginning to sink in. My business — my beautiful shop — was gone, at least for the time being. My clients’ valuables were still safe downstairs, but the inventory I’d so carefully collected for sale was trashed. It would take me weeks, maybe months, to get back to feeling safe.

  Safe? Where did that come from? To get back to normal, I meant to say. But it was true. I didn’t feel safe, and it would be a long time before I felt that way again.

  And as quickly as the thought came, it passed. No matter what happens to me, I’ve never allowed myself to feel like a victim. I chew on a problem until I find some way through it, some action I can take to start moving ahead again. Even terrible tragedy — the death of my darling John — forced me to finally make the break with New Orleans that brought me to my new life in Arizona. And that, in its turn, brought John back to me again.

  Thinking about building my business again somehow made me feel better. I could take action, if not against Penelope, at least towards restoring the order in my life. It was a temporary setback — one that I could do something about.

  But first, I needed sleep. I needed to spoon up with John and make it all go away for a few hours. I was not going to tell him about Penelope’s rampage, at least for now. I needed for my condo — my home — to be a refuge from this mess.

  “Yes,” I said to Mark, leaning my head against his barrel chest. “Please call Barry. I need to go home.”

  Mark gestured toward the door. “We need to lock up first,” he said.

  He was right. Penelope could come and go anytime she wanted now that the door believed she was Lissa.

  I had an idea. I turned the door and gave it a password — nothing magical, just a little phrase that would provide us with two-part authentication for anybody who wanted to gain entry. Mark grinned when he heard me instruct the door to admit no one who didn’t recite the phrase: “Quoth the Jabberwock, nevermore.”

  I shrugged and tried for a grin. It made as much sense as anything else that had happened today.

  ♦

  Barry drove me home. The uniformed doorman at my condo tower gave his battered old rodeo pickup a snooty glare, but Barry sat there, idling out gray smoke under the grand portico until he was sure I was safely inside the lobby.

  John was frantic. I was four hours late, and I hadn’t been able to call to let him know what had happened because he still hadn’t mastered the telephone. Well, he knew how a phone worked, of course — he just hadn’t been able to use one since his death. He’d mastered controlling the TV remote with his mind, but when he tried it on my cell, I could hear buttons being pushed, but his voice didn’t come through. All I heard was static.

  John was pacing in the kitchen when I came in. I took an extra moment to drop my purse and keys on the hall table, hoping he might calm down a little when he saw that I was safe.

  Sit,” I commanded, and he joined me on the couch. And I caved.

  John and I had never had any secrets during our marriage, and I couldn’t start now. I quickly explained what had happened. He turned white as a ghost. Well, of course, he was a ghost, but you know what I mean.

  I assured him that we had things under control. We’d locked Penelope out and secured the store, at least what was left of it. Barry was on his way back to help Mark assess the damage, and I’d meet them there late tomorrow to begin reconstruction.

  “And Penelope? What are you going to do about her?” John asked in his husband voice.

  “We’re working on it,” I said. It was the best I could offer.

  I’d been running on caffeine and adrenaline for hours and it had caught up with me. I deflated like a balloon.

  John raised an eyebrow. “Bedtime, sweetie,” he whispered.

  I struggled to my feet, feeling John’s frustration. He wanted to help, but if he tried to physically touch me, his hand would go right through. He settled for walking along beside me as I staggered toward the bedroom.

  “I just need to make one phone call,” I said.

  “It can wait,” John said, but I shook it off. “I’ll be right there, I promise.”

  John knows a lost cause when he sees one. “Five minutes,” he said, sternly tapping an imaginary wristwatch. I grinned at him, and he grinned back over his shoulder as he headed for the bedroom.

  I fished out my phone and called Lissa. She was horrified at what Penelope had done, and I couldn’t blame her. Once again, her mother had used her to get to me.

  I reassured her as best I could that none of this was her fault, and I explained about the new password. I made sure she understood that giving her the key to the door proved how much I trusted her. I promised to cover her salary for the weeks the shop would be closed for renovation — which, as I said it, struck me as still a pretty good cover story — and told her I’d give her a call in the morning.

  John was awake when I finally came back to bed. I started to explain to him about calling Lissa, but he gently shushed me. “Sleep now, talk later,” he whispered softly in my ear as he cuddled
up, keeping the blankets between us so I could feel his body spooning around me. In an instant, I was asleep.

  ♦

  Mark called the next day and said he was bringing a present. It wasn’t my birthday, and we were still weeks away from reopening Pentacle Pawn so it wasn’t a housewarming gift. But I’m up for presents, anytime.

  “Close your eyes,” Mark said through the cell phone an hour later.

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside in the alley. Close your eyes,” he insisted.

  I did as I was told. When he told me to open them, I saw Mark sitting in front of my desk.

  I raised up out of my desk chair. Mark was sitting on the Eames chair. Not possible, of course — the Eames chair had been destroyed during Penelope’s rampage. It must be the one from the vault. What was he up to?

  “Why did you bring that upstairs?” I asked. “And, more to the point, how?” I’d spent this morning going over the vault inventory. There were still hundreds — maybe thousands — of magical items marooned down there. Nobody had been down in the vault since I had popped back upstairs holding Ajax’s drinking horn.

  Mark was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “I didn’t. Your chair is still down there.” He stood and gestured with a flourish at the chair upon which he had been sitting. “This is your present.”

  The lacquer on the plywood was a bit darker, but it was an Eames chair, all right, nearly identical to the one that had been destroyed.

  “Oh, Mark! Thank you so much! Where on earth did you find it?”

  He grinned. “In my living room — it came with the Malibu house. The previous owner collected mid-century modern.”

  I slid into the new Eames chair, restored the incantation and popped downstairs.

  The two chairs was not quite dialed in yet, and I felt a bit of vertigo before I landed down in the vault. Maybe it was the darker lacquer on the new one, but they weren’t precisely synced up. There was still some fine-tuning to be done, but it worked. I owed Mark a major pasta pigout.

  ♦

  I still couldn’t figure out how Penelope had gotten past the supposedly-unbreakable locking spell on Pentacle Pawn’s iron-bound oak door. It was time to take confession.

  I pulled a chair up next to the door and, with my appointment book on my lap, I recited a short incantation, a sort of rewind on the door spell. The door’s rich baritone voice was conversational as it began reciting the dates, names and entry and exit times of the people it had admitted.

  As the door mentioned a name, I checked each appointment off in my book. We worked our way back through that last week’s appointments. I saw that Lissa was usually 15 minutes late to arrive, and I was 15 minutes early. It showed us leaving at our usual times. So far, so good.

  I turned back to the day I’d called Enoch, the day that Mrs. Sandringham had dropped in. The door had accurately logged the arrival and departure of my other clients throughout the evening, but it had no record of Mrs. Phoebe Sandringham. I went over it twice. She wasn’t there.

  I involuntarily glanced over at the broken settee. She had sat right there, I thought, drinking tea and making small talk with me. Lissa had seen her, too, so it wasn’t my imagination. The woman had been right there.

  I took the door through the schedule again and got the same result. I was mystified. The door had logged Lissa’s arrival and her early departure on her way out to her big dinner with Orion. Mrs. Sandringham and I had been sitting right over there when Lissa returned, but according to the door log, I’d been alone.

  I wondered what else the door had gotten wrong, so I kept going, trying to reconcile the appointment book with what I knew to be true. And this is where it got very confusing.

  According to the door, Lissa had come in twice and then exited twice.

  What on earth?

  My memory of that night was that Lissa was still swooning over her boyfriend in a restaurant a couple of miles away when Mrs. Sandringham unexpectedly dropped in. I knew that Mrs. Sanringham had arrived just before midnight, but according to the door, the only person who came in around that time was Lissa.

  The door log showed that Lissa came in again about a half-hour later, which matched my memory of that night. By then, I knew, Mrs. Sandringham and I were chatting on the settee. The door believed that Lissa had exited a few minutes later, but I remembered her being down in the vault at that point, and she didn’t leave the shop until the end of the shift.

  There was only one explanation: the door had confused Mrs. Sandringham with Lissa.

  Something was terribly wrong here. The door identifies people by their aura, and an aura is as individual as a fingerprint. This could not have happened — but it had.

  ♦

  I’m no expert on auras, but Daisy is. She made it to the shop in under 15 minutes.

  “Somebody’s been using a masking spell,” Daisy said when she compared the appointment book and the door log.

  “Penelope,” I said. “But how is that even possible?” I’m a pretty powerful witch, but even I couldn’t pull that one off. It’s the equivalent of punking a DNA test.

  “If I remember correctly, Lissa is an only child?” Daisy asked.

  I nodded.

  Daisy was thoughtful. “Penelope’s child.”

  My stomach dropped. “Could she really do that?” I whispered, more to myself than to my aunt.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Daisy said gravely. “It requires a sample of Lissa’s aura, just like you’d need a cell sample if you wanted to clone somebody’s DNA.” She thought about what he just said. “Actually, she could do it more easily than anybody else. Penelope created Lissa, in a very real sense. As her mother, Penelope’s powers have an affinity for Lissa.”

  Daisy squinted her eyes. “Does she have access to any of Lissa’s things?”

  I felt a chill go down my spine. “Lissa used to live in Penelope’s pool house.”

  “There you have it, then,” Daisy said. “Means, motive, and opportunity. This was a scouting mission, a dry run for the attack. But what’s the endgame?”

  Chapter Ten

  I went back to Pentacle Pawn, what was left of it, the next morning. Time, tide, and taxes wait for no man, and I still had paperwork to do.

  The electricity was still off, but I used the flashlight app on my phone to make my way to my smashed-up desk. Everything on my desk top was now on the floor, the neat piles tossed and the papers torn up and scattered.

  You know, sometimes in the aftermath of disaster, you get a flash of insight. Mine came as I was on my hands and knees on the floor, rummaging through the ruins of my beautiful shop.

  What on earth was I doing? There were people I loved, people who loved me, waiting for me out in the world. How much of my life had I wasted chasing perfection? Not actually doing a job, mind you, but obsessing about it. I remembered all-nighters in college, trying to make a paper that was already an A+ just a little bit better. I’d tried to keep perfect books for the shop, when all I needed was a clear record.

  The paperwork could wait. I threw the crumpled, dirty remains of my paperwork into a box and hauled it all back to the condo. John was waiting.

  We had breakfast — well, I did — and hung out, just enjoying the rest of the morning and each other’s company.

  “It’s killing you, isn’t it?” he finally said with a smirk.

  It was. I could hear the paperwork calling to me.

  He grinned at me indulgently. “Baby steps, sweetie,” he said. “Nobody expects you to go cold turkey.” He blew me a kiss and headed for the TV.

  I’d been working in my home office for about an hour when I ran across the neon-pink “While You Were Out” memo from Bronwyn, reminding me about her visit with Mrs. Phoebe Sandringham. I crumpled the memo in my fist. As it hit the trashcan — a three-pointer — my phone rang.

  “I asked around,” Enoch Dobbins said. He was chomping on a cigar again. “Jacob Carroll was not a popular man. He was in pretty deep with the wrong people.�
��

  “We knew that, but it’s good to have confirmation. Did you find out anything about Penelope’s contract?”

  I heard Enoch chuckle. “What did you do to piss that woman off? She was pretty determined to see you dead. She was offering a quarter of a million dollars to make sure.”

  “Wow!” was all I could say.

  Enoch let me catch my breath. I could hear him puff that cigar. “Apparently, our Jacob couldn’t resist.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me! It was Jacob in the alley the other night? I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.”

  “Oh, he didn’t,” Enoch said. “He hired a shooter. Jacob was the other guy, the spotter.”

  “And you know this — how?”

  “Because the shooter rolled over on him. He got picked up by the gang task force that same night, and he sang like Pavarotti. The cops cleared half a dozen cases. Yours was one of them.”

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not, and I said so to Enoch.

  “Don’t get comfortable,” he cautioned. “Penelope is still in the wind.”

  ♦

  Jim promised me coffee at the deli the next morning. There was something he needed to tell me the couldn’t be said over the phone.

  He’d already ordered for both of us by the time I got there. The buttery kaiser rolls demanded our full attention, and I waited until we had munched our way through the prosciutto and Swiss sandwiches, slathered with pomegranate jam. When I reached for my second chocolate chunk cookie, Jim decided it was time.

  “There’s no easy way for me to tell you this,” Jim said, staring down into his coffee. “Jacob Carroll is dead.”

  I stopped in mid-munch. “When?”

  “The coroner thinks it was the same night you were attacked in your alley. It’s a good thing you had Stella come pick you up.”

  “She’s not a suspect, is she? Stella is…”

  Jim shook his head. “Her rideshare logs put her elsewhere for the rest of her shift. Thank heavens for GPS.”