The Viking Horn Spell

by Amanda Hartford

  Her grandmother had coiled the little bowl, only about the size of half a grapefruit, out of clay dug from a hillside near their home up near Four Corners. If you get it under a bright light, you can see a fine network of dark brown lines on the surface of the glossy black glaze. My friend’s grandmother had wandered in the foothills where the wild horses grazed and found long strands of the hair from their tails and manes, caught in the creosote bushes. She would pull her pottery from the kiln while it was still scorching hot and drape strands of the horsehair on the hot surface. The patterns that the singed hair left behind on the surface of the black bowl contained traces of the horses’ courage and grace.

  I placed the bowl on my desk next to the teapot: two black objects, similar in shape and form, but the exact opposite of their intent. I went to the back to get a cup of water to fill my bowl.

  When I got back, Frank was perched on my desk, gazing intently at the two objects. He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “You’re not really thinking about trying to activate that thing?” he said to me. He sniffed the teapot and hissed.

  “Actually, that’s precisely what I’m going to do. You can watch if you want.” I gave him a pleasant smile.

  Frank leaped from my desk. I saw his tail twitch as he slunk into his bed under the front counter. “I think I’ll watch from here,” he muttered.

  I poured the water into my bowl and focused in the center, just as a fortuneteller might gaze into a crystal ball. What I needed was a spell within a spell, a way of peeking into the incantation inside the teapot without actually triggering it.

  I started slow, placing a ward on the teapot itself to keep whatever was contained in there from getting out of hand. I prefaced the next step with a few lines of verse that ordered the teapot’s incised incantation to reveal its true nature. I could hear Frank mumbling to himself under the counter as I took a deep breath and began to whisper the teapot’s spell. Fingers crossed.

  The teapot had no aura, but rainbow steam began to pour out of its spout. It smelled like old books and conjuring herbs. Whatever was in there had been around a long time.

  I came to the line in my incantation that required the force in the teapot to name itself. The steam hesitated for a beat, and then in one giant puff, the teapot whistled a name and was silent.

  There was something in my vault that Penelope wanted, and it wasn’t that bloody teapot. It was Albertus Magnus.

  Saint Albert the Great was an early German Dominican friar and philosopher. He became a bishop and was later canonized as a Catholic saint, but he’s also remembered as one of the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages. Albertus was a skilled alchemist and magician — which means, in modern terms, that he was probably a wizard. Penelope was trying to recruit the varsity team to help her with her problem.

  But how did he get in the teapot?

  I didn’t need magic to figure that out — I just used Google. His skeleton lies in a Roman sarcophagus in a church in Cologne. I was pretty sure that the skeleton was probably missing a toe or two. When this was all over, I’d have to arrange for Clayton to pick up the teapot and help St. Albert pull himself together again.

  ♦

  Penelope wanted that teapot. We wanted to stop Penelope. The teapot was going to make dandy bait.

  Albertus Magnus and his teapot weren’t the answer to this mess, but I had it, and Penelope wanted it. It was just a matter of time before she came for it.

  Frank came out from under the counter just long enough to give the teapot another sniff, cast me an evil eye, and stalk off to his food bowl in the break room. He didn’t have to say a word to let me know that he thought that this was a really bad idea.

  ♦

  Fifteen minutes later, Stella dropped me off in a dead-end parking lot in Papago Park.

  The evening was quiet, but this was a park in the middle of the city. There was a soft rumble of traffic from the freeway a half-mile away, and the drone of jets landing and departing from Sky Harbor just over the hill was a constant.

  An enormous red sandstone butte loomed above me, silhouetted in the sunset. The trail that led away from the deserted parking lot wasn’t used much even in the daytime; most of the hikers and bikers were over on the other side of the butte, near the zoo and botanical garden. I walked a few hundred yards on the smooth gravel path to the edge of a small, green lake.

  Penelope probably had eyes everywhere — in fact, I was counting on it. I could feel her presence as I placed the teapot on the picnic table beside the water, its cover beside it on the worn planks.

  And then she was there.

  “You came alone?” Penelope asked with a smirk.

  “I thought it was time we had a private chat,” I said, trying to keep my lip from quivering.

  Penelope nodded. “So you’re here to make a deal?”

  “No deal. You walk away.”

  “And why would I do that?” Penelope laughed. She sounded like a crow.

  “Because you’ve done enough damage. Because your daughter doesn’t deserve this.” I looked her right in the eye. “Because enough is enough.”

  She took a step closer to the table. She wasn’t buying it. And that’s what I was counting on.

  I’d been careful to position myself so that Penelope had a clear path to the teapot. As she reached out to pick it up, I mumbled the last line of my incantation.

  Two of the park’s neighbors called in reports that night of kids playing with fireworks in the park. What they actually heard was the bang of my incantation as it swept Penelope off her feet. Sulfur burned my nose and my ears rang as Penelope disappeared in a puff of yellowish smoke.

  The smoke became a funnel cloud just Penelope’s height. Inside it, Penelope shrieked her fury.

  I raised my arms and the funnel cloud swirled faster. I picked up the teapot.

  The whirling smoke compressed into a coil and threw itself into the pot, nearly wrenching it from my hands. I grabbed the lid from the table and slammed it in place.

  Penelope’s screams fell silent.

  As fast as I could mumble it, I completed the incantation and sealed the pot. The lid locked down tight; a green glow plugged the spout.

  Penelope had gotten her wish: she was up close and personal with Albertus Magnus at last.

  I heard a noise behind me and saw a man standing in a clearing on the other side of the small lake. He wore an old-fashioned fedora pulled down over his eyes. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He held his hands out in front of him.

  I watched in horror as smoke poured out again from the teapot spout. It drifted across the lake and formed a glowing ball in his cupped hands.

  The man closed his hands together and then opened them again to show me: a magician’s trick. The ball of energy — Penelope — was gone.

  ♦

  The fire department searched the park where Penelope had disappeared, looking for the kids with the fireworks. I had searched, too, but the man was gone. There was no sign of Penelope.

  Only one engine had been called to the park, and it was a good thing, because most of the fire department was occupied elsewhere. They had been called to Penelope’s estate up on the hill. By the time they arrived, the main house was a total loss.

  Orion and I stood beside Lissa as she watched the tile roof collapse inside the adobe walls of her childhood home. All in one day, her mother had tried to kill her — again — and then disappeared quite literally in a puff of smoke. Now the house that Lissa had grown up in was gone. She was so shell-shocked that she couldn’t even cry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I hadn’t heard a word from the investment banker about Ajax for weeks, but I wasn’t surprised when I got an envelope from his business address. It contained a photocopy of the pawn receipt for the auroch drinking horn. Across the bottom, he had scrawled two words in capital letters: SELL IT. He’d signed and dated it below the handwritten note.

  A cover sheet on his business letterhead confirmed tha
t he wanted to rid himself of the drinking horn. The only condition was that I could not sell it to Barry.

  Daisy and I sat on her patio, puzzling it out. The northern part of the country was still in the grip of winter, but Daisy’s Arizona garden in March was bursting with springtime. I reached behind me and plucked a sprig of fresh orange mint and dropped it into my lemonade.

  “Barry’s really got his heart set on owning that auroch,” I told her, “but I don’t see how I can make it happen for him.”

  Daisy shook her head. “That Swensen needs to get over himself. He can’t use the horn, so he doesn’t want the one man who can appreciate it to have it.” She brightened. “Maybe you could use a straw buyer.” Daisy batted her eyelids innocently at me and grinned. “If you sell it to me, you have no control over whether I turn right around and sell it to someone else the next day. You’ve met the terms of your agreement.”

  It was a simple and elegant solution. I raised my lemonade to Daisy, and we clinked glasses. “To devious witches,” I toasted.

  ♦

  A week later, Lissa got a call on her cell phone while she was at work. She knew that her phone was supposed to be stowed in her purse in the back room, so she turned away from me while she quickly got rid of her caller. Something was said that kept her on the line. I only heard Lissa’s end of the conversation, but whatever she heard had clearly rocked her.

  After the call ended, Lissa refilled her water bottle and stowed her phone in the break room before she came to sit on the couch in the showroom. I went back to my paperwork, trying to give her some space to deal with whatever had just happened.

  After a few moments, Lissa turned to me and said: “I just can’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?” I asked, sitting next to her on the new couch.

  “That was my mother’s lawyer,” Lissa said. “Rebecca Dunning.”

  I knew Rebecca well; she had handled a few things for Pentacle Pawn when Enoch had a conflict. The magical community is very small, more like a small town, and everybody knows everybody’s business.

  “Rebecca says that while my mother was in town, she put the estate in my name,” Lissa said in awe. “The money is there, too. Apparently, my mother put everything into a trust for me.”

  I could see that she was thinking about the fire. The beautiful mansion was gone, but the property was still worth a fortune. The pool house was intact, and except for some singed junipers around the mansion’s foundation, the landscaping was untouched. Developers would be falling all over themselves to make a bid. They wouldn’t even have to tear down the old house to make room to build their even gaudier McMansion.

  “Why would she do that?” Lissa asked. “After everything she’s done to us, why would she do that for me?”

  “Because she loves you, in spite of herself?” I ventured.

  Lissa thought about that. “I’m not sure that my mother is capable of loving anybody, I mean really loving them. She wants what she wants, and heaven help anybody who gets in her way. But maybe this is her way of making amends. Money is how Penelope keeps score.”

  She was right. Penelope was never going to be the mother that Lissa wanted or needed, but maybe this gesture would help start to heal the wounds. I didn’t share with her what I thought was the real reason — that, had Penelope been able to kill me, the money would have been powerful leverage to force Lissa to allow her mother access to the vault of Pentacle Pawn.

  “Did my mother start the fire?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think it was somebody destroying her base of operations. They were trying to keep Penelope from coming back here ever again.”

  Lissa looked shocked. “Who would do that?” She was remembering the circle, examining the faces of her friends to discover her mother’s secret enemy. She thought of her father Alex, sad and strong, determined to make amends.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  Lissa smiled. “Yeah, I am. And maybe I can do some good with the money.” She brightened as another idea hit her. “Hey, I’m rich!” Her smile turned mischievous. “And, by the way: I quit!”

  ♦

  Alex was waiting for her in the alley outside. Lissa wasn’t much surprised to see him. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  Alex gave her a sad smile.

  “You burned down our house,” Lissa said. It wasn’t a question.

  “It was the only way I could protect you.”

  Lissa laughed in his face. “Protect me? By leaving me homeless?” Alex shook his head. “You’re not homeless. You and that boy Orion — I want you to have a real chance. You’ll never have that as long as your mother is in your life.” “That’s not yours to decide.” Lissa’s body was shaking with anger. “You left. You have no right to mess with my life.” “But I’m the one who created this problem in the first place. Yes, I left. I’m not going to explain myself to you, and I’m not going to ask for your forgiveness. But you know how Penelope is. She is eaten up by jealousy. She’ll never rest until she feels vindicated.” Lissa shook her head. “Jealous of what?”

  “Maggie. You.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You’ve made a life for yourself. You and Maggie and her friends — you’re a family. You think Penelope’s going to put up with that?”

  Lissa was silent.

  “I want you to understand something, daughter,” Alex said. “It tore my heart out to leave you, and it hurts every moment that I’m back. But we can’t go back and fix it; we can only go forward. Penelope has been ill for a long, long time. I tried to get her help, more than once, but she refused. I even managed to get her into therapy once, but she said the medications took away her personality. She defines herself by those wild highs and lows.”

  At least Lissa was listening.

  Alex sighed. “What Penelope wants — what she’s always wanted — is me. It’s not love; it’s obsession. She held onto my life so tight that I couldn’t breathe. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Lissa thought about her childhood: how her mother had suffocated her with attention. Penelope had been the ultimate helicopter mother. What must it have been like to be her husband?

  “So what happens now?” she finally asked.

  “So, now we end it. Penelope understands that she can’t have me — she can’t step back into my life — so she’s going to make sure that no one else can: not you, not anybody. If I’m not with her, I’m alone. Those are the rules. That cannot stand.”

  “You’re going away again.”

  “For now,” Alex said, his voice far away. “She's somewhere safe, at least for now. She can't hurt anybody else. But we both know she'll find a way out, and then she'll come looking. She’ll always find me; she always has. She believes that she just needs better incantations or bigger magic to bind me.”

  Her mother would always be pitted against her father. It broke Lissa’s heart. “It has to end,” she said.

  Alex nodded.

  “Be well, Daddy,” she said.

  “Be well, daughter,” Alex said he stepped into the shadows and disappeared.

  ♦

  I mailed Swensen a check for the full value of the auroch drinking horn, paid out of Pentacle Pawn’s inventory account. Now that I owned it outright, I could find Ajax a home.

  Daisy met me for breakfast, and we did the paperwork. She wrote the shop a check for the amount I’d paid Swensen for the horn; she left with a battered trombone case under her arm and a single crumpled dollar bill in her needlepoint bag.

  ♦

  That same morning, Daisy invited Barry to lunch at her condo. He was puzzled at the invitation, but he went. When he showed up, he found the trombone case sitting in the middle of her patio table.

  “Is that Ajax?” he asked, awestruck.

  Daisy nodded, trying to keep a straight face.

  “What’s he doing here?” Barry asked. Then, embarrassed by his forwardness, he backtracked. “Sorry, ma’am. I mean...”

 
“I bought the horn from Maggie,” Daisy said.

  Barry’s eyes fell.

  “Take a seat, boy,” Daisy said. “We need to talk.”

  They sat at the wrought iron patio table surrounded by herbs and roses, and Daisy poured Barry a glass of lemonade. The young cowboy looked as if he was about to explode.

  “I understand that you are the only person on this planet who can properly control my auroch. Is that true?”

  Barry didn’t lift his eyes, but he nodded.

  “You understand that it takes a powerful witch to own that auroch, don’t you?” Barry was nodding along.

  “I bought the drinking horn to keep it safe from people like Swensen,” Daisy was saying, “but I don’t exactly have room for him here.” She gestured around the tiny patio. “Are you interested in taking care of him for me?”

  Barry’s eyes went wide. He was speechless.

  “So, what do you say?” Daisy nudged.

  Barry was bobbing his head. He tugged his hat brim down to hide his moist eyes.

  “I’ll assume that means yes,” Daisy said, “so here’s how this is going to work. It’s a handshake deal. I’m leasing Ajax to you, for as long as you want him.”

  Barry looked sad. “Ma’am, I’d love to have him, but I just can’t afford…” Daisy plowed on, ignoring Barry’s comment. “I expect you to send me a dollar a month. Never miss a month, or our deal is void.”

  “I don’t understand,” Barry said, shaking his head.

  “Boy, you’re like a tumbleweed. I’m going to anchor you to me. From now on, we are family. If you need me, I’ll be there for you. If I need you, you’d better come running. Agreed?”

  Barry was dumbfounded, but he nodded.

  Daisy was trying to look stern. “I’m sorry — I didn’t hear you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I agree.”

  They shook hands, at first formally — but then Barry caught the spirit of it, and he pumped her arm so hard she thought it might separate from the socket. They were both grinning.