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.”
“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.”
Orion 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 i
nstinct 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. “This should take care of any lingering problems. I think you’ll be more comfortable now.” John was flopped on the couch, but she didn’t notice him. Or maybe couldn’t see him? He winked at me.
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. His referral to Pentacle Pawn came from Penelope, right? He’s just doing what she 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 t
ake 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
THE CIRCLE
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 Jerry the Uber Guy was going to have a busy night.
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