The Blue Amber Spell

by Amanda Hartford

  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 ju
st 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.