The Blue Amber Spell

by Amanda Hartford

  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.