The Amulet of Caorunn
Juliette Harper
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Juliette
Copyright © 2017 by Juliette Harper
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-1-943516-50-6
Created with Vellum
Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I . . . I hardly know, sir, just at present . . . at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” —
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
1
One morning early in November, my best friend and business partner, Tori Andrews, handed me a wrapped package when I came downstairs from my apartment over the store. We have coffee together every day and discuss business, like what variety of beans we needed to order for the espresso bar.
That morning, we had a lot more to talk about than the merits of Hawaiian Arabica versus Brazilian. Her parents, Gemma and Scrap Andrews, just ended their 35-year marriage. The conclusion of the legal proceedings marked the beginning of a kind of migration from our childhood home, Cotterville, North Carolina to Briar Hollow.
Tori’s mom, Gemma, and my folks, Jeff and Kelly Hamilton, bought two buildings on our town square — Gemma across the corner from George and Irma’s grocery store and my parents two doors past Chase McGregor’s cobbler shop.
Throughout the summer, in the months just after I took over the store from Aunt Fiona, I dated Chase, but we faced hurdles worthy of the Complicated Relationship Hall of Fame.
You see, I’m a witch — we all are, except Tori and Gemma use their abilities to study alchemy. Chase and his father, Festus, are werecats and the sworn guardians of our hereditary line, the Daughters of Knasgowa. However, witch and werecat magic aren’t compatible when it comes to what they insist on referring to as “mating.” The feeling against such unions is so strong; it amounts to a taboo among their kind.
Unfortunately, the McGregors seem to like the strong women my family routinely produces — they like us a lot. Festus still carries a torch for my mother, and I think he was sweet on my grandmother, Kathleen Ryan.
Werecats live much longer than humans, which you can either see as a chance for more experiences and adventures or a ticket to greater heartbreak. The more I talk with Festus, I think both are true.
Am I human? That’s an idea I struggled with in the beginning. I didn’t know about my magic until I was almost 30 years old. I didn’t know that there are beings called the Fae who primarily occupy another dimension known as the Otherworld or that sandwiched between that place and the human realm is a no man’s land labeled simply the “In Between.”
Once, hundreds of years ago, humans accepted magic as just another part of nature. The Fae had great affection for humans and interacted with them routinely. But then a new idea began to sweep across the face of the world, the Christian religion.
As the power of the organized Church grew, humans drove magic into the shadows. Witch hunters hanged the accused, pressed them under massive stones to extract confessions, broke their fingers with thumb screws, and in some instances burned their victims alive.
The horrible truth is that the vast majority of those who died weren’t witches at all, a tragedy that caused tremendous pain for the real witches. One reason the Fae go to such lengths to keep their world and their affairs hidden from human view is because they’ve seen the horrors of human hysteria.
Coming into my magic, I struggled with the idea that I might be something evil. Here’s a simple but difficult fact; different doesn’t always mean evil. I am Fae. If I spend most of my time here in the human realm, I’ll live a fairly conventional span of years. But the more my powers grow, and the more time I spend in the Otherworld, the longer I’m going to be around.
At first, my powers scared me. I found the affairs of the Fae reality complicated and confusing. Now I’d describe myself as curious and excited. Let me try to explain.
I dated this guy in high school who loved to take pictures of bugs. Like most teenage girls — and even though I would describe myself as a tomboy — I drew the line at creepy crawlies. Not Jimmy.
“You don’t have to touch them, Jinx,” he said. “Just look at my pictures. These are the eyes of a butterfly, and see that long, curly tube? That’s called a proboscis. It works like a straw. The butterfly uses that tube to drink nectar.”
Jimmy showed me spider’s faces and the veins in the wings of dragonflies. He made me see that underneath rocks or on the bottom side of leaves or way back in the dusty corners of attics, there are alternate worlds. To the fly caught in the spider’s web, the monster coming toward it looks just as big as Godzilla up there on the movie screen.
With the lens of his camera, Jimmy changed my perspective on what I saw going on around me and what I didn’t. That’s how I feel about being Fae. I’ve been given a different lens to see a part of life most people don’t know about and couldn’t handle if they did. For me, that knowledge carries extra responsibilities.
Magic, like all life on this planet, sprang from the natural order, but that includes a system of checks and balances. If you’ve ever heard of Newton’s Third Law, you’ll have some idea what I’m trying to describe. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Where there is light, there is also dark.
If you’re going to fully appreciate the story I’m about to tell you, we need to turn our attention back to the 12th century for just a minute, to two men, Gregorius Chesterfield and Henri de St. Clair. Both were Fae wizards and Knights Templar. They rode together to the Crusades not to fight for the church, but to ensure that the magical artifacts of the “Infidels” were not destroyed or worse yet, used to commit evil acts against humankind.
Gregorius had a son named Irenaeus, and Henri fathered a daughter named Brenna. Neither of those two children possessed hereditary magic and both, in time, made a deal with the darkness to become “made” practitioners — the first Creavit.
Nine centuries later, people like me are still trying to clean up their messes. The Creavit are immortal, ambitious, and prone to play power games w
ith little thought to the collateral damage they might cause.
Just a couple of weeks before Tori handed me that wrapped present, Irenaeus Chesterfield kidnapped my brother. We got Connor back safely, but Chesterfield managed to get his hands on the Amulet of Caorunn, an artifact that might have the ability to sever the realms and set Chesterfield up to rule over the humans as a Creavit dictator.
When I reached to accept the gift Tori was holding out, I spotted Rodney peeking out of the collar of her sweater.
“What’s this all about?” I asked. “And I see that we have an audience. Good morning, Rodney.”
The black and white domestic rat held up one paw and waved in response. Then he pointed at the package and mimed ripping the paper.
“Hold on,” I laughed. “Let me at least sit down.”
Rodney is something of a mystery. He was left at the front door of the shop shortly before I took over from Aunt Fiona. Clearly, he has no trouble communicating with us — even to the point of using a computer keyboard — but he remains mum on the subject of his life BBH (Before Briar Hollow).
“He’s not the only curious one,” Tori said. “You might as well show yourself Darby.”
Our in-house brownie immediately materialized by her elbow. Invisibility is only one of Darby’s many, many talents. Honestly, I don’t know what we’d do without the little guy for all kinds of reasons.
A disturbing amount of my life tends to be lived in metaphysical disarray, But physically? We could be on the cover of Better Home and Garden. Darby keeps the store, the lair, and our apartments immaculate — and he cooks for us — which makes him six feet tall in my book. (He actually stands just under 2’11”.)
“Well,” I said, “and good morning to you, too.”
“Good morning, Mistress,” he said cheerfully. “We can hardly wait to see if you like your gift. Please do as Rodney says and rip the paper off now.”
“Won’t happen,” Tori said, as I sat down and began to painstakingly apply the edge of my fingernail to the first piece of tape. “She’s just like her mother — peels the tape and folds the paper.”
I almost had the first piece of tape off cleanly when I stopped. “Wait a minute,” I said, “aren’t we short one spectator here?”
On cue, a Barbie-sized green witch on a broom banked low over the espresso counter, zipped into the scene, and came to a hovering halt in front of my face.
Glory is a former archivist for the State of North Carolina colorized and shrunk by — you guessed it — Irenaeus Chesterfield. The Creavit wizard sent her into our shop as a spy, with vague promises that he’d restore her to her normal self if she helped him get what he wanted.
That was never going to happen regardless of what Glory did or didn’t tell him, something she figured out when her cover was blown. She defected to our side because we enlarged her from 3 inches to her current towering 6.5 inches. Well, that and she’s absolutely terrified of Chesterfield.
“I thought you had to be around here somewhere,” I said. “You’re cutting it a little close flying through the shop just before we open, aren’t you?”
Balancing herself perfectly on the broom, Glory put her hands on her hips. “I’m not the one taking forever to open the present,” she said. “Get on with it!”
“Yeah, what she said,” Tori agreed. “Come on, Jinksy. I bet you’re even going to fold the tissue paper, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” I said, removing the lid from the box, “who in their right mind would waste . . .”
As I drew the first layer of tissue aside, the words caught in my throat. Rodney’s eyes went wide, and he put one paw over his mouth. Glory let out with a “wow” that made her wobble in mid-air, and Darby stood on tiptoe to get a better look.
A book bound in dark leather lay nestled in the silver and blue tissue, its hand-tooled cover bearing a majestic tree I recognized immediately; the Mother Oak that grows in the center of Shevington. That’s the Fae sanctuary in the Otherworld founded and still governed by my many times great-grandfather, Barnaby Shevington.
The decorative border around the tree panel bore perfect miniature depictions of the flock of dragonlets that greet me every time I pass through the portal to Shevington. My embossed initials appeared in the lower right-hand corner in elegant gothic letters, NJH.
“I designed the cover, but Connor made it,” Tori explained. “We had Mr. Pagecliff do the binding and enchantment. Write all you want to, Jinksy. You’ll never run out of pages. Every witch needs a grimoire to help her study her magic.”
Darby nodded solemnly. “Mistress Tori is correct,” he said. “The shelves in the archives hold the grimoires of your ancestors and those of many other great witches and wizards.”
Our building sits atop a fairy mound, which resides cloaked in the In Between. If other people go downstairs, they’re in a cluttered, dirty space filled with spiders big enough to saddle.
We enter a work area equipped for our needs and elegantly furnished with leather chairs and sofas, lush Oriental rugs, paneling, bookshelves, and a fireplace that never goes out or needs cleaning.
The fairy mound also serves as an archive for Fae documents and artifacts. In Myrtle’s absence, Darby tends the collection.
“Thank you,” I said to Tori, with tears in my eyes, “both of you. I’ll call Connor later and tell him how much I love it.”
Tori grinned. “You’re welcome,” she said, “but there’s more. Open the cover.”
Gently lifting the grimoire — my grimoire — clear of the tissue, I opened the book, delighting in the intoxicating smell of new leather. Inside, resting in a loop next to the pages, I found a breathtaking black pen overlaid with an intricate design of crimson swirls. It took me a minute to realize the lines formed a great bird. The wings stretched out to wrap the barrel as if the creature strained to reach the golden nib.
“That’s from Barnaby and Moira,” Tori said. “Same deal as the grimoire. You’ll never run out of ink and if you need to draw something, just think about the image you want to create and the pen will do the rest.”
Tori knows me better than anyone. Without magic, I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.
“Alchemy?” I asked.
Moira is the resident Alchemist in Shevington. She and Granddad are in a relationship, which they try and fail to keep secret.
Tori nodded. “The ink contains a formula to aid in the transformation of raw ideas.”
Running my fingers over the design, I said, “And this is the Great Phoenix, the bird that rose from the ashes.”
As a Daughter of Knasgowa, I also serve as a priestess to the Mother Tree. In Latin, I’m called Quercus de Pythonissam, the Witch of the Oak.
Now, before you ask, I don’t fully understand the responsibilities of my job — or I didn’t then. The complexities of the Fae world and its interaction with the human realm represent a long learning curve. The intricate connections stretch back for centuries.
The Fae lead incredibly long lives. My grandfather, who was born in 1125, will turn 891 this year. Just before Christmas, he confessed to us that his real name is Barnabas Chesterfield. Irenaeus is his younger brother by five years. The dynamics of their relationship are, in modern psychological terms, “dysfunctional” at best.
There’s some accouterment that comes with my position as Witch of the Oak — a sentient staff named Dílestos, and an amber amulet encasing a single feather of the Phoenix.
That bit of bling currently hangs around the neck of my second father and dear confidante, Colonel Beauregard T. Longworth. In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you Beau’s technically dead. The amulet allows him to have corporeal form.
“It’s perfect,” I said, standing and pulling Tori into a hug. “I love it.”
“We just thought maybe starting to work on your grimoire would help you get a handle on everything that’s happened this year. Consider it an early birthday present.”
“Great,” I said, releasing
her and wiping my eyes, “your birthday is three days after mine, and there is now literally no way I’m going to come up with a present for you that is anywhere near this awesome.”
“Yeah,” she grinned, “but you’ll try, which means one way or another, I’ll score something cool. That’s a win/win in the Tori column.”
I was so blown away by the thoughtfulness; I could have easily dissolved into a sentimental, crying lump. Instead, I squared my shoulders and said, “Okay, show’s over. Tori and I have to get to work and you three need to get out of here so we can open up.”
For Rodney that simply meant burrowing back into Tori’s sweater. Darby winked out of sight, and I held the basement door open to Glory could fly back downstairs to the lair.
She hovered in mid-air a few inches in front of my face before making the descent. “Jinx Hamilton,” she declared, “even if you do have an awful, terrible, evil, scary wizard trying to get you pretty much all the time, I think you may be the luckiest witch alive.”
With that, she zoomed through the doorway, disappearing into the darkness below. As her words sunk in, a feeling of gratitude washed over me. I couldn’t agree with her more.
That feeling stayed with me all day and put a spring in my step that night as I carried the grimoire to my new alcove in the lair.
When our friend and mentor, the ancient being we called Myrtle, lived with us, I thought she was responsible for any additions to our subterranean headquarters. But then Myrtle was forced to merge with the Mother Tree to heal from exposure to a toxic artifact, and the lair went right on expanding and improving itself anyway.
With no input from us, the fairy mound anticipates our wants and needs, generally before we realize what those things might be.
The day after my brother’s return, I walked downstairs and found an alcove outfitted with a desk, bookshelves, a comfortable, easy chair upholstered in soft fabric, and a tiny private fireplace. An unseen hand tugged at me to investigate more closely.
“Is that for me?” I asked.
The Amulet of Caorunn (A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 7) Page 1