The Viking Horn Spell

by Amanda Hartford

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  We skipped breakfast and spent the morning measuring and photographing the drinking horn and its case. John wanted to get started right away, so I left him to it. I drove the drinking horn back to the shop and secured it in the vault. That thing made me nervous.

  On the way back home, I picked up a fast-food breakfast sandwich. Salt, sugar, fat: the basic food groups, right? John doesn’t eat, so I wolfed it down on the way home.

  By the time I made it back to the condo, I was exhausted and frazzled with a junk food high. John was engrossed in the computer, so I blew him a kiss and wandered off to bed.

  I was just falling asleep when I felt a weight on the other side of the mattress. John slid in next to me.

  One of our great frustrations is that not only can John not touch physical objects, we can’t touch each other. Our hands go right through. It’s creepy, but we accidentally found a workaround. It turns out, when John gets into bed, his body displaces space in under the blankets, just like when he was alive. He can wrap himself in the covers and snuggle up next to me, and it almost feels like he’s really there.

  It was only a shadow of John, I knew, but when he spooned up next to me, with the blanket between us, and whispered goodnight in my ear, I felt his presence. I drifted off to sleep in my husband’s arms.

  ♦

  Barry came back to Pentacle Pawn the next night for more lessons. I let Lissa tend the shop while we popped down to the vault together. The trombone case was right where I had left it, in a wire cage with both padlock and magical wards to keep it there.

  I sent Barry back up to the break room to bring down a gallon bottle of distilled water. We always keep a jug on hand — not for drinking, because I don’t like what all those plastic bottles are doing to the planet — but for use in our work. If you want a drink, there’s a filtered tap on the fridge.

  While Barry fetched the water, I brought the trombone case out and put it in the center of a small table I keep downstairs.

  We sat on either side of the table with the horn between us. I poured a bit of the water into the small black bowl that I use to focus my concentration and stared into the center of it, much in the way the fortuneteller would use a crystal ball. I tried to pick up on the horn, but I got nothing.

  I asked Barry to put his hands over the horn without touching it. “You said the other night that it felt warm. You still feel that?”

  Barry nodded. “A little more now, I think. Does that mean something?”

  “It means that the horn is responding to you.” I didn’t tell him that both of their auras were glowing with a bright light.

  “That’s good, right?” He wasn’t going to admit that he was scared.

  “That’s very good. It means that you might be able to establish control over it. Large magical animals can be very tricky. If we can make this work, you might be able to help me keep this thing out of mischief until its owner comes to get it. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to stick around a little longer?”

  The grin on Barry’s face told me that he was all in.

  ♦

  After Barry left, I popped down to the vault to log in a set of pretty little abalone earrings — not particularly valuable except to their owner, a nice little old lady who had inherited them from her grandmother. She was overly fond of absinthe cordials, and she relied on the charm on the abalone to help calm her protesting liver.

  I secured the earrings in a drawer, but just as I sat in the Eames chair, I heard a loud bang. A small puff of smoke appeared from one of the wire cages on the other side of the room.

  I didn’t have to check the log book to know where the trouble was coming from. I heard the trombone case’s brass latches snap open.

  I wasn’t sure what condition the horn was in, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I placed a quick protection ward around myself, a sort of magical suit of armor, just in case, before I walked as softly as I could to the other side of the vault.

  Inside the wire cage, the lid of the trombone case stood open. The horn’s aura was purple and petulant. It was sulking. I was disappointed — it had been so well behaved when Barry and I had worked with it the night before.

  Barry. The horn had formed an attachment to the little cowboy. This was not a happy development for either of them. The horn needed to go back to its owner as soon as possible, whether his business deal was concluded or not. Barry needed to get back on the rodeo circuit before the horn got him into something he wasn’t ready to deal with.

  Most of all, I needed to get that horn out of my vault.

  My first call was to Barry. He was excited by the idea of carrying the trombone case on a private flight to New York.

  My second call was to Swensen. I told him to send his jet.

  ♦

  John was so excited when I got home, he didn’t even wait for me to take off my shoes.

  “I found it!” he shouted as I opened the door.

  “Found what?” I said as I dropped my keys on the side table.

  “The horn. I think I’ve pinned it down.”

  I’m not sure who was more thrilled: John or me. Being a ghost is no fun if you have to spend all your time alone, and he was stuck in our condo all day. He’d been bored out of his skull.

  John disappeared, then immediately materialized next to my computer and stood there, arms folded across his chest, impatiently waiting with a silly grin on his face. I dropped my purse on the couch as I went by and slid into my desk chair.

  John took up his place behind me, just as he had when he was alive, but now he was moving the cursor with his mind. A Google image search appeared on the screen. “See this one in the upper left corner?” John said, his words tumbling out in a rush. “See the silver braces? The inscription is very similar to the one on yours.”

  He was peering over my shoulder as the cursor flew around the screen. It was like sitting in a meeting and having somebody run the PowerPoint with a clicker.

  I squinted at the monitor, and John expanded the image so I could get a better look. He was right: the style of the ornate script around the mouth of the horn was nearly identical.

  “Any idea what language that is?” I asked.

  John puffed out his chest. He’d solved it.” Vernacular Latin.” He flashed me that beautiful grin.

  The script looked almost Cyrillic, but under all those curlicues, I made out a few Latin words. “I guess so,” I said, “but I’ve never seen Latin like that.”

  “You’re used to seeing high church Latin. Government scribes wrote this. You see it a lot in business documents from the time.”

  “Which is?”

  Poland, 17th century.”

  I felt my heart skip a beat. “It’s the auroch,” I whispered in awe. This was the horn that Mark had mentioned. It was almost an exact match to the one in the basement.

  John did something with the computer, and the screen displayed a magazine article about efforts by modern scientists to restore the gene pool of Ice Age animals. At the top of the page was the image of the same drinking horn.

  “I think that word is in the caption somewhere,” John was saying.

  He was right. The article explained that, back in the day, the Emperor of Poland was a bit of a conservationist, and he kept an exclusive forest preserve where his rare animals could roam free. It was on that preserve, in 1611, that the last auroch died. The emperor had felt the loss deeply, and he commissioned the drinking horn to commemorate the end of the majestic animal’s line.

  My mind reeled. Mark was right — this was no ordinary cow horn we were dealing with. It was a primitive, wild animal. There was an auroch in my vault.

  ♦

  I called Mark, and he dropped by my condo the next morning. He brought cannolis and Daisy.

  Mark studied the image of the auroch horn in the Polish museum while I pigged out. “That’s not similar,” he said in awe. “It’s a mirror image. This is the other half of the pair.”
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  I enlarged the image on the computer screen and compared it to the horn on my desk. The coloring and striations matched. These two horns had come from the same animal.

  Mark quickly scanned John’s report. “This is a nice piece of work. Did you do the research?”

  I wasn’t ready for Mark to find out that my husband was back just yet. I love Mark like a brother, but he has a tendency to fret and I just didn’t want to hear it.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I have a freelancer now. A sort of ghostwriter.”

  I saw Daisy wince.

  “Excellent job,” Mark said, flipping through the pages. “Keep him.”

  “Oh, I will,” I said, pointedly not making eye contact with my aunt.

  John was standing behind her. He winked at me.

  After Mark left, I settled on the couch next to Daisy. John snuggled in on the other side of me.

  “Well, that was certainly interesting,” Daisy said.

  “Mark had no idea,” I said.

  John was smirking.

  “Can you see him?” I asked Daisy.

  Of course I can,” she giggled. Daisy leaned across me and blew John a kiss. “How are you, mon cher?”

  He blew one back. “Still dead, but otherwise I’m doing fine.”

  “Well,” Daisy deadpanned, “we all make the best of it, don’t we?”

  Chapter Five

  It turns out that Stella, now dubbed Queen of Rideshare by one of her clients, is really good with people. She has a perky personality, and she’s cute in a farm-girl sort of way with great big eyes and a long brown ponytail. The customers adore her, and they trust her just as they had trusted Jerry. She says the tips are great.

  One of her first customers was Jacob, back again with an insulated shopping bag, the foil-lined kind you buy at the grocery store to bring ice cream home in Arizona before it melts down to soup. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a package wrapped in a brown paper, tied up with jute twine.

  Jacob carefully placed the package on the counter. I noticed a small mesh bag filled with dried herbs, knotted into the tie. Someone had taken care that the contents were secured.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my cat Frank hop up on the end of the counter. His eyes narrowed and his tail twitched. He was wondering the same thing I was: was the packaging meant to protect the contents — or protect the recipient from whatever lay inside?

  “This belonged to my late mother,” Jacob said. “She inherited it from her mother. I remember the day this arrived in the mail. She wanted to get rid of it right then and there, but Papa said it was probably a valuable art piece, so she wrapped it back up and shoved it way into the back of the china cabinet. It’s been there ever since.”

  All this was starting to make sense. Jacob’s grandmother, like his mother, had been a witch, renowned in our community for her talent with small personal spells.

  “Do you want me to open it?” Jacob asked.

  “Give me a second.” I ran my open hands around the package, scanning about six inches above the surface for any lingering spells or wards. “I think it’s okay — go ahead.”

  “Do you have scissors?” Jacob asked.

  I shook my head. “Don’t cut it. If there’s a hidden protective spell, that could trigger it. Just work the twine off of the corners.”

  Jacob gingerly tugged the twine away and ran his thumb under the brittle cellophane tape to release the paper bag. He lifted out a small porcelain teapot with a shiny black glaze. Jacob placed it on the counter and stepped back.

  It was an unusual shape for a teapot: a tall rectangle instead of a globe, with a triangular spout set high on one corner and a flat, square lid. The black Bakelite handle and lid knob had gleaming chrome fittings.

  “It looks Deco,” I said. I liked it a lot.

  Jacob nodded. “It’s by a California art potter from the 1930s. She was pretty famous in her day.”

  “May I?” I asked.

  Jacob nodded, and I picked the teapot up and, securing the lid between my fingers, flipped the piece over to look for maker’s marks. I found two stylized initials, designed to mimic Japanese characters but clearly were the letters DF and the numbers 1/1 and 329.

  “One of one. So this is a custom piece?”

  Jacob smiled. “The artist was a friend of my grandmother’s. That 329 is her customer number.”

  “And how did your grandmother use it?”

  “Orange Pekoe, mostly.” He caught my eye and blushed. “Oh, I see what you mean.” He bent down to get eye level with the teapot. I noticed he didn’t pick it up to examine it. “That glaze is pretty reflective. I suppose she could have used it in her work as some kind of mirror, maybe? I’m only guessing, of course. I never saw her do it.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  He shook his head. “I only met my grandmother once. I was pretty little when she died, and I don’t remember much. She and my mother didn’t get along.”

  “So,” I asked, switching gears, “what would you like to do with it today?”

  “I’m hoping you can find a new home for it. I’m not very comfortable with it; for once, I actually agree with my mother — I think it’s kind of creepy. Can you help?”

  I lifted the object again. I didn’t detect any lingering magic on it, but something whispered to me in the back of my mind. There was more going on here than brewing tea, but it didn’t necessarily feel malignant. It might be fun to figure it out.

  I started the paperwork and asked Jacob for his identification. The general public may not know that the alley shop exists, but we still do the paperwork for the police. I file everything through Bronwyn’s computer system at the end of each shift.

  Jacob patted his back pockets and then his front. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I must’ve forgotten my wallet. May I bring it back to you?

  I had in front of me a magical object with a vibe I couldn’t identify, and a client with no proper identification. He’d happily produced it when he picked up his mother’s brooch, so he knew I was going to require it. It was almost like he didn’t want his name officially associated with the teapot.

  “Mr. Carroll, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you this evening. Stella’s probably not too far away. Let her take you back to your hotel and pick up your wallet. Meanwhile, I’ll get the pawn declaration ready for you to sign when you get back.”

  He took it with grace. I offered to pay the rideshare back to his hotel, but he declined, saying it was his mistake and he should pay his own way. He used his own phone to call Stella to pick him up.

  Jacob waved over his shoulder as he stepped into the alley, the insulated shopping bag dangling from the fingers of his other hand. I didn’t know it then, but it was the last I would see of him. I wish I could say the same about that teapot.

  ♦

  Stella was back in less than an hour. The door recognizes her as a staff member, just as it did Jerry, and she can come and go as she pleases. This time, she didn’t look very pleased.

  “Hey, Stella!” Lissa said.

  “Hey, Lissa,” Stella said without much enthusiasm. She set Jacob’s shopping bag on the counter. “Mr. Carroll left this in my car when he got out. He said he just be gone a few minutes, but I sat there for nearly half an hour. When I finally went in and asked for him at the desk, the hotel said he had checked out this afternoon.”

  “He’s gone?” Lissa asked.

  I got up from my desk and walked over to them.

  “Who’s gone?”

  “Jacob Carroll,” Stella said. She pulled out her phone and checked her rideshare app. “He didn’t rate me, and there’s no tip. He’s out of here.”

  I glanced inside the shopping bag. The black teapot was still nested in its brown paper wrapping.

  “I didn’t know what to do with it,” Stella said, “so I brought it back. I’m supposed to turn lost objects in, but I don’t think he’s coming back for it.” She raised her eyes to me. “I was afraid it m
ight be dangerous.”

  Fair enough; this wasn’t her problem, but she might have picked up information I could use to sort it out.

  “Did you get anything from him when he was in the car?” I asked.

  Along with being a talented astronomer and rideshare queen, Stella could read people’s thoughts as easily as if she was watching a TV sitcom.

  In our former lives as professor and student, I’d recognized that Stella had some unusual talents that reach beyond her academic career. It was uncanny how she knew what people were thinking.

  Over time, she’d opened up a little. She’d been able to read people’s thoughts since she was a child. It was involuntary, and sometimes she out found things she’d rather not know. She tried to avoid strangers; the flotsam and jetsam of their lives were unsettling.

  There are some limitations: she can’t talk to ghosts, and she doesn’t tell fortunes. She gets her insights in real time, subjects know. On the other hand, it’s tough for anybody to lie to her, since she knows what they’re genuinely thinking even as they are spinning her their tall tale.

  “It was kind of weird, actually. On the way over here, with him in the back, he was very closed off. For a little while, I thought he was asleep, but I think now that he might have been trying to block me.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I’d felt it, too; there was something about all this that Jacob didn’t want me to know. That’s why I’d declined to take in the teapot, but I was stuck with it now, at least until we could locate him.

  I thanked Stella and offered to buy her supper for her trouble. She and Lissa popped out to grab barbecue down the street on my credit card while I sorted out the teapot.

  I placed a small protection ward around my desk and sat the teapot in the middle. It looked harmless enough, and another quick manual examination confirmed that it was clean. But I didn’t trust it.

  I keep a penlight and a small dentist’s mirror in my desk drawer for just such occasions. I pointed the light inside the jar and maneuvered the mirror so that I could inspect the interior walls. My hunch was right: there were a few lines of writing incised into the clay in the same stylized lettering I’d seen on the bottom of the pot.