The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  “People rarely do.” He sits on a barstool, leaning on the counter, his tall, thin frame folded over. His hands rubbing together make a rasping sound. “I could tell you a secret.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can only read thoughts that have to do with me. Keeps me in line, don’t you agree?”

  Interesting. I decide to test it out and think, Gladys was murdered. I raise my eyebrows and he raises his back.

  “What was your thought?”

  “You know Bright Vixen? She was in Gru’s coven.”

  “I remember.”

  “She’s dead. Murdered. And it was done with magick.”

  His face falls and I feel a surge of certainty. I can trust his good intention if nothing else. “Tell me everything.”

  “Well, there was this effigy—”

  “No,” he interrupts. “Go back further.”

  “Okay. Viveka showed up at my door.”

  “No. Further. Tell me about you.”

  Well, why not? Who doesn’t like to talk about herself? I tell him about my childhood, about growing up as a coven kid. How Gru took Auntie Tess and me under her wing. How I can see things and read things that others can’t. How I gave it all up and why, and how it suddenly came back to me unbidden. And the way Viveka left her daughters, his granddaughters, with me, which would have been fine if I didn’t have the strongest of hunches that they are in great, grave danger as long as they are with me. I tell him about Tyson (leaving out the kissing part) and Alice and the hotel break-in by Tucker’s own son-in-law. I only stop talking when the doorbell rings and our organic Chinese meal arrives.

  Tucker waves away the money I offer, which is actually his since it’s the money Viv gave me. He sets down a bag of steaming food and before I can say anything else he asks, “What about your beau?”

  “What about him?”

  “Why him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you choose him?”

  “I love him.”

  “Come come, Memphis. You’re a witch. You should be sleeping around, rocking and rolling through the astral festivals.” He gives me a rueful look. “Settling down with an older man. Hm.”

  “That’s my business,” I say, sorry to be rude. “What I want to know is, if you’re so close to Viveka, why didn’t she leave the girls with you? I thought you’d had a falling out.”

  “No. She had a falling out with her grandmamma Gru, and her mother Sadie…” His eyes shine a little with what I recognize is grief. Of course for all his bravado about divorce, he still feels the loss of his ex. “Sadie and I were only meant to be in the creation of our daughter. It’s true, Viveka and I are not as close as we once were, if we ever were. But the fact is she simply could not leave the girls with me. She had to leave them with you and only you.” He pats me on the hand. “Now, would you mind going to their room and getting them? We can’t have the perfection of this delicious food go to waste.”

  “And then you’ll tell me what you’re talking about?”

  He opens his arms magnanimously. “Everything I know is yours. And you still have to tell me about that effigy.”

  I think I should tell him right now, but he reads my mind. “Later. Let’s not let the food get cold.”

  I make my way upstairs. The girls’ bedroom is lovely and girly, like a movie set. Twin canopy beds with ruffles, a tea-party table, lots of toys and scarves and dress-up clothes. Romola and Cleo have built a fortress of pillows and blankets underneath a gauzy yellow tent that hangs from a ceiling hook near the center of the room.

  “Food’s here,” I say.

  “We just ate,” Romola says.

  “I know, but your grandfather ordered some anyway.”

  “Simply Fried?” Cleo asks as she puts on a blue princess dress over her T-shirt and shorts.

  “Yup.” I’m in no hurry to eat either, and crawl into their tent with them. Tucker’s unassuming suburban McMansion is fairly buzzing with magickal mojo. Gladys’s place had it too, but that was different: a combination of swirling forces of trouble and confusion. This place is one constant hum, and I draw a parallel to Gru’s Mendocino homestead, a place where I’ve always felt safe. I conjure up what I love about Gru’s—the abundant lavender plants, the damp earth, the fallen redwood needles in her yard. The smells of cooking foods, which almost make me swoon with their purity.

  I think I know what Tucker is up to with his out-of-the-blue inquiry into my love life. His motivation is not simple distraction and redirection, though that’s part of it. The choices a person makes, if choices is the right word, in love and sex and all that fun maddening stuff, highlight her quintessential nature. Does she settle? Is she a perfectionist? Will she lie, kill, cheat, run away? Tucker is probably trying to figure out why I was the one chosen to watch over his granddaughters, as am I.

  Still, the questions are troubling, especially given the recent snogging with Ty. He’s right, we do have a connection. But is it with hexed Ty or real Ty? And either way, what does it mean for me and Cooper? It’s true that witches don’t always settle down or handfast. Even if they do, they are often totally down with open relationships. But I’ve never been completely comfortable with that, and I seriously, seriously doubt Cooper would be.

  Now seems as good a time as any to try locating Tyson. I close my eyes and get a hazy vision of him riding in a jeep next to a long-legged girl, with two of her friends in the back. He is putting on the charm, making nice. Sunglasses on, of course. The sun is setting to their right—they are heading south, away from us. I wonder if he’ll bestow any kisses on them, the slut.

  “Are you all right, Memphis?” Romola asks. “You’re staring for a long time.”

  “I’m fine. Thanks.” I lie back on a pillow and remember to smile. “It’s been a long day, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah.” She settles down beside me and we gaze up into the yellow fabric, darkened by the dying light of the day. I guess we’re going to stay the night here, although I have the feeling Tucker won’t let me leave the girls with him. He said as much.

  “Memphis.” Cleo stands over us. “We forgot the kitty.”

  It takes a few seconds for me to figure out what she’s talking about. “Oh, shit. I mean shoot. Sorry.” Bright Vixen’s cat. “Go eat food with your Grandy, okay?” I jump up and run down the stairs.

  The critter does not want to dislodge from underneath the car seat, its sharp claws digging into the carpeting. I finally manage to drag it out and it only growls a little.

  Inside, Tucker and the girls have set out plates and small bowls of soy sauce. The scene is picturesque and cozy, happy and safe, and I am filled with a warm glow in my belly.

  “Well hello, pussycat,” Tucker says as I settle the overweight tabby on the floor. “Would you like some tuna?”

  Bright Vixen’s cat gazes up at us, a look of pained boredom in its yellow eyes. Its body begins to heave and ripple in the way cats do when they’re about to deliver a hairball.

  “Uh oh,” I say.

  “Crap,” Tucker mutters. He’s about to get up from his chair but it’s too late—the deed is done. We assess the contents of the cat’s stomach. I can’t believe what I’m seeing and I look to Tucker for confirmation.

  His face turns dark and then an ashy pale. “Oh no.”

  That’s enough—I have to believe what I see.

  “Is that a doll?” I ask, knowing it’s not.

  Romola cups her hand over her nose. “Yuck. It smells!”

  “It’s not a doll.” Cleo reaches for my hand. She’s right. It’s not a doll, but I wish it were. Bright Vixen’s cat has just vomited up the body of a dead fairy.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Done with its business, Bright Vixen’s cat looks up at us with glum, challenging eyes before skulking away at a shambling trot. We watch it disappear out the kitchen doorway to wander the house. The room brims with an awful silence as we each take in the little body it has left behind.

&
nbsp; “Well, whatever it is—it’s disgusting,” Romola says.

  Tucker glances up at me but looks down again quickly, and in that moment he seems to recover from the shock. Color returns to his face. “Quickly, girls, before the food gets cold.” He ushers Romola and Cleo to the table. “I’ll just get this cleaned up.”

  Stepping around me, Tucker pulls open a kitchen drawer and produces a clean dishtowel. He wraps the dead fairy in it with a care bordering on tenderness. I follow him like a hurried cortege of one through a door in the pantry that opens onto a set of descending stairs. These lead into a modest yet formal wine cellar more than half-filled with bottles—three walls lined with shelves, one row in the center.

  At the landing, Tucker turns the corner to a short narrow door under the stairs. He nudges it open with his shoulder and ducks down a little on the way in. A light floods the doorway with a warm, orangey glow. The room is much too large to fit under the stairs. I step back to make sure my eyes aren’t playing tricks on me. They aren’t.

  “Come, come,” he says, and I go in, shutting the door. Whereas Tucker’s house up to this point has looked like a Pottery Barn catalogue photo shoot, this room is the home’s junk drawer. I see broken chairs with legs missing or splats blown out; glass jelly jars with no tops; shredded garments; candle stubs with hardened wax dripping over table ledges; dried herbs long past their magickal-effectiveness due dates; crumbling books layered with dust, some covered in crinkling library cellophane; dirt and cobwebs everywhere. Against one wall, concealed by leaning scrolls and towers of books, is a large cabinet. In the center of the room is an oval wooden table that looks like it could seat twelve. Tucker lays the fairy down upon it. He pulls a pair of goggles and a flashlight off a pegboard, which is covered with tools every red-blooded American man would long to wrap his hands around.

  Tucker begins to mutter, his voice congested, and I see that the goggles have gone misty. Gently, he turns the little body over so it’s lying on its stomach.

  “Fairies,” he says, his voice such a quiet rumble that it takes me a moment to discern what he’s saying. “Fairies in some ways more closely resemble bats than humans or insects.”

  “I’ve read about that,” I say.

  He nods. “Since they are mammals, they give birth rather than lay eggs, but their wings have, over the millennia, taken a more insect or birdlike shape. It’s all a part of their mating rituals.”

  “To attract the opposite sex.”

  “Only problem is”—he gives a wry chuckle—“they haven’t mated in over a hundred years.” His finger traces the fairy’s bloodied back. “They just stopped.”

  “You mean they’re infertile?”

  “No. I don’t think so. They just don’t want to have any more little fairies.”

  “But why?”

  “They won’t tell me.”

  I feel a surge of something—excitement or hope. “They talk to you?”

  “Of course. Don’t they talk to you?”

  “They communicate. But I haven’t heard them speak.”

  Tucker lifts his gaze from the body and gives me a sharp look. “You haven’t?” I shake my head and he considers this for a while.

  I have so many questions—too many, and I’m afraid of wasting time with the wrong ones. “I thought fairies were immortal.”

  “Well, they live a long time. But something kills them eventually. For a while it was lung cancer. Fairies are heavy smokers, even if they claim it’s medicinal.” He makes air quotes with his fingers on this last word. “I don’t care if you call it a peace pipe or glaucoma treatment, burning leaves sucked into your pulmonary system over time isn’t healthy.”

  I must have a look of disbelief on my face because Tucker chuckles and adds, “They don’t smoke as much as they used to. There’s a big campaign in the fairy community, actually, to give up smoking in favor of fermented honeysuckle drops.”

  “What do they smoke?”

  “Ragweed mostly. Sometimes fairy’s fire.” Tucker starts tapping his finger on his chin, his eyes glazing over in thought.

  Part of me—the fairy lore junkie—could sit here all night soaking up these tidbits of pixie trivia, but the other part of me—the one that is running on little sleep and fast food—mentally bitch-slaps the junkie back to the here and now. “What do you think happened to this fairy?”

  The question brings Tucker out of his reverie. “This fairy was murdered.”

  “By the cat.” I look up at the ceiling where the beast is prowling above somewhere, and a sudden panic takes hold of me. If the cat is capable of taking down a fairy, what can it do to two little girls?

  My panic is short-lived because Tucker says, “I think not,” and I let that thought go.

  “Yeah. I think so too.” The girls are in the kitchen eating, and when I reach out I find them easily, struggling with their chopsticks.

  I tell Tucker what I wanted to tell him earlier, about going to Bright Vixen’s house and what we found there, including her dead body, the doll in the pool, and the bomb-collared cat. Tucker’s eyes widen.

  “Magick and petards. Sounds like a holy war.” He sighs and runs his hand back and forth roughly through his hair. “If anything, the cat helped us by preserving the victim. Maybe unintentionally, but nonetheless…” Tucker beckons me closer. “See here, on the back?”

  The fairy is female, wearing clothes the color of lilacs. Her skin is russet, covered in a fine, downy fuzz. The nails of her hands are indeed rodentlike, like a bat’s. At the end of her long legs her feet are bare, and the bottom pads are sweetly pink, reminding me of a gerbil in my third-grade classroom that often escaped from his cage. He would wind up in my desk, usually wearing a miniature shako and nibbling a tiny baton. The colors of the fairy’s clothes might have matched her wings, but I can’t be sure because they’re gone, broken off with nothing left but stumps that have long stopped bleeding.

  “The cat must have chewed off the wings,” I say.

  Tucker shakes his head. “No. There would be teeth marks. These breaks are too clean for that.”

  “Then what?”

  Tucker goes to his cabinet and pulls open the enormous doors. Inside are approximately a thousand bottles of brews, herbs, and instruments—at least two-dozen wands alone, and thirteen pentacles, one for each moon cycle. An odor of decaying flowers gives way to the scent of baking cinnamon cookies. On the bottom shelf are more books, a collection of small, handsome, leather-bound volumes. Tucker runs his fingers along the spines before pulling one out. He flips through the pages quickly, and I see that the print within is handwritten. Fountain pen.

  “Your book of magick,” I whisper, slightly embarrassed by the nerdy reverence in my voice but unable to help it. My own book of magick is an old-school blue, fabric-covered binder with an Independent Trucks skateboarding sticker on the front as well as lots of random, inartistic ballpoint doodles. It’s from my high school days, and I never bothered to upgrade. I gaze at Tucker’s face, and he looks absolutely cuckoo with those goggles on.

  “My father gave these books to me. He kept almost eighty of them himself. Had a guy in Florence make them up. A good Italian strega near the Piazza del…Ah. Here it is.” His goggled eyes stare. “Of course. How could I have been so blind?”

  “What is it?” I ask, wanting to pinch him, to hurry him the hell up with clueing me in on his discovery already.

  “I think someone is trying to do the Flower Bowl Spell.”

  “Sounds pretty.” Which means it’s probably not.

  Tucker shakes his head and I wait for him to explain, but instead he turns to an ancient rolltop desk tucked in another corner of the room—also piled with books and dust and old candles—and rolls the top back. Inside is a pristine, glossy work surface. Interior lights go on, illuminating all manner of gadgetry—an expensive laptop, the latest iPad, a sleek little smartphone, and a fancy digital camera, among other electronic items I can’t identify except as very, very expensive. Tucke
r boots up the computer.

  “Why don’t you keep your cell phone upstairs? You can’t possibly hear it ring down here.”

  He pops it out of its charger cradle. “This is my magickal cell phone. I rigged it so that whenever it rings, it just shows up in my pocket. Then I don’t have to go hunting and I have less to carry around.”

  “Cool. So, what is the Flower Bowl Spell?”

  “An abomination of power.” The laptop is done warming up and he goes to an online Wiccan encyclopedia, which I’ve consulted now and then but found a bit sketch since it’s maintained by Wiccans and pagans with little if any sort of fact-checking or accreditation (meaning, freaks and wannabes troll its virtual pages, mucking up the genuine stuff), and taps in the words Flower Bowl Spell. “This gives you a synopsis.”

  I lean over and scan the text, which is highlighted with little black cats and pentacles along the margins, along with some sort of audio file of chirpy, Renaissance-faire-sounding panpipes.

  Believed to have first been developed on the Asiatic continent, specifically northern China, the Flower Bowl Spell is one of power building, particularly for a fallen practitioner of magick. The tools, incantations, and ingredients have been adapted over time and by the various traditions and cultures through which the spell has passed (one Masonite found the pickaxe a most efficient addition), but it’s generally agreed that a fertilized chicken egg, filet of mermaid, a piece of elephant tusk (the whole tusk is preferred, but the endangerment of the animals makes this prohibitive), a fairy’s wings, and a pair of Chinese foot-binding shoes are essential. These last were the original tool used by once-scorned Imperial Court Sorceress YiYi, known in the Occident as Snow Lotus, and give the spell its name. If a pair of shoes cannot be found, one shoe will do.

  Water runs through the pipes overhead, and through the ceiling I hear Romola’s muffled voice directing Cleo to help clean up the dishes. I look up from the computer. “Fairy’s wings.”

  Tucker nods.

  “There’s something else.” The memory comes back to me quickly. “Auntie Tess told me someone stole a carved elephant tusk from a store in Chinatown.”