Six Times a Charm

by Deanna Chase

  “What?” I asked. “He has a problem with water chestnuts?”

  “Baby corn. You can never be sure that child-labor laws weren’t broken in its harvesting.”

  I leaned back in my chair, feeling utterly defeated. “So what did you end up with?”

  “An order of steamed cabbage wontons and a side of brown rice.”

  I laughed. “At least it couldn’t take you very long to eat. You could make it back home with plenty of time for a real dinner in the peace and quiet of your own kitchen.”

  “And that, my dear best friend, is where you would be wrong. Michael-the-doctor is a proponent of natural digestion.”

  Even Clara was taken off guard by that one. “Natural digestion? As opposed to what? Swallowing a bunch of enzymes and jumping up and down?”

  “Nat-u-ral di-gest-ion. Chewing each bite fifty times.” Melissa took on a tone as if she were reciting the good doctor’s words. “Complete chewing promotes the release of hormones, digestive enzymes, and gastric juices specific to the food being chewed. Chewing also lets the food become covered with saliva.”

  “And you actually made it through a plate of cabbage wontons?” My fascination and horror were blended in equal amounts.

  “I made it through three.”

  “Three plates?”

  “Three wontons. I couldn’t, um, stomach any more.”

  “What a horrid little man!” Gran exclaimed.

  “But why did he choose Eat First, if he had so many problems with their menu?” I asked.

  “Can you think of any place he might have liked more?”

  Clara started laughing. “And let me guess. Your part of the dinner bill—”

  “Came to eight dollars and twenty-three cents. Tax and tip included. Ten percent tip, because they stopped filling our water glasses after the first hour.”

  “The first hour!” I whooped. “How long were you there?”

  “Three and a half hours,” Melissa enunciated grimly.

  We all exploded with laughter. Three point five hours, one order of cabbage wontons, and a bowl of rice. Plus waiting. Plus lying over height. Plus the lost opportunity to pose as piano-playing Penelope for George. “This may be your best blind date story yet,” I said.

  “You are a cruel and heartless woman,” Melissa countered. She glanced at her watch. “Look, I have to get going. There’s always a rush at the bakery on Saturday afternoons.”

  Clara stood and stretched. “I’ll walk you out. I want to get a bottle of water. Anybody else need anything?”

  Gran and I demurred, gave our goodbyes to Melissa and then were alone in a room that was suddenly too silent. After an awkward moment, I reached toward her. “Can I shift that pillow for you?”

  “It’s fine,” she said. I tugged at it anyway. “Jane,” Gran said, and I knew that her warning tone was about more than the pillow.

  “What?”

  “She’s trying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can see how impatient you are with your mother. It’s written across your face, every time she says something.”

  “Most of the time, she’s saying something weird!”

  “She’s every bit as nervous as you are. She wants this to work.”

  “She’s got a strange way of showing it.” I knew that I sounded like a brat, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to think of something a bit more mature to say.

  Fortunately—or not—Gran filled the conversational gap. “Make me a promise, Jane.”

  I sighed. “What this time?”

  “Promise me that you’ll come up to the Farm.”

  The Farm. A Connecticut farmhouse just outside of Old Salem. It had been in the family for years. Gran’s sister and two brothers always got together there the third weekend in October. They brought their kids and grandkids; the place absolutely swarmed with aunts and uncles and cousins. There were two huge rooms in the attic, a “Girls’ Room” and a “Boys’ Room,” and assorted outbuildings were pressed into service as guest cottages.

  “Gran, you know I hate the Farm.”

  “You loved it when you were a little girl.”

  Of course I did. When I was a little girl, we spent the entire weekend running around, playing practical jokes on each other. We ate apples that we picked fresh from the trees in the yard. We lit a giant bonfire. We stayed up talking until the darkest hours of the night, pretending that the thumps we heard from the boy’s dorm were ghosts haunting the hallways.

  Now, everyone was settled down. The last time I’d gone—seven years before—I had explained to thirteen different relatives that Scott and I were going to get married some day. Some day soon. He loved me. We just weren’t ready to settle down. But we would be. I knew we would be.

  I could hardly face all of them now. Alone. Still unmarried after all that time. Without a likely candidate on the horizon.

  “Gran—”

  “Jane, I don’t make many requests of you.” She didn’t? What world did she live in? “But your mother is going to be there. And I want you to come too.”

  I looked at her, pathetic in her hospital bed. They had dressed her in one of those embarrassing cotton gowns. An IV needle threaded into her arm, and her papery flesh looked bruised. Plastic tubing draped around her neck like some avant-garde excuse for a necklace. A machine by her head pulsed a bright red light every time her heart beat.

  “Okay, Gran,” I sighed. “I’ll go to the Farm.”

  “You can bring along a friend.”

  Like that would help. Melissa had to run the bakery. And Neko…. Let’s just say that he wouldn’t quite fit into the Farm esthetic. Still, I managed a smile. Gran was trying to make this easier for me. “Thank you. I’ll see if I can think of anyone to ask.”

  Chapter 21

  Neko said, “Tell me again what you’re looking for?”

  I waved my hand at the stacks of books surrounding us. “I don’t even know, really. Something that will help my grandmother. A spell that I can work for her to get better faster. Something to help her breathe more easily. To keep her fever down.”

  I’d spent the entire day at the hospital, but I was too tired to sleep. After climbing in bed at midnight, I’d stared up at the ceiling, telling myself that I really needed to get my rest. When the digital clock flashed 3:00, though, I’d given up.

  When I’d snuck into the living room, Neko was instantly awake, calling out from his makeshift bed on one of the overstuffed couches. I hadn’t heard him come in from his dinner with Roger; that was a sign of how distracted I’d been. I’d made us a pot of chamomile tea, and we’d discussed the relative merits of standard undershirts versus a-shirts. (According to Neko, Roger had a distressing tendency to wear the latter. I didn’t want to know more.)

  We’d retreated to the basement when I realized that I just wasn’t going to get any sleep that night. If anything, the books were in greater disarray than when I’d first discovered them. I had personally thumbed through the shelves a couple of times, studying titles and bindings, and I suspected that Neko had been prowling around during the days, when I was at work. I really needed to make the time commitment to getting them in order.

  Right. After Gran got out of the hospital. After the opera guild’s Harvest Gala. After the trip up to the Farm.

  “How about crystals?” Neko asked.

  “What!” I hadn’t mentioned Clara to him. What possible good could it do to tell my familiar about her oracular harmonic-convergence-centering crystal-cleansing?

  “All the best witches use them.” Neko looked around the basement. “I know there’s a box in here somewhere.”

  “You have got to be kidding.” Were the crystals really another link between Clara and me? More proof that my family had magical roots?

  Neko blinked. “I never kid. Not about magic anyway. It’s not in my nature to joke about my essential raison d’etre.”

  I sighed. Far be it from me to question my familiar’s essential raison d’etre.r />
  Neko crossed the basement, peering into the darkest corner. “Let’s see. I sensed it when you first awakened me. I could feel all of the power in the room—that’s one of the first things they teach us, to take an inventory of our surroundings.”

  “Who is ‘they?’”

  “The Coven.” Neko looked at me as if I were either insane or heinously stupid. “Maybe you’re too tired to think about this tonight. If you want to go back to bed, I’ll see if I can find the crystals, and we can talk about them in the morning.”

  Neko being solicitous was almost as annoying as Neko being fashion advisor. I shook my head. “Okay, so the Coven teaches you to take an inventory each time that you’re awakened.”

  “Right. And when you awakened me, I was standing there…” He moved back to the reading table, where he’d crouched as a cat statue. “And I felt the harmonic vibrations—”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “What?” Neko looked totally innocent.

  “Harmonic vibrations? Next thing, you’ll be telling me that you’re a trained vibrational consultant.”

  “And when would I have found the time to do that? I’m just a familiar, you know. And Hannah Osgood locked me away in 1919. They’ve only been training vibrational consultants for the past thirty years or so.”

  I shook my head at his matter-of-fact tone. “What about black tourmaline?” I challenged him, thinking of Clara’s offer to cleanse Nurse Lampet’s amber. “Did you sense any black tourmaline solution when you woke up?”

  “Right,” Neko scoffed. “Like I’d actually fall for that ‘black tourmaline’ stuff. I didn’t join the Coven yesterday, you know. It’s only the most gullible fools who get taken in by ‘black tourmaline’ solution. You might as well waste your money on eye of newt.”

  So there. Even if Clara was a witch, she’d been conned by a beginner’s trick. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse.

  “Aha!” Neko pounced on a pile of books with the vigor of a tabby going after a mouse. He picked up half a dozen volumes, one by one, setting them aside and shaking his head. And there, underneath the disarray of parchment and leather, was a wooden box.

  With a grunt, Neko picked it up, but he sneezed as he brought it to rest against his chest. “Dust. Someone should really get this place cleaned up.”

  “I thought that was your job,” I said, hoping to deflect a little of my guilt.

  “I don’t do windows,” Neko said. “Or dust. Or vacuum. Let’s get this thing upstairs, where the light is better.”

  I followed him out of the basement, unable to resist looking over my shoulder a few times. I don’t know what I expected to see. It wasn’t as if the books were going to come to life on their own. They weren’t going to fly across the room, placing themselves on the shelves in order.

  Neko grunted as he set the wooden chest on the coffee table. I sat beside him on the couch and studied the thing. It had looked heavy in Neko’s arms. It was about two feet on a side, entirely made of wood. I could make out a pair of corroding brass hinges on the back and a metal hasp along the front. A bar of polished wood held the hasp closed.

  The surface of the box was scarred, as if someone—or something—had sharpened its claws against the surface long ago. I looked at Neko, but his well-manicured nails did not seem up to the destructive job. He met my eyes. “Well, go ahead.”

  “Go ahead?”

  “Take out the wooden bar. Open the thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Open.” He sighed and rolled his eyes, as if he were waiting for me to finish trying on a new blouse.

  I set my jaw and pushed on the wooden bar. It was surprisingly difficult to get moving. I grunted and tried again. “Son of a—” I said, as I ripped one of my fingernails.

  “Ah, ah, ah!” Neko said, playfully stopping my foul language.

  His admonition wasn’t enough to knock me silent, but my fingers were. I had torn a fingernail. Me. The girl whose nails had been bitten to the quick for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to break one. Inordinately pleased with myself, I attacked the wooden bar again, and it finally started to slip. I banged it with the heel of my hand a few more times, and it fell free from its brass hasp.

  I made short work opening up the box. Inside, there were a half dozen nested trays, suspended on a complicated system of brass hinges and struts. The container reminded me of a tackle box, but it must have been built in the days well before plastic. Built in the days before glowing fishing lures, as well, for that matter.

  But my ancient wooden tackle box was filled with treasures, nonetheless.

  Each tray was broken into dozens of velvet-padded compartments, and each of those cells contained a separate stone. There were rocks that were readily classifiable as crystals—jagged shards with regular angled sides. There were other stones as well– some beads that looked as if they’d been rubbed smooth by countless fingers, a handful of spheres, each polished like perfect marbles.

  “What are these things?” My voice was thick with wonder as I reached out for the nearest stone.

  “Neko, aren’t you obliged to warn her before she touches the Spinster Stone?”

  I jerked my hand back and bit off a surprised cry, managing to smother another like I was swallowing a hiccup. Even before I turned toward the kitchen door, I recognized David Montrose’s voice. “Don’t you knock anymore?”

  “I did. You must not have heard, because you were down in the basement. I let myself in and helped myself to some tea.”

  He saluted me with his mug of chamomile. I cast a wary eye toward my front door. I could have sworn that I’d locked it before I went to bed. “You did,” David said, as though he were reading my mind. “You locked it. It’s standard practice, though, for a warder to be able to open his own witch’s locks. It can come in handy if she’s ever in any real danger.”

  “I guess witches don’t feel any great need for privacy.”

  David shrugged. “I guess not. Not from their warders, anyway.” For just a moment, I was reminded of the David Montrose who had appeared on my doorstep that first night, after I’d awakened Neko. That man was cold and angry, domineering in his possession of specialized information. Not the same man who had taken me to dinner at La Chaumiere and Paparazzi. Not the one who had answered the rest of my questions with good humor. Not the one who had kissed me and retracted that promise.

  David grinned, and the expression helped him to slip back into the new and improved warder that I’d come to like. “So you’ve decided to move on to crystals?”

  “I told Neko that I was looking for something to help my grandmother.” I summarized Gran’s illness.

  David nodded. “You’ve shown some affinity for spells. But working with crystals is completely different. Most witches aren’t able to work both areas.”

  “I think I might manage.” I looked at the box again, at drawer after drawer of empowered stones. “I think my mother has an affinity for crystals.”

  If David understood how much effort it took for me to call Clara my mother, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he came to sit beside me. “Let’s see what you can do, then.” He reached into the box and shifted the layers to get to the bottom one. His fingers ranged over the divided compartments, alighting first on one stone, then on another.

  I glanced at Neko. He was watching David curiously, turning his head slightly to the side, as if he were trying to discern some meaning behind my warder’s actions. As David finally selected one stone, Neko nodded minutely. I reached out my hand for the rock, and Neko leaned close to me, as he had when we cast the fire spell in my kitchen.

  David set the stone on my palm. “Tell me what you feel.”

  It was a clear crystal about half the length of my index finger. I turned it around in the light, looking for striations or other markings, but there was nothing to distract from the stone’s simple perfection. If not for its weight and its cool touch, it might have been made of plastic. I examined
its facets and found nothing, no distinguishing marks, no surface features.

  I started to feel silly. I mean, here it was, the middle of the night. I was a grown woman, looking for a magic token to help my sick grandmother. What did I think this was? Some sort of fairy tale? I closed my hand over the stone and looked at David. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing! It’s a rock.”

  Neko shifted closer to me, and I sensed that he was disappointed in my response. I craned my neck to look at him, but his attention was locked on the crystal closed inside my fist. I took a deep breath and tried again. “It’s clear. It’s heavy, for its size.”

  “Very good,” David said, and I could tell from his tone that he meant it. “How does it feel?”

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to concentrate. After all, the spells had worked, even if I had first thought that their sing-song rhymes were absurd. “It doesn’t have a feeling,” I said after a long pause. “It doesn’t have an emotion of its own. Instead, it’s like a magnifying glass. It makes other things more intense.” The more words that I strung together, the more confident I became. “Yes! That’s it! It enhances other feelings. It’s making me more sure of myself right now!”

  “Precisely.” I had not realized that my eyes were closed until David spoke. I popped them open to find that he was smiling at me. “That’s clear quartz in your hand. An excellent specimen of it, too. It’s an amplifier, a strengthener of your existing thoughts. Try this one.”

  He dug around in the box again, extracting a rounded stone. He took the clear quartz from me and filled my palm with the new specimen. This one was pink, with black stripes arcing through it. It was completely smooth, as if it had spent years in a rock tumbler.

  I folded my fingers around it and closed my eyes. This one had a definite…flavor. A power. It was soft. Gentle. It made me think of Gran. Of Gran tucking me into bed at night, when I was a little girl. I remembered something that Clara had said at the museum that morning—it already seemed so long ago! The pink crystal there meant family.