"Thanks a lot," the amulet said dryly. "You think I like her any better than you do?" The chain that usually suspended Ammi from the front of the fax machine made a tinkling sound when the amulet trembled with rage in Dov's hand. "I can't stand it when I've got to announce a fax from that one. The bile positively oozes from every syllable in her transmissions! Mind you, big guy, you give her back as good as you get, but being forced to listen in on your exchanges is like playing go-between for a pair of rabid hyenas. It's starting to wear on my nerves."
Dov's mouth quirked up at one corner. "You don't have nerves."
"I've got sorcery-generated circuitry," Ammi replied peevishly. "It's practically the same thing."
"Well, in that case, I've got some good news for you: You won't be troubled by faxes between my sister and me for much longer. You know what the rest of Mother's message said, don't you? She's going to leave the family business to just one of us." His mouth tightened. "That one's going to be me."
He strode over to his desk and snapped his fingers. The polished glass top glowed. Rainbow-hued swirls of energy swam across the surface, transforming it into a seer's pool. Most mere mortals owned desktop computers that they hoped would meet all their needs, but Dov Godz was master of a real desktop that actually could do that and more.
"Research all available data and compile a list of key players in the E. Godz corporation. Include prospective as well as active clients if their potential influence is comparable. Make all necessary travel arrangements enabling me to visit each of these in the most efficient manner possible, allowing for M.E.S.T."
"M.E.S.T.?" Ammi the amulet echoed.
"Minimum Essential Schmooze Time," Dov replied. "I want to depart today by—" He consulted his wristwatch. Then he noticed that it wasn't there. He'd taken it off for his aromatherapy-massage session. "Oh, hell, I'll leave at six. Make New Orleans my first stop and get a really good dinner before getting down to business. No way New Orleans won't make the list." He glanced at the still-swirling desktop. "Stream the appropriate documents to my palmtop. Copy that?"
The desk uttered a soft, almost voluptuous sigh and in the voice of the divine Diana Rigg replied, "Anything you say, Dov."
Dov grinned. "I never get tired of that."
"I do," Ammi said petulantly.
"Jealous?" Dov's grin widened. "Too bad. And now it's back to the fax for you." He headed for the machine, intent on replacing the moody amulet.
"Wait a minute!" Ammi protested. "Don't put me back there! Take me with you!"
"Why?"
"I can provide remote access for all fax messages that might arrive in your absence."
"My palmtop already has that capability."
"I'm a portable firewall. You can stick me on your hotel phone and I'll screen all your calls."
"Nothing a discretionary shielding spell can't do."
By now the little amulet was grasping at straws. "Take me into any jewelry store and have them chip off as many bits of me as you want. Drop them off on the clients and you'll be able to eavesdrop on everything they're up to even after you're long gone!"
Dov clicked his tongue and shook his head. "No sale. You think these people are rubes? They've got their own resources for detecting bugs, even magical ones." He hung the amulet back on the fax machine and brushed invisible dust from his hands. As he turned to go he said, "Sorry, Ammi, but there's really no good reason for me to take you with me."
He was almost to the door when a very small, very shaky voice behind him said, "But I'll miss you."
Dov stopped in his tracks and looked back. "Say what?"
"I said I'll miss you," the amulet repeated, almost reluctantly. "A lot. There. I said it. Happy?"
Dov snatched the little trinket up again and confronted it with the impossible. "You're an appliance. How could you miss me? Or anyone, for the matter? It's like someone claiming he can't program his VCR because he once said something to hurt its feelings."
"Look, I can't explain it; I just know it," the amulet said, getting defensive. "And that crack about VCRs was uncalled for: They happen to be very sensitive. It comes from all the soppy chick flicks people make them play. Hey, take me with you or leave me behind, see if I care. But I'll tell you this much: It's going to get mighty lonely out there on the road, and one of those cold, solitary nights you're going to wish you had a sympathetic ear to listen to your troubles, even if it's only one that's made out of silver."
Dov stared at the amulet, taken aback by its outburst. The trouble was, its words made sense and he knew it. Only an idiot kept fighting when it was past time to surrender.
"Oh, fine," he growled. "You'll probably do something nasty to the fax machine if I leave you here alone. Might as well take you with me." He thrust the amulet into his pocket.
There was only one problem: He was still wearing nothing but a towel.
"Put on some pants, Einstein," said Ammi from the floor where he'd fallen. "Then let's get this show on the road."
Chapter Four
"Ah, Salem!" said Teddy Tumtum, pressing his fuzzy nose to the glass of the passenger's side window as Peez's rental car glided up Lafayette Street, heading north for the center of town. "Lovely, notorious Salem, infamous and immortal for fostering the mass hysteria that reached its bloody conclusion in the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials ... not!" He giggled.
Peez pulled the car over. "What do you mean, 'not'?" she demanded. "Everyone who knows even a crumb of American history has heard of the Salem witchcraft trials!"
"Sure," said the diabolical bear, enjoying himself. "The way they've heard of George Washington's wooden teeth and Pocahontas being a total supermodel babe with the hots for John Smith and Betsy Ross making the first United States flag ... not!"
"I wish you'd stop saying that," Peez muttered. "You sound like a refugee from a no- brainer teen flick."
"Flick? Did you say flick?" The bear could not open his mouth, but he gestured at it with his paw and made choking noises. "Even your vocabulary is dowdy, and your lack of cool is immeasurable. Gag me with a spoon full of honey!"
"I would, if it'd shut you up. I may not be 'cool,' but I'm sure I know more about American history than you do, you glorified wad of dryer lint!"
"This is the thanks I get for trying to educate you," Teddy Tumtum said. He sounded worse than hurt: He sounded Stereotype Jewish Mother hurt, the kind of hurt that packs a load of payback. "You only think you know American history when all you really know is a grab bag full of popular anecdotes, sound bites, and shaggy dog stories that are about as historically accurate as saying that the French invented French fries!"
"They didn't?" Peez was genuinely taken aback.
"Nope. That was the Belgians."
"Oh." Suddenly she realized she'd given the bear the upper hand. She quickly affected a fake air of indifference, trying to regain lost ground. "I mean, oh, who cares, anyway? History is irrelevant."
"Not here in Salem, it's not," the bear replied. "Here it's business. Big business. And if you think big business is irrelevant, don't call yourself an American!"
Peez made a face and started the car up again. Teddy Tumtum had been making himself unbearable—pun intended or not, she didn't really give a hoot—ever since they'd picked up the rental car at Logan Airport. Somehow or other he'd reached the unilateral decision that being Peez's traveling companion wasn't enough of a challenge for him. No, he had to be her self-appointed mentor, strategic advisor, and back-pocket Machiavelli too. He'd filled their driving time with an unending stream of chatter, alternately briefing her on what awaited them in Salem and telling her exactly how to handle it once they arrived.
He sounded just like her mother.
"Fine, ignore me," the little bear declared. "See where it gets you. More to the point, see where it gets your brother!"
Peez took a hard right, heading the car east. She tried to focus on the traffic and the driving directions that the ever-thorough and reliable Wilma Pilut had provided
for her, not so much out of the fear of getting lost but the better to shut out Teddy Tumtum's nittering.
"Ooooh, nice Beethoven imitation there," the bear sneered. "A regular Meryl Streep, no less. You could almost make me believe you're deaf ... not! You don't have to pay attention to anything I say, but by Teddy Roosevelt's overstuffed ghost, you are going to hear it! It's not just your future you're risking here; it's mine. I've been thinking it over and I've decided that I don't want to spend the rest of my unnatural life as the only close companion of a total failure. Because that's what you'll be if your brother gets the corporation and you get the shaft. What'll become of you then? Wilma's got a better resume. You might find a job somewhere, something that pays crap per hour and has benefits too small to be seen with the naked eye. If you're lucky, you'll be able to scrimp and save and manage your pitiful finances well enough to get yourself a dinky little apartment somewhere so far from New York City that your neighbors think a bagel is a kind of dog like Snoopy! Remember how you always used to tell Dov that the only reason people were nice to him was because they wanted to get close to Edwina? Well, that was true enough and let me tell you, it wasn't because she made the best chocolate chip cookies on the block. No sir, it was because she had the power. Power's got the pull of a million magnets, and it's more of an aphrodisiac than oysters, perfume, trips to Maui, lace lingerie, Super Bowl tickets, Swiss bank accounts—"
"All right, all right!" Peez threw in the towel, though it was about the size of a bath sheet. "I'll listen to you, you furry-assed pest! Even a history lesson has to be better than this. So go ahead and educate me."
"Sorry, that's too big an assignment, Peezie-pie," Teddy Tumtum replied. "But I will give you a few tidbits that might help you out when we call on Queen Fiorella. First of all ..."
* * *
Peez Godz stood on the sidewalk outside Ye Cat and Cauldron Booke Shoppe and took a deep breath, steeling herself for the interview to come. She never had been much good with face-to-face business meetings, preferring the anonymity of e-mails, faxes, phone calls and, in a pinch, the old-fashioned letter. She suffered from selective shyness: She never had any problems when it came to giving orders to her employees, because in that situation she held all the aces and she knew it. But a client was by no means an employee, and when that client was the head of one of E. Godz, Inc.'s most influential subscriber groups, the playing field became so incredibly tilted in that client's favor that it resembled the down-at-the-bow Titanic just before it slipped beneath the waves.
Could the situation possibly be any worse? What a silly question! Peez knew that most situations could always be worse, and were only awaiting the opportunity to do so, especially if she was involved. It wasn't a question of if the manure would hit the whirlwind, it was a matter of how much, what kind, and when it would ever stop raining cosmic cowpats.
In this case, the manure had taken a form whose best description was seldom associated with manure: beauty. Fiorella, undisputed queen of the largest chain of wiccan covens in America, was beautiful.
Peez stared at the life-size photographic cutout of herself that Fiorella had placed dead center in the window of Ye Cat and Cauldron Booke Shoppe. The witch-queen (as she always styled herself whenever she appeared on talk shows, usually right around Halloween) had a body that would not quit, the perfect combination of curves and concavities, slender but not skinny, voluptuous yet without a single excess ounce of warm, welcoming flesh. Her summery blond hair fell in a silky cascade down to her hips, her full, red lips curved upward in a very knowing smile, and her slightly slanted green eyes seemed to burn with their own inner fire. If you believed in such a thing as body language, then Fiorella's body was playing an endless loop tape of that great old hit, "I Can Get Anything I Want From Anyone I Please Because I Look Like This And You Don't."
To which Teddy Tumtum would probably add the chorus: Neener, neener, neener.
Teddy Tumtum wasn't there to add anything. Peez had opted to lock him in the trunk of her rental car. He'd served his purpose, giving her a crash course in the true history of Salem and how best to apply that knowledge during her upcoming interview with the witch-queen. She had to admit, he did have a devious mind, for a stuffed animal, full of practical insights on human nature. On the other hand, Peez didn't need anyone to tell her that the person who showed up at a business meeting packing a loaded teddy bear—even a magically articulate one—had already lost the first through fifteenth rounds of negotiations.
She's beautiful, Peez told herself. But I've got something that's better than beauty: I've got brains. I'm smart, and I'm only going to get smarter as time goes on. Meanwhile, she's just going to get old and wrinkled and saggy. There's just so much that plastic surgery can do. She's not going to flummox me. I can take her.
She drew another centering breath and went into the bookstore.
A small brass bell above the door chimed sweetly as Peez entered. The shop appeared to be deserted, which was strange. Peez checked the sign on the front door, but it said open.
Maybe she's doing something in the storeroom, Peez thought, glancing at the red and black bead curtain veiling the doorway behind the counter. She opened her mouth to call out, but changed her mind. She'd never been very good at knowing what to say under such circumstances. Yoo-hoo? Helloooo? Hi, it's me? All lame, all guaranteed to make her feel like a fool. Fools did not win the support of influential clients for a pending corporate takeover. Not unless they were highly-placed government officials. She decided to say nothing and simply await Fiorella's inevitable appearance. Meanwhile, she looked around her.
The interior of Ye Cat and Cauldron was a comforting blend of dim light and musty smells. The shelves were laden with a fine selection of books, hardcover and paperback both, dealing with matters of the occult, though there was an entire section marked off as Love Spells. A thread of patchouli incense wove its way through the displays of plaster skulls, crystal balls, and mass-produced Egyptian statuettes of gods, goddesses, cats and hippos. There was a real cat present—black, of course. He lay stretched out full length across the top of a glass display case that was crammed with enough silvery ankh pendants to outfit half the population of suburban Goth wannabees on the Eastern Seaboard. There was also a cauldron in one corner. It was full of umbrellas.
"Loaners, in case of a sudden cloudburst," said Fiorella. She had passed through the bead curtain without calling forth so much as a click-click. The black cat let out a wowowowwwwlllll of ecstatic greeting and leaped onto her shoulder where he perched like an owl. "They're for the tourists."
"Isn't everything?" Peez said, letting her eyes sweep across the shop. Her smile mirrored Fiorella's. It was a stratagem that Teddy Tumtum had suggested to her. She wished he were there to see how well she had begun this interview. Amazing how coolly she could comport herself on the outside when her gut felt like a blender set on puree. "Very kind of you to help them out, but doesn't it run into money when they don't return them?"
"Not at all." The witch-queen's little pink tongue ran lightly across her upper lip as if she were relishing the taste of something very toothsome indeed. "Please note the sign."
Peez looked at the wall above the cauldron. There hung a sheet of yellowed parchment, slightly charred at the edges, with the calligraphed words:
Welcome Ye Be to Borrow Mee in Tyme of Neede, Yet Hearken Ye: A Witche's Curse Doth Follow Fast on Hee Who Keepeth Mee.
"That," said Peez, "is false advertising. There's no curse on those umbrellas. I'd be able to feel it."
"Nothing but the curse of truly awful poetry," said Fiorella complacently. "But it works like a charm, and it's much cheaper than imbuing the umbrellas with a homing spell. The tourists come here because they believe, or because they want to. The first rule of successful retail is to give the public what the public wants, or thinks they do. I'm in the business of meeting popular expectations. Just between the two of us, black isn't my best color, incense makes me sneeze, and I'm frightfully al
lergic to my darling Pyewacket, here." She reached up and scratched the black cat's fluffy chest. He purred mightily. "But the tourists expect Ye Cat and Cauldron to have both, and I have a reputation as a witch-queen to uphold. You can buy an awful lot of antihistamines on what this store clears in a week."
"I know. I've reviewed your records."
"Thorough," Fiorella murmured. "But I'd expect no less of Edwina Godz's daughter." She stepped back, gesturing at the bead curtain. "Would you care for some tea? I've just been making preparations in the back—my Lilith Lair, as I like to call it. The two of us have much to discuss."
The area behind the bead curtain was a miniature jewel of a room, all ruby glass, burgundy velvet, and gold silk tassels. The tea things were already set out on a low mahogany table with ball-and-claw feet. Fiorella waved Peez to a place at one end of the settee before settling herself at the other. "Two sugars and a squeeze of lemon for you," she said, filling Peez's cup.
How does she know that's what I always put in my tea? Peez fought to keep her self- possession. Fiorella had meant to astonish her, to throw her off-stride and gain the initial advantage in this interview. I-know-something-about-you-that-you-didn't-know-I-knew was a business ploy that had been old when Babylon was young. The witch-queen was up to something. Peez felt a fleeting urge to rush out to the car and fetch Teddy Tumtum, but she knew that was impossible. Instead she sat up a little straighter and launched a silvery laugh.
"How very kind of you to find out how I take my tea," she said smoothly. "But I'm afraid your information is sadly out of date. I no longer care for lemon. Just cream." She arched one eyebrow and peered critically into the tiny porcelain pitcher on the tea tray. "That is cream, isn't it? Real cream?"
Fiorella's perfect cheekbones flushed red. She muttered a few arcane words and wiggled her fingers over the little pitcher. The level of liquid went down slightly and the color deepened from the bluish-white of skim milk to the more buttery-white of full dairy cream.
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