Wicked Charms

  “Almost?” I asked.

  “I’m missing the powdered newt snot, but I don’t think it will matter. Powdered newt snot is mostly used as a binding agent.”

  Diesel smiled, and I bit into my lower lip to keep from whimpering.

  “Candle burn, smoke expire, Martin’s brain will now retire,” Glo said.

  “Do you have a candle back there?” I asked her.

  “I have a Bic lighter,” Glo said. “I didn’t bring a candle.”

  I heard some pages rustle.

  “Whoops,” Glo said. “I lost my place.”

  More pages rustling.

  “Here it is,” she said. “Brain of dog, trusted friend, remember not the sad end but act as ever.”

  “That doesn’t sound right,” I said to her.

  “It’s dark back here,” Glo said, “but I’m pretty sure I got it correct.”

  The first police car flew past us on the other side of the road. It was followed by two more police cars and a fire truck.

  “Maybe we should drop Ammon off at the hospital,” I said to Glo. “How bad is he?”

  “He’s okay,” Glo said. “His nose has stopped bleeding, and he sort of has his eyes open.”

  “I’ve got his hands tied with some rope we had back here,” Josh said. “I think he’s secure.”

  “So if we don’t take him to the hospital, where do we take him?” I asked Diesel.

  “Your house. I’m hungry.”

  “No, no, no. I don’t want him in my house.”

  “Lizzy is right,” Glo said. “I’m pretty sure he’s a demon, and he might infect Lizzy’s house with demon cooties. For a second there when we were rolling around I thought I caught a glimpse of a double pupil in his eyes, and then they might have glowed red.”

  Diesel turned off Ocean Avenue onto Atlantic. “He isn’t a demon. He’s a narcissist with demonic ambition.”

  “What if we take him to my house and a SWAT team shows up and crashes through my windows and breaks down my doors?” I said. “That would be awful.”

  “I won’t lock the front door,” Diesel said. “Then they can just walk in.”

  Ten minutes later we carted Ammon from the van and set him in my kitchen. Cat glared at him from a vantage point on the counter and Carl gave him the finger. Diesel went off to find a parking space.

  Glo had her Magic 8 Ball out.

  “Magic 8 Ball tell me true, is Martin Ammon a demon?”

  “Well?” I asked. “What does it say?”

  “It says ‘Signs point to yes.’ ”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ammon was standing in the middle of my kitchen, swaying slightly, his eyes glazed, his hands tied in front of him.

  “Demons don’t like salt,” Glo said, grabbing a box of salt from my cabinet.

  She poured the salt onto the floor in a circle around Ammon.

  “Okay,” she said to Ammon. “Step out of the salt circle.”

  Ammon didn’t look like he was totally with the program.

  “Maybe he’s confused because I put the forgetful spell on him, and he doesn’t remember he’s a demon,” Glo said.

  “Maybe he’s confused because he was knocked out twice and has a concussion,” I said. “What happens to demons who cross the salt line?”

  “I think they melt,” Glo said, “but that’s secondhand information.”

  Josh gave Ammon a shove, and Ammon stumbled across the salt line.

  “Hunh,” Glo said. “He’s not melting.”

  Ammon tipped his head back and howled.

  “Omigod,” Glo said. “He’s a demon werewolf. We need to shoot him with a silver bullet. Who’s got a silver bullet?”

  Josh and I shuffled around. We didn’t have a silver bullet. We also didn’t have a gun.

  “He hasn’t got fangs like a werewolf,” I said. “Are you sure you did the right spell?”

  Glo thumbed through Ripple’s. “Here it is…uh-oh.”

  “What uh-oh?” I asked. “I hate uh-oh.”

  “I might have made a mistake when I lost my place in the van. I think I might have put the man’s-best-friend spell on him.”

  Ammon was on his knees licking up the salt. He moved to the work island and lifted his leg.

  “Bad dog!” I said. “No!”

  He put his leg down and looked up at me.

  “Do something!” I said to Glo. “Change him back.”

  “That could be a problem,” Glo said, “since I seem to have made a combination of two spells. But here’s the good news. I didn’t have any powdered newt snot, so the spell is most likely temporary.”

  Diesel walked into the kitchen, set the map on the counter, and went to the refrigerator. “How’s it going?”

  “Not so good,” I said. “Ammon thinks he’s a dog.”

  “Not my bad,” Diesel said, grabbing a meat pie. “And I’m not walking him.”

  “So this is the map,” Josh said, staring down at it. “Hard to believe it will lead to such riches.”

  Diesel ate the meat pie cold like a sandwich and washed it down with a beer. He removed the map from the frame and placed the map back on the countertop. I thought Josh was right. The map didn’t look like anything that would lead us to a treasure. It was a round piece of old parchment. On one side was the inscription “Denarius clavis ad chartum est.” There was also a rudimentary sketch of a collection of islands below the inscription. One of the islands had an X drawn onto it. The other side of the map was filled from top to bottom with seemingly random letters. A series of concentric circles drawn on the round map were the only things that seemed to separate one group of letters from another. It looked like an archery target.

  “This isn’t a slam dunk,” Glo said. “The treasure could be buried anywhere on those islands. We could dig holes for a thousand years and never find anything.”

  Diesel turned the map over to the side with the letters. He put the coin on the parchment. Nothing magical happened. Josh tried to rub the letters with the coin, as if it was a scratch-off lottery ticket. Nothing happened.

  “How did you get the seven pieces of coin to stick together?” I asked Diesel.

  “Superglue.”

  “Maybe it’s like a Ouija board,” Glo said. “Maybe we just need to put the coin on the map, and we all put our hands on it, and the coin will move around while we chant.”

  “It’s some kind of a puzzle,” I said. “I’m sure we have to figure out how to use these concentric circles.”

  I put the coin in the center circle…the bull’s-eye. It was a perfect fit.

  “Omigosh,” Glo said. “There’s a letter peeking out through one of the little holes in the coin.”

  I rotated the coin and there were more alphabet letters.

  “The coin has to be perfectly rotated to have letters appear in the holes,” I said. “Right now we have an ‘E’ and an ‘O.’ ”

  “We need the missing piece of the coin,” Diesel said. “Without that piece it’s impossible to know if the coin is oriented correctly, if we’re missing letters, or even if we have the correct letters.”

  “What about the outer rings?” Josh asked. “They all have letters in them, too.”

  Diesel put the coin on top of the outermost ring. The width of the coin was exactly the width of the “doughnut ring,” the space between the outside ring and the next one. In fact, each of the concentric rings, though they formed smaller and smaller doughnuts, had the same exact width of approximately one and a half inches, the same width as the diameter of the coin.

  “Try to rotate the coin in the outer ring and see if you can find letters in the holes,” Diesel said to me.

  I chose a random place within the doughnut ring and put the coin inside it. I rotated the coin slightly until letters were visible through the holes. I used that as my starting point and rolled the coin, like the wheel of a bicycle rolling down the road, so that it stayed inside the confines of the doughnut ring. It looked like a planet revolving aro
und the sun. As the coin moved through its orbit, additional letters were revealed through the holes. I rolled the coin around all of the rings, and Diesel wrote down all of the letters.

  “This makes no sense,” Diesel said, looking at what he’d written. “We need the last piece of the coin from Wulf. We can’t decipher the map without it.”

  Ammon was on his feet, looking around. He spied Cat, gave a woof, and chased Cat into the living room. Cat planted his feet, hissed, and swatted at Ammon, slashing a four-inch rip in Ammon’s pants leg. Ammon yelped and jumped away from Cat.

  I pointed at the couch. “Sit!” I said to Ammon.

  Ammon got on the couch, scrunched around a little, and curled up.

  “We have to do something with him,” I said to Diesel. “He can’t stay here. Either we turn him over to Rutherford, or else we take him to the animal shelter.”

  Crash! Ammon fell off the couch.

  “What the heck?” I said. “Is he okay?”

  “I think he tried to lick his dog balls and fell off the couch,” Glo said.

  Rutherford arrived fifteen minutes later. We were outside on the sidewalk with Ammon. Ammon was no longer bound, but Diesel had a grip on him so he wouldn’t chase after cars or squirrels.

  “I found him on my doorstep,” I said to Rutherford. “He seems confused.”

  Ammon growled at Rutherford.

  “He must be in shock from the traumatic fire,” I said. “He’s not himself.”

  “It’s true,” Josh said to Rutherford. “He thinks he’s a doggy. You’ll want to watch him on the carpets.”

  Rutherford gaped at Ammon. “He’s bloody!”

  “Yeah,” Diesel said. “He might have fallen down.”

  Rutherford loaded Ammon into the Mercedes sedan, and they drove off with Ammon’s head out the window, his nose pointed into the wind.

  “Go figure,” Glo said.

  We drove the van back to Dazzle’s. We all got into our own cars and drove home. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that Diesel was following me. I parked in my space alongside my house, and Diesel parked on the street one house down.

  “Not going home?” I asked him.

  We were on the sidewalk in front of my house, and Diesel looked toward the front door. “I left my monkey here. And Wulf is here.”

  “How do you know Wulf is here?”

  “I have a cramp in my ass.”

  Diesel went in first, flipped the light on, and I saw that Wulf was sitting in a chair in the living room. He looked deadly calm and perfectly at ease. He didn’t blink in the sudden bright light. He didn’t smile. He didn’t scowl. He didn’t look surprised to see Diesel.

  “Hello, cousin,” Wulf said.

  Diesel gave a small nod of recognition. “Wulf.”

  “I’ve been admiring the map,” Wulf said. “Pity it’s useless without my piece of the coin.”

  “What’s the deal?” Diesel asked him.

  “You keep the treasure, and I get the stone if I give you my piece.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Diesel said.

  “Martin Ammon looks the fool right now, but he’s no fool.”

  “He’s also no demon,” Diesel said.

  “There’s a demon inside all of us,” Wulf said. “Ammon’s demon is greed. He will always want more wealth and more power. He’ll stop at nothing to get it. And there are those who follow him doglike, if you’ll excuse the expression. Mammon has his disciples, whether they be misguided or not.”

  “And your point?” Diesel asked.

  “My point is that for all purposes he now owns Miss Tucker. She’s signed a contract that gives Ammon control of her professional future. She’s been caught on security cameras kidnapping Ammon. She’s in possession of stolen property from his house. He will use all this to blackmail her into helping him find the treasure. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll raise the stakes until she agrees. He’ll burn down her house, kill her cat, and kidnap her mother and chop off her fingers one by one.”

  This was all said very matter-of-fact, without any emotional inflection or doubt that it would happen. It was the word of Wulf, and Diesel and I knew that everything he said was true.

  “Better I get the stone than Ammon and his Mammon worshippers. I can control the power. Followers of Mammon will unleash it.”

  “We could just leave the stone hidden,” I said. “Even someone as crazy as Ammon would understand that we’re at an impasse.”

  “It won’t stop them from chopping off your mother’s fingers,” Wulf said.

  “Even a crazy person has to realize I have no control over you, and can’t get you to give me the last piece,” I said to Wulf.

  Diesel and Wulf exchanged glances.

  “You do have control over him,” Diesel said. “Wulf couldn’t allow anything bad to happen to you or your family. He would have to act.”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason I couldn’t allow it,” Diesel said. “We’re bound to you.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “It means there would have to be a price paid for destroying what I’m bound to protect,” Wulf said. “And that would be a large, tiresome project if my targets were Mammon followers.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Wulf. “You threaten me all the time.”

  “There’s me, and then there’s them,” Wulf said, laying his single piece of the coin on the coffee table.

  Diesel took the piece and joined it to the other seven pieces. We put the coin on the map, and Diesel recorded the letters that resulted when we rolled the coin around the rings.

  “What does it say?” I asked Diesel.

  “ ‘In the deep water west of Gull Rock lies Babur’s cursed gemstone. It may find ye a treasure but the price be your bones.’ ”

  “Oh boy,” I said. “A cursed gemstone.”

  “Whatever it is, you need to find it,” Wulf said.

  Phuunf! There was a flash of light and some smoke and Wulf was gone.

  “How does he do that?” I asked.

  Diesel grinned. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

  “Did we just agree to give him the Stone of Avarice?”

  “Yeah, and it doesn’t make me happy, but his power is limited as long as we have two stones safely locked away. He needs all seven to do real damage.”

  “Wulf mentioned Mammon followers,” I said to Diesel. “Do you think they exist?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. And I can understand why they would gravitate to Ammon as their supreme representative.”

  “You don’t suppose he could actually be Mammon, do you?”

  “No. I think his parents made an unfortunate choice of a first name.”

  “What would these Mammon followers look like?” I asked. “Would they be like a zombie army worshipping Ammon?”

  “My money’s on Rutherford,” said Diesel. “He’s always got Ammon in his sights. And if Rutherford is one of them, there are probably other acolytes on the household staff.”

  “Rutherford seems unusually devoted to Ammon, but I don’t know if I could see him as a Mammon worshipper. He looks so normal.”

  “My Aunt Lydia looks normal, but she belongs to a coven that elected her Goddess of the Daisies.”

  “You have a strange family,” I said.

  “Not by California standards.”

  I poured myself a glass of wine and chugged half. “About tonight.”

  Diesel was relaxed against a counter, thumbs hooked into his pants pockets, tie loosened, top button to his shirt open. “You had to drink half a glass of wine before you brought it up?”

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  “Not on my end,” Diesel said.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “I’m sort of creeped out to stay here by myself. Wulf pops in whenever he wants, and I’m worried that Ammon will realize he’s not a dog, and I have his map.”

  “So you want me to spend the
night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where am I sleeping?”

  “Wherever you want,” I told him.

  “This is too easy.”

  “I thought you liked easy.”

  “I’m good at my job because I have superior instincts, and my instincts tell me this isn’t going to end well.”

  “You’re doing me a favor by staying here. The least I can do is offer you my bed…being that you don’t fit on the couch.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ll sleep down here,” I said.

  “Because?”

  “Because I don’t want to take any chances on having to save the world all by myself.”

  “I thought we figured that one out,” Diesel said.

  “What if it was a fluke? Like, what if someone had just been asleep at the switch? There’s a lot at stake right now.”

  Diesel helped himself to the wine and refilled my glass. “Let me know if you change your mind. I’m good on short notice.”

  —

  I changed my mind at ten o’clock when we shut the television off.

  “Maybe we could try the pillow thing again,” I said. “You stay on your side, and I’ll stay on my side.”

  He wrapped his hand around my wrist and tugged me toward the stairs. “It would be easier if I had Hatchet.”

  “He’s a nut.”

  “True, but I have no desire to get him naked.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d want to sleep with your clothes on.”

  He tossed his jacket over a chair. “Don’t suppose I would, but feel free to wear whatever you want.”

  I grabbed some flannel pajamas and changed in the bathroom. Diesel was already in bed when I came out.

  “It’s July,” Diesel said. “Don’t you think you’ll be hot in flannel pajamas?”

  “They feel cozy.”

  “I bet.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My smartphone alarm buzzed me awake. The room was pitch-black. I could feel Cat curled at my feet. I was cuddled next to Diesel. No pillows. I checked my pajamas. Still buttoned. Still on me. I eased out of bed, found some clothes in the dark, and went into the bathroom. I was showered and dressed in fifteen minutes. Diesel was still sleeping.

  “No, I’m not,” Diesel said.