Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 19

  “Of course we can do it. Like I told you, we can do anything together, if we put our minds to it.”

  “Our minds,” I murmured.

  But not our hearts.

  He seemed to hear that, even though I didn’t speak the words. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he forced himself not to. After we had come back to this realm, he had tried to convince me that he really loved me, that the spell he had used to make me fall for him had been a mistake, and that he regretted it and wanted to set things right between us. I wanted to believe him…but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not after everything that had happened. I couldn’t believe him, I couldn’t forgive him, and I certainly couldn’t open my heart to him again. That resolve hadn’t weakened with the passage of time, although there had been more than a few moments when I wished it would.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Yeah,” as if he were determined to move on, too. “If Cearul is the bird, let’s try to figure out why he’s so important. Like you said, he can’t still be alive.”

  “But he could be stuffed,” I said.

  I don’t know where the words came from. They just popped into my head. As soon as I said them, though, I knew the idea made sense.

  “A thousand-year-old stuffed bird?” Donovan said in a skeptical tone. He shook his head. “Can’t be. No matter how good a taxidermy job somebody did on it – and I don’t know how advanced that art was back then – it would have rotted away by now.”

  I was in the mood to be stubborn, so I said, “Maybe, maybe not. Eamon was a p-powerful warlock, obviously. He couldn’t put a spell on Cearul to keep him alive this long, but once the b-bird was dead and stuffed, it was an inanimate object. Eamon could have put a protective spell on it to keep anything from happening to it, including decay.”

  “Maaaaybe,” Donovan said in a drawn-out tone that told me he still didn’t believe it.

  “How else are we supposed to f-find him if something like that isn’t true?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a painting of the bird. That could be it, couldn’t it? Or maybe a little statue of it?” He held his hands a foot apart. “You know, a figurine about this big, painted black – “

  “So help me, D-Donovan Cole, if you make a Maltese Falcon joke, I’m kicking you out of this apartment.”

  He chuckled and said, “Take it easy. I know this is serious. You could be right about the bird being stuffed.” His eyebrows rose. “Hey, wait a minute. My mother could have hired those private detectives to try to track down the bird – The Emerald Talisman!”

  He shot to his feet so suddenly as the words burst out of him that I jumped back on the sofa without thinking. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “It’s an obscure legend,” he said as he started pacing back and forth. “Almost like a…a witch fairy tale. My mother told me about it when I was a little kid. Didn’t your folks ever tell you anything like that?”

  I had to shake my head. “They told me about how they and Mark had p-powers, but remember, I was the stuttering little girl who couldn’t even c-cast a spell. I think they tried to raise me as much like a human as possible, probably so I wouldn’t feel b-bad about myself.”

  If that was the case, it hadn’t really worked, I thought, but that was irrelevant now.

  “Well, the Emerald Talisman is a legend about the familiar of the most powerful sorcerer of ancient times. It says that whoever possesses this familiar will increase their power a thousandfold. But nobody knows what, exactly, the familiar was. Most people who know about the legend assume that it was a cat – “

  “But it could have been a f-falcon,” I said, catching some of his excitement. I was on my feet now, too. “If that’s true, if Cearul was this Emerald Talisman and Eamon the powerful warlock, do you think it’s p-possible Cearul could still have that ability? Assuming it still exists, that is.”

  “I don’t know,” Donovan said. “A stuffed bird? That seems awfully far-fetched to me, Aren. But I have to admit, there are other magical talismans that can increase the powers of a witch or a warlock. If it worked…if we had the bird and it increased our powers like that and we joined forces…we might be able to use the reversal spell in the book and free my mom and your dad!”

  “And Angela,” I reminded him.

  That put a little damper on his excitement. “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I don’t suppose we could just leave her there, could we?”

  “Not really. You’re engaged to her, remember?”

  He winced. “I think we can safely say that’s over and done with. Arranged marriage or not, I have absolutely no intention of spending the rest of my life with that crazy woman.”

  “Will the w-witches’ council allow that?”

  “They won’t have any choice. We’ll have the Millennium Falcon on our side, remember?”

  I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Oh, Lord, don’t call it that. Please.”

  Donovan came over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. He said, “When you first told me that story about a sword fight in your living room, I really did think you were crazy, Aren. But you’ve convinced me. It all fits together too well not to be true. And we’re on the right trail, I know we are.”

  Since he had hold of my shoulders like that, it would have been easy for him to pull me closer to him and slide his arms on around me. A part of me wanted him to do that, wanted it desperately. Hey, we were making real progress on our mission, weren’t we? Surely it would be all right to celebrate that progress with a hug, wouldn’t it? I looked at him and he looked at me, and we were only inches apart and I could tell he was thinking the same thing…

  “Oh, sorry, guys, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Taylor’s voice made me jump back. I turned around quickly toward the door of her bedroom, where she stood with an embarrassed look on her face.

  “You weren’t interrupting anything,” I said. “There’s n-nothing to interrupt, is there, Donovan?”

  “Nope,” he said, and his voice was flat and hard now. “Not a thing. We were just about to get back to work.”

  Chapter 8

  So that’s what we did, got back to work. Taylor went out and got lunch for the three of us, bringing it back to the apartment so we could work straight through. At Donovan’s suggestion, she even pitched in and helped with the translation. As a lawyer, she had an organized mind and was good at seeing the connections between things that somebody else might miss.

  She kept her distance from the actual book, though. “I saw it burst into flames for no good reason,” she explained. “I think I’ll just stay down here at this end of the sofa.”

  There was no way for Taylor to help us with what we were doing unless she knew the whole story. I told her about how I had seen Eamon here in the living room and how he had told me to find Cearul. She nodded solemnly and looked like I wasn’t telling her anything more unusual than that we were out of cereal.

  She had been there when my father and Donovan’s mother were shooting force beams at each other from their hands, I reminded myself, so I suppose this story didn’t sound so unbelievable to her.

  “This guy Eamon,” she said when I was finished, “you say he was pretty good-looking?”

  “Well, in a m-medieval sort of way, I guess. It had probably been a long time since he had a b-bath.”

  “The earthy type, eh? Like a…construction worker, say. The next time he comes around, Aren, you need to introduce me.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll ever show up again,” I said, trying not to get exasperated with her. “And d-don’t forget, another guy with a sword was trying to k-kill him. It really wouldn’t have been much fun to meet him.”

  “Meetings are what you make of them,” Taylor said. “Anyway, you say this green bird belonged to him.”

  “We didn’t say the bird was green,” Donovan told her. “That would make it a parrot, not a falcon.”

  “Then why is it called the Emerald Talisman?”

&n
bsp; “Because it’s from Ireland, which is known as the emerald land. Green for Saint Patrick’s Day, right? And it’s a talisman because it bestows magical abilities on whoever has it.”

  “On anybody, or do you have to be a witch to start with?” she asked.

  I could tell her questioning was starting to annoy Donovan, but it was actually a good thing and not just because of that, I thought. We really needed to think through all possible aspects of this situation, and Taylor brought a different perspective to it than either of us did. I said, “I think you’d have to have some m-magical ability to start with. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to sense the p-power inside the talisman to make use of it.”

  Donovan nodded. “That sounds right to me, too.”

  “So this stuffed green falcon – ” Taylor held up a hand to forestall Donovan’s objection. “I know, we can’t be sure what color it is until we find it, but you don’t know that it’s not green.”

  Donovan shrugged in defeat. “Fine. Maybe it is green.”

  Taylor resumed, “So this stuffed green falcon could have been handed down from person to person for a thousand years, and most of those people probably had no idea it was some powerful magical object.”

  “Yeah, that’s certainly possible,” Donovan said as he frowned in thought. “Eamon might have even entrusted it to someone and asked them to protect it without actually telling them what it was and what it could do. Then they would have passed it along to somebody else, and on down the line for a thousand years.”

  Taylor’s face lit up. “Which would make it – “

  “Not you, too,” I said.

  “Hey, that movie’s part of our culture. My brother must have watched it a thousand times. I know he wore out at least three videotapes of it.”

  “Moving on,” Donovan said. “If we assume it’s possible whoever has the falcon doesn’t know what it is, then we need to look for it among normal humans.”

  “But that’s only a p-possibility,” I countered. “And there are b-billions of normal humans.”

  “How many witches and warlocks are there?” Taylor asked. “I’m just curious, I don’t mean to pry.”

  “I’m not sure anybody really knows,” Donovan replied with a shrug. “If you don’t count the people who call themselves Wiccans and regard it as a religion, but don’t have any real powers, maybe a million worldwide. That’s just a guess.”

  “So, a lot fewer than normal humans, but still ‘way too many to just go around asking them if they have a stuffed green falcon in their attic.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Back up a little bit,” Taylor said. “This Cearul, he was Eamon’s familiar. Like a black cat?”

  “That’s pop culture you’re thinking about. Black cats were thought to be familiar spirits, supernatural beings that helped witches use their powers, all the way back to the middle ages, but really, any animal could be a familiar. Some people even thought that familiars could take the form of humans. Like a lot of things we see about witches in movies and TV, there’s a grain of truth to the whole black cat business, although it’s been wildly exaggerated and distorted over the years. There’s no reason why a falcon couldn’t have been Eamon’s familiar.”

  “But then after the bird died and was stuffed…”

  I put in, “Which we d-don’t know for sure happened. That’s the m-most reasonable theory, though.”

  “Since the falcon wasn’t alive anymore to be possessed by the familiar spirit, it became a talisman instead, because the spirit’s power remained within it.” Donovan shook his head. “I don’t know how that happened. Maybe Eamon locked the power inside it somehow. I’d love to sit down and talk with him.”

  “So would I,” Taylor said. She looked at me. “I told you…next time, intros.”

  “G-Got it,” I said.

  o0o

  For some reason it made me feel good to see Donovan and Taylor getting along so well. There was quite a bit of give-and-take between them. They were well matched intellectually. When Beth was around she took part in the discussions, too, but she had a long shift at the ER that weekend so she wasn’t there that much.

  I was glad Taylor was around for another reason, too. Her presence kept me from thinking too much about how it had felt to have Donovan’s hands resting on my shoulders while the two of us stood so close together. I didn’t want those feelings coming back. It would be too easy to let them get out of control and lead me into doing something I would regret.

  Also, by staying busy with the translation, the weekend didn’t seem quite as long. Donovan was supposed to call me on Monday morning as soon as he found out anything from the private detectives, even if it was just to report that they wouldn’t give him any information.

  I woke up early on Monday, too filled with anticipation to sleep very well. Beth was sleeping after her hospital shift, but Taylor was up getting ready to go to work.

  “That was fun this weekend,” she said as she sipped a cup of coffee, her only breakfast. “I understand why you’re mad at Donovan, Aren, but he does seem to be trying really hard to make it all up to you.”

  “Are you defending him, c-counselor?”

  “No, just telling you what I can see with my own eyes, that’s all.” She rinsed out the cup and put it in the dish drainer, then said goodbye and headed for work, leaving me to think about what she’d said.

  I didn’t want to think about it. So I concentrated on fixing a big bowl of oatmeal with bananas and walnuts instead. Matilda rubbed around my ankles while I was doing that, so I knew she was counting on getting at least a taste of my breakfast.

  The knock on the door surprised me. I wasn’t expecting to hear from Donovan until later, after he’d had time to call the private investigation firms. And since Beth was sound asleep in her room and likely wouldn’t be waking up for a while, for all intents and purposes Donovan and I would be alone in the apartment. That was getting to be more problematical than I liked.

  Funny, as I walked across the living room to the door with the bowl of oatmeal in my hand, it never occurred to me that my visitor might be someone other than Donovan.

  Taylor had left just a short time earlier, so the chain wasn’t fastened. I reached for the knob with my free hand and was about to open it when I remembered that I ought to look through the peephole first. I had already turned the knob part of the way.

  The man in the hallway must have seen the knob move and realized I was right on the other side of the door. I barely caught a glimpse through the peephole of a rugged, unfamiliar face before he lowered his shoulder and rammed it into the door.

  I’ve heard that breaking through a door like that is a lot harder in real life than they make it look in the movies, but I already had the knob partially turned and the sudden impact made the door pop open the rest of the way. It slammed back against me and knocked me off balance as I let out a startled cry. The stranger bulled into the apartment.

  My first thought was that he was a warlock who had discovered somehow we had Eamon’s book and wanted it for himself. He started past me toward the table, all right, but my computer was lying there, too, along with my phone. He could be just a simple smash-and-grab burglar, although they usually hit retail stores, not residences, I thought.

  He didn’t look like a warlock. He had the beard-stubbled, angry look of a common criminal. Of course, appearances can be deceiving.

  For example, he probably thought I was just a terrified young woman who wouldn’t fight back.

  Instead, all the strain and tension of the past couple of months boiled up inside me, and I yelled, “Hey!”

  His head turned instinctively toward me, and I hit him in the face with the bowl of oatmeal. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have on hand. In this case, it wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing. The bowl was thick, heavy ceramic, and I had heaped it pretty high with oatmeal. It had to hurt a little when it hit him, and I know it surprised him. He stumbled and went to one knee.
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  That gave me time to scurry around the table and put it between me and him. I grabbed the book and my computer and tried to edge away from him.

  The more I saw of him and the way he acted, the more convinced I was that he wasn’t a warlock but just a petty thief. I didn’t want to use a spell on him and reveal my powers to yet another human, so I shouted, “You get out of here! I’ll scream and call the police!”

  “Go right ahead, lady,” he said as he pawed oatmeal out of his eyes. The stuff dripped thickly off his face. He growled a curse, reached in his pocket, and pulled out a gun.

  My eyes went wide with terror. I don’t know kind of gun it was, except to say that it was a revolver with a short barrel. As he pointed it at me, I forgot all about protecting my secret and worried about saving my life instead. I cradled the book and my computer against me in my left arm and stuck out my right hand at him.

  No force beam erupted from my palm this time, but the guy flew backward anyway, like he’d just been slapped by a giant hand. He landed on his back and skidded all the way through the open door into the hallway.

  Somebody outside yelled, “Hey!” I recognized the voice.

  It belonged to Donovan.

  The intruder had dropped his gun when he hit the floor. I saw him glance down the hall toward Donovan. I guess he was thinking about whether he wanted to put up a fight. He must have decided that he didn’t, because he rolled over, surged to his feet, and ran the other way. I knew there were stairs at that end of the hall, too.

  I heard the pound of rapid footsteps, then Donovan appeared in the open door with a frightened look on his face. That fear was for me, I sensed. He wasn’t worried about himself.

  “Aren!” he said. He’d been running so hard he had grabbed the door jamb to stop himself. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m f-fine,” I told him.

  “Stay there! I’ll go after that guy!”

  “No,” I said, holding my free hand out toward him. “Let him g-go. I’m all right.”