Wicked Charms (12 page)

We put our heads down and quickly walked into the hall, through the empty kitchen, and into the garage where Josh was waiting, making hurry-up motions. We crossed to the van, Josh and Glo climbed into the back, and I took the seat next to Diesel.

“Why the rush?” I asked Diesel. “Did you get the map?”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, when you set the house on fire, Ammon rushed up to his study to save the map and caught me leaving with it. There was a brief discussion over who was going to retain ownership, and Josh smacked him with a serving tray.”

“I saw him leave the room, and I followed him,” Josh said. “Good thing I did.”

“Omigosh. Was he hurt?” I asked.

“He be a bit stunned,” Josh said, reverting to pirate talk.

“More like he be a bit knocked out,” Diesel said, putting the van in gear, “but he was coming around when we left.”

Police cars and fire trucks were screaming in the distance.

“We need to get out of here before we’re blocked in,” Diesel said.

It wasn’t a very long driveway, but there was valet parking and cars were lined up on either side. Diesel carefully drove toward the gate, and halfway there a man burst out from between two cars and jumped in front of us. It was Martin Ammon. He was crazy mad, waving his arms and shouting.

“Help! Police! Rutherford!”

“This is a real pain in the ass,” Diesel said.

Diesel inched the van up to Ammon, but Ammon wouldn’t budge. He banged on the hood and kept shouting.

“What are you going to do?” I asked Diesel.

“Run him over,” Diesel said.

“You can’t do that! You’ll kill him.”

“And?”

“You don’t have permission to kill.”

“Extenuating circumstance,” Diesel said.

Ammon gave the hood one last thump and moved to the driver’s side door, trying to pull it open.

“You’re not leaving with my map,” he yelled.

“My Magic 8 Ball is telling me that in five minutes this place is going to be swarming with police,” Glo said.

“I’ll have you arrested, and you’ll rot in jail,” Ammon said. “The police are on their way. I can hear their sirens.”

Diesel rolled the van forward. Ammon staggered back, pulled out his cellphone, and dialed.

“This isn’t good,” I said. “He’s calling 911.”

“We’ll have to take him with us,” Diesel said.
“Get him!”

Glo, Josh, and I jumped out of the van and ran at Ammon. He took off down the driveway, and Josh tackled him at the gate. Diesel pulled the van up, we wrestled Ammon into the back, and Josh and Glo sat on him while I climbed into the front. There was a lot of grunting and swearing and scuffing going on in the back of the van while Diesel motored off the property and headed for the causeway. There was a loud
“Unh!”
And
thunk.
And then there was quiet.

“What just happened?” I asked, trying to see beyond the racks for dishes and holding trays.

“The Magic 8 Ball jumped out of my hand and beaned Ammon,” Glo said. “Ammon seems to be sleeping.”

“Omigod, we knocked Martin Ammon out cold,
twice,
and now we’ve kidnapped him!” I said. “We’re all going to prison. My mother will have to be sedated.”

“I have
Ripple’s
with me,” Glo said. “I can put a forgetful spell on Ammon, so he won’t remember anything.”

There was a moment of silence. No one had a lot of confidence in Glo’s spell-casting abilities.

“Here it is on page thirty-seven,” Glo said. “And I have almost all the ingredients with me.”

“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 around 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.”