“Something’s poking at me under the covers,” I said. “That better not be what I think it is.”
“Maybe you should take a look just to be sure you’ve identified it correctly.”
“That would be awkward.”
“I could deal,” Diesel said.
“It might lead to…things.”
I sensed him smile in the dark room. “No doubt.”
He moved over me and kissed me. There was some tongue involved, and heat flooded into every part of me. So maybe I could save the world on my own if it came down to that, I thought. Maybe I didn’t care if one of us lost our abilities. Maybe I just cared about running my hands over every fantastic part of him, and then following it with my mouth, and then the inevitable would happen. Oh boy, I really wanted the inevitable.
“Damn,” Diesel said.
“What? What damn?”
He slipped out of bed and got dressed in the clothes that were lying on the floor. “There’s a problem,” he said.
“Can you solve it?”
“Absolutely.” He laced up his shoes. “I’ll be back.”
CHAPTER TWO
Three weeks later, Diesel still hadn’t returned. Who cares and good riddance, I told myself. My life was humming along just fine. Maybe it was a little dull compared to chasing down enchanted objects with Diesel, but at least no one was trying to kill me or kidnap me.
Salem is half small-town USA, with its steepled churches, family neighborhoods, and traditional New England values, and half spook-town USA, with whole chunks of town devoted to the tourism industry built around the Salem witch hunts of the late 1600s.
Personally I don’t buy into the witch thing, but Glo, the counter girl at Dazzle’s, is smitten with the possibility that she might secretly be Samantha Stephens of Bewitched. Truth is, if Glo channels anyone from that television series, it’s Aunt Clara. Glo is four years younger than me and an inch shorter. So that puts her at five foot four. She has curly red hair chopped into a short bob. She lives with a broom she hopes will someday take her for a flight over Salem. Her wardrobe can best be described as goth meets Sugar Plum Fairy.
I’m not nearly as colorful as Glo. I have blond hair that is almost always pulled back into a ponytail. My eyes are brown, my metabolism is good, and my wardrobe lacks imagination. White chef coat, jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and a sweatshirt if it’s a chilly night.
Glo and I had closed up shop for the day, and her latest boyfriend, Josh Something, was giving us an after-hours tour of Salem’s Pirate Museum. Josh works as a guide in the museum and was in period dress—a white puffy-sleeved shirt, black-and-red-striped breeches, and a grungy leather knee-length frock coat. His brown hair was long and tied with a slim black ribbon at the nape of his neck, and he usually wore a patch over his left eye. Since we were the only ones in the museum, his patch was up on his forehead.
“And look here, my lassies,” Josh said to Glo and me, pointing to a grim replica of an unfortunate pirate prisoner. “This be a fine example of pirate justice. ’Tis a nasty way to end a life. The lad would have been better off thrown to the sharks.”
The prisoner’s leatherlike skin was stretched tight over his skull and bony frame, and his mouth was open in a perpetual silent scream. The creepy mannequin was dressed in the sort of rags you’d expect to find on a desiccated corpse. And this phony-looking, partially rotted thing was stuffed into a flimsy cage that hung from a rusted chain attached to the ceiling. The rest of the room was filled with artifacts, both real and not so real. Cannons, cannonballs, maps under glass, cutlery, jugs of rum, a stuffed rat, coins in a small open chest, timbers, ropes, and weapons were all displayed in dim light.
“It’s hard to get emotional over something that’s so obviously fake,” I said.
“Aye,” Josh said. “He be a bit worn. The scurvy dog has been in that cage a good long time.”
“I could try to put a spell on him to perk him up a little,” Glo said.
A while back Glo found Ripple’s Book of Spells in a curio shop, and she’s been test-driving Ripple’s recipes ever since, with varying results.
“It might help if you gave the cage a coat of Rust-Oleum,” I said.
I reached up and touched the cage, there was some creaking, dust sifted down on us, and the chain separated from the bars. The cage crashed to the floor and broke into several pieces. The imprisoned dummy flopped out, its peg leg fell off, the skull detached from the neck, and its arm snapped in half.
We all gaped at the mess in front of us. The prisoner’s leathery skin was split where the arm had cracked, and a bone was protruding.
“Aargh,” Josh said.
“I think that be a human bone,” I whispered.
—