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."

"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."