Flapper Bobbie Morgan is always a welcome house guest at weekend parties. But the young woman her hosts think is only a jolly fun girl with nothing but dancing and fashion on her mind, is actually a jewel thief and her latest job is to steal a South American diamond with a long and bloody history, for a buyer waiting in New York. While Bobbie is crossing the Atlantic with the stolen diamond, Iandara, a ghost bound to the cursed stone, manifests, with one mission -- free herself forever by destroying the diamond.
As if the temporarily-corporeal, thousand-year-old ghost of a trainee witch isn’t enough trouble, Bobbie’s ex-partner and now rival thief, Frances Stryker, is aboard and also determined to steal the diamond from her. Bobbie and Iandara team up to thwart Frances, and in the ensuing shenanigans become much more to each other than simply temporary allies.
But there is no way for both of them to complete their missions. How can they find a way to free Iandara and also allow Bobbie to complete a job whose stakes are higher than Iandara knows?
“So,” Bobbie said, drawing out the oh sound. “So, you ... died.”
“Yes.”
“And you went inside the diamond.”
“That’s right. Mother’s spell bound my soul to it. So my soul couldn't go to the Lake of Souls in Hetzl’s domain.”
“Hetzl, the Snake God of Death.”
“Right.”
“So,” Bobbie said, again drawing out the oh. “You are insane.”
Iandara sighed. She’d told the story a couple of times before. Even in earlier times when people were more receptive to the supernatural it had rarely gone over well. Especially when she told those people she was a witch.
“I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that would make you believe it.”
“I doubt it.” Bobbie took a small white item from a silver case, and offered one to Iandara, who frowned at it.
“What’s this?”
“Cigarettes,” Bobbie said. “Oh I don’t suppose you had those in the jungles of Brazil a thousand years ago.”
“Oh, tobacco,” Iandara said, catching the scent. “I don’t think they had it in this form last time I was corporeal. Very convenient.” She took one of the cigarettes and allowed Bobbie to light it for her. After a couple of puffs at it she took it out and looked at it dubiously. “This is pretty weak. You’d never enter the Realm of the Goddess of Enlightenment smoking this.”
“I don’t think it’s meant to do that.”
“It’ll never catch on.” Nevertheless, she continued smoking it. Pleasantly diverting. Suitable for children perhaps. “So, as I said, Mother’s spell bound me to the diamond. And that kept me from being taken to the Lake of Souls. But it also meant I couldn’t pass on to the afterworld, the realm of the sky gods.”
“Leaving you stuck there doesn’t sound like a very kind thing to do.”
Iandara sighed. “I expect she intended it to be a temporary situation. Later she’d have used another spell to free me. Except ...”
She didn’t want to think of it. How helpless and trapped she’d been, unable to help as more soldiers rushed into the room, and one by one the witches were cut down.
“Except she didn’t get the chance,” she said. “And now there’s only one way for me to be free -- when the diamond is destroyed.”
“But nobody is going to destroy a diamond.”
“I know. And by Jazcet, I have tried. I’ve tried to induce the people who possessed it to do so. I’ve driven more than one of them mad whispering in their ear to destroy it. Like that weak minded idiot, Quetzal.”
“The king who wanted to sacrifice you, you haunted him into madness?”
“It was a short trip. I tried to persuade him that the only way to be free of me was to destroy the stone, but before I could get him to actually do it, he was assassinated, and the next king took the diamond as part of his regalia and so on and so on, until our city fell.” It had made her sad at the time. But a thousand years of watching history had given her perspective. They all fell in the end.
“Then the Spanish ended up stealing it, and I came to Europe.”
“You should have tried to send the ship’s captain mad until he threw you overboard.” Bobbie frowned, when Iandara flinched. “What?”
“I did the opposite. I stayed silent. I’ve never been more afraid in my ... ah, period of existence. Don’t you understand? Falling into the depths of the ocean wouldn’t destroy the diamond. It would lie on the bottom of the sea like any other rock and nobody would ever find it again. And I would be stuck there with it. I can’t go far from the diamond. If I could, I’d just, I don’t know, wander the Earth. Perhaps go to concerts and ballets and the theater.”
“A thousand year old witch from the jungles of Brazil likes ballet?”
“When you’re magically bound to a large diamond that’s usually set in an ostentatious necklace, you go to the theater a lot. Also balls, and royal receptions. I can tell you some stories! Like the time I was stolen by Sonia Golden Hand. That was at a ball in Moscow, and oh there was quite a rumpus. I was smuggled to Paris concealed inside a jar of caviar. I swear I could smell fish for the next fifty years.”
