.5 To Have and To Code (20 page)

Daniel kicked an invisible rock.  And felt the truth vibrating under his skin.  He was falling hard for a woman who could turn him to ashes at sixty paces.  “So what do I do now?”

“Same thing you always do,” his friend offered easily.  “Decide on the next pitch.”

-o0o-

There were some things that were constants at Sullivan family dinners.  Immutable laws of the table.  No pranks, all magical mischief punishable by parental decree.  No feeding food to the plants, even if it was really, really awful.

And no leaning on anyone who was hurting.  That could happen after dessert.

Retha passed down plates of salad, sweet potatoes, and roast turkey—food miracles produced by her youngest son, who was apparently expanding his culinary horizons—and sent quiet love her daughter’s direction.

In their own ways, with their own magics, every person sitting at the table did the same.

Caro, the woman who had trained Nell ever since she was a wee little girl with fire shooting out her fingers, regaled them with stories of her Hawaiian vacation—and kept a careful eye on the witch she loved as her own.

Retha looked down at a neat pile of sweet potatoes and channeled her thoughts carefully toward their guest—Nell’s mind powers were the strongest of any of her children.
 Thank you for coming.  I know we barely gave you time to climb off the plane.

I needed to eat.
  Caro’s matter-of-fact voice had been a rock in Witch Central for as long as Retha could remember.  Some people were just born steady. 
And that son of yours is turning into a darned good cook.

From Caro, that was high praise. 
She’s holding this one tight inside her.

I can see that.  Don’t think knitting’s the cure this time.

Caro owned the best yarn store in town and taught every fire witchling how to knit.  Most loved it.  Nell had scowled through every stitch of knit and purl she’d ever done, and mastered control of her magic with the shortest scarf of any witch in recent history.  Retha smiled at the memories. 
Well, it might change her mood some. 
She’d take grumpy over sad any day of the week.

Ha.  I’m smart enough not to want scorch marks in my yarn store.

“You two can stop talking about me now.”  Nell looked up from her plate, a swirl of sweet potato art as much progress as she’d made with her dinner.

“It’s what moms do,” said Devin glumly, winking at Caro on the side.  “And after they’re done with you, they’ll probably start working on Matt’s stinky feet.”

“My feet smell just fine,” said Matt, chasing salad around his plate.  “Somebody forgot to empty the gym bags before they did laundry last week.”

“At least somebody
did
laundry last week.”

Retha listened to the genial squabbling of her boys and blessed them for the steady footing they were handing to Nell—the comfort of things that never changed.

Nell, wonderful, creative, brave, fiercely loyal woman that she was, hated change.  And every one of her brothers knew it.

Matt snuck a look at his sister.  “I hear baseball players have really stinky socks.”

His big sister rolled her eyes and snorted.  “I stopped smelling anything that came off a sweaty guy a long time ago.”

Retha smiled.  Matt had always had a sensitive touch with his temperamental sister.  Maybe they wouldn’t have to wait until dessert after all.

Caro had clearly come to the same conclusion.  She leaned over and patted Nell’s hand.  “So.  Tell me about this Daniel of yours.”

“He’s not mine.”  There wasn’t any kick to Nell’s words.

“I hear he climbed into that crazy game of yours and caused trouble.”  Caro passed over a slice of the fresh-baked bread she’d brought.  “I hope you taught him some manners.”

“Tried,” said Nell wryly.  “He stood his ground pretty well.  Hid behind a blackberry bush.”

“Creative.”  Caro’s lips twitched.  “Good trait in a man.”

“I’m creative,” said Devin, reaching for the bread and neatly interrupting his sister’s retort.  “So far the women aren’t falling all over me.”

“If they fell any faster, we’d need to stack them up around the house in layers.”  Matt had somehow beat his brother to the basket—food didn’t last long around hungry, growing almost-men.

Nell swiped the bread and pointedly handed it to her father, who calmly patted the second basket beside his plate.  The nearly empty basket. 

Retha chuckled.  Sometimes, age and wiles still won. 

“So he knows how to stand up to you in a fight,” said Caro, buttering her bread almost meditatively.  “Does he fight clean?”

“Dunno.”  Nell’s lips tightened.  “He doesn’t have any magic, so how am I supposed to know?”

“Pfft.  Magic’s just an extension of the character of the man or woman who wields it.” 

Nell froze, eyes cast down at her plate again, the words landing somewhere deep inside her.  And when she looked up, Retha could see that another piece had fallen into place in her daughter’s heart. 

Caro just waited, with the infinite patience she’d always had in abundance.

Nell’s smile was wobbly—but heartfelt.  “If he had magic, he’d be a good witch.”

“Then he’s a good man, magic or no.”  Caro nodded and picked up her fork, her work for the evening done.

Retha sent as much gratitude as she dared—Caro wasn’t one for “emotional nonsense.”  And watched, pleased, as Nell picked up her fork, too.

-o0o-

Daniel pushed back from his computer screen, as satisfied as staring at it could make him.

He had Realm figured out now. Lines of code integrating age-old magic with leading-age gaming.

It was brilliant.  Sheer genius in design and stunning in execution.  Three hours in Realm’s game code with new eyes and he finally understood just how good the Sullivan programmers were.

Their admin code, where he’d previously spent his time, was sturdy, competent, and very non-magical.  The kind of stuff he understood and respected.

Their gaming code had him in awe.  Breathtaking stuff, hidden in a quiet, classic swords-and-sorcery game. 

And that was before they tossed in the magic.  If he pretended the real world was a gaming fantasy, it all made perfect sense.  Dozens of witches gathered to play—modern geeks with magical powers. 

It blew his mind. 

His very flexible, adaptable brain was careening around corners trying to reshape his world in a way that could accept the truth of a sexy blonde in blue jeans shooting fire at the sky.  And melting in the effort.

His fingers worked an old baseball, finding the worn spots on the leather, the hanging threads.

Magic was real.

To a guy who’d spent half his life wandering around the online universe pretending to have magic, those three words were like discovering Santa Claus, Middle Earth, and UFOs were real.  All at the same time.

And even now, his fingers itched to pull up one of those quirky lines of code one more time and see if he could turn it on.  He’d tried.  Several times.  Watched in the background as other players did it with ease, over and over.  Snorted as it backfired more often than it worked.

Felt the yearning of the small boy deep in his chest.

Oh, to have magic in his fingers.

He looked down at the baseball in his hands and let the spurt of amusement come.  They’d called him The Magician.  The man with ball magic in his fingers.

Clearly they’d never met Nell Sullivan.

He closed his eyes.  Quieted his fingers.  And finally let the truth land.

Nell was a witch.

And unless he’d badly misread things, so were unknown numbers of her brothers, her mom, and a random assortment of other people who regularly walked the streets of Berkeley.

Whatever the little boy in his chest might dream of, the man had no bloody idea what to do with what he knew.  Or how he felt.

He knew only that he wanted.  And that he was afraid.

-o0o-

Nell listened to the abstract rhythm of knocks on her apartment door—the third volley—and sighed.  Sometimes, there was nowhere to hide.

She pulled it open and found Sammy, holding two pints of Ben & Jerry’s, on the other side.  “How can you knock like that with ice cream in your hands?” 

“I can do anything with ice cream in my hands.”  Sammy winked suggestively and handed over a pint.  “Want some lessons from the master?”

Nell grinned—Shane was in for a heck of a wedding night.  “You’re in a good mood.”

“I marry the love of my life in—“ Sammy consulted her watch, “forty hours.  Shane is off doing something manly and immature with your brothers, my parents have taken a nice, long drive down the coast, and my best friend has a crisis to distract me.  Life is good.” 

Nell groaned.  Sammy had been included in the Witch Central gossip chain long ago.  “Who told you?”

Her best friend raised an eyebrow.  “A better question would be, why didn’t
you
?”

Because she hadn’t wanted to pile on to the last two days of Sammy’s life as a single woman.  “It’s no big deal.”

“Right.”  Sammy dug in the cutlery drawer in search of her favorite spoons.

Nell held back a sniffle.  She and Sammy had collected every spoon in that drawer, one painstaking garage sale and thrift-store find at a time.  It was a collection full of love, stories, and silly sisterhood.  And in a few hours, it would be wrapped up with a pretty pink bow and added to the train of Texas-bound wedding gifts.

She hoped they had ice cream in Texas.

“Success.”  Sammy handed over Nell’s all-time favorite spoon, one lavishly decorated with Irish hex symbols and a skull and crossbones.  “Now come sit on your couch with me and tell me the whole story.  Start with the part where you shot lightning at the sky and had Mr. Sexy hiding behind a bush.”

That narrowed down the list of people who had paged Sammy considerably.  “Sounds like you have most of it already.”

Sammy’s eyes swam with empathy.  “Just enough to tell me how much ice cream to bring.”

Nell stuck her spoon in a swirl of caramel and dark chocolate and blessed the two men who knew how to soothe her soul best.  Or not.  Ben and Jerry would have a far harder job when the pints didn’t come with a best friend attached.  “It feels like one of those sitcoms where the actors are missing the big pink elephant in the room and the audience keeps laughing at them.  How did we miss that he’s not a witch?  Hell, how can you hang out in The Dungeon for a week and not know that
we’re
witches?  Jamie teleports donuts every five minutes.”

“People see what they want to see.” 

Nell snorted—it was one of the most basic tenets of Witch Central, and part of how the witching community lived in Berkeley so openly.  Most people didn’t notice.  Those with open minds saw and accepted.  Daniel didn’t fit either group.

Sammy handed over her pint for a flavor switch.  “So he didn’t know you’re a witch, and now he does.”

Nell contemplated the landscape of mint chocolate chip.  “Isn’t it more important that he’s
not
a witch?”

“And why would that be, exactly?”

The dry-as-dust tone of her friend’s voice snapped Nell out of her ice-cream coma.  “Give me a break—you know I like plenty of people who aren’t witches.  This is different.”

“Is not.” 

Crap.  That was the Sammy-was-almost-a-lawyer voice.  “It is different, Sam.  I’ve always had lots of friends who don’t have power.”  Nell fingered the spoon’s skull and crossbones.  “But it takes a really special person to wrap their head around magic when they don’t have it.  Not everyone is as flexible as you are.” 

“What happened?”  Sammy’s eyes narrowed.  “Did he freak?”

“Yes.”

The bride-to-be raised an eyebrow and waited.

Nell squirmed—Sammy was going to make a really good mom someday.  “Okay, he only freaked when I shot fire out my hands.”

“Idiot.”

That was more like it.  “Yeah.  He’s not gonna deal.”  Which wasn’t a huge shock.  At the end of the day, while lots of non-witches hung out on the periphery of Witch Central, very few made it to the center.

Sammy shook her head and sighed.  “I meant
you’re
the idiot.”

Nell frowned.  “What happened to sisterly sympathy along with my ice cream?”

“You tell him you’re a witch, destroy the laws of the universe as he knows them, shoot lightning at the guy, and then decide he’s a wimp because he makes a run for it?”

Sometimes the compulsion to be honest sucked.  “He didn’t run.  He just backed up a little.”

“How big were your fire streaks?”

Crap.  “Pretty big.”

“Pretty big in inches or feet?”

Yeesh.  Someone should warn the cows in Texas to take cover.  “A few feet, I guess.”

Victory streaked through Sammy’s eyes.  An almost-lawyer preparing her closing arguments.  “So you shot several feet of fire at some guy who’s known you for less than two weeks, while claiming to be a witch, and he’s still in the state of California?”

It all sounded so reasonable—unless you’d been there.  “He freaked, Sam.  Trust me.  His mind was one big ball of panic.”

A steady hand reached to touch hers.  “Was that before or after you told him about your mind magic?”

When Sammy threw a punch, she knew exactly where to land it.  Nell felt the tears threatening and pushed them away.  Fire witches didn’t cry.  “After.”

“Give him time.”  Sammy reached out to wipe the errant tear.  “You gave me weeks to absorb what you threw at him in two minutes.”

She didn’t have time.  Her life turned into a pumpkin in less than forty-eight hours.  After that, her feet were going to stay on the straight and narrow until she learned how to live without a best friend.  Nell put down her pint.  “It’s not about time.  He’s not going to deal.  I’m a fireball who can read his mind.  What guy is going to wrap his head around that?”

For a long time, Sammy only sat, eyes full of compassion.  And when she spoke, the words were simple.  “The right one.”

It was punch number two, straight to Nell’s gut.

Chapter 14