An Imperfect Witch (25 page)

Something new, tangled and bright, hit Raven’s eyes.  “I got those from my mom.”

“Yeah, me too.”  Lizard moved off the wall and plunked down on the couch, bringing her newly minted sister along with her.  “You can’t have my guy, my best frying pan, my red leather bag, or my green skirt.  The rest is negotiable.”

“I don’t wear skirts.”  A really long pause, during which not a soul in the room so much as thought about breathing.  And then Raven crossed her ankles and slouched further into the poofy cushions.  “What else you got?”

Lizard didn’t blink.  “Some really hot seventeenth-century poetry.”

The teen groaned.

“A cactus plant?  It’s mostly dead, though.”

The pillow landed with deadly aim—it was hard to miss from six inches away.

Laughter began, and then died, drowned in still-too-new awkwardness.

Lauren grinned.  Finally—a bomb she knew how to handle.  She pinged a fast message to Jamie, holding small children incommunicado in the backyard fort.  
Pillow fight needed, stat.  Release the captives.  And see if you can find more pillows.

It didn’t surprise her when a mountain of them ported in with one very excited boychild sitting on the top.  Or when three girls streaked in the back door, barely pausing long enough to arm themselves before they launched an attack on two totally astonished sisters.

But when Lizard and Raven glanced at each other, grinned, and grabbed a pillow in each hand?

That caught a savvy, slightly cynical realtor somewhere under the ribs that she hadn’t known existed.

-o0o-

Nell carried in plates of Dutch baby, the eggy, dense farmer food well hidden by mountains of whipped cream and strawberries.  Daniel had decided the masses needed protein.

The pillow fight had been epic. 

Raven and Lizard had gotten past their newness in about two minutes, courtesy of three girls who had been ganging up on people together since birth.  Nell, Nat, and Lauren had shrugged and joined the fray, figuring sister-in-law was close enough.  And Aervyn had grabbed Kenna’s hand and rained down pillows on everyone from on top of the table, entirely oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t anyone’s sister.

The guys had looked on, amused—and carefully armed some teams and swiped ammunition from others.

Nell waded into the living room, still a minefield of pillows and giggling sisterhood.  “Food.  Anyone who trips me is going to get a fork in the eye.”

Lizard held up a hand for a plate.  “Your children are demons.”

Nell grinned.  “Raven started it.”

The first plate got passed to the teen in question, lying on a floor pillow with a blonde companion.  Nell raised an eye at her most rambunctious daughter.  “Just what are you two plotting, hmm?”

“Nothing.”  Mia snickered.  “If you fork any eyeballs, can I eat them?”

An elbow from the sixteen-year-old lying beside her.  “You’re so weird.” 

Nell shook her head wryly.  Raven had a first-class set of teenager faces.  She was pretty sure three girls were going to be sporting some of them by sunset.

Sorry.
 Lizard sounded it. 
I can try to ask her to tone it down a little.

Responsibility, still sitting awkwardly on narrow shoulders. 
Don’t waste your energy.  Teenagers only have two settings—outrageous and asleep.

Okay.
 Lizard still looked worried.

Nell handed down a plate of the best antidote she knew, under the cover of the comfortable insults firing through the room. 
My girls have two aunts within six feet, a father and two uncles hiding out in the basement, and a mom who will kick the ass of anyone who leads them too far astray. 
She grinned. 
Besides, they hang out with you, and all they’ve picked up so far is a shoe habit and a big vocabulary.

Lizard snorted, looking very much like her younger sister. 
I tried to talk them into nose piercings.

Nell squatted down in the loud chaos and pitched her voice low.  Time to have a very straight conversation with the honorary aunt her daughters all adored.  “One day, at least one of my girls will show up on your doorstep wanting to get something pierced.  You know that, right?”

The ex-delinquent turned pasty.  “What do you want me to do?”

Nell paused a beat, enjoying herself a little too much.  “Take them someplace safe and clean and feed them chocolate afterward.”

Lizard stared.

Kenna wasn’t the only silly wiggle in Witch Central.  “You’ve got the hair, the boots, the nose ring, the grunge-meets-retro style, the tats.  There’s no one better to teach my girls how to express who they are.”

“You want your girls to get tats?”  Lizard looked like she’d just witnessed the zombie apocalypse.

Not her first choice.  But not nearly the last, either.  Nell picked a spot on the floor and sat.  “If sixteen-year-old Mia comes to you and wants a tattoo, what are you going to tell her?”

“Um.”  Red cheeks—and a mind finding solid ground.  “To, uh, get a haircut.  Hair grows back.”

Decent first try.  “And if that doesn’t work?”

Lizard’s fingers traced her own tats.  “To find a design true to who she is.  And to who she will be.”  A  pause.  “And then I’d try the haircut thing again.  With a red-glitter dye job.”

“Exactly.”  Nell stabbed a whipped-cream-soaked bite of Dutch baby.  “You have damn good instincts.  Ones I will trust my daughters with when the time comes.” 

She pointedly ignored Lizard’s thoughtful glance at Raven.  Nell Walker had fairly decent instincts too.

-o0o-

I grew up alone.

A child fallen into the space

where people put the stuff

they don’t want anymore

but can’t really bear to throw away.

I didn’t turn to dust like I was supposed to.

Gram wouldn’t let me,

and neither would the words inside my head

that insisted way too damn loudly

that I was human and not garbage.

The words and Gram

filled up the cracks far enough that

I never could quite fall all the way through.

I’ve spent my whole life looking down,

waiting for the cracks to gobble me up.

And it turns out I should have been looking up

because a freaking sister

got dropped on my head

and I was still gazing down at my navel.

I don’t know how to be a sister.

Nobody teaches that when the closest thing

you have to a relative

is someone who thinks they saw your mom once

in a bar in Sun City, Nevada.

And a hundred books of poetry

cover a whole bunch of ways

to leave your lover and screw up your life,

but none of them seem to give a damn

about the whole family thing.

I guess they all stare at their navels too much too.

I know these three girls

who have the sister gig down really solid.

Maybe they give lessons.

-o0o-

A village asleep.  Moira listened approvingly to the silence and then made her way along the dark path to her pool.  Cloudy tonight—the sky was resting too.

She walked around the last gentle bend and nearly ran into two sturdy shadows.

“Oops.”  Lauren chuckled.  “I meant to put us down on the other side of the pool.”

Transport spells didn’t always have the best aim, for reasons Moira didn’t try to understand.  “Not a worry.  At least you didn’t land in my flowers.”  They didn’t appreciate a disturbance at this time of year.

Nell stuck her toe in the water and sighed in happy anticipation.  “Yup, this was a great idea.”

Indeed.  It had been a memorable couple of days.  Moira left her cloak hanging on the arm of the whimsical fairy Marcus had installed only the week before.  She’d seen it standing in a Halifax market and known it belonged in her garden.  In the spring, she’d plant a carpet of posies under the winged girl’s feet.

“You coming in?”  Lauren sounded amused.  “You’re making us cold just looking at you.”

Ha.  “We used to do sky-clad circles in spring and fall.  Gets the blood flowing.”

Nell’s lips quirked.  “Don’t get any ideas.”

Moira slid into the waters.  Not a worry—these days, a warm soak was far more amenable to her old bones.  “So, how are Raven and Lizard doing?”  She’d left after tucking Nell’s girls into bed.  A kiss and a quiet blessing of sleep for three hearts who had so gladly offered a shiny window into their effortless sisterhood.

“Josh took Lizard home.”  Lauren stretched out her legs.  “And Devin and I delivered Raven to her temporary digs.  I can’t keep that house off the market much longer—agents are sniffing.”

“Not our problem to solve,” said Moira mildly.  Especially not after the events of this day.  “Family takes care of its own.”

“That’s a big job for Lizard to pick up.”  Nell fanned the waters with her hands.  “She’s feeling pretty overwhelmed.”

“Of course she is.  But Witch Central is a fine place to learn how to be a family, and Lizard’s lived with us more than two years now.”  Trust the fertile soil to do its job.

Lauren sighed.  “I was kind of hoping she was getting ready to make a move in a different direction.  Raven’s a pretty big distraction.”

“Yeah, this might slide Josh to the back burner for a while.”  Nell looked resigned on his behalf.

Ah, the difference thirty or forty years made.  Moira twinkled at her two visitors.  “If I were properly Irish, I’d wager those two married by Christmas.”

Jaws dropped.

“Uh, not that I bet against you ever,” said Nell, reaching for a cookie, “but isn’t it November already?”

“Yes.”  Moira smiled, enjoying herself so very much.  “But it’s often those who move slowest at first who finish the job most quickly.”  When Lizard and Josh got past the few wee barriers left in their way, she didn’t expect them to do it slowly.

Lauren looked at Nell and shook her head.  “Why is it that we are constantly being out-thought by old women and preteen girls?”

If that were true, Witch Central would be a far less effective heartbeat of goodness in the world.  Moira smiled.  “Lizard has been standing on the edge of being ready for quite some time.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that.”  The woman who spent many of her days with their young poet nodded.  “And Josh has been quietly asking her to jump for ages.  You don’t think Raven’s going to get in the way of that?”

“Hardly.”  Sometimes the universe was so wonderfully efficient.  “It’s going to be young Raven who gives Lizard a good shove toward the abyss.”  Or perhaps already had.

Nell started laughing.  “You’re such a romantic.”

Ah, but she was.  “The romance happens after she lands.”

The third member in the pool wasn’t laughing.  She was thinking.  Hard.  Moira waited—wisdom was also a muscle that grew stronger with practice. 

Lauren smiled, finally seeing it.  “Lizard has to believe she can do family—that’s the biggest thing in the way of her and Josh.  And Raven isn’t going to give her a choice.”

“Exactly.”  A responsible young man might let her dither.  A love-hungry, slightly lost teenager—not a chance.  “And when Lizard realizes she already knows how to be that which she fears, Josh Hennessey had better be ready.”

She had little doubt on that account.  But it would brighten her November greatly waiting for the moment to arrive.  It wasn’t certain, by any means—but Moira Doonan was an optimist.

Chapter 21

It was time to have a conversation that had scared her for more than two years.

And Lizard was intensely, awfully afraid that it was going to break something.  She had her amulets laid out on the table—a plate of bacon, a small purple rock, and a cup of tea.  She had no intention of drinking the latter, but it came straight from Moira’s kitchen, and it smelled of tough old ladies and wisdom.

One day, she aspired to be both.

Josh levered up off her couch, where he’d been planning world domination and studiously avoiding talk of sisters.  Or possibly streaming some live sporting event involving spherical objects.  With headphones on, it was oddly hard to tell—the man got excited about strange things.

He snagged a piece of bacon off the single green plate.  “Hey.  I thought you were working, not cooking.”

Her usual smart-ass replies got lost in the sudden urgency of what mattered.  “I need to talk to you.”

Josh Hennessey was not slow.  He dropped down into a chair, eyes never leaving hers.  “Yeah, figured you might.”

She was about to surprise him.  “It’s not about Raven.”  And that fact had a melon baller attacking her intestines.  Moira was right—she already had a family.

He waited, a universe in his eyes.

The melon baller had moved to her lungs now.  She wrapped her fingers around the small purple rock.  Some things that were broken found a way to be whole again.  “I need to know what you want.  I know you’re being really patient with me, and I know I’m probably not ready to handle what you want, but I need you to stop hiding it.”  Doing that was only breaking him slowly.