An Unlikely Witch (8 page)

He eyed her for a moment, and then tipped his head in close and spoke in his adorably loud stage whisper.  “Okay, but you can’t tell Uncle Jamie what I’m doing.”

Solstice gift in progress.  Nell snagged a cookie before they all disappeared, caught up in his bubbly excitement.  There were crazier things than dragons, and his control was enviable.  And if it slipped, it wouldn’t be the first time the basement had needed a paint job.  “I promise.”

Aervyn waved two fingers and threw up a new training circle.

Nell blinked—from this side, she could see just how massive it was.  She eyed her youngest son.  “Just a teeny dragon, huh?”  The circle was solid enough to contain a herd of fire-breathing pteranodons.

He snickered, his fingers weaving something far more complicated now.  “It’s not for the fire.  I’m trying to do your layering spells, and they’re getting all squiggly on me.  The last one tried to make a tornado on accident.”  He looked sheepish.  “I tried to hook the ends together and I missed, cuz they’re really teeny tiny.”

You didn’t survive the everyday chaos of the Sullivan-Walker family without being quick on the magical uptake.  Nell stared at the lines of power in her son’s hands.  The layering spell she knew very well—it was one only about four witches in the world could pull off, and only because she’d taught them.  It had been Nell Sullivan’s calling card when she’d entered the ranks of the finest witches of her generation.  A tricky, complex, and novel spell with a boatload of moving parts, requiring a spellcaster’s finesse and enough raw power to keep trillions of air molecules doing exactly what you wanted them to do.  It had taken her two full years of practice.

Aervyn had pulled it off before he turned four.

Nobody, however, had ever tried to do it in miniature.  She squinted at the form glimmering on the table.  A tiny, holographic dragon, with…  Her eyes refused to process.  Calling up a spell she’d only recently and grudgingly learned, Nell magnified the form on the table.  And felt her brain melt.  “How many layering spells are you running in there?”

“Twelve.”  Her son was near grunting again.  “I think that might be too many, though.”

She’d managed two.  Once.  And had eaten her bodyweight in cookies right after.  Holy hell.  Nell tossed another wall of concrete at the training circle.  If this thing blew, they’d have more than tornadoes to worry about.

One disgusted sigh later, Aervyn began walking the magic backwards.  “It’s not gonna work.”

That was something her kiddo of nearly unlimited magic didn’t say very often.  Nell waited until he had all but the dregs of power cleaned up.  It was good practice and she wasn’t all that fond of storms in her basement, accidental or otherwise.

When he finished, he looked up, eyes a little sad.  “I wanted to make the best toy ever for him and Kenna to play with.”

For the uncle who had been obsessed with dragons ever since he could talk.  Jamie would flip.  Nell grabbed a cookie and settled in to help.  “That’s a great idea.  Why all the layering spells?”

“I was trying to make it kind of like a magic puppet.”  Aervyn’s hands moved as he talked.  “With a layer for each of the dragon’s parts, so they could just push on one of the spells a little and the dragon would jump, or waggle its tail, or roar, or whatever they wanted it to do.”

Interlocking, user-driven layering spells.  Nell gaped.  That was insane. 

He eyed her, having no trouble reading her thoughts. 
You guys do it all the time with coding in Realm. 

Realm was an online world.  One where all the dragons were virtual and the programming code held still if you told it to.

Aervyn’s eyes turned obstinate.  “Uncle Jamie explained it to me.  You guys write chunks of code that do all the little stuff, and then you stick them together to make big stuff happen.”

More or less.  “Coding and magic don’t always work the same.  It’s hard to get magic to repeat itself.”  She caught up with her own words and realized exactly what her kiddo was trying to do.  Damn.  “Unless you loop a layering spell.”

“Yup.”  He flashed a grin and popped up something on his hand that looked like a wriggly cucumber.  “I got the idea when I was playing with Kenna and reading her
Hungry Caterpillar
book.”

Nell watched, captivated, as her son’s fingers fluttered.  He only did that when the magic was
really
complicated.  One layering spell, then another—and she could see how he was connecting lines from each of them to various parts of his holographic cucumber.  A few seconds later, he set the caterpillar down on the table, much more solid in form now.

Nell laughed, a mix of awe and amusement, as the tiny green creature wiggled its way across the table.  “That's a heck of a spell, hot stuff.”  The kind she might pull off with a month of practice and a cookie IV.  And he was doing it to amuse his little cousin.  

He held out his hand to turn the caterpillar back their direction.  “Can you see where to push on the little spell handles to make it move?”

She squinted again, looking at the complex, iridescent flows of magic driving the caterpillar’s wiggle. 

Hang on.
 Aervyn flashed his fingers again and the spellshapes magnified. 
That’s a good idea—I can make it do that all the time.  Uncle Jamie has old eyes too.

Nell knew an insult and a dare when she heard one. 
Punk child.

He grinned as she stared at the power flows.  The handles were clear enough.  Using them to wiggle a caterpillar wasn’t, and Aervyn was no longer demonstrating.  Gingerly, Nell pushed on one of the controls.  And then a second one in a hasty attempt to fix things as the poor creature convulsed and nearly swallowed itself.

Her son sat absolutely still—with wild, irreverent giggles shaking in his head.

Nell stuck her nose down at table level with the caterpillar.  She was one of the best gamers on the planet—she could handle a magical inchworm.  It took a couple of minutes, and a surprising amount of focus, but she eventually got the poor beast back over to Aervyn’s waiting hands.  “Kenna will love it.”  And get in a whole lot of practice with very delicate magics, something she normally resisted mightily.

Aervyn’s face crinkled in concentration.  “She’ll love it even better if I can figure out the dragon.  It’s hard, though.  Dragons have more parts than caterpillars, and they need to roar and stuff.”

There was a time when she’d been able to help her boychild with his more complex spellcasting.  Nell squeezed his spare hand, deeply aware that time had largely passed.  Which made her proud and scared and a whole bunch of other things mamas didn’t unload on almost-seven-year-old boys.  “You’ll figure it out.  Or you’ll get an even better idea.”

Her words met thin air.  Aervyn wasn’t listening anymore, his whole body tuned into something else.

Nell leaned in sharply when his face crumpled.

And then he reached for her, one very distressed boy.  “Auntie Nat’s really sad.  She wants to throw all the plates in the world until they smash into a bazillion pieces.”

Oh, hell.  There were very few things Nell could think of that would rock her wise, serene sister-in-law like that.  And all of them required the same immediate response.  She reached for her phone to text her brother—and then realized there was a far easier way.  One that gave her very upset son something to do. 

She tugged Aervyn into her lap, pretending for one more day that he was still little.  “Can you find Uncle Jamie, sweetie?  Tell him to go home, that Auntie Nat needs him.”

He nodded quietly into her chest.

She hugged him tight, knowing Jamie would be at Nat’s side in moments.

And knowing that he had something far bigger to tangle with than fire-breathing dragons.

-o0o-

Jamie landed in his living room like the invading Norse hordes.

Aervyn hadn’t known why Nat was sad.  But on this day, there could only be one reason.  Devastation by stupid line on a plastic stick.  He tried to calm his magic long enough to actually find his wife’s mind.

And gave his ears a chance to work instead.

Sobbing.  From the kitchen.

He ported there.  And landed with an odd crunching, feet headed every way except down.  Jamie grabbed for the walls, a chair, anything—and executed a perfect home-run slide straight into his wife’s legs.  She landed on top of him with a wallop that chased the air out of both of them.

Bloody hell.  So much for his avenging-superhero skills.  Jamie tried to get any of his body parts working and sensed weird, sharp, lumpy things under his back.  Better not to move.  And then the woman lying on top of him started to shake, and all coherent thought fled.  “Nat.  Sweetheart.”  Desperate, he tried to sit up, cursing as he stuck his hand down on something that sliced into his palm and its sharp companions attacked his jeans.  None of which mattered in the slightest, except it was making it damnably difficult to soothe the wrecked woman in his lap.

And then she looked up, tear-streaked cheeks and puffy eyes, incoherent sounds pouring out of a raw, angry throat.

His heart closed—and then his ears caught up.

Her tears weren’t finished.  And in the midst of the storm, she had found enough solid ground to laugh at him.

He went with it, picking it up like the huge and mighty sword he needed it to be.  “One of my better entries, huh?”

She hiccupped, twice.  And the slightly crazed giggles started again.  With better foothold this time.

Retha Sullivan hadn’t raised complete idiots.  He smiled at his laughing, crying wife.  Wiped her nose with the front of his shirt, which fed the laughter more than it did the tears.  And managed to tamp down on the urge to port them both to Tahiti.

Big swords couldn’t fight everything, even Tahitian ones.  He stroked her cheek, wishing like hell her tears didn’t wreck him—she surely needed to shed some.  “That’ll teach me to land on whatever the hell I broke.”  He’d finally identified the shards trying to poke holes in his jeans.  Some poor, innocent plate.  “I hope it was something we hated.”

Nat snorted, which in her current condition, had him diving for his shirt again to take care of nose goobers.  “It was already broken before you got here.” 

Jamie’s brain froze. 
Nat
had thrown things?

She looked up, eyes tilting back toward anguish.  “A plate.  I threw it at the wall.  Just one.  You got here in time to save the really ugly ones from my parents.”

That was horribly unfortunate.  He dragged his brain out of the cryogenics lab.  “Wanna throw them together?”  He could use a good tantrum against the stick too.

“Maybe.”  She was breathing deeply now.  Pulling herself back from the edge, one lift of her ribcage at a time.

Jamie wondered if he should stand up and throw the entire contents of their kitchen with her and let her rage.  He raised his hands to her cheeks, ignoring the line of blood trickling down his palm.  Far more important things were bleeding.  “I’m so sorry.  I wish I’d been here.”  He was pretty sure she’d arranged it that way.

Her face nearly crumpled.  Watching her fight it back into a semblance of Nat was one of the saddest things he’d ever seen.  “How’d you get here so fast?”

There was no point hiding it—she’d figure it out as soon as her brain stopped weeping.  “Aervyn.  He picked up a little of what you were feeling.”

His wife sucked in one harsh, guilt-laden breath.

He grabbed her arms before she took that any further.  “He’s fine—he was with Nell.  And I’m damn glad he heard you and I got here.”  The last words rasped out over a throat determined to close.  “Why, Nat?  Why do this alone?”

Her eyes slid closed, two shuttered windows in a landscape of pain.  “Because this is mine to do.”  She strangled a sob.  “And apparently, I can’t.”

Chapter 7

Nat settled into the single mat in the middle of Spirit Yoga’s studio.  A very conscious choice.  Her mat, her turf.  A space of serenity and comfort, bathed in the energies of those who had come and met something important.

Something life-changing.

Spirit Yoga’s mission had never been small.  Humble, but never small.

And the woman who dared to name changing lives as her purpose could ask no less of herself than she asked of every uncertain student who walked through the door. 
Seek your truth.

The mat had always been a place where she’d found what she needed.  And in the drab light of early morning, refreshed by sleep and the steady love her husband had emanated all night, it was time to do the hard work of figuring out what she needed next.

Life before yoga had been coated in grays, punctuated by the awful maw of panic attacks and far too many nights drifting to sleep with cheeks covered in helpless tears.  A slim, blonde teenager dressed in the latest fashions, sent to the very best schools, and drenched in her parents’ precise and unending disappointment.

She’d never been a child they could love.  And the five years of therapy they’d arranged had almost managed to convince her that the fault belonged with the child.

Then, at sixteen, she had found a yoga mat, and found a way to keep the frayed threads of Natalia Smythe whole.  Strength in surrender.  In opening.  In breathing life into cold spaces and laughter into still ones.