Witches in Flight (28 page)

“How?”
 
Kathy
clutched her cup.
 
“I don’t know
how.”

Nat had already given her the words, but Elsie knew all too well
how it felt to be unready to hear them.
 
“For now, baby steps.”
 
She
grinned as inspiration struck.
 
“Do
as much of the class as you can with your eyes closed.”

Kathy’s laugh was surprisingly loud and rich.
 
“I can try that.”
 
She stood up and backed out of the tiny
kitchen.
 
“Thanks.
 
I think.
 
I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Elsie still had a dopey grin on her face as Nat walked into the
kitchen.
 
“You look happy.”

She was.
 
She’d
broken every rule of eight years of training—and it had maybe actually
worked.
 
“I think I might have just
done more good in five minutes that I used to do in most months as a
therapist.”

“You did the good you were able to do.
 
Then and now.”
 
Nat reached for a teacup.
 
“My first yoga training was in a particular tradition that came with
lots of rules.
 
This pose had to
come after that one.
 
Students
needed correct practice and dedication.”

That didn’t sound like Nat’s kind of yoga.
 
“What happened?”

“I evolved.”
 
Nat
sat down, smiling.
 
“I picked up
bits and pieces from other traditions, other teachers.
 
Found my own feet.
 
But I still hold on to some of what I
learned in that first training.
 
Alignment matters.
 
Breath
matters.
 
Hip openers are good for
everyone.”

Elsie laughed—their workshop students had been predictably
unimpressed with the morning’s hip-openers class.
 
“How do you know what to keep and what to throw out?”

“It’s a journey,” said Nat softly.
 
“And you don’t walk alone.”

Elsie reached out and touched the happy disarray of napkins. No,
she didn’t.
 
And neither did Kathy.

~ ~ ~

There was hocus-pocus brewing in the front office.
 
Lizard pulled her mind barriers down
tighter and tried to focus on depressed romantic poets instead.
 
She was really, really tired of all the
be-still-my-beating-heart crap, but apparently Professor Allard wasn’t done
torturing them yet.

And dammit, did they have to be so freaking quiet out
there?
 
Three mind witches, and not
a stray thought.
 
Which meant they
were trying not to be heard.
 
In
Witch Central, that could only mean one thing.
 
Maybe Shakespeare wasn’t so far off with the whole
toil-and-trouble thing.
 

Witches breathed trouble.

She dug into the next lines of poetry.
 
“Forever warm and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting, and
forever young—”
 
Lizard
slammed her head on the desk in disgust.
 
No way this poem was about love.
 
It was exactly what it sounded like—Keats on some seriously weird
drugs, pretending to be a Grecian urn.
 
They locked you up for that crap now.

And it was still totally silent in the front room.
 

Frack.

Some dead dude who thought he was made out of marble, or three
mind witches on the prowl for howlet wings and fenny snakes.
 
Her life was full of fun choices today.

She grabbed a cruller on the way out of the back office—Lauren
was on a serious donut kick lately.

Three faces looked up as she clomped into the front room.
 
Three guilty faces.
 
“What’s going on out here?”

Lauren recovered fastest.
 
“Glad you found the donuts.
 
Josh dropped them off this morning.”

Lizard tried not to choke on cruller.
 
“Josh?”

“Mmm.”
 
Lauren
reached for a file.
 
“He’s been
delivering them all week.
 
I have a
new listing for you to check out if you’re done with your poetry reading.”

A month ago, that kind of brush-off might have worked.
 
And the Josh-donut-distraction thing
might have worked a week ago.
 
Lauren was very good—but Lizard was getting smarter.
 
She leaned against the desk and glared
at three squirmy witches.
 
“What’s
going on?”

Caro leveled a sharp gaze her direction.
 
“Have some respect for your elders,
girl.”

Yeesh.
 
They were
bringing out the really big guns.
 
Lizard grabbed the folder from Lauren and pretended to read.
 
The house was way overpriced.
 
No surprise—the listing agent was
an idiot.
 
“My elders wouldn’t be
planning to meddle in somebody’s life, would they?”
 
Josh didn’t need any more freaking help.

Jennie stopped trying to hide her grin.
 
“Possibly.
 
Want to help?”

Not in this lifetime.
 
And then Lizard blinked.
 
“Wait—who’s life are you messing with?”
 
Maybe it wasn’t hers.

Lauren’s fingers tapped the desk.
 
“A certain Frenchman’s.”

All levity in the room quietly slunk away.
 
It wasn’t her life they were
targeting—it was Elsie’s.
 
Happy, singing, dance-in-the-kitchen-while-trying-to-fold-egg-whites
Elsie.
 
Her roommate, and dammit,
her freaking best friend.
 
Lizard
looked down at the file in one hand, donut remainder in the other—and
felt anger flaring in her belly, fighting for oxygen.

She opened her mouth and breathed deep, feeding the flames.
 
It was time for this witch to take a
stand.
 
“Elsie’s a grown-up.
 
Maybe she hasn’t done all the things in
her life that the three of you have, but she’s smart, and she’s lonely, and she
has a right to go dance with some guy who makes her feel good without a herd of
witches coming to interfere.”

“We’re worried,” said Jennie softly.
 
“Our pendants keep acting up.”

Hers did too, but that was totally beside the point.
 
“They’re freaking rocks.
 
Rocks don’t have brains.
 
And even if they’re the smartest
magical rocks in the universe, are you really going to go hunt down some guy
and question him in a back alley because your necklaces are buzzing?”
 

“We weren’t planning the back alley.
 
Yet.”
 
Caro’s
steady eyes held hints of things Lizard couldn’t read, but back alleys seemed suddenly
plausible.

Lizard slapped the file down on the desk, fury firing through
her veins.
 
“Even if he is a
jerkwad, you can’t fix everything.
 
Bad things happen to people, and you won’t always be there.
 
And you aren’t always right.”
 
Donut crumbled in her fingers, temper
morphing into something more complicated.
 
“You aren’t always right.
 
Let Elsie have a life—she’s earned one.”
 
Her eyes drilled into Jennie.
 
“That’s what WitchLight does, right?
 
Helps people find their life?”

Jennie nodded slowly.
 
“We try.”

“Well, Elsie’s finding hers.
 
And if you all get in the way every time she takes a step,
you’re telling her that she hasn’t done a very good job.”

“It’s not that simple,” said Lauren quietly.

“Really?
 
When was
the last time a witch crashed one of your dates?”
 
Or took some guy who had the hots for you out for coffee to
ask his intentions, but they were talking about Elsie.
 
“She was kind of screwed up when she arrived,
but she’s freaking awesome now.”

The words were coming from somewhere Lizard could hardly see,
but they physically shook her with their force.
 
“Being screwed up isn’t a life sentence.
 
You can stop guarding the
birdcage—she’s not in there anymore.”

Three faces just watched her for the longest time.
 
And their eyes held something new.

Respect.

~ ~ ~

--------------------------------------

To:
[email protected]

From:
Jennie Adams <
[email protected]
>

Subject:
Lizard just gave us hell.

--------------------------------------

Dear
Vero,

There are lines.
 
So
damn many lines.
 
And Lizard just
gave us hell because she thinks we’ve crossed one.
 
Maybe we have.
 

She defined WitchLight as helping people to find their lives,
which I thought you would love.
 
And then reamed on us for not letting Elsie do the job we’ve prepared
her for.

I don’t think she was only talking about Elsie.

I don’t know how to tell her that it’s awfully hard for parents
to watch their children grow up.
 
Hard for us to realize they’ve added wisdom to their bravery and
imagination and guts, that they’ve earned the chance to fly for themselves and
follow their own compass.

She loves Elsie.
 
But somewhere in her words, I also heard that she loves Lizard.
 

I don’t know which one has the tears running down my cheeks, but
it’s been an emotional day, and a soul-searching one.
 

Elsie has become a marvelously expressive, creative, daring
woman—and she’s doing wonderful work with the people in the workshop she and
Nat are running.
 
Lizard quietly
goes about finding half of Berkeley a home—and her heart teeters on the
edge of embracing both the poetry inside and the love outside.

They’re not yet finished—but they’re beautiful.
 

Lizard said it best.
 
We’re guarding a cage they’re not in anymore.
 
Marvelous women have the right to live, make mistakes,
succeed and fail, without a bunch of hovering witches.
 
We will always be there—it’s
written somewhere in our witch DNA.
 
But it’s time to get ready for our WitchLight charges to leave the
nest.
 
They’re going, whether we’re
ready or not.

I thought I understood better lately what it is that you and
Melvin had done all these years.
 
I’m keenly aware today that I wasn’t even close.
 

Finally
seeing the light,

Jennie

A guy drops by for breakfast one day, makes nice, and then
decides he can just send a text and she’ll hike halfway across the city for
him.
 
Lizard dragged herself up the
last flight of stairs to Josh’s offices and scowled, because clearly he was right.
 
She headed for The Pit.
 
If she had to ask someone where he was,
better the geeks than the business-school grads.

“Not in here—over in the main conference room.”
 
Someone grabbed her arm—and she
had to look twice to make sure it was Danny.
 
His jeans had no holes that she could see, the dreads were
tucked under a really cool black beret, and he had something resembling a suit
jacket pulled on over his Deadhead shirt.