A Lost Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 7) (14 page)

“Yeah.  It will get us there without running into anyone.”  Which would cause ten kinds of problems
and
hold up his search for a more worthy breakfast. 

She finally shrugged—but the song about bluebells and cockle shells had gotten a lot louder.  “It can’t be any worse than being crazy.” 

True, that.  Bringing up the mental coordinates for Caro’s storage room in his mind, he reached for Hannah’s hand.  Waiting wasn’t going to make this any easier.  “Close your eyes and think of something warm and fuzzy.”

She paled several shades more—but she took his hand.

Good enough.

-o0o-

It wasn’t every morning that the power readings in her storeroom spiked through the roof.  Caro set down her muffin, darn sure it wasn’t yarn doing magic in her back alcove.  A quick mindtouch through the wall and she was clear on the identity of one of her visitors.

Jamie poked his head through the hanging curtain that served as a door.  “Good morning.  I brought someone to see you.”

That much, she’d already figured out.
 This the new witch?

Yup.  And she likes yarn.

Than was an acceptable reason to show up at the crack of dawn.

Jamie flipped on light switches and spoke out loud now, presumably for the benefit of the mysterious woman who had landed with him.  “Caro’s the owner of this shop, and an excellent mind witch.  Caro, I’m going to reinforce the fancy stuff we’re doing in Hannah’s head to help keep her precog at bay, and then you two can meet.”  The message he sent on mental channels was far more succinct. 
Get your barriers up.
 

Caro did as instructed. 
What am I looking out for?

Her precog triggers are visual.  New faces are the worst. 
He waved her over their direction.  “Why don’t you come back here?” 
She’s a little overwhelmed at the moment.

Well, this was more interesting than her usual first customer of the day.  Caro picked up a skein of the new yellow handspun behind her counter.  Might as well go in armed.

She slid through the curtain, yarn and barriers at the ready.

Jamie stood against the back wall, radiating enough power to wake up half of Berkeley.  And to his left, a lovely, terrified woman was going to take a tumble into the new shipment of silk if she backed up any farther.

That wouldn’t do—they’d just finished inventory.  Caro held out the yellow yarn.  “I’d be Caro.  Welcome to Knit a Spell.  If this isn’t your favorite color, I have a couple of others tucked behind the counter instead.”

Breath whooshed out of the other two residents of the storage room.  Jamie stepped away from the wall, relaxing off red alert.  Clearly the worst hadn’t happened.

Hannah reached tentatively for the skein of yarn.  “It looks like sunshine.”

That had been the idea.  “Do you knit?”

“No.”  A slow shake of a still very nervy head—but Hannah’s fingers were already burrowing in the yarn.  “I weave.  This would make a gorgeous pillow.  So cozy.”

Caro ditched the beginnings of a plan to use it for colorwork.  “I think I’ve got enough to make a small throw, if you like.”

“My loom isn’t big enough.”  Hannah smiled, cuddling the yarn.  “And I’m sure I can’t afford a lot of it, but I’ll do whatever I have to for this one.”

Handspun was never for sale.  Caro patted the skein a final time, glad to have found it a good home.  “Just appreciate it.”  She nodded the direction of the shop.  “Come up front and look around.”  The yarn would distract Hannah while she had a small chat with her bodyguard.

She wasn’t wrong about Hannah—the young woman made a beeline for the new wall of silk, relief and the beginnings of delight beaming from her mind.  Jamie, however, was in no shape to chat.  One witch in channel distress.

Yeah.
 He followed her to the counter. 
Have any sugar?

Caro reached under the counter for her emergency brownie stash. 
What on earth are you doing that’s using up so much power? 
He practically glowed with it.

More like spluttering. 
He reached for the brownies and started shoveling them in double-fisted. 
Lauren calls it a brain clamp.  We’re basically cutting off oxygen to the source of her precog.  Brute-force magic.

He’d brought her a witch in lockdown.

Can you trace what I’m doing?  I could use an assist if you can figure it out.
  Jamie mentally winced. 
Bringing her here on no breakfast probably wasn’t my best idea ever. 

Caro closed her eyes briefly, following the flows.  What he’d done wasn’t difficult—but the amount of magic it was taking to keep the clamp in place was staggering.
 She’s that powerful?

Either that powerful, or that out of control, or both. 
It was their best witch trainer speaking now, brain coming back online as the sugar hit. 
Either way, we can’t let it loose.

Just a statement of fact—no one was panicking.  When you regularly held enough magic in your fingers to set fire to a city block, you learned to rest easy with things big and barely controlled.  Jamie knew how to roll with it, and so did Caro. 
She’ll be fine here.  I can teach her to knit.

His relief was palpable. 

And along with it came several other bits he wasn’t aware he was leaking at all.  Caro frowned—more was up here than a witch needing some weaving supplies. 
What’s going on?

He shrugged, more than a little uncomfortable. 
She makes my precog itch.

Jamie Sullivan was the most adaptable witch she knew—and he was practically squirming.
 
Caro added up the pieces and set down her knitting.  Competent and quick, she slid her magic in under Jamie’s.  Brain clamp, handed off. 
Go.  Quit eating all my brownies and find yourself some breakfast.

He didn’t move. 
You sure?

Of course.
  Caro hopped down from her stool.  There was work to do.  It seemed she had a new witch to adopt. 

She smiled as Hannah cuddled a ball of soft and fuzzy blue angora to her cheek.  This one probably wasn’t going to protest overmuch.

-o0o-

“Looks like you know your way around a yarn shop.”

Hannah looked up as Caro walked over.  “Not really.”  Chrysalis House hadn’t run to rooms of cuddly yarn.  “It must be so wonderful to spend your days here.”

“You’ll get a chance to see for yourself.”  The shop owner started rearranging a rainbow cascade of small, wooly balls.  “Things are quieter in the summer, but the regular knitting group will start showing up in an hour or so.  You can get yourself a lesson if you’d like.  Most weavers take to knitting pretty quickly.”

It sounded like a dream.  Until the part where other human beings got involved.

“I can’t—” Hannah felt the panic setting in and tried to tamp it down.  “I can’t be here while other people are here.”

“Nonsense.  It’s a life you seek, and that can hardly happen if you’re in solitary confinement.”

Hannah stared.  Someone who had met her two minutes ago had just named the knot in her soul.

Jamie chuckled, mouth full of brownie.  “Caro’s good at figuring people out.”

“I most certainly am.”  The older woman winked at him.  “Comes from trying to teach a bunch of rowdy boys how to knit.”

There had to be a story there.  Hannah had loved those things once—the funny, quirky, irrelevant bits of people’s lives.  Collected them, almost.

Caro smiled.  “Come.  I’ll help you find something to knit.”

She would have traded anything in her possession for it to be that simple.  “Maybe one day.  I can’t control my magic just yet.”  The understatement of the century.  And until she could, easy contact with other people was way off-limits.

“Pfft.”  Caro nodded her head at Jamie.  “He’s off to scrounge the three of us some breakfast and I’ll hold on to the clamp in your brain for a while.  You’re welcome to spend the day here—anyone who loves pretty yarn the way you do is always welcome.”

The yarn was glorious—and it wasn’t the problem.  She tried to explain.  “It takes months for me to get introduced to a new person without having an attack.” 

Or it had.  Before the miraculous brain clamp.  Hannah tried to open her mind to the possibility of different.

“Ah.  Well, in that case, caution isn’t a bad thing.”  Caro had picked up some knitting, a string of hot orange yarn traveling up to her hands and joining the round tube on her needles.  “If you wanted to meet some of the regulars here, what kinds of things would make it easier?”

Dr. Max had asked questions like that.  Always trying to give people a chance to own some tiny part of their lives.  Hannah tried to extrapolate from the tightly controlled world of Chrysalis House.  “Well, I used to look at photographs.  Learn a little about people.  See them through a window at first, and then maybe far away down the hallway.”  She remembered her second meeting with Lauren and Tabitha.  “Or it helps if I don’t look at someone when we first meet.”  She stopped talking, overwhelmed by the weird requests she was making of the world.

Real life didn’t work that way.

Caro nodded slowly.  “I think we can do that.  Give me twenty-four hours.”

Hannah stared.

“I’ll take pictures of the knitting group today and give you a little look tomorrow morning.  That’s most of the crew in here these days—not too many people come wandering in for yarn in August, and you can always tuck away in the back room if they do.”  Caro set down her knitting.  “And I’ve got an idea for giving you something to hide behind.”  She stood up and looked at Jamie.  “Do you have enough juice left to port us to my townhouse?”

He glanced Hannah’s direction.  “You sure?”

Hannah wasn’t sure who he was speaking to—but she really liked the plain-spoken woman who knit orange yarn and made insurmountable quirks seem almost normal.

And she hadn’t left Chrysalis House to live in terror. 

She looked around at the glorious shelves of yarn and pulled out all the bravery she had left.  “Okay.”

Chapter 11

It was a thing of sleek, outrageous beauty. 

Hannah had followed Caro up the stairs of her townhome, drinking in orange walls and vivid artwork, and shaking off the strange, cold void that was Jamie’s magical transport.

And then Caro had pulled a sheet off the many-limbed creature in the corner of a small bedroom, and all thought had stopped.

Hannah stepped over to the large floor loom, hands reaching out reverently.  “It’s old.  And lovely.”

“It was my grandmother’s.  My granddad had some talent for woodworking.  Made it for her when they got married.”

Family history in every line.  “You must treasure it.”

“Not nearly enough.”  Caro touched the warp threads running up the loom’s vertical face.  “It sits here in my spare room and gets used as a hanger by my guests.  I never did take to weaving overmuch.  Just the knitting.”

Such beauty.  Hannah picked up a shuttle, neatly wound with the remnants of a project started long ago.  Someone had loved this loom once. 

“There’s a corner at my shop where it would fit.”  Caro moved around the room, plumping pillows and tidying small treasures.  “If you’d like to set up there and give it a try, you’re more than welcome.  I’m pretty sure I have Oma’s stash of weaving thread tucked under the bed there.  Lots of colors—she liked silk.”

Hannah wasn’t a complete idiot.  This was no casual offer.  “Why?”

Caro looked over, eyes full of something murky.  “Because you need something to hold on to.  And because I know what it is to need the therapy of something moving under your fingers.”  She shrugged.  “And I figure Oma’s pretty mad at me for letting it sit unused for so long.”

Hanna looked down at her hands, unsure of what to do with that kind of information.  “I’d be truly honored to use it.” 

“There’s no shame in busy hands—or in asking for what you need.”  Caro’s matter-of-fact tone didn’t make the words any less gentle.  “It will take time to find your way in this new life you’ve landed in.  And in the meantime, you can sit in the corner and make some pillows for my shop if you’ve got a hankering to be useful.”

She hadn’t.  Not until the words were said.  “Thank you.  I’d like that very much.”

Caro snorted.  “Decide if you want to thank me later.  You’ll have people hanging over your shoulder all the time, asking what you’re doing.”

Curiosity was a privilege of those who were sane.  No one at Chrysalis had ever leaned over her shoulder.  A very few had watched from afar, eyes half lit.  “I spent every day of the last twelve years wishing to get out.  And now I’m not sure what to do with myself.”  Hannah Kendrick, lost.

“Do what any good weaver does.”  Caro reached out a hand and stroked the wood of the loom.  “Start with the warp threads.”

Just that simple.  Hannah hugged the idea to her heart.  One string at a time, up the loom and down.

Caro smiled.  “You can work on it now some if you like.  Jamie can port it to the shop in the morning.”