A Lost Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 7) (22 page)

Caro snorted from her stool by the counter, a very competent thread hanging down from her own twirling toy. 
Careful what you’re calling ugly, girl.  I hear weavers like a good textured yarn.

Hannah eyed the hot-pink rope and felt the giggles coming on.  And an idea for a pillow.  She grinned up at Helga.  “Can you make about ten more yards of that?”

“Maybe.”  The spritely lady on the ladder eyed her creation doubtfully.  “It’s a little unpredictable just yet.  But you should see what Marion made last night.”

“Mmmm.  It’s yummy.”  Jodi tickled Sam and, carrying him away from the irresistible spinning things, reached into a brown paper bag on the table.  “She spun a rainbow.”

The skein that landed in Hannah’s hands was pure magic.  Reds and oranges making their vivid, dancing way over to greens and blues and violets.

And not a floof in sight.  Tightly spun coils of color.  Made for a loom.

“Figured you could maybe weave with it,” said Marion gruffly.  “I know you like the bright colors.”

Hannah looked at the yarn.  And the bright spots of color on Marion’s cheeks and the small smile Caro was hiding in her knitting.

She’d crashed to the floor in their midst yesterday.  And this was their reply.

Trying very hard not to sniffle, she held up a basket.  A small reply of her own.  “I made rolls.  Not as good as Caro’s, but I think they’re edible.”

“Perfect timing,” said Retha merrily, walking in the door.

Hanna felt her insides seize up.  She wasn’t nearly ready to let go of this blissful moment of normal.

I’m here to knit. 
Retha patted her bag. 
And maybe eat a roll or two and see if I can talk Helga out of a few of her spangles. 

Hannah wanted, desperately, to believe her.

Belief is an action, my dear.
 Retha settled onto a stool and tapped the counter.  “You can set those rolls down right here.”

“Ha.”  Helga nabbed the basket out of Hannah’s hands.  “I’ve seen you Sullivans eat.”

Marion stood in the middle of the floor, still holding her rainbow skein.

And Hannah realized she wasn’t the only person feeling a bit strange this morning.  She smiled and held out her hand.  “Come.  I’ll show you how to weave that into a headband.”

“I’m no weaver.”  Marion’s frown traveled the well-worn furrows of her face.

Yet.  Hannah smiled down at the vibrant palette in her hands.  “It’ll cost you.  Another skein, about this size.”  She closed her eyes for a minute, imagining.  “In red, please.”

“Pfft.”  Marion scowled at the loom and reclaimed her yarn.  “I’ll have you spinning your own by dinnertime.”

Hannah grinned.  She was so winning this war.  “A woman can never have too much bright yarn.”

Marion’s face still furrowed, but her eyes began to twinkle.  “Deal.”

Hannah followed her new student over to the loom—and felt the steady approval of the watching audience behind them.

Celebrating two women who had just grabbed hold of a tiny thread of their lives.

It felt insanely good to be one of them.

-o0o-

They’d been so silly.

Retha watched the two heads tipped together over the loom, the way they’d been for the past hour.  And when Marion got up for a stretch and a cookie, seized her moment.  She wandered over and reached out toward the weaving, very sure it was the compass they sought.  She just wasn’t precisely sure where it pointed yet.  “Tell me why you do this.”

“To pass the time.”  Hannah frowned, tracing the threads of her loom.  “Or that’s how I got started, at least.  Dr. Max brought me the small loom and a book and told me to do something useful so I didn’t go crazy.”

Carefully chosen words by a very smart man.  “It seems you learned rather well.”

“Sixteen hours a day.”  Hannah looked down at her hands.  “That’s how long I was awake.  When you’re crazy, there’s just not that much to do.”

And the courageous, determined soul in front of her had walked those sixteen hours every day for over a decade.  Retha stared at the weaving.  There had to be a key here.  Something.  It was such a part of the woman they all wanted to help.  “Tell me about the process of setting it up.”

Blue eyes looked at her, incredulous.  “
You
want a weaving lesson too?”

Maybe so.  “The beginnings of one.  I want to hear you talk about it.”  Guerrilla tactics.  Not all fighters attacked from the front.

“Okay.”  Fingers tracked the vertical threads, highlighting their glimmering orange order.  “The first thing you do is set up the warp, which is the foundation for your weaving.”

Something tickled Retha’s mind.  “What makes a good warp?”

“Something strong.  Dense and smooth, with lots of twist, so the weft—the yarn you weave with—can pass by it easily.”  Hannah held up the skein that Marion had spun.  “This will make wonderful warp. See this one?”  She held up some fluffy yellow wool.  “Soft and poofy.  I’ll use it for the weft so this pillow ends up nice and squishy.”  Hannah patted the orange.  “But it’s the warp that matters most.  Without that, nothing holds together.”

Holding together.  Strong and dense.  Smooth and twisty.  Those were fighter words—or they could be.  Retha touched the lines of striking orange, tugging on the mental bit of string she’d found.  “I think that’s what we need to do with your magic.”

Hannah’s eyebrows shot to the sky.  “Make it twistier?”

Retha felt all the circuits connecting at once.  Motherboard overload.  “No.  Exactly the opposite.  We’ve been trying to work with your magic.  To weave who you are around it.”  She reached for the ball of sunny yellow fluff.  “To make you better weft.”  Soft and floofy and yielding.

Confusion clouded her student’s mind.

The first rule of a fight was to hold it on your own turf.  Retha wrapped the younger witch’s fingers around the taut orange threads.  “You’re the warp, Hannah.  We need to help you hold firm and strong so your magic knows exactly where to go.”  And how much.  And how fast.  “To make
you
smooth and dense and twisty.”

Silent hands stroked bold threads.  Thinking.  Brain absorbing what her fingers already knew.

And Retha knew that they’d finally found the beginning.

-o0o-

Hannah stared, trying to figure out what her weaving could teach.

She was the warp.

Sometimes hidden, always strong and straight and true.  A singular job to do, unlike the weft that got to dance and wander and nothing too terrible happened if it took a detour or had a weak spot.

Good warp like Oma’s could hang on a loom for fifty years and still make a solid foundation.

Again, more slowly this time, Hannah ran her fingers up and down the threads of the old, sturdy warp.   Seeking the lessons of its history.

The best weavers knew that all designs, all function, all beauty began there.  Even the most unruly of wefts could be tamed by the good strong threads of the warp.

Precog was hella unruly.

Hannah swallowed.  She wasn’t weaver enough for this.

I believe you began yesterday,
sent Retha quietly. 
You chose something that you wanted to see.

Guilt slicked Hannah’s soul.  “I’m so sorry.”  She hadn’t thought—hadn’t considered the cost of her little fairytale wish.  Opening her eyes to five people passed out cold on the floor of Knit a Spell had dumped an avalanche of remorse onto that little oversight.

Retha raised an eyebrow.  “Missed the laying down of your first weft thread, did you?”

Hannah stared.  And considered.  She’d made a choice.  Just like a weaver sitting at a loom.

Ah, yes.  I’d missed that.  Warp and weaver too.
  Retha fingered the bottom edge of the work on the loom.  “I see the bottom edges aren’t as perfectly straight as the rest.”

“Selvage.  Those will get removed later.”  Hannah’s fingers moved up an inch.  “See, these are nice and straight.”

“But for now, those first rows do their job just fine, unevenness and all, do they?”

Hannah shook her head, wry humor kicking in.  “Are all your innocent questions quite so loaded?”

Retha batted her eyelashes, eyes sparkling.  “Why, my dear, whatever do you mean?”

Marion snorted from the counter.  “Are you done monopolizing my teacher yet?”

“Yes.”  Retha smiled.  “I do believe I am.”

“Thank you.”  Hannah reached out on pure instinct, touching Retha’s hand.  “I have a lot to think about now.”

“We missed all the signs.”  The older woman patted the loom.  “You’ve already picked your place to stand and fight.”

Nothing she’d done, even yesterday, felt remotely like a fair fight.  “I always lose.”

“No, my dear.”  Brown eyes drilled into hers.  “You are a delightful, sane, strong, funny human being.  The battle isn’t over, by any means—but you’re a seasoned warrior, Hannah Kendrick.  Don’t let anyone tell you different.  Not even those of us who think we’re trying to help you.”

Such bright, powerful words.  Hannah wanted so very badly to believe them.  “How can you know that?”

Retha smiled.  “I saw one of your pillows.”

It sounded like a complete non sequitur.  “I have a lot of them.”

“I thought you might.”  Retha got up from her stool.  “Someday, I’d very much like to see them.”

That wasn’t a problem, but Hannah was entirely mystified as to why.

A hand reached out briefly to touch her cheek.  “To better understand the battles you’ve already won.”

-o0o-

Nell knew mutiny when she saw it.  And judging from the faces of her three girls, it had just arrived.  Lauren sat at the inn’s dining room table, eating Aaron’s strawberry shortcake and talking home renovations with Cassidy, but her mind had tuned in sharply too.

Uh, oh.

Mia took the lead.  “We want to go home.”

That was a new one—all her kids loved the beaches, berries, and wild lawlessness of life on Moira’s turf.  “Okay.  Can you tell me why?”

“Everybody’s scared of Hannah,” said Ginia flatly.  “We’re not.  And without us around, she doesn’t get to have any fun.”

Nell raised an eyebrow and tiptoed into the muck.  “I’m fun.  And Uncle Jamie’s hilarious—you guys say so all the time.”

“He has a scratchy head and he’s grumpy cuz he misses Nat and Kenna.”

It was the first part that had them all concerned.  “We don’t know a whole lot about Hannah’s magic yet.  And we know that being around her bothers Uncle Jamie and Gramma, so we’re trying to be really careful.”

“Ginia’s been around her and her head doesn’t scratch.”  Shay spoke up, quiet and dangerous.  “And Uncle Jamie says his head only gets scratchy when he’s trying to monitor her or use that brain-clamp thing.”

Nell frowned and tried to follow ten-year-old data analysis.  “You think it only bothers people with precog or mind magic?”

Shay shook her head.  “They have to have both.  And maybe they have to be using their mind magic—we’re not so sure about that one.  Dad says we need a bigger sample size.”

Uh, oh.

You just got played.
  Lauren’s mental voice was highly amused.

Ya think?
 Nell ignored Lauren’s silent laughter and eyed her triplets.  “Already ran this past him, did you?”

Three heads nodded vigorously.  Mia spoke next, back on point.  “Kevin says he didn’t see anything in the books that would cause problems for our hypothesis.  So we have a plan.”

Of course they did.  Nell sighed—after thirteen years, she was beginning to get the hang of this parent gig.  Time to get all the cards on the table before she agreed to anything.  “And what would that be, exactly?”

Ginia grinned.  “We want to have a water fight.”

Aww, dang.  No wonder Daniel had caved.  Nell’s heart exploded with love for her imps, even as the logistics started ticking themselves off.  The “why” was obvious—more than one person had been welcomed into the arms of Witch Central by just that brand of innocent summer fun.

The “how”—that was a lot more tricky.

“She lived in a yucky place for a really long time.”  Shay again, with her reserved, implacable logic.  “And if she has to go back, we want her to have the best memory ever.”

They hadn’t kept the kids out of it at all.  Nell absorbed that fact as she took in the three faces who had gazed on the outcome everyone who touched Hannah feared most—and decided to respond with an act of outrageous fun.

She sent a tight mind message to their aunt, who had given up all pretense of looking at paint chips. 
Think we can figure out the logistics?

Yeah. 
Lauren’s mental voice was more than a little sniffly. 
We’ll come up with something.  We always do.

Nell squeezed her three girls in tight.  “Okay.  Let’s go home.”

Chapter 17

It was time.  A weaver who couldn’t control her warp and weft was no kind of weaver at all.

Hannah sat down at her kitchen table and waited for the three women who had become her informal teaching team to assemble.  She had coffee sitting for Lauren, a nice spiced tea for Caro, and something called a refresco for Retha—the Costa Rican version of a mango smoothie on ice.