A Lost Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 7) (5 page)

A stir at the table.  Jamie knew who had arrived even before he turned.  Lauren’s mind was heavy—and afraid.

Nat reached her friend first.  And stuck at Lauren’s side, even as Devin landed.  Retha altered course and wrapped her arms around the second woman coming into the room. Tabitha looked serene—until you saw her shaking hands.

Witch Central, buoying up their own.

“Freaking stupid fetching spell.”  Nell cursed under her breath beside him.

Not the spell’s fault, sister mine.
  He handed her back the bacon platter, a true act of sibling love. 
And if a witch is in trouble, better we know.

He didn’t add what they all feared—that they’d found out far too late.

-o0o-

Sometimes, a mother just had to take charge.  And now that they knew why the mental chalkboards had been scratching, that time had arrived.

Retha Sullivan pushed Tabitha toward an empty chair beside Nat and stepped to the end of the table.  “Devin and Jamie, quit hogging the bacon.  Moira, if you squeeze over a bit, Lauren can slide in beside you and make that husband of hers behave.”  Chairs and platters and frozen brains started to move.  Retha watched a moment and then took a seat, well pleased.  “Nell, is that orange juice in my favorite vase?”

Her daughter grinned, used to maternal wiles.  “That’s what happens when your favorite vase is a juice pitcher.”

Retha raised an eyebrow.  “My previous favorite had a mysterious meeting with a softball.”

Nell glared down the table.  “It’s not my fault Devin ducked.”

Her brother forked a waffle and snickered.  “It’s not my fault you throw like a girl.”

Retha hid a smile as Devin dropped his suddenly very hot fork, a good portion of the rest of the table laughing as he did so.  Much better.  If they had a witch to rescue, they’d do a far better job of it well fed and with fear pushed far into the background. 

She waited, biding her time, as waffles and syrup found suddenly hungry mouths.  And listened, amused, as spouses stepped comfortably into the well-practiced sibling rivalries of the Sullivan clan.  Her children had chosen very well.

Daniel slipped into the room, a third plate of waffles in his hands.

Jamie’s face was mournful, only partly in jest.  “What, no more bacon?”

Two platters materialized on the table, well away from the brothers Sullivan.  Retha grinned—Daniel was no dummy, and neither was his small teleporting assistant.  She reached out her fork and snagged another piece.  Costa Rica was a wonderful place, but bacon was a scarce commodity in the rainforest.

Everyone was here now.  Time to begin.  Retha looked over at her newest daughter-in-law.  “So, tell us about Hannah.”

Lauren swallowed and drained half a mug of coffee before she spoke.  “We don’t know a lot—most of it’s just guesses.  We know she has magic, or she wouldn’t have caught the fetching spell’s attention.  We know she’s had a difficult life.  And we know she has attacks triggered by seeing new faces.”

Retha’s precog had first manifested with just such an “attack.”  She set down her fork, homing in on the details.  “Are they sure it’s visual contact that’s the problem?”

Lauren blinked.  “That’s what the doctor reported.  What else are you thinking?”

Far too many things.  “It could be a new voice, or the touch of a strange mind.  Precog can be visual—” she smiled over at Jamie and Nat, who were the most memorable episode in recent memory, “but it doesn’t have to be.”

“Does it matter?”  Devin frowned, forked waffle stalled in mid-air.

“Yes.”  Retha could still taste the panic of her first precog experience.  “If she can’t control her episodes, we’ll have to try to do it for her.”  And the only way to do that was messy, deeply difficult, and fraught with ethical complications.  “The less often we have to do that, the better.”

“You did it for me once.”  Jamie’s voice was almost somber.  “Stood inside my head and fought the magic back.”

He remembered.  Retha looked down the table, eyes only for her son.  “You were so little, sweetheart.”  And the vision he’d seen had scared her silly until the following Halloween.  Little boy visions hadn’t been able to separate fake monsters from real ones.

“You were deep inside my head.”  Her son pulled them both back from the past.  “Really deep.  I remember.”

Yes.  To a small child, it had been the ultimate comfort.  To a stranger and a grown woman … Retha turned to Lauren.  There were only a handful of mind witches in the world strong enough to pull off what they might have to do.  “It’s the magical version of a Vulcan mind meld.  I have no idea if it will work on an adult.”  Or on a witch who appeared to be far more plagued by precog than anyone at the table.

Lauren looked grim.  “We can’t exactly walk into Chrysalis House and take over her mind.”

“Even if it could get her out of there?”  Retha asked the hard question, knowing everyone at the table needed to hear it.  “She’s a witch.  We can’t help her if we can’t be with her.”

Devin didn’t move, but she could feel his energy coiling.  “How dangerous would this melding thing be?”

Concerns for his wife.  Sometimes mothers didn’t have the answers.  “I don’t know, love.  That will depend on how hurt Hannah’s mind is, and how much she’s willing to trust us.”  And whether they could pull it off at all.

“She might not need to trust
us
,” said Lauren slowly.  “At least to start.  The psychiatrist who works with her—Dr. Max—cares about her deeply.  Perhaps she trusts him.”

Retha frowned.  “But he’s not going to trust us.”  There was too much they couldn’t tell him.

Lauren shrugged, not ready to discard her idea.  “He’s not your average psychiatrist.”

“Unless he’s your average witch, none of this is going to seem credible to him.”  Hell, most witches thought precog was a myth.  “This isn’t the ability to light a candle or bloom a flower.  We’re talking about mind control here.”  Some people were open-minded enough to accept small magics.  Large ones took a special heart. 

Lauren stared at her bacon for a long, still moment, and then looked over at Tabitha.  “I think we need to try.”

The older woman nodded slowly.  “He’ll listen with an open mind.  If anyone outside our community could process this, it would be Max.”

Their resident realtor’s convictions were firming.  “It’s our only chance to do this gently.  We have to try.”

No matter what, it wasn’t going to be gentle.  But if it worked, it would at least be less violent.  Retha nodded and honored the wishes of the witch most likely to be on the front lines.  She smiled at her daughter-in-law, once again marveling at the sterling people who had chosen to partner her children.  “Devin says you can sell snow to the North Pole.  Here’s your chance to try.”

It didn’t surprise her in the least that Lauren was already mentally marshaling her tactics.

Not all warriors used swords.

-o0o-

It wouldn’t go away, this desperate need to ask.  Hannah looked at the calendar on the wall, the out-of-place whimsy filled with children’s drawings and happy faces for holidays.

August 16
th
.  One week until her birthday.

Something perilously close to a wish tried to lodge in her chest.

She looked over at Dr. Max, who was sitting in a chair, waiting.  He’d stay that way for hours if necessary—no one had more patience.

She’d asked him to sit with her here in this monstrosity of an office.  Surely she could manage one small question.  Hannah took a deep breath, stared at the carefree drawing of a red dragon flying in a rainbow sky, and squeaked out the words that had lodged in her throat all day.  “Has anyone come to ask about me?”

Dr. Max got the strangest look on his face.  “Why do you ask that?”

The dragon blurred, crayon colors merging with the fog in her head.  “Please.  Was it two women?”

“Yes.”  He wasn’t sitting casually now.  “How do you know that?”

The way she always knew things.  “I had a dream.”  While sitting up in a chair wide awake, but she’d learned to steer around that part.

Even in a mental institution, there were degrees of crazy.

“A dream, or an attack?”

His words were gentle, just like always.  And they sliced at the part of her that ached to be capable only of simple dreams.  Frustration lit, ignited by the persistent, awful speck of hope flitting in the dusty air.  “Does it matter?  I know.  One has brown hair and pretty, competent eyes.  The other looks like somebody’s grandmother.  And her heart shines.”

Dr. Max smiled at the last.  “Yeah.  It does.  Her name is Tabitha Schwartz.”  He paused, watching the dust dance in a stray sunbeam.  “She says she would like to try to help you—but I think, somehow, that you already know that.”

They’d never gone here.  Never talked about her dreams, or the visions in her more full-blown attacks, sometimes being true.  Hannah wanted to curl up in a small ball.  She gripped the edges of her chair instead and tried to hold on to what really mattered.  “You know her.”  His voice had held affection.  That hadn’t been in the dream.

“I do.”

His eyes told her nothing.  “Can she help me?”

“I don’t know.”  His gaze never left hers.  “But I know that she’s kind and very capable.  She works with children with autism.”

Of all the diagnoses people had tried to pin on her, that had never been on the list.  “She thinks I’m autistic?”

“No.”  His laugh carried hints of confusion—and that damnable hope.  “But she thinks you might be someone she can help.”

He was asking for permission.  It was one of those small things Dr. Max always did—a quiet, insistent quirk that brought respect and honor and light into a place where it would be far too easy to let humanity slide.  And even the patients who lived deep far gone in a world of their own loved him for it.

It was probably a good thing that he was always late and liked country music, or people would suspect him of being an angel.

And she was woolgathering again.  It was happening more often lately.  She needed more time with the discipline of her loom and less time staring out windows.  “I don’t know how she can help me.”  Legions had tried—and most of them started with eyes full of eagerness or hubris.

They never left that way.

“I don’t know either.”  Dr. Max shifted, his jeans making the comfortable swishing noise she associated with life on the outside.  “But I’ve seen her work.  I don’t know what she does, exactly—it’s a bit of a mystery.”

There was a story in the air—she could feel it.  Hannah squinted, trying to read his face in the odd shadows and light.  “What have you seen?”

“I was an intern at her center, fresh out of my first year of med school.  Lots of hard work, lots of kids who needed play therapy and occupational therapy and speech.”

Sounded like a fairly typical regimen. 

He smiled.  “She let me play with a few of the kids.  Said I did a good job of being in touch with my inner child.”

Her giggle sounded loud in the dirge of an office.  “That’s a nice way of calling you immature, I think.”

“Yeah.”  He grinned, chasing away the shadows.  “I’ve never claimed to be an adult.”

He did that every day he walked in the doors of Chrysalis House, but she wasn’t going to argue with him.  “So what happened?”  It delighted her, this knowing he had a story to tell.  Curiosity wasn’t something she allowed herself to feel all that often.

“There was a boy.”  Dr. Max’s words got the far-off sound of someone picturing the words they spoke.  “About four years old.  He was pretty new, and he’d come in a couple of times a week and sit in a corner with his eyes closed.”

She knew what that meant.  Hiding from the world.  Eyes that didn’t want to see.

“Tabitha had one of us sit with him, every time.  And she always took a turn.  Just sitting.  Sometimes she would hum a little.”

“She’s patient, then.” 

“Like a thousand-year-old tree.”  Max paused, finding the trail of his story again.  “We’d been doing this for about a month, and dumb summer interns were figuring this kid was a lost cause.”

Hannah wasn’t convinced he’d ever been dumb.  Or that ready to give up on a small boy.  “What happened?”

“He came in one Tuesday morning.  Sat in his corner, eyes closed.  I was sitting with him, humming some Bob Marley.”  The words were husky now, laced with emotion.  “He started humming with me.”

The moment every crazy person lived for—the start of not being crazy.  Hannah hugged her knees, waiting.  Delighting for the small boy who had found his moment.

  “I was this scared, dumb summer intern, humming reggae in the corner with a kid who was supposed to be hopeless, and I had no idea what to do.  Tabitha was there in less than a minute.  Came over and sat with us and started quietly singing.”  He paused, a grin flitting across his features.  “I remember being astonished that she had ever heard of Bob Marley.”

She could hear his respect—and his awe. 

“We sat there for almost an hour like that.”  Dr. Max’s breath let out in a whoosh.  “And then the boy opened his eyes and looked at her.  And he laughed.”

Hope, unlocked.  Hannah could see it in his eyes.  “You reached him.”

“
She
did.”  There was no jealousy in his words.  “She told me I found the key, but I can promise you, I had no idea how to turn it.  She took it and turned it into the beginning of the rest of that kid’s life.  Taught him and his mom the words to the song.”  Dr. Max grinned.  “The poor guy talked with a Jamaican accent for months after that.”

Months?  Hannah eyed him.  “I thought you were just a summer intern.”

Something suspiciously red crept up his cheeks.  “Yeah.  Mostly.  I went back when I could.  He started high school last week, and he has this cute girl with braces for a lab partner.  I think she likes him.”

It was a story of beauty and humility and treacherous hope, and one that told her as much about the gentle man sitting in the nearby chair as it did about a woman named Tabitha. 

And somewhere in the words, Hannah had found her answer.  She stood up, watching the dust motes scatter out of her way, and gave Dr. Max one long, last look.  “Tell her I don’t know any Bob Marley.”