A Lost Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 7) (6 page)

He smiled.  “I’ll let her know.”

Permission granted.  Hannah let herself out of his office—and tried not to think any more about the lady from her dreams who knew how to turn lost keys.

-o0o-

Lauren smiled at Devin.  The log on the fire was totally unnecessary, but he knew she liked it.  Ambience, and the metaphoric and literal comfort of home fires burning.

He leaned down and kissed her cheek.  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”  He was handling Kenna duty while Nat taught a class. 

A good way to skip out on the precog briefing that was about to happen.

Lauren would have given a week’s supply of her best coffee beans to be going with him.  To duck, however briefly, into a moment of normal.

There’s always time for normal,
said Retha’s mental voice. 
Although hanging out with that granddaughter of mine might not qualify.

The offer implicit in the words was both insightful and kind.  Lauren shook her head. 
No.  We need to do this before tomorrow. 
She wasn’t walking into Chrysalis House unprepared a second time.

Jamie cracked an eyelid and looked at his brother.  “Go away.  If we don’t get rolling on this soon, I’m adopting your couch for the night.”

Devin tossed a well-aimed pillow at the lazing form on the couch.  “Don’t drink all my beer.”

Sibling antics—one of the Sullivan family’s best things.  Lauren was pretty sure the next hour wasn’t going to threaten the beer supply any.  She smiled as her husband hopped over the couch and Jamie’s prone body on his way out the door.

The comforts of home came in so many ways.

Jamie opened one eye as the front door shut.  “So why are we doing this, again?”

Lauren opened her laptop.  “Because I need to ask you a bunch of nitpicky questions, and you’ll be less grumpy if you get to lie down while we do it.”

“Nitpicky, huh?”  His mind wasn’t nearly as grumpy as his face.  “Not sure I can be much help.  Precog sucks—end of story.”

Realtors were immune to grumpiness.  “When I walk a client into a house, I want to know everything.  The kind of shingles on the roof, when the walls were last painted, the dimensions of the front hall closet.”

Jamie’s eyelid slid up again.  “You help people find comfortable homes.  What’s that got to do with a freaking closet?”

Spoken like a man who didn’t own a shoe collection.  “You write interminable lines of gibberish on your computer screen.”  Poking his buttons was fun, even if she had to work hard not to grin as she did it.  “What’s that got to do with a swordfight on the drawbridge in Realm?”

Retha chuckled.  “Someday my sons are going to wise up and stop picking dumb fights with the smart women who have joined this family.”

“Nah.”  Jamie tucked a pillow under his head and opened both eyes.  “We have to keep you all amused somehow.” 

Amusement wasn’t ever in short supply around the Sullivans.

“So, details matter.”  Her brother-in-law’s mind was awake now, whatever his body language said.  “You want me and Mom to babble about precog, or do you have some specific questions?”

Both.  And she usually let her clients do the talking first.  “Give me the fast rundown.”

He shrugged.  “Precog’s unpredictable, in both the triggers and the content.  It’s not always right, and the visions usually hit pretty hard.  Sometimes good, sometimes bad.”

“That’s true for us.”  Retha paused a moment, picking her words carefully.  “But we’re only two people.  Hannah’s magic might be quite different.”

Which could render all her careful data collection obsolete.  Lauren tapped on the keys of her laptop.   It was a good point, and one she needed to remember in the morning.

She typed quick notes on his rundown, and then zeroed in on the one that bugged her most. “Why do you think it’s wrong sometimes?”

“That’s one of the little details you wanted to clear up?” asked Retha dryly.

Lauren shrugged—some details were bigger than others. 

“It’s not like regular magic.”  Jamie frowned at the crystal ball that had passed to Lauren from Moira’s family, sitting unobtrusively in the corner.  “It’s kind of like that thing, actually.  You don’t know when it will decide to talk to you, right?  Or what it will decide to talk about?”

True—and it made her crazy.  She was very glad mind magic wasn’t so hinky. 

“I don’t know that precog is wrong,” he said slowly.  “I think it shows us something that might happen, and we make the mistake of thinking that the future is singular.  Maybe it’s just some universal gamer dude running scenarios, and sometimes he shows us ones that aren’t very likely.”

That made a frightening amount of sense.  If you believed in universal gamer dudes.  Or temperamental crystal balls.

Jamie shrugged.  “Or maybe they’re all just full of shit.”

He didn’t believe that.  She knew how deeply he and Nat loved a small boy who didn’t yet exist.  “That’s how you cope.  You push away what it might mean.”

“Sure.”  He scrunched a pillow in his hands.  “Some days.  If I can’t do that, then we’re just peons in level four of some big virtual reality game.”  He tossed the pillow at her head.  “I don’t like being a peon.”

“We have the luxury of believing it doesn’t own us.”  Retha’s mind was drenched in sorrow.  “Hannah’s not so lucky.”

“Yeah.”  Jamie was deeply sober now, incipient pillow fight forgotten.

Lauren closed her eyes—and headed to the core of what they danced around.  “When you saw Nat the first time, it triggered your magic, which sounds similar to what might be happening for Hannah.”  Except for one important detail.  “But it happens for her with everyone she meets.”

Jamie looked grim.  “I don’t know whether that means she’s more sensitive, or her universal gamer dude’s leveled up a bunch, but either way, it’s not good.”

It wasn’t the words that caught Lauren.  It was the molten emotion behind them.

He wasn’t lazing at all now.  Just meeting her gaze, a very grown-up witch who wanted her to know exactly how he felt.  “Precog sucks, even when you just have a little.  We laugh and make light of it, but it’s not like my other magic.  I can’t train it or control it, and it lies often enough that I can’t use it in ways that help anyone.”

Retha nodded slowly.  “It tries to take away who we are.”  The words were quiet.  The stark feelings behind them, far less so.

Jamie blinked, looking at his mother.

And Lauren, reading the sudden currents in the room, realized enormous truth had just landed in the middle of her attempt to herd the details.

They had a witch to rescue.  With a magic that two confident, talented, very skilled witches… hated.

Chapter 5

There was welcome this time—and also oddness.

Lauren stepped through the door Max held open and checked her mental link with Tabitha. 
Something’s up.

He’s working this through. 
Tab sounded entirely serene. 
He’s always been a very bright, very observant man.

That didn’t make sense. 
We haven’t said anything yet.  Or done anything.

No.  But we believe we can.  This will be kicking up a lot of things for him—he’s been her primary doctor since the day she arrived here. 

They’d learned a lot since their last visit.  Hannah had lived at Chrysalis House for twelve years.  Her parents and brother still visited her often.  And Dr. Max had resisted all efforts to move her to other facilities.

Under his direction, Hannah’s wing of Chrysalis House had become a haven for some of California’s most severely disturbed.

Today, they’d come to see if he’d let one of his charges go.

It wasn’t his office he led them to this time.  Instead, he took a left turn into fragrant flowers—a greenhouse of a sunroom that edged toward steamy.  If you ignored the white coats and locked doors on the way there, it could have been a lovely retreat in a country manor.

Tabitha reached out to touch a beautiful pink flower.  “Still babying orchids, I see.”

His smile was a cheerful, easy one.  “Mom says I’m still doing penance.  Apparently when I was a toddler, I presented her with a collection of petals.”

In the chronicles of the Sullivan family, that would have been a minor offense, but not all mothers gave birth to a trio of hurricanes.  Lauren found a chair amongst the flowers, admiring the riot of color.  Orchids run amuck.  “Most people don’t let them grow wild like this.”

“They only look fragile,” said Max easily, dropping onto a wobbly stool.  “If I turn my back on this place for a few days, they turn into a jungle.”  He winked at Tabitha.  “And they enjoy a good Bob Marley song.”

Lauren was lost at sea—but whatever memory the good Bob triggered, it mattered deeply to the two people she was with.  And that kind of trust was about to matter immensely.  She sat in silence and let Tab begin the dance.  Her turn would come.

The older woman leaned forward and set a hand on Max’s arm.  “We believe Hannah is a witch, Max.  And that she can’t currently control her magic.”

His brain gridlocked, a multitude of emotions caught in freeze frame.  Lauren felt them all—and marveled.  Shock, surprise, disbelief, consternation.  But not a whisper of fear.

And the disbelief didn’t last long either.

Deep blue eyes never left Tabitha.  “A witch.”

Lauren’s mentor nodded slowly.  There was no fear in her mind, either.  Very few people were more secure in who they were than Tabitha Schwartz.

Max’s gaze moved to Lauren.  Wondered.  Assessed.

She tried not to squirm.  Witch Central rarely came out of the closet quite so brazenly.

When he finally leaned back, his mind was already edging toward acceptance.  He smiled at Tabitha, a little off kilter, but open.  Seeking.  “We always said you must have magic.”

“An extra dose of empathy.”  Tab shrugged, letting him look.  “An ability to see a little more deeply than most.”

“It’s how you find the keys.  You feel them.”  Max’s eyes sharpened.  “And you think you know what might help Hannah.”

“Maybe.”  Tabitha glanced at Lauren.  Her turn to dance.

Lauren assembled her thoughts—she’d been the primary one doing the crash course on precog talents.  “There’s a kind of magic where people see fragments of the future.”

“Precognition.”  His brain was focused now, almost glistening.  A man who would use anything, no matter how hocus pocus, if it might help his patients.

Good.  She wasn’t all that thrilled with the hocus part herself, but she’d use what would work.  “Yes, although most of what exists in stories and literature doesn’t bear much resemblance to the truth.”

His smile was wry.  “Books kind of tend to mangle crazy people, too.”

She really liked him.  Solid and open-minded.  That was going to make this a lot easier.  “We know a couple of people with minor precog talents.  If we can verify that’s what Hannah is dealing with, we might be able to help her get her magic under control.”

Max’s fingers reached out to touch an orchid.  “Crazy people have often been persecuted as witches.”  His words were quiet and full of pain.  “It seems kind of ironic that we might have been persecuting a witch by calling her crazy.”

“You don’t persecute people here, Max.”  Tab’s words were all the more powerful for their softness.  “And they don’t teach magic at medical school.”

His fingers left the flower.  “They don’t teach Bob Marley, either.”

A man who picked up tools where he found them—Tabitha had been right.  Lauren waited, letting him take the next step.  She wanted anyone as tenacious as the good doctor completely in her camp.

When he looked her direction, he was already most of the way there.  “What do we do first?”

Lauren took a deep breath and joined him on the road.  “You said that new faces trigger her attacks.”

For the first time since they’d entered the sunroom, fear grazed his mind.  “They do.  Not exclusively—sometimes we don’t know why they happen.”  He swallowed.  “She knows you’re coming.”

Tabitha nodded slowly.  “I’d wondered.”

“Generally we introduce new people extremely slowly.  Pictures first.  Then through glass.  It seems to diffuse the trigger some.”

“We can do that.”  Lauren leaned forward.  It was time to lay the gamble on the table—the thing she and Jamie and Retha had talked about longest and hardest.  “But we’ll learn more about Hannah if we can feel her mind.  And we’ll have the best chance to help her control her precog if we’re in the same room.”

Or at least that’s what the brain trust had concluded after a hard hour of wrangling.  No one was certain.

Max looked at Tab long and hard.  And then he shifted back to Lauren, mind full of steel.  “What kind of witch are you?”

“Her magic is much like mine,” said Tabitha calmly.  “As are her ethics.”

“Sorry.”  His breath whooshed out, and kindness eased back into his eyes.  “I’m not handling this very well.  You’ve come to help.”

He was handling it better than she’d ever hoped—but that wasn’t what he needed to hear right now.  “I’m a mind witch.  I can read thoughts and images and feelings.”

His eyebrows flew up.  And then the wry smile returned.  “Never mind.  Dumb question.”