“That’s the groom and his daughter.” Retha smiled.
They weren’t all so happy. “A couple of older boys. One takes a pretty bad fall. Tell him to swordfight on level ground.” Another fragment hit. “And to watch out for Ginia’s motorcycle. I think that one’s quite a bit in the future. She seemed a lot older.”
Retha looked amused. “I’ll tell Jamie to keep his bike shed locked.”
“Wait.” Dr. Max leaned forward. “Are these predictions, or only possibilities?”
“Likely some of both,” said Retha quietly.
They all felt immensely real. Hannah’s soul cringed. She hated the remembering—and the forgetting. “They all get jumbled pretty fast after that.” So much horror. “An old lady in her gardens. Others somewhere green. Ireland, I think. A fire.” And the words she couldn’t get out, of the sad, lonely cries of a child who no longer had a sister.
Sorrow clogged the room. “That’s enough, sweetheart.” Retha leaned in and touched her cheek. “It supports our guess about what happened. You’re describing a good portion of the wedding guests. We should have seen it coming—not your fault at all.”
Hannah tried hard not to crumble yet another cookie into oblivion. “What is it that happened, exactly?”
“Our weddings generally have a circle.” Retha looked over at Dr. Max, choosing her words carefully.
“Not a wimp,” he said mildly, taking a wedge of sandwich.
“Very well, then. We have a circle. A basic call to the elements—a gathering of power, if you will, and love.”
“Sounds appropriate for a wedding.”
Hannah was glad Dr. Max was coherent—her own words had fled, drowned by overflowing peanut butter and gelatinous fear.
“Ritual is important to witches.” Retha smiled at him, teacher to apt student. “Circles are a form of collective celebration, but they also call on significant magic.” Her attention was all on Hannah now. “That’s the part we missed. We never looked at whether active power triggers your precog. Especially when people you feel connected to are involved.”
Hannah felt her eyes going googly. “You were on the other side of the continent.”
“Aervyn can feel magic that far away.” Retha was talking softly now, almost to herself. “And at a life event of such import… My precog often strikes in such moments. It’s possible you felt ripples from the circle. Magic calls to magic, lovely girl—and I think that all of us gathered together in collective magic like that, perhaps we called to yours.”
Across thousands of miles. Hannah recoiled, rejecting the awful implications.
“Don’t.” Retha’s hands were firm, her eyes pointed brown lasers. “We will figure this out.”
It was a promise from a strong and very generous witch.
And Hannah knew, even as she ached to believe the words, that Retha shouldn’t be making it.
Some things were just not possible.
Retha laid a kind, sturdy hand on her shoulder. “Get some rest.”
Hannah leaned her head back on the bed, suddenly exhausted, and avoided Dr. Max’s eyes. She suspected she’d be seeing him again soon enough.
Beyond help. Same as always.
Chapter 21
Two more refugees. Jamie looked up as Retha and Max entered the small living room and handed them bottles of beer. “How’s she doing?”
“Exhausted. We waited in the hall until she fell asleep.” Retha reached for a brownie along with her beverage. “And she’s already digging. She knows we haven’t told her everything. For now, she knows as much as she can handle.”
“That won’t last.” Max stared at his brown bottle. “She’s not a wimp.”
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “No one thinks she is.”
He sighed. “Sorry. I’ve watched a lot of people give up on her, and they usually do it in moments like this. She has a right to be sad and scared and curl up in a corner. Her life is a special kind of hell, and today tossed her back in the deep end.”
No argument there. Jamie reached for his fridge and ported more beers—this conversation seemed like it could use them. “How long does it take her to bounce back?”
“Not long.” The thanks in Max’s eyes was for more than the beer. “Usually I’m fighting for patients who have given up on themselves. In twelve years, she never has. Not for more than a few hours, anyhow.”
Jamie had sulks over burnt toaster waffles that lasted longer than that. “Well then, we have a couple of hours to figure out what comes next.” If he timed it right, he could probably avoid the limbo contest his nieces were planning.
Max leaned back and studied the frayed knees of his jeans. “Yeah.”
Hannah wasn’t the only one who had been tossed back into the deep end today. Jamie reached out with the only thing he had to offer. “There are an awful lot of people who can help this time.”
When Max looked up again, his mind had lost some of the sad. “Witch brain trust, huh?”
Retha chuckled and joined Max on the couch. “Depends. Can you handle people transporting into the room again?”
The good doctor had done impressively well the first time. Not everyone would have been quite so sanguine about an emergency ride into a Star Trek episode. Jamie began quietly triggering Realm transport spells. Max was in deep now—he might as well get a good view of Witch Central front and center.
Assorted people began landing in the room, most with something in their hands. Moira, balancing her cup of tea, sat down by Max. “You’re the young man who’s been taking care of our Hannah, are you?”
Max only grinned and saluted her with his beer.
Lauren, Devin, Sophie, and Nell all found seats—and Ginia landed moments later, arms crossed and scowl in place, daring anyone to tell her to leave.
Jamie sighed—he hadn’t activated her transport spell. And then went to bat for the rights of girlchildren everywhere. He pinged Nell, carefully. She’s a really creative witch—she might be useful.
His mental channel had been tight, but apparently not tight enough. Every mind witch in the room grinned into their beverage of choice.
And none of them disagreed.
Nell rolled her eyes. That, and she’s probably planted a code bomb in any transport spell intended to get her out of here.
That too. Jamie just waited—time to let love and common sense do their work.
Nell patted the seat beside her. “Come sit down, troublesome child. And don’t eat all my cookies.”
Max’s eyes had gotten much wider than normal. “Don’t you all have a wedding to be at?”
“People are mostly taking afternoon naps.” Ginia yawned. “There’s gonna be lobster chowder and lots of dancing in a couple of hours, if you want to come.”
“That’s a pretty cool invitation.” Max smiled. “But I’ll probably hang out here with Hannah.”
“We’ll take turns.” Ginia spoke with the assurance of a child who had grown up in the middle of Witch Central team sports. “One healer and one mind witch at all times. We don’t want her to get hit by precog again until her channels recover.”
Respect for Max went up several notches when he took their youngest healer entirely seriously. “Okay. I’m neither of those, but I’ll help however I can.”
“Ginia’s right.” Sophie took over from her apprentice, who was currently stuffing herself full of cookie—it had already been a very long day for the witches who were coast-hopping.
-o0o-
Hannah walked into the room, eyes still crusty with her failed attempt at sleep. She’d stared at ceilings enough in her life—and the murmur of conversation in her living room had sent out a quiet gravitational beam. “Ginia’s right about what? Aren’t you all supposed to be at a wedding?”
“Soon, my dear.” Moira smiled. “How are you feeling?”
Like hell. But as Hannah looked around the room, she realized that description fit pretty much everyone present. Her eyes narrowed. “What the heck happened?” A whole lo
t of tired mind witches. There had only been one cause for that lately. She found Retha. “What did you have to do to turn my attack off?”
“The same thing we did in Caro’s shop.” The older woman spoke evenly. “But we arrived later, so it took more effort.”
They’d arrived later. Hannah felt her brain stall. The miracle was that they’d come at all, from thousands of miles away. She’d been all alone when she’d dropped to the floor. “How did you know?”
Retha and Nell exchanged careful glances.
The bottom dropped out of Hannah’s gut.
It was Lauren who finally spoke. “Aervyn was getting a feed from your visions.”
The small, giggly, life-adoring boy from the top of the play fort. The one who had plopped himself in her lap, soaking wet, and offered up half a brownie and his favorite water blaster.
Hannah felt something inside her strangling. “Is he okay?” The words came out like cracked ice.
“We think so.” Jamie’s eyes held huge empathy. “He’s in Nova Scotia now, playing on the beach with his cousins. Getting his good wedding gear all wet.”
“Is he—“ She couldn’t find oxygen for the awful fear. “Has he got precog?”
“We don’t think so.” Jamie swallowed. “We hope not.”
An evil, awful shadow rose up over the room. Hannah gave up trying to stuff her guts back into their proper cavity—that didn’t matter anymore. She walked over to Nell and crouched down, looking the adorable boy’s mother straight in the eyes. “Could I make that happen?”
Nell didn’t look away. And her face didn’t move.
But her eyes told the truth.
Oh, God. She was putting a small child at risk.
Hannah tried to imagine the buoyant, giggly Aervyn at Chrysalis House—and something in her heart died.
And then something rose, fierce and hot and right.
She stood up and waited until all the eyes in the room turned her way. “I’ll go back to Chrysalis House.” She held up her hand as the shocked protests started. “It’s my choice. I won’t hurt a small boy so I can have a chance at a life, and it will be easier to protect him if I’m there.”
She found Sophie. “You can help Dr. Max with my medicines. Something to make sure I don’t have any more attacks.”
“Oh, child.” Moira’s face contorted in sorrow. “We would never ask such a thing of you.”
They hadn’t asked. “This magic stole my life. I won’t let it steal someone else’s.”
She met the eyes of each person in the room—one last moment of communion. And needed to say one last thing before she left. “You gave me a week, and I will always be grateful.”
And then she turned to Dr. Max and his hollow, sad, proud eyes. It was time to go.
-o0o-
The room sat silent, the trauma of hideous sacrifice and horrible failure shrieking in every mind.
Lauren felt the consuming need to puke. To scream. To rend a hole in the word “impossible” and find a way.
And then a ten-year-old girl stepped forward, her fists clenched at her sides. Ginia looked at Hannah, face white and truth shining in her eyes. “There might be another way.” Her chin trembled, but her words didn’t waver. “It would be very dangerous, but you deserve to know. There might be a way.”
Time stopped.
And so did Hannah.
“I read it in one of the old books.” Ginia spun around, seeking her teachers. “A young woman with terrible precog. They stopped her magic.”
“It might have been done, lovely girl.” Moira’s hands fluttered in the air and then gripped each other back in her lap. “Many things we once knew have been lost to history.”
“The old books have clues. You tell us that if we read carefully, we can save some of that history. Use it and make it part of our present.”
The sadness on the old witch’s face was breathtaking. “I will look, my girl. I promise.”
“I already did.” The young healer’s words were soft now, and for the first time, uncertain. “I don’t know if I found it all. And I had to guess at some of the parts. But I think they scorched her channels. From the inside.”
Emotional earthquake hit the room. Witches seeking to name. To fight. To protect.
Ginia stood very still and met Hannah’s eyes. A red rock. A fellow fighter.
And somewhere deep inside their collective soul, hope rose from the ashes.
“It might work.” Sophie nodded very slowly. “Magic needs a pathway. Without one, it has no foothold.”
“I don’t understand.” Hannah spoke in the harsh whispers of someone risen from the dead.
“There is magic everywhere in the universe.” Sophie recited words they had all heard hundreds of times. “For most people, it passes right by them and through them, but some of us have affinities for the different energies. We can call them into ourselves, give them pathways and channels to flow in, just like our blood. If we damage your channels carefully enough, the magic would have nowhere to come.”
Lauren wasn’t listening to the words. Moira’s face as she listened was serene—but her mind quaked. Cataclysmic fear.
For her students. Those she loved like daughters.
Lauren knew what it was to step in the path of Hannah’s precog. She waited for Sophie’s words to end. “It would be dangerous.” Not a question—Moira’s mind left no other possibility.
“Yes.” Sophie kept her focus on Hannah. “It would require absolute precision timing with an enormous and volatile magic. It would be very dangerous for both the healer and the witch.”
Hannah’s head was already shaking. “No. I won’t trade someone else’s life for mine.”
“We can do it together.” Ginia sounded very young—and utterly determined. “There will be less risk then.” She turned to Sophie and Moira, beseeching, and held up her hands, tears streaming down her cheeks. “We are given this magic to heal. To help. We can’t let her go back to that place.”
Lauren felt the room’s collective shudder.
And then one soul rose up to meet it.
“I’ll do it.” Sophie laid her hand on the young healer’s arm. “Alone.”
Thunderclouds stormed across Ginia’s face. “No smart healer works alone—you taught me that. You’ll need someone to hold the channel ends open while you start the fire.”
Sophie laid her hands over the thunderclouds. Smoothing. Gentling. “There are others who can help.”
The student stared at her teacher for a long, silent time. “They aren’t as good as I am.”
Hannah’s horrified thoughts were as plain as if she’d shouted them. Seeing what the rest of them already knew. It wasn’t hubris speaking. The second-best healer in the witching world was a child.
And when their weaving witch moved, it was to stand in front of that child. “When I go back there, I will remember how brave you are, every single day. And it will help me, I promise you that. Every single day.”
“No. I can do it.” Ginia’s eyes held the weight of ancients, even as tears washed down her face in sheets. “Someday this might happen to my brother. I have to know what to do.”
Devin’s hands clenched hard around Lauren’s shoulders, a man trying to yank back words that had already been said. But the face she watched was Nell’s—and the message there was absolute.
There would not be another Sullivan child put in the crosshairs of Hannah’s magic.
Not while Nell Sullivan Walker still breathed.
-o0o-
No. She would not let them make this choice.
Moira collected the healing wisdom of a thousand years, the headstrong courage of her people, and the steadfast beating of the earth under her feet.
And set her teacup down on the table. “There is, perhaps, another way.”
The eyes that turned her direction ranged from disbelief to gratitude to frantic, aching hope.
First, to honor those bravest. “Ginia, my beautiful, lovely girl, you have a he
art of pure magic. And one day, healing may well call on you to put your life on the line for love and craft and duty.” The words rose up from the very earth and trees and flowers. “But that day will not be today.”
She looked next to the first they’d fetched. “Lauren, you have taken your place in the very heart of this community, and it hurts my soul that we asked so much of you so quickly. Perhaps it is no accident that we found you when we did.”
Already hearts were nodding.
And they had not yet named the greatest bravery of this day.
The woman who would walk away from her life to keep a small boy safe. Her body might live on in Chrysalis House—but Hannah Kendrick would die.
And on this day, Moira refused to believe that had to be. She gazed at their weaving witch and felt the old magics stirring. There just might be a way. “Hannah, my sweet, you fought twelve years for the right to be free. Allow us to stand beside you.”
Jamie spoke the question in a dozen heads. “What is the other way?”
“It is an old magic. One of the oldest, in fact.” Witches had not always been kind to their own. “It was done as a punishment, a kind of magical banishing.” And only when Ginia had pulled her clues from history had it occurred to Moira that there might be others. “It’s a spell that asks for power to be denied to one who is no longer deserving.”
“No one deserves this kind of magic.” Jamie’s response was instant and heartfelt. “It took away twelve years of Hannah’s life.”
“Aye.” And that, perhaps, would give them a foothold. “It is spellwork born of prejudice and small-mindedness, but there is precedent for using it for good.” Or at least the murky threads of hushed Irish story said it might be so. “Back when witches were most feared, it was occasionally used to protect young girls—the ones who came into their power too young to be circumspect.” Better to live without magic than to die at the hands of the torturers.
“Kenna.” Horror blew into Jamie’s eyes.
“Exactly that.” Moira nodded, keeping her mind carefully focused. The next part needed exquisite care. She turned to Hannah. “The words are harsh, and I would be afraid of changing them overmuch.” For better or for worse, they were the words of history. “A full circle of witches would gather and declare you no longer welcome in our midst.” A casting out of the cruelest kind.
A Lost Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 7) Page 21