Debora Geary - A Nomadic Witch

Cripes, she hadn’t even made it that far. So much for being the calm presence in the room. Sophie reached out again to bright lavender eyes, this time with a fully barriered scan, and tried to contain her unease. The aura of power around the tiny girl was supernova bright to magical sight-and Marcus was right. Most of it wasn’t hers.

Time to wake up more than Fisher’s Cove.

Nell shook off the still-weird feeling of a Realm transport spell and caught her daughter by the shoulder. “Easy, sweetheart-Mike said it wasn’t an emergency.”

Ginia stopped trying to run and rubbed her eyes, adorable in jeans, a single bunny slipper, and one of Aervyn’s T-shirts. She’d been asleep in her brother’s bed when the all-healers alarm had sounded. “They need my help, Mama.”

Nell bent over and slid the second bunny slipper on a small foot, trying not to resist the adult-sized weight that came with her daughter’s talents. “I know, love. Here, have a cookie.”

“Aunt Moira has cookies too, you know.” Ginia’s eyes were brighter now, her sense of humor waking up along with the rest of her brain. “But none of them are as good as yours.”

If cookies were all you rode with into battle some days, they’d better be damned good ones. Nell took her daughter’s hand. “Let’s go find the troops, shall we?” They’d beamed into a very quiet cottage, so clearly the action was elsewhere.

They’d made it about three steps into Moira’s garden when Lizzie came flying down the path, eyes glowing. “Ginnie, Ginnie! Uncle Marcus has a baby girl and she’s cute and her name is Morgan and we have to untie her magical stuff and Sophie says maybe Net magic will help but we should be careful. Come on!”

Nell, well used to translating small-child communications, relaxed. Whatever it was that had called them here, it wasn’t life-threatening-for all her exuberance, Lizzie took healing very seriously.

And then the details of her babble hit. Marcus. A baby. Magic.

Oh, shit.

She grabbed both girls’ hands. “Where is everyone, Lizzie?”

“At Sophie and Mike’s house. That’s where Uncle Marcus brought Morgan, and he woke Adam up and everything.”

Nell winced-Adam was a touchy sleeper. “Who else is there?”

“Just you guys. And Gran.” Lizzie squiggled through the fence at the end of the garden. “We’re not supposed to make a big kerfuffle cuz it’s the middle of the night.”

Ginia hopped over the fence, bunny slippers and all. Nell grinned as she used the gate-she’d been a fence-hopper too, once upon a time.

“Oh.” Their small guide stopped, forehead wrinkling. “And I woke up Elorie even though Aaron said that it better be really important or heads would roll.” She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t know if heads would roll very well-they’re kind of bumply.”

Yikes. Nell moved the girls along more quickly. Anything that involved waking up the sleeping mothers of small babies edged into emergency territory. Her programmer brain was also starting to come online. Elorie’s only magic was Net power-and if Sophie was awake, maybe it wasn’t Ginia’s healing powers they were after.

They filed into Sophie’s house. The worry in the room would have hit Nell hard-if the basket on the table hadn’t already gotten her full attention. It practically glowed radioactive with magic.

Elorie turned, face taut with effort. “I don’t think it’s Net power. Similar, but I can’t see enough of the threads to untangle it.”

Sophie never looked away from the rosy-cheeked baby. “Is it fire power, Nell? We know it’s not water, air, or earth.”

Not any fire she’d ever known. “No-but it’s one of the most complex spellcasts I’ve seen in a long time.”

The relief in the room was palpable. Marcus shifted off the wall. “You can see the threads? Can you undo them?”

Nell studied the intricately woven lines. Given three days or a full circle, maybe. “What’s it doing?” Unraveling a spell was dangerous work-doing it blind was insanity.

“Some of it’s a barrier.” Marcus stood beside her, magically pointing.

Nell frowned. “You can see it now?”

“I tapped into your thoughts.”

Which normally would have earned him a serious kick in the shins, but given the circumstances, she’d give him a pass-his spellcasting talents were second only to hers. She looked where he pointed. “Yeah, okay, I can see that. A three-layer barrier-one inside, one out, one figure eight.”

Figure-eight barriers had made Nell the premier spellcaster of her generation. They kept magic stable without a caster-and there were only three other witches she knew of who could set them reliably. Her brother, her youngest son, and the crabby witch standing beside her. Analyzing more quickly now, she slid past the barrier lines. “And a hell of a protection spell.”

“Double-sided.” His words were calm as glass-his mind anything but. “Protecting us as well as her.”

Nell was no stranger to babies who could rock the planet with their magic. She focused on the rest of the spell-and the small baby in the basket began to wail. Loudly.

Two hands slid into the basket before anyone else could move, soft Irish murmurs doing their age-old job.

And the spell evaporated.

Moira turned around, Morgan tucked into her arms. “Evan would mean us no harm. The wee girl is hungry. Let’s see what we can do about that, shall we?”

Nell stared at the space above the baby’s head. Not five seconds ago, it had contained enough lines of magic to blast Fisher’s Cove to Mars. “It’s gone.”

She could feel the same shock in Marcus’s mind-and then felt it double as Moira held out their tiny guest.

Marcus stepped back, horror radiating from every pore. “I’m terrible with babies.”

Moira simply settled the baby in his resistant arms.

He glared at Nell with something akin to begging in his eyes.

There was no running away from destiny. Five years of being Aervyn’s mother had tattooed that onto her soul. She shook her head, feeling a large spurt of sympathy for the man destiny now targeted. “Sorry. She wasn’t sent to me.”

They said that a man discovered his true friends in his greatest hour of need.

Marcus stood in the middle of the gravel road that served as the main street of Fisher’s Cove, looked around at the emptiness, and tried to will his panic away.

Apparently he had no friends.

They’d handed him the baby, a bag of supplies, a couple of cookies. And then Aunt Moira had patted his cheek and sent him on his way. He presumed the cookies were for him.

The small bundle in his arms wiggled. Hecate’s hells. It was the middle of the night-didn’t babies sleep?

A small fist squirmed out of the blanket and started waving in the general direction of Marcus’s face. He tucked it back inside and cursed as a foot emerged instead. Sophie’s sausage-wrap contraption was rapidly coming unglued.

He had a second to form misanthropic thoughts about octopus babies, and then her face started to scrunch up. He felt the wail before he heard it. She looked like a baby bird, pink mouth gaped wide in loud search of sustenance.

Food. Baby birds needed food. Marcus juggled the bag on his shoulder, desperately seeking anything that resembled a bottle. His fingers brushed against a ridiculous number of mysterious objects. He had no wish to discover what the cold, wet, squishy things were. Or the jingly ones. Or why he needed two tons of supplies to last until morning.