An Unlikely Witch Read online

  “Oh, nothing to worry about,” said Helga grandly, sweeping on a bright blue feather boa and dropping a kiss on the top of Nell’s head. “The word’s gone out that the big-people Sullivans have something hard to do and that you need to be reminded that we love you.”

  She headed for the door, grinning back over her shoulder. “Just consider me the opening act. Lizard’s got the main gig, and she’s going to blow you all away.”

  Nell shook her head, bemused, as the door swung shut. If Helga and Lizard were in cahoots with the little people of Witch Central, the world might never be the same again.

  -o0o-

  It was a very strange collision of her worlds. Lauren looked across the table at Moira, sitting in Romano’s front booth in her winter cloak, looking like she’d just dropped in from several centuries past. And drinking a beverage that most definitely wasn’t tea.

  Not that she was complaining—they were being treated like royalty. Romano adored the old Irish witch, and he’d dipped into his special collection of espresso beans to impress her.

  Lauren took a sip from her own cup, not sure she had the self-control to make heaven last much longer. The rich, dark smell alone was making her neurons giddy. “I didn’t know you drank coffee.” Especially at 7 p.m. That wasn’t very sane, even for a caffeine-addicted realtor.

  Green eyes twinkled her direction. “When in Rome…”

  Romano’s roots were in some little village far south of Naples, but that probably didn’t matter overly much to anyone other than the pasta maestro himself. “Every time I come in here, he tells me about the beautiful orchid you gave him. It blooms every other week, and he loves it like a grandchild.” The man had plenty of those, too. And anyone who didn’t want to hear about them or his beloved orchids needed to go satisfy their noodle cravings somewhere else.

  Few did. The linguine was worth it—and Romano never forgot a face or a name or a story.

  “Ginia did most of the work with the orchid.” Moira smiled, looking around the crowded, homey restaurant, conversation bubbling under cheerful holiday music. “And anyone who can build a place of community like this is most welcome to whatever small gifts I can provide.”

  It was a place of magic. Lauren loved to sit in one of Romano’s booths and watch bustling, sophisticated Berkeley residents walk in the door. Unsuspecting newbies. Usually he left them alone long enough for their noodles to arrive. And then he’d take a tour of the floor, shoving tablets and phones into bags and solo diners over to crowded tables. Liberally sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and enough kindness that no one managed to mind for long.

  Change out the Parmesan cheese for tea, and it wasn’t hard to understand why he’d bonded with an old Irish granny.

  And one realtor knew better than to sit down innocently at a table with either of them. She sent a casual look Moira’s direction, trying to judge whether they’d hit the talking part of their dinner just yet.

  “You know what I’m here about.” Competent hands split one of the still-warm rolls and offered up half of the yeasty goodness. “But I’d have come just for a chance to sit here with you and drink in what’s offered in this marvelous place.”

  Lauren was pretty sure they weren’t talking about the espresso anymore. And she knew a little something about soaking in the ambience. “I’m glad you came to visit. Lizard will be sad she missed you.” As sad as her associate got these days, anyhow.

  Moira’s eyes crinkled. “How do things go for our wee poet and her man?”

  Not the couple they were here to talk about, but it was a worthy detour. “If you could bottle the happy buzz of those two, you’d make a fortune.”

  “Aye.” A pleased and knowing smile crossed the old witch’s face. “He finally got what he wanted, and she got what she’d barely dared to dream of. Either of those can make a soul buzz in lovely fashion.”

  It was all of that and more. “He came by the office yesterday. She was busy with a client, so he just sat and watched her in the conference room.” With a look on his face that had left Lauren’s heart fluttering stupidly.

  “I imagine it’s much the same as the way a certain Sullivan looks at you when you’re not paying attention.” Moira’s mind spiked with mischief. “In my day, we’d have been expecting babies from the lot of you by spring.”

  It was impossible not to laugh. “That would wreak havoc with our office’s busy season.”

  “Ah, you’d manage. You’d slide the babe into one of those fancy slings and do what women have always done.” An old hand patted hers. “But not to worry. I know that’s not the dream of your heart just yet.”

  Something that felt terribly selfish right about now. Lauren sobered, feeling the reason for Moira’s visit land on the table between them. “It seems like dreaming and wishing isn’t always enough.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Sadness slid into wise eyes. “And it’s a journey hard to wish on anyone, but it does seem a particularly harsh and unfair thing when it’s someone we love.”

  Love wasn’t the half of it. “She’s my sister.” Lauren looked down, daring to say the one thing she hadn’t been able to get out with anyone else. “I wonder sometimes if it might not be her that’s supposed to have this baby. Maybe it’s me.”

  -o0o-

  Moira felt the snap of anger. Not at the woman sitting at the table with her, but at the single moment of vision that was tying so very many of the people she loved up in knots.

  Seven decades of learning to trust, and still, she wanted to shake her fist at the universe.

  There were, however, more important tasks to attend to. And this one was clearly long overdue. She reached out for Lauren’s hands. “Dreams aren’t exchangeable, sweet girl. And you do Nat no service by wishing you could do this for her.”

  Brown eyes looked up, flashing stubbornness. “We’ve all assumed the little boy in the vision looks like Jamie. Maybe he looks like Devin.”

  There were times to let people wander the wilderness by themselves. And times for a wily old matriarch to pound a big signpost into the dirt. Moira reached for her cudgel, post at the ready. “I’ve no doubt that when you and Devin decide to have babies, they will be truly lovely, and they might well have brown curls and dancing eyes and flashing smiles.” She would bet her life on it—the Sullivan genes ran straight and true. “But you’ve felt what Jamie and Nat saw more strongly than most.”

  Lauren shrugged, still resisting. “I’m a mind witch. Comes with the territory.”

  And a very good friend. Which wasn’t doing her objectivity any favors just now. “Then use that, my dear, not your eyes. You’ve felt Jamie’s mind when he looks at Kenna.”

  Lauren nodded, puzzled.

  “And when he looks at Aervyn, who he loves very much, just as he would a child of yours.” She paused, a matriarch well experienced with the power of good timing.

  And watched the woman across the table put together the rest. “It still feels different.” The realtor sighed. “They believe the small boy is theirs.”

  “Aye.” The Sullivans loved easily and well—but the love of a parent for their child was unmistakable. Moira leaned in, stepping her heaviest weight onto the scales last. “And they’ve believed that from the very first, haven’t they? From the first day they set eyes on each other as strangers.”

  Lauren had been there. She would know.

  “Yes.” A quiet rasp slid out over a throat tight with tears. “They were willing to believe, even then. He was theirs.”

  Aye. They’d opened their hearts to each other and to the impossible. And that was why this was hurting so many people so deeply. Love like that had earned a happy ending a thousand times over.

  The matriarch moved aside, and a sentimental old witch took her place. She reached out to grip Lauren’s hands. “I came here to tell you to watch over your friend. Her soul shakes right now.”

  Brown eyes said they already knew.

  Moira nodded. “I’ll tell you this instead.” Even matr
iarchs needed a place to let the wishes of their heart tumble out sometimes. She reached into her bag and pulled out her knitting. Bright red yarn, two balls of it. Running up to two lumpy shapes on her needles.

  Lauren frowned. “What are those?”

  Defiance. Hope. An old witch’s answer to the interminable waiting. “Mittens.” Just the size for a small boy.

  Chapter 11

  Moira looked up from her knitting as a pile of books landed with a thud on the coffee table. “Oh, goodness, child. You startled me.” Mostly because an old witch’s head had been off in the clouds, wandering in circles through half-forgotten herbal lore.

  Trying to find a tidbit they might have missed.

  If the books in the pile were any indication, Ginia had been trying the same thing with rather more fortitude. “You’ve been doing some research, have you?”

  Ginia looked awfully sober. “A lot of babies used to die.”

  “Aye.” Not a truth they had hidden from her, but a much younger Moira Doonan well remembered her first reading of some of those books. Midwife journals, mostly. Seeing all the weights and genders, knowing the names of the mothers who cried for the loss of their babes—that made it far more real. “It was a fine day of work back then when a healer could leave a healthy mama and her wee one.”

  It was still a fine day of work.

  “Maybe the problem was what they used to try to help the mamas get pregnant.” Ginia picked up one of the dustier tomes, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “This one says to make a bowl of goat’s blood and raw eggs and drink that every month on the full moon. And some other yucky stuff if that didn’t work.”

  Moira smiled. It was exactly that kind of brew that had given witches a bad name—the potion had likely tasted foul and smelled worse. “I’d imagine that was quite a fine remedy for infertility in those days.”

  Her student looked entirely flummoxed.

  “Ah, sweetling.” It was so easy to sit here by a comfortable fire, with a full belly, and forget what most of history had been like. “Back in my great-gran’s day, many women wanted to be having a dozen babies or more. What do you think happened when they did that?”

  Big eyes tried to wrap around such a crazy notion. “I bet they were really tired!”

  Tired in ways most modern women never had to contemplate—although they’d done a fine job of creating new forms of exhaustion. “Indeed. And some of them found it difficult to have the fourth or fifth babe. Their bodies had decided to take a rest.”

  An entirely cute nose was back to wrinkling. “I don’t see how goat’s blood helped with that.”

  “It’s full of iron and minerals.” Moira picked up her needles, thinking back. In those days, maternal nutrition had been a fierce battle. “My gran often prescribed an egg a day for a woman who had taken to feeling poorly.”

  “I bet she said to cook them.” Ginia wasn’t giving in on this one easily. “And I bet she didn’t say anything about adding bug parts or seeds from the maidenhair tree.”

  The latter made Moira blink. “Who said that?” The herb they knew as ginko biloba grew in her garden, but she hadn’t planted it herself, and didn’t know of any back in Ireland who had, either. It was one of Sophie’s additions, spurred by her interest in Chinese medicinals.

  Ginia frowned, doing the job of every healer trainee and trying to pull up the details of what she’d read. “It was from the book written by the traveling healer. She heard a minstrel sing a song about the very luckiest women being the ones who ate the seeds of a maidenhair tree, and they would have babies with fat cheeks and good dispositions.”

  Moira snorted. An aphrodisiac would do nothing of the sort, but Irish bards hadn’t been the first or the last to try to propagate such nonsense on the female population. “I expect the writer was curious about the herb.” Songs often carried the hints of truth, even if they blew the rest of things all out of proportion.

  “Maybe.” Blue eyes looked into the fire, lost and a little glum.

  Ah. Done with traipsing through old fertility recipes, then. “What’s on your mind, my dear?”

  “I wanted to help Nat.” Ginia sighed. “I read until my eyes hurt, but I don’t think I found anything useful at all.”

  She wasn’t the only witch feeling that way. And perhaps it would help her to know it. “Sophie’s done scan after scan, and she’s not finding things yet either. The way of the healer isn’t always quick.”

  A blonde head nodded, not overly convinced.

  The hazards of having more talent than the average ten witches. Moira leaned in for a quick hug—and felt a seed she’d been nurturing for weeks suddenly explode into full bloom. Something old, indeed. “Sit here for a moment, my sweet girl. I think that now might be the perfect time for your Solstice gift.”

  Moira made her way over to the small glass-fronted bookcase and took out a tattered box that held one of her most prized possessions. She turned back to her student, feeling the deep rightness—and the sharp, sweet memory of the moment in time when this gift had been handed to her.

  Ginia’s eyes had stretched into big blue platters.

  Carefully, Moira settled the simple box in the lap of the girl who would one day be the finest healer an old Irish witch would ever know. “It is right that you have this, lovey. My great-gran gave it to me when I was just a little older than you are.”

  A soft, awed exhale as trembling fingers touched the top of the box.

  Moira smiled at the reverence. Great-gran would be very pleased. “The pages are tattered and torn and you’ll need to treat them with care, but there’s such wisdom in here.”

  Ginia cuddled the box like it held treasure. “Maybe there will be something in here to help Nat.”

  Perhaps. Gran had been a fine midwife, and a more accurate source of information than most. “Come sit with me on the couch, and we can look at some of the pages together.” It would be pure delight, even if all they did was touch the words of history. “You’ve a good instinct for clues. You never know what we might find.”

  And it might well be more fruitful than an old witch swimming around in the lost memories of her mind.

  -o0o-

  Lauren looked up, surprised. Trinity wasn’t entirely a stranger at Berkeley Realty these days, but she usually crept through the doors in the evening, not at the crack of dawn.

  “Hey.” The vibe of the streets still clung hard to the young woman who now ran Lizard’s castle with a firm hand and really squishy heart. Especially when she was out in public. “I need a favor.”

  Those were big words in the realtor world—and even bigger words in the concrete shadows Trinity came from. And Lauren totally owed her one after the whole sending-Missy-to-yoga deal. She set down her paperwork. “Okay, shoot.”

  “You know that house you guys sold over on Jefferson?”

  Lauren slurped more of her coffee and ran back through their recent deals. Only one on Jefferson. “You mean the cottage Lizard sold to Helga?”

  “Yeah.” Leather-clad shoulders tensed. “Do you still have a key?”

  Lauren felt her eyebrows fly up—and then caffeine connected the right neurons. Trinity had been given Helga’s name for the holidays. An act that had caused a tantrum heard for blocks and smiles on the faces of the three girls who had emerged from the castle victorious.

  Trinity was part of Witch Central whether she liked it or not.

  And not by a flicker was Lauren going to suggest anything different. “I don’t, but I bet Lizard has one.”

  “I can’t ask her.” Trinity was almost squirming now. “She’s all mushy and happy with Josh and every time I bang on their door, I figure they’re upstairs knocking boots.”

  Lauren snickered. “Oh, thanks. Just the mental image I needed this morning.”

  The woman newly off the streets grinned. “I hear you got a pretty hot guy yourself—what are you doing in here so early?”

  Coffee nearly splattered all over the room. Devin had woken up before
the fishes. And that was as far down that track as she was going with an audience watching. “I’ll get you a key.” There was probably one hanging around the office somewhere. Or, knowing Helga, one under the welcome mat.

  “Thanks.” Trinity got up to leave, mind still holding the edgy discomfort it always carried when she showed up.

  The urge to give it a friendly poke was unavoidable. “Be careful before you let yourself in—I hear there’s a fair amount of boot knocking going on in there, too.”

  Something that almost resembled embarrassment slid into Trinity’s mind. “Yeah. I heard. I’ll make sure they’re scarce.”

  The I-don’t-belong-here vibe was easing. Lauren gave it another prod. “I don’t suppose I can talk you into telling me what you’re up to.” Nobody in Witch Central was spilling anything good these days—the place was lousy with secrets.

  “Nah.” A saucy grin and another step toward the door.

  The body language said she was leaving. The barest whisper from her mind said something different. Carefully, Lauren tiptoed in. “You sure? I have brownies. With candy-cane icing.”

  “That stuff will kill you.” A look of disdain—and the unspoken wish, breathing a little louder.

  All was fair in love and making friends. Lauren pulled out her best weapon. “I have enough for the whole castle.”

  “You’re evil.” Glares and capitulation and a wish daring to exhale. Trinity stared at a stretch of teal-blue wall. “I hear Helga pretends that place is some Paris garret. Thought maybe I’d go shine it up some.”

  Helga would love whatever happened, but Lauren was openly curious now. She pulled the container of brownies out of her bottom drawer. “Shine it up how?”

  “Paint.” Her visitor’s mind was a tangled mess of tortured cautiousness and a need to tell. She touched the teal blue on Lauren’s wall. “This is a good color.”

  “You’re going to paint her walls?” Being a mind witch wasn’t making this any clearer.

  “Raven’s gonna do that part.” Trinity hung her head and pulled some scruffy pages out of her pocket. “Marco took me to the library and we found some of those old painter dudes. Streetscapes, he called them.” Her eyes fired a warning. “We made copies. And paid for them and everything.”