A Hidden Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 2) Page 4

  It was a sweet piece of coding, and they’d tested it on practically every witch in California who owned a computer mouse.

  Mia and Shay were at Jamie’s place, working to integrate the scans into Enchanter’s Realm. Ginia, who had the deepest attachment to Moira, had asked to stay for Elorie’s test.

  Nell hoped that wasn’t a really bad idea.

  Ginia bounced on the chair beside her. “Hi, Aunt Moira!”

  “Hello, sweetling. And hello to you as well, Nell.”

  Nell could see Elorie’s face. Her eyes were full of sadness and dread.

  Her empathetic witchling could see it, too. “Don’t be scared, Elorie. The scan is really easy, and we worked hard all day to make it a lot better.”

  A face Nell recognized, but couldn’t name, came onto the screen.

  “This is my nephew Marcus,” said Moira. “I think you’ve met him a time or two, Nell, but it’s been a while.”

  Marcus spoke in a kind of arrogant growl. “She’ll know me better as Gandalf.”

  Ginia gasped and stomped her foot. “Oooohh! You locked me in a high tower yesterday and gave the key to the evil sorcerer’s apprentice!”

  Marcus raised an eyebrow. “You’re Warrior Girl?”

  Nell thought he should look a little more impressed. Ginia, having just displaced Sophie, was now the number-four-ranked player in the witch-only levels of Realm, and hot on Gandalf’s heels. Her girl had some mad gaming skills.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” Ginia whispered behind her hand. “He’s toast—he just doesn’t know it yet. Nobody locks me in a tower and gets away with it.”

  Marcus held up his mouse. “Okay, Warrior Girl—run this scan of yours on me. I want to see how it works.”

  Nell leaned forward and hit a few keys. “I’ve sent a screen-share so you can see the readouts we get.” She nodded at Ginia to start the test.

  The trio of heads on the Nova Scotia end all squinted at the screen. Marcus read aloud. “Mind powers at moderate to strong levels. That’s right.”

  Elorie pointed at the screen. “Strong air elementals, weak in water and earth.”

  Marcus snorted. “Someone needs to double-check their code. Air and water are correct, but I don’t have earth power.”

  Ginia glared. “You do so, Gandalf.”

  Nell elbowed her witchling. “This is real life, daughter mine, not the game. No trash talking—show some manners.”

  Moira chortled. “You might keep that in mind yourself, Marcus.”

  Still mutinous, Ginia eyed her archnemesis through the screen. “Have Aunt Moira test you, then. I bet you do so have earth power.”

  The tone of her delivery earned another elbow, but Nell couldn’t fault the idea. Marcus raised his eyebrow again. “That’s not necessary. I’m a trained witch; I can pull any power sources available to me.”

  Ginia crossed her arms. “So pull earth power, then.”

  He gave an arrogant shrug and reached off-screen, coming back with a closed flower bud in his hand. Nell smiled. Moira always had flowers nearby. Marcus closed his eyes for a moment, and then focused on the bud.

  Ginia was the only one not the least bit surprised when the flower very slowly bloomed. Moira gave a delighted laugh. “I guess you can teach an old witch some new tricks.”

  Marcus studied the flower a moment longer. “That’s some nice coding you’ve done, Nell.”

  Nell grinned. “Wasn’t me. Warrior Girl and her two sidekicks did almost all the work.”

  Marcus scowled. “There are three of you?”

  “Yep,” Ginia said. “But if you wanna take on all three of us, you have to leave the witch-only levels. Fight us code-to-code. My sisters aren’t witches.”

  He almost cracked a smile. “I think I’ll stay where I have magic on my side, little fighter. I have no doubt the three of you could take me down coding with one hand behind your backs.”

  It took a moment for Nell, caught up in the banter between her daughter and Marcus, to notice Elorie’s white face.

  Oh, shit. They had more important things to do than schedule a Realm take-down. Time to end the agony of waiting. “Okay, Elorie, you’re up next. Grab the mouse, and let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Elorie sat frozen. Marcus shoved the mouse in her hand with an impatient arrogance that had Nell gritting her teeth.

  Ginia ran the test, and the numbers popped up on both screens.

  Moira was the first to speak. “I don’t understand this.”

  Nell shook her head. “I don’t either. It says Elorie has significant power potential, source unknown.”

  “Speak English,” Marcus growled.

  Ginia stepped into the breach. “It means she’s a witch, and probably a strong one, but we don’t know what kind. It’s not any of the types the test can read.”

  “So, what can’t your primitive test read?”

  Nell growled. No one insulted her kiddos.

  “Chill, Mama. He’s just a grumpy old man who wishes he could code half as good as me.” Ginia ticked off on her fingers. “It can do elemental, mind, and healing. So that leaves precog and animal magics.”

  Moira shook her head. “Those talents always develop very young and very hard. We’d hardly have missed Elorie communing with the spirits or flying with the seagulls.”

  Marcus crossed his arms. “Use of those power sources still leaves traces we should be able to detect. I’ve scanned Elorie myself. There are no traces.”

  “The code hasn’t been wrong yet,” Ginia said firmly. “And it says Elorie’s a witch.”

  Moira’s helpless shrug was a perfect reflection of how Nell felt. How could you prove the existence of power only a computer could see?

  Marcus was still in arrogant-king-to-peasant mode. “Are you saying my testing is wrong, little girl?”

  Ginia laid her hands on the table in full Warrior Girl form. “Maybe Elorie is an extra-special kind of witch we’ve never seen before.”

  “Maybe your nine-year-old imagination is overriding your logic.”

  “Maybe your imagination got drowned in a moat and eaten by crocodiles.”

  Steam was going to come out of her daughter’s head any minute, and Nell wasn’t in any mood to stop her. Hell, she was a hairsbreadth away from stepping up and holding her cloak. Pompous old witch.

  “Enough.” Elorie started to speak, eyes anguished. Then the screen went blank. Ginia dove under the desk to troubleshoot. When she didn’t surface quickly, Nell went down to help. Ten minutes later, she called Moira’s landline.

  No one had any idea what had happened, but Moira’s computer was entirely cooked.

  Chapter 4

  Elorie sat down at the kitchen table, rubbing her tired hands. After a full day of jewelry making, she appreciated both the break and the sublime smells emanating from the stovetop—the unmistakable scent of basil, melting butter, and something else she couldn’t identify.

  “That smells incredible, sweetie.”

  Her husband turned around and grinned, his “I Cook for Sex” apron splattered in unidentified green stuff. Aaron was an amazing cook, but not a neat one. “Pesto meatballs and risotto. It’ll be just another couple of minutes.”

  Pesto explained the green goo on the apron. “Whatever you’re trying to soften me up for, it’s working.”

  “You’re just a lucky bystander. I’m making pesto omelets for breakfast tomorrow, so I blended a fresh batch this afternoon. I figured I could use some of it to liven up our dinner.”

  “Gran’s totally jealous of your basil patch. Even with magic, she can’t match it.”

  Aaron grinned. “We non-witches have our skills.”

  And he was a constant, solid reminder of that. Elorie got up from the table and laid her head against his back. “I’ll miss your cooking while I’m gone. I wish you could come with me.”

  He turned around and popped a meatball in her mouth. “So do I, but the guests get grumpy when there’s no one here to feed them.”
<
br />   While technically they were co-owners of the Sea Trance Bed & Breakfast Inn, Elorie knew she could slip away for a week and hardly cause a ripple in the smooth functioning of the inn.

  Aaron, unfortunately, was fairly indispensible, especially since their most experienced staff person was currently out on maternity leave. They’d managed to sneak away the night before to celebrate their anniversary, but a whole week was unthinkable.

  He carried two plates to the table and Elorie followed, drooling. As they sat down, he reached for one of her hands and started gently massaging. “Are you all ready for the show?”

  Elorie nodded as she spooned in risotto. She’d been feverishly preparing inventory for the San Francisco Art Fair for over two months, ever since her totally unexpected selection as an emerging artist. Her mentor insisted she would need at least ten thousand dollars of wares to sell, double that if her sea glass was popular.

  It was mind-boggling to imagine selling that much in a weekend, but Elorie believed in her art. She had almost four hundred pieces ready to take with her to California, and her exhausted hands were evidence of just how hard she had worked.

  “I need to go back out tonight and pack up for the plane, but everything is ready to go.”

  Aaron smiled and switched to rubbing her other hand. “I’ll come out and help you with that. Your booth setup should arrive in California tomorrow, and Nell’s going to pick you up at the airport.”

  Elorie tried to find the energy to protest. “She doesn’t need to do that. I can catch a cab.”

  “And when was the last time we let a guest take a cab?”

  He had a point. “It will be nice to see everyone again. I made sea-glass pendants for the girls, since they were so enamored with mine when I visited in March.”

  “They’re pretty magical for young girls. I’ve seen it here, too. Lizzie would happily have a different necklace for every day of the week.”

  Aaron held out his last meatball. All of hers had magically disappeared. Maybe her super-secret hidden witch talent only worked on meatballs.

  He tugged her hair, as if following her jumbled thoughts. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you about all that.” She’d spent a decent chunk of their night away in tears.

  “It wasn’t you, it was the meatballs.” Her husband, long used to her conversational tangents, waited patiently for her to start making sense. Rather than explain the meatballs, she just told him what he really wanted to know.

  “I’ve already wasted far too much of my life hoping to turn into a witch. I’ve held on to that dream for so long, what happened with the computer scan was bound to affect me some. But I have a good life, and a really important opportunity coming up, and I don’t plan to blow it by worrying about stealth magical powers.”

  He just smiled. Aaron was always good for a sanity check, and when your world was full of witches and spells, that was a very good thing.

  Getting away for their anniversary had helped. Her adult life had always had two important gravitational pulls. Her work for and with the witching community was one, and her life with Aaron and her sea glass was the other. A little time away had helped her find steady footing again, on entirely non-magical ground.

  She reached for his hands. “When I get back, maybe we can get started on adding a little Shaw around here.”

  Aaron scooped her up. He moved fast for an innkeeper. “What’s wrong with now?”

  That pretty much ended dinner.

  ~ ~ ~

  Jamie scowled at the melted computer parts on the table. Marcus had quietly overnighted him the innards of Moira’s cooked computer, but there wasn’t much to see besides a mess of mangled metal.

  Not that he could see very well with three curly heads all leaning over the table too.

  “What do you think?” Ginia asked.

  “There’s not a lot to work with, girls. I was hoping Elorie had just shorted something out and we could get a read on some of the data, but…”

  Mia giggled. “I don’t think there’s any data left alive in there. She totally fried it.”

  Jamie nudged Shay, usually the most contemplative of the three. “What do you think?”

  Shay tilted her head. “Are we sure Elorie did this?”

  Quiet didn’t mean slow, Jamie thought. Shay was by far the best debugger of the three because she never skipped any steps, even when the answers seemed obvious.

  Mia shrugged. “What else could have done it? Uncle Jamie, have you ever seen anything like this?”

  He shook his head. “No, but Shay asked a great question. I suspect Elorie’s the culprit, but good coders rule out weird possibilities, too. Elorie wasn’t the only person in the room when this happened.”

  Mia considered the melted mess. “I bet Aervyn could melt a hard drive if he wanted to, and he might not even have to be in the same room.”

  Three sets of eyes looked up in sudden fascination. Uh, oh. This was the kind of stuff where he was supposed to be the adult. His internal debate didn’t last long. He wasn’t a father yet, and trying to zap hard drives with magic sounded like serious fun.

  Mia grinned and jumped up. “I’ll go get Aervyn.”

  Shay looked at Jamie. “I bet you could do it too, couldn’t you?”

  Jamie started digging in boxes, looking for old hard drives. They were about to find out.

  Aervyn bounced into the room with glee written all over his face. “I get to melt computers, Uncle Jamie? Can I blast ’em, just like Cyclops?”

  Jamie jumped in front of his brand-new laptop. “Hold on a minute, hot stuff. Not this computer. And, think Superman, not Cyclops—focused magic. Your mom will be mad at me if we start a big fire in the basement again.”

  He picked up an old hard drive and sat it next to Moira’s melted heap on the table. “First, let me explain what we’re trying to do. We think that one of the witches in Nova Scotia managed to turn computer insides like these ones—into this.”

  Aervyn looked at the cooked hard drive in fascination. “It’s pretty hard to melt metal stuff. They must be a pretty good witch.”

  “Well, that’s part of the problem. We’re not sure who did it, or how they did it. I thought we could do some experiments and see if we can copy what they did.”

  Jamie stopped talking and let his nephew think for a minute. He had his own ideas to try, but Aervyn was a highly creative witch. Left to work out his own solution, he might well come up with something none of them had considered.

  Aervyn looked up with a grin that gave Jamie just enough warning to throw up a hasty training circle. Nell was pretty lenient, but she drew the line at house fires. A few seconds later, the edges of the hard drive were melted, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the puddled goop of Moira’s drive.

  Aervyn frowned. “It’s pretty hard. The metal doesn’t want to melt.” His eyes brightened. “I could do it with a circle to help.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Not just yet, hot stuff. We learned something important here. You used fire power, right? If you can’t melt it by yourself that way, then that’s probably not how this happened. We need to think of a different way to try.”

  Ginia held up a mouse. “If we believe it was Elorie who did it, then she was using one of these.”

  Shay spoke up. “And she was on an open Internet connection.”

  Jamie hardwired the mouse into the hard drive. “Aervyn, do you think you can direct power through this?”

  For once, his trainee looked bewildered. “Maybe.”

  Several tests later, including one where Jamie and Aervyn joined forces, they had managed to do no more than melt the edges of the hard drive, and one small witchling was a tired, hungry boy.

  Jamie sent him upstairs for cookies and stared at the failed experiments on the table. He looked up to see Ginia eyeing his laptop with speculation. He’d been a witch trainer long enough to know when trouble was brewing.

  “Don’t even think it, niece of mine.”

  She looked so innocent
. “Think what?”

  “Whatever you were planning to do with my computer.”

  “Not your computer, exactly. I bet I know how we could do this, but I need a full computer, not just a hard drive.”

  He hoped it was for a good cause. Jamie concentrated for a moment and teleported one of the old clunkers from his home office. “You can use this one, but use the firewalled port to hook it up to the Net. We don’t want to fry anything else by accident.”

  “I’m not going to fry this one—I just need the screen interface.” She nodded to her sisters. “Help me wire the old drive into the USB port.”

  Jamie sat and watched, and soon the old drive was hanging off one of the clunker’s USB ports. They were good, and he was still totally lost. “What are you planning?”

  Ginia flexed her fingers in a movement common to master coders everywhere. “I’m going to melt it with spellcode. Go away. I’ll tell you when it’s ready.”

  Damn. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  He went upstairs to swipe some of Aervyn’s cookies. By the time he came back, three faces were grinning with maniacal glee. Mia bounced in a circle. “It’s gonna work, Uncle Jamie. Watch!”

  Ginia focused, clicked twice with her mouse, and the old hard drive hanging off the side of her computer turned into a puddle. The acrid smell of melted metal underscored her success.

  Jamie hugged his excited nieces and tried to think. He was totally impressed. There was only one problem. No one in Nova Scotia could spellcode their way out of a paper bag. Well, Marcus could, but he hadn’t been the one sitting at Moira’s computer when it fried.

  He was pretty sure they hadn’t actually learned anything at all, except that Ginia was a freaking awesome spellcoder. Elorie was still a total mystery.

  ~ ~ ~

  Ginia prepared to login to Realm. She had a whole hour, a new strategy, and three new spells. Gandalf was going down. He deserved it, for thinking her coding sucked. If she could spellcode a computer melt, she could take down some old guy who learned to code in the last century.

  Well, he was actually a pretty good coder, but his spellcode had some cracks. She’d tried taking him in a duel, and he’d locked her up in a tower. Her friends had busted her out, but he was too strong in a head-on battle. She needed to be sneaky.