A Hidden Witch

chapter 2

Elorie figured that at twenty-six, she’d looked at more small rocks than most people would see in three lifetimes. Finding sea glass on the beach was the art of scanning and letting your eye catch the unusual, the bright glimpse of color in a sprawl of gray and brown.

Which would be simpler if ocean pebbles actually were gray and brown. Especially when wet, the stones on the beach were an astonishing variety of colors, with glints of gold and green and occasional glimpses of almost every other color in nature. Add in fragments of pretty shell and unidentified chunks of sea crud, and it wasn’t as easy as you might think to spot the hidden bits of tumbled glass.

Elorie had loved hunting for them ever since she was a little girl. Her mother would bring her to the beach, making up stories about the glass and where it had been. She remembered the first time she’d taken a treasure find, suspended it from a black shoelace with dental floss, and presented it as a Mother’s Day gift.

It had taken fifteen years and the shoelace breaking to convince Mom to let her put that little piece of purple glass on a proper chain with a handcrafted silver-wire setting. And she was pretty sure her mother still had the shoelace remains tucked away somewhere.

Sentimental, maybe, but now that she was considering a baby of her own, it was a little easier to understand why Mom had worn a shoelace around her neck for a decade and a half.

As she strolled along the beach, Elorie rubbed her belly and pondered what it would be like to grow a baby. Children weren’t much of a mystery when you’d grown up surrounded by them, but having a baby inside you was a wonder. Aaron had been dropping hints lately. Maybe after she got back from San Francisco.

A piece of water-blue glass caught her attention, and she reached down to tuck its wet coolness in her pocket. This beach was out of the way enough to have quite a scattering of finds left by the ocean waters. She could afford to ignore the brown and green glass and just seek out the rare and special colors—the blues, reds, and purples that hadn’t been made for centuries.

The next piece to catch her attention was perfectly round and a deep cerulean blue. A child’s marble from centuries ago, rough now from its ocean voyage. It would make a gorgeous necklace if she could bear to part with it. Her studio and home were littered with small treasures she couldn’t resist keeping.

Elorie slid the marble into her cargo pocket and walked over to a sunny rock. Time for lunch and listening to the waves for a while.

The morning mists had burned off, but the air still felt wet—not enough wind today to chase the spray away. Unusual for this stretch of beach. The tide was out, the smells of seaweed and salt all a little riper under the noonday sun.

She was well aware the main purpose of her morning escape hadn’t been to increase her sea-glass stash. It was the old hurts in her heart that needed the soothing ritual of the treasure hunt. Another thing she’d learned as a grown woman—doing was often far more soothing than crying.

Even Aaron, fully content as a non-witch, didn’t truly understand what it was to know the desire of your childhood would never come to be.

For as long as Elorie could remember, she had assumed she would be a witch. Gran was a witch, and the history and the craft called to her blood. Or at least that’s what she’d believed as a young child, waiting for her powers to emerge.

She’d thrown herself into the lessons taken by all young ones in the witching community, and sat for hours listening to Gran talk of witches past.

Then she’d tried to be patient as a teen, as so many around her came into their powers. Watched in an agony of envy as Sophie had grown into her magic. Gran had scanned her regularly, and Elorie knew that she still did, seeking traces of talent in her beloved granddaughter. Nothing had ever appeared.

Walking the beaches in search of sea glass had turned from childhood treasure-seeking into a kind of therapy, and from there, into a purpose and direction for her adult life. She was an artist, a wife, a dancer, a trainer. Not a witch, and she’d come to terms with that.

Most days.

Then there were the days when a fetching spell went wrong and sparked the tinder of hope she couldn’t quite eradicate from the hidden corners of her heart. She wasn’t a witch, but neither was she entirely free of the desire to be one.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the hurt, just for a moment.

As a thirteen-year-old girl, she’d believed she needed to be a witch. When that had failed to come, and with Gran’s gentle persistence, she’d found a path for herself, a purpose and a sense of belonging that didn’t require magic. Not an easy feat for a non-witch.

And still not quite enough to free her from the wanting.

Sitting on the beach in the quiet morning sun, Elorie could admit to herself one more hard truth. She was afraid that part of the reason she wanted a baby was the hope that power might skip a generation and bloom in her child.

Then she shook her head ruefully. If Gran had taught her nothing, it was that every child needed to find their own way. If she turned into some terrible, hovering mother, Gran would lead the charge to thunk her over the head. In Nova Scotia, you still had a village raising a child, and that was a very good thing.

She pushed away the errant thought that Gran might not be around to watch her children grow. Irish witches usually lived very long lives.

Then there was Aaron—he would make a wonderful father.

One day she would walk these beaches with a toddler of her own, looking for colorful bits of glass. And that would be a magic of its own.

~ ~ ~

Nell shook her head at her triplets. “There must be a bug, girls. We fetched Elorie. You remember her—Moira’s granddaughter.”

Mia rolled her eyes. “We know, Mama. She was here for our birthday. But we tested our code a lot. It’s not wrong, so Elorie must be a witch.”

Ah, the arrogance of youth. Her girls were awesome coders, but no programmer was invincible. “Moira has tested Elorie ever since she was a child, just like we keep an eye on all of you. If your code is right, that means you’re saying Moira is wrong. Is that really what you mean?”

Three faces frowned and turned back to their respective screens, brains humming louder than the roomful of computers. They were old enough to know that Moira’s word was gospel in the witching world, and for good reason—she was rarely wrong.

Ginia finally looked up. “I still don’t see anything. Maybe we need to run a test.”

Shay, who often wore the pessimist mantle in their trio, shook her head. “We’ve already done lots of testing on us. You get fetched, Mia and I don’t.”

“I know,” Ginia said. “But right now, the only way to know if someone is a witch is to see if they get fetched or not. That’s what Dad calls an indirect consequence. He says it’s hard to debug if you only see the end result—you gotta see all the stuff going on in the middle.”

Nell hid a smile and tucked that little tidbit away to share with Daniel. It was largely to his credit that Ginia was still prouder of her coding skills than her emerging elemental powers. And that was a good thing, with two non-witch sisters.

“So, how do we do that?” Mia asked, always ready for a new experiment.

Ginia grinned. “We show Mama our other surprise.”

What was it about turning nine that had transformed her triplets into giggly secret keepers? Nell raised an eyebrow and waited.

Ginia typed on her laptop for a moment. Because all their monitors were screen sharing, Nell could see her log into an encrypted file labeled “Keep Out—Girl Coders Only.” That made her smile, but Ginia’s encryption layers on the file made her blink. Her husband must have added beginner hacking to his coding lessons.

Shay went over to the corner cupboard and got out an old computer mouse with princess stickers on it.

Nell raised an eyebrow. “Where’d you find that? That thing’s ancient.”

“It was in Aervyn’s toy box. We tested different ways of doing the scan, and this works best.”

Nell was pretty sure she hadn’t caught up yet. “What scan?”

Shay set the mouse down in front of her and plugged it into a vacant USB port. “Here, try it. Just hold the mouse like you were going to use it, but don’t do anything.”

Nell followed instructions and watched her computer screen. In a few moments, a series of tables and chart readings popped up, along with a flashing pink “Yay, You’re a Witch!” graphic.

Holy crap. Nell grabbed her cell phone and texted her brother.

Moments later, Jamie materialized in the room. Teleporting was a very convenient talent for quick arrivals. “Hey, my favorite nieces, what’s up?”

Ginia gave him a hug. “We built a witch scan!”

Jamie had plenty of practice rolling with surprises. “Cool. What’s that?”

Ginia led him over to Nell’s chair and handed him the mouse. “Here, hold this.”

Jamie looked at the princess stickers in perhaps not entirely fake disgust. “I’d be happy to get you girls a new mouse. This thing’s an antique.”

Mia laughed. “Don’t be silly, Uncle Jamie. No one actually uses a mouse any more. It’s our scanning device. Just sit there and hold it.”

He followed instructions too, and pretty soon the “Yay, You’re a Witch” graphic showed up onscreen again, along with party streamers and glittery stars.

Holy shit, he mindsent to Nell. Did you help them with this?

She just shook her head.

“Very glittery. How come I get pink messages—can’t it tell I’m a boy witch?”

The triplets looked at each other in consternation. “Maybe we could add that. Does girl-witch power look different than boy-witch power?”

Ha, Nell sent. You walked right into that one, brother mine.

“Stop mindspeaking, Mama,” said Ginia. “That’s rude.”

Jamie looked at Ginia in surprise. “You’re picking up mindspeech now, kiddo?”

Three sets of eyes rolled. “No,” Mia said. “You and Mama both get wrinkles between your eyes when you do it. Aunt Jennie says it’s because you don’t practice enough.”

Jamie belatedly got smart enough to change the subject and turned back to his screen. “So, tell me about all these little graphs and squiggles. You’re obviously scanning power signatures, but what’s the rest of the data?”

Nell sat back and watched in amused pride as three heads joined his and started pointing to all the bells and whistles they’d built into their new toy.

In a few moments, he leaned back and glanced at Nell. “So, what we have here is a remote scanning device that can detect power traces and give a probability readout on whether the person being scanned is a witch.”

Ginia nodded. “It only works for elemental and mind powers. Aunt Jennie said it wasn’t a good idea to scan for some of the other kinds of power.”

Nell blinked. “Aunt Jennie helped you with coding?”

Mia giggled. “Mama, don’t be silly. She helped us with the scanning spell, cuz Ginia didn’t know how to do that yet. Then Ginia spellcoded that to hook it up to the rest of what we’d done.”

Okay, that made more sense. Aunt Jennie was awesome cool, but a spellcoder she was not.

“So, what do we do with this fancy new toy?” Jamie asked.

“Use it to scan Elorie,” said Ginia. “Except we need a little help to make it work with a trackpad if she doesn’t use a mouse.”

Jamie laughed. “I think they’re still using mice in Witch Central East, although maybe not one quite this old.”

Ginia paused for a moment, looking suddenly shy. “And we wondered if maybe you could use it in Enchanter’s Realm.”

You didn’t need to be a mama to read the hope gleaming in three sets of eyes. Nell felt her own misting over. She and Jamie had been the primary coding team for their gaming world for almost fifteen years. It looked like they had just gained an assistant staff of three.

Jamie looked over at Nell and grinned. “Oh, I think maybe we could find a use for it.” He pointed at the graphics on his screen. “We might have to tweak your design a little, though.”

Shay looked at the screen in confusion. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

Nell did the smart mama thing and slipped out to make lunch. Jamie could handle the explanation of why Realm wasn’t pink and glittery.

~ ~ ~

Nell: Moira, have you had a chance to talk to Elorie?

Moira: Not today. She disappeared to the beach this morning, looking for more of her sea glass.

Nell: Hmm.

Sophie: What’s up?

Nell: Well, I spent the morning digging into the fetching spell with my girls. It’s clearly picking up power traces from Elorie, and I can’t find any errors in their coding.

Moira: There must be, Nell. I’m not trying to tell you how to spellcode, but I wouldn’t have missed a witch who practically lives under my own roof.

Nell: Exactly. Which is very puzzling. The girls have rigged up another nice piece of programming that might help. I was hoping I could run the test on the two of you.

Sophie: I’ll be your guinea pig. What kind of test?

Nell: It’s a virtual scan. They took a regular scanning spell—Aunt Jennie’s, in this case—and twinned it with some snazzy programming code. Let me activate the spellcode, and then all you should need to do is hold onto your mouse.

Sophie: Should I be using power?

Nell: No, not necessary, although I’ll have you do that in a minute so I can see how the readings change.

Sophie: It’s not easy typing with one hand. Should I be feeling anything?

Nell: I’m done. It shows you have strong earth power, a little water, and an unidentified power source. The girls only have this set up to test for elemental and mind powers right now, so that would be your healing talent.

Sophie: Wow. Think how useful this would have been in the spring with Lauren!

Nell: I’m guessing Jamie’s pretty happy he had to go to Chicago, but yeah. It’s a pretty cool toy.

Moira: Can you really see Sophie’s powers through the Internet, then?

Nell: More or less. It’s not all that different from what the fetching spell does—it’s just giving us more information.

Moira: I don’t want to sound suspicious, but are you sure it isn’t just reading your knowledge of Sophie? That’s always a risk when we scan in person.

Nell: Do you have a spare witch nearby? We can test them without you telling me who it is.

Moira: In fact, there are witchlings eating cookies in my kitchen. Let me go get one.

Sophie: You so have to put this in Realm.

Nell: Jamie’s already on it, with three very willing assistants.

Moira: All right, I have a volunteer. He just needs to hold this wee mousie, then?

Nell: That’s all. Give me just a minute… Okay. The scan is picking up fire, water, and air power, with a little mind power as well.

Moira took the mouse back from Kevin and switched to video chat. She was getting pretty comfortable with all this modern gadgetry for an old witch, but some things were much easier done face-to-face. Nell and Sophie’s faces showed up on her screen.

Making sure Kevin was fetching her a cookie as she’d asked, she turned back to Nell. “You’re sure on the last? The rest is true enough, but we haven’t tested young Kevin for the latter in quite some time.”

Nell grinned. “That might be worth doing in the next day or two. I’d be very curious to see if our little scanning program is right.”

Moira wasn’t entirely convinced yet, but she had two other witchlings at her elbows clamoring to be scanned. Lizzie’s readings showed her strong water elementals, and hints of something else. That was no surprise—little ones could grow new talents as fast as they grew out of their clothes.

When Sean held the mouse, Nell looked very surprised. “Sean, honey, are you a spellcaster?”

Sean brushed cookie crumbs off his face. “Gran says so, but I’ve only worked with small circles so far.”

Moira hadn’t lived this long without knowing some things weren’t meant for small ears. She picked up the plate of cookies. “Why don’t you three take the cookies into the garden and pick some nice, fresh flowers to brighten my table.”

When their voices grew faint, she turned back to Nell. “What are you seeing in our Sean?”

Nell frowned. “I can’t be sure of this part of the code—we haven’t done enough testing. But Sean has a big spike in the unknown powers category, which could be healing, casting, or something more rare.”

“I don’t think he’s a healer,” Sophie said. “I spent some time with Sean last summer, and he didn’t show any evidence of healing talent.”

Moira nodded. “I agree, and we’ve seen no signs of astral travel or precognition. He does very well with complex spells for a boy of ten, so we assume he’ll be a solid spellcaster.”

“His spike is almost as big as Jamie’s,” said Nell.

Oh, my, Moira thought. Jamie was a talented spellcaster at the peak of his powers. “That’s a little more than we thought we were dealing with. We haven’t a full circle’s worth of witches on hand at the moment, but the next time we do, perhaps we’ll test him in a bigger circle.”

“Maybe when we all come for witchling training this summer,” Sophie said. “With me and Nell, you’ll have enough, I think.”

“Jamie and Nat are going to stay here,” Nell said, “but Lauren would like to come. She’s turning into an able trainer—with her mindspeaking, she could guide Sean through the process of hooking into a full circle quite nicely.”

Moira’s heart warmed at the thought of seeing Lauren again. She’d developed such a fondness for their first “fetched” witch. And it was good to know they had a spellcaster of some considerable talent to train, even if the method of discovery had been a bit unorthodox.

She glanced toward Great Gran’s crystal ball, sitting in its usual place in the corner of the room. Perhaps if the darned thing had ever worked, they wouldn’t need all these new-fangled witch tools. The old ones could be a tad unreliable.

Ah, well. Witches made do with what they had. “That’s quite the pot your little scanning spell has stirred up, Nell. I’ll speak with Elorie about what we’ve discovered—she coordinates training for the young ones.”

“Do that.” Nell frowned. “And if it turns out the readings are right, we have a bigger mystery to solve.”

“And what’s that, dear?”

Sophie spoke gently. “The fetching spell said Elorie has power, Aunt Moira. If this new tool of Nell’s is accurate, she’ll need to be scanned again.”

Moira shook her head slowly. Her own power had reached out to Elorie in hope time and time again, but found no magic. It didn’t seem possible that a wee gadget could see what she couldn’t. “It will cause her pain, just in the asking.”

“I know,” Sophie said. “So let’s not go there just yet, and take one step at a time. Test Kevin first—see if he has mind magic. If he does, then we can think about the next step.”

“Aye. That much I can do. I’ll contact Marcus myself.” Moira turned at the sound of running footsteps down her hallway. “I’ll let you know what we find.”

“Blessed be, Aunt Moira.”