A Modern Witch

CHAPTER 7



Lauren walked into the kitchen with Nat close behind. “I could eat half of Chicago, and I feel like my brain got hit by a bus. What the heck happened?”

Jamie, well versed in the needs of trainee witches, shoved a carton of food in her hands. “Eat. That will help with the head. Then we’ll talk.”

Nat took a plate out of the cupboard, and then stood watching in amazement as Lauren began to vacuum-suck lo mein straight out of the carton. Jamie watched her reaction with amusement. Clearly Lauren didn’t usually eat like a starving teenage boy.

He handed Nat a carton as well. “Dig in. Trust me—you want to get to it before she does.”

Jamie looked at the stranger he would love and the witch he’d just begun to train. Now what the hell did he do?

He had a very tricky conversation coming up with each of them, and he wasn’t sure he felt equipped to handle either one. He bit into an egg roll and decided Nell had no idea how big she was going to owe him.

Let’s handle it like a complex spell, he thought. One step at a time, and try not to break anything too critical.

“The head doing better, Lauren?”

“Yeah.” Lauren spoke around mouthfuls of her second carton of lo mein. “Food’s helping. You the genius who ordered enough food for ten people?”

“Yeah. Trainee witches are always hungry.”

“Smart man. You going to share those egg rolls?”

Jamie ran a quick scan on Lauren just in time to hear her pick up Nat’s thought. He called her a witch and she didn’t even blink.

“It’s a long story, Nat.”

Nat frowned. “Was I talking out loud?”

“Oh, shit. I can hear you thinking.” Lauren turned to Jamie, rising panic on her face. “I can hear her thinking. What happened to me?”

Jamie sent out as much calm as he dared. “Your channels overloaded. Too much input. When that happens, people often end up extra-sensitive for a few days. Just like it was hard to soften your mental barriers before, now it’s going to take some work to put them back up. Until you do, you’ll pick up at least the outer layer of thoughts and emotions from people around you.”

“Okay.” Lauren nodded very slowly, but still looked skeptical. “Why can’t I hear you?”

“I’ve got barriers up. It’s what we were working on when you overloaded.” He turned to Nat. “With your permission, I can help strengthen your barriers as well. Too many stray thoughts are going to be hard for Lauren to handle right now.”

At Nat’s nodded assent, Jamie slipped quietly into contact with her mind. He took just a moment to soak in her amazingly serene energy, and then gently fortified her barriers.

“That should take care of it for a few hours. It’s not a total block; it will just soften what gets through. Lauren, as soon as we’re done eating, we’ll go work on getting your channels closed back up some.”

Lauren waved her chopsticks like a weapon. “Nuh uh. Not a chance I’m playing that game with you again until I know what the heck happened the first time. It felt like my head exploded.”

Jamie sighed. “That was my fault, and I owe you a big apology. It’s the trainer’s job to make sure the energy flows stay manageable, and I totally blew it.”

“That was more than a bit unmanageable.”

Jamie could see the lines still creasing her forehead. “Head’s still bad, isn’t it. Do you have some ibuprofen or something? That will help.”

Lauren walked out of the room, a third carton of lo mein in her hands.

…

Finally full after three cartons of lo mein and four egg rolls, Lauren sprawled on her couch beside Nat and eyed Jamie. “So, back to the big question. What the hell happened?”

“I have some ideas,” Jamie said, “but I’d like to gather a little more data first. I need you to try to think back and tell me exactly what you remember, what you felt.”

“I was concentrating, trying to shrink my bubble.” She looked at Nat. “You’d be better at it than I am. It’s a lot like the breathing and meditation stuff you do.”

Nat looked puzzled. “Bubble?”

Jamie beat her to an explanation. “It’s the first lesson for mind witches. The goal is to create flexible barriers where Lauren can control what passes in and out of her mind.”

“Lauren is a mind witch?”

Go, Nat, thought Lauren. Mind witch, feeble telepath, whatever. If it could make her pass out on the floor, she must have something, but she wasn’t happy about it.

Jamie nodded and watched Nat steadily. “I think so. We were going to do some more testing tonight to make sure, but non-witches don’t overload.”

Nat grinned at Lauren. “You lead an interesting life, girl.”

Lauren could see Jamie’s obvious relief. That was interesting. Or maybe not. Most friendships would probably be a little rocked by ‘hey, your pal’s a witch’. She elbowed Nat. “I think Jamie was worried you might abandon ship.”

Jamie looked shocked. “You heard that?”

He thinks I read his mind. Silly witch. Lauren hugged a pillow. “No funky mind magic required. I bet you suck at poker. It’s not Nat you have to worry about taking a hike on this whole witch thing. It’s me.”

Jamie grimaced. “Yeah, I got that. So, let’s get back to what happened. You were working on deflating your bubble…”

“It felt like it was going better than the previous times. I could feel you there, kind of holding things steady, but that’s all I got from you at first…” Lauren slowed down as she mentally walked through what had happened next.

She glared at Jamie. “Wait a minute. I assumed I’d overloaded myself, lost control of something. But it came from you. This huge wave of stuff came from you. What the hell happened?”

He looked at her steadily. “You’re right. It wasn’t anything you did. I lost control for a moment, and unfortunately, with how tightly we were hooked together, some of it pushed to you. As I said before, that shouldn’t happen, and I’m sorry for it.”

“I thought Nell sent you because you’re good at this.” Lauren was more than a little scared that a half-competent witch had been inside her head. With her permission, no less.

Jamie sighed. “I’m very good. That wasn’t the problem. You remember when I walked you through the different kinds of power? My talents are primarily with elemental energies, but I also have a little bit of most of the others. That’s part of what makes me a good trainer—I can do a little bit of everything. Unfortunately, one of the talents I have is weak and very occasional precog.”

“Precog?”

Nat leaned forward on the couch. “You see the future?”

If one of them had to be a witch, thought Lauren, it should have been Nat. She’d be way better prepared.

Jamie shrugged. “Precog’s not that clear, which makes it a really frustrating talent. You see possible futures, and not necessarily the most probable. I just get small flashes usually, brief glimpses. This was longer and more powerful than usual. It only happens once or twice a year. The timing just really sucked.”

He could see the future? That was entirely creepy. “So I got brain-smacked by a totally random event?”

Jamie sighed. “No, it wasn’t random. Precog events usually have a trigger.”

Lauren waited through a long silence. Jamie looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Ah, you going to fill me in? What was the trigger?”

Nat spoke into the silence. “I think it was me.”

Lauren shook her head. No way Nat was on the hook for this. “That doesn’t make any sense. We didn’t even know you were there. You must have let yourself in.”

“I knew,” Jamie said. “Part of my job is to monitor the perimeter of a training circle to make sure it isn’t disrupted.”

Nat looked horrified. “Did I break the circle? Is that what overloaded Lauren?”

Jamie reached over for Nat’s hand. “Absolutely not. It wasn’t your fault at all. I let you into the circle because Lauren trusts you, and you have a really serene mind presence. We would have included you in the circle for the next training exercise.”

Jamie got up, walked into the kitchen, and came back with two pints of chocolate ice cream. Cripes, thought Lauren. You know it’s bad when the guy tries to soften you up with ice cream first. However, it might work. She was feeling hungry again.

Jamie sat back down on the floor and looked at Nat. “You didn’t do anything to Lauren. It’s what you did to me. You were the trigger for my precog.”

Lauren started to laugh. “Man, you witches are trigger-happy. First I trigger a fetching spell, then Nat sets off your precog.”

She sobered as a crazy thought hit her. “Wait, does that mean Nat is a witch too?”

Jamie gave Nat a closer look and reached for her hand. “That’s a good question. I’m just going to do the same basic scan I first did with Lauren.”

“And when exactly did that little invasion of privacy happen?” Lauren asked.

“Give him a break, Lauren,” Nat said. “If he’d asked you first, would you have let him scan you?”

It was extremely rare for Nat to take that tone with her. “No.”

Nat fixed Lauren with a very serious look. “If this is part of who you are, love, it’s better to know. It’s a gift, and we have a responsibility to reach for our gifts and nurture them. If Jamie can help you do that, cut him some slack. I don’t want you randomly passing out on the floor on me. You need to know what’s inside you.”

Which was the fancy Natalia Smythe way of telling her to grow up and cooperate, thought Lauren.

Jamie looked very impressed. “You’re going to make a great mom some day.”

Nat blushed. “Sorry—I don’t make speeches very often.”

“That just makes them more impressive when you do,” Lauren said.

Nat looked at Jamie. “So, do I need to take my own advice? I don’t think so. I’m not a witch, am I.”

“No. You have a flexible and clear mind. You’d handle power well, but you’re not a witch.”

“How can you be sure that quickly?” Lauren asked. “Don’t you have to do all those tests you ran on me?”

Jamie shook his head. “No. I can probe for the presence or absence of power very quickly. When you access power sources, even unintentionally or in untrained ways, it leaves an imprint, a kind of echo. It’s unmistakable, and Nat doesn’t have it.”

“That’s just some weird karma. She’d make a way better witch than I would.”

Jamie grinned. “She’ll make an excellent training assistant. She has a steady mind and emotions, and those will work very well.”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “You’re just hoping she’ll keep me in line.”

“That too. However, it’s been a long enough day already. Get some rest, and we’ll start again tomorrow.” Jamie looked at Nat. “Can you come back then?”

She nodded. “I’ll walk out with you.”

…

Nat paused outside the front entrance to Lauren’s building. “My yoga studio is only a couple of blocks away. We need to talk. Do you want to grab some coffee on the way?”

Jamie looked down at her. Uh, oh. Time for tricky conversation, part two. After that little speech she’d given Lauren, it was very clear Nat was no pushover. He wondered how she’d cope with visions of the future.

“Some of the tea you have at the studio will be fine.”

Nat gave him a long look. “All right. And then you can tell me whatever else it is you saw about my life.”

“Didn’t miss that one, huh? I’ll fill you in, but let’s get out of this crazy cold first.” They walked in silence down the street. Jamie blew O’s with his breath and wondered just how much to tell her.

The quiet continued while she let him in the studio and headed off to make tea. He wandered into her main studio space and looked around. It felt like her.

Nat walked in a few minutes later with two cups of tea and sat down in front of him.

She’s so amazingly calm, thought Jamie. “You know, Lauren’s really lucky. Not all friends would have handled today nearly as smoothly as you did. She’s just beginning to understand that her mind powers aren’t ordinary.”

“You mean that she’s a witch.”

“Yeah. You could have made it a lot harder for her today, a lot more uncomfortable. Friends who can accept you, even when the rules change like that, are gold. It seems like both of you know that.”

Nat smiled. “We met the first day of college. We were assigned to the same dorm room, and I think it took us about five minutes to bond for life. When we graduated, I wanted to open a yoga studio. My family was totally opposed. It doesn’t fit their image of what a Smythe daughter should do with her time.”

“Really?” There had been nothing of Nat’s family in his precog visions. Maybe that wasn’t coincidence. “What do they think you should be doing?”

“It’s a long story. Anyhow, I got a small inheritance when I turned twenty-one, two months after we graduated. I signed a lease on this space and hired a contractor to do the renovations. Apparently, my father tried to block the necessary permits.

“He probably would have succeeded, but Lauren got wind of it through a friend at her new office. She threatened him with some seriously unfriendly publicity, and he backed off. I didn’t hear about it until two years ago, and I didn’t hear it from Lauren.”

Jamie watched Nat as she spoke, trying to fit the poor little rich girl she described with the woman of his visions, the one who built snowmen and laughed in the early mornings.

His family was big, rowdy, and contentious. That any one of them might try to seriously squash his dreams was unthinkable.

Nat spoke again. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I have a life I love. That wasn’t always true, but what came before led me to here.”

“’Here’ just took a bit of a crazy turn. That sits okay for you?”

“Lauren’s life is never boring.” Nat sipped her tea and thought a moment, then gave him a more serious answer. “Sometimes you know you will spend your whole life with someone. A partner, a child, a friend. A lifetime will bring some surprises—it has to. If Lauren’s a witch, then I’m friend to a witch.”

She would stick. Jamie wondered how a woman who grew up with jerks for parents learned to love like that. Time to find out if she had room for one more.

“Can you handle two witch friends?” He started to add that it would be easier on Lauren, and then just shut up. It was time to talk about Nat and Jamie. Just Nat and Jamie.

Nat smiled slowly. “If you’re going to be my friend, you need to tell me what you saw. It doesn’t seem fair for you to know more about my future than I do.”

Well, that headed straight for the gooey, sticky stuff. Jamie still wasn’t sure exactly how much he wanted to tell her. “You need to know that precog is really unreliable. Sometimes it shows the future, sometimes only possibilities. It’s wide open to interpretation, too—the visions aren’t always literal.”

Nat’s face furrowed. “You don’t like having this precog talent, do you?”

“Sucks. Seeing the future sounds cool until you get this two-second flash and have no idea what it means, or if it will really happen.”

“So, you only saw a couple seconds of my future?”

“No. This wasn’t your garden-variety precog episode.” Jamie stopped. She had a right to know, and maybe it would be easier to show her. God knew he was going to die of embarrassment trying to tell her.

“I can share what I saw with you. Precog leaves a strong imprint, so I pretty much have a tape of it stored that I can play for you. I’ll need you to be open to me, though. My mind talents are fairly weak, so I can only project that much detail if you help me out.”

Nat sipped her tea. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but isn’t that what conked Lauren over the head?”

Definitely not a pushover. “Sort of. There are two big differences, though. Precog hits hard, and this one was more intense than most. Being connected on a replay won’t carry the punch of the original. Second, you’re not a mind witch. For Lauren to have overloaded the way she did tells me she’s very sensitive. One day she’ll be really strong. Right now, it just made her very vulnerable.”

“So if it had been me sitting where she was, I wouldn’t have been as affected?”

“Exactly. And it won’t be a surprise for me this time, so I should be able to keep my reactions under wraps.” He hoped.

Jamie wasn’t thrilled about sharing precog visions with the woman who starred in them. It was going to require some serious finesse to share the visions, but keep his emotional reactions to himself. His mind powers ran to the clunky side of things.

“You do yoga, right? So can you meditate, clear your mind?” Of course she could. No mind was that serene by accident.

Nat went to collect a couple of comfortable bolsters and handed him one. She sat gracefully and tangled her legs into full lotus. Jamie wasn’t dumb enough to try to copy her. “This is easier with a physical connection, if that works for you.”

“It’s fine. You didn’t do that with Lauren.”

“No. It’s a bit of a crutch, so we try to avoid it in early training. Once she can work using only a mental connection, she can layer in the physical contact to increase sensitivity. Since this isn’t training, I can take the easy way.” Jamie scooted knee-to-knee with Nat and reached for her hands.

“Close your eyes and do whatever you normally do to clear your mind. I’ll pick up with a visualization in a few minutes.” Jamie gave himself a good swift kick for thinking physical contact would make this easier, and made a determined effort to clear his mind.

He heard Nat’s breathing slow and felt her mind soften. She had impeccable skills—he was more than a little envious. She could teach his student witchlings a thing or two.

Using words at first, and then just mind touch, he gently opened a channel between them. This was something he did with trainee witches all the time.

Nothing about this felt like a training exercise.

Slowly, Jamie pulled up the precog imprint. He shaped the memories like a film reel and hit slow-motion play.

Nat dancing at the club, face full of invitation. He could sense the music called to her, even through the fog of vision.

Nat in the midst of his family on Christmas morning. This time her reaction slammed into his gut. Confusion. Envy. Desire. An ache to belong, and little-girl sadness. His need to comfort was huge. They’re my family, he gently sent. I’ll take you to meet them.

Yoga in a meadow, the light of early morning glistening off her face. He could feel her calming, tucking away the sad little girl. Yoga centered her. Then surprise, as she realized she wasn’t alone. She couldn’t see him, he realized. It was his vision, his future memory. She could only sense him.

Nat, belly round with a baby. He felt her smile and welcome for the babe-to-be.

A snowman, a toddler. Jamie felt Nat reach out to the child that could be. Then the connection broke. His eyes flew open. Nat’s face was white, eyes wide, her cheeks streaked with tears.

“He looks like you. The child, he looks like you.”

Jamie held her hands tightly. She wasn’t the only one who was shaky. “He’s ours. That’s why it was so strong. The future I saw was my own.”

“He’s beautiful.” Nat’s tears flowed again. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.” Jamie’s heart broke a little, and he spoke very gently. “Nat, precog isn’t certain. I don’t know for sure if he will even be.”

Nat paled further. “He felt real. I loved him. I don’t know how to do this.”

Jamie lifted her into his lap and held on. “I don’t know, either.”

Slowly, his world stopped shaking. Nat felt cold. He grabbed a line of power and pumped some heat into the room. Not a lot of finesse, but it would do. He could impress her with his magic tricks some other time.

When she was warmer, he closed down thoughts of curly-haired toddlers and snowmen. There was only one way he knew how to deal when his entire future was on the line.

“Hungry? I know a decent sushi place.”

…

Carrying tea and a bowl of pretzels, Lauren walked back over to her beloved couch. What a day. Her head still felt vaguely hollow, as did her stomach. If she kept eating like this, she was going to need to seriously upsize her next grocery order.

So, she was a witch. Some kind of mind powers, anyhow. Maybe she was basically an empath. That didn’t sound so completely weird. She’d think more about that tomorrow. Thinking hurt.

Lauren let her mind go and drifted toward sleep. She watched the edges of dream drift across her mind. Dancing at some club. Nat surrounded by hordes of people on Christmas morning. Couldn’t be Nat’s family—they were way more uptight. Nat with a big pregnant belly. Nat building a snowman with a kid who looked like Jamie.

Lauren sat up fast enough to dump her pretzels. Nat and Jamie? She shut her eyes again to sharpen the image. No. Nat, Jamie, and a little kid who looked a lot like Jamie. They were a family. It made her ache, how much he loved them.

These weren’t dreams; this was from Jamie’s head. His precog had been about him and Nat. That’s what had hit her so hard—Jamie’s feelings. Holy God. Her best friend was going to make babies with a witch?

Lauren picked up her tea. She was wide awake now, with plenty to think about. She tried to imagine the future she’d just seen. She might not have asked for weird witchy powers, but maybe she wasn’t the only one whose life had just taken a sharp turn.

Then a stray thought almost added hot tea to the mess in her lap. Jamie’s precog had missed one thing.

Nat’s mother’s head was going to explode. For that alone, she would cheer for Jamie. Even if he was a witch.