"Starving. Where's the nearest fast food joint? I could eat a buffalo."
"If I ate like you, I'd be big as a house. There's a Bojangle's near here. Chicken okay?"
"Long as it's fried protein, I'll be happy." My stomach punctuated the statement with a growl. I ate as Rinaldo drove, putting away three Cajun filet biscuits, two egg and cheese biscuits, a sausage biscuit, and three servings of Potato Rounds, all washed down with a gallon of sweet iced tea. I treated Rinaldo to a biscuit and let him watch me eat, which always seemed to give him enormous pleasure and cost me next to nothing. It paid to keep my emergency transportation happy. The meal was wonderful. Half asleep, belly rounded out against the thin fabric of my T-shirt, I lolled all the way to my front door while Rinaldo listened to zydeco music on the radio, his fingers banging out the African rhythm on his steering wheel. I handed him thirty bucks, which was my standard payment, and made it inside just as Molly and the kids came downstairs, Angelina knuckling her eyes.
"Morning, Aunt Jane." She held her arms up, and though Molly had been telling her she was too big to be picked up all the time, I hoisted her to my hip and nuzzled her hair. She smelled of sleep and pillow and safety. "Did you and the ladies have a nice swim?"
Molly met my eyes over Angie's head as we maneuvered the kids into the kitchen, and she took in my damp hair. I nodded. At this further demonstration of her daughter's rare and potent gift, a gift she was trying to keep under wraps from the human media and government, Molly's reply was carefully neutral. "Sweetheart, how did you know Aunt Jane went swimming?"
"Biscause she did. And they were all naked." Angie yawned, her mouth open wide, face scrunched. "Mama, we can't go home yet. Aunt Boadacia and Aunt Elizabeth is fighting a big bad ugly that showed up in their circle last night. It was purple and red and had big teeth and it wanted to eat them, and Aunt Boadacia says to stay gone, that it would eat Little Evan. Mama, would Little Evan go crunch? Like the deer bones Aunt Jane ate this morning?"
Molly closed her eyes and mouthed what looked a prayer, maybe for guidance and protection for her gifted children. Or maybe she was cussing silently. I couldn't help it. I laughed and squeezed Angie.
Molly's sisters, both the witch sisters and the humans ones, owned Seven Sassy Sisters' Herb Shop and Cafe near Asheville. Business was booming, both locally and on the Internet, selling herbal mixtures and teas by bulk and by the ounce, the shop itself serving gourmet teas, specialty coffees, breakfast, brunch, and lunch daily, and dinner on weekends. It was mostly fish and vegetarian fare, whipped up by Mol's oldest sister, water witch, professor, and three-star chef, Evangelina Everhart. Her sister Carmen, an air witch, newly widowed and newly delivered of a bouncing baby, ran the register and took care of ordering supplies. Two other witch sisters, twins Boadacia and Elizabeth, ran the herb store, while the wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were waitstaff in the cafe.
Boadacia and Elizabeth, the youngest and most adventurous of the bunch, were always trying new incantations and spells, and had been known to get into trouble with the results. It sounded as if they had a minor demon trapped in a circle and weren't quite sure how to dispel it.
Usually, they spent quite a while trying to extricate themselves from the messes they made before calling in the big guns, their elder sisters. I could imagine the ruckus when they admitted to Evangelina that they had messed up again. The eldest often had assisted with the cleanup and her tirades were legendary and generally ignored by the twins.
"Angie, how did you know that Aunt Jane went swimming this morning?" Molly dropped Evan Junior into the highchair that had appeared at my table with my guests. "Did you dream it? Were you awake and just thought it? What?"
Angie shrugged as I sat her into her chair, the table nearly to her chin. "I want oatmeal like Aunt Jane fixes it."
"It's important, honey," Molly said. "How do you know things like that?"
"I just do. I see Aunt Jane a lot. But sometimes other people. And Aunt Elizabeth sometimes talks to me inside my head. Can I have oatmeal?"
Molly's mouth formed a thin line, and I knew what the expression meant. Visions and mind-speech were new and troubling indications of her daughter's power, which shouldn't have manifested until she was sixteen, and which should have been tightly bound beneath the magical constraints applied by Big Evan and Molly when the power came upon her too potent and far too young.