To Love A Witch

To Love A Witch By Debora Geary



Chapter 1  

Jake stood in front of the sign for the Franklin County Youth Detention Center and sighed. How come he got all the juvenile delinquent witches?
Being a monitor for the Witch Sentinel System was supposed to be a life of excitement and reward. At least that’s what his recruiter Duncan had said when he signed on the dotted line. Of course, Duncan was monitor for zone eleven, which meant he mostly got to sit around on Maui beaches.
Lots of sand in New Mexico, but that was about where the similarities ended. And this was the second time in three months a Sentinel alert had led him to a kid in lock-up.
It probably made sense. Uncontrolled magical powers tended to get you in trouble.
In extreme circumstances, you grabbed the witch and asked questions later, but since there were no signs of impending magical disaster, Jake preferred to do surveillance first. He was going to have to get inside.
He reached for power, and reveled in the flow of magic. One of the good things about the New Mexico zone was an ample power supply.
“I ask the power of earth and land,
Come on out, give me a hand.
I need a way into this dive,
Peel away years, ten and five.
Gotta do what must be done,
Make it so, Number One.”
He hoped Jean Luc didn’t mind the line rip-off. Some witches could get away with spellwork that didn’t rhyme, but he wasn’t one of them. And he’d gotten past the “as I will, so mote it be” crap a long time ago.
The bit of his face he could see in his motorbike mirror looked fourteen. Excellent. It was always easiest to cast an illusion that was fairly close to reality. Peel fifteen years off his looks and passing for a delinquent wasn’t going to be a problem.
Franklin County juvie wasn’t one of the hardcore lock-ups, so sneaking in shouldn’t be too difficult. Sneaking out with a rescued witch in tow might be a bigger issue, but he’d cross that bridge later.
Jake walked in the front door and muttered a standard “don’t notice me” spell under his breath. He’d needed that one a lot lately.
Moving to a chair in the corner, he sat down and tried to get a read on the place. Three doors—one for staff only, one into the detention wing, and the front door. Damn, that wasn’t a lot of escape routes.
It was an entirely depressing space. Puke-green walls, grunge floors, and a bunch of bureaucratic paperwork and preachy signs blanketed over the walls. A colorful poster advertising rehearsals for Delinquent Drama’s production of West Side Story was the only thing that kept his eyes from squeezing closed in self-defense.
A hand clamped down on his shoulder. Damn. The hand belonged to a skinny black woman dressed in a guard uniform. Her nametag said Darlene.
“Where are you supposed to be, kid?”
It took Jake a moment to remember he looked fourteen. And delinquent. “Dunno.”
“Well, who left you out here?” Darlene looked very grumpy. He couldn’t blame her. Puke-green walls could cause an epidemic of cranky.
Jake tried his best tough-guy face and shrugged.
Darlene scowled. “You’re never going to be as tough as me, kid. Don’t even try. Where are you supposed to be?”
The wall poster caught his eye. “Stupid drama rehearsal.”
“You one of Romy’s kids? You must be new; I thought I had all her kids pegged. Come on, I’ll take you in.” The hand on his arm was a lot gentler than he’d expected.
Romy must be the do-gooder that ran the drama program. No way the state funded anything that touchy-feely.
Darlene escorted him through the door into the detention wing. The puke-green theme continued, with no windows to see the desert outside. Sadly, he was no longer shocked by where society chose to stash some of their kids. Five years ago, as a green recruit, he’d been horrified.
He suspected his power-detection spell wasn’t going to work very well through concrete walls, but he tried anyhow. Nope. All he knew for sure now was that Darlene wasn’t a witch. Of the magic-wielding variety, anyhow.
She ushered him into a big room and pointed at a row of chairs at the back. “Sit there. Watch. Don’t move.”
Jake sprawled on a chair and got his first look at a Delinquent Drama rehearsal. A kid with tattoos over every visible inch of skin was currently running everyone through a dance sequence.
He tried to think back to the time he’d flown his sister to New York for her birthday, and they’d caught West Side Story. Rival gangs, soppy teen love story, lots of dancing. Tattoo Boy must be one of the gang members. If he wasn’t, casting had totally screwed up.
Except for Darlene sitting in the corner, there didn’t appear to be any adults present. Maybe do-gooder Romy had to pee or something.
Time to give the power-detection spell another crack. You only set off the Sentinel alarms if you had pretty decent power. If his target witch was one of the kids currently learning how to dance in formation, this was plenty close enough to tell.
Jake muttered under his breath. A slight, redheaded girl in the back row of dancers lit up like a Christmas tree, to witch-sight at least. Check. Witch located.
Then the glow abruptly disappeared. Crap. One, the girl had noticed his power-detection spell. And two, she had enough control over her magic to lock it down and go stealth.
Normally, he was a fan of people who could control their magic, but anyone with that kind of skill was going to be a little trickier to rescue.
She hadn’t found him yet. However, judging from the way she was ping-ponging off other dancers, Tattoo Boy’s choreography wasn’t her current focus.
He’d learned a few things in his five years with Sentinel. If you were trying to snatch a witch and run, speed was your friend.
Grabbing power through concrete sucked, but he did it anyhow. No way he got the two of them out of here without a fairly jazzy piece of spellwork.
“I ask the power of earth and land,
Come on out, give me a hand.
Freeze the people in this room,
Long enough for us to zoom.
Lock down the magic of the red-haired witch,
And leave these folks with a memory switch.
Gotta do what must be done,
Make it so, Number One.”
Everyone in the room went stone-still. Awesome. Jake jumped up from his chair, threw the immobilized girl over his shoulder, and ran.
The freeze part of the spell would give him a couple of minutes, but he didn’t trust the lock-down on the redhead to hold for that long.
Tossing out a quick “don’t notice me” spell, he ran through the front room. The clerk at the front desk never looked up.
He felt the bundle over his shoulder start to wiggle and cursed. Any witch who could go stealth could also uncloak with a vengeance, and just like the Romulans, they could be mean once weapons were online.
Throwing an ignition spell at his motorbike, he tried to climb on and dump the girl behind him. It wasn’t the most graceful of maneuvers, and he lost his grip.
She was out of reach in a split second and rounded on him from several feet away. “Hands up, you bastard. What the hell are you trying to do?”
When you were facing a monumentally pissed-off teenage witch with sparks flying out of her fingers, and you were straddling a gas tank, there was only one smart thing to do.
Jake was no dummy. He cut the ignition and dropped his illusion spell. Time for an adult to take charge.