To Love A Witch

Chapter 5

  

Jake leaned against his bike and waited for Romy to come out.
That had been quite the education. The bar fight loosely disguised as a scene in a play hadn’t been a big deal, but watching Skate handle a tough interview with brains and self control… How the heck had Romy pulled that out of a kid from the hood?
He watched her walk out of the building. She still looked at him with suspicion; he was going to have to work on that.
“When does Skate get out?” That was obviously the last question she’d been expecting.
“In sixteen weeks, three days—why?”
“Think he’d be willing to relocate to San Francisco?”
“I imagine he’d be thrilled to go anywhere that wasn’t here, but why?”
Jake took out his cell phone and dialed a friend. “Hey Mikey, it’s Jake. Quick question—you got a spot for a new intern in about four months? Good artist, great fighter.”
Romy’s face was caught somewhere between scowl and disbelief.
After listening a moment longer, he hung up. Mikey hated talking on the phone. “There’s a job for him in San Francisco if he wants it. Mikey’s a good guy. He’ll work him hard enough there won’t be any time left to find trouble.”
“Doing what, exactly? Fighting’s the last thing Skate needs to be messing with when he gets out.”
Only if you thought like a girl. Jake smiled. “You can’t take fighting out of him, Romy. Mike runs a video game design shop, about a hundred employees. Lots of fight scenes in the games. I figure if Skate designed all those tattoos he’s wearing, he’s a decent artist, and Mike will make sure he gets trained in all the latest animation tools.”
Now the disbelief on Romy’s face warred with hope. “You got him a shot at learning to design video game fight scenes?”
He shrugged. “Seemed like it would fit him.”
Her eyes flooded. Shit, that wasn’t what he’d been going for. He was no knight in shining armor. “There’s a string attached.”
Now her eyes hardened; that was a lot easier to deal with. “Name it.”
“Have dinner with me. Listen with an open mind to what I have to say.”
“That’s it?”
Jake laughed. “What were you expecting?” On second thought, he probably didn’t want to know. “Your ride, or mine?”
Romy looked at his bike, and he could see desire in her eyes. He tossed her the keys. “I’ll let you drive.”
They hopped on the bike. She was tiny enough he could have wrapped his arms around her and driven himself, but there was no need. He could tell she knew one end of a motorcycle from the other, and he didn’t plan for them to stay on pavement for long, anyhow.
Romy kicked them off and headed down the road toward Albuquerque. There were none of the wiggles and squeals that had come from the last girl he’d put on his bike. Just competent driving and a grin he could see all the way through the back of her head.
He looked around and made sure the road was deserted. In New Mexico, that wasn’t a hard thing to come by.
“I ask the power of earth and land,
Come on out, give me a hand.
Lift us high in the daybright sky
Hard work’s done, it’s time to fly.
Gotta do what must be done,
Make it so, Number One.”
When the bike lifted of the pavement and headed for open sky, he got his wish. Romy squealed. And wiggled.
He wrapped his arms around her securely and killed the engine. He liked the rumble, but it made talking pretty much impossible. “Relax. I do this with all the pretty girls.”
She sat still as stone for almost an entire minute. Then she began to laugh. It was the sound of absolute freedom, and the heart of why he flew. Something inside him… yearned.
Which was more than a little disturbing. For all the normal guy reasons, and because his mom swore he would love once, love deeply, and marry a brunette. You didn’t argue with one of the world’s best fortunetellers.
Leaning forward, he grabbed the handlebars. “Hang on.” He kicked up the speed and flew into a slow vertical loop. Romy squealed again and reached for his arms—and sparks flew out of her fingers.
Her voice was high and panicked. “Put us down. Now.”
Crap—big mistake. He’d been so sure she would enjoy that. “Sorry, I won’t do it again. Nice and steady all the way to dinner, I promise.”
“Jake. Down, please, I can’t control it for much longer.”
She was going to be sick? Jake headed for the ground with all possible speed. Airborne puking could be an unholy mess.
They’d barely hit the sand before she was off the bike and running away at top speed. Cursing, he ran after her, and then stopped dead when she threw a fireball into the desert.
Wow. No wonder she’d set off the Sentinel alarms.
She turned her head back to him. “Stay back. I’m not done, and I can’t get it under control.”
Jake watched, puzzled. She was clamping her hands, exactly the same thing she’d done at their first meeting when she’d been shooting sparks out of her fingertips.
He cursed profusely under his breath. The signs were all there, and he was an idiot for missing them this long. Fortunately, he had long practice with the required spell.
“I ask the power of earth and land,
Come on out, give me a hand.
Put up a barrier to the power,
Hold her magic quiet this hour.
Gotta do what must be done,
Make it so, Number One.”
That wouldn’t work against her will, but if she wanted control, she should have it now.
Romy turned around slowly to face him, hands still clenched. “What did you do?”
“A basic spell to buffer your access to power. It should make your magic easier to control.”
She nodded, just once. “Thanks. Sorry, I have no idea what happened.”
He sighed and kicked a rock in disgust. “What happened is I’m an idiot. You haven’t had any training. Your control is impressive, so I managed to forget that for long enough to fly you into the sky and coat you with my power stream. No untrained witch could handle that and keep her own magic quiet.”
Romy frowned. “Your magic set off my magic?”
“Yeah. Maybe not during the first part, but when I decided to show off and fly us in a loop, that requires a power turbo-boost. It would have seriously zinged your channels. Looks like when that happens, you make big fireballs.”
Her hands were trembling. “I haven’t done that in a really long time. I was hoping maybe I’d grown out of it.”
Jake couldn’t resist his need to comfort, and he didn’t want to think too hard about why. He sat down on the sand and pulled her down beside him, taking her shaking hands in his.
Magic needed to be trained, not shut down. Damn Alvin for condemning her to ten years of trying. “Did you have trouble with sparking as a kid?”
“All the time.” She pulled her hands out of his.
He took them back. “Tell me about it.”
Romy sighed and looked away into the sky. “It started on my eleventh birthday. I got really excited; Gran had one of those inflatable bounce houses set up in the back yard, and half my class at school had come. I was inside jumping with my best friend Boise when the bounce house started smoking. Gran told me later the fire had come from my fingers.”
That didn’t compute. “Your Gran knew magic?”
“She was a witch,” Romy said. “Or at least she believed she was. She was sick, and she said it took the magic from her. Cancer—she died six months later.”
“I’m sorry.” Jake wrapped his arm around her shoulders.
She shrugged, but left his arm in place. “I went into foster care after that, and the sparking happened more often. Gran said she would teach me how to make it stop, but she didn’t have time.”
Jake frowned. The rest he knew from her file, but one big question wasn’t at all clear. “And where were your parents?”
“I never knew them. Gran wasn’t my blood relative; she took me in when I was a baby.” Her voice trembled. “She called me the child of her heart.”
Now, Jake understood. Romy’s Gran had been a witch, and witches took care of their own.