Witches on Parole: Unlocked

Chapter 12
Sometimes, a few words could stop a day dead in its tracks. A whole paragraph… Jennie read Lizard’s text one more time. I signed up for the class. Here’s my next picture—I don’t want to feel like an idiot. And maybe a little less like a juvenile delinquent drop-out and a little more like something else. I don’t know what yet, though. I’m not a freaking photographer.

She danced a quick jig, narrowly avoided knocking over a nice old couple walking down the street, and sent a return text. It’ll do.

“You know this morning’s class is hip openers, right?” Caro, more sprightly than the nice old couple, had managed to avoid getting bumped by Jennie’s exuberance. She leaned against the wall of Spirit Yoga, looking highly amused.

Jennie grimaced. “Don’t remind me. I have no idea how I get talked into trying to make my hips do things they’re only meant to do while giving birth.”

“Then how come I have to do them too?” Jamie leaned in, kissing Jennie’s cheek. “Because trust me, these hips of mine were never meant to do any of the stuff my wife thinks they should do.”

“She’s just getting even with you for what hers will have to do during birth.” Caro grinned. “And trust me, you’ve earned every minute of it.”

Jamie linked arms with the two of them. “Just for that, I’m going to do Nat a favor and make sure you two actually enter the building. She seems to think you occasionally ditch class in favor of the coffee shop down the street.”

Busted. “Only once or twice.” And almost always on hip-openers days. “Aren’t you supposed to be babysitting this morning?” Nell and Daniel were delivering their older kids to summer camp, and the last Jennie had heard, Jamie had been designated to keep Aervyn out of trouble until they got back.

“Nope.” He grinned. “Elsie’s doing it—Aervyn’s trying to talk her into baking cookies.”

Jennie’s heart quaked. “You left the two of them alone together?” She had seen with her own eyes the destruction either one of them could wreak with a bag of flour. Put them together and they could easily be dealing with baking Armageddon. “You’re on cleanup squad, nephew mine.”

Jamie’s lips quirked. “I ported the flour to safety. They’re at the park, playing in the sand. It’ll be fine, and if it’s not, Elsie knows how to use a phone.”

Jennie looked at Caro as Jamie veered off to say hello to his wife. “Am I silly to be concerned?” Elsie was a grown woman, and a highly responsible one.

Caro snorted. “That girl’s going to discover her sense of adventure one day, and Aervyn would be more than happy to help her find it. We’ll walk down to the park after class and check up on them.” She grinned. “Then we can bring them back to the store to help with the leftover cake.”

Jennie winced. “Was it edible?”

Caro’s laugh blew through the normally quiet murmur of Nat’s yoga studio. “It tasted better than it looked, but that’s not saying much.” She picked up her yoga mat, still chuckling. “Helga adored it.”

Of course she had. And maybe they could just bury the rest of the poor, sad cake, and not give Aervyn a tummy ache.

~ ~ ~

What, fancy San Francisco start-ups didn’t have fax machines? Or elevators? Lizard grumped as she marched up four floors to the funky warehouse offices of the company where Josh worked. He’d asked her to bring over the final paperwork on his townhouse, so she’d spent two hours on a freaking streetcar caught in a traffic jam just to get him to sign a stupid piece of paper.

Maybe she was giving up on the whole delinquent thing a little too fast.

She yanked open the door of suite 406 and looked for someone resembling a receptionist. Instead, what she saw was chaos. Computer screens everywhere, some of them bigger than she was. A pool table, Pac-Man arcade game, two guys swimming in a huge pool full of plastic balls, and the thrumming beat of a rap song. Sung by a guy over in the corner with dreads and some very cool tats.

“Welcome to chaos,” said Josh’s voice over her shoulder. “Thanks for coming up.”

She looked around one more time. “Is it always like this?”

“No.” He grinned, catching a Superball aimed at his head. “Half the staff don’t get here until noon. This is quiet. Come on this way—I’ve got something to show you.”

Rap-singing dreads guy winked as she followed Josh through a set of huge doors—into total quiet. Lizard stopped dead, feeling like she’d stepped through a wormhole. Here was the tastefully hip and cool start-up—clear glass cubicles, funky art, and employees who look like they’d graduated college instead of being kicked out of kindergarten.

Lizard was pretty sure she belonged on the other side of the doors. “You work here?”

Josh grinned. “And back there in The Pit. This is the business side—strategy, marketing, partnerships. The Pit’s our product development guys. I’m one of the few people who goes through that door on purpose.”

Yeah. The college types would get eaten alive in The Pit. She looked around again—and realized Josh was on the move, headed through some glass doors.

She followed him through—and then froze, recognizing the explosion of color up on the monitors. Her maps. Or not her maps. Highly jazzed-up versions of something resembling her maps. What the hell. “What is this?”

Josh was watching her carefully. “It’s a mock-up—an idea of what could be done with a little programming muscle behind your ideas.”

She knew what the frack a mock-up was. How come they were they playing with her maps? “Why?”

“Because it’s a creative, smart idea you had. I think it could maybe be turned into something other people would pay a lot of money for.” He held up a hand as her brain fizzed fury. “Give me two minutes, okay? Let me show you some of what it can do.”

He grabbed some fancy remote-control toy and pointed. “See here? This takes restaurant recommendations from five review sites, filtered by user demographics. That way, you can find places to eat that are preferred by people most like your clients. And here? This pulls in the census data through an API, so you don’t need to manually load it. You can find Thea a grandma without having to work so hard.”

When the hell had Josh met Thea?

He moved the remote thingy again. “And here, you can put in the parameters of your client’s budget and preferred neighborhood feel, and it will narrow down the top five areas to look. You can overlay listings on that too, and do the usual things with price ranges and bedrooms and stuff.”

Her fingers itched for the remote. Right after she killed him. It was totally awesome—and it wasn’t hers anymore. Lizard tried to stay professional. He hadn’t signed the paperwork yet. “What are you going to do with it?”

He looked… hurt. “That’s my question for you. This was just me goofing off a bit with a couple of the guys from The Pit. Mira and Danny—he was the guy rapping back there—have a bunch more ideas, but this is a pretty decent prototype.”

She was way lost. “A prototype for what?”

“To sell to investors. This is a genius idea, Lizard. You could make a ton of money selling it. We’d like to help.”

Her knees were buckling, and the hip-and-cool office didn’t have any chairs nearby. She backed up against a wall and slowly slid to the floor. “It’s just a map.”

Josh came to sit beside her. “No, it’s not. You’ve totally changed the way people can find a home, don’t you get that? Most real estate agents ask how many bedrooms you want and do a search on that.” He waved at the wall monitors. “You get that the house doesn’t really matter. It’s about the neighborhood, the little piece of the world you live in.”

Sure. “It’s what Lauren does. I just made some maps to help.”

He grinned. “Then give her a cut of the profits. There will be plenty to go around.”

Okay, now they were back at the part that made her knees dissolve. His mind felt way too freaking sincere. “Anybody could make a map. You just need Google Maps and a little time.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t let Danny hear you say that. He spent a bunch of hours cursing at the census data API.”

Well, yeah. Not having to enter that manually was a pretty big deal. “Can you do that with the driving time and transit data too?” Calculating how long it would take to get to people’s offices and stuff was a major time suck.

Josh’s eyes gleamed. “Let me get Danny and Mira in here.”

~ ~ ~

Babysitting witchlings wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Elsie was beginning to think she’d gotten in way over her head. “I don’t know if the park people really want you adding a water fountain to the sandbox.”

Aervyn grinned. “Uncle Jamie can fix it if anyone gets mad, but I bet some of the other kids wanna make mud pies too.” He wiggled his fingers again, and water started spouting out of the small pipe he’d magicked out of the ground. “See?”

Engineering wasn’t her strong suit. “Isn’t that just going to flood the sandbox?”

“Uh, huh.” His eyes gleamed. “And maybe I can even make a moat and a castle too.”

She didn’t have enough fire power to do a quick-dry spell on a sandbox the size of her living room. Especially if there was still water pouring in. “Do you know how to turn the water off?”

“Sure.” Aervyn started mixing water and sand, totally unconcerned. “But first we should get dirty and silly and have fun. Gramma Retha says that’s what kids are supposed to do. If you’re clean at the end of the day, then you aren’t doing it right.”

Elsie looked down at her very clean hands, and her very clean shorts—and wished there had been a Gramma Retha in her childhood.

“It’s okay,” said Aervyn softly, holding out handfuls of dripping sand. “You can be dirty and silly with me now. There’s plenty of mud.”

Elsie paused long enough to hope her mud-pie skills weren’t as rickety as her cake-baking ones—and then plunged her hands into wet sand. Eew. She held up her fingers, dripping goop, and made a face at Aervyn. “Totally disgusting, dude.”

“Yup.” He giggled and sloshed his handfuls into a pile, mud droplets spraying everywhere. “So first we have to make a mountain. A really, really big one. Which is kinda tricky, because it all wants to slide back down into the goop lake.”

She dumped a handful of muck on top of his pile and watched. Sure enough, it was all morphing back into primordial ooze. “How do we stop that from happening?”

“Magic.” He grinned. “We can use a fire spell to dry out some of the mud. Kind of like a moat, only backwards. And then we put the wet mud on the inside, and keep drying the outside, all the way up to the top.”

Elsie thought hard, helped by the mental picture he casually dumped in her brain. Hard and dry on the outside, wet on the inside. “Won’t that make a volcano?”

“Yeah.” The glee in his eyes scared her silly. “You can ’splode the first one if you want. That’s the funnest part.”

“Wait—aren’t we just making mud pies?” She was the babysitter. The responsible adult.

“Nope.” Aervyn shook his head, grinning. “We’re supposed to be having silly, dirty fun, remember? Uncle Jamie said to start slow, cuz you’re new to punk witchlings, but I bet you really, really want to make a volcano ’splode. Right?”

She couldn’t have said no to those eyes if her life depended on it. Elsie picked up a big handful of soggy sand. “Okay, you do the fire part on the outside, and I’ll put the wet stuff in the middle. I need the practice.”

He nodded soberly. “I can stay all the way ’til lunch time. That should be enough time to get pretty dirty.”

~ ~ ~

Nat grinned as they arrived at the edge of the park. “You guys are the kinds of friends my mother warned me about.”

Jennie laughed—quietly. They were trying to sneak up on a pair of witches, and Aervyn, even well distracted by a sandbox, was still a formidable mindreader. Nat was pretty sure Jennie and Caro were doing something mind-witchy to keep them all from being detected.

“I can see the top of Elsie’s head,” said Caro, pointing. “But that little hill’s in the way.”

That much, Nat could fix. If you were going to be a spy, you might as well be a competent one. She reached up for the tree branch over her head. “We should be able to see from up here.”

“I’m no tree climber, missy.” Caro’s chuckles were putting their skulking at risk. “And Jennie used to clamber pretty well, but I’m guessing she’s not headed up there either.”

Nat shook her head, amused. And stopped at the first branch—pregnant women probably shouldn’t be climbing very far up a tree, either. “You’re mind witches. If I can see, you two can just borrow my eyes.”

Caro gave Jennie a nudge reminiscent of the Three Stooges. “How come we didn’t think of that?”

Nat laughed. One of the most awesome things about Witch Central was that most of the adults never quite grew up. Life was a lot more fun that way. Settling on a wide branch, she looked over at the sandbox. She had a clear line of sight now—and what a sight it was.

Elsie was covered in mud, head to toe. Any more and she’d be mistaken for sandbox sculpture. Aervyn was a little cleaner, but that wasn’t saying much. And in between them sat a humongous mountain of wet sand.

Since there was a serious gigglefest going on in her head, clearly Jennie and Caro had hooked in. Assuming they’d hear her, she asked the obvious question. What the heck are they doing?

Jennie just shook her head, shoulders quaking. No clue, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Elsie’s idea.

Caro snorted. Good thing they didn’t do it in my kitchen.

Nat grinned—her husband made that kind of mess in the kitchen on a regular basis. She’d come to really appreciate a good cleaning spell.

This wasn’t done in the pursuit of food, sent Caro dryly. And you ever need cleaning, you just ask. You’ll have a line-up around the block in trade for a jar of your husband’s spaghetti sauce.

She’d married into witch royalty—Jamie’s tomato sauce was sublime. People were willing to share all kinds of useful things in exchange for some. Nat leaned over for a better view. Elsie and Aervyn were still busy piling and patting, shaping the outside of their mountain. Nat watched in fascination as the woman who used to be her intern focused every bit of her being on a mound of dirt—and felt some of the residual tension leaving her shoulders. This was much better than folding towels. So much better.

Aervyn suddenly stood up and scrambled back from the dirt mountain, looking gleeful. And Elsie, looking very determined, waved her fingers at their muddy creation.

Caro squinted, not much help when she was using Nat’s eyes. Now what are they up to?

Jennie started to laugh. Uh, oh.

Nat didn’t have much time to wonder. One more wiggle of Elsie’s fingers and the sandbox blew up, a pelting shower of mud coating everything and everyone within a hundred feet. They were outside the spray zone—barely. Poor Elsie, sitting at ground zero, was plastered, and it obviously wasn’t the first time. Aervyn danced a jig in front of her, clearly very excited at the outcome.

Nat held her breath, holding a wish in her heart.

And felt happiness bloom as Elsie grabbed Aervyn and rained glunky kisses on his cheeks, blanketing the park in their shared laughter.

Exploding mud volcanoes definitely beat folding towels—especially when you liked it.

~ ~ ~

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To: [email protected]

From: Jennie Adams <[email protected]>

Subject: Two happy hearts.

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Dear Vero,

I just watched a minor miracle happen. Aervyn shared the magic of his little-boy heart, and Elsie learned how to get really, really dirty. On purpose. The baking mess was a bit of an accident—this time, it was entirely intentional.

Her mud volcano was spectacular—and their laughter after, even more so. It was sheer delight to watch, even if we nearly blew our super-spy cover with our giggles. Tell Melvin that as Nat watched Elsie, I watched Nat—and he’s right. She’ll be fine. It did her heart much good to see Elsie happy. I’m not sure I gave Melvin enough of those opportunities in our early days together.

From Lizard, we have heard little. Lauren reports that she headed off to San Francisco this morning to take some paperwork to Josh. And since he hasn’t shown any signs at all of being a high-maintenance client before this, she suspects he’s up to something.

So I’m off to sit in her office and await the prodigal assistant’s return. Some days we do more than indulge in spying and idle gossip, but apparently today isn’t one of those days.

All my love,

Jennie