I stood in surprise and said, “No. You may not.”
Angie Baby burst from behind the door opening and down the two steps into the great room, shouting, “You can’t have him! You can’t!” Child fast, she whirled, strawberry blond hair streaming behind her, and ran through the house. The door to her room slammed.
My mouth slowly closed; I hadn’t been aware that it hung open. Everything—every single thing—had just changed. “Will you do me the kindness of waiting here while I speak with my eldest?” I asked carefully. When they both nodded, as unsure as I was, I added, “There is a kettle of hot water on the stove. Tea is in the tin beside it. Please make yourselves at home in my kitchen. And if you take the opportunity to search for the teapot you desire, I assure you, it isn’t there.”
Jerel said, just as carefully, “As I recall, children are . . . difficult, at times.”
“Yes. I’ll return as soon as I know what’s going on.” They nodded and I followed my daughter to her room. When I was still several feet away, I heard the sound of furniture moving and realized that Angelina was barricading her door. My eldest, possibly the only preadolescent witch with two witch genes on the face of the earth, was hiding something. Something important. Something dangerous. Something that could hurt her? Had bespelled her?
I didn’t bother with simple responses. I unleashed the spell I had prepared for the vampires and blew her door off the hinges. It was a restricted spell, releasing and containing any debris, intended to toss vamps off my property but not injure them. Much. Angie’s door shuddered, tilted in from the top, and fell forward to rest upright against my daughter’s bed.
Big Evan would have some new things in his honey-do jar when he got home.
Angie was standing at the foot of the bed, fists on her hips, and shouted, “You broke my door!”
“Yes. I did,” I said as I crawled over the mess of the door, the bed, and the toy box, and into the room. Except for tears and an outpoked bottom lip, Angie Baby looked all right—no streams of black magic wafting off her, no dark manacles. Standing with my hands on my hips I demanded, “Young lady, what is going on?”
“George is mine. He came to me,” she shouted, arms out wide, her face red, tears streaking her cheeks. “They can’t have him!” She was positively furious. I struggled not to smile at the picture she presented; she needed only a sword and blue paint to look like a Celtic warrior princess, and something about her stance made me feel inordinately proud. My baby was defending something, not bespelled.
I sat on the foot of the bed and laced my fingers together. From behind me, my familiar—not that I had a familiar; no witches have familiars—leaped into the room and stalked across the bed, purring. I said, “Tell me about George.”
Angie’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but when I didn’t do anything more frightening, she opened her toy box and removed a teapot. It was redware, made from local red-brown clay and glazed in red-brown, except for the yellow daisy on the front. Angie cuddled the teapot like a doll in both arms. And I had never seen it before, which pricked all my protective instincts again. “How did you get it?” I asked. “Did you buy it with your allowance? Did someone give it to you?”
“No,” Angie said crossly. “It showed up in my toy box this morning. Like poof.” Like poof meant like a spell. Like magic. “Its name is George. It loves me.”
“May I hold it for a moment? Please?”
Angle scowled but passed the teapot to me. It tingled in my hands like an active working, a spell still strong. Worse, it felt . . . alive somehow. As if it quivered in terror. I handed it back to my daughter, who petted the teapot and said, “It’s okay, Georgie. I got you now. It’s okay.”
“Angie Baby, do you remember the time KitKit disappeared? We looked and looked and then we found her at Mrs. Simpson’s place, down the hill?” Angie’s scowl was back and, if possible, was meaner. “She was lapping up milk from a bowl and Mrs. Simpson was mincing salmon for her. KitKit had no interest in coming home, but she belonged here, with us. Remember? Mrs. Simpson gave her back to us.”
Angie looked down at the teapot, her hair falling forward over it, a tear splashing on the top handle. “But . . .” She stopped, sniffling. “Okay. But I wanna give George to them myself.”
“Okay. Can you be nice?”