“Yeah. You want to know why?”
Angie narrowed her eyes at me. I placed one hand on the floor at my hip and propped my weight on it. With the other hand, I kneaded my belly. It growled loudly. The two half shifts and the fighting had left me weak and starving, but sometimes there were more important things than food. I watched Angie, reading the emotions that flashed across her face as she considered my question.
“I guess,” she said, as if the words were dragged out of her.
“Because I get really sick when I move fast. The last few times, I threw up blood.”
Angie sat up straight. “You puked blood? Ewwwww.”
“I know, right?”
“Did it stink?”
“Yeah. It did. And I was so sick afterward that I had to shift back to human to not end up dead.”
“You think I would puke blood and end up dead if I moved fast?”
“I think it’s possible. And because you’re my godchild I had to stop you from doing something that would hurt you. The same way I’d have to stop you if you wanted to jump off a cliff to see if you could fly.” I cocked my head at her and my hair, still trapped under my shirt, but no longer bound in the scrunchies, slid forward on my shoulder. The scrunchies dropped to my waist in a little nest of knitted material that itched, but I’d have to wait to scratch that one until Angie was pacified. “You know what being a godmother means? Not a fairy godmother like in fairy tales, but a real godmother?”
“Daddy says it means you can spank me if I’m real bad, but I don’t believe him. You would never hurt me.” When I didn’t reply she asked, “Is going fast being bad?”
“Can you fly?”
Angie tucked her chin at my seeming non sequitur.
“Let’s say you had a spell that you thought might let you fly, and you wanted to jump off a cliff to see if it worked, instead of testing it by jumping off your back deck. I’d have to stop you from jumping off a cliff. And if you were really grown-up enough to test that spell, you would never have thought of testing it by jumping off a cliff in the first place.”
Angie thought about that for a while as I kneaded my belly and breathed in the wonderful bacon smell that was wafting under my door. “You mean that if I was stupid you would have to stop me from being stupid?”
“Yep.”
“I was stupid to go fast?”
“There might be a cliff at the bottom of go fast.”
“Did my magics get messed up because I tried to go fast?” Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, and I felt like crap because of them. “I can’t use my magics no more.” She sobbed and buried her face in my pillow.
Thank God, I thought.
Kit, Beast thought. Pull kit in to nurse.
No way. Ick. But a good cuddle, maybe, I thought back at her. I managed to get to my feet and went to the bed, where I sat on the tangled sheets and pulled Angie to me. She was overheated and sweaty and smelled like . . . like Angie. I placed her on my lap and positioned her head on my healed shoulder, my nose in her hair. She smelled wonderful, of little girl and happiness, even over the scent of anger and tears.
“You didn’t mess up your magics trying to go fast. At least not permanently. But you did get snarled back up in the binding while you were trying to figure out time, and now your magics are tied in with it. Meaning that you can’t use your magic until your parents say so. You won’t be able to make them forget things or not see you doing things.”
“Not fair!”
I chuckled. “It’s fair, it’s just not what you want. There’s a difference.”
“You jumped off a cliff.”
My breath caught at that accusation. Because she was right. I jumped off cliffs all the time. “I guess I did. But I’ve jumped off cliffs for a long time and I started with little cliffs and I know how big a cliff I can jump off of. And I also know that, sometimes, it’s better to jump off a cliff and risk death than the alternative.”
“What’s alternative?”
“What’s it mean?”
Angie nodded her head, bumping my nose.
“Saving you and your mama and the new baby is worth jumping off a cliff. Worth risking my life for.” I nuzzled her head, and she repositioned herself on my lap and sighed. “Some things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.”
“But if you died, then what about us? We might have died too.”
I nodded. “I knew that was a risk. And if I’d had lots of time to reason through it, I might have taken the selfish way out and gone fast and changed things to my benefit. To all our benefit. But making things turn out the way I want can have unintended consequences. You know what that means?”
“It means that I plan for a good thing to happen with my magics, but my plans make a bad thing happen. Mama says that’s witchery one-oh-one.”
I grinned against her head.