A Hidden Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 2) (6 page)

She reached for his hands. “When I get back,
maybe we can get started on adding a little Shaw around here.”

Aaron scooped her up. He moved fast for an
innkeeper. “What’s wrong with now?”

That pretty much ended dinner.

~ ~ ~

Jamie scowled at the melted computer parts on
the table. Marcus had quietly overnighted him the innards of
Moira’s cooked computer, but there wasn’t much to see besides a
mess of mangled metal.

Not that he could see very well with three curly
heads all leaning over the table too.

“What do you think?” Ginia asked.

“There’s not a lot to work with, girls. I was
hoping Elorie had just shorted something out and we could get a
read on some of the data, but…”

Mia giggled. “I don’t think there’s any data
left alive in there. She totally fried it.”

Jamie nudged Shay, usually the most
contemplative of the three. “What do you think?”

Shay tilted her head. “Are we sure Elorie did
this?”

Quiet didn’t mean slow, Jamie thought. Shay was
by far the best debugger of the three because she never skipped any
steps, even when the answers seemed obvious.

Mia shrugged. “What else could have done it?
Uncle Jamie, have you ever seen anything like this?”

He shook his head. “No, but Shay asked a great
question. I suspect Elorie’s the culprit, but good coders rule out
weird possibilities, too. Elorie wasn’t the only person in the room
when this happened.”

Mia considered the melted mess. “I bet Aervyn
could melt a hard drive if he wanted to, and he might not even have
to be in the same room.”

Three sets of eyes looked up in sudden
fascination. Uh, oh. This was the kind of stuff where he was
supposed to be the adult. His internal debate didn’t last long. He
wasn’t a father yet, and trying to zap hard drives with magic
sounded like serious fun.

Mia grinned and jumped up. “I’ll go get
Aervyn.”

Shay looked at Jamie. “I bet you could do it
too, couldn’t you?”

Jamie started digging in boxes, looking for old
hard drives. They were about to find out.

Aervyn bounced into the room with glee written
all over his face. “I get to melt computers, Uncle Jamie? Can I
blast ’em, just like Cyclops?”

Jamie jumped in front of his brand-new laptop.
“Hold on a minute, hot stuff. Not this computer. And, think
Superman, not Cyclops—focused magic. Your mom will be mad at me if
we start a big fire in the basement again.”

He picked up an old hard drive and sat it next
to Moira’s melted heap on the table. “First, let me explain what
we’re trying to do. We think that one of the witches in Nova Scotia
managed to turn computer insides like these ones—into this.”

Aervyn looked at the cooked hard drive in
fascination. “It’s pretty hard to melt metal stuff. They must be a
pretty good witch.”

“Well, that’s part of the problem. We’re not
sure who did it, or how they did it. I thought we could do some
experiments and see if we can copy what they did.”

Jamie stopped talking and let his nephew think
for a minute. He had his own ideas to try, but Aervyn was a highly
creative witch. Left to work out his own solution, he might well
come up with something none of them had considered.

Aervyn looked up with a grin that gave Jamie
just enough warning to throw up a hasty training circle. Nell was
pretty lenient, but she drew the line at house fires. A few seconds
later, the edges of the hard drive were melted, but it wasn’t
anywhere close to the puddled goop of Moira’s drive.

Aervyn frowned. “It’s pretty hard. The metal
doesn’t want to melt.” His eyes brightened. “I could do it with a
circle to help.”

Jamie shook his head. “Not just yet, hot stuff.
We learned something important here. You used fire power, right? If
you can’t melt it by yourself that way, then that’s probably not
how this happened. We need to think of a different way to try.”

Ginia held up a mouse. “If we believe it was
Elorie who did it, then she was using one of these.”

Shay spoke up. “And she was on an open Internet
connection.”

Jamie hardwired the mouse into the hard drive.
“Aervyn, do you think you can direct power through this?”

For once, his trainee looked bewildered.
“Maybe.”

Several tests later, including one where Jamie
and Aervyn joined forces, they had managed to do no more than melt
the edges of the hard drive, and one small witchling was a tired,
hungry boy.

Jamie sent him upstairs for cookies and stared
at the failed experiments on the table. He looked up to see Ginia
eyeing his laptop with speculation. He’d been a witch trainer long
enough to know when trouble was brewing.

“Don’t even think it, niece of mine.”

She looked so innocent. “Think what?”

“Whatever you were planning to do with my
computer.”

“Not your computer, exactly. I bet I know how we
could do this, but I need a full computer, not just a hard
drive.”

He hoped it was for a good cause. Jamie
concentrated for a moment and teleported one of the old clunkers
from his home office. “You can use this one, but use the firewalled
port to hook it up to the Net. We don’t want to fry anything else
by accident.”

“I’m not going to fry this one—I just need the
screen interface.” She nodded to her sisters. “Help me wire the old
drive into the USB port.”

Jamie sat and watched, and soon the old drive
was hanging off one of the clunker’s USB ports. They were good, and
he was still totally lost. “What are you planning?”

Ginia flexed her fingers in a movement common to
master coders everywhere. “I’m going to melt it with spellcode. Go
away. I’ll tell you when it’s ready.”

Damn. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

He went upstairs to swipe some of Aervyn’s
cookies. By the time he came back, three faces were grinning with
maniacal glee. Mia bounced in a circle. “It’s gonna work, Uncle
Jamie. Watch!”

Ginia focused, clicked twice with her mouse, and
the old hard drive hanging off the side of her computer turned into
a puddle. The acrid smell of melted metal underscored her
success.

Jamie hugged his excited nieces and tried to
think. He was totally impressed. There was only one problem. No one
in Nova Scotia could spellcode their way out of a paper bag. Well,
Marcus could, but he hadn’t been the one sitting at Moira’s
computer when it fried.

He was pretty sure they hadn’t actually learned
anything at all, except that Ginia was a freaking awesome
spellcoder. Elorie was still a total mystery.

~ ~ ~

Ginia prepared to login to Realm. She had a
whole hour, a new strategy, and three new spells. Gandalf was going
down. He deserved it, for thinking her coding sucked. If she could
spellcode a computer melt, she could take down some old guy who
learned to code in the last century.

Well, he was actually a pretty good coder, but
his spellcode had some cracks. She’d tried taking him in a duel,
and he’d locked her up in a tower. Her friends had busted her out,
but he was too strong in a head-on battle. She needed to be
sneaky.

She logged in and headed to the pub, pretty sure
she’d find him on his usual chair in the corner. She didn’t get
that—Realm was a lot more fun with friends, but Gandalf always
played alone. People had tried—the third-best player in Realm would
make a powerful ally—but he was always his usual rude self, and
they eventually went away.

Today he was dressed like a monk. Generally, the
simpler his disguise, the more dangerous he was. She set a couple
of warding spells in place just to be safe.

Warrior Girl:
Good evening to
ya, Gandalf.

Gandalf:
Merry meet, Warrior
Girl. I see your friends aided in your escape. Can I buy you a
drink?

Warrior Girl:
Some of us
have
friends. Cider, please.

Gandalf:
Get the girl a
cuppa. Make it a small one, since she’s being rude today.

Warrior Girl:
I have a
proposition to make.

Gandalf:
Big word for a
little girl.

Warrior Girl:
I’m big
enough.

Gandalf:
Really. And what big
things have you done lately?

Warrior Girl:
I melted a
computer this morning.

Gandalf:
On purpose?

Warrior Girl:
I’m a
well-trained witch. I don’t do magic by accident.

Gandalf:
Ah. Trying to
recreate the incident with Aunt Moira’s computer, were you?

Warrior Girl:
Yup.

Gandalf:
Learn anything?

Warrior Girl:
Well, it wasn’t
just power overload. Even Aervyn couldn’t melt a hard drive that
way, and he tried. Uncle Jamie thinks he could do it with the juice
of a circle behind him, but—

Gandalf:
If the baddest
witchling in the West couldn’t do it alone, then it’s unlikely
that’s what happened.

Warrior Girl:
Exactly.

Gandalf:
So, if Aervyn
couldn’t do it, then how’d you pull it off?

Warrior Girl:
I didn’t just
use magic; I used coding, too.

Gandalf:
You spellcoded a
computer melt? Remind me to keep you away from my electronics.

Warrior Girl:
It worked, but
you’re the only spellcoder at Aunt Moira’s house.

Gandalf:
I didn’t cook her
computer, little fighter.

Warrior Girl:
Could you?

Gandalf:
Good question. I
don’t happen to have a spare one around to test on, however.

Warrior Girl:
Uncle Jamie
doesn’t think Elorie could have spellcoded.

Gandalf:
Ha. The girl can
hardly answer email.

Warrior Girl:
But what if she
did it by accident? Not spellcoding, exactly, but something like
that.

Gandalf:
Hmm. Different
process, but same result?

Warrior Girl:
Huh?

Gandalf:
Never mind. You’ve
got me thinking now, which I’m guessing was your intent.

Warrior Girl:
Yup. You might
be a crusty old witch, but you’re pretty smart.

Gandalf:
Be gone with you,
brat.

Ginia logged out of Realm and giggled. Mission
accomplished. Well, two missions, actually. It probably
was
a good idea for Gandalf to think about Elorie’s magic. Maybe he’d
figure something out.

More importantly, however, the conversation had
distracted him long enough for her to plant her weaving spells. By
this time tomorrow, his two most potent spells wouldn’t recognize
him as caster. They’d belong to his two biggest challengers besides
her. She hoped they got the hint and ganged up on him. And while
they were doing that, she’d be going on a spell raid.

Warrior Girl was going to rule Realm. It was
just a matter of time.

~ ~ ~

“It’s so you don’t forget about us while you’re
gone,” Lizzie said.

Jeebers, Elorie thought. You’d think she was
going away for years instead of a week. Her three students had
shown up with a care package of homemade snickerdoodles, some
freshly picked blueberries, and a painstakingly drawn and lettered
card—clearly Lizzie’s handiwork.

“We picked the berries this afternoon,” Kevin
said. “There were more, but it was hard to stop eating them.”

Elorie looked at the gallon bucketful and tried
not to giggle. It didn’t seem likely they would let her take those
on the plane. Aaron would be serving blueberry pancakes to their
guests for days. And the snickerdoodles wouldn’t make it as far as
the plane—their cinnamon-y goodness was already teasing her
nose.

She hugged Lizzie. “I’m only going for a few
days, so I won’t forget you, and I most definitely won’t be hungry.
Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone, okay?” She looked at
Sean as she said the last.

He rolled his eyes. “We don’t try to get into
trouble. It just kind of finds us.”

“Find a better hiding place.” She kissed the top
of his head, sure to annoy him. “I don’t want Gran having to do a
lot of spellwork while I’m gone. Remember, she tires more easily
than she thinks.”

“She won’t have to,” Kevin said. “Uncle Marcus
is staying here while you’re gone. He says we need better
supervision.”

Uncle Marcus?
Wow. He only came out of
his cave a couple of times a year, and never for more than a day or
two.

“He likes people more than you think,” Kevin
said, and then blushed. “Oops, sorry. I’m not too good at
mind-witch manners yet. Uncle Marcus says I need to practice
harder, but your mind is really leaky.”

Lovely. Just what she needed to hear as she
headed off to Witch Central, where there were mind witches
practically wall-to-wall. “You can practice while I’m gone. Or
maybe if you’re hearing things you shouldn’t, you could at least
help keep Sean out of trouble.”

Kevin shook his head. “Nope. His mind isn’t
leaky at all.”

Lizzie talked with her mouth full of
blueberries. “Is my brain leaky?”

Sean grinned. “It’s gonna be leaking blueberries
soon if you don’t stop eating them. You’re gonna have purple poop,
too.”

“Eeeewwww, I will not,” Lizzie said. She looked
at Elorie. “Can poop really turn purple?”

“How many of those have you eaten?”

Lizzie contemplated the blueberry container.
“Maybe one whole bucket. Granny Moira said I could eat as many as I
wanted. She said blueberries are good for witchlings.”

Elorie gave her a hug. “They’re very good for
you—and that many blueberries will definitely give you purple poop.
Did Gran want any blueberries for herself?”