to close the circle.
After the slow beat of the rocks, it felt like a footrace. Lines of magic snapping everywhere. Connections lost.
Cass opened her eyes, suddenly adrift - and was comforted by Moira's smiling face across the circle. She sucked in a breath. "The rocks were just having a little stretch. They're sorry they messed up the pool." As sorry as rocks got, anyhow.
She pulled suddenly cold hands up into her sleeves.
The rest of what the teenage rock had said, she planned to thoroughly ignore. No hunk of granite got to decide who made her heart beat faster.
She turned and walked away, shaken by the pull of a gentle, complicated man and a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.
Music was her singular focus. Her lifeblood.
She and Rosie could visit here - but they couldn't stay.
And it troubled her that somewhere nestled in the touch of the rocks and the mind of the man, she had wanted to.
Chapter 11
Sophie opened the front door of the inn, Adam already craning his head. "You hear her, don't you, sweet boy?" Curious, she released him from the carrier and set him down on all fours.
And watched, grinning, as her boy who usually hid in a corner beelined for the parlor as fast as his chubby, crawling limbs could take him. Quickly, she slid out of her wet boots and followed.
Adam was moving more slowly now, head tipped up and eyes glued on the woman at the other end of the room.
Cassidy smiled from her stool by the window and studied the small boy headed her direction. "Heard the music, did you, love?" She put her fiddle back up on her shoulder. "What do you like best, hmm?"
Fingers flew into a melodic, glitzy version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Adam sat up, wool longies bunched at his knees.
Still watching him, Cass switched to something fast and bright that Sophie didn't recognize. Her son's feet squirmed on the floor.
And then she felt the tug of distant magic, and Rosie began to sing something long, low, and melancholy. Sophie felt her own earth power rising in response.
Adam began to sway.
Cass got down off the stool, crouching down beside the small, transfixed boy. Note by note, she cocooned the two of them in soft, aching sound.
Sophie drank in her son's silent, easy joy. And wished for Mike.
Her husband had been exhausted after the tub repair. Not from fixing a crack - for a witch of his power, that was all in a day's work. It was trying to follow Cassidy's magic that had flattened him. Trying to learn something that might help their boy.
But before falling facedown on the bed in a stupor, he'd said words that had lit Sophie's mind on fire. "Cass hears the planet, Soph. Maybe that's what Adam needs, too."
It made an eerie kind of sense. Adam was the child of two witches connected deeply to the energies of living earth and rock.
And it was the best clue they had.
Something beat out of alignment in their son. And a woman with a violin on her shoulder and a gentle smile on her face knew how to fix it.
Such a sweet baby. Cass let the last notes of her improvised jazz lullaby fade into the room's corners, her eye still on the lovely boy. She spoke in low tones, pitched just loud enough for Sophie to hear. "It's rare for me to have such a rapt audience."
"Your music is magic for him."
Decades of training and Irish blood let Cass hear the unsaid things better than most. "Tell me about your son." She looked up and met sober eyes. "You worry about him." Lots of people did.
Sophie sank onto the floor, smiling as Adam crawled off toward a pile of blocks at the edge of the room. "Some days."
"Some kids are just different." Her brother Rory had been one of those. Late to walk, late to talk - and as Nan was still wont to say, late to finish sowing his wild oats.
"It's more than that." Sophie's fingers played with the tassels on the edge of the rug. "I'm an introvert. A scientist and a thinker. But I'm happy that way, you know?" She looked over at her son, busy pushing a block across the floor with his toes. "Too often, Adam isn't happy."
Cass's sympathy flared. She'd seen it. Adam squirming at the dinner table as the other babies sat happily babbling in someone's lap. "I saw Mike out walking last night." Under the light