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