run—there are perogies for dinner, and I’m starving. Good night, all.
Sophie: Ouch.
Moira: Oh, dear.
Nell: I feel like we stepped in something there, and I don’t know the whole story. Anyone care to fill me in?
Moira: Elorie has always longed to be a witch, ever since she was a small girl. She hides it very well now, but I don’t know that she’s ever really grown out of it. I was so certain she would develop power that I wasn’t as careful as I might have been in helping her accept the alternatives.
Sophie: Non-witches are as welcome as any witch, Aunt Moira—you’ve always made sure of that.
Moira: Of course they are, but the magic has always called to her. Normally when a witchling has that kind of attraction to the craft, their powers emerge at some point, but hers never did. And it was doubly hard with her and Sophie being so close. You handle that beautifully with your triplets, Nell—I didn’t handle it nearly so well.
Nell: Not to ignore the history, but maybe she should be tested again. It sounds like she hasn’t been scanned in a while. I swear, my code says she’s a witch. Maybe your instincts weren’t wrong.
Sophie: She’s around practicing witches and active circle work all the time. It’s hard to believe she has stealth witching talents we’ve all failed to notice.
Nell: Yeah, active power streams usually make any nearby untrained talents pretty obvious.
Moira: It shames me somewhat to say it, but she’s been scanned much more recently than she knows. I stopped telling her when I do it, since it saddens her so, but it’s been no more than a few months since I last checked.
Sophie: And we’ve surely saddened her and you again tonight. I’m so sorry, Aunt Moira.
Nell: Crap. I’ll debug my code and try not to screw up again. Sorry—with the girls doing most of the work on this, I’ve obviously missed something. No excuses, but we’ll go through it with a fine-toothed comb tomorrow.
Moira: Not to worry. Aaron will tend to her heart; he’s a very good man.
Elorie closed the door of her studio and leaned against it, sucking in the brisk ocean air. No, dammit. She was not going to let this get to her. Teenagers got to cry about the powers they wanted and didn’t get. Grown women needed to make peace with the life they had.
She had a good one, and right now, it involved a big plate of perogies.
Chapter 2
Elorie figured that at twenty-six, she’d looked at more small rocks than most people would see in three lifetimes. Finding sea glass on the beach was the art of scanning and letting your eye catch the unusual, the bright glimpse of color in a sprawl of gray and brown.
Which would be simpler if ocean pebbles actually were gray and brown. Especially when wet, the stones on the beach were an astonishing variety of colors, with glints of gold and green and occasional glimpses of almost every other color in nature. Add in fragments of pretty shell and unidentified chunks of sea crud, and it wasn’t as easy as you might think to spot the hidden bits of tumbled glass.
Elorie had loved hunting for them ever since she was a little girl. Her mother would bring her to the beach, making up stories about the glass and where it had been. She remembered the first time she’d taken a treasure find, suspended it from a black shoelace with dental floss, and presented it as a Mother’s Day gift.
It had taken fifteen years and the shoelace breaking to convince Mom to let her put that little piece of purple glass on a proper chain with a handcrafted silver-wire setting. And she was pretty sure her mother still had the shoelace remains tucked away somewhere.
Sentimental, maybe, but now that she was considering a baby of her own, it was a little easier to understand why Mom had worn a shoelace around her neck for a decade and a half.
As she strolled along the beach, Elorie rubbed her belly and pondered what it would be like to grow a baby. Children weren’t much of a mystery when you’d grown up surrounded by them, but having a baby inside you was a wonder. Aaron had been dropping hints lately. Maybe after she got back from San Francisco.
A piece of water-blue glass caught her attention, and she reached down to tuck its wet coolness in her pocket. This beach was out of the way