A Hidden Witch - By Debora Geary Page 0,44

like nobody’s business.

The sheet floated gently toward Kevin and settled an edge down around the first mattress corner. They got the next two corners on in quick succession, but the last one was tricky. After a couple of attempts, Lizzie abandoned ship and switched focus to the duvet.

Swift teamwork settled the cover on the bed over the errant sheet corner, and added two pillows.

Lizzie opened her eyes and grinned. “There, we did it!”

Elorie laughed. By six-year-old standards, that was probably an acceptable solution. She’d fix the last corner later.

Aaron arrived in the doorway. “There are scones and milk in the kitchen, if anybody’s hungry.” He got out of the way of the stampede, grinning at his wife.

“There’s got to be a joke in here somewhere about how many witches it takes to change the sheets on a bed.”

Elorie laughed and held up the corner of the cover so he could see Lizzie’s shortcut. “Don’t hire them just yet.”

Aaron chuckled. “Not a problem. Aervyn’s sleeping in that bed, and he’s only three feet tall. He’ll never notice.”

Elorie fixed the sheet anyhow.

~ ~ ~

Sophie sat down in front of her laptop and let out a long sigh. Packing was finally done, her house was back in order, and her system was settling down after the lovely shock of Mike’s arrival.

He’d found excellent use for her zinging hormones and then gone off for a run while she finished packing. Running was serious business for Mike—she didn’t expect him back for at least another hour.

She had plans for that hour. A nine-year-old was aiming for Realm domination, and Gandalf wasn’t the only witch who could take her down. Sophie’d been planning a sneak spell-raid for almost two weeks now, and her pushed-up travel plans meant she needed to spring the attack tonight.

Warrior Girl was online and on the prowl. Perfect. And odd. She was wandering around in one of the easiest witch-only levels, and she had company. Huh. Normally the top players stayed in the higher levels. It wasn’t any fun squishing newbies, and complex spells didn’t work as well in the beginners’ zone.

Sophie dropped into the level-one world to investigate. Maybe Warrior Girl would be more vulnerable without her fancier spellcoding tricks.

At first, Sophie thought one of the lower-rated players had made the eternally dumb mistake of launching a magic attack on Realm’s number-four-ranked player. Watching from the forest, however, it soon became clear that Warrior Girl wasn’t fighting—she was training. Which was fascinating on a bunch of levels, not the least of which being that her companion had a very strange mix of glaring weaknesses and nifty magical tricks. Sophie looked up the username. Hecate. Hmm.

She didn’t know what gave her presence away, but suddenly Hecate fired a very tricky freeze spell in her direction. Sophie reacted instinctively, pulling a reversing spell out of her bag in the nick of time.

Nothing like being completely unprepared. Ugh. Sophie squared off with Hecate and tried to keep an eye on Warrior Girl.

Hecate had some nice magical moves, and she used them. Sophie dodged where she could, retaliated when she had to, and wondered how the heck she was going to get out of this with even a fraction of her spell stockpile intact.

Just when she was getting somewhere, Warrior Girl tossed in an illusion spell to make things interesting. Sophie would have appreciated her sense of fair play more if Hecate didn’t appear to have six arms now.

There was only one way she could see to end this, and she’d better take it before Warrior Girl got more seriously involved. Hecate had snazzy magic tricks, but she had really weak physical fighting skills. Sophie waited for an opening and moved in. One conk on the head with the butt end of her sword, and Hecate dropped to the ground like a stone, out cold.

Ginia flew to the side of her fallen trainee. “Aunt Moira!”

Sophie’s brain slowed to molasses. “Aunt Moira?”

Ginia looked up, a very pained look on her face. “Ssshh. Keep it down. She’s my secret weapon, but it won’t do me much good if everyone figures out who she is.”

Oh, God. She’d conked Aunt Moira on the head. In an online game. Either of those events was insane. Both must mean the world was coming to an end.

She bent down beside Ginia. “What do we do?”

Ginia looked up. “I don’t know. I don’t have any safe zones in this level.”

Sophie sighed and drew a cloaking spell out of her bag. This was going