A Modern Witch - By Debora Geary Page 0,14
a little weird.
Jamie held up his hands. “Don’t shoot until you hear me out, okay? The women you chatted with last night are all great people, but they had no idea they’d find someone who didn’t know she was a witch.”
Getting weirder. “I’m not a witch. How did you find me, anyhow?”
“Nothing spooky. Nell had your name, and she Googled you. Chloe at your office said I’d probably find you here. I was hoping you’d be willing to talk with me for a few minutes.”
Chloe would do that. Lauren sat back. Her brain might have shut off there for a moment, but no realtor worth her license stayed that way for long. Jamie was definitely prime guy material. He had a strong and mobile face, with laughing green eyes and a mop of curly black hair.
She tended to trust her first impressions, and her initial sense of Jamie said a heaping dose of charm layered on bad-boy good looks. Nothing said creepy or dangerous enough to leave a perfectly good lunch uneaten. What the heck. Witches 2.0 part two. It couldn’t be any worse than the speed-dating thing she’d been talked into last week, and she was hungry.
She cast around for a reasonably normal topic of conversation. “Seven kids? Your mom must be a saint.”
“They had four, decided to have one more, and had triplets.”
“So, how are you the youngest, then?”
“I was born seven minutes after the first two landed. Makes me the youngest.”
Lauren grinned. Definitely bad-boy charm. “And you milk it for all it’s worth. Nell has triplets too, doesn’t she? I can’t even imagine. I’ve heard that multiple births run in families, though.”
“They’re pretty common in hereditary witching families.”
End of normal, meet-cute-guy interlude, Lauren thought. Switch to meet-cute-guy-who-thinks-he’s-a-witch part of the program. She sighed. “So, Nell was serious; you guys believe you’re witches?”
“I am a witch.”
Lauren wasn’t sure whether to laugh or leave. “And yet you look so normal.”
“I’m a pretty normal guy. I like to eat, play baseball, geek around on the computer, ride motorcycles.”
“Normal guys don’t think they’re witches.”
Jamie watched Lauren steadily. “Your beans are cold.”
Lauren looked down at her edamame beans and choked back a shriek as small tongues of flame danced over the surface of the plate. A few seconds later, they disappeared.
“Go ahead, try them. They’re warm now.”
She reached out a finger. Sure enough. Holy shit. “Handy trick.”
“Tough audience.” Jamie shrugged his shoulders and gestured toward the conveyor belt. This time he spoke just loud enough for her to hear.
“Rise above your landed place, float on air,
Stay in line and hover there.
As I will, so mote it be.”
All the plates on the conveyor belt slowly levitated. Lauren looked incredulously around the restaurant. Was she seriously the only person noticing two hundred floating plates?
“People generally see what they expect to see,” Jamie said. He turned to grin at the little boy behind him, who was watching the plates with glee. “Little kids are sometimes the exception.”
The plates quietly settled back down, except for one plate of edamame beans that floated over to the delighted toddler.
For the second time in less than ten minutes, Lauren felt her brain come to a dead stop. This time she wasn’t entirely sure it would start back up again. The man had levitated plates. Hundreds of plates, with what had sounded a little too much like “double, double, toil and trouble”.
Lauren grabbed a plate of tiny pastries off the conveyor belt. When in doubt, reach for chocolate. She considered herself a pretty rational person, but those plates had definitely been airborne. “Is this like telekinesis or something? How did you do that?”
“It’s a form of telekinetics. There are lots of ways to think about power. Scientists tend to focus on the outcome, so if you move something with your mind, they give it a fancy name and call it telekinesis. In the witching world, we work more with the ‘how’. I called on air as the conduit of power. I could just as easily have called on the air to create a nice breeze in here, or blow out all the candles, but I was trying not to attract a lot of attention.”
Floating plates was subtle magic? Lauren gave a mighty effort to wrap her head around the impossible. “The words you said—that was some kind of spell?”
“Yeah. Some witches work without any words and rhymes, but for most of us, it turns up the wattage on a spell. Don’t need to say it out loud, though; that was