A Modern Witch - By Debora Geary Page 0,25
her mouse around aimlessly. Jamie didn’t get worried without good reason. He’d worked with plenty of trainee witches. Heck, he was Aervyn’s primary trainer. Power, even abundant power, wasn’t enough to make Jamie jumpy.
Maybe Lauren’s legs were just too distracting. Knowing Jamie, that was the real problem.
...
Nothing was more delicious than a Saturday afternoon nap on the best couch in the world. Lauren stretched in contentment and considered rolling over for a second dose of lethargy.
She’d earned it this morning. Coffee-bearing witches who could talk in your head and long-distance snoop into your nail polish collection were hard work.
It was still possible this was all Jamie. His mind magic, his apparently very real powers. She definitely preferred that theory.
Unfortunately, if it were true, it meant three women in a chat room and a guy in California had formed this wacko conspiracy to convince a sane woman she was a witch. Her ego just wasn’t big enough to think she was the chosen target of a very odd witch hunt.
What was that Sherlock Holmes line? Eliminate the impossible and whatever’s left, however weird, must be true. Something like that.
So, maybe she had some feeble telepathy. In Jamie’s world, that made her a witch. In her world, it probably just made her a better realtor. She had good gut instincts, and really, how much bigger a stretch was it to think your brain could sense things, if you believed your guts could?
Lauren rolled over and decided to take nap part two after all.
…
Nat danced her way down Lauren’s street. Three yoga classes today, all packed to the rafters. Spirit Yoga was making its mark. There was nothing she liked better than taking a group of people and sending them all home more limber and centered than when they’d arrived.
Growing up, she never could have imagined a life this happy. Or—she laughed at herself—one so much at odds with what was expected of a Smythe. Teaching yoga might not raise eyebrows in some families, but in hers, it was up there with joining a cult or hitting the local bar for karaoke night. Fairly close to unthinkable.
And never mind yoga—she was apparently about to have dinner with a witch. That probably set a new Smythe record for profoundly inappropriate behavior. Shallow, maybe, but she enjoyed her little part in rebalancing the family karma.
Not that she needed any more reasons to come to dinner. Lauren had asked, and that was enough.
She was very curious about Lauren’s witch. Magical mind powers and floating plates. And some kind of mind-reading practice. It was going to be a fascinating dinner.
…
“Better. You still need to relax and open your channels more, but that was better.” Jamie twisted a little to relieve the kinks in his spine. He and Lauren had been sitting on her floor for over an hour, working on the most basic of mind-magic exercises—opening and closing mental channels.
“Your barriers are still really rigid. Don’t think of them as a wall—more like a soft and flexible bubble. When you want to block most things and keep the emotions and thoughts of others at a distance, you inflate the bubble. To be more sensitive, you deflate the bubble and pull it in tighter, so you can read what’s outside more clearly. Very rarely do you want to let go of the bubble entirely; that leaves you completely vulnerable.”
“It’s a wonder I’ve survived for twenty-eight years,” Lauren said wryly.
“Oh, your current barriers are effective enough. You likely don’t pick up much that you don’t want to hear. But to truly use mind magics, you also need to be able to choose when to open and when to send. You can’t do that with the clunky walls you currently have in place. You need more refined tools.”
“Bricks, bubbles, pink feathers. I guess I still don’t really see the point.”
“It will make more sense when your friend Nat gets here. I’ll support your barrier control while you try some simple sending and receiving with her. Then you’ll see the difference between bricks and bubbles, trust me. Let’s try the bubble one more time.”
Jamie patiently walked Lauren through the deepening of quiet mind and sending breath to her mental barriers, floating her bubble on a wave of breath. With a quiet mental touch, he encouraged her to slowly deflate the bubble. Good—she was doing better this time.
Different students needed different visualizations. For some, bricks worked just fine. Bubbles weren’t his favorite—he always imagined them popping—but they seemed to be working for