A Modern Witch - By Debora Geary Page 0,26

Lauren.

Deep in concentration, neither of them heard Nat let herself in the front door. Jamie sensed her first, a new presence at the edge of the training circle he’d cast.

Not wanting to jar Lauren while she was so exposed, he sent Nat a gentle mental signal to stop. He was grateful that she didn’t seem at all distressed by voices in her head. Perhaps his trainee could take some cues from her friend. Splitting his energies, he held the bond with Lauren steady and opened the training circle to allow Nat in.

Then he slowly opened his eyes and saw Nat for the first time.

Lauren felt her head explode. Brain-pounding tsunamis of feeling. Shock. Desire. Fear. Acceptance. Love.

Jamie felt the dropped connection in his head as he heard Lauren hit the floor. Out cold. Oh, shit.

Nat was beside Lauren in an instant. She reached for her friend and turned big eyes to Jamie. “Help her. What happened?”

He looked at Nat. His control was tighter now, so the tidal wave wasn’t quite as big. But he knew, absolutely knew, that she was the rest of his life. And he was pretty sure the backwash of his reaction had hit Lauren down her wide-open channels.

With the training of thirty years, he snapped his barriers in tight. He sent out a finger of power to monitor Lauren and heaved a breath of relief. “Simple overload. Nothing too serious, but she needs to sleep for a bit. Where’s her bed?”

Jamie picked up Lauren and followed Nat down the hallway. He laid Lauren down gently on the bed and sat beside her. His legs weren’t feeling too steady either, and he couldn’t blame it on newbie-witch status.

Breathing to center himself, he closed his eyes and reached gently for Lauren’s mind. He was no healer, but all witch trainers learned the basic spellwork to treat symptoms of power overload. He calmed and closed her channels, and sent her deeper into sleep.

When he opened his eyes, Nat sat on the other side of Lauren’s bed, her legs wrapped into the easy lotus pose that only came with long practice.

“She’s fine—she just needs rest.”

They sat together for a moment, listening to Lauren’s peaceful breathing.

Nat had a very restful mind, and a very open one. Her single thought was crystal clear to Jamie. Every life had some really big turning points, and her closest friend in the world had obviously just crashed headlong into one.

That about covered it, thought Jamie. And she isn’t the only one.

He spoke quietly to Nat. “You can sit with her—that will be calming. She’ll be starving when she wakes up. We’ll let her sleep for an hour or so, and then she’ll need to eat. I’ll go order Chinese.”

…

Jamie walked into the kitchen, took out his cell phone, and then just sank into a chair. His very weak and totally unpredictable precog talent had picked a hell of a time to put in an appearance.

One look at Nat and he’d been overwhelmed with vision fragments of their future life together. Their potential future life. Precognition showed possibilities, not certainties.

Screw that. It had felt freaking certain.

Dancing at the Shattuck in downtown Berkeley, Nat’s face full of laughter and invitation. Christmas morning with his family. Sunrise yoga together, and the wildly improbable sense that he actually enjoyed it.

Nat’s belly rounded with their first baby.

Building a snowman in their front yard with a toddler that looked shockingly like Aervyn. And damn it all to hell and back, because it didn’t snow in Berkeley. It snowed in Chicago, where he would live with Nat, at least one very cute kid, and a snowman.

Where he would love Nat, and a little boy, with shocking fierceness.

He’d been hit by all of that while holding someone else’s mental channels in his hands. Unbelievably bad timing.

Generally he was pretty laid back about training incidents. Shit happened, and when you trained witches, it happened fairly frequently. Cleaning up spell misfires, healing minor injuries, pulling innocent bystanders out of the way—all part of the job description.

Jamie leaned his head back against the wall. He could try to pretend this was a training incident, but really, Lauren had just been an innocent bystander. Any mind witch within a mile would have felt the shock waves of a precog episode that strong. Lauren had been pretty much at ground zero, and unbarriered.

It had, however, answered a very important question. Only a mind witch of major proportions would have been able to absorb that kind of tidal wave