A Nomadic Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 4) (3 page)

It had never come up.  He stayed silent.  Talking only gave people reason to stay.

Her eyes saddened, and she reached out to touch his cheek.  “I’ve not have caused you that kind of pain, my dear sweet boy.  Not ever.”

Dammit.  Moira in high dudgeon he could perhaps repel.  The aunt who had rocked him for hours, saying nothing, for days after Evan had died?

Even he wasn’t that crusty.

He pulled her hand down from his cheek, giving it a quick squeeze before locking down his armor.  “What was the message?”

“There’s a baby coming.  A wee girl by the name of Morgan.”  Not by an eyelash did Moira betray her unease, but he could feel it stirring in her mind.  “She’s to be yours.”

Marcus stared.  And then felt the most unusual sensation.  Laughter, bubbling all the way up from his toes.  “Someone escaped from Las Vegas to tell you I’m going to be a father?”  Clearly an object lesson on trusting his first instincts—nothing that glittery could possibly be real.  “I can assure you, there are no babies out there with Marcus Buchanan genes.”  He wasn’t entirely a hermit, but his recent life in Fisher’s Cove hadn’t exactly lent itself to clandestine encounters.

He got up to deal with the whistling kettle, wishing the whole day to hell.  “Any other messages from beyond?”

“The dead don’t always speak clearly.”  Moira, not taking the hint, reached into the cupboard for his cookie tin.  “And there was one more bit about a missing soldier and church steps.”

The words hammered into his lungs.  Marcus bent over, clutching the counter, vaguely aware that the dropped kettle had smashed a teacup to smithereens.  Pink and green shards floated in front of his eyes, a terrifying gray haze sliding in to enfold his brain.  The mists had come for Evan.  Now they were coming for him.

And the part of him that would have been glad to go vanished in an onslaught of fear.

~ ~ ~

He was coming round.  Sophie eased out of her healing trance slightly—Marcus was a strong mind witch, and he wouldn’t appreciate the invasion once he was conscious enough to feel it.

She looked over at six-year-old Lizzie, competently handling healer’s assistant duties.  “Nice job on the monitoring there, sweetheart.  What did you notice?” All moments were teaching ones, even when a perfectly healthy adult had collapsed while drinking tea with Aunt Moira.

Lizzie frowned.  “It’s like Gran, but different.”

That was interesting.  Lizzie had served countless hours as nursemaid when Moira was recovering from her stroke.  “What do you mean?  Different how?”  One of the healer trainee’s more difficult tasks was learning to put words to things vaguely felt in scans.

Lizzie’s face screwed up in thought.  “Well, the hurt is in his head, just like Gran’s, but there’s nothing really there.  It doesn’t start anywhere—it’s just kind of all over.  With Gran, we healed the hurt spot, and she got a lot better.”  She looked down at Marcus, who was stirring now.  “We can’t heal his whole head—it’s too big and grumpy.”

Sophie hid a grin—truer words were never spoken.  “Sometimes when we aren’t sure what happened, it’s best to ask the patient.”  She directed a light flow of energy into the healing trance.  Time for Marcus to wake up and face the music.  The fairly limited music—they’d cleared the room. 

Some patients appreciated waking up to a room full of love.  Marcus was not one of those patients.

When his eyes finally opened, the pain in them nearly knocked Sophie over.  And then it eased—locked behind the impenetrable wall he always wore like armor.  She felt the healing trance disconnect, lopped off by the strong mental will at the other end.

Marcus growled, the kind of hungry-bear sound that would have had most six-year-olds running for the door.  Fortunately, Lizzie was made of sterner stuff.  She patted his cheek and gave him a glare that would have done Moira proud.  “Lie still while the blood finds your head or you’ll just end up lying on the floor again, and Uncle Aaron says you were heavy enough to carry the first time.”

Bright spots of red popped up on Marcus’s cheeks.  His eyes zinged to Sophie’s.  “What happened?”

Some things weren’t meant for little ears, even ones preparing for important responsibilities.  Sophie put a hand on Lizzie’s shoulder.  “Go send Gran in, lovey—and then if you could make up some of my chamomile tea, that would be helpful.”  She leaned in and whispered, knowing it would take a good bribe to separate Lizzie and her newest patient.  “You can doctor it up with anything you’d like from the bottom shelf of my herbals.” 

She grinned as fast feet flew out the bedroom door.  The most potent remedies were well out of Lizzie’s reach—but plenty of lovely and vile stuff inhabited the bottom shelf.  Good practice for a budding healer—and an excellent threat if Marcus didn’t prove cooperative.

A good healer needed to be skilled with both carrots and sticks.

She looked back over at Marcus, who glared at her with well-deserved suspicion, and smiled.  “I suggest you recover quickly.”

He snorted.  “That would be easier done if I knew what the hell happened.”

Moira slid in the door, showing none of the hand-wringing fear she’d been wearing like a cloak when Sophie first arrived.  She sat in the chair beside the bed, never taking eyes off her nephew.  “It seems the medium brought you two messages—one I understood, and one I didn’t.”

Sophie felt the terror raking Marcus again—and wondered what on earth had just crashed into Fisher’s Cove.

~ ~ ~

Moira watched her nephew, the scar tissue in her heart aching at the haunted fear in his eyes.  They’d never truly been able to reach the devastated five-year-old boy who had watched his brother vanish into the eternal mists. 

She remembered when they’d found him standing on the cliff’s edge just outside the village, screaming Evan’s name into the wind and holding more power in his hands than most adult witches used in a lifetime.

It had taken months to heal his seared magical channels.  His heart, they’d never been able to touch.  They’d lost Evan to the awful power of astral travel—and she often thought his twin’s heart had gone with him.

Just as she’d done for more than forty years, she reached out with love.  And prayed that one day it wouldn’t be turned away.  “Tell us what happened.”

His scowl wouldn’t have scared a newborn mouse.  “You delivered a message of nonsense from someone dressed like Lizzie last Hallow’s Eve.”

Lizzie had been a green caterpillar last Halloween.  Moira sighed.  Every battle had its time and place.  “Nonsense wouldn’t have landed you unconscious on the floor or broken one of my favorite teacups.” 

“Spew enough garbage and something’s bound to be true.”  Marcus waved his hand in weak dismissal.  “It reminded me of something, that’s all.  If someone will bring me the teacup’s remains, I’ll see that it’s repaired.”

Idiot.  Moira looked at Sophie—it was always good to check in with the healer before you hammered her patient.

Sophie nodded.  Hammer away.

“You great, clodding imbecile of a man.”  Moira let her Irish free.  Not that it ever managed to dent Marcus’s hard skull, but it would make her feel better—he had scared her silly crashing to the floor like that.  “I’m neither fool nor patsy, and you’ll be telling me what you know about soldiers and church steps or I’ll be putting that frying pan of yours to another purpose.”  It was a heavy cast-iron one—she’d added it to his kitchen herself.

It was a good and proper rant—the kind that put snap back in her nephew’s eyes and color in his cheeks.  “I’m not a small boy anymore.  I’ve a right to the privacy of my own head, and I’ll ask you to leave now and take this noisy gaggle of witches with you.”  Marcus stared pointedly out the window. 

He’d always been able to punish with silence.  Moira felt the scars rip anew—and fought against the tears.  They wouldn’t help her now.  Or him.

It shocked her to the core when Sophie reached out, healing power turned on full force, and drilled an angry palm into Marcus’s chest.  “Is this the crap everyone’s been taking from you all these years?”  Electricity snapped in Sophie’s eyes and ran straight out her fingers.  “You take love when you want, and send it to hell the rest of the time?”

Marcus fought, sheet white, against the power streaming from her hands.  Moira watched in horrified awe as the most talented healer she knew walked perilously close to an unforgivable line.

And finally stopped.  Sophie sagged in her chair, energy drained from her hands.  “She loves you, you old fart, and so do most of that noisy gaggle out there.”  She pulled herself up to standing, shades of the old woman she would one day become.  “I don’t really have any idea why.  It would be more pleasant to love a field of thistles most of the time.” 

Sophie’s voice carried a sadness Moira had never heard—one that could only have come from touching a broken heart deeply.  Healing always came at a price. 

Marcus only stared, cheeks as white as those of his healer.

On legs shaking like reeds in the wind, Sophie headed for the door.  “Tell her about the soldier.  Or I will.”

“You read my mind?”  Marcus’s rasp sliced at the air in the room.

“No.”  Sophie shook her head, clinging to the doorjamb for support.  “I read your heart.”

~ ~ ~

What had the witch done to him?  Marcus leaned back against the pillows, feeling his guts still spilling through the hole Sophie had punched in his heart.

And tried to fight the memories swirling in his head.

The toy soldiers had been contraband—a black-market trade with one of the other kids in Fisher’s Cove.  Mom had believed in non-violent toys for her boys.  Dad had laughed and called her “his hippie witch.”  Evan and Marcus had just learned to hide their precious soldiers carefully and well.

Under the back steps of the village church.

He looked over at his aunt, watching him, her eyes full of sympathy and demand.  They’d always been such, even when he’d been a fractured little boy carrying the guilt of the universe on his shoulders.

She huffed out a sigh and reached for her tea.  “When you were little, the threat of cauldron scrubbing often got you to talk.”

It had.  He’d also become the youngest witch ever to master a copper-burnishing spell.  “Threats don’t carry much weight with me anymore.”

“Mmm.”  Moira wrapped her hands more comfortably around her cup.  “So, should I be telling the village elders there’s a soldier buried under the church?”

Amusement slapped oddly against Marcus’s ribs.  Evan would have loved a mystery and a dead body, and the chance to ruffle the calm waters of Fisher’s Cove.  “We had a set of six toy soldiers.  After Evan—“ He stopped, all traces of humor fleeing.  “I could only find five.”

And dammit, he’d searched high and low under those church steps.

“Ah, I remember.”  Moira’s smile tinged with sadness.  “Your mother let you play with them in secret, against her better judgment.  They made you happy.”

Nothing had made him happy—but they’d helped him to forget for a while.  Given him somewhere else to look while the light in Mom’s eyes had slowly gone out. 

He’d barely been out of boyhood when his parents moved to Florida, land of sunshine and golf tees.

“They were wrong, you know.”  Moira reached for his hand, her grip strong and sure. 

Mind barriers had never kept her out. Marcus shrugged, the ache old and dulled by time.  “They wanted to forget.”  Easier to do away from the gray mists.

His aunt’s eyes snapped.  “They lost one son.  They chose to let go of the other.”

And for all the days he’d hated her for it, she’d never been willing to do the same.  He met her gaze, for once wanting her to know what she meant to him.  “I wasn’t easy on any of you.”

“No, you weren’t.”  Moira’s fingers touched his cheek, whisper soft—and then her eyes began to dance.  “And for penance, you can drink the concoction young Lizzie carries up the stairs.”

Blasted healers and their witch brews.  “I should have made a run for it while I had the chance.”  If his legs hadn’t still felt like a close cousin to spaghetti, he’d have been long gone. 

“You’ve never been quite fast enough.”  His aunt’s grin blossomed as footsteps reached the top of the stairs.  “Drink it all up, and I might bring you a nice bit of tea with whiskey.”

“I’m not a small boy who needs bribing.”

“No.  You’re a man who needs his strength.  You’ve a message to consider.”

His brain was less wobbly now.  The dead didn’t speak—and they didn’t talk to escaped infomercial actresses.  Someone had simply gotten lucky.

He didn’t have to look to feel Moira’s eyes piercing his head—she’d always been able to do that, too.  And her Irish was back to full strength.  “Sometimes messages come in strange packages.  It doesn’t make their contents any less important.”

She had a special talent for making him feel like a small boy again—and a badly behaved one.  “You think Evan reached across forty years to help me find a toy soldier?”

“No.”  Her voice was drizzled with the sense of humor that was one of her greatest gifts.  “But you could start there.”

Right.  He’d get on that—right after he dealt with whatever vile concoction was about to walk through his door.  Lizzie’s mind practically overflowed with glee—and the whispers outside the door suggested she had company.

His kingdom for a remote cave.

Chapter 3