A Lost Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 7)

  A Lost Witch

  by Debora Geary

  Copyright 2013 Debora Geary

  Fireweed Publishing

  Kindle Edition

  A Quick Character Reminder :)

  Many of you have asked for a way to remind yourselves of the characters in my books so that you can better enjoy the newest book. With that in mind, here goes!

  At the core of Witch Central are the Walkers and the Sullivans. Nell and Daniel head up the Walker clan and have five children—Nathan, Ginia, Mia, Shay, and Aervyn. Nell’s younger triplet brothers (Jamie, Devin, and Matt Sullivan) have grown the family a lot lately. Jamie is married to Nat, and baby Kenna is growing up fast. Devin married Lauren, and we met Matt’s love, Téo, briefly in A Witch Central Wedding.

  Tabitha is back in this book, and not working with autistic children this time. You will also see some of the characters from the WitchLight trilogy—in particular, Caro and her yarn shop crew, and Lizard, Lauren’s assistant.

  Have fun with the latest installment of my witches.

  An Important Announcement!

  I know, I know—just let you read the book. But this is important, and apparently not all of you read my little messages at the end of each book :).

  This is the final book of the initial A Modern Witch series. But don’t panic!! In September, I will be releasing the first book in the new Witch Central series. Same witches you know and love, with a new plot twist that I think you’ll enjoy.

  So—breathe. I will be writing witch books for years and years yet. I promise.

  Dedication

  There is a special place

  called FOAY.

  I hope the people who live there

  will find themselves

  in the warp and weft

  of this book.

  And to the Sand Witch.

  Because sometimes it only takes

  One to make a difference.

  Chapter 1

  It was her favorite way to pretend she wasn’t crazy.

  Hannah tied off the last of the warp threads on the small lap loom and brushed her fingers across the taut, evenly spaced vertical lines. Organized in a way her life could never be.

  She was using yellow silk today. Bright and girly and the same color as the dandelions that used to bloom in the front yard of the townhome that had been her last truly happy place. Pretty yellow flowers dancing in the grass, aided and abetted by one small girl who loved to blow the seeds helter-skelter.

  Floating in the wind.

  She sighed and looked out the window. Moody mornings were never a good sign, but dammit, she didn’t want to go hide in her room on such a glorious late-summer day.

  She picked up her shuttle, already loaded with some of the wild and crazy rainbow yarn she’d dyed herself. Dr. Max had bent a lot of rules for that afternoon in the kitchen, full of hot water, fragrant smells, riotous color, and odd looks from the kitchen staff—ones that had leaned toward panic when she’d picked up a knife to open her dye packets. They weren’t used to having one of the inmates in their midst.

  With a quiet chuckle, Hannah threaded her shuttle through the shed, beginning to lay down her weft threads. They weren’t supposed to call themselves inmates, but they did anyhow. Dr. Max only grinned and made calming noises at the other medical types. Something about the importance of reclaiming words—the kind of thing that mattered when you couldn’t reclaim your life.

  Hannah pulled down the reed, beating her first weft threads into place. Already, she could see that the yellow warp was an inspired choice.

  Everyone always ignored the warp threads. Hidden away, nothing but structure—but take them away, and all you had was a tangle of pretty and useless color.

  On her loom, warp threads were celebrated. A way to make people see the hidden and the ignored.

  Hannah rolled her eyes and let her hands pick up speed now that the bottom edge was set. It was too damn early in the morning to get all philosophical. Yellow was pretty and bright and gave her eyes something to look at. And in the drab white and gray and muted pastel colors of the world she lived in, eye-popping was a good thing.

  She was pretty sure paint companies ran regular fire sales on all their shades of gray.

  She looked over as Harvey drifted in and took a chair in the corner of the sunroom. He liked to hide here—staff generally gave the quiet, cozy room a quick glance and kept moving. “Morning, Harvey. Did you feed your oatmeal to the plant again?” Breakfast had taken a turn for the worse lately—budget cuts—and the plant that lived closest to his breakfast chair was paying the price.

  For a man of few words, Harvey managed to express his opinions just fine.

  His face showed no signs he’d heard her, but his hands relaxed in his lap. Having a good day, then. Hannah kept up the rhythm of her weaving—she wasn’t the only one at Chrysalis House it soothed.

  “There you are, Harvey. I thought I told you to go wait outside your room.”

  Hannah was facing the door—there was no escape. Her eyes were on the entering attendant before survival instinct could yank them closed.

  Someone new. A stranger in her protected cocoon.

  She gripped the sides of her loom, caught in the awful, frozen moment just before the attack would start.

  A decade ago, she would have prayed for it not to come. Ten years of unanswered prayers and she didn’t bother anymore. Despairing, she stared at the intersecting lines of yellow and red on her loom and watched as they began to melt.

  Images started flashing, a horrible, dizzying montage of home movies on fast forward. People and places she didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

  I am Hannah Kendrick, and this will stop. Nails digging into her palms, she threw her words at the onslaught.

  She slid to the floor, needing to feel the cool tiles under her cheek. Soon, not even those would penetrate.

  I am Hannah.

  Puny, insignificant words. The torrent never cared.

  The new attendant, sitting on a beach, eyes happy, toes covered in sand. In the dark, crying, a sodden wedding dress in her lap. Holding a tiny baby with pain in her eyes.

  A tiny, very still baby.

  Hannah knew, long before she saw the grave covered in bright yellow flowers.

  Before she heard the heartrending wail of a mother with empty arms.

  Or maybe the screams were her own.

  I. Am. Hannah.

  “I thought I’d made my orders perfectly clear.”

  Dear, sweet Dr. Max. Always on her side. His orders were clear—but real life in a mental institution didn’t always follow orders.

  Hannah felt the sedatives kicking in. And the black hole of depression.

  She was never going to be free.

  -o0o-

  Nell checked her to-do list. The world was about to end and she didn’t want to miss a single second of the action.

  Clothes, check.

  More clothes for when Aervyn fell in the ocean in his wedding attire, check.

  Gorgeous purple flowers Ginia had been singing to daily, check.

  Hookup so that all of Realm could watch the most thoroughly embarrassing day of Marcus Buchanan’s life, check.

  Nell grinned as she ticked that one off the list. As Witch Central’s top emissary to the wedding planning in Fisher’s Cove, she’d seen firsthand how much their grumpy bachelor had changed. He smiled, he laughed, and when he thought no one was looking, he gazed at Cassidy Farrell with the kind of naked longing that made mothers of five look away, all gooey inside.

  But none of that was going to help him survive his own wedding.

  A marriage of two witches whose cla
ns were both entirely delighted their lost sheep had found home pastures. It was going to be epic.

  One more week. And the Walker clan was heading out early to help with, and likely contribute to, the pre-wedding chaos. Nan and Moira were running a tight ship, but herds of Irish visitors weren’t expected to be much better behaved than most witchlings.

  Fisher’s Cove, preparing for happy, boisterous invasion. Nell was more than happy to add to their ranks.

  Back to the list—lobster stew called.

  The handwritten scrawls at the bottom of Nell’s list made her giggle. Daniel’s additions. Figure out what Ginia’s up to.

  Nell snorted. “Thwarted your spy network too, has she?” They were still getting used to three daughters who suddenly didn’t spill all the beans about their nefarious activities. Parenting was way easier when the culprits started babbling before you even asked any questions.

  There had been a dearth of pink bunny slippers lately, though.

  Nell grinned. Whatever Warrior Girl had up her sleeve, it was likely to be memorable, funny as hell, and ultimately harmless.

  None of which precluded her parents’ right to snoop, but clearly neither of them had time at the moment.

  Nell turned back to the list. Turn OFF the fetching spell. Marcus is busy enough.

  She shook her head, amused by her husband’s priorities. It wasn’t a bad idea, though—if they were going to fetch Marcus yet another family member, it was probably reasonable to wait until after the wedding to do it.

  She pulled up Realm’s admin controls and clicked several times, navigating to the well-hidden guts of the fetching machinery. A couple of quick changes and done. One spell, put to bed for the next couple of weeks. Witch Central had a wedding to attend.

  She backed out of the guts, veiling them with the set of layering spells that kept out wandering child labor and not-so-innocent gamers. And groaned as her shut-down routine issued a warning. The spell had someone in active tracking.

  Sighing, she pulled up the innards again. The spell often followed a witch around for a while before it fetched them. She began typing a quick subroutine to unlock the tracking. Whoever her sniffer had found, it could darn well find them again later.

  Her fingers moved quickly, most of her brain back on her checklist. Aervyn claimed that one of his black shoes had gone missing. And Ginia wanted lavender. Bushels of it.

  Nell sneezed—even the thought of lavender made her nose itch.

  Sighing, she peered at her screen and the cursor that had sneezed along with her nose. And saw the two words that weren’t supposed to be there.

  HELP ME.

  Her hands froze. A practical joke, maybe. Or a stray line of code that had ventured over from Realm. Something innocuous and innocent that would unclench the very bad feeling in her gut.

  Reaching for a second keyboard by feel, her eyes still glued to the two words, Nell tried to quiet her insides. Pre-wedding jitters. Or maybe Ginia had snuck something into the spaghetti sauce.

  Her warrior soul didn’t believe either.

  HELP ME.

  Nell pulled up the log files—the enormous, bloated, coma-inducing scroll of lines that tracked every action ever taken anywhere on the Sullivan servers. Well used to log-file drudgery, she isolated records for the last week and ran a search.

  Nothing.

  Crap. Instincts yelling now, Nell grabbed several billion lines of log-file data. Look harder, dammit. Mentally berating the computer didn’t make it work any faster, but it gave her impatience something to do.

  She imagined that the computer groaned in reply—even Sullivan computing power wasn’t thrilled about trying to digest that many lines of data. Her eyes scanned as the servers worked, looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Avoiding the two words on her laptop screen.

  When the answer finally popped up, it did nothing to relax the knot in her stomach.

  Two words, confirmed. Typed in the dead of night from an IP address the servers didn’t recognize. Not Witch Central. Not Realm.

  Instincts flaring, she pulled up a browser tab and ran a reverse IP lookup, hammering that result into Google.

  And stared at the answer, unease curdling into horror.

  Her next move was for her iPhone and its bat signal.

  They had a witch emergency.

  -o0o-

  All clear.

  Hannah tiptoed down the quiet, dark hallway and remembered the game she’d played with her brother. She’d always been the scout, he’d been the attack force. Mom had made them tinfoil walkie-talkies to use.

  Her hands clenched, warding off the memories. Attacks were bad enough without the very real bits of her history they seemed to dredge up. Life before.

  Before something alien and awful had invaded her brain.

  That wasn’t something she said out loud anymore. Crazy people were supposed to embrace the invaders, stop seeing them as other. The first step toward mental health.

  Funny how all the people who said that weren’t crazy.

  She wasn’t going to be making friends with shimmering images of dead babies anytime soon.

  The new attendant wasn’t going to be working Hannah’s wing of Chrysalis House anytime soon, either. Dr. Max’s eyes had still been furious when the sedatives had worn off twelve hours later. Fury that had bled to puzzlement when she’d asked if the attendant was pregnant.

  At fifteen, she’d believed the images were visions—a preview of things to come. She’d clung to her brother, begging him not to get in the car or climb the tree or sixteen other ways she’d seen him die. Told him one day, blushing eleven shades of red, that he would marry a woman with dimples and blue eyes and a tiger ring on her toe.

  It wasn’t long after that when her blips, her tiny, fascinating glimpses of what she’d thought was the future, had turned into an avalanche of nightmare.

  Her brother’s face had been both happy and sad, several years ago now, when he’d come to tell her about his new wife. A woman with no dimples or toe rings.

  At least the blue-eyes part had been right.

  Hannah turned the handle on the computer-room door very slowly. In the wee hours of the night, stealth always felt appropriate, even if she was free to roam. Dr. Max’s orders, along with moving heaven and earth to keep enough doors unlocked for her to do it—most people weren’t big on crazy people having mobility.

  There was a freedom in the night. No new attendants accidentally strolling through doorways. And the computer room, a busy, clacking place by day, was always empty.

  She’d come every night for a month, drawn by a fragment of dream she couldn’t shake.

  Hannah sat down at the far-corner terminal, typing in the series of passwords and codes that would take her to her specially restricted corner of the Internet. Devoid of pictures, stripped of anything visual that might trigger her particular brand of crazy. Nothing kept the attacks away all the time—but the convoluted rules they’d worked out made them come less often.

  She touched her mouse to the purple dot in the top right corner—a little splash of color that violated all the rules. It had simply shown up one day, following her around the anonymous interwebs.

  And then she’d dreamed. Of the two words she would type, and the two women who would come.

  They felt so very real. Just like the woman with dimples her brother had never married.

  A stray bolt of fury blasted through Hannah’s chest, puncturing the breath she’d been holding. And then died, fizzling in the gray, dark waters of long-term despair.

  When you were crazy, “real” was a very suspect term.

  She opened the little black screen where she’d typed the two words. And deleted them.

  Chapter 2

  “Breathe,” said Jamie, knowing full well it wouldn’t work.

  His sister only tightened her mind barriers. Fighter, ready for battle.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t sure who the enemy was just yet. “Everyone will be here s
oon.” It had taken all of ten minutes to wake up half of Witch Central in the middle of the night, and Nell had paced for all ten of them.

  He knew why—the horror in her brain echoed in his own gut.

  Devin transported in, eyes bright and curious. His wife, cuddled at his side, looked a whole lot sleepier. Jamie handed her a mug of coffee—they needed Lauren’s brain online, and that never happened until at least her second dose.

  Moira landed on the couch of the Witches’ Lounge, cup of tea in her hand. She’d been the only one already awake when he’d sent out the bat signal—morning came earlier in Nova Scotia. Their elder witch nodded in greeting and got straight to the point. “Sophie’s at a birth, but Marcus can come if we need him.”

  Hopefully not. Marcus had been the only one with his phone anywhere near his sleeping person, but waking up a guy two days before his wedding was bad enough. Dragging him off on a witch rescue mission would probably draw the ire of half the women of witchdom.

  Hardly, sent Lauren wryly.

  Good—her coffee was kicking in. Jamie grinned. We menfolk have to hold tight to our fond stereotypes.

  Her mind was getting sharper by the second. What’s going on?

  Jamie looked at his sister. Her story to tell, and they had enough people here to start telling it.

  Nell surveyed the room. “I was turning off the fetching spell, since we’re all headed to Fisher’s Cove for a few days.”

  “A good plan.” Moira’s voice was steady—an anchor in the coming storm.

  “It was tracking someone.”

  The tension in the room was already ratcheting up, thanks to mind magic, coffee, and plain old witch smarts. Devin popped onto his feet, a man looking for action. “Someone’s in trouble.”

  “I don’t know that for sure.” But every stitch of Nell believed otherwise, and her brothers knew it. “There were two words trapped in the fetching code.”

  Jamie pulled up a virtual screen so they could all read. HELP ME.

  The collective intake of breath could have sucked in a good portion of San Francisco Bay. Dev stabbed his finger at the screen. “Where?”