Read Online An Unlikely Witch by Debora Geary - Free Book Online

wish held in her palms of light.
    She slammed the test down flat on the counter and spun around.  Looking for a wall to crawl.  A precipice to scale.  Anything.
    Her mind registered the count.  Three agonizing minutes.  One hundred and eighty heartbeats.  An eternity of trying to hold a balance pose on the head of a pin.
    When the metronome in her head hit time, she turned around and reached for the stick.  Impatient.  Dreading.  Feeling her lungs collapse as she read the message in the damning single line.
    Not.  This.  Time.
    She breathed, trying to find a way through the grief and anger and awful, stalking shadows of inadequacy.  Just as she’d done every twenty-nine days for the past year.  Knew her ability to do that was growing to a close.
    And felt a single, fierce thought rise up through the agony.
    This had to stop. 
    -o0o-
    The forces could be terrible taskmasters.
    The orb watched as the shimmering possibility of the tiny snagged thread folded back into the ether, and found itself sorrowing for the human specks that would grieve so deeply.  Not all threads were meant to happen, especially for the beings so inextricably linked to the linear progression of time.
    But this small boy—he was so very important.
    The orb shook itself.  It was becoming confused, distracted by human priorities.  That wasn’t its job.
    The forces hummed in agreement in the background.  Tools had a singular purpose.
    It felt itself resisting.  Felt itself holding, just a moment longer, to a thread that would not be woven into time this day.  To the image of a small boy with a quick smile as he touched the thing they called snow.
    The forces vibrated, puzzled.
    The orb let go.  And, watching the vestiges of the thread disappear, felt an odd yearning. 
    Just once—it wished to be able to hold the needle.
    -o0o-
    Nell padded down the stairs, moving slowly and dispersing lurking whispers of magic as she went.  Something was brewing in her basement—something bearing the unmistakable magical signature of her youngest son.
    There was a sign on the door.  SEcriT Work in Prguss.  GO Awy.
    She grinned.  His spelling was still atrocious.  Carefully, she scanned the doorknob.  Her brothers had been masters at rigging booby-trap spells.
    Nothing obvious.  Just a training circle and a few leaky atoms.  Aervyn’s magical discipline was growing by leaps and bounds this year, as was his fine-tuned control.  None of which made whatever was happening under the hood down here a good idea.
    She pulled a quick funnel of air power and knocked gently on his shields.  Hey, superdude.  What are you up to in there?
    It’s a secret, Mama.
    I can read that, sweetie.  Is anyone in there with you?
    Nuh, uh.  He sounded distracted.
    She stuck a quick probe into his training circle and rolled her eyes as it got rebuffed.  Distracted almost-seven-year-olds with enough power to melt the entire city didn’t get to throw up unsupervised training circles in her basement.  Are you using lots of magic in there?
    Yeah.
    Something shifted in his head for a moment and she caught a vague image of a fire-breathing dragon.  Terrific.  Should someone be in there with you?  I can call Uncle Jamie or Uncle Devin if you don’t want me to know what you’re doing.  It was the time of year of many secrets, and she tried to give her kids the space to scheme and plot them.  Even ones of the fire-breathing kind.
    Nuh, uh.  Now he sounded like he was lifting a small mountain.  And then the training circle whisked down and a bright-eyed head peered around the door.   "Hi, Mama.  Did you bring any cookies?"
    She held out the plate in her hand and followed him into his domain, taking a covert look around.  No scorch marks.  Either the dragon had been good-tempered, or she’d shown up before the spell had been finished.
    Aervyn giggled and took a cookie.  “It was only a really baby dragon.”  He held up his fingers about four inches off