.5 To Have and To Code (5 page)

Sammy made a face, her mind leaking gooey affection, mostly for Nell.  “I’m trying to think of it as an adventure.”

They weren’t talking about cows anymore.  “It will be, sweetie.  He loves you.”  Nell looked over at her best friend in the world and offered up the thing she’d been clinging to for weeks.  “When I feel his mind?  It’s kind of what my dad feels for my mom.  Not as ripe, maybe, not as many layers—but what they’ve got?”  She paused a beat, trying to keep her own tangle of feelings in check.  “You found it.”

Tears threatened the swirling cookie dough.  “You think?”

“Yeah.”  Nell groped for the solid ledge of funny—and couldn’t quite get there.  “And you’re smart enough to know it, and brave and spontaneous enough to do something about it.”

“Dammit.”  Sammy swiped at tears.  “Keep that up, and these cookies are going to taste all wrong.”  She sniffled.  “Shane’s got some cute friends, if you want to be brave and spontaneous with me.”

She’d grown up with six brave and spontaneous brothers.  “I like my life boring and predictable, thanks.”

All she got in reply was Sammy’s bubbling laughter.

“What?  I do.”  Nell started ticking qualifications off on her fingers.  “I’m a computer programmer.  I cast well-thought-out, complicated spells.  I have a math degree, for Pete’s sake.”

“Right.”  The queen of cookies just rolled her eyes and added more chocolate chips—and then put on her best radio announcer voice.  “Nell Sullivan is one of the smartest and savviest of this new computer generation and one-half of Realm’s innovative, bleeding-edge development team.”

Nell pitched a measuring cup at her friend’s head.  “Stop.”  The article in
Wired
had been embarrassing enough before Sammy had started quoting from it regularly.  At least she’d stopped before the “sexiest half” comment—Jamie had tormented her with that for weeks.

Sammy ducked and grinned, unrepentant.  “And they don’t even know you’re a witch.”

“Witches can be boring and predictable.”

“I know.”  A floury hand patted her shoulder.  “But that’s Govin, not you.”

Okay, next to Govin, world’s most responsible college roommate, most grandmothers would have looked reckless.  Which was good, because her other roommate had needed a caretaker.  “Speaking of, I’m going to see them tomorrow—can I kidnap some cookies?”

“Only if you stop eating the chocolate chips.”  Sammy wiggled an eyebrow.  “You can be fired, you know.”

Nell grinned.  It wasn’t a serious threat.  Yet.

-o0o-

Daniel had ignored the email from Pedro.  Family dinner at Chloe’s house was loud, raucous, full of kids, and just served to remind him that he still hadn’t found a grown-up life.

Some days, he was okay with that.  Other days, it made him crazy.  He wrote code, piled his laundry in the closet, and threw a baseball for fun and relaxation.  The only difference between that and college was a few classes.  And underwear that had gotten six years older.

He turned his bike into a seedy lot in the hood.  When his belly burned with frustration like this, there had only ever been one outlet.  Vaulting off, he tossed the bike against the fence.  Contemplated locking it.

A snort came from behind him.  “Nobody’s gonna touch that thing.  Ugly mofo.”

Daniel grinned and turned to a guy who shared the fire in his belly.  “One of your kids tried to take the last one.”

Skate snorted again.  “What, you got all soft in your old age?  Can’t protect your pretty wheels anymore?”

His wheels were righteously ugly and he could take care of them just fine.  Daniel let some of the steam he’d been tamping down flash into his eyes.  “Who you calling pretty?”

Catcalls and snickers from the fence line. “Not you, Skate.”  Daniel turned to assess the crowd.  Skate was
ex
-gang.  The “ex” part didn’t apply to most of the teens he mentored.

“What up, white boy?”  The guy who stepped forward was tall, skinny, and dead mean with both a knife and a basketball.  Went by the name of Poison.  He threw a hard pass at Daniel’s chest—the kind that broke ribs if you didn’t catch it.

Daniel had no idea how come
he’d
ended up “white boy.”  Under the tats, Skate was plenty pale.  He hurled the ball back.  “Not much.  You guys playing tonight, or talking like ladies?”

Rumbles from the fence. 

Skate grinned.  “Got a couple of new kids tonight who think your trash talk means something.”

Nah.  He left big talk to the others.  And he knew the drill.  “Gimme Poison and one of the new kids.”

Skate, parole officer to the toughest cases in the young offender system, nodded his head at the fence groupies.  “Take Kareem.  He says he can play.”

Poison smirked, which probably meant the kid had some game.  Skate only ever gave them two kinds of teammates—ones who couldn’t play worth shit, and ones who had no idea what “team” meant. 

He looked around and counted.  Three on five was suckier odds than usual.  Daniel grinned—clearly Skate had read his mood.  He pitched the ball at Kareem, a low, hard pass.  Kid caught it without breaking a finger and dribbled over to the pathetic rim and cracked concrete that served as a court in this part of town.

Poison headed for the paint.  They’d let the kid be point guard.  That left Daniel to his favorite job—skulking, snaking through the mean elbows, and getting his hands where they needed to be.  He’d never been good enough or tall enough to make a pro team—but Daniel Walker was the best ball stealer anywhere.

And oddly, guys who made a life out of stealing anything that moved usually didn’t appreciate his skills.

He waded into the middle of mean.  Skate had always argued that the only difference between Daniel and any of his parolees was pure luck, white skin, and nice parents.  Time to prove him right.

-o0o-

Nell nudged open the door to her old duplex and sniffed carefully.  The last time she’d visited, Govin had been out of town, and TJ, mathematical genius and life idiot, had managed to microwave his old gym socks.

Fortunately, she’d been smart enough to check the washing machine for the microwave popcorn bag and averted disaster number two.  TJ had more brains than any three people she knew, but he was a menace in the kitchen and pretty much everywhere else.

The three of them had lived together for the last two years of college—and Nell couldn’t remember a single week that hadn’t threatened the life of some appliance.  Good thing the landlord was a witch and well used to mysterious shenanigans.

“Hey.”  A friendly face swung out of the kitchen.  “Come on in.  I think the coast is clear—TJ’s been programming all night.”

That’s when he was at his most dangerous.  She offered up the bag in her arms.  “Cookies, strawberries, and leftovers from last night.”  Her mother took good care of stray ladybugs, puppies, and old college roommates.

Govin’s eyes lit up.  “Real food.  Your mom is a goddess.”

Nell snorted.  “It was her night to cook.”

He eyed the bag more carefully—they’d been friends for a long time.  “Is it edible?”

“Yup.”  It would get eaten either way—TJ’s standards were extremely low—but she’d had to fight her brothers off the day-old pizza.  “Heavy on the grease.  Add the strawberries, and it’s practically a balanced meal.”

“Says the high priestess of Doritos.”  Govin shoved around some of the fridge’s more questionable contents and slid the bag inside.

Doritos were a food group.  Anyone who said they weren’t had clearly never powered through a seventy-two-hour gaming marathon and emerged victorious.  Or had to sit through advanced calculus before breakfast.  Nell slid onto a stool at the counter.  “How goes it with the mongo grant proposal?”

Govin backed out of the fridge, two beers in his hand.  “We got it.”

“Seriously?”  Happiness hit Nell like a gale-force wind.  “The whole thing?”

“Yeah.  With a possible extension for five more years.”  Pride leaked in every word.  “They loved TJ’s preliminary modeling work.”

“It’s not only his.”  Nell waited until he passed over a beer and met her gaze.  “Without you, all TJ’s brilliance would be moldering away in the basement of the math department somewhere.”  She ignored the embarrassed shrug.  “You gave him a focus, Gov.  A reason to come out of his cave and live a little.”

His lips twitched.  “I’m not sure being a weather geek qualifies as living.”

That was usually her line.  “It’s better than what he’d have gotten into on his own.”  She was fairly sure some criminal element would have found TJ, hooked him up with a never-ending supply of potato chips, and used him for evil.

“We’re better together.”  Govin smiled quietly.  “And with the new toys, maybe we save some more lives.”

It was all he’d ever wanted to do.  She had come into her fire powers days after he had, and the weeks of hard training to master their new magic had bonded the fiery girl and the quiet, careful boy with the need to help others.

Then one day in seventh grade, he’d been assigned a research project on tropical storms and discovered how many people died every year due to bad weather.  And Govin Indirani, fire witch, had dedicated his life to changing that number.

He’d harassed every trainer on the West Coast, figuring out how to do with heat and practice what most witches did with air and water power.  And when he learned about the interconnected web of planetary weather, he’d fallen in love with the math that helped him understand it.

Nell had majored in mathematics because she liked the clean logic—Govin had done it to learn how to put himself in the way of a tornado.  And halfway through their first year, he’d met TJ in the basement, improving NASA weather models for fun.

She couldn’t match Govin’s dedication or TJ’s sheer brilliance.  So she fed them.  Teased and tormented them.  And forcibly dragged them away from weather models often enough to keep them human.

It was worth it.  Govin was one of the very few who understood deeply what it was to live with enormous power at your fingertips.  Most witches had minor magic.  The two of them could have destroyed half of California.

He was still watching her in the steady, quiet way of his.  “You’ll need to replace me at Realm.”

He was their mop-up guy—the one who cleaned up all the messes that happened in the witch-only levels.  And she’d always known it would be temporary.  “We’ll survive without you.”  She put a smile into the words and shifted out of funk mode.  Replacing him would suck, but the weather geeks had something to celebrate, and she wasn’t going to rain on their parade.  “Want to go scout out uber-cool new computers?  I think I can get you a lead on some monster-sized monitor screens.”  If she scored a couple for Enchanter’s Realm, even better.

“Not yet.”  Govin’s tone was light, but his mind was concerned.  “Before we get new toys, we need a new cave.”

She tried to pick her jaw up off the floor.  “You’re gonna move?”  Now she knew the source of the tension—TJ adapted to change about as well as a hibernating bear.  Hence the reason both guys still lived in their old college digs.

“Yeah.  The grant funds the purchase of a weather monitoring station on the coast.”  He shrugged.  “TJ’s never going to leave all the toys, so we might as well live there too.”

Nell was still stuck on the first part of what he said.  “You got enough funding to buy California coast real estate?”  Holy shit.

“They
really
liked TJ’s models.”

Dang.  And the models were just cover for the real work—it was hard to get government funding for throwing witch power at bad-mannered storms.  She also knew it wasn’t their grumpy-bear genius who had explained the models to the feds.  Nell grinned over her beer.  “You did it, Gov.  You really did it.”

A smile finally exploded over his face.  “Yeah.  We did.”

And now they needed to move.  Nell looked around the apartment that had anchored her first years of adulthood and kept the homesick twinges in her belly to herself.

TJ wasn’t the only one who didn’t like change.  Even for the best possible of reasons.

Chapter 4

Daniel ducked a seriously bad-ass stasis spell and tucked in behind a bush.  Again.  He’d spent half the night in the virtual bushes of Enchanter’s Realm.

Scouting mission gone seriously wonky.  How did a guy get decent weapons in this place?  He’d borrowed someone’s low-level avatar, but even a lowly minion should be able to skulk without attracting attention.  He felt like a gaming newbie, and that stage of his life had ended fifteen years ago.

Time to pull something out of his borrowed bag of tricks.  Scrolling through the spell stash of the journeyman soldier he’d hijacked, Daniel looked for something that might help him wander around without having magic constantly hurled at his head. 

Ha.  Invisibility spell.  He activated the code and watched his screen, waiting for some kind of indication the darned thing had actually worked.

Ten seconds later, the error message showed up. 
Spell requires magic.

He didn’t have time to wonder what the hell that meant.  Along with the error message came about fifteen simultaneous notices of attack launched.  Adrenaline joined the already swarming caffeine in his veins.  Cover blown.  Really, really blown.