To Love A Witch (A Novel Nibbles title) (4 page)

“Jake. Down, please, I can’t control it for much
longer.”

She was going to be sick? Jake headed for the
ground with all possible speed. Airborne puking could be an unholy
mess.

They’d barely hit the sand before she was off
the bike and running away at top speed. Cursing, he ran after her,
and then stopped dead when she threw a fireball into the
desert.

Wow. No wonder she’d set off the Sentinel
alarms.

She turned her head back to him. “Stay back. I’m
not done, and I can’t get it under control.”

Jake watched, puzzled. She was clamping her
hands, exactly the same thing she’d done at their first meeting
when she’d been shooting sparks out of her fingertips.

He cursed profusely under his breath. The signs
were all there, and he was an idiot for missing them this long.
Fortunately, he had long practice with the required spell.

“
I ask the power of earth and land,

Come on out, give me a hand.

Put up a barrier to the power,

Hold her magic quiet this hour.

Gotta do what must be done,

Make it so, Number One.”

That wouldn’t work against her will, but if she
wanted control, she should have it now.

Romy turned around slowly to face him, hands
still clenched. “What did you do?”

“A basic spell to buffer your access to power.
It should make your magic easier to control.”

She nodded, just once. “Thanks. Sorry, I have no
idea what happened.”

He sighed and kicked a rock in disgust. “What
happened is I’m an idiot. You haven’t had any training. Your
control is impressive, so I managed to forget that for long enough
to fly you into the sky and coat you with my power stream. No
untrained witch could handle that and keep her own magic
quiet.”

Romy frowned. “Your magic set off my magic?”

“Yeah. Maybe not during the first part, but when
I decided to show off and fly us in a loop, that requires a power
turbo-boost. It would have seriously zinged your channels. Looks
like when that happens, you make big fireballs.”

Her hands were trembling. “I haven’t done that
in a really long time. I was hoping maybe I’d grown out of it.”

Jake couldn’t resist his need to comfort, and he
didn’t want to think too hard about why. He sat down on the sand
and pulled her down beside him, taking her shaking hands in
his.

Magic needed to be trained, not shut down. Damn
Alvin for condemning her to ten years of trying. “Did you have
trouble with sparking as a kid?”

“All the time.” She pulled her hands out of
his.

He took them back. “Tell me about it.”

Romy sighed and looked away into the sky. “It
started on my eleventh birthday. I got really excited; Gran had one
of those inflatable bounce houses set up in the back yard, and half
my class at school had come. I was inside jumping with my best
friend Boise when the bounce house started smoking. Gran told me
later the fire had come from my fingers.”

That didn’t compute. “Your Gran knew magic?”

“She was a witch,” Romy said. “Or at least she
believed she was. She was sick, and she said it took the magic from
her. Cancer—she died six months later.”

“I’m sorry.” Jake wrapped his arm around her
shoulders.

She shrugged, but left his arm in place. “I went
into foster care after that, and the sparking happened more often.
Gran said she would teach me how to make it stop, but she didn’t
have time.”

Jake frowned. The rest he knew from her file,
but one big question wasn’t at all clear. “And where were your
parents?”

“I never knew them. Gran wasn’t my blood
relative; she took me in when I was a baby.” Her voice trembled.
“She called me the child of her heart.”

Now, Jake understood. Romy’s Gran had been a
witch, and witches took care of their own.

Romy sat at a table with the menu up in front of
her face and stewed. She was humiliated and hungry, and that was a
bad combination.

“The lasagna’s good,” Jake said. “Or the
ravioli, or pretty much anything except the eggplant thingie.”

The waitress who had just strolled over whacked
him on the head with a menu. “Just because you don’t like
vegetables, mio caro, doesn’t mean my Franco’s eggplant parmesan
isn’t out of this world.”

Jake grinned. “Tomatoes are vegetables. I like
those.”

“Fine, I’ll bring you a bowl of tomato
sauce.”

“Put some spaghetti under it, and I’ll be a
happy man. Romy, this is Carla, the owner of this fine
establishment. Carla, this is Romy, a new friend of mine.”

Carla winked at Romy. “Collecting pretty women
again, is he?”

Romy rolled her eyes. “I’m hard to collect.
What’s good tonight?”

“Everything, bella, but the manicotti is better
than sex.” She leaned in. “And when the same man can give you both,
you should lock him up and swallow the key.”

Then she whacked Jake on the head again.
“See—you’ll never get one of these lovely girls to keep you unless
you learn how to cook.”

Romy laughed as Carla walked away. “She’s quite
the character.”

“You should meet her husband, Franco. Looks like
he played a bit part in the Godfather, but he’s a magician in the
kitchen.”

“The witchy kind of magician?” Romy spoke around
an unbelievably good bread roll.

Jake shook his head and swiped half her roll.
“Nope, just garden variety culinary genius. Carla’s the witch;
Franco still insists she must have nabbed him with a love potion.
They lived in New York until a year ago, and then moved out here
for the warm weather and the grandkids. Franco’s cooking is one of
the reasons I agreed to take this zone for Sentinel.”

Romy cast a cautious glance around. A covert
witch organization was the last thing she wanted to be talking
about in a public place.

“Relax,” Jake said. “One bite of Franco’s
cooking and no one will notice if you danced naked on the
tables.”

“You first.”

Jake sighed. “As much fun as that would be,
Carla would probably banish me, and then I wouldn’t get any
spaghetti. She’s strict like that.”

Romy told the tingles in her belly to settle
down. Why did she always go for the bad boys with a sense of humor?
This one had tried to kidnap her, for cripes sake. She needed to
work on some higher standards.

“Sounds like she runs a tight ship.” Romy
snagged another roll.

He laughed. “Just you wait until after dinner
when she gets started on you.”

“Why me? I’m not the one threatening to dance
naked in her fine restaurant.”

Jake suddenly looked very serious. “She’s one of
Sentinel’s mentors. Without the royal screw-up in this zone, you’d
have been matched with someone like her years ago—someone who could
help you access your magic and control it.”

Her control had been fine for years, until some
he-man had tried a witch snatch-and-run. “I don’t want to access my
magic; I want it to go away.”

“Why?”

She could feel her teeth clench at the
gentleness in his voice. “Because all it’s ever done is send my
life up in flames.”

“Yeah, I get that. But it doesn’t have to be
that way.”

She was an actress, dammit. No one got to churn
up her insides this way unless she meant for it to happen. Time to
change the script.

“So, tell me about the screw-ups in this zone.
Why did I get left to rot in juvie? Sounds like this organization
you work for isn’t very competent.”

Carla slid a plate of manicotti in front of her.
The smell alone could have made her beg. “When you’re done eating
this, you come see me. We’ll talk about that magic of yours.” She
walked off before Romy could say anything.

Jake motioned to her plate. “Try it.”

Carla was right. It was better than sex. When
she opened her eyes, Jake held out a forkful of spaghetti. “Now try
this. My mama’s been trying to replicate Franco’s tomato sauce for
twenty years, and she’s nowhere close.”

Actresses could always use potent experiences to
help trigger emotions onstage. The next time she needed tears on
command, she’d just imagine someone snatching her plate away before
the next bite. Food filled your belly—this was going to fill her
soul.

And wow, that was waxing far too lyrical over
some noodles. Even deliriously good ones.

“So back to the fun stuff. Let me guess. The
system screwed up, a kid or two fell through the cracks, and you’re
here to make sure it never happens again.”

Jake grimaced. “Unfortunately, it’s worse than
that. The system royally screwed up, a lot of kids fell through the
cracks, and thanks to the sexist jerk who monitored this zone for
forty years, they were almost all girls.”

Romy put down her fork slowly. She’d designed a
special place in hell for people who preyed on defenseless girls.
“How many?”

“Over eighty.”

“And what happened to these girls?”

Jake’s face got mean and hard, which caused more
odd tingles in her belly. “Most of them didn’t turn out as well as
you did. Quite a few died young. Too many turned to drugs, probably
trying to make the magic go away, or at least tune it out. One’s
doing twenty-to-life in California. A couple are married with kids
and seem pretty happy.”

“Wait. You know what happened to each of
them?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I did a little digging. I
figured the least Sentinel could do was try to clean up some of the
wreckage. There’s a lawyer heading to California tomorrow; we’ll
try to get the woman there out on time served. Most of the rest
will be assigned back to me.”

Something still wasn’t computing. “Why are they
stepping in now?”

Jake shrugged. “Want some more of my
spaghetti?”

Romy had worked with delinquents for years. That
pathetic an attempt to distract her was hardly going to work. She
took his plate and handed over the remains of her manicotti. It
wasn’t a very even trade; she’d eaten a lot faster.

“So what exactly did you hang over their heads
to get them to care about a bunch of girls they abandoned years
ago?”

“New information. Alvin monitored this sector
for forty years. Sweeping a couple of girls a year under the carpet
probably wasn’t all that hard. It wasn’t until I added up forty
years of data that the totals were pretty stark. I painted a
picture for the folks at Sentinel headquarters, that’s all.”

She had plenty of experience with bureaucratic
systems. They didn’t shift gears because some data geek showed them
a few tables and charts. Romy reached out a hand and grabbed Carla
on her way by. “What did he do? At Sentinel, to make them pay
attention.”

Carla nodded in sharp approval. “Word has it he
rode in there like an avenging angel. Threatened them with mayhem
and field staff revolt if they didn’t do what they could to clean
up the travesty.” She patted Jake’s cheek. “And that was before he
caused a little earthquake. Nice magic, my boy. I’ll go get you
some tiramisu—you earned it.”

He’d tracked down information on a bunch of lost
girls, and then thrown a witch hissy fit? Romy could feel the
tingles in her stomach mate like bunnies.

Dammit. She’d grown out of heroes a long, long
time ago, and this hero’s story had at least one pretty big hole.
“So how exactly did you come by all this data on the girls in the
first place? I’m guessing Alvin the Asshole didn’t leave a file
lying around.”

Jake just grinned. “Fortunately, no one at
headquarters thought to ask that question.”

Romy yanked the veil off her head and picked up
the smallest flower girl, who was looking a little cranky. Because
of all the children involved in the Old Fashioned Wedding scene,
they had to keep rehearsals short, but that didn’t mean they were
any less exhausting.

Today was dress rehearsal with full costumes,
and late nineteenth century wedding apparel hadn’t been designed
with the comfort of the wearer in mind. The little girls had been
squirmy all rehearsal.