by Debora Geary
“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.
And all he had to fight back with were a bag of malfunctioning spells and a bush.
A smart man used what he had. Daniel activated every spell in his bag, a quick line of code redirecting the error messages back at the band of misfits who had him under attack—most people at least paused when their screen started flashing red. Then he crouched lower behind the bush and started coding. One actually functioning shield spell, coming right up.
He had to give the misfits credit. Several of them nearly beat him to the punch, and his coding was tight, fast, and powered by way too much adrenaline. The shield popped into place just in time to rebound a lightning bolt that would have missed and a flying dagger that would have come way too close for comfort.
Damn.
He tapped into the root code for the bush—maybe he could make the darned thing grow thorns. Halfway through a grow spell, instinct had him looking up.
And nearly screaming like a girl.
The blasted bush was growing, all right. Long, snaking tendrils—the kind that wrapped up minion avatars and ate them for breakfast.
Crap. The coiled-spring feeling moved from his mouse hand to his chest. Fight or flight time. He needed bigger guns, and he was pretty sure he knew who had them. A couple of slingshot lines of code, and he landed just inside the door of one of The Wizard’s spell stashes. Realm’s number-one player, but it was a minor cache and a poorly guarded one, spotted ten minutes before all heck had broken loose.
He grabbed what he needed—and hoped like hell that The Wizard was fourteen years old and headed to morning classes. Raiding the top-ranked player in Realm was likely to get the poor schmuck of an avatar he’d borrowed in some serious trouble.
For right now, however, it gave him what he needed. Big game mojo. He sucked in a loin-girding breath of air, grabbed a fireball spell, and hit activate. Time to clear the bushes.
A blast of light—and then an error. Spell requires magic.
Spells were freaking magic. Daniel yanked up the code for the spell, trying to spot the problem. Line 42—some kind of weird dead-variable call. Maybe the spell cache hadn’t been so unguarded after all. Fingers flying, he did surgery on the spell code, pulling out the dead lines and hooking together the rest.
And tossed it over the bush just as the first guys with sharp swords breached his shielding spell.
When the smoke cleared, the troops were backing up. Fast.
Victory pounded behind Daniel’s eyes. Hot damn. He had weapons.
Or he would have, once he did some repairs. Until then, he needed to make scarce. Smart gamers didn’t fight with half-cracked tools, and he was a very smart gamer. And a guy running on pretty much no sleep.
Scooting down a convenient rabbit hole, he ditched the avatar and silenced his code. Daniel Walker, over and out. He watched, amused, as the dizzying attack melted into friendly and slightly confused chatting. The players on this level had mad skills, insane weaponry—and the organizational skills of two-year-olds. Raid leaders they were not.
But even if you considered escaping down a rabbit hole a decent gaming tactic, at best he’d held them to a draw. And that was fairly embarrassing.
Even on no sleep.
Daniel scrubbed his eyes and peered at the clock in the corner of his screen. Damn. Nine o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t actually made it to bed yet.
He leaned back in his chair and groaned. Shit, he hadn’t iced his ribs nearly long enough either. Poison had the meanest elbows in the hood, even when he was on your side. And it had taken three hours of ball-stealing to convince the new kid that a little teamwork went a long way.
He pushed back from the desk. An all-night gaming session wasn’t his usual gig after a night with Skate and crew. Especially one where he was on the wrong end of daggers and lightning bolts. Those spells he swiped were going under the microscope—but first, he needed a nap. Or at least some fried eggs and an ice pack.
He pulled up onto his feet, wincing. This was the kind of crap that happened when he wished for a little more excitement in his life.
-o0o-
“He what?” Nell tossed a box of donuts on the desk, trying to hear over her brother’s furious typing.
Jamie grabbed a donut without looking. “Some jerk hijacked one of Govin’s avatars, shielded himself against a lightning strike, and stole some of your spells.”
The first two parts of that sentence were bad enough. The last had little red spots flying behind her eyes. Nobody raided her spell caches and lived to tell about it. Nell slammed into a chair, fingers already heating up. The miscreant was going down.
“He’s gone.” Jamie brushed spray sprinkles into his palm and licked. “Vanished about two minutes ago. You ju
st missed him.”
She glared at the messenger and yanked her hands up off the keyboard. Fire-witch fury was never good for the electronics. “Dammit, why didn’t you stop him?”
“I thought the guys had it handled.” Her brother shrugged, continuing to decimate donuts. “It was a minion avatar he stole, and they had him pinned behind a bush.”
Nell’s brain was making its way through the haze of fury. “Wait, what? Back up.” Stealing avatars was bad, and way against the game rules, but minions had really limited abilities. “He shielded with a minion? Against freaking lightning bolts?”
“Yup. Wrote some really sweet lines of code to do it.” Jamie grinned. “While crouching behind a bush. Govin nearly got him with a dagger.”
Govin had very few weapons—and unerring aim. He also had a very upright set of morals. Not the guy to steal from. Nell pulled up the gaming logs, scrolling backwards through the action. “When did he come online?”
“Midnight.” Jamie crunched, adding Doritos to his donut breakfast. “Spent most of the night in stealth mode. Got flashed this morning when he tried to activate one of the minion’s spells.”
Minion spells required less magic than sneezing. “What happened?”
“He tried it with straight coding.”
The big difference between Realm’s public levels and the elite, private ones was the ability to blend computer code and magic. Throwing the switch between the two was second nature to all their witch players. Someone had obviously been way too focused on being an obnoxious ass-hat.
Nell looked at her screen with scorn. “Thiefs an avatar and can’t even get his basic spellcode right?” She pulled up user data. “Who is this joker?” Somebody needed a refresher course on polite game play. That happened fairly often in the public levels, but witches usually had better ethics.
“Dunno. I was just about to take a look when you arrived with donuts.”
Nell waited almost patiently—grunt work was what little brothers were for. She helped herself to the last raspberry cream-filled.
“Huh.” Jamie looked a lot more serious now. “His IP address is cloaked and his other info doesn’t match any players that have logged in for the last year.”
