Sophie felt parts of her brain beginning to melt. “Someone’s trying to give Marcus a baby?”
A grin the size of Texas flashed across Adele’s face. “Yup. Evan seemed fairly amused.” She sobered again, a touch of uncertainty sliding back into her voice. “He said the girl-child was for Marcus, and no other. A matter of life and death.”
“That makes no sense.” On all kinds of levels-Sophie knew firsthand exactly how much Marcus disliked babies.
Humor chased across the medium’s face. “Messages from the dead rarely do, girlfriend. He also said Marcus would find the missing soldier under the back steps of the church.”
And then she was gone, the alarms of Realm wailing in belated alert.
Jamie parachuted into Realm, wondering just how his life had descended into total chaos before lunch. And hoped his sister wasn’t in a mood to shoot the messenger.
Pulling open the door of the Witches Lounge didn’t deliver any reassurance on that front. Nell pounced the second he set foot inside. “What happened-how’d she get in?”
He winced. “We don’t know.”
Yeah. That answer landed like a load of bricks. Nell just glared.
Dammit. Kenna had been pulling her middle-of-the-night fireworks tricks again, and three hours was just not enough sleep. Jamie tried to kick his brain into gear before Nell melted him with another Supergirl stare. “There are no traces of hacking. Not even a whisper. The first time our system detected her is when she popped into the room.”
Nell’s scowl would have scared a lesser man. “Hijacked transport spell?”
“Nothing activated, no raid on the spell library.” That part he’d personally checked.
“Fine. We’ll check deeper.” His sister pulled out her computer, a wondrous machine covered in pink stickers and fire-engine art. “Do a trace-back on the logs. No one leaves zero fingerprints.”
Jamie risked his life and stepped in the way of the Mack truck named Nell. “We checked. Top to bottom.”
“My girls are good.” Nell’s fingers were a drumbeat of war on her keys. “But there are a few tricks they don’t know yet.”
Jamie sighed and tapped a button on his phone. Time to call in reinforcements. “It wasn’t the girls running the traces-or at least, not most of them.”
Nell’s eyes flew up in surprise as her husband materialized in the room. “Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?”
Daniel grinned. “Boring meeting. They won’t miss me much.”
Jamie was pretty sure showing a Fortune 500 company how you’d hacked their servers and made Donald Duck acting CEO wasn’t all that boring. “Thanks for the help.”
Daniel chuckled. “I remember what new-baby brain goo feels like.” He looked over at his wife. “I ran the traces. There’s nothing to find. I don’t know how your quack got in, but it wasn’t via code.”
Nell’s scowl was laced with confusion now, but it was still pretty fierce. “Someone invaded our turf, and the best hacker in the world can’t figure out how she did it?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure I can tell you how.” Daniel stepped over and started rubbing his wife’s shoulders. “There are only two ways into Realm. If she didn’t code, then it must have been some hocus-pocus.”
Jamie snorted. Someone had been spending too much time with Lauren, their resident witch skeptic.
“Adele isn’t a Net witch.” Nell’s grin wasn’t meant to be comforting. “I scanned her when she started pushing fire globes around. She’s a weak fire witch-no Net power.”
“Does your scan read spirit channeling?” Moira, silent until now, spoke quietly from the couch.
It was an unusual sight for Jamie to see his sister squirm. “No. But she charges people by the minute. Probably uses the fire globes for cheap parlor tricks to keep them paying.”
“She wouldn’t be the first witch to use smoke and mirrors to hide her true magic.” Moira stroked Adam’s head. “And she got in here. That tells us something, even if you don’t want to see it.”
Jamie stared, trying to follow the breadcrumbs.
“She comes in power. And I’m going to assume she deserves respect for it.” Moira motioned Sophie over. “Take your sweet babe, my dear. I have a message to deliver.”
There was dead silence as she poofed out of the lounge, witch matriarch on a mission.
Jamie tried to wrap his mind around what had just happened. Realm had the best firewalls code and magic could procure. And they’d been breached by a woman who worked for $4.99 a minute.
A woman who hadn’t taken much longer than that to breach the defenses of the toughest old witch he knew-Moira was nobody’s biddable messenger.
An odd sound escaped from the couch. Jamie looked over at Sophie, who was quietly giggling into her son’s hair. She looked up, waving her hand in apology. “Sorry. I know we have some serious issues here, but oh, to be a fly on the wall of the conversation she’s about to have.”
Jamie blinked and tried to backtrack. In all the mad code checking, he’d mostly tuned out the audio feed from the room. Something about a baby. Or a soldier. But mostly stuff about Marcus’s dead brother.
Daniel, who never missed anything, started to chuckle. “A baby in a basket, headed Marcus’s direction.”
A grin slowly bloomed on Nell’s face. “A girl baby.”
Jamie tried to imagine. And really, really wished he wasn’t too old for a good eavesdropping spell.
Chapter 2
Marcus tried to find any vestiges of patience that an afternoon on the boat with Sean hadn’t already obliterated.
Without success.
“You have a what kind of message for me?”
Aunt Moira pursed her lips. She didn’t approve of his general grumpiness. “We got an unusual visitor in the Witches’ Lounge today. She brought a message for you, from the spirits.”
It was a particularly bad day when even the dead wouldn’t leave him alone.
And his aunt’s mind was oddly jumpy. Marcus gave up on his vain hope that the universe would disappear in a poof of dust and lasered in on the jumpiness. “What’s going on?”
She reached for his hands, a sure sign of impending disaster. “The message is from Evan.”
Evan. One word, and oxygen vanished from the world.
Marcus fought for the right to breathe, just as he had every day of the last forty-three years. “Evan is dead.”
“I know, dear boy.” Tears threatened to spill over in Moira’s eyes. “But a special few can hear the words of those gone from us.”
You didn’t grow up in Aunt Moira’s world without at least some respect for the more mystical magics. Marcus tried to keep his gruffness in check. “I wasn’t aware that you knew any mediums.”
“I don’t.” She shook her head slowly. “She was a stranger, sent to deliver a message.”
From Evan. Marcus had spent most of his life trying to reach across the veil that kept his twin just beyond his reach. That a stranger had done it drove him to fury and guilt in less than a breath.
And then he breathed one more time, and reason kicked in. “A stranger showed up in Realm with a message from the dead? And you believe her?” He reached for Moira’s mind. Politely-she’d always been hell on poor witch manners.
“Go ahead and look, my boy.” Her voice was pure Irish primness. “And then remember that appearances can be deceiving.”
Marcus looked. And then scrambled to clean up the brain melt caused by all the glitter and glitz. “That’s your visitor?”
“You’re a fine one to judge.” Moira sniffed and reached to put his kettle on the stove. “You dress like some ruffian my aunt Martha would have chased out of her kitchen with a broom.”