Free Spells & Stitches by Barbara Bretton

into this world of yours and then good-bye.”
    It probably shouldn’t have bugged me that she didn’t want to be here any more than I wanted her to be. I mean, I would have given away all my qiviut, with a baby camel chaser, to get her a one-way ticket back to Salem, but Samuel’s last wish was immutable.
    Aerynn’s mate, the man who had fathered her only child, had been a powerful sorcerer who had gathered up every micron of magick left to him at the end of his earthly life and wrapped it around me and the foul-tempered troll with the yellow hair, binding us together until the next generation of Hobbs woman had safely entered this world.
    Believe me, I had tried every spell I knew (and a few new ones I invented) to send Elspeth back to the lighthouse where she had kept house for Samuel all those years, but nothing worked. Worse, they left an intradimensional trail that told her exactly what I had been up to.
    Last week I did manage to conjure up a charm that afforded Luke and me a zone of privacy where Elspeth was concerned. Without it she would think nothing of marching into our bedroom at five a.m. to complain about the birds singing outside the window.
    And without it, Luke might have walked into the Atlantic with Lorcan.
    “You’re blocking the screen, Elspeth.” I didn’t mean to send her flying over to the caps lock key when I hit the backspace. It just happened. The fact that she also disappeared was a very lucky break.
    Over time Sugar Maple had developed a system for living as magick in a nonmagick world. Many of our children ended up going away to top-notch schools in the human world. (Janice, for instance, went to Harvard.) But without birth certificates, medical records from a licensed practitioner, and valid SAT scores that education couldn’t happen, so we improvised.
    Okay, so we lied. We had a close call a year ago when the powers-that-be in the state capital became very interested in our “missing” birth and death records, but with Luke’s help we had managed to dodge that bullet. But I considered it a wake-up call.
    If we were going to continue to live in the world of humans, we would have to at least pretend to play by their rules. My human side might have felt guilty, but my magick side didn’t bat an eye at translating our own meticulously kept records into something viable for the world beyond Sugar Maple.
    Usually we didn’t worry about this sort of thing until the child reached high school, but Brianne believed earlier was better, so I had a list of dates and info I needed to e-mail back to her. That was what I should have been doing, but you know how it is. I love me some Internet in the morning.
    I logged on to Ravelry, checked for messages, then headed straight for my Gmail account.
    TO: Chloe
FROM: Bunny and Jack MacKenzie
SUBJECT: brunch
     
     
    We MapQuested Carole’s Lakeside Inn and it’s an easy ninety-minute drive for us. Jenny and Paul will try to make it. Kimberly and Travis are a definite. Ronnie and Deni are bringing the grandkids. Kevin and Tiffany will drive up from Rhode Island the day before and spend the night with Danny and Margo (cousins). Patrick said he’ll try but it’s his weekend with the kids. And Meghan if she can tear herself away from her latest beau.
     
    TO: Bunny and Jack MacKenzie
FROM: Chloe
SUBJECT: re: brunch
     
    Sounds great. We have a one o’clock reservation for sixteen people. Carole says we can push it to twenty if we need to, okay?

     
    I knew Luke came from a humongously big family, but seeing all of those names listed in Bunny’s e-mail made me break out in a cold sweat. I was usually pretty good with names—it’s part of a knit shop owner’s skill set—but pregnancy brain had muddled up my neurons to the point where even my own name slipped my mind.
    Bunny had written from a different address this time, one she shared with her husband. I reopened the e-mail, scrolled down, and noted a link to Ronnie’s real estate website. A