The old woman cocked her gun and narrowed her watery blue eyes on Gentry. “I can see Kit passed out right there in your backseat. I couldn’t get that kid to relax and let his guard down in his damn crib as an infant. He’s a light sleeper. What’d you do to him?”
“Nothing. He fought some mages to save us, and then passed out as soon as we got into our car.”
“Your stolen car,” the old woman corrected, not the least bit taken with her lies, “and none of mine are dumb enough to mess with the government without someone pulling their strings.”
Just then, the lanky witch gasped awake, his limbs rearranging into a defensive posture. His wide grey eyes took the two women in, but then he relaxed and smiled. “Nona,” he said, “good to see we made it to you.”
The old woman snorted. “That’s one way to put it. You said you’d visit years ago, Kit. You could’ve at least called. That’s what the others did.”
The lanky witch lost his smile. “The others suck up to you,” he muttered. With a couple of swear words and grunts, he exited the car and stretched. Then he peered down at Gentry through the glass. “You going to get out?”
“Not while Nona still has the gun pointed at us.”
“It’s Sophia for you, girl,” Nona growled as she lowered the barrel of the shotgun to the ground. She and Kit, in sync, walked towards the house. Gentry noted that the male witch had slowed his pace considerably to match the old woman’s, a limp present no doubt from the tumble he’d taken from the window at the Mage Corps headquarters.
She exited the car, awkwardly following to the wraparound porch and then into the house. Just as Gentry had suspected, the interior smelled of homemade sausages and pancakes. The excited, high-pitched voices of children overwhelmed the air as Gentry took in the homey living room filled with a mix of lawn and wooden chairs. Some were high chairs. Directly connected to the living room was a kitchen dominated by a long dining table filled with at least twenty children ranging from babies to around ten years old. A few of the older ones were up and swarmed around Kit.
The tall witch had a girl picked up into a bear hug, and he set her down to slap the back of another boy with rosy cheeks. Thenhe greeted the next one. Sophia watched on with a tough grin tugging up at her lips. She then spotted Gentry at the edge of the living room. “C’mere and eat! No one likes to be watched during a meal.”
Gentry hesitantly picked what appeared to be the cleanest part of the table — a space between two five-year-old girls who were clearly in the middle of an argument about who’d played with the newest doll last. Their tiny voices as they shouted nonsense at each other made her ears ring. Distracted as she couldn’t tell which one was lying, she didn’t even notice when Sophia served her up pancakes with far too much syrup. Only her mouth watering made her look down to realize it.
The kids all fell silent when Sophia finally sat down at the head of the table, followed by Kit at the other end. The older children couldn’t seem to peel their eyes away from the male witch.
“Before we say grace,” Sophia announced, “I want us all to say ‘Welcome Home’ to Kit, do ya hear?”
Enthused shouts, completely out of sync, rang out around the dinner table as the children tried to obey Sophia’s request to the best of their varying linguistic abilities. Gentry was somewhat charmed that all the kids seemed to have Kit and Sophia’s southern drawls.
The breakfast was far too loud and messy for Gentry to hear anything from Sophia’s side of the table, as she was closer to the older kids and Kit. They were hardly giving the man a chance to eat his food from how much they were talking to him.
“What’s Skadra like? Is the Sky Road as awesome as the kids at school say it is?” one boy asked, nearly leaning his elbows into his tater tots in eagerness. The other kids shouted their agreement or added in their own stories, each one more incredulous than the last.
“Nu-uh, I’m not spoiling anything to you, Eddie,” Kit drawled with a smile to the groans of the other children, “you’ll all seeit soon enough. Have you been practicing your spells as Nona’s been teaching you?”
Gentry nearly dropped her fork from the new information.Witches. She looked around at her breakfast mates with new eyes. One of the five-year-old girls next to her was levitating a ball in the air, a toddler exploded their applesauce with a screech without touching it, one boy was blowing smoke from his fingers… Were they all witches? How had she missed it?
She was still observing random spurts of childish magic when breakfast ended. The older children went to work like a well-oiled machine as Sophia barked orders at them like a wizened general. Some handled the babies and toddlers while others cleaned up the large mess scattered on the dining table. Their magic became very well apparent at that point. Dishes flew in the air towards the sink as one unfortunate girl scrubbed. Others directed mops like they were orchestra maestros, their fingers dancing through the air as the mops scrubbed themselves across the floor to collect bits of food. Within ten minutes, Sophia’s orphans had the kitchen spic and span.
Gentry could only watch on in amazement. Her father had only ever used magic for parlor tricks. Never anything as practical as this.
“It’s something else, right?” Sophia asked them, smiling as she held a baby on both hips. “It took a long time to figure this system out, you know.”
“Why don’t you help them?” The dumb question left Gentry’s mouth before she could stop it. Her mother had always griped about parents who made their children do all the work. Something about making kids into adults before the world did being senseless cruelty.
Rather than be insulted, Sophia laughed, “Couldn’t if I tried. Don’t have any magic. Besides, these kids need some way to figure their magic out. This is better than catching grass on fire.Caught Kit a few times out back pulling those stunts. With too many kids and not enough hands, I had to figure something out.”
“Where do you find them?” Gentry asked.
“This community has a high number of witches, and they have an unofficial network for finding unwanted magical kids. Some parents relinquish them to me. Everyone helps out. Kit and his sister were among the first I took in,” Sophia said before the baby on her right screeched indignantly. She shushed the red-faced thing. It giggled.
Gentry watched in amazement as the rough, gruff woman transformed into something far softer. It was all too much to process. The fact that a magic-less human could handle so many young, untrained witches at once, that this place was out in the open in their community, and that the government, so desperate for witches, wasn’t breathing down their necks. They were only an hour away from the Mage Headquarters!
Then there was the matter that this place had produced the assassin who’d nearly ended her life last night.
Overwhelmed, she zeroed in on Kit who was still talking to the younger witches. She stalked over to him, sliding over so that he had to look down at her. The kids scurried out of her way.
Maybe it was the hands she had squarely on her hips, but Kit seemed to catch on to her ire quickly. “What’s the matter?”
As always, his politeness grated at her nerves, practically because she could see he didn’t mean it. She growled, “Why did you bring us here? It isn’t safe. For them.”
