Life Guards in the Hamptons Read Online Free

born in the bloody, bewitched Harbor should be tested for psychic ability by the people at the Royce Institute. Then they should marry according to some genetic pattern, like breeding horses for stamina or cows for better milk. I wasn’t a freaking labradoodle. I wasn’t a freak.
    Half of Paumanok Harbor was terrified of her after that incident with the cabbages. The other half relished her fresh vegetables and tea readings. I didn’t want to know the future she had in mind for me.
    I guess she had a point about studying with the espers at Royce, though. I’d had to learn in a hurry about Royce, DUE, Unity and the rest, and still had no idea what a Visualizer like me was supposed to do half the time. Not that any of the so-called experts did either. But this was chiggers, nothing arcane or out of the ordinary.
    “Of course I know how to get rid of chiggers.”
    “It doesn’t involve a razor, does it?”
    “No. They’re bad this year. I have to make up a new batch of ointment, but I am too busy right now. You have heard about the Patagonian oiaca, haven’t you?”
    “Yeah. It’s got pink toes.”
    “It’s wrecking my fields.”
    Grandma Eve had experimental gardens tucked all over the working farm, growing exotics, illegals, and heaven knew what. Some had government approval; Eve Garland was such a renowned herbalist. Most witches were.
    “I thought it was a small bird. How much could it eat?”
    “It’s not the bird. It’s the jackasses come to gawk at the poor thing.”
    I almost asked if any of them were named Stu, but she was on a rant. “They’re trampling everything in sight, showing no respect for private property or ripening crops. I’ve had to hire extra workers just to guard the perimeters and put up more fences. The bird can’t survive here, anyway, not with winter coming. It has no mate, either.”
    Either? People could survive without a mate. People like me. Grandma Eve never missed a cheap shot to remind me of my unmarried state, or my lack of propagating the species of paranormals. We’d ridden this merry-go-round enough times that I ignored the dig. “Why don’t they catch it and take it home to South America?”
    “The ornithologists think it escaped from some private contraband collection. They can’t bring it back to its original habitat in case it picked up a disease that could wipe out the last of the species found in some obscure bit of forest. Now the high muckety-mucks in charge are trying to decide where to take it. If they can find it. The dratted thing keeps flitting around, hiding in the shrubs. One faction fears they’ll hurt it worse by capturing the bird. Another says let nature take its course. I say they’re already traumatizing the creature with all the hubbub.”
    “Is anyone worried about a hawk or an owl or a feral cat carrying it off?”
    “They’re not sure that hasn’t already happened. No one has seen the oiaca in two days. You should be here.”
    “Why, to look for pink toes something spit out?”
    “No, Willow, you should be here to stand by your family in time of need. That’s what we do.”
    No, what we did was more complicated than that. Grandma Eve brewed herbs and incantations. My mother talked to dogs, my father predicted doom. Susan’s cooking could change moods, her father read dirt, and her mother wrangled schoolkids. Before she died, my other grandmother talked to invisible people who answered her back. Some family, huh?
    As for me, sometimes I imagined magical beings that actually appeared, but mostly I wrote books. I tried, anyway, after hanging up the phone to cut off my grandmother’s usual disappointment in me.
    My hero still had no sidekick and I had a wastepaper basket filled with wasted paper. After that I spent another night wrestling with the sheets and the scratching before I took a Tylenol PM. Little Red woke me up before dawn with a loud, constant slurping at his toes.
    “Damn it, Red, go back to sleep.”
    He didn’t.
    I