Witches Under Way Read Online Free Page B

your idea?
    Nope.  He came up with that one all by himself.  Lauren grabbed Aervyn’s other hand and helped swing him down the sidewalk.  I’m just admiring his ingenuity.
    I was going to go.  Really.  Lizard tried to sound as convincing as possible.  She was almost sure it was true.
    Aervyn was practically floating, which wasn’t ideal when you were on Main Street in broad daylight.  Lizard pushed down on his head and he put his feet back on the ground, grinning.  “What are you gonna do on your first day?”
    “No idea, dude.”  When you moved around as often as she had as a teenager, you got a lot of first days at new schools, and pretty much all of them had sucked.  “I’ll probably just get a lot of homework or something.”  And this time around, she might actually have to do it.
    “There’s no homework in kindergarten.”  Aervyn looked oddly saddened by this.  “Maybe I can help with yours.”
    She grinned.  “Know anything about dead poets?”
    He considered for a moment, and then shook his head.  “Nope.  But if you need help, Mama’s really smart at homework.  What’s a ‘poet,’ anyhow?”
    Cripes.  She should have had more coffee instead of the extra bacon.  Bacon didn’t help you think faster.  “Someone who puts words together into kind of a mini-story.  Like a song, but without any music.”
    Aervyn tried to wrap his head around a tuneless song.  “What kind of words?  And how does a poet know how to put them together?”
    “Well, they’re kind of like spells—sometimes they rhyme, and sometimes they just sound good next to each other.”
    Superboy’s eyes brightened.  “Are poets witches?”
    There was a question she wasn’t going to ask in class.  And she was way done talking about poetry, even with adorable witchlings who shared their pencil crayons.  Which seemed like a reasonable stance until Aervyn’s eyes clouded with hurt.  Damn—she kept freaking forgetting how powerful a mindreader he was.
    Fortunately, he wasn’t the only mind witch on duty.  You’re going to owe me for this.   Lauren sent Lizard a brief glance and then looked down at their small sidekick.  “Some poets write about witches.  There was this one guy, Shakespeare, who wrote some pretty famous stuff.  This one’s from a play about a crazy king named Macbeth.” 
    Lizard grinned as Lauren produced a credible witch cackle, and said the words along in her head. 
    “Fillet of a fenny snake,
    In the cauldron boil and bake;
    Eye of newt and toe of frog,
    Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
    Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting,
    Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.
    For charm of powerful trouble,
    Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
    Double, double toil and trouble;
    Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
    Aervyn grinned in delight.  “That one’s funny, but I don’t think that Shake guy’s a witch—he got too many things wrong.  He should go talk to Aunt Moira.  I don’t think she puts any frogs in her cauldron.”  He giggled.  “Or any ‘Lizards’ either.”
    “Well, poets get to make things up.  So he could make witches be however he wanted.”  Lauren winked at him.  “Even creepy women who boil frogs and lizards.”
    He bounced on the sidewalk beside her.  “More!”
    Lauren shrugged.  “That’s about all I know. Sorry, munchkin.  I had to memorize that one for high school English.”
    Aervyn looked up, all innocent curiosity.  “Maybe Lizard knows another one.”
    The words blossomed in Lizard’s mind, popping up despite her best attempts to keep the lid on.  She remembered the first time poetry had danced in her soul—and the Silverstein poem that had done it.  They’d stood on the end of the sidewalk, she and Grammie, looking down at the first blades of grass and imagining a world of possibilities.  That dog-eared book had been one of her most prized possessions.  She’d hidden the words down deep after Grammie died—they were way too freaking