.5 To Have and To Code by Debora Geary Read Free Book Online

few who understood deeply what it was to live with enormous power at your fingertips.  Most witches had minor magic.  The two of them could have destroyed half of California.
    He was still watching her in the steady, quiet way of his.  “You’ll need to replace me at Realm.”
    He was their mop-up guy—the one who cleaned up all the messes that happened in the witch-only levels.  And she’d always known it would be temporary.  “We’ll survive without you.”  She put a smile into the words and shifted out of funk mode.  Replacing him would suck, but the weather geeks had something to celebrate, and she wasn’t going to rain on their parade.  “Want to go scout out uber-cool new computers?  I think I can get you a lead on some monster-sized monitor screens.”  If she scored a couple for Enchanter’s Realm, even better.
    “Not yet.”  Govin’s tone was light, but his mind was concerned.  “Before we get new toys, we need a new cave.”
    She tried to pick her jaw up off the floor.  “You’re gonna move?”  Now she knew the source of the tension—TJ adapted to change about as well as a hibernating bear.  Hence the reason both guys still lived in their old college digs.
    “Yeah.  The grant funds the purchase of a weather monitoring station on the coast.”  He shrugged.  “TJ’s never going to leave all the toys, so we might as well live there too.”
    Nell was still stuck on the first part of what he said.  “You got enough funding to buy California coast real estate?”  Holy shit.
    “They really liked TJ’s models.”
    Dang.  And the models were just cover for the real work—it was hard to get government funding for throwing witch power at bad-mannered storms.  She also knew it wasn’t their grumpy-bear genius who had explained the models to the feds.  Nell grinned over her beer.  “You did it, Gov.  You really did it.”
    A smile finally exploded over his face.  “Yeah.  We did.”
    And now they needed to move.  Nell looked around the apartment that had anchored her first years of adulthood and kept the homesick twinges in her belly to herself.
    TJ wasn’t the only one who didn’t like change.  Even for the best possible of reasons.

Chapter 4

    Daniel ducked a seriously bad-ass stasis spell and tucked in behind a bush.  Again.  He’d spent half the night in the virtual bushes of Enchanter’s Realm.
    Scouting mission gone seriously wonky.  How did a guy get decent weapons in this place?  He’d borrowed someone’s low-level avatar, but even a lowly minion should be able to skulk without attracting attention.  He felt like a gaming newbie, and that stage of his life had ended fifteen years ago.
    Time to pull something out of his borrowed bag of tricks.  Scrolling through the spell stash of the journeyman soldier he’d hijacked, Daniel looked for something that might help him wander around without having magic constantly hurled at his head. 
    Ha.  Invisibility spell.  He activated the code and watched his screen, waiting for some kind of indication the darned thing had actually worked.
    Ten seconds later, the error message showed up.  Spell requires magic.
    He didn’t have time to wonder what the hell that meant.  Along with the error message came about fifteen simultaneous notices of attack launched.  Adrenaline joined the already swarming caffeine in his veins.  Cover blown.  Really, really blown.
    And all he had to fight back with were a bag of malfunctioning spells and a bush.
    A smart man used what he had.  Daniel activated every spell in his bag, a quick line of code redirecting the error messages back at the band of misfits who had him under attack—most people at least paused when their screen started flashing red.  Then he crouched lower behind the bush and started coding.  One actually functioning shield spell, coming right up.
    He had to give the misfits credit.  Several of them nearly beat him to the punch, and his coding was tight,