Lost Magic (The Swift Codex Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the top of the cabinets. He jumped down with a thin artist paintbrush, the cheap sort which came with children's water color sets. It must have been from an old set, it was made of wood. “Hold this but do not break it.”
     
    Before I could ask what he was up to, I saw both that the house had alarms on the windows, and that he was going to open the door. I found a way to cover the infant's ears, but as soon as the siren blared through the house, she jumped and started wailing. Less than ten cries of the alarm later, I already felt a matching throb starting to form into a painful pulse behind my left eye. A migraine was the very last thing I wanted today of all days. The glare I gave Mordon made him give a sheepish shrug, then he took the other end of the paint brush.
     
    Breaking it wasn't as easy as you'd think, but I was impatient to escape the assault on my ears. The noise followed us through the portal and hummed around my head for a time after we were left standing on the sea side.
     
    Deciding that the noise was just in my memory—or maybe a trace remnant from the portal—I walked slowly along the beach, shushing and sympathizing with the baby as we went along. By now I felt like I'd spent all day and night drinking at the snail races at the Mermaid's Tale, and it took me a few minutes before I noticed, much less enjoyed, our surroundings.
     
    I knew next to nothing about beaches. I'd never lived within two hundred miles of the coast, so I had no way of knowing if this was east or west. But I was reasonably certain we weren't north of the 45th parallel, and probably weren't as far south as California unless it was unusually cold. Nor was the beach sand the pristine white of tropical paradise but a motley grayish color, and the skies were dark. It was getting colder as the sun had evidently already fallen below the horizon.
     
    To my embarrassment, I didn't even know if the tide was coming or going. There were so many things I didn't know, such as what I was going to do with the baby or what was with the amber stone I was determined to keep safe.
     
    I exhaled, releasing all the fear and pressure from the last hour or two. My hands were cold, shaking, just remembering what had happened with Josephina. The grotesque wasn't too terrible, I told myself, but at the uncomfortable weight of the child in my arms, I felt more terrified than I could ever remember being in my whole life.
     
    What had I done? What would my parents say, what would Mordon do when the immediate troubles were over? I knew this would change everything. Like, everything . Right down to how I took my showers in the morning.
     
    All I could do was feel anxious. This wouldn't be the first crazy thing I'd done, so my parents and Leif and Lilly would be cool enough about it. Probably not perfectly OK, but they'd understand. In my parent's case, I fretted getting a talking-to. Adult I may be, but I didn't feel like one at the moment. Not with the harried way I'd been chased, not with the sheer uncertainty of how to cope with the sudden responsibility in my arms. Mordon was occupied doing his thing, whatever it was, but I didn't want to interrupt him anyway. For a few minutes longer, I wanted the illusion that the two of us wouldn't be radically changed by the presence of this tiny body.
     
    I knew our relationship would never be the same again.
     
    Or at least, that's what all my child-rearing cousins and friends said. That their relationships had changed after kids.
     
    One had even ended in divorce.
     
    That was a reassuring thought.
     
    As the child calmed, I watched the ebb and swoosh of the waves as they washed ashore, flurried with seaweed and foam, then slid back into the ocean. Every now and again I heard the roaring of a big wave building, and it would crash against rocks and send spray up into the air, to land with a slap on the shore. After a while, I started to get wet. The tide must be coming in. The baby had fallen asleep, and I