Page 63 of Wicked Deeds

“I think so. I’ll just check her aura,” Meredith said. She studied Gwen for a time and then asked, “May I touch you?”

Gwen nodded and Meredith rested two fingers on her forehead. Curious, I let my sight shift into the magic, to see the aura for myself. It was stronger now, not as misty as earlier. And I couldn’t see anything unusual. Meredith would be doing adeeper scan, using whatever magic it was that healers did to see all the things that I didn’t even know to look for.

Whatever she saw, it seemed to satisfy her because she moved back, smiling. “Perfect. Let me get you set up with some pain meds and you’ll be out of here.”

Chapter Sixteen

As predicted,hauling myself out of bed a few hours after getting home was no fun at all. But I had one last client report to complete and today was the deadline.

I padded down the hallway and eased Gwen’s door open. The room was dark, and she was a lump under the covers, dead to the world. Good. She needed the rest. I needed caffeine. All the caffeine.

After coffee, breakfast and a shower, I felt human enough to tackle the report and managed to finish it in an hour. I moved straight on to the Archives metadata I was working on for Damon, rather than giving in to the urge to take a nap.

I finished the first batch of entries, processed the changes, and got ready for batch two. We’d been refining the taxonomy as we increased the number of volumes scanned and updating entries was complicated. Ralph had shared some information about how the UK Cestis cataloged their collection and it was even more complicated than Cassandra’s method, so Cassandra wanted some additional data added.

It wasn’t the most exciting task in the world, but if I logged in to do any testing prep for Damon, I’d have to talk to the restof the team and, knowing Righteous, word would have spread about the accident last night. I didn’t want to answer a thousand questions.

I tagged entries for forty minutes before my caffeine-fueled determination to be productive flagged. When my inbox notification chimed, I gave in to the lure of distraction. The first one was from the National Genetics Registry.

What the heck? Was Meredith sending me Gwen’s results?

Sure, my DNA was in the database. When my grandparents had taken me home after Sara died, they’d asked me if I wanted to try to find my father. At the time, thirteen-year-old Maggie had wanted nothing more. I tried one more time when I was eighteen. Still nothing. After that I’d locked my profile down and forgotten about it. I’d never had any requests for medical information.

Frowning, I opened the email.

“Dear Margaret Diana Lachlan,” it read. “This is a mandatory notification that your medical history has been utilized.” Followed by a lot of boring legalese about the relevant laws and a plain English explanation of what had been released, which boiled down to gender, genetic traits for any diseases, and any other known conditions where the genetics hadn’t fully been nailed down yet but were suspected to have hereditary factors. As far as I knew, I didn’t have anything to report.

“Should you wish to know more about this match, please access your file via the Annex site. Authentication by palm or retina scan is required to access the match.” Annex site? Oh, right. The database for witches. I should ask Cassandra about that. As far as I knew, my grandparents had used the regular site. After all, they thought I had no magic. Had the Cestis moved my record?

I sat back in the chair, stomach churning. Who the hell had I matched with? I knew all my immediate relatives on mymother’s side. There weren’t many of them. My grandparents had both come from small families—one sibling each—and neither my great-aunt nor great-uncle had had children. They’d died before my grandparents. And, of course, my mother was an only child.

Obviously there were more distant cousins I’d never heard about. Maybe one of them doing a search?

I read the email again and something moved uneasily in my stomach, my intuition pinging. Weird timing. Gwen does a search and I get a match? Surely it was a coincidence? It had to be.

I couldn’t have matched with Gwen. She was English. I had some Irish and Scottish blood, but my family had been in the US for more than a century.

Vaguely queasy, I opened a connection to the Annex database, logged in, provided the palm scan and checked my notifications.

Which didn’t tell me much more than the email. My medical history had been provided following a duly authorized request. As my account was locked down in relation to other information, no other information had been provided. I could request the nature of the relationship via the relevant form. As this was the Annex database this process could take up to five business days due to privacy and blah blah blah. It also gave me the process to initiate a search for relatives.

I shut down the site, wondering why I was so uneasy. It had to be a coincidence, right?

But my nerves didn’t settle so, acting on instinct, I vidcalled Meredith, expecting to leave a message. But instead I got her, looking neat and tidy as always in a misty green T-shirt that matched her eyes under her white coat. She leaned closer to the screen, looking worried.

“Maggie, hi. Is something wrong with Gwen?”

“No, sorry. Didn’t mean to alarm you. Can I run something by you, if you have time.”

“I have about ten minutes, then I have another patient. Is that okay?”

I had no idea if it was enough time, but I wasn’t going to waste the chance. “I got a notification from the genetics database this morning.”

“Oh?” Her brows drew down.

“Yeah, it says my medical history was accessed. That’s never happened before.”

“Never?” Her frown deepened.

---