The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2) by J.D. Horn
ONE
“Hold the fire in your hand now, girl.” Jilo’s whisper washed over me. “Don’t let it just take you in. You control it this time. Don’t you enter its world till you ready to control your time there.”
The small flame didn’t burn me, even though I knew its heat must have been intense. It danced in my palm as it tried to pull my consciousness back—back into a memory of myself and my sister. Maisie had given me these enchanted flames, tongues of fire that allowed me to relive experiences from our childhood in vibrant detail. Now she was lost to me, torn not only from this world, but from our very reality. No one knew where she was, or even if she was.
These bright flickers were the last of her magic left on our plane, and they strained to touch their source like iron shavings reaching toward a magnet. They were my only hope of finding Maisie. I struggled against the flame’s tug, trying to descend into the past, step-by-step, this time without getting lost in the memory. We had already used a dozen of the flames; the lights had given their lives one by one as they tried to guide me to her. They burned so brightly, but they flickered out too quickly for me to find the connection, to understand where I was being led. Counting this one, the flame that quivered in my palm, only five remained.
“Hold on to the light in your right hand, and you listen to Jilo’s voice, hear?” She grabbed my free hand and squeezed it tightly. I squeezed back. “Let Jilo’s voice be yo’ anchor in this world. No need to rush, my girl, no need to rush.”
Jilo’s language and her insistence on speaking about herself in the third person belied her education. I knew for a fact that she had graduated from Spelman College with a degree in chemistry, but due to her sex and skin color, she had been born about two decades too early to follow her dream of becoming a medical doctor. Instead she became a Hoodoo root doctor, building a persona around herself that matched both the expectations and superstitions of those who sought her services. I was one of the few who had ever been allowed a peek behind this mask.
Jilo took a deep, slow breath, reminding me to emulate her. The waves of power washed up against me, but each came with less strength, and their frequency was diminishing. I resisted the gravity of the world that had begun to grow before me, trying to divert the energy of Maisie’s spell from its intended use, turning it toward my own ends. The energy slowed and began to stretch out before me, bending. Frustrated by my resistance, it began to turn, stretching out and glowing like a comet nearing the sun. Just as I’d intended, the magic began to seek its source, reaching out in all directions until it found Maisie. I honed my consciousness, following the flame’s path, but it was too late. The flame incandesced, expanding and brightening like a nova. An instant later it died. So, resisting the flames’ pull caused them to burn out more quickly . . . This time, I didn’t even get the joy of reliving a beloved childhood memory. Just blackness.
“We got closer that time,” Jilo said, even though we both knew it was a lie. We’d made it this far twice before. She stood and hobbled over to the table where the Ball jar that held the remaining four flames sat and closed the lid tightly on them. “I can’t do no more today. I ain’t as young as you are,” she said, but all the while her eyes never left my midsection. I knew she worried that too much of this walking between worlds might be bad for the baby growing there. I worried too, but I was also worried that I was running out of time to find Maisie.
“I appreciate what you are doing for me,” I said, rubbing my palm over my ever-expanding stomach. I was just three-and-a-half months along now, but I could already tell that my Colin would arrive a very big boy.
“Jilo know you do, girl,” she said, and then said again in a tender voice, “She know you do.” She put her hand on her hip, rubbing away at some ache. “Jilo still think you should tell yo’ family what you up to. They witches, they have a much easier time helpin’ you find your sister than Jilo.”
“I don’t want to involve them. The other witch families won’t even listen to a whisper about trying to bring Maisie back into our dimension. She damaged the line, they say, weakened it.” Millennia ago, powerful witches, including many of my own ancestors, had woven a web of magical energy to protect our world. We called this barrier “the line.” The beings who’d once ruled the earth—call them demons if you are religious, or trans-dimensional entities if you put your faith in science—had set themselves up as gods, meddling in human evolution, even more so in the genesis of witches than in that of regular folk. Eventually we witches rebelled, chasing the serpents out of Eden. The line prevented them from ever coming back. “My aunts and uncle would stop me too. They’d feel obliged to,” I said, fearing that they might not have helped me even if the other families hadn’t been opposed to finding my sister.
While my Aunt Iris wanted nothing more to do with Maisie, saying that she’d earned any punishment that had befallen her, Aunt Ellen was offering her usual blind allegiance to the united witch families. She didn’t want to risk making waves. Uncle Oliver wasn’t as dead set against finding Maisie, but he didn’t think there would be much of her left to find. He had spent days ripping out the patch of lawn where Maisie had last stood before the power of the angry line threw her far from our world. He said the earth there had been burnt black several feet deep, and it wasn’t even worth trying to plant anything. He’d returned the damaged soil, laid down pavers to cover the spot, and added a sundial. I guess it constituted his own form of a memorial. No, I knew my family would not support my clandestine efforts, and even if they did, the other anchors—the witches like myself who had been chosen to maintain and protect the line—had forbidden any efforts to bring Maisie back into our reality, fearing she would do more damage to the line.
“Jilo think maybe they should stop you. This sister of yours, she tried to kill you.”
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” I objected. “She was under the influence of a demon, a boo hag. The boo hag you yourself nurtured and used to spy on my family.” Maisie was more than a sibling, she was my twin. Fraternal twin, yes, but still we’d come into the world together. If I didn’t look for a reason to forgive her, who else would?
“Jilo done told you she sorry about that. She had no idea that yo’ sister had got messed up with that thing.”
I still felt sick when I thought about how Maisie had taken the shadow entity and given it a form. Named it Jackson and took it as her lover. Allowed it to cut me and taste my blood. I felt even worse when I remembered how I myself had fallen in love with Jackson. A shudder ran down my spine.
“That right,” Jilo continued as if she had read my thoughts. “That the sister you trying to find now. Jilo says you better off leaving the bitch wherever she landed. Sometimes you just gotta cut the cord, blood or no.”
“Well, that sure isn’t going to happen,” I said sharply, but then regretted my tone. “I can’t do this without you, Mother.”
She shook off my frustration without even a grimace. “The families still chokin’ off yo’ power supply?”
“Yes,” I said. “They don’t think I’m ready to control it.”
“And they still pissed you shared a little with Jilo.”
“Yeah, they didn’t seem too happy when they figured that one out.” The other witch families had staged a kind of trial to determine if I was ready to assume the full use of my powers. The fact that I’d given Jilo just enough to keep her in business had actually been used as Exhibit A in the case against me, but I wasn’t going to burden her with that fact. It was my power to give, and I’d done it of my own free will. “They say they’re doing it to protect me from myself, that I don’t know how to handle the power, that I’m not mature enough for it,” I said, mentally ticking off their list of complaints, “and that I think too much with my heart instead of my head, putting my own desires before the greater good.”
“Who the hell are they to judge you?” she asked, angry as a mother hen protecting her chick. “The line, it chose you, even without yo’ magic. It knew you. It picked you.”
“They said that letting me have access to my full power would be like letting a six-year-old play with an atomic bomb. I’ve got to ease into it, like I would have if I’d been able to access it since birth.”
“What about the line? How you gonna anchor that damned thing if you don’t have you full power?”
“I’m not anchoring right now. I’m connected to its power. I have to be, ’cause it chose me to help anchor it, but the nine other anchors are sharing my allotment of its energy and my portion of the burden of maintaining it. I’m sure if they could remove me as an anchor without bringing down the line, they probably would.”
“Oh, they a way. They could kill you, just like yo’ Ginny got killed.”
My mind flashed back on the scene I’d walked into that summer. My Great-Aunt Ginny lying dead in a pool of blood. Bludgeoned with a tire iron. “They wouldn’t do that,” I said, praying that I was right.
“You sure about that?” Jilo asked. I said nothing, knowing that she’d read through any lie I tried to float. I wasn’t sure. Ginny’s murder had triggered the events that had led to the line’s selection of me as an anchor. It had crossed my mind more than once that I ought to take care until I had my footing. Killing me would be the easiest way to create another vacancy.
Deep down I suspected that if I proved too inconvenient, too much of a handful, the families might decide to remove me from the scene entirely, and then congratulate themselves on being able to make the hard calls. I knew my aunts and uncle would go down trying to protect me, but some members of my extended family might even put their seal of approval on the decision. That’s why I’d been agreeing to everything the families had asked of me, everything other than giving up on Maisie.
“Jilo, she don’t get it,” she continued, pulling me from my dark thoughts. “How is what they doin’ any different from what old Ginny pulled on you? They stealin’ what rightfully yo’s. They know they a price for stealing a witch’s power.”
“They aren’t really stealing . . .”
“They taking it from you without yo’ permission,” she said, but then read my silence. “Ah, Jilo see. You gave them permission, didn’t you?”
“I did what I had to do. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know what I’m doing. I never had the chance to learn. I’ve got to catch up.”
“The hell you say. Don’t you see, girl? The line, it thought you ready. These other anchors, the families, they scared you into givin’ over yo’ power.”
I knew she was right, but the truth was that I was afraid. I was terrified not only of the families, but of myself. I doubted I could control my magic at half power, leave alone full. I had missed out on my formative years as a witch, and now I was toddling along, taking baby steps. A magical infant who kept falling on her magical butt. The families had tasked Emmet with my education. Emmet had begun life as a golem, intended to house the consciousnesses of the families’ representatives. But the same energy that had knocked Maisie into whatever place she’d landed had also fused the consciousnesses lent to Emmet’s form into a single, brooding, pain-in-the-ass personality.
Happily, the energy donors were pretty much unharmed—they didn’t seem to be diminished in the least by what they’d lost to their golem. Emmet still shared much of their knowledge and had retained a portion of their powers too. Since he possessed both wisdom and magic, the families had decided that he would be my teacher, and that he would show me how to harness my own power. Even though Emmet could be grating, I still felt sympathy for him. We had a bit in common. The families stomped all over him too, never even asking him if he had his own ideas about what he wanted to do with his life. They simply pointed him in my direction and told him to go to it. But even with Emmet as my capable tutor, I had only gained imperfect control over what little magic they’d allowed me. I shrugged.
“Fine. We keep lookin’ for yo’ crazy-ass sister together, then. Tomorrow,” Jilo said, picking up the red cooler she always carried with her to Colonial Cemetery, where she met with her regular clientele. She slipped the Ball jar into the cooler. I had asked her to keep custody of it, to make sure no one intent on punishing Maisie could make use of its contents. “You better be puttin’ some thought into what you gonna do with her if we do find yo’ Maisie, ’cause Jilo ain’t gonna be babysitting her.” A sharp beam of sunlight found its way through one of the square, foot-long openings in the wall. The old woman of the crossroads stood there in silhouette, her features obscured by the bright light engulfing her. “I know you determined to do this—that why Jilo helpin’. But you don’t owe yo’ sister nothing. It that baby you carryin’ you need to be worrying about.” She opened the heavy door with a wave of her hand. “You ain’t gonna be able to keep flittin’ around on that bike of yours for much longer. If we gonna keep on with this, Jilo say you find us some place cleaner and closer to home.” She let the door slam behind her, punctuating her point with the sound of metal slapping metal.
I looked around this forgotten room in the abandoned powder magazine where we’d been meeting. The gunpowder had long since been removed, but pointed and rusted objects still lay strewn everywhere, coated in decades of dust. Outside the redbrick fortress, heaps of garbage negated the medieval, almost fairy-tale glamour of the magazine’s crenellated roofline. I would have been hard-pressed to find a more septic situation for my unborn child. “Maybe she’s right, Colin,” I said, addressing the child. I knew the baby was a boy; there had been no need for an ultrasound, since my Aunt Ellen always hit it dead on in these matters. I also knew I would name him Colin, after his father’s father.
Aunt Iris was pressing me to go ahead and marry Peter Tierney, making it official before the baby was born. I had every intention of marrying him. I’d even accepted his ring, but I didn’t wear it yet. Like the heart of a Russian nesting doll, I kept it stowed in its blue velveteen box in the jewelry case on my makeup table. I loved Peter, but every time I envisioned myself standing there before God and the world to say “I do,” I remembered how he had gone to Jilo and paid her to place a love spell on me. He’d been desperate, terrified that I would leave him for Jackson. It bothered me more than a little that I’d actually considered doing as much. I’d forgiven Jilo, and on the surface, I’d forgiven Peter, but the betrayal had been so deep, so unexpected, that part of me wondered how far Peter would go in any situation where he felt hard-pressed.
As this thought registered, it made me feel a twinge of guilt. Peter was trying so hard to step up and be a good father and provider. In addition to his regular job, he’d gone back to working nights at his parents’ tavern, and he was doing his best to start up his own construction business, taking on smaller jobs that he could do on weekends with a couple of buddies from his regular crew. I had reminded him that money was not a problem—ever since I had turned twenty-one, I’d been receiving a monthly stipend from the family trust—but he would have none of it.
“No,” he had told me, holding up his palms toward me. “I can’t take money from you. I don’t want to take money from you. I want to know that I can take care of my wife, or soon-to-be wife, and my child. Without your money and without your magic.”
It was a display of arguably antiquated male pride, but instinct and intuition told me not to challenge him on it. I simply nodded and smiled. “All right. I respect that,” I said at the time, even though I was only humoring him. After taking some weeks to reflect on it, though, I had come to realize how much respect I did have for him. “You are one lucky boy to have a daddy like that,” I told Colin, running my hand over the small bulge beneath my shirt.
I leaned into the enormous door, intent on opening it under my own steam. The seven-by-four-foot slab of steel cracked open with great difficulty. When I was a little girl, someone had managed to steal the massive door, taking it right off its hinges. That’s about as far as they got, though, its weight causing them to abandon it by the side of a dirt road, leaving the city of Savannah with the task of rehanging it.
I considered using my magic to open the door, as Jilo had done, but while I might manage to swing the door open, I might just blow it off its hinges and into the next county. I decided to use my hands. I leaned into the steel, and was nearly blinded by the light that rushed in to fill the dark space behind and around me.
The day was a fabric woven from heat and humidity, the noises of nature, and the drone of traffic on Ogeechee Road. My bike was where I’d left it, propped up against the building. I could have used my magic to bring myself to the magazine, but had decided against it. The one “spell,” for lack of a better term, I had managed to master so far was teleporting short distances. Not all witches could do it, but I could, and I could do it well. All the same, I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Each time, there was an odd sensation that the person I’d been at Point A wasn’t necessarily the same as the one who’d ended up at Point B.
“Mama needs her practice, but she also needs her exercise,” I rationalized aloud to my son. A thrill ran through me as I sensed for the first time an intelligence on the other end of the conversation. Colin was there, connected to me. A feeling of love, unequal to any I had ever known, flooded through me. I realized that I would do anything to keep my baby safe. Anything. Then I wondered whether “anything” included giving up the search for Maisie. I decided to leave that an open question for now, but determined that I would find a cleaner and safer place to meet Jilo from now on.
I started for my bike, but then a noise came from behind me. Something close. I turned. A lonely clump of Georgia pines stood a few feet ahead on my right, and an older—no, incredibly old—man stumbled through them. He staggered and almost tripped, but then righted himself. He turned around in a circle, seemingly intent on finding his bearings. The air felt way too hot and sticky for the overcoat he was wearing, especially since the garment was several sizes too large. The hem nearly brushed the ground. In spite of his diminutive size, I began to feel uneasy. Something wasn’t right.
This fear of strangers had only come upon me recently; I was no longer protected by any charms. When the line chose me, its power blended with my own, unraveling the protections that Emmet and my family had woven for me. Regular witches can’t charm the line’s anchors for good or bad. Now I had to stand on my own.
“Good morning,” I called out to the man, but he didn’t seem to hear me.
“Ta me ar strae. Ta me ar strae,” he repeated, circling once more before finally registering my presence. He made a rush toward me, and my breath quickened as adrenaline urged me to a fight-or-flight response. In his hurry, he nearly fell forward but managed to right himself at the last instant. He stopped and looked up at me. He had the most innocent face I had ever seen, his eyes wide and trusting. He was balding, and what tufts of hair remained around his temples were snow white. Deep wrinkles covered his face, but the folds there were laugh lines.
“Hello,” I said again. “Do you need some help?” I asked, hoping he understood English.
“You must be the angel,” he said, a thick Irish accent lending a lilt to his words. “They told me you would come for me at the end.” He held his arms out to me in a gesture of welcome.
Any fear I had of this stranger dissipated. I took a few steps toward him. “Sorry,” I said, “no angel here.” Was that disappointment I saw in his eyes?
“That’s just as well,” he said, snagging his coat on some brush and nearly tottering over.
“Listen, are you all right? Can I help you somehow?” He looked up at me again with his sweet face. Something about him seemed to be touched by magic. He radiated a faint white light, a luminescence I wasn’t sure I could have seen if I weren’t a witch. I found myself wondering if he were indeed a man, or some kind of elemental masquerading as one. After recent experiences, I had grown much less inclined to accept things at face value.
He tugged at his coat, freeing it from the brush, and took another step toward me. He began rubbing his left arm with his right hand. “It’s only that I am not quite sure where I am,” he said.
“You are off Ogeechee Road,” I replied. “Do you live around here?”
His answer came in the form of a short, sharp laugh. The laughter died as quickly as it had come. “I don’t know.” His knees buckled, and he fell to the ground. I ran to him, nearly tripping over my own feet, and knelt by his side. I gave him a gentle shake. He did not respond. I rolled him over with some difficulty. His skin was blue, and the radiance I had noticed only moments before had disappeared. Whatever magic had clung to him had deserted him.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I said and opened his coat, surprised to discover how slight his body was beneath it. I loosened his collar. He smiled up at me, but then his eyes glazed over. I felt for a pulse. There was none. I had taken a CPR certification course a couple of years before, and I did my best to remember the steps. Placing my right hand over his chest and my left hand over my right, I began compressions. Two inches deep, one hundred compressions per minute.
“Help!” I screamed, hoping that someone in one of the nearby businesses might hear. “Call an ambulance.” I kept counting compressions as I listened for any response. There was none. I called out again. I had picked this place for my work with Jilo because the noise of a busy road drowned out most other sounds, and even though there were businesses in the area, large trees hid the powder magazine entirely. Now I cursed the noise and camouflage. He only had six minutes even with CPR. How long had I been pressing into his chest? Maybe only thirty seconds, but it seemed like forever. Should I stop CPR and call for an ambulance myself?
I gasped as a sudden realization shot through me—I was a witch now, but I was thinking like a human. What would a witch do? I knew that my resuscitation efforts alone would not bring him back. At best, the CPR would keep oxygen flowing to his brain until a defibrillator could be used. His heart needed to be restarted with a shock of electricity.
The moment this thought came to mind, a pulse of light shot down my arm, bright and blue like a tight ball of lightning. I hadn’t consciously commanded it. My magic had interpreted my confused thoughts and taken over for me. The bolt shot into the man’s body, and for an instant, his eyes flashed open, full of astonishment. His body lifted a few inches off the ground, and as I tried to pull my hands away, it followed me, the electricity between us attracting him like a magnet. Then the link broke at last, and he dropped to the ground, his eyes fluttering shut for the last time. The stench of burning meat rose to my nostrils, and I grew sick. The part of his chest where the energy had entered him had been burned black, and a gaping tunnel had been blasted through the space that once held his heart.
What had I done? I clawed at the sandy soil, scraping away the residue that clung to my palm, my fingers. My breath failed me, coming only in short gasps that couldn’t fill my lungs. Hands reached out from behind me and held my shoulders. A calm, feminine voice spoke to me. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. But you have to come with me. We have to get you away from here.” I had never heard that voice before, but I had known it all my life. I began shaking, my skin cold. The light reaching my eyes alternated between impossibly dim and painfully bright. I felt like the world had fallen away beneath me. I had to be hallucinating. I looked away from the damaged corpse I had created. My head turned slowly, knowing that once I laid eyes on her, nothing would ever be the same again. I looked up. A smile. Loving green eyes. A face so very much like my own.
“Mama?” my voice squeaked out of me, forcing its way between the walls of amazement and disbelief.
“Yes, baby. It’s me,” she said, and then seemed to read the next thought pressing on my mind. “It’s me. I’m alive.”