“I’ll admit it,” he said as I pondered his inexplicable appearance. “I’m not thrilled to see you here so soon.”
“Here?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Where are we?”
“Oh, honey,” my father said. His eyes crinkled with the weight of the information he was about to bestow upon me. “We’re in the otherworld.”
I backed away from him, yanking my hand from his grasp. “No.”
He was stoic and solemn with his next words.
“Yes. I’m afraid you’re dead, ace.”
Witch Myth: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery- Book 2
Chapter One
In Which I Challenge the Definition of Dead
The pebbled beach of the otherworld was not something I had expected to see for a very long time. The dark water tickled my toes, almost as if to welcome me to this new world, but I stepped away from the black tide, rejecting its salutation. My father, a man I had not seen since I was a child, stood silently next to me, waiting patiently for me to come to terms with my new state of being. As I gazed off into the distance, disturbed by the fact that death seemed to have no horizon, a terrifying thought finally crossed my mind.
I, Morgan Summers, had died.
The real shit ticket was that my death was purely accidental. At least I hoped it was. If I understood the laws of life and death correctly, my soul had basically been offered up in return for two others. The catch? I’d never agreed to go forth and become a sacrifice. My frustration, which I’d been trying to temper ever since I’d woken up in the otherworld, seethed and bubbled over.
“Mother fu—”
“Language, Morgan!” my father scolded before I had a chance to complete my epithet of irritation.
I flashed him the middle finger and stormed away from him down the beach. He had all of eternity to forgive my rudeness, and I was allowed to be upset over my own untimely quietus. Unfortunately, the never-ending beach wasn’t helping me cope with my current status. It would have been one thing if the otherworld had a little bit of sunshine, but this depressive gray riverbank was so far from paradise. It was miles and miles of stupid dusty pebbles and no end to the dim beach in sight. At some point, I realized that no matter how far I seemed to walk, my father, who hadn’t moved his feet, was still only a few paces away from me. I spun around to face him.
“Ace,” he said gently, employing a nickname that I hadn’t heard since I was nine years old. “Tell me what happened.”
I didn’t even know where to begin. All of my problems, including that of being trapped in the otherworld, stemmed from the fact that I lived in a small town called Yew Hollow. The town seemed like any other in the New England area, quaint and charismatic, but that wasn’t the whole story. Yew Hollow was home to one of the largest known covens of witches. My coven: the Summers. It shouldn’t have been any surprise that Yew Hollow experienced a myriad of unnatural occurrences. I thought I had seen it all. As a psychic medium, you eventually get used to the idea of the impossible, what with all the ghosts and spirits contacting you from the beyond and requesting your services. My current dilemma, though, was a whole new ball game.
“There was this guy,” I began, now pacing from the water’s edge to my father and back again. “A real dumbass. He stole our coven’s power, Dad. And then he went and brought back his mother and sister from the dead. So—”
“Wait a second,” my father said, forcing me to halt my retelling. “What do you mean someone stole your power? If I recall, one of the most important facts of witchery is that only women have the privilege.”
“Witchcraft,” I corrected. “Normally, you’d be right. It’s a long story, but this guy, Dominic Dobbes, is a real witch.”
My father squinted at me as if trying to understand a complicated mathematical equation. “Okay, I’ll just let that one go. Now, you say, he raised the dead?’
“Yes. And apparently it was one hell of a trade.”
“Meaning?”
I huffed out a big breath. Truthfully, I didn’t even understand what had really happened that night in Yew Hollow, so explaining it to my father was an even greater challenge.
“I think I’m stuck here because of Dominic’s ritual,” I finally said. It was the only thing that made sense. If witchcraft was temperamental, then necromancy was downright manic. Dominic had succeeded in his mission to bring back his mother and sister from this gloomy, eternal bank, but magic always had to balance itself out. Their return to earth required payment, and since Dominic had used my blood in his ritual, I was the first one to get dragged through the passageway into the otherworld. The mere thought of Dominic’s ill-prepared plan was enough to reignite my already turbulent emotions.
“Where are we anyway?” I demanded, kicking the ground furiously and showering my father’s sensible work boots with the tiny, colorless stones. “What is this place, purgatory? Because it sure as hell isn’t heaven. And what are you doing here? I had no idea you were dead.”
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You didn’t? Where did you think I was?”
I glared up at him. For all of our similarities—the apple-green of our eyes, the disheveled brown hair, and the olive skin—I certainly had not inherited my father’s height. He loomed above me, his handsome face no older than the last time I had seen him.
“You left us,” I accused my father.
If it was possible, his eyebrows would’ve disappeared into his hairline. “Morgan, I would never leave you or your sisters. You know how the Summerses are. They tried to run me out.”
He had a point there. My family was unorthodox, to say the least. Then again, when your family was a coven of witches, things were bound to get a little dicey. Witches were notoriously cynical toward men, and the Summers coven was no exception to the rule. The women in my family were infamous for luring good men in, only to drop the poor suckers like hotcakes as soon as their warranties expired.
My mother, in a sense, had thwarted this stereotype for an unusual number of years. My father had stuck around for a while, long enough to bring four daughters and a son into the world. Still, for the better part of my life, my dad had never been around.
“You should’ve tried harder to stay,” I told my father. “You didn’t even stick around for the birth of your youngest daughter. Laurel’s never even met you! And then you went and had a one-night stand with Mom and knocked her up with Wren. What a major screw-up that was, by the way.”
My father’s expression of confusion only deepened. I wanted to smack it off of his face. All of my pent-up feelings were flowing to the surface, threatening to overflow and drown my father in them. Everything I felt about him, every bit of insecurity over his lack of involvement with my life, poured out. I guess being overemotional was a side effect of death. At that moment, I couldn’t understand why I was so focused on my father’s reappearance when I had other much more substantial issues on my plate.
“Wren?” said my father, a look of consternation still etched across his features. “You mean your mother never told you?”
“Told me what?” I demanded.
He rubbed his forehead between his first finger and his thumb, a habit of his that I remembered from way back when. “Morgan, I died shortly after Laurel was conceived. I didn’t leave you. Wren was never my son. I only know about him because I’ve kept an eye on you throughout the years. Though I admit I’ve been a little lax with that lately.”
My lips parted with the impact of this new information. “Run that by me again?”
My father sighed, looking out across the black water. “Your mother and I were happy, but the coven wasn’t. I… I died in the woods behind the house. You know where that big barn was?”
“I live there now,” I said unhappily, less than eager to hear the rest of my father’s story. Then I remembered how un-alive I was. “Lived, I guess.”
“I was out there chopping wood one night,” my father continued. “All of a sudden, one of the trees fell out of nowhere, crushing me beneath it.
Your mother was beside herself when she found me, and I’m still convinced that the coven had everything to do with my death. Your mother thought so too. I guess that’s why she never told you the whole story.”
I waved my hands in front of me to defend myself against his recollections. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“I just need you to know that I wouldn’t have left you alone, Morgan,” he said softly. “I loved your mother and your sisters. And you, of course.”
My eyes were burning with the familiar presage of tears, but I swallowed the lump in my throat to steady my voice. I needed to get the facts straight. “So…Wren is only my half brother?”
“Yes. His father was a stranger that your mother only met with a few times.”
“And you think that the coven arranged to kill you?” I asked, having trouble making eye contact with him as I did so.
His eyes were solemn as he nodded. I sank down to the pebbled shore, hugging my knees into my chest. This was not the way I wanted to pass over into the next life, premature and with the aching knowledge of my father’s fate. I rested my head on my arms, listening to my father’s boots disturb the rocks beside me. Then he sat next to me, his long legs stretching out nearly to the water line, and wrapped a comforting arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him. He smelled the same as he always had, like mint leaves and smoking firewood.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said. The otherworld ate sound up. My voice didn’t carry or echo. I wanted to yell into the abyss, to hear something resonate back to me.
My dad patted the top of my head. I guess it had been a while since he’d ever had to comfort anyone. “That’s what we all say, kid.”
I pondered that for a moment. I was no stranger to death. Every spirit I’d ever made contact with lamented their passing. There was almost always denial at first. After all, how could you be dead if your soul was still lingering on earth? But eventually, the facts filtered through, and the ghosts grasped the concept of death with varying amounts of grace. Not me, though. I refused to be dead.
I pushed myself up from the ground. “How do we get out of here?” I asked, planting my hands on my hips and looking down at my dad.
“How…? Ace, there’s no getting out of here.”
“No, I mean, this”—I indicated the vast emptiness around me—“can’t possibly be all of the otherworld, right? There are other people here? Other places?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, get up, then,” I said, waving him to stand. “I need to find someone who can send me back to Yew Hollow.”
My father studied me for a moment, peering up at me from his seat on the pebbled shore. “Morgan, I’m sorry, but you’re dead. There is no going back.”
“No,” I said firmly, my index finger pointing at him for emphasis. “I refuse to accept that. I was not a willing party of Dominic’s garbage ritual, and I don’t belong down here. Not yet, anyway.”
My father sighed heavily and hung his head between his knees. I felt like I was five again, asking him to explain why the sky was blue. This time, however, I didn’t need a rational or scientific explanation; I needed hope and a solid plan to reunite my soul with my material body. I’d be damned if my life was over so soon. Literally.
“Morgan—”
“Dad,” I interrupted before he could say anything else. “I need you to understand this. It is not my time. I have to go back to Yew Hollow. My family is still in trouble, and there’s no way I’m going to let Dominic use them as his creepy puppets. Besides, I promised Mom I’d look after someone.”
“Who?”
“She picked up a stray. Another psychic medium,” I said, running a hand through my loose hair and wishing I had a hair band. The otherworld was uncomfortably tepid, and despite the lazy wash of the tide, there was no hint of a breeze. “Her name is Gwenlyn. She’s only sixteen, and she doesn’t deserve to deal with Dominic’s crap on her own. She’s been through enough as it is.”
My father finally decided to rise to his feet, scattering pebbles as he elongated and stretched upward from the ground. “This Gwenlyn. Does she know you were taken to the otherworld?”
“Probably not,” I sighed. That was another qualm to add to my already extensive list of issues. Gwenlyn was a teenaged runaway and had never had another human being around that she could truly rely on. I hated that my unexplained disappearance would most likely only contribute further to Gwenlyn’s troubles. “She wasn’t around during the ritual, so I don’t know how else she would have found out.”
“Shame,” my father said. “A medium in the otherworld already puts you at an advantage in this place, but a link with another medium in the real world? You might have actually had a shot at fixing things up there.”
“Wait. How so?”
“I’ve only heard stories,” my father said. “But apparently your ability to communicate with the dead is an asset down here. There should be a way that your friend—Gwenlyn, was it?—would be able to contact you. Like a very long-distance telephone call.”
“Why didn’t you say so before?” I asked, my voice pitching with the sudden prospect of possibility. If I could reach Gwenlyn and figure out what the situation was in Yew Hollow, she could straighten out Dominic’s backward ritual to bring me back. “How do I do it?”
But my father looked forlorn at my eagerness. “I don’t know, Ace. It’s all legend down here. Half the time, I don’t know what’s true or false.”
“I’m going to take this opportunity to believe that all the legends are true,” I said. If my dad, without a drop of witchcraft in his veins, had heard about a way to contact the living, there had to be some kind of merit to it.
“You might not want to jump to that conclusion so quickly,” my father warned. “There are things in the otherworld you don’t want to know about.”
“Oh, I want to know,” I insisted. I didn’t have time to ponder what horrors lay waiting. At the moment, it didn’t seem likely that the colorless stretch of beach held anything other than more pebbles, but I trusted my father to know what he was talking about.
My father arched an eyebrow. Clearly, he was skeptical of my show of confidence, but I wasn’t about to let his distrust of the unknown parts of the otherworld stop me from making an attempt to reach Gwenlyn. It was the only sliver of a plan that I had to latch on to.
“Ever heard of Cerberus?” he asked, one eyebrow still quizzically raised.
“The three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology?” I clarified. He nodded. “Sure, I’ve heard of him.”
My father fixed me with a meaningful stare.
“What, he’s real?” I asked with a scoff. “Well, good thing I have no intention of popping into Hades’s realm. I was never really a fan of hot tubs. Now, tell me, where’s the local pub around here?”
“Sorry?
Apparently, the otherworld had also robbed my father of his sense of humor. “I want to get off this damn beach,” I said, picking up a handful of stones and throwing them into the water just to disturb its annoyingly peaceful ebb. “Where do all of the other inbetweeners hang out?”
“You have to find your own way off the beach, Morgan,” my father said. “I was only sent to welcome you.”
“Not a great welcome wagon, Dad,” I commented. “And what do you mean, I have to find my own way off the beach? In case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t exactly a handy dandy map around. You got a special trapdoor that I don’t know about?”
“All you have to do is walk into the water,” another voice said from behind us.
I whirled around, almost expecting one of the dangerous legends my father had just promised to me, but I was met with the face of a different legend, one that hit a lot closer to my home of Yew Hollow.
The woman who had spoken had a familiar face, a face that I had seen every morning in the mirror. Like me, she was small and thin with honey-colored hair and a crooked set to her lips. There was only one difference. Sh
e had the trademark gray eyes of the Summers coven. Were it not for this subtle distinction, I would have patted the otherworld on the back for conjuring such a convincing twin of myself. There was nothing more terrifying than confronting yourself and owning up to your personal insecurities.
“Who are you?” I asked, glancing nervously at my father. He did not appeared to be worried by this ethereal woman’s presence. If anything, the wrinkle of his nose and curl of his upper lip indicated an evident distaste for her.
The woman extended a dainty hand out toward me, which I hesitantly reached forward to shake.
“Dorothy Summers,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you.”
My jaw dropped open. “Dorothy Summers. As in, one of the original witches of Yew Hollow?”
She dipped her head in acknowledgement. “At your service.”
Chapter Two
In Which I Make a Possibly Regrettable Deal
In my world, Dorothy Summers was essentially a goddess. From day one, every child born into the Summers coven was thoroughly educated on our illustrious history. My elementary studies of arithmetic and language arts were supplemented with the biographies of the five women who created and shaped Yew Hollow for what it was today. Mary Summers, the coven’s earliest leader, and her four daughters—Ann, Elizabeth, Bridget, and Dorothy—were the roots of my heritage, and though I had once tried to reject the sorority I had been born into, I never lost the immense amount of respect for the original Summers women that had been fostered in me since birth. To come face to face with any one of them was beyond surreal. Yet here I was, my hand clasped tightly between both of Dorothy’s as if we had known each other personally all along.
My father, on the other hand, did not seem to hold Dorothy in such high regard. As I blathered on to Dorothy about what an immense pleasure it was to meet her, my father shifted from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with the interaction before him. Dorothy seemed to recognize this, because she withdrew her hand from my grasp and turned to face my father.
Witch Myth Omnibus: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery Page 11