Hawthorn Witches: Demons & Dracaena, Sorcerers & Sumac, Werewolves & Wisteria (Hawthorn Witches Omnibus Book 1)

by A. L. Tyler

  “No.”

  A shift of his eyes, and a chair zipped up behind me so fast that I lost my footing and sat down. It continued to move forward until it hit the edge of a table, pinning me in.

  The student center wasn’t crowded—it was summer, after all, and it was still very early in the day—but I would have thought someone would have noticed a chair moving of its own accord.

  Glancing around, I gritted my teeth. No one had even looked up.

  “We’re invisible, Annie,” Stark said, taking the seat opposite me. “They can’t hear us, either, so don’t bother trying to scream. It will only annoy me.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him off, but he must have thought I was up to something much more sinister, because he waved his hand and the air stopped dead in my throat. I couldn’t breathe, and I instantly started to panic. Stark only leaned back and folded his hands on the table.

  “Oh, don’t fight it,” he said, analyzing me. He seemed unimpressed with what he saw, but he must have been wise, because he wasn’t about to underestimate me. “I’ll keep you alive until you start breathing again, so try to forget you need to do it. I don’t need you using your words against me, whatever you’ve been taught by your sister witches or Charlie. Just sit and listen, and nod. And don’t lie, or I’ll see to it that you regret it. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded. I had never really taken notice of the constant movement of my chest as I breathed all day, but now that it was gone, the stillness was incredibly disturbing.

  “Good. Now, I never took much interest in you, but Kendra kept your pictures around. I think it was her way of screening for someone who liked kids…she might have done better to keep living specimens. It’s not terribly hard to fake enthusiasm for a picture. Are you the younger sister, or the elder?”

  I blinked. Stark cracked a smile.

  “Forgive me, Annie. Are you the elder sister?”

  I shook my head.

  Stark pursed his lips, looking disappointed, and waved his hand. Air rushed back into my lungs.

  “You’ve stumbled into something you can’t handle, then,” he said with a dangerous grin. “Kendra liked your sister for an apprentice. She wasn’t sure you had inherited the gifts at all. But if you managed to summon Charlie…”

  I felt something go taut behind my neck, and then snap free. The sumac pendant that Charlie had given me flew across the table and into Stark’s hand.

  “…then this must be your magic feather.” He toyed with it idly. “What is Charlie trying to convince you to do?”

  I swallowed. I wanted to believe him that the pendant did nothing for me, but I knew he was wrong. Maybe, eventually…Charlie had called it training wheels, and that was what it had felt like. All along, I had lacked balance in this whole thing, but the living sumac had fixed it. Someday I would balance on my own, but not yet.

  “My sister is going to miss me. I’m supposed to be out gathering supplies for her.”

  “Lisa?” Stark asked. “Linda…Lyssa! Alyssum, like the flower. Why your parents didn’t go the simple route and call her Alice for short is beyond me.”

  If he only knew my parents had insisted on shortening my name, Anise, to Nissa, until I was nearly twelve. When I started middle school, I forced them to sit down with me and feel my pain, because the kids at school were starting to refer to me as Nessie, like the Loch Ness Monster. I had insisted on Annie ever since.

  “You poor little thing…”

  Stark didn’t sound the least bit sorry for me.

  “…did you even have any warning of all this before…before what? I suppose you must have summoned him by accident, unless Kendra decided to kill him.”

  “Kendra’s dead,” I said decisively. “And speaking of summoning, how did you get here?”

  His eyes flashed at me, and another smile told me I wasn’t going to like what he said.

  “I’m no common demon, Annie. I’ve been handling demons for thousands of years, and I know all of their strengths and weaknesses. I know all of their tricks. It doesn’t matter how I managed to get back, because I’m here now. And if Charlie is still at the teat of the Hawthorn family, then no, I very much doubt Kendra is dead.”

  I shook my head. Everyone was convinced but me. I had been trying to find her with magic, and so had Lyssa, but she wasn’t out there. We were going to pay for her fugitive acts, and I was beginning to curse her for it in the few quiet moments of my life that remained.

  This was one of them.

  I cocked my head. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “I believe you,” he said. “But finding your aunt is a simple matter for me, because I know how to summon her.”

  “You do?” I raised my eyebrows. “Do it, then. It would solve a lot of the recent problems in my life.”

  “Hmm…” For the first time, Stark gave a friendly smile, and I worried I was in trouble. He thought we were friends. “First, I’ll need you to give me back what’s mine, Annie. I need the book.”

  “The book?” I asked, surprised. I had thought he was after Charlie…But then, what use would a demon have for another demon?

  “The book!” Stark snapped. “If you summoned Charlie, then you must have known about him, which means you read it in the book. Charlie’s book. You will give it to me!”

  Now I remembered. “Charlie took it. He has it. I don’t know where he put it, but he won’t give it back. I’ve already asked. What’s so important about the book?”

  Stark grinned sarcastically, and turned his head to the side. “And you didn’t even bind him. Bravo, Annie. A demon more clever than its master is a dangerous thing. I should just put you both out of your misery.”

  “But why is the book so important?” I pressed. I had thought that Charlie had taken it because it held some information about how to control him. But now that Stark wanted it, I had to wonder if there was something more. “Is that how you’re going to find Kendra? With the book?”

  “You stupid girl…” He lifted his lip in a snarl. “After I get the book, I’m going to kill Charlie, and when that happens, I’m sure Kendra will decide to show up.”

  I looked down at the table, closing my eyes. The fact that Charlie openly want to die didn’t figure into my decision, because murder was murder. A willing victim didn’t make it any less of a murder, and I was pretty sure that Stark’s hatred of Hawthorns ran a little deeper than Charlie’s. Once he killed Charlie and Kendra, I was going to be the next thing on his radar. I had no clue who had summoned him, or become his bridge, as was more likely the case, because he seemed to be wandering free. He had made no offer of safety to me for helping him, and I had no intention of making a deal with him for it.

  I wasn’t going to feed him Charlie. Charlie was probably the only person who knew how to fight him, having been in his service for so long.

  And that was when I knew what I had to do, because it was the only move I had left to make. The only spell that I had ever managed completely on my own, without even a pair of training wheels.

  “Why would Kendra show up for Charlie’s death?” I asked. Sometimes, all it took was speaking his name. If I talked about him long enough, it was bound to catch his ear.

  I was his bridge. We were connected, and he would come. I had faith.

  We were friends. And if he saved me, I was going to give him whatever memory he needed.

  Stark’s eyes became rueful, and his lip curled in distaste. “He talks about me, but not about himself. Apparently his arrogance has finally found a limit. He was the one responsible for banishing me, Annie. He and Kendra both, for the same reason as any other man who has ever been betrayed by his best friend and his girl.”

  I stared at him. I had stopped breathing again, but this time out of surprise. Charlie had admitted to me once that he had been the one to take Stark to the Other Side and leave him for his final sleep, but he had never fully explained why. I had always assumed that it had something to do with Kendra tricking him into taking her a
s a bridge instead; he went on and on about her trickery and deviousness.

  “Wait… they were…?”

  The cold in Stark’s eyes was nearly palpable. I actually felt the temperature around us drop, and wondered if the AC had just kicked on or if he was influencing the atmosphere without meaning to.

  “Together,” he said. “Behind my back. I should have known, because witches are always bad news. I sought her out to steal her heart and burn it, and she outsmarted me the once. It should have been enough to teach me the only good witch is a dead one.”

  The world went dark around me, and I felt a claw-like grip rip into the flesh of my side and take hold of my ribs.

  It wasn’t like when Charlie took me to the Other Side. That was like a dimming of the lights, and a moment of disorientation, almost like waking up from a dream.

  This was agony. Whatever had me was dragging me from reality, like I could feel bits of my skin torn ragged as it ripped across the fabric of the universe and into a dark field illuminated by a blood red moon.

  I was on my hands and knees, screaming in pain as wet dripped around me, and I kept my eyes shut, sure that I was going to see nothing but gore and horror when I opened them. My skin felt like raw hamburger, and I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t seem able.

  “Thorn, get up!”

  My eyes shot open, and I saw my hands beneath me. I was slicked with sweat and the cramp in my stomach refused to relent as Charlie dragged me to my feet.

  I wanted to hug him, and then vomit down his back.

  A bolt of lightning broke the sky into a million pieces, and the smell of a fog so thick it was practically viscous made it hard for me to suck air into my lungs. I looked across the field to see Stark, walking slowly toward us as the lightning boomed a deafening drum in my ears, striking repeatedly down from the sky and into his fingertips.

  “Run, Thorn!” Charlie yelled over the cacophony. “Hide, and don’t lose consciousness! If you do—”

  His last words were lost when a bolt of lightening struck him directly in the chest, hurling him backward across the landscape. But he didn’t need to finish, because I already knew what he was going to say.

  Lose consciousness in the Other Side, whether from falling asleep or being knocked out, and you became a demon. Lose consciousness, and you never got to leave the Other Side again.

  Charlie rolled to miss another bolt, and I saw Stark’s eyes turn to me.

  I ran.

  Toward no one and nothing, because Stark’s vision of the Other Side was a field so flat and featureless I may as well have been an ant running across a massive piece of paper.

  I heard the lightning hit behind me, and I winced, the blood pounding in my ears nearly too much. I kept running, and I opened my eyes, and that was when I saw the trees and walls growing straight out of the ground.

  Charlie was influencing the landscape, and a quick glance over my shoulder showed a toppled and smoking wall that would have been my final resting place if it hadn’t popped up just in time.

  “CHARLIE!”

  His voice boomed nearly as loud as the thunder and the devastating crack of stone split by lightning. Every noise made my heart skip a beat, over and over and over, until I was sure it would never beat steady again. I found a little nook in a wall, just deep enough for me to fit inside if I curled into a fetal position, and I did so.

  “YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME FOREVER!”

  Another ripple of lightening, and a clap of monstrous thunder from directly overhead, and the rain started pouring down. The pitter-patter of the drops hitting the pavement dulled the sound of Stark’s anger, and I was grateful.

  The rain was Charlie’s doing. It had been raining in his Other Side more often than not lately, and now I knew why. He had been angry at Kendra for what she had done, but now the anger had burned out. Now, he was only alone.

  Another loud clap and the world shook, and shook, and shook…

  It was an earthquake.

  My nook was crumbling from above. I didn’t have time to react, and I felt the stones shift around me into a trap I couldn’t break free from. They pummeled me in the head, and I heard my bones breaking.

  I tried to stay awake. I tried to keep my grip, and focus on the new information that Charlie had been in love with Kendra when she had banished him, but it was the peaceful image of the crimson sumac in his garden that lured me away. I could see it, just there in my mind’s eye, and slowly I followed it through the darkness that swallowed me.

  Chapter 9

  I don’t remember much of my beginning. I floated in a place of nothingness. It was a reality without form, like a sandbox leveled flat, and waiting for me to shape it to something worthy of being seen.

  I started with the trees.

  I made tall, elegant ones, and short ones with character. I made wide ones, and narrow ones, and twisted ones, and ones that bore fruit.

  Then I did the bushes, and as many flowers as I could remember from the place I had been before…

  Where was that place? I wasn’t sure that I knew.

  I needed a ground to stand upon, and physical form to do the standing. So I made the ground, and then I made me.

  My hair was dark blond, and I was just a little taller than average for a girl my age.

  Age. Why would I care about age, as a noun or a verb? I was never going to do it. I was never going to be it.

  And yet it mattered, because I knew it would matter to the one who would take me to the place where I would feed.

  Eighteen. That was my age.

  I made myself a little house in the middle of my garden, and I filled it with dried herbs and pickled goods, handmade furniture and handwritten books, a walking stick for hikes and a little satchel to carry my finds.

  I looked for the black cat… but then I realized I was the black cat.

  What?

  Where was the kindly woman? The one who fed me?

  ~~~~~~~~~

  When I opened my eyes, it took me a minute to process the stillness of the world.

  Everything was just so… fixed. It lacked fluidity, and I wanted to shape it to something more to my liking.

  I licked my lips and stared at the light above me, intent on making myself a sky of stars to stare at instead, and I blinked.

  Nothing happened.

  “You’re back, Thorn.”

  I looked over at the man sitting next to me. I knew him, but it felt like ages ago…

  “Charlie,” I smiled. He was like me, a shaper of things. One of the finest tinkerers the universe had ever seen.

  He was pushing something into my hands, and I took it. It was a pendant charm, and it glowed red like blood as he set it in my hand.

  I stared into it. It welcomed me.

  I sat bolt upright. “Stark—!”

  The figure of a woman swam into view, and I was suddenly aware of a cat seated at my feet. They had been no more than a minor feature of my world before; like insects underfoot.

  “Now, Annie…” Lyssa was pushing me back onto the bed. With her reddish hair unwashed and only half pulled back, she looked more haggard than I had ever seen her. “That was more than a month ago, just lie down, and listen—”

  “A month?” I said. I didn’t feel like I needed to lie down. I felt like I needed to rework the heavens so that lightning didn’t exist. “A month?”

  A force pushed me back onto the bed, and Charlie raised a finger to his lips to silence me.

  “I found you just in time, Thorn,” he said. “Or perhaps, just barely not in time. We’ll see how you do. You kissed the Other Side, but you left a piece of yourself here when you went, so I don’t think it took.”

  I furrowed my brow in confusion, but Charlie put a hand on mine. I was clutching the sumac pendant he had given me.

  “Stark dropped it when I tackled him,” he said calmly. “He grabbed you instead. Do you remember?”

  I tried to think back. It all got… malleable. Like the details didn’t really
matter.

  “I remember a little cottage,” I said wistfully. “And old books, and jars of stuff and dried plants. And I was looking for an old woman who smelled like—”

  Charlie only smiled, raising his eyebrows for a moment and nodding. “Yes, I know. The early memories of the Other Side can be strange.”

  I closed my eyes, shaking my head. This wasn’t a memory from the Other Side. This was something else. “No… No. That’s not what I mean—”

  Gates had walked up to give me a hug by way of a feline head-butt, but she stopped just as her ears folded back for impact. Lyssa stared at me with concern, unmoving.

  My eyes moved back and forth between them, and then to Charlie. “We’re in fast forward again?”

  “No,” he said with a weak smile. “This time I slowed them down.”

  “Ah.” I tried not to jostle Gates as I moved to sit up a little more. “Why do I remember looking for a woman who smells like lavender? And why do I think I was a cat when it happened?”

  Charlie took a deep breath, and then he shook his head. “Because I didn’t get to you in time, Thorn. I’m sorry.”

  It took me a minute to grasp the meaning of his words. And when I did, my heart sank in panic. “I’m a demon?”

  “No.” He shook his head again, looking forlorn. “Thorn, you never made it all the way there. I already had the ingredients for the spell gathered. The cottage and the woman aren’t your memories. They’re mine, from my first mistress. I was a witch’s familiar at the start.”

  “But—” I could hardly believe what he was saying. “But you needed them. You needed them for you. You were going to help Gates, and Lyssa’s hair—”

  “Yes…” Charlie frowned, looking down. “Lyssa’s hair didn’t work, so I had to use Kendra’s. It was a trick getting you to give it to me while you were delirious, but you eventually handed it over…” His eyes fell a little. “It’s gone now.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll gather them again,” he said dismissively. “And I am sorry, but I find myself drained again after this experience. Gates will have to wait.”