The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3)

by Horn, J. D.

  I slid my hands down Emmet’s sturdy neck to his shoulders. They were growing warmer to the touch. I risked taking my eyes from Sam only long enough to confirm Emmet’s chest still rose and fell. “So this was all another one of Emily’s tricks?”

  “I wouldn’t say it was so much of a ‘trick,’” Sam said and shook his head, “as a well-timed disclosure of truths. Your mother, she played her cards close to her still-perky little tits. She’s held on to these tasty tidbits for decades now. Nice, huh? I knew your granddad had trouble keeping it in his trousers, but damn! Not only sowing his seed in that dark soil, but buying the field he plowed. I cannot tell you how much I love it that your prissy stuck-up bitch of a grandmother was never even legally married to your grandfather. Imagine. You all were born on the wrong side of the sheet. Illegitimate.” He sounded each syllable out as if it were a separate word.

  My emotions blurred. I had begun to grow fond of Sam, but I detested the creature who had taken him over. “What happened to Sam? Is he in there with you?”

  “Sam? Sam, you in here?” Wren called and rocked from side to side, rapping his knuckles against his temple. He stopped and shook his head. “Nope. He isn’t home.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “The little bitch has been buzzing around me all day, trying to get back in, but I got things locked down in here. He won’t manage to hold out longer.”

  “That’s all I’ve been waiting to hear.” Maisie’s voice came from nowhere. She stepped sideways from nothingness into my field of vision. My eyes caught the flash of a knife’s blade slicing up through the air, and twisting into Sam. Sam’s hand moved to cover the wound, but Maisie slapped it away. Her lips began moving silently at first; then her voice built to a whisper. I knew her words to be an incantation, but they were in a language I didn’t understand.

  She dropped the bloodied knife to the floor, where it bounced and slid beneath the tub. Sam’s body stood rigid, frozen in place by Maisie’s spell. She stiffened her fingers, and placed their tips against the hole in Sam’s abdomen, wiggling them back and forth until her hand disappeared all the way to her wrist beneath Sam’s skin. Sam’s mouth fell open, and a horrible sound, something lost between a scream and an angry teakettle’s cry, escaped his lips.

  Maisie pulled her hand back, a small tarlike orb struggling within her caged fingers. She tightened her grasp, and her chant grew in intensity. The struggling substance in her hand caught fire. “That’s enough of him,” she said and wiped what was left of Wren from her palm on her jeans. Sam’s body went limp, and Maisie used her magic to guide it gently to the floor. The room’s walls rushed back into their customary positions, but my family had not returned with them. Maisie knelt next to Sam’s limp form, pressing her hands over the wound she’d put in him.

  She looked up at me. “Now would be the time to find Ellen.”

  SEVENTEEN

  We hadn’t even had a full day to recover from our disastrous holiday when we received a summons from the other anchors. Teague’s remains were to be disposed of in a way that was intended to serve as warning to any who might consider challenging an anchor.

  Now my family and I stood in a place that was nowhere, and yet everywhere at the same time. It was a blank space, existing only in the imagination. This void was “where” the anchors convened, and it was normally open only to the line’s anchors. Here they could project their avatars, mental images of themselves, without ever truly leaving their own backyard. I had never visited before. Even as an anchor, I had never before been invited, and I suspected my invitation to visit would not extend past the current gathering. Tonight, though, my fellow anchors had made the space accessible to any witch from the ten families who remained loyal to the line. The doors wouldn’t open to general admission, though, until after the little meeting that had been called between myself, my family, and the line’s other loyal anchors.

  I wondered if Emmet would take advantage of this gathering to find me. He had succeeded in freeing my grandmother from Gehenna, leaving her soul to ascend to wherever it is unburdened souls go, but Rivkah had been left apoplectic by Ellen’s failure to favor Emmet over Oliver. She insisted he return to New York with her, and honestly, I think she was right in doing so. Emmet wanted to remain in Savannah, and I felt sure Emmet would have stood his ground had I offered him the slightest encouragement. Instead I did what I knew I must. I clung to Peter as if he were the only man I could ever love, for I did love Peter with all my heart. I had made my choice, so that was the way it had to be.

  The anchor’s meeting space itself was totally malleable, capable of reflecting any mental image projected onto it. The others who would join us might envision their surroundings as resembling Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery, a tiny country graveyard, or even a dumpster in some dark alleyway for all I knew. My family had agreed to use the beach on Hunting Island as the template for our shared experience. It was there that we had taken on the line’s other anchors, and we had won. We agreed the memory of this victory would put us on a better psychological footing. Of course, if it hadn’t been for Jilo, the outcome of that confrontation might have been very different. Again I felt the already familiar stab of pain in my chest that meant I was missing her.

  “Welcome to the ‘grand imaginarium,’ ” Oliver said with no great enthusiasm. “Hope the gift shop’s open.” I was sure many of the witches who would visit this space tonight would find all this terribly impressive, but Oliver and I had seen better. Much better. This setup seemed amateurish in comparison to Jilo’s haint-blue room, which had truly straddled dimensions of both space and time. “Just think what the old buzzard could have done with this much magic,” Oliver said to me, confirming that we were sharing many of the same thoughts, if not the same feelings.

  “We should not be wearing black,” Iris warned for the umpteenth time, speaking of the avatars of ourselves that we projected into the invented space.

  “It’s a funeral—” I began.

  “It’s a celebration,” Iris interrupted me. “It’s dangerous for us to ignore tradition, at least when tradition is working in our favor.”

  After Ellen patched Sam up and got him on his feet, he took off without a single word. He had been spooked all right, and understandably so. I knew my aunt was hurting, so I overlooked the sharpness of her tone. I knew it had nothing to do with me. “No, I refuse to celebrate Teague’s death,” I said in a calm voice.

  “Well, Gingersnap, you can be damned and well certain that little son of a bitch would have celebrated yours, had he been given the chance.” Oliver had acquiesced to my request for the appearance of somber dress, but he hadn’t done so quietly.

  “Uncle Oliver is right,” Maisie said. “Teague would have killed without a second thought, if it would have got him the power he craved.”

  Ellen touched my shoulder, whether in reality or only in this realm, I wasn’t sure. The gesture felt real, so maybe it didn’t even matter. Things that took place in these magical spaces had a way of affecting the dimensions they touched. I suspected whatever happened in this realm would ripple out to our reality, maybe even all realities. “It’s only the others might find us showing up in mourning attire confusing. Tradition holds that we celebrate the demise of those who would harm the line or its anchors. This is meant to be a party.”

  “You should listen to your elders.” A voice came from nothingness. I recognized that voice. Even though I had learned his real name was Fred Firth, I would always think of him as “Mr. Beige.” The air shimmered, and the man who had expressed the sentiment, or at least his projected image, stood before us, medium build, thinning light-brown hair, middle-aged, wearing tan khakis and a blue button-down shirt. To this muted fellow, the color combination he wore must have seemed nearly garish.

  He was one of my fellow anchors, and we should have been allies, but our only true face-to-face encounter had ended with my nearly ripping out
his solar plexus along with his connection to the line’s power. He threatened my child; he would never be that foolish again. None of them would, but neither would any of my fellow anchors let me within a stone’s throw of them again either. No sooner had I thought of the other anchors than I witnessed sparks and shimmers coalesce behind Beige. One resolved into the diminutive Asian woman I now knew to be Ayako Izanagi. In a different world, I think we would have been friends, but given the way my fellow anchors viewed me, probably never in this one. The remaining anchors materialized in nearly the same instant. Beige took their arrival in. “We will soon let down the barrier and let the other witches enter, but before we do, I feel we should make sure we are all on the same page as to what we need to accomplish today.”

  I had no interest in Beige’s agenda. I let his words roll over me as my eyes coasted from one anchor to the next. A part of me found it amusing that the avatars with which many of them presented themselves hid the actuality of their true form’s physical defects, or showed them as taller, slimmer, and often younger than they truly were. It was almost as if half of them were basing their avatars on old or airbrushed photos.

  Only one showed himself completely as I remembered him. The young, nearly sexless man with flaxen hair and horrible blank eyes. I knew more than the odd one’s name; I had made a study of him, as he was the one who had made the connection between my baby and the change that had been effectuated in the line. As my fellow anchors worked to bind me, the line had reached out through my little Colin and tapped into Fae magic. By doing so, it strengthened itself and loosened the witch anchors’ control over it.

  The pale one was Fridtjof Lund, from a city of the same name in southern Sweden. Lund, the municipality, stood as the oldest town in Sweden, but it remained unclear whether the town took its name from Fridtjof’s family, or vice versa. The truly odd thing about this sexually ambiguous witch was that he had not been born from a union of male and female. He had only one parent, a self-fertilizing being identical to himself. In effect, each new generation was a clone of the preceding. How far back this chain went was anyone’s guess, but descriptions of a witch resembling Fridtjof could be traced back to the point where history blurred with folklore. How far this chain would extend into the future depended on whether he respected my warning to leave me and my baby alone.

  Behind the other anchors, in the distance, I noticed a group of tall and extremely slender pallbearers, winding their way toward us, their unnaturally long arms carrying Teague’s exposed and naked body on a bier. They didn’t jostle the body as they drew near, as those who bore it approached us without any apparent form of locomotion. Their feet hovered a good six inches above the ground. The pallbearers themselves wore a somewhat anachronistic getup, including stovepipe hats befitting Victorian-era undertakers. I very nearly pointed out these men wore black, but then they came close enough for me to see their faces, or at least where their faces should have been. These voids held no features, only a blankness that looked like pale silk had been stretched over a skull. Shadows filled their eye sockets; two narrow snakelike slits sat where a nose should have been. Their mouths were gaping holes filled with tiny steel blades whose alignment made me think of barbed wire. “What are they?” I asked.

  “As I said, they are scavengers.” Beige cocked his head to the side and regarded me like I was an ignorant child. I guess my question showed I hadn’t been paying attention. “They are here to consume your cousin’s body, and along with his body any magic that is still bound up within it.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. I felt repulsed by the idea. “Nothing like that is going to happen.” The six pallbearers turned their heads toward me, groaning and gnashing their horrifying dental work together.

  “They’re very hungry.” Beige spoke on their behalf. “They haven’t eaten in nearly six hundred years.” His avatar took a step closer. “This is not simply tradition. It is law. Young Teague here tried to harm one of the line’s anchors.” I felt him will my eyes to meet his own, but I denied him the pleasure of thinking himself capable of controlling me. His tone turned even more bitter. “And this is the prescribed fate of those who would harm an anchor of the line. At least those who aren’t lucky enough to have somehow charmed the line itself.”

  He meant his comment to send a shudder down my spine, but instead it reinforced the steel I felt growing there. I had nearly forgotten, but his words reminded me: I was in charge here. The line had loosened the other anchors’ grasps on it. I didn’t know why, but it had chosen to align itself with me.

  “This is all just for show, right?” Oliver asked. “That isn’t really Teague’s body. That’s only a projection here, like the rest of us.”

  “No, Mr. Taylor. Those are young Mr. Ryan’s remains. This realm isn’t capable of supporting human life, at least for more than a few moments, but that is no longer an issue for him.”

  “And those creatures?” I asked.

  “Oh, they are really here too.”

  “This is atrocious,” Ellen said, pulling me back into her embrace. “Why can’t we burn him and be done with it?”

  “Because, Mrs. Weber”—he addressed my Aunt Ellen using her married name, my father’s name—“he died at the hands of an anchor. A connection, a type of open wound, has been created. These creatures will draw those toxins into themselves, keep the wound from turning gangrenous. Keep the poison from infecting the line. Now, if he had died at the hands of someone other than an anchor, well, then yes, we could . . .” He let his sentence die, held his hands out, palms up, and shrugged.

  He’s lying. The knowledge came to me. I turned my head involuntarily to find the source of the words, but couldn’t pinpoint it. “Yes, I did kill him.” I pulled away from Ellen. “But I know you’re lying. This horrid show you want to put on. It’s unnecessary.”

  “Well, perhaps I am not speaking the literal truth, but metaphorically I am being completely honest. A situation I’m sure you can appreciate,” he said, his bland face pinching in on itself as a twisted smile rose on his lips. He knew I hadn’t laid a finger on Teague. “This ‘horrid show’ you speak of is indeed very necessary. Thanks to your mother—” He shook his head. “No, thanks to you”—he pointed at me—“we anchors must provide pageantry such as this to let the witches under us . . . under the line,” he corrected himself, “know that we are still in charge. That we are still in control of the line. That we are still acting in unison.”

  “I sense very little unity here,” Iris said, “and we all know your control over the line is at best tenuous. This precious passion play of yours is for your own benefit. You need it to maintain the illusion of being in control, to convince everyone else to have faith in you.”

  “I’m not saying otherwise, Mrs. Flynn.” He held up his hands and forced an innocent smile on his face. “I’m sorry, Ms. Taylor. I understand that unlike your sister you have cast off your husband’s name.” He said this as if Ellen’s failure to do so betrayed a disloyalty to the line, if not an absolute endorsement of Erik’s attempt to end the line. I nearly told him what I thought of his tone, but he carried quickly on. “All I ask is that you consider this: If we lose the confidence of the families, we might lose control of the line altogether. If we lose control of the line, it may very well come crashing down around us. Should that happen, I doubt any of us would survive the return of our old masters. It could quite literally be the end of the world for both witches and humankind.”

  He sighed deeply. “Listen, I know this all feels very personal. Like everyone is out to get you, but that isn’t the truth. We as anchors have one simple goal: to protect the line. Many are frightened by what they perceive as your reckless behavior. Even your own cousin turned against you because he believed he was acting in the line’s best interest.”

  “Teague turned against me because he was jealous and greedy. Not for any other reason.”

  Beige nodded. “That may very well be
, but there are others, and it may surprise you to learn I am not among them, who feel he was justified in his efforts to contain you. It is in your own best interest Mr. Ryan should be made an example of. We must demonstrate that his attack against you was an attack against all of us, regardless of his motivation or the perceived righteousness of his cause.”

  “So it’s true then,” I said addressing the other anchors. “You were supporting Teague. You did clear the way for him to make use of Gudrun’s magic.”

  Beige shook his head. “Oh, no. Not all of us, and certainly not I personally, but one of our little family did.” He turned back toward the others. “Isn’t that right, Ayako?”

  She flushed red and took a step back stammering. “It seemed a peaceable solution. You would not have been harmed.”

  Nope. We would never be friends. “No, my child and I would have just been stolen from my husband and family and sent to a dimension where I could die from old age before they sat down to dinner.”

  “The time differential is not that great. And you were not to be alone, you were all . . .” Her words trailed off as she realized she had given away much more than she had intended.

  Oliver stomped forward. “Well, I will be damned.” He turned to face us. “Do you hear that? She was going to ship us all out. Get rid of us pesky Taylors once and for all.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. I wanted you all to be together.” I could hear the buzzing of the other anchors as they communicated telepathically with one another. They were blocking their words, but I felt a world of condemnation falling on Ayako. “I am sorry,” she squeaked.