The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2)

by Horn, J. D.

  By J.D. Horn

  Witching Savannah

  The Line

  The Source

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 J.D. Horn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Cover illustration by Patrick Arrasmith

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781477870143

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013955185

  In loving memory of Quentin Comfort Horn, the source of much happiness

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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 soi
l, 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 gl
amour 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.”