The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2)

by Horn, J. D.

  “I’m fine. I’m good.”

  Iris nodded to acknowledge my reflexive response. “It’s only that I sense there’s something you might want to share with me. Unburden yourself, perhaps?” My mind jumped first to my mother, and it took all of my self-control not to parrot Iris’s words right back at her. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that betraying my mother’s confidence to my aunt would bring me harm, but it bothered me more than a little that I couldn’t completely shake the fear—no matter how small—that my aunts might turn my mother over to the families. Whatever Iris’s reason for doing so, be it mendacity on Ginny’s part or duress, she had sided against my mother before. I bit my lip. Hard. Then my memory rewound further to the incident with Peadar. Did Iris know about any of it? Or maybe she was just fishing, like she used to do when Maisie and I were young? She’d sense something wasn’t quite right, and let on that she knew what the issue was, tricking us into spilling the beans.

  I smiled and shook my head. “No, I’m good.” I could have, maybe should have, told her about Peadar, but I was afraid of where the discussion might lead. I had begun accumulating all these little bits and pieces of my life that I didn’t feel safe sharing, and I hated that.

  Iris stiffened a little and then stood, returning to her work table. “All right. You’ll tell me when you’re ready. Until then I’m going to get back to work,” she said, waving me from the room, dismissing me from the awkwardness of the situation.

  The shade of the library had chilled me, so I decided to head back out into the warm sunshine. I sat for a moment in the garden, but felt the need to get a bit farther away. For the first time since Connor’s face had covered the front page of the newspaper, I felt comfortable enough to return to River Street. Most of the people there would be tourists anyway, I reasoned. They wouldn’t know me from Eve. I found a bench by the river and watched a freight ship maneuver the dredged side of the waterway until it negotiated its way under the bridge. I accepted a graciously offered sample from one of the candy stores, then headed back up the bank, letting my feet carry me where they would. I found myself wandering without any real destination, just following a tug I felt. I cut through Warren Square and followed down East Julian, the tug growing a tad stronger with each step.

  “It’s a classic five-four-and-a-door,” Oliver’s voice called out to me. He sat on the steps of a beautiful yet modest example of Savannah architecture, dressed only in running shorts and shoes. Oliver seemed to defy the passage of time. His youthful appearance caused most people to suspect that he’d hired Dorian Gray’s portrait artist. He had the flat-muscled stomach, slim hips, and broad shoulders of a much younger man. He was my uncle, but he could easily pass for my brother. I used to think that he used his magic to create a glamour for himself, making people perceive him without the scuff marks of time. Now my witch sense told me that his power had somehow preserved him, aging him at a much slower rate than the rest of us. “I made an offer on it this morning,” he said, running his hand over his new buzz cut. He’d just gotten back a few days earlier from closing up his home in San Francisco, and had his hair cropped close in order to ease his adjustment to Savannah’s harsher clime. “I’m pretty sure the sellers will accept,” he said, smirking. He read the disapproval on my face. “Oh, come on. I made a fair offer. Didn’t use a single smidge of magic.” He held up two fingers, making the Boy Scout oath. “Do you like it?”

  “Of course I do. I’ve always loved this place, but why would you want to buy it?”

  “Because I’m a grown man, and I need my own space. A space where my big sisters are not constantly sticking their noses. I can’t even set something down in my own room without having it up and disappear on me. And you can forget entertaining, if you know what I mean.” He stood and turned to take the house in. “This place is perfect. I can run my business on street level and live upstairs.” He turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “All business on the bottom, and party on the top.”

  “Oliver,” I said, blushing.

  He burst out laughing, thrilled to have embarrassed me. “So, tell me,” he said, switching gears without warning. “How goes the magic?”

  “I don’t know. I kind of feel like I am standing in the middle of a hurricane.”

  “And the Sandman?” It was his nickname for Emmet.

  “He’s a huge pain. He criticizes and complains constantly, but he never gives me anything I can use.”

  Oliver just nodded. Then he shifted gears again. “Anything else you’d like to talk about?”

  “No,” I responded too quickly.

  Oliver had always been much more direct than Iris. “Nothing at all?” he prompted. When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Nothing like punching a hole through some itinerant’s chest?”

  The blood drained from my face. “How did you know?”

  “How did I know?” he asked and reached out to tousle my hair. “Gingersnap, we all felt the burst of power. Wild, uncontrolled, amazingly strong. It had your pretty little fingerprints all over it. As far as knowing about the ‘mysterious’ death of the old man, the story was all over the news.” He tapped his forehead. “I used my astounding powers of deduction to tie the two together. Iris was hoping you’d open up to her, but I understand she couldn’t get a squeak out of you.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him . . . I was trying to help.” I heard the petulance in my own voice.

  “Oh really, so you haven’t turned into a serial killer stalking old men?” He grinned at me. “Come on, let’s walk.” He took my hand and began leading me down East Julian toward Warren Square.

  “Where are we heading?”

  “Home for us to change and pick up your aunts, and then off to Elizabeth for my official welcome home dinner.”

  “You know how thrilled I am to have you home for good,” I said as he tugged me along. “I just don’t know if I feel like going out tonight. I’ve got nothing to wear. I’m too fat for my nice clothes. Besides, people are still looking at us funny because of what happened to Connor and Ginny. I’m not up for being on public display.” And if those objections weren’t reason enough, there was also the fact that I’d be more comfortable eating glass than I would, sitting across from him and my aunts without being able to demand the truth about my mother. I couldn’t give voice to that, though.

  “Well, I hear ya, but you are coming with us tonight for a couple reasons. First of all, you are paying. Second of all, I am back in town.” Oliver’s return to Savannah had been heralded in the society section of the newspaper, the focus being placed on the success of his public relations firm rather than on any superstitions surrounding the Taylor family as a whole. “That means the Taylors are back.”

  The reporters at the paper had been trying to do us a favor by shifting the focus off the recent scandals that had rocked our clan. Maybe it wasn’t fair that we’d pinned Ginny’s attack on Connor, but—as I’d learned firsthand—my uncle had been more than capable of killing. Besides, even in Savannah, we would be hard-pressed to find a grand jury who would believe she had been killed by a boo hag masquerading as a man.

  “People can’t talk about you behind your back if you are constantly in their faces.” Oliver punctuated this thought by calling out to one of the city council people who was passing us on the other side of the street. “We are back, Gingersnap. Now, regarding your clothing issue, Ellen has you covered. She has been out all day scouring maternity shops to build you a brand new wardrobe.”

  “Not all day,” I said. “I saw her with Tucker this morning. I think she’s seeing him again.”

  Oliver nodded. “Yeah, she is, but that situation is out of your control, Gingersnap. You might as well surrender to that fact and the fact that you are doing dinner with us, ’cause you are not going to win in either case.”

  “I saw Detective Cook yesterday,” I said, surprised by my own mean streak. I wanted to derail Oliver, mak
e him a little less in control, but it amazed me that my first resort was punching below the belt.

  “Yeah, me too,” Oliver said, not perturbed in the slightest. “He came by to see us. Adam figured he might as well pay us a visit sooner than later, since the stranger who died mysteriously is from the family you are marrying into.” Silently, we cut through the south end of the square and continued west on Congress, swinging south on Habersham.

  “I didn’t know they were related,” I blurted out when the silence got too heavy for me.

  “Mmm” was Oliver’s only response.

  “I didn’t . . . not at the time. He showed up from nowhere, and he needed help.”

  “And you tried to help him, but you aren’t in control of your power yet, so you overdid it.”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “But rather than taking your time to learn how to control your power, you’re blowing off Emmet, whose sole purpose at this point is to train you, so that you can hang out with Mother Jilo.” I pulled my hand out of his, ready for a fight.

  “There’s that redheaded temper again,” he said with a smile. “What? You’re surprised that I have been keeping tabs on you?”

  “No, I am not surprised. I am downright pissed.”

  His laughter made me even angrier. “I know what you’re up to. You and that old scarecrow.”

  I just glared at him.

  He turned and started walking away. “You aren’t going to find Maisie. Not on your own, and not with Jilo’s help either.”

  “Well I can’t just forget her,” I snapped. “I can’t turn my back and walk away like all of you have done.”

  “I haven’t walked away,” Oliver turned back, his face flushed red, his fists clenched by his sides. “I have been doing everything in my power to find her.”

  I crumpled. Maybe my hormones had gotten the best of me. Maybe I just felt relieved to know that Maisie hadn’t been completely deserted. Oliver reached out and pulled me into his arms as I started sobbing.

  “I could never walk away from Maisie. Any more than I could walk away from you. Neither can your aunts.”

  “But Iris said—”

  “You forget what Iris said,” he interrupted me. “And you forget what Ellen said too. There’s a difference between what we say around the house, where we suspect the families are listening, and what we say when we are pretty sure they aren’t.” He paused. “We will find her. We will,” he said, tilting up my chin so that my eyes met his.

  I was thrilled by this proof that my aunts were willing to put Maisie’s welfare before their allegiance to the families. There had to be a reason why they’d separated my mother from us. One that even my mother herself didn’t understand.

  “But you do need to prepare yourself,” Oliver said, perhaps mistaking my relieved reaction for overconfidence, “because we really do not know what shape she’ll be in when we do.”

  “But how will we find her?”

  “We’ll start with the one thing that should have been obvious to that old root doctor, Jilo. Dirt.”

  “Dirt?” I knew that Jilo often used soil in her mojo bags, using the energy to draw like to like. Soil from a bank for money, soil from a graveyard for death.

  “That’s right. The dirt from where Maisie was standing when she disappeared. Why do you think I dug it up? Why do you think I put a sundial out there?” I shook my head. “Have you ever really looked at it?”

  “No, not really,” I replied. Honestly, I’d avoided the spot altogether.

  “Take a good look when we get home. You’ll notice something interesting.”

  “Tell me,” I begged him.

  He smirked and raised his eyebrows. “The shadow never moves. It isn’t a sundial. It’s a time lock that’s keeping that little patch of earth nice and fresh and as close to how it was the moment Maisie disappeared as possible. Now tell me, do you feel a little more like celebrating?”

  I went up on my toes and kissed his forehead. Maybe, just maybe, everything would end up all right after all.

  EIGHT

  We needed a large space, one where we could work magic without attracting the prying eyes of the other witch families. To my surprise, Jilo volunteered the use of her haint-blue chamber, a magical hall that existed just outside our dimension but could still connect to any place within it. It stood as a testament to Jilo’s skill that she, a non-witch, could use borrowed power to build such a thing. For years, she had secretly connected it to a room in our own house, making her capable of coming and going as she pleased. Not that she’d snooped around too much on her own. She’d relied on the boo hag who had camouflaged himself first as Oliver’s imaginary friend, Wren, and then as Jackson. Wren had manifested himself in our home for decades, but my family had never caught on to his true nature, assuming he was a tulpa, or a thought-form, a thing so well imagined that it had separated itself from the one who’d originally envisioned it.

  I hadn’t been inside Jilo’s haint-blue room since the night I’d found Wren there holding a knife to Jilo’s throat. Walls, floor, everything had been colored the same aquamarine that was prized for its efficacy in repelling unfriendly spirits. That being said, if you invited the spirits in, the way Jilo had done when she’d made her pact with the boo hag, the haint blue wouldn’t do you much good.

  Today, Jilo’s cerulean throne was missing, and in its place Oliver had drawn a chalk sigil. The etching consisted of a crisscrossed combination of lines and circles that took up a good portion of the room. Walking around it, I counted ten circles, and I noticed that a pentagram had been inscribed in the centermost one.

  “Jilo told him, he oughta use blood, not chalk, but that sweet uncle of yours would have none of it.” Jilo’s voice echoed around me, although my eyes couldn’t get a fix on her yet. To me, the room looked completely empty. Then the air in one corner rippled, like August heat coming up off the highway, and there she stood. “He,” she said, punching the word into the air, “say he know what he doin’, though, so Jilo need to stand back and let the expert handle things.”

  “What is it supposed to be?”

  “He say it the ‘Tree of Life,’ but it sure don’t look like no tree Jilo ever lay eyes on. We didn’t talk much. He just pranced in here, made his scribbles, and took off.”

  Disdain for my uncle dripped from her every word. That Jilo would ever allow Oliver into her sanctuary, that she and Oliver would or even could work together, amazed me. “Thank you for helping us, Jilo. Thank you for letting us use your . . .” I struggled for a term. Room? No, it wasn’t a room. Rooms remained stationary, but this space could coexist with any other point on the earth. Right now it hovered over our own garden. The pentagram at the center of Oliver’s drawing overlaid the point where he’d placed the sundial. “Well, just thank you. And thank you for putting up with Oliver’s ego too.”

  Jilo’s creased face smoothed as much as her advanced years would allow. “You welcome, girl. All the same, Jilo like to buy you uncle for what he worth and sell him for what he think he worth.”

  A humming filled the air, and the lines on Oliver’s diagram began to glow. I was focusing so intently on them, I didn’t notice the shimmering air that signaled his arrival. I sensed his presence—a tingling that ran down my spine—and looked up. He stopped dead in his tracks and took a moment to absorb the haint-blue chamber. “I failed to say so last time, but this truly is impressive, Mother.”

  I was grateful that he’d used the term of respect when addressing Jilo.

  “I don’t think many of those born of the power could construct a chamber like this.”

  He had meant it as a compliment, but to Jilo’s ears, it sounded like another reminder that she had no power of her own, only borrowed power. “Well that is mighty ‘witch’ of you,” Jilo said, her eyes narrowing.

  “I meant no offense,” Oliver said, offering a cou
rtly bow.

  “No need to bend over for Jilo. You ain’t her type,” the old woman sniped and then chuckled at her own barb. “Let’s get on with this.”

  “You have the jar?” I asked, meaning the Ball jar where we’d been storing the remaining flames.

  “’Course,” she said, her voice laconic, cold. Her eyes looked in our direction without focusing on us. Her mouth was set in a straight line. I hadn’t seen this look on her in quite a while. I had grown unaccustomed to Jilo’s reptilian mask. She had allowed Oliver into her realm, but she would not display any sign of gentleness that he might mistake for weakness. She pulled her red cooler literally out of thin air, its color a vibrant contrast to this turquoise world.

  Jilo opened it and passed the jar to me. Bright little sparks flitted about inside, bright little sparks that would hopefully lead me to my twin. I watched them interact for a moment, changing colors briefly as they bumped into one another and then flew apart. I offered the jar up to Oliver’s outstretched hands.

  “So how will this all work?” I asked, as he placed a satchel that I had not previously noticed on the floor next to him.

  He knelt and set the jar down next to the satchel, then opened the bag. “Earth,” he said as he pulled a brown paper sack out of it. He gave Jilo a taunting look. Dirt played such a great role in her form of magic, but she and I had completely overlooked its power up until now. Jilo grunted to show that he had not managed to impress her.

  “That’s from beneath the sundial?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “It’s the earth where Maisie was standing when she disappeared.” He sat the bag down. “Air,” he continued, pulling out a perfume atomizer and giving it a quick spray. Maisie’s favorite scent rose up around us, summoning an image of her face as clearly as if she’d appeared before me.

  “Fire,” he said lifting up the Ball jar. “And water.” He produced a bottle of scotch and three glasses. “Single malt, twenty-one years old. I’d intended it as Maisie’s birthday present.” He lined the three glasses up on the ground next to the satchel, filling them without spilling a drop. He held a glass up. “Mother?”