The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2)

by Horn, J. D.

  The hurricane was almost upon us. Waves lapped farther up on shore and washed over the inert bodies of those I loved. If they didn’t wake soon, the sea would carry them away, and they’d be lost to me forever. Jilo released my hands and faced the sea. I felt my heart slowing, as the other anchors continued their efforts to bind me without collapsing the line. A wave found me and knocked me flat. I struggled to push myself up. When I managed to force myself back to my knees, Jilo had disappeared, but the entire world around me had filled with the sickly, bruised blue light that I’d come to associate with Tillandsia.

  I found my feet and turned toward the sea. The source of the light floated out above the ocean, thirty, maybe forty yards from shore, but I would have known Jilo from a thousand yards away. She had drawn the energy of Tillandsia into herself and was doing her best to single-handedly drive the storm away. Even though she knew the power had been poisoned, she had chosen to take it into herself anyway. She had put the well-being of others before her own. She must have known that, even with the power of Tillandsia, it would take a real witch to turn the hurricane away, especially when it would require taking on both the storm and the anchors of the line. She had sacrificed everything just to buy us a little time. To buy me a little time.

  “There’s a price for stealing power,” I said softly, calmly. “And you all are stealing my power. Return it to me. Return it.” A searing pain ripped through me, making me cry out. I tried to block out the pain by turning my mind to the power of the line. It had recognized me once before. It had chosen me. If, as I’d sensed at times, it was something more than a tool, more than a mechanism for controlling others, it would hear me. I called out to the line, wrapping my plea in the single grain of hope that hadn’t yet deserted me. I was answered by a pain worse than any other I had felt, a sensation like my solar plexus being ripped wide open, the pain so great that my vision failed and everything around me was swallowed by blackness. During that dark moment, I let myself collapse on the wet earth. It was over. I had been defeated. The line had deserted me; the other anchors had won. For a moment I felt sure my heart would stop beating, but then around me flashed another world, green and cool and lovely. Music trumpeted from every direction, then faded away. The pain in my solar plexus cooled, and my own thundering reality gelled back around me. I felt the line reenergize itself, regain its ground, reinforce its walls, and then I felt a change, a shift, an explosion that felt like joy bursting out of me. Colin had reached out and filled my heart with his own power, one that fell outside any witch’s ability to control. Fae magic, which the anchors could never touch.

  With that added ammunition, I stopped the world. Everything around me slowed. Raindrops stopped in their descent. Trees that had been bent by the wind held their tortured poses, even though the wind itself had lost its power to blow. All motion and sound ceased. With my son’s help, I ripped my magic from the hands of the other anchors, pitiful fear-filled souls, and their consciousnesses scurried away from me like Emily’s rats. I broke the binds placed on Rivkah and my family. Then I looked out at Jilo, and with a thought brought her to my side, disconnecting her from the lethal force she had taken into herself. There, frozen in its path, loomed the storm I had feared so. I looked at the suspended hurricane and laughed. I claimed its towering energy as my own, turning its force to my purposes. I sent my awareness out to the line, and it zoomed in every direction around the earth at once. Breathtaking. Beautiful. Strong. Stronger, perhaps, than it had ever before been. Silently, I asked its permission to free my sister, and the line acquiesced. I reached out, like a comet burning not through common space but through fluctuating dimensions, and caught hold of Maisie. Then I brought her home.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “How’s she doing?” Oliver whispered as he slipped into Maisie’s room. Though she had been home with us for more than a day, she had only opened her eyes once. She hadn’t spoken at all.

  “The same,” I said. I hadn’t left Maisie’s side for more than a few minutes at a time. I could barely stand to take my eyes off her for fear she’d disappear. I was afraid the other anchors would do something to steal her from me.

  “Any news from Adam?”

  Oliver’s face darkened. “Physically he’s fine. He’s shut me out though. He’s shut all of us out.” He tried to muster his patented smile of confidence, but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I think Adam and I are through. I don’t think he’s going to be able to get past whatever it was Emily showed him.”

  I would have liked to find some words of encouragement to offer, but I didn’t want to lie. Adam had been so angry, so frightened. So over us Taylors and our magic. He had said that he knew what we were now. I wasn’t sure if he meant the magic, or if he had somehow seen deeper into our true nature. Either way, I couldn’t lie to my uncle. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you may be right about that.”

  Oliver kissed the top of my head. “You should take a break. Get some sleep. Your aunts and I will stay with her.”

  I shook my head. “No. I can’t. I can’t give them a chance to take her away.”

  “No one is going to do that. I promise you.” He stood at the foot of Maisie’s bed and watched her sleeping.

  “Did you know Maisie and I have a half brother?” I asked. Oliver’s head bounced like a bobblehead doll in surprise. His jaw dropped, but he said nothing. He had been struck speechless for the first time in his life. “I don’t know the details, but Erik had a son. His name is Joe . . . Josef. He’s been helping Emily.”

  “I guess we should tell Ellen, but . . .”

  “Yeah, but . . .” How much more could Ellen take? Tucker’s body remained with the county coroner. We hadn’t even had the opportunity to hold a memorial for him yet, leave alone a proper burial. She needed to mourn her fiancé, and hitting her over the head by pointing out another of Erik’s infidelities would not help.

  Oliver shifted from one foot to the other, and then sat down on the foot of Maisie’s bed.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.

  “You’re getting pretty good at that . . . reading me, I mean,” he said.

  “It isn’t magic; you are just terrible at hiding things from me.”

  He smiled and took Maisie’s hand, caressing it as he searched her face for signs of life. “Emmet has returned.” His eyes traveled from Maisie’s face to my own.

  “I asked Emmet to stay away from Savannah.”

  “The families sent him here to negotiate with you.”

  “Negotiate?”

  “To sue for peace if you will.”

  “But I am not the one who declared war.”

  “You, Gingersnap, have scared the holy hell out of them. I don’t understand what you did, but you single-handedly changed the line.”

  “No. The line changed itself. It simply used me to do it.” I paused, trying to collect my thoughts. “I know it sounds nuts, but I think the line is alive. It’s self-aware. I think it wants to evolve, but it can’t while the anchors hold on to it so tightly. I think that’s why it chose me. I’ve been an outsider to magic my whole life, powerless and overlooked. The other anchors didn’t think I could possibly threaten the way things stand.”

  “The other anchors will view any attempt to change the status quo as a sign that you have aligned yourself with Emily. That you, too, want to end the line.”

  “That couldn’t be further from the truth,” I said and stood. My limbs had gone stiff from inactivity. I stretched, and felt the blood begin to pump more freely through them. “I’ve seen what it protects us from. Still I don’t think we should fear change. My gut tells me that the line wants to form a partnership with us rather than acting as our master or our slave.” I went to the window and looked out at the gray autumn sky. “Emily’s wrong about pretty much everything . . . except one thing. The anchors maintain a power structure that’s based on secrecy and misdirection, if no
t out-and-out lies.” I turned back to Oliver so that I could witness his reaction. “To begin with, witches don’t get their power from the line. The line gets its power from us.”

  “I don’t understand how that could be,” Oliver said, surprised and uncomfortable to have his own worldview challenged. His right hand smoothed down the thick blond hair of his left arm. As he considered my words, his mouth pulled down into a deep frown, and he looked down at the floor.

  “I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s like an alternating current. I doubt if the other anchors will ever share the details of how the witches created the line with me now, so I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure. But I do believe that the magic begins as ours and is fed into the line. From there, it gets parsed back out, in a more even distribution. No witch does without, but no witch can rise to his or her true potential either.”

  “No witch who isn’t an anchor,” Oliver said, nodding. “I don’t like it. Your theory makes me uncomfortable, but that tells me you are more than likely on the right track.”

  “I don’t like it either. I wish there was a clear and easy way to look at the line and the decisions that the families who built it have made. I mean, yeah, the three rebel families are evil. Their evil is Technicolor, in-your-face evil. I worry, though, that the side we have chosen has its own form of evil too. One path is totally wrong, but what if the other is just a longer, more scenic route to the same hell?”

  “Then you will blaze us a new path toward sanity,” Oliver said. “Frankly I think that’s why the line chose you. Most people want easy answers to life. They will agree with whatever the echo chamber around them says as long as it means they don’t have to think for themselves. Only a precious few can cope with ambiguity and carry on.”

  A soft knock on the door interrupted us. The door opened a crack, revealing the dark giant on the other side. “I apologize for the intrusion,” Emmet said. His black eyes poked holes into me, probing me. Checking to make sure I was truly unharmed. Checking to see if the experience I’d been through had led to a change of heart. I smiled, as I felt happy to see him, but I did my best to convey without words that nothing had changed between us. He turned from me to look at Maisie. “She will awaken soon. I am sure of it.” I sensed that he had not intended his words as an actual prognostication. He had meant them more as a comfort.

  “Thank you,” I said, and he nodded.

  “I meant to honor your request,” he said, “that I stay away from your home, but circumstances—”

  “I know. The families sent you.”

  “Yes. They hope that you will accept a request to meet with the other anchors. Work through any misunderstandings that may have arisen.” Oliver harrumphed, and we rolled our eyes at each other. “Please understand,” Emmet continued, “that even though I agreed to act as emissary of their message, I am in no way neutral, not after the crimes they have committed against you. I have chosen a side, and you, Mercy, have my full allegiance. The families are aware of this, and that is why they asked me to approach you. They hope to prevent the deepening of any schism between you and the other anchors. They ask that you meet with them to see if you can work out your differences in a way that will not harm the line. In return for this meeting, they will make an oath not to interfere with your sister.”

  As I considered his words, I listened to Maisie’s steady breathing and turned to look at her beautiful face, blessed in sleep with a serenity I hoped she might one day feel upon waking. I wanted many things from the other anchors, starting with this oath to leave my sister alone as we worked through her issues. For once, though, I found myself in a place of power, and I had every intention to take full advantage of that. “Tell them I agree,” I said. “But I will pick the time and the means.”

  FORTY

  I learned that the line’s anchors rarely met face-to-face. Of course, due to their duty as anchors, they could not physically venture too far from the places they had been chosen to anchor. Because of this, when they gathered together, they did so virtually, leaving their bodies at home and projecting their minds to the meeting space. I knew the perfect place for the gathering they had requested, one that would allow all of us to meet, perhaps for the first time in the history of the line, in the flesh. I opened new entrances to Jilo’s haint-blue chamber over each anchor’s home. We could all meet together without anyone leaving their territory.

  I bent these entryways, though, so that each entrant would have to pass through the world of the endless living shadows, the minor demons that folk in the low country called boo hags before reaching the chamber. These creatures held no fear for me now. I could almost pity their lust for a skin that would allow them to walk in the world of light. Almost.

  I laughed at the thought of the other anchors seeing this place, a place that had once terrified me, built by a woman who had once scared me out of my wits. Again and again I found myself taking comfort in the smallness of my past horrors. My skin prickled and turned to gooseflesh as I wondered if there might arrive a tomorrow when I looked back from the vantage point of even greater terrors, feeling nostalgic for today. That kind of thinking would get me nowhere.

  The chamber had collapsed to half its previous size, bending and twisting in on itself. The endless cyan was now punctured by bruised plum stains left by the poisoned magic of Tillandsia. I had to maintain my focus and my confidence. Thoughts of Emily and Josef were a threat to both, so I pushed away any remembrance of Tillandsia and took my place at the portion of the room that bent upward. I would claim the higher ground. It might not lend me any true physical advantage, but it would help a lot psychologically. I claimed Jilo’s abandoned cerulean throne and sat in it. This would count as the final time I’d come to the haint-blue room. At Jilo’s request, I’d close the chamber down after this meeting, collapsing it until it became merely a dense, dark point in space. In the quiet before the others came, I allowed myself one long last look.

  Just as I finished taking the room in, its edges began to shimmer. A fluctuation in the air here, a quiver there, vibrations announcing the arrival of my magical colleagues. Disappointing was my most prominent thought as they resolved into their full physical forms. They were not as tall as giants, and not one of them had a sunbeam crown or a quiver full of lightning bolts. No, the pantheon of anchors looked like plain old regular folk. African, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and combinations of all the above. True, all of them were witches, and if they were not truly the most powerful witches in the world, they were at least the witches with the greatest access to power. All the same, I swear one of them looked like she had come from dropping her kids off at soccer practice, and another like he had been working in his garden. Calm. Nonthreatening. None of them would even arouse a sense of disquiet, leave alone danger. I suspected this was by design, but this calculated attempt to disarm me brought Hannah Arendt’s phrase “banality of evil” to mind.

  Smiles from some, heads lowered in deference from others. Each person’s pose screamed, “We are all friends here!” In spite of that, my intuition shouted at me. I feared that maybe I was growing paranoid or jaded. Maybe the way my own mother had turned on me had colored my perception of the world. I considered the possibility that perhaps these witches weren’t my enemies, but then I remembered how they’d tried to sacrifice the innocent individuals of my hometown in a misguided attempt to look out for what they considered to be the greater good. “All right. Y’all wanted to talk. Well, I’m listening.”

  A middle-aged man with an average build and thinning mousey brown hair that framed a friendly and guileless face stepped forward. In my mind, I labeled him Mr. Beige. “If it is all right with everyone, I will volunteer to speak for the group.” The fact that no one protested or even spoke up told me that this decision had long since been made, and that this was in fact nothing more than a show, probably intended to demonstrate how well the rest of the anchors played together. Yep. They were all about the
collaboration. All about the team. Individuals need not apply. “Even though we each represent our respective families, we anchors like to think of ourselves as a family in our own right. A family of anchors.” He smiled, holding his hands out toward me. “On behalf of all of us, it is a pleasure to welcome you.” He didn’t introduce himself; no one did. I said nothing, letting the silence thicken around us.

  “I regret that our first meeting should occur under the cloud of the regrettable circumstances your mother created.” He accented the last three words, an obvious attempt to goad me, but I didn’t bite. My failure to respond as expected affected his confidence. He seemed a little less sure of himself when he began to speak again. Small beads of sweat started to form on his upper lip. “It’s unfortunate that we had to step in. We merely did what we felt necessary to protect the line. We hope that you will understand that and put aside any ill will you may feel about the actions we felt compelled to take.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “What is it you want from me? Are you looking for pardon? Because I have to tell you, I’d only consider forgiving you if I thought you wouldn’t follow the same course again.”

  “Well, no,” Beige said, pulling himself up, the air of congeniality slipping away, “we are not looking for forgiveness. We did what we felt we had to do to protect the line.”

  “And that makes the fact that you are all attempted mass murderers something I should overlook?”