The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2)

by Horn, J. D.

  The other eight began shifting, looking at one another. “I didn’t want anyone to come to harm,” a diminutive Asian woman said. The illusion of cohesiveness crumbled. “I didn’t want to interfere with your efforts.”

  “Then why did you?” My own voice surprised me, a venomous hiss pinning the woman to the spot as I leaned forward and struck her with my eyes. “Why did you allow them?”

  “I, I was outvoted,” she said, lowering her eyes.

  “Listen,” Beige continued, trying to regain momentum, “none of us wanted harm to come to the people of Savannah. Remember we didn’t start the storm.”

  “No. Emily did. She did it to prove a point to me. The point that you all would be willing to see an entire city wiped off the map. That you would be willing to bathe in blood, and would pat yourselves on the back for doing so.”

  Beige looked around at the others. “This path will get us nowhere. We came here today because we want to put what happened behind us. Yes, you defied us, but we were perhaps in the wrong.”

  “Perhaps in the wrong?” I spat back at him.

  “Yes, from your perspective, we were wrong. Evidently from the line’s perspective as well,” he allowed, a trace of humility in his voice. “We don’t understand what happened. We know you don’t like the stance we took, but it’s the same stance we anchors have been taking since the creation of the line. And that stance is to protect the line at all costs.”

  “Costs that others are left to pay. Well, this time the line kept you from standing on the sidelines and letting people get hurt. The line doesn’t seem to want the kind of protection y’all have been offering.”

  With this, Beige’s bluster faded, and the real man stood before me. Middle-aged, balding, dressed in a tan suit and loafers, and suddenly faced with the possibility that for a good portion of his life he had been working under the wrong set of assumptions. “You seem to have a deeper connection to the line than any of us. You communicate with it. It interacts with you as if it were a living entity in its own right.”

  It surprised me that my experience of the line was not common to the rest of the anchors, but I did my best to feign disinterest in his disclosure. It would not do to give too much away. “I never assumed it wouldn’t communicate with me.”

  The other anchors looked at one another, and I could hear a buzzing of communication between them. They blocked my full comprehension, but I could still pick up snatches of their conversations. The words dangerous and control popped out at me. When the buzzing stopped, Beige addressed me. “We understand that for some reason the line has chosen you to enjoy a special relationship with it. We would like to better understand this relationship, but you must have your own concerns that you would like us to address. Perhaps you can tell us what you would like from us?”

  I took a moment to consider. The truth was, all I wanted was for these witches to go away. To leave me and my family alone. To let us live out our lives in peace. But I knew that even if they promised that to me, they would be lying. The line had used me—no, it had used my son—to loosen these people’s stranglehold on it. They would grant me no peace until they could understand what had happened and find a way to dig their claws back in. I could read it in their eyes that this false promise of security was exactly what they wanted me to ask for. They thought I would trade what I knew about the line for their promise to leave me be. They could not have been more mistaken. “Just tell me the truth about one thing. What is the source of the line’s power?”

  “I believe you already know the answer to that.”

  “I’d still like to hear it from you. Come on. I’m an anchor now. I thought I had earned the right to learn the secret handshake.”

  “The sharing of knowledge follows the gaining of trust,” Beige said, stiffening as if he had suffered a personal affront. “And sharing what you know about what happened to the line will go a long way toward gaining our trust.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “Now you are just being childish,” exclaimed a heavyset woman with a thick Russian accent. Whatever she saw on my face silenced her. She stepped back.

  “We don’t know,” the Asian lady spoke up. “We know that the line is stronger than before, but the magic has been modified. There has been a foreign strain added to it. It is somehow less ours.”

  Less in their control, she meant. Beige glared at her, willing her mouth to close. “This foreign magic,” he said as he turned to face me, “it is not unknown to us, nor is it totally unrelated to our own. We encounter it occasionally in a burst here and there, but never in such a quantity or concentration as last night.”

  Now he had my attention. “How is it related?” I leaned forward, straightening my back and tilting my head. My posture had betrayed my interest. That meant they would never tell me. I felt one pair of eyes pin me with more intensity than the others. Instinctively I turned toward a waiflike young witch, impossibly pale and fair, nearly androgynous with the scale leaning almost imperceptibly toward male. His eyes, white and devoid of either iris or pupil, fell to my stomach.

  “The sharing of knowledge follows trust,” Beige repeated. His words were almost drowned out by the buzzing unspoken communications of the other anchors. Beige continued his soliloquy, but I tuned him out. I focused intently on the thoughts of the others, until the words Fae and infant and study twined together and became the common thread. The boy had made the connection between the magic and my son.

  “We thank you for this meeting.” Beige’s words broke in through my panic, and shimmers at the edge of the room announced that many of the anchors had already begun to take leave. My heart raced. They had tricked me. They might not completely understand, but they knew the line had tapped into fairy magic, using my baby as the conduit.

  “No,” I said, slamming the exits closed before any more could fade. “You will not harm my child,” I said, feeling the intensity of my emotions build. “You will not study my child.” I flew up from Jilo’s throne, grasping it with my magic and hurling it at them. “You will not use my child.”

  Beige threw up his arm, and the throne burst into flames in midair, falling as a rain of ashes. “No?” he asked. “And how do you intend to stop us?”

  I began shaking, fear and rage combining to tear reason from my grasp. How could I stop them? How could I prevent them from taking Colin from me? Locking him in a laboratory and sacrificing him to the greater good? My feet made contact with the floor, and I was no longer myself when I strode toward Beige. I approached him like an angry lioness, transformed by fear into a living, breathing embodiment of Durga, the very spirit of a mother’s drive to defend her young. Beige’s confident smile slumped, the corners of his mouth turning down as his brow furrowed. As I neared him, he tried to take a step back, but my hand shot out of its own accord and pierced his skin, above the navel, below the heart, right at his solar plexus, right at the point where the line connected its magic to his. I ripped that connection out of him. He screamed, from pain and from powerlessness. I held the ball of light, bright and shimmering, before his eyes and then shoved it back into him and closed the wound.

  His knees gave way, and he tumbled forward. “That,” I said as the other anchors rushed in to catch him, “that is how I will stop you. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding furiously as the others helped him balance.

  “Good,” I said and reopened the haint-blue room’s exits for the last time. “Now, get out of here and tell the families to stay away from me. Stay away from my child. Stay away from my husband. Stay away from my family. And stay the hell away from Savannah.” The anchors who had remained fled the chamber and rushed into the realm of the living shadows, comforted, I am sure, to face the kind of adversaries to which they felt more accustomed. I made one last turn in the cerulean light, and then watched as Jilo’s chamber folded in on itself, sliding awa
y only at the last possible moment before it disappeared for good.

  FORTY-ONE

  A truly vintage wedding dress from the 1940s, ivory silk with a cowl neckline and a low-draped back. A bouquet of white roses and blue hydrangeas. Both from Ellen. Iris had loaned me the pendant necklace I was wearing, which had been passed down through more than a hundred years of Taylor women, a diamond-encircled cabochon emerald above a drop-shaped emerald. Iris had also made me a gift of a new pair of emerald and diamond earrings, the emeralds’ color an astonishingly close match to the antique ones in the necklace. From Maisie, I stole a kiss, as she continued to live in her dreams.

  Oliver, of course, would give me away. His other contribution to the event was that he’d convinced the justice of the peace and the parks authority with just three days’ notice to let us perform the service in Forsyth Park, where Peter and I had first met. Peter had the idea that we should marry at the foot of the oak we’d always called “the climbing tree,” the one with the lowest and sturdiest branches. No groomsmen, no bridesmaids. Just the two of us before God. Iris had balked at first when Peter and I had said we wanted a simple wedding, no fancy reception, just cake and a band in the park. In the end, she’d capitulated and had even taken out a full-page ad in the Savannah Daily News welcoming the whole darned town.

  We had taken over a suite of rooms at the Mansion, and a team of hair and makeup artists were surrounding me, turning me into a fairy-tale princess, an image I’d never re-create under my own steam, even with magic. I loved every minute of it, though, because this day wasn’t just for me. It wasn’t even just for me and Peter. It was for the whole family. My aunts and uncle had arranged everything, devoting their attention to even the smallest details, although I had a surprise to spring on them as well.

  “Shame on you,” I said as that surprise trudged into the room, dressed in chiffon the color of blue morning glories and a purple hat large enough to shade half of Savannah.

  “Why shame on Jilo?” she asked, scanning me to try to find a place to land a kiss without messing up my hair or makeup.

  I popped up and kissed her instead. “You know you aren’t supposed to outshine the bride.”

  “Well, darlin’, Jilo can’t help it if the Lord has bestowed such blessings on her. Wouldn’t seem right to hide them.” She laughed, and took a seat on the foot of the bed. “Are you happy, girl?”

  Tears started welling up in my eyes just as Ellen and Iris entered the room. “Yes,” I said. “Yes. I am very, very happy.” Jilo nodded in reply.

  “Oh, now, now,” Iris said reaching for a tissue. “No waterworks until after the photos,” she said. Then she noticed Jilo. “Oh, Jilo. I am so glad you liked the hat. I knew it would suit you perfectly.”

  “I love it. Thank you,” Jilo said softly and smiled. So much for my ability to surprise anyone. I looked at these three beautiful women. Each of them, in her own way, was a mother to me.

  “Let’s loosen her hair a bit,” Ellen said to the stylist. Then she turned to me. “I’ve got a crazy idea,” she said. “It’s only that the thought of you and Peter marrying here in the park reminds me of when you were still a scrawny little tomboy. Well, since you aren’t wearing a full-length gown, how would you feel about doing this barefoot?”

  A knock at the door interrupted the decision. “May the future mother-in-law come in?” Claire asked. We hadn’t seen each other since the day Ryder and Josef had barged into the bar. I hadn’t been purposely avoiding her, I had just been busy. I knew from her tone that she was concerned that I might actually turn her away.

  “Of course,” I said, waving her in. “Would y’all mind if Claire and I had a moment alone?”

  The assistants dropped everything as soon as I made the request, but my aunts exchanged a look before moving. Jilo grumbled a little under her breath, but then she worked her way off the foot of the bed. Once the room had been cleared, Claire stepped closer. “You, my dear girl, are breathtaking.”

  “Thank you,” I said, reaching out to take her hand. “I am so sorry, Claire. For what I did to Peter—your natural son Peter, that is.” Heck, I should probably apologize for what I’d put her adopted son through as well, but I would spend the rest of my life doing my best to make it up to him.

  “No, I am the one who’s sorry. It was only my grief and confusion talking. I know that you tried to help him and that he was already dead when you put your hands on him. I know,” she said, tapping her hand against her heart. “Listen, I have realized that the Fae did live up to their promise, just that time must move a bit differently in their world than in ours.” She paused. “When the police found him outside the powder magazine, he was wearing a heavy overcoat.”

  “Yes, I remember it.”

  “A fortune in gold and jewels had been sewn up in its lining. A fortune befitting a prince.”

  “Yes, Jilo picked up on that and told me.”

  “Well, Colin and I have been discussing what we should do with the proceeds from this unexpected windfall. We have decided to donate everything to the research of children’s cancer, because that, in the end, is really what took our Peter from us. We are donating everything he carried with him except this.” She opened her purse and pulled out a silver baby’s rattle, monogrammed with the initials PDT, Peter Daniel Tierney. “This belonged to him. We sent it with him,” she paused. “I cannot explain why—I don’t understand it myself—but it would mean the world to me if you’d carry this with you today, if you could find it in your heart to include our other Peter in your marriage to my adopted son.”

  “I would consider it an honor,” I said, taking the rattle from her.

  “I love you, Mercy Taylor,” Claire said, tears bursting from her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

  “That’s Mercy Tierney,” I said.

  Claire smiled through her tears and reached out with both hands to grasp my stomach. “And you too, you little monkey. Grandma loves you.” She stood and walked to the door. “I’ll send your entourage back in.” She smiled at me once more, then left.

  I’d experienced the magical warping of time many times over now, but it couldn’t begin to compare to the way natural time moved on my wedding day. One moment I was sitting in the hotel, getting the final touches to my makeup and hair, and the next I stood in the park beside Oliver, waiting for the musical cue to start toward the climbing tree. “You good?” he asked, leaning back and taking in the full view of a niece so done up he could barely recognize her.

  I lifted my bare foot and wiggled my newly polished toes. “Never better.”

  Iris took honors as the first mother-of-the-bride. I watched as her new boyfriend, Sam, escorted her up the aisle. Ellen followed her as the second mother-of-the-bride. I had expected Peter’s buddy Tom to serve as her escort, but as I squinted against the sun, I realized that Ellen was holding on to Adam’s arm. It shocked me to see him there. He’d told me he was done with us, all of us, and I had believed it to be true. I didn’t know what had led to his change of heart, and frankly I did not care. I squeezed Oliver’s hand. “You good?” I asked.

  His eyes were wide with surprise. “Never better,” he said, his face beaming.

  Finally, Jilo, the third mother-of-the-bride, proceeded between the rows of white folding chairs on the arm of her great-grandson, Martell. As she settled into her seat, I heard big Colin call out to the band, “Strike ’er up, boys!” “Haste to the Wedding” came from the temporary bandstand Peter himself had helped build. Oliver looked at me with questioning eyes. I nodded once, and we wound our way through the open field. There, waiting beneath its sheltering limbs stood the man I loved, the man I had always loved, my Peter. I looked into his mismatched eyes and everything else faded away.

  Next thing I knew, music was swelling up all around me as Peter spun me in his arms and the party officially began. The happy faces of well-wishers whisked in and out of view. I da
nced from Peter’s arms to Oliver’s to Colin’s. And then Adam stood before me. He bowed to me and extended his hand. I took it gladly.

  I was pleased it was a waltz, and a slow one to boot. It gave me a chance to catch my breath and find out why Adam had changed his mind about us. “I’m so happy you’re here,” I said. “But what changed? I thought you’d seen too much, been pushed too far. I thought we’d lost you forever.”

  “I thought so too,” he said, sadness creeping into his eyes, even though he was still smiling. “Emily showed me the worst side of you all. She showed me things I don’t think the rest of you know about yourselves.”

  “Like what?” I asked, forgetting all about dancing.

  He laughed and led me back into the dance. “There’s plenty of time to get into all that, but today is about celebrating. Like I said, Emily showed me the worst side of witches. But you and Iris and Ellen, and hell, even Oliver, y’all have shown me the best. You risked your life to save me. Besides, in spite of it all, I love that impossible uncle of yours. No matter what.”

  Peter had been pulled aside by his buddies and was being fed whiskey chasers for the champagne he’d already been downing. “Not too much there, buster,” I called as Adam waltzed me past him.

  “Just married and she’s already calling the shots,” one of Peter’s friends said and slapped him on the back.

  “That’s fine by me,” Peter said and stole me back from Adam, but not before I’d placed a kiss on the detective’s cheek. Adam surrendered me to my husband, and Peter smiled down at me, holding me tight in his arms. And I, well, I had never felt more love before in my entire life. I knew toasts had been made, I knew we’d cut cake at some point, and I had vague recollections of being pulled in one direction and then the other by a photographer who was bound and determined to capture every moment. But I knew those moments would be the ones I’d always remember—standing in Peter’s arms, enjoying a golden, happy blur with everyone I loved around me, and the fine people of Savannah, even those who would not truly call themselves my friends. Before I realized it, the sun had slid to the western sky and was sending its light down at an angle that announced twilight would follow not far behind. And as the jigs had given way to waltzes, in fine Celtic tradition, with the setting of the sun, the waltzes gave way to a few tearful laments.