The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2) (2 page)

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 glamour 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, m
aking 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.”

It was a display of arguably antiquated male pride, but instinct and intuition told me not to challenge him on it. I simply nodded and smiled. “All right. I respect that,” I said at the time, even though I was only humoring him. After taking some weeks to reflect on it, though, I had come to realize how much respect I did have for him. “You are one lucky boy to have a daddy like that,” I told Colin, running my hand over the small bulge beneath my shirt.

I leaned into the enormous door, intent on opening it under my own steam. The seven-by-four-foot slab of steel cracked open with great difficulty. When I was a little girl, someone had managed to steal the massive door, taking it right off its hinges. That’s about as far as they got, though, its weight causing them to abandon it by the side of a dirt road, leaving the city of Savannah with the task of rehanging it.

I considered using my magic to open the door, as Jilo had done, but while I might manage to swing the door open, I might just blow it off its hinges and into the next county. I decided to use my hands. I leaned into the steel, and was nearly blinded by the light that rushed in to fill the dark space behind and around me.

The day was a fabric woven from heat and humidity, the noises of nature, and the drone of traffic on Ogeechee Road. My bike was where I’d left it, propped up against the building. I could have used my magic to bring myself to the magazine, but had decided against it. The one “spell,” for lack of a better term, I had managed to master so far was teleporting short distances. Not all witches could do it, but I could, and I could do it well. All the same, I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Each time, there was an odd sensation that the person I’d been at Point A wasn’t necessarily the same as the one who’d ended up at Point B.

“Mama needs her practice, but she also needs her exercise,” I rationalized aloud to my son. A thrill ran through me as I sensed for the first time an intelligence on the other end of the conversation. Colin was there, connected to me. A feeling of love, unequal to any I had ever known, flooded through me. I realized that I would do anything to keep my baby safe.
Anything
. Then I wondered whether “anything” included giving up the search for Maisie. I decided to leave that an open question for now, but determined that I would find a cleaner and safer place to meet Jilo from now on.

I started for my bike, but then a noise came from behind me. Something close. I turned. A lonely clump of Georgia pines stood a few feet ahead on my right, and an older—no,
incredibly
old—man stumbled through them. He staggered and almost tripped, but then righted himself. He turned around in a circle, seemingly intent on finding his bearings. The air felt way too hot and sticky for the overcoat he was wearing, especially since the garment was several sizes too large. The hem nearly brushed the ground. In spite of his diminutive size, I began to feel uneasy. Something wasn’t right.

This fear of strangers had only come upon me recently; I was no longer protected by any charms. When the line chose me, its power blended with my own, unraveling the protections that Emmet and my family had woven for me. Regular witches can’t charm the line’s anchors for good or bad. Now I had to stand on my own.

“Good morning,” I called out to the man, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

“
Ta me ar strae. Ta me ar strae
,”
he repeated, circling once more before finally registering my presence. He made a rush toward me, and my breath quickened as adrenaline urged me to a fight-or-flight response. In his hurry, he nearly fell forward but managed to right himself at the last instant. He stopped and looked up at me. He had the most innocent face I had ever seen, his eyes wide and trusting. He was balding, and what tufts of hair remained around his temples were snow white. Deep wrinkles covered his face, but the folds there were laugh lines.

“Hello,” I said again. “Do you need some help?” I asked, hoping he understood English.

“You must be the angel,” he said, a thick Irish accent lending a lilt to his words. “They told me you would come for me at the end.” He held his arms out to me in a gesture of welcome.

Any fear I had of this stranger dissipated. I took a few steps toward him. “Sorry,” I said, “no angel here.” Was that disappointment I saw in his eyes?

“That’s just as well,” he said, snagging his coat on some brush and nearly tottering over.

“Listen, are you all right? Can I help you somehow?” He looked up at me again with his sweet face. Something about him seemed to be touched by magic. He radiated a faint white light, a luminescence I wasn’t sure I could have seen if I weren’t a witch. I found myself wondering if he were indeed a man, or some kind of elemental masquerading as one. After recent experiences, I had grown much less inclined to accept things at face value.

He tugged at his coat, freeing it from the brush, and took another step toward me. He began rubbing his left arm with his right hand. “It’s only that I am not quite sure where I am,” he said.

“You are off Ogeechee Road,” I replied. “Do you live around here?”

His answer came in the form of a short, sharp laugh. The laughter died as quickly as it had come. “I don’t know.” His knees buckled, and he fell to the ground. I ran to him, nearly tripping over my own feet, and knelt by his side. I gave him a gentle shake. He did not respond. I rolled him over with some difficulty. His skin was blue, and the radiance I had noticed only moments before had disappeared. Whatever magic had clung to him had deserted him.

“You’re gonna be okay,” I said and opened his coat, surprised to discover how slight his body was beneath it. I loosened his collar. He smiled up at me, but then his eyes glazed over. I felt for a pulse. There was none. I had taken a CPR certification course a couple of years before, and I did my best to remember the steps. Placing my right hand over his chest and my left hand over my right, I began compressions. Two inches deep, one hundred compressions per minute.

“Help!” I screamed, hoping that someone in one of the nearby businesses might hear. “Call an ambulance.” I kept counting compressions as I listened for any response. There was none. I called out again. I had picked this place for my work with Jilo because the noise of a busy road drowned out most other sounds, and even though there were businesses in the area, large trees hid the powder magazine entirely. Now I cursed the noise and camouflage. He only had six minutes even with CPR. How long had I been pressing into his chest? Maybe only thirty seconds, but it seemed like forever. Should I stop CPR and call for an ambulance myself?

I gasped as a sudden realization shot through me—I was a witch now, but I was thinking like a human. What would a witch do? I knew that my resuscitation efforts alone would not bring him back. At best, the CPR would keep oxygen flowing to his brain until a defibrillator could be used. His heart needed to be restarted with a shock of electricity.

The moment this thought came to mind, a pulse of light shot down my arm, bright and blue like a tight ball of lightning. I hadn’t consciously commanded it. My magic had interpreted my confused thoughts and taken over for me. The bolt shot into the man’s body, and for an instant, his eyes flashed open, full of astonishment. His body lifted a few inches off the ground, and as I tried to pull my hands away, it followed me, the electricity between us attracting him like a magnet. Then the link broke at last, and he dropped to the ground, his eyes fluttering shut for the last time. The stench of burning meat rose to my nostrils, and I grew sick. The part of his chest where the energy had entered him had been burned black, and a gaping tunnel had been blasted through the space that once held his heart.

What had I done? I clawed at the sandy soil, scraping away the residue that clung to my palm, my fingers. My breath failed me, coming only in short gasps that couldn’t fill my lungs. Hands reached out from behind me and held my shoulders. A calm, feminine voice spoke to me. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. But you have to come with me. We have to get you away from here.” I had never heard that voice before, but I had known it all my life. I began shaking, my skin cold. The light reaching my eyes alternated between impossibly dim and painfully bright. I felt like the world had fallen away beneath me. I had to be hallucinating. I looked away from the damaged corpse I had created. My head turned slowly, knowing that once I laid eyes on her, nothing would ever be the same again. I looked up. A smile. Loving green eyes. A face so very much like my own.

“Mama?” my voice squeaked out of me, forcing its way between the walls of amazement and disbelief.

“Yes, baby. It’s me,” she said, and then seemed to read the next thought pressing on my mind. “It’s me. I’m alive.”

TWO

My mother guided me through the scrub-filled ravine that separated the powder magazine from the parking lot servicing the nearby businesses. A limousine waited there, and a liveried driver who was standing by its side jolted to attention, then opened the car’s door. Together, my mother and he eased me into the air-conditioned cocoon, and then my mother slid in next to me. A dark privacy glass separated us from the driver’s area, and even blacker windows, nearly onyx, protected us from the world outside. The car began moving, but I had no idea where we were going. Frankly, I didn’t care. I held on to my mother’s hands, grasping them so tightly it must have hurt. Her face held my eyes. It seemed so much like a mirror of my own, except that it held a couple decades more of experience, of sadness.

“I know you must have so many questions.” Her words began to make their way through the haze. “And,” she said as her eyes caressed me, “there are so many things I need to say to you. But we don’t have time now.” A pained smile formed on her face. She managed to extricate her right hand from mine, and ran her fingers through my hair. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. I didn’t want to just fall into your world, but I tracked you down at the powder magazine, and I had to get a look at you.” She pulled my head to her bosom, pressing her cool palm against my cheek. “If only I’d arrived a few moments earlier, I could have helped, but I discovered you too late. The old gentleman had already . . . expired. You were so distraught, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave you there.”

“But how could you?” I asked. “I mean, how could you have left me before? Left Maisie?” I pulled back from her, a sharp and stinging anger cutting me to the quick. “How could you let us grow up believing you had died?”

“I had no choice,” she said. “She wouldn’t let me near you. She was working against me long before she plotted against you.”

My mother didn’t need to supply the name. “Ginny,” I said. A slight nod confirmed my thought. “But why?”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. Only not right now. I’ve waited all your life to have a chance to explain things to you, and it isn’t a story that can be rushed.” She reached forward and pulled me into her again. I felt intoxicated by her scent—it reached all the way through the years and brought me right back to the cradle. For a moment, I let go of everything and just let my mother hold me. “I have to let you go for now,” she whispered. “But I’ll be near, and we’ll talk soon. Very soon. I promise.”

“No,” I looked up to her, my heart in my throat. “No, you have to come home,” I pleaded. “Come home now. We have to tell Iris and Ellen and Oliver that you’re still alive. They are going to be so—”

Her body tensed and her eyes narrowed, small lines forming at their corners. “No,” a barbed refusal tore from her lips. She drew a breath, forced her shoulders to relax. “No,” she said more calmly. She pushed me away gently, but then patted my hand. “They can’t know I’ve returned. Not yet.”

“But they have to . . .” My words died in the air as the look on her face told me more than I wanted to know.

Her eyes had turned downcast and distant, as if she were reliving an unpleasant memory. A tremble danced at the corner of her mouth, and she clenched her jaw to regain control of the tic. “Oh, they know, my darling girl. My sisters know very well that I’m alive.” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “I’m not sure what they have told Oliver, but your aunts, they know.” She leaned in and pinned me with her gaze. “Iris and Ellen took you and Maisie from me at Ginny’s bidding.”

“I cannot believe they would do something so terrible,” I heard my own voice pleading with my mother. “Why would they?”

“The same reason Ginny stole your power and worked to turn your twin against you—yes, I know all about it. The line. Ginny justified all of her crimes by saying she committed them to protect the line. And in separating my children from their mother, Iris and Ellen were her willing accomplices.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to believe, but there was something about my mother’s words that I found so compelling.

She continued. “You think you know them, but you don’t. Not really. You only know the side they have allowed you to see. If they realize you know . . . if they learn I am back, I fear for your safety.” I started to protest that they would never do anything to hurt me, but she held up her hand to stop me. “They have always put the line before your well-being, and they always will. Deep down you know that, or you wouldn’t be sneaking around with the old root doctor trying to find out what the line has done with Maisie. My sisters will not think twice about alerting the united families if they find out you know about me. The other anchors already have it in for you simply because you are my daughter. If they learn that I have made contact with you, they
will
make a preemptive move against you. I fear they may work a binding on you.”

She waited until her warning had fully registered. Now that I was an anchor, a binding wouldn’t merely strip me of my powers. It would leave me to live out the rest of my life in a vegetative state—the power of the line would consume me, leaving me as nothing more than a receptacle. “You must say nothing. Tell no one. If you do, we will lose each other again, and this time it will be forever.”

“But what could you have done to threaten Ginny so? I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t,” she said and tapped once on the window that separated us from the driver. “And I’m sorry, but it isn’t safe for me to linger. I’ll explain everything when we see each other next. For now, promise me that you will keep this to yourself, for your own sake. For my grandson’s sake.” She smiled as she mentioned Colin. “Promise me.” She placed her smooth, cool hand under my chin and tilted my face so that my eyes met hers. I heard the car’s trunk being opened, then closed. That was when I realized we were no longer moving.

I found it impossible to refuse her. “I promise,” I said, and she leaned in to kiss my forehead. “But how do you know what’s happened to Maisie?”

“I have . . .
friends
who have kept me informed about my two daughters,” she said. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t prevent it all.”

“Okay, but can you help me find her?”

She smiled at me one last time. “I already am, my girl.” The door next to me opened, revealing the chauffeur. He stepped aside. I knew he expected me to exit, but I couldn’t tear myself away. My mother touched my cheek and then moved her hands to her neck. She unhooked the necklace she’d been wearing and fixed it around my own neck. Something about wearing her locket made me feel so safe, so loved. She gave me a gentle push. “Go on now. You’ll see me again very soon. This I promise you.” I climbed out of the car to find we had stopped not far from the southern edge of Forsyth Park. My bike, which had been in the trunk of the car, was waiting patiently on the curb. Suddenly a thought hit me, and I reached out to stop the driver’s hand before he could close the door.

“The man, the old guy,” I said, remembering that we had left the poor man’s body lying in the weeds.

My mother leaned slightly forward. “It’s already been taken care of,” she said, and the driver closed the door. I watched the limo as it pulled away, leaning on my bike for support, putting all my strength into not letting my legs give way. The blare of a siren yanked me out of my fugue, and an ambulance and police car flew past me, heading, I knew, toward the old powder magazine. A second police car followed them a minute or so behind. This one had its lights and siren working too, but it moved at a less frenetic pace. As it passed, a passenger inside turned to look at me, and a flash of recognition crossed Detective Adam Cook’s face.