The Source (Witching Savannah #2)

“Shall we load up then? Head over to Candler?” Oliver asked, interrupting my reverie. I nodded, and my aunts grabbed their purses as Oliver took charge of the supplies Iris had pulled together. I grasped the doll. I knew my resistance was irrational, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Emmet carrying the poppet to its sacrifice.

“It was my idea,” he assured me once more.

Oliver and Iris drove together, and Emmet and I followed with Ellen. We had planned for Oliver to arrive first so that he could charm the newly instated security guards. It bothered me to see that Candler was no longer deserted—the first visible evidence of the restoration work was the light that shone all around the building that had been dark my entire life.

I hadn’t expected to see that the parking lot had already been extended, and the opening into which I had descended in search of Jilo was now paved over, sealed for good. “Rumor has it they wanted to cut down the old oak to make space for a few more cars,” Ellen said as we followed Oliver. “I thought Iris would die from a fit of apoplexy. She’s put a curse on the oak now, you know. Anyone who attempts to harm it will be sorry they tried.” My aunt smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “You know Iris and her love of history.”

“Good for her,” I said. The Candler Oak was sacred to me as well.

Thanks to Oliver’s powers of persuasion, both magical and his plain inborn sense of entitlement, we were not only allowed access—we were actually escorted inside by the guard on duty. “You’ll keep everyone else out of here tonight, and tomorrow morning, you will forget we were ever here, please.”

“Of course, Mr. Taylor,” the man responded. “Y’all have a good evening now.”

I still wasn’t totally comfortable with Oliver’s ability to compel others, the way he would impose his will on them without the slightest twinge of conscience. Maybe it was my conscience that kept me from being able to work this skill as well as my uncle could.

The door hadn’t finished closing behind us before Emmet spoke up. “I sense that something is wrong here.” We all stopped in our tracks, and I watched as my family tried to sense what he had.

“I don’t feel anything,” Ellen offered, shaking her head at me.

“No,” Iris said. “Emmet is correct. Someone has been here tonight. Magic has been worked.”

“Blood magic,” I said, feeling the horror of the victim rush up around me.

“Yes,” Emmet said, pride for me, his prize pupil, showing in his eyes. It was intriguing to watch him learn how to connect to human emotions. He seemed to feel love, perhaps anger, but his response to the victim’s pain was clinical at best. Empathy hadn’t caught up to him yet . . . at least not empathy for strangers. I could sense the pain and fear she had experienced. I knew it without a doubt—the victim had been a woman. The sense of betrayal she felt toward the man who had brought her here broke my heart. I found myself clutching the doll I carried for comfort.

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” Oliver said, getting a full fix on our surroundings. “There’s something missing, something that should be here but isn’t.”

“The demon is gone,” Iris said, her tone revealing that she herself could not as yet wholly accept that fact. “I sense a blankness, a hole where its evil was.”

I began walking, following my witch’s sense that had little if anything to do with the normal five. My family and Emmet followed me, a tightly knit shield of our combined magic protecting us as we continued down the main hall and to a stairwell that had been blocked off for decades. The steel door had been removed, no, blown from its hinges, and it lay several feet from where it had once hung. “Down here,” I said, my feet leading me down the stairs to the basement. The door at that end had also been ripped from its hinges. It lay several yards away, bent into the shape of a U. The hall was bathed in shadow, only a single naked bulb shedding an insufficient circle of light. Splinters of glass running the length of the ground showed where the other bulbs had been broken. As my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I saw the body that was only partially hidden behind the bowed metal door. A pair of denim-covered legs stuck out, one foot covered by a dirty sneaker, the other bare and twisted toward us so that even in the shadows, I could make out the neon pink polish on the toenails.

The smell coming from behind the door was impossible to bear. I brought my hand up to my nose. I wanted to stop, but my body continued to carry me closer. As I drew near enough to see over the door, I cried out involuntarily, “Oh God,” and stopped. The body had no torso, only a ravaged stump that stuck out a few inches above the top of the blood-soaked jeans. There, through the redness that colored the remaining flesh, I recognized the remaining part of a tattoo as the orange feet of a famous cartoon bird. Without my consciously attempting to do so, my magic charged the room, awakening a vision of the violence that had happened here.

I saw the train people. Joe held Birdy, while Ryder cut into her with an athame, a ceremonial dagger. He held it in his left hand, manipulating it clumsily. Birdy’s screams echoed in my ears—heart-wrenching wails of pain and unheeded pleas. Joe’s face tilted up and strained in an expression of sexual, nearly religious ecstasy as he assisted Ryder in this act of treachery. I turned and started swiftly back toward my family, but tripped over something. The doll flew from my grasp and shattered as it hit the floor. I fell to my hands and knees as Emmet rushed up in an attempt to catch me. I looked over my shoulder to see what I’d stumbled on and gasped in horror as Emmet pulled me into his arms, holding me tight to shield me from the horrors I had seen. I’d tripped over an arm, a familiar hand and tattooed forearm that was partially covered in the molten steel of a hunting knife.

“He offered up Birdy,” I spoke in Emmet’s ear. “He offered up Birdy for power.”

“That appears to be the case,” Emmet said, releasing me into my Aunt Iris’s outstretched arms, but taking his time about it.

“You know this person?” Iris asked. I calculated how much I could tell her without exposing the truth about Peter. “She was a friend of yours?”

“No, not a friend. She and her associates tried to use Mercy and Claire as bait to capture me,” Emmet said. “This woman’s mate, a man named Ryder, has been consorting with a witch, a true witch who placed the mark of the collector on him. In her efforts to protect me, Mercy damaged his mark. I suspect he summoned the demon, offering it freedom in exchange for the power Mercy took from him.”

“But how could he use Birdy to summon it?” I asked. “I thought the demon was only attracted to children and innocents. I wouldn’t have considered Birdy either.”

Ellen and Oliver had walked away from us, crossing over to examine what remained of Birdy’s body. “I’m afraid, sweetie,” Ellen said, tears welling up in her eyes, “that there was a baby. This Birdy of yours was pregnant.”

NINETEEN

I retreated to my room the second we returned home. I was morally drained and physically exhausted. In spite of the horrors of the day, I slept like a stone. I didn’t make it up and out until after noon the next day, but as soon as I did rouse my sorry self, I made a beeline to Colonial Cemetery. I needed to find Jilo and talk all of this through with her. She’d had far more experience with conjured demons, borrowed power, and misdirected love than anyone else I knew. She’d enjoy chiding me about a “mud pie” falling in love with me, and I could sure use the laugh her wicked comments would bring us both. Besides, I hadn’t seen her since the Tree of Life ceremony, and I missed her.