Hawthorn Witches: Demons & Dracaena, Sorcerers & Sumac, Werewolves & Wisteria (Hawthorn Witches Omnibus Book 1)

by A. L. Tyler

  I was once again reminded of exactly how hokey the entire witchcraft thing felt.

  “It is hokey,” Charlie said, much to Lyssa’s chagrin. He flicked an ear. “A lot of the rituals aren’t even necessary, except to get into the right frame of mind. It’s like a small child that needs a stuffed animal to fall asleep. You don’t actually need the stuffed animal.”

  Lyssa narrowed her eyes at him. “If you can make this work without the full moon, then please, enlighten me.”

  “I can make it work right now if you’re willing to spike your tea with a little werewolf blood,” he said. “But no, I agree the moonlight is necessary. I was referring to your salt and candles, and the patently stupid idea that writing something on a bay leaf and burning it can do… well, anything, really.”

  His words reminded me of something Stark had said to me before his attack, and I fished my sumac pendant out of my shirt, holding it between two fingers.

  “Is this like that?” I asked.

  He flicked a feline ear. “No. That is real, and very important.”

  “Stark said—”

  “Stark has always been jealous of blood magic,” Charlie said curtly. “Most warlocks are.”

  “Blood magic?” I asked. I hadn’t realized there were names for the different types, but Charlie had told me there were different types before.

  Lyssa took a breath, but Gates got there first.

  “There are three different types. You can be born with it, you can learn it, or you can be afflicted with it,” she said. Lyssa was staring at her, impressed. “What? There’s a lot of stuff in Kendra’s notebooks. That was one of the first ones I read.”

  “I’ve read all the journals,” I said. “I didn’t read that.”

  Gates’ gaze wandered as she considered. Then she looked directly at Charlie.

  “That book is no longer with you, Thorn,” he said. “But Gates is correct. There’s blood magic, book magic, and bane magic. You were born with it, and Stark was not. You can work some spells seemingly out of nothing, but he needs certain elements. Usually at least one from a magical source, which is why warlocks are notorious murderers and thieves. They need body parts from those who have blood or bane magic, or else things they’ve imbued.”

  “And bane magic?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. Vince was still downstairs, occasionally letting out a howl that was still loud enough for us to hear.

  “Persons capable of wielding like they have blood magic, but usually due to some malady,” he said, tilting his head. “And usually at a high price or with several conditions, as you can see with your gentleman guest. Werewolves don’t wield anything, though they are imbued, and their mental capacity is often crippled by transformation. A made demon, like Stark, can wield a massive amount of power. However, he needs a bridge to eat, and he can be bound to a sorcerer, or summoned or banished, just like any other demon.”

  “But what about you?” I asked. Charlie shifted, but didn’t answer. Lyssa didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. “You were born a demon. Demons can be either blood or bane magic?”

  Lyssa looked at him, and he glanced anxiously at the living room, but he didn’t leave. It was odd to see a man as powerful as he was considering running from a fight, but then, he was trapped in the body of a cat. I was beginning to appreciate exactly how demeaning it was to put him in such a position.

  “Demons can be born?” she asked. “I thought it was purely a malady. The only way demons can make more demons is by tricking others into the Other Side. Demons can also make… baby demons?”

  His whiskers twitched in annoyance. “I’m unfamiliar with the mechanics of it, if that’s what you’re asking. But yes, I was a baby demon at one time.”

  “And you know this how?” Lyssa asked. Her eyes had gone a little wide, and I wasn’t sure why she found the idea so shocking.

  “Because I have no memory of a life previous to this one, Alyssum,” he said. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know how old I am. Time passes differently when you’ve grown up in a place where time doesn’t exist.”

  “Then what’s your earliest memory?”

  Charlie hesitated, and I felt my heart skip a beat when he looked at me. It was like he could still remember it, but only faintly. When he had tried to put together a spell to make himself human, he had told me that a memory needed to be gifted to him by a friend. The more emotionally charged the memory was, the better.

  Charlie had ended up using that spell on me. And that memory, the first of his time in this world, was the one he had given to me.

  “Leave him alone,” I said, diverting my eyes from both Gates and Lyssa. “Anyway, you were saying about that book?”

  “You can’t have it back,” he replied without skipping a beat.

  “Why?”

  He looked me squarely in the eye, both grateful and defiant. “Because it’s not your book, Thorn. And it’s important.”

  That’s all he would say about it. Gates suggested that I order him to tell us about the book, or even better, order him to just give us the book, because he was bound by the rules of familiars when he was a cat and he would have to follow my order. I had grown to respect him too much, though, and I refused to do it.

  We all jumped when a loud thud rang out, but it didn’t come from the basement.

  It came from my bedroom.

  Gates was a cat again, and Charlie was running toward the noise.

  Chapter 4

  Charlie burst through my bedroom door, and I was right on his heels. I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like there was anything I could do to stop a rampaging werewolf.

  I nearly slid down the stairs after Charlie, and found Vince—not the animal—breathing hard on the ground outside the door that he had just ripped open.

  “Annie—”

  “Vince!” I yelped, leaning down to help him up. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Charlie had already snapped his fingers, and the door was fixed. “I reinforced it. Annie, you need to put him back inside.”

  But Vince’s hands were already growing hair, and he dug them into my arms, refusing to let go.

  “I can’t go back in there…” he mumbled under his breath. “Don’t make me go back in. It’s not natural. It will kill me…”

  “I can’t help you,” Charlie growled at me. “Shove him back in before we have a real problem here!”

  I pushed him back gently until his heels hit the frame of the portal door. His eyes snapped up to meet mine. They were pulsing red and angry, but when he spoke, only the desperation came out.

  “You have to kill me!” he said, his voice already growing hoarse. “You have to kill me…!”

  “Annie!” Charlie snapped.

  I shoved him once hard in the chest and sent him sprawling back onto the floor. Charlie shut the door before he could get back up.

  “We’re going to need a second door next month,” he mused, his gaze wandering uncertainly over his creation. “I don’t actually know how he got through this one. The silver should have burned his skin off first.”

  I went back to the viewing hatch, cracking it open just enough to catch a breath and a snort from the wet-nosed snout on the other side before he growled and clawed and let out a howl that made me shut the hatch in alarm and sent a shiver up my spine.

  I leaned back against the door, even as it started to shake and bump with his attempts to rip it open once more.

  “That was the illness talking,” Charlie made a feeble attempt to reassure me. “Are you buying it when I say that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. Because you shouldn’t. And this is only the beginning.”

  Charlie turned to go.

  “Is he going to…” I wasn’t sure how to say it, but I had to know. “Could he kill himself? Is there a way, and do you think he’ll try?”

  Charlie frowned as he stared at me, then turned to face me and crossed his arms. I could hear movement in the room above us, and I
knew that Gates and Lyssa had come to inspect the situation.

  “He might try,” Charlie said. “Do you want me to stop him? Or at least try?”

  His moral ambiguity was starting to concern me, because I felt like the answer should have been obvious. That was, unless Charlie knew something that I didn’t.

  “Yes,” I said firmly. “If he tries, I want you to stop him.”

  He pursed his lips and took a breath through his nose, and I knew he was considering how much he wanted to tell me.

  “Spit it out.”

  “This is going to get bad, Thorn. And it’s not going to get better.”

  “It’s already bad.”

  He weighed his words carefully. “It will get worse. All I am saying is that you need to think of this as a terminal illness. He will die with it, and he will likely die because of it. You’re taking away his choice to end his suffering.”

  “Walter deals with it,” I said, crossing my arms and refusing to accept his point.

  “Walter is different,” Charlie said. He looked up the stairs to where Lyssa was standing. “Do you know about them?”

  “About who?” I asked.

  It was getting too hard to talk over the racket that Vince was now making as he tried to claw his way free from his cell. Charlie put a hand on my back and encouraged me back up the stairs, closing the hatch behind us with a heavy look.

  I sat down on the bed, and Lyssa and Gates came to sit with me.

  “Werewolves run in packs,” he said simply. “And much as you might expect, they usually run in families, but the ailment isn’t passed down genetically. They pass it on to their children through a bite or a scratch soon after birth. They grow with it, and their predecessors care for them and teach them how to cope. Walter has had a lifetime of experience living with this condition. He’s adapted to it in a way that Vince won’t ever be able to do.”

  With Vince downstairs, reacting as any caged animal would, I couldn’t believe that any parent would willingly do this to a child.

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  Charlie looked at Lyssa, but she looked away. He looked back at me. “Revenge, mostly. Someone in their past saw a loved one killed for magic stock and they wanted to fight the warlocks, but they couldn’t because any warlock is more powerful than a human. So they acquired the curse to make themselves strong enough and passed down the vendetta from generation to generation. It’s a religion to them.”

  Too many thoughts clouded my mind right then, ranging from musicians and painters that managed to adapt to becoming deaf or blind to the fact that it wasn’t my call to make. It should have been Vince’s call, but I couldn’t let him kill himself without feeling complicit in the act. I would be an accessory to murder, or maybe a little more, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t in his right mind anymore. I was the reason he had been bitten, too, and that only added to my personal responsibility to him.

  “That would have been very helpful information when we first met Walter,” I said dryly. “To let me know that werewolves make it their life mission to kill warlocks, and he assumed I was one.”

  “I can’t read a werewolf’s thoughts,” Charlie replied, narrowing his eyes. “I knew he didn’t like the look of us, but we didn’t do anything to threaten him. I thought he would spread the word that a demon was in town, and we might get a visitor around the full moon and we would explain ourselves. Going from zero to biological warfare is a fast escalation, even for a werewolf.”

  I nodded. My thoughts were finally starting to iron themselves out into a plan. “Okay. Okay, maybe we can still fix this. If I could talk to Walter, maybe we could ask him to take Vince into his pack, and then he could teach him—”

  But Lyssa was already shaking her head. “No, Annie, you don’t understand. They can’t help him anymore. When Charlie said biological warfare, he meant it. Werewolf kids grow up with this, and that’s why they have immunity to some of the more troubling aspects of it. Vince doesn’t have that.”

  I frowned at her. “You said it was the right choice to do this.”

  “And I still believe that,” she said. “We should do everything in our power to help him. But I think you need to understand what we’re up against, and I think you need to respect that he might not want to live this way.”

  I stared down at the hatch in dismay.

  “Even if you could talk to Walter,” Charlie said, softening his tone, “Stark got to him first. I don’t know how, but he did, and he’s out for blood. You can bet he’s already filled Walter’s head with ideas about us. We won’t find help for Vince there.”

  I closed my eyes, knowing that he was right but hating to admit it. I didn’t know what to say or feel anymore, because we had been so close to fixing things before. We had just decided that Stark was going to take Gates’ curse, and then things would go relatively back to normal. And then Vince had showed up.

  And now he had a curse that could never be lifted.

  I had trouble wrapping my mind around the finality of it, even though it hadn’t happened yet. I had been spinning plates ever since meeting Charlie, trying not to let each delicate soul touched by my summoning a demon fall or break. I had saved Jennifer. Rosie had been spared. I was on my way to fixing things for Gates.

  And now Vince had a death sentence. There was nothing to be done.

  “Annie…?” Gates asked.

  “Fine. I get it.” I lifted myself off the bed, refusing to look any of them in the eye. “I understand now. We’re not letting him kill himself like this, though. We’re keeping him alive until after the full moon, and then we’re explaining this to him. All of it. I want you to tell him what his life will be like, and when he’s Vince again, he can decide.”

  And with that, we didn’t talk about it anymore. We went about our lives, eating and sleeping and watching television, and Lyssa taught me what she thought were the important aspects of protection charm creation. Charlie corrected her, and I wrote it all down in a notebook, and he told me he would find a way to help me practice. He thought I was going to need them in the future.

  Vince went in and out of his wolf form with less frequency as the full moon approached, and more than once he asked, then demanded, and finally begged me to kill him. I still went down and sat with him three times a day or more, staring at the open viewing hatch. Sometimes he looked back at me with terrified, desperate eyes, and other times he snarled or panted and paced.

  I didn’t know what I was looking at, exactly. I had failed him somehow, and I felt like I needed to really feel it. I wanted to brand the sting of what I had done to him into my mind forever, because I couldn’t afford to do this to anyone else.

  This was irreparable damage, and I wanted to see every moment of it. I lost sleep staying awake to listen to him clawing his hands bloody against the walls. After a time, the confinement made him neurotic and he started to chew his fur from his body in red, saliva-soaked clumps, and I still watched.

  I cried for him, and because of him. I worried about whether or not he would be human again if he managed to kill himself, and if his body would bear the marks of his self-inflicted mutilations. I wanted to give a body back to his family if that happened, but I knew I couldn’t do it if he was torn to pieces. Or worse, if he was still a wolf.

  I pictured myself having to bury him in the ground in the wild, alone with Lyssa, Charlie, and Gates. I couldn’t put him in an unmarked grave like he was my dead pet dog. I couldn’t do that to him, or to his family.

  The full moon came, and Lyssa told us to take the charms and carry them with us, next to our skin, until we could bury them somewhere secret. No one could ever know where we put them, and as long as we never told, we would be safe from Stark’s meddling.

  The morning after the full moon was one of the most fearful of my life as the three of us stood outside the apartment door. Charlie sat just inside, having resumed life as a cat to allow Gates to return home for a few weeks and explain thin
gs to her mother. He had arranged her backstory for her.

  All that was left to do was leave the apartment.

  “You’re sure this will work?” she asked Lyssa.

  Lyssa nodded at her, then looked at me. “You’re sure you want me to go?”

  I was never more sure in my life. If there had been a way to make sure that the two of them went back to their families and never came back, I likely would have done it. But I had already asked Charlie, and they were too involved. Stark knew about them, and they were probably already on his list. There was no more harm to be done. Leaving now wouldn’t save them.

  Gates was leaving with an additional charm for her family, similar to the one that Kendra had put on my dad. Lyssa was taking another to use on Vince’s family. As long as they never found out about the existence of demons, they would be safe from them.

  Lyssa went out to her car and drove away. Gates went to a bus station to make her way home.

  I went out and drove to a place, took a walk, and eventually I dug a hole. I won’t say where. I try not to even think about it anymore. I said a silent prayer, and put the charm in it, and covered it back over.

  And then I went back to my apartment. Classes started the next day.

  Chapter 5

  Vince came out of his psychosis that night. When I asked, Charlie blinked his cat eyes and reset his little apartment in the basement back to the way it had started.

  Seeing him in a heap on the floor, in the middle of all the normalcy, was beyond surreal. He was at least ten pounds lighter than before, and I fretted that we hadn’t been giving him enough food. Charlie reassured me that he had offered everything he could think of, even live rabbits, but the wolf had refused.

  “Wild animals aren’t meant to be in captivity,” he apologized.

  Now dressed in sweatpants and a tee-shirt, Vince wordlessly accepted my help as I pulled one of his arms across my shoulders and steadied him as we walked up the stairs. I set him down at the table. With a vacant expression and sunken cheeks, he watched me go into the kitchen to fix dinner.