Whiskey Storm (Whiskey Witches Midnight Rising Book 1)

by F. J. Blooding

  “Sorry,” the kid shouted back.

  They were going to need to stock up on toilet paper.

  Ew. And probably flush the septic.

  Which—wait. They didn’t have water without a pump, so how was the toilet working?

  No. She didn’t care. It was working and that’s all that mattered. She just needed to accept it.

  Right.

  But toilet paper. She could add that to her worry list.

  She was really interested to know how the—wait.

  Balnore had just made tea.

  With the stove.

  She really did have electricity. She ran to her charge cord and plugged in her phone, not knowing how long the power would last. “Okay. Well, I need to know how to remain in the fight. We’re headed toward war and whatever those mages use, it’s affecting me.”

  “It’s not—” Balnore licked his lips as the kid who’d ran to the bathroom came out.

  He smiled apologetically and waved. “Hey.”

  Paige replied with her eyebrows.

  Bal continued after the boy closed the sliding glass door. “You know that the original magick users blended the blood lines.”

  “I did read that.” Though, it felt more like reading the Book of Genesis.

  “Well, they were trying to create a witch powerful enough to wield both elemental and the ley line energies.”

  Fuck. No. “You’re trying to tell me I can do that?”

  “No. It can’t be done unless you’re… well, more than human. But I am telling you that you’re the closest thing we’ve had to achieving that in a really long time.”

  That wasn’t what Paige had wanted to hear.

  “Let me give you a brief history of what happened in the previous attempts to blend the lines.” Witches had gone crazy, and magick itself had seemed to “infect” the magick user. The things they’d done sounded like Doctor Moreau’s Island.

  “Infect?” He had to be kidding.

  Balnore nodded, an apologetic twist to his lips as he continued. The world’s history was filled with their attempts. Small disasters throughout the lands. Entire civilizations that just “disappeared” for no apparent reason.

  “The two energies are not intended to mix.”

  She hadn’t missed what he’d also said. In humans. “So, I can absorb the ley line energy.”

  “It appears so.”

  “But it affects my shift.”

  “Most likely because your shifter spirit is almost purely elemental.”

  “But if they’re throwing it at me, what am I supposed to do?”

  Balnore looked up at the ceiling as if in patience. “The previous witches capable of ley line absorption went insane. The last one devoured an entire town.”

  Wait. “Devoured?”

  Balnore licked his lips. “There wasn’t anything left of it. Ley line magicks are very powerful and very pure and are a direct connection to the earth. Mages can tap into it because they are disconnected from it, but a witch, an elemental witch, connects to the elements. The energies touch her soul. And that is what makes it so very dangerous.”

  So, in other words, in her attempt to save the world, she might very well…

  Devour it.

  Maybe the president was right to be afraid.

  25

  Paige invested the next few hours of relative peace and quiet while the kids slept to researching the books Elder Yad and Merry had brought, but Balnore was right. There were a lot of theories, but they hadn’t gotten close enough to record any real facts.

  But… if she could connect to the element earth and she could use its rawest of energy, shouldn’t that be a good thing? Shouldn’t she be able to use that to their advantage?

  Her predecessors had gone insane and, according to their journal entries, they hadn’t thought they were insane. So, maybe she was already suffering from something similar. What appeared like a good idea on the inside didn’t from the outside.

  Reading the accounts of what the witches said and how they acted sent chills down Paige’s spine. She knew where those witches had been mentally. They were viewing the world—the human world—through the eyes of something much bigger, more powerful than humans could ever comprehend.

  Their worries, their demands and commands, their needs were all so small and insignificant to the wide world. These puny things were so destructive and so insignificant at the same time. The world didn’t understand how something so minor could be so infective.

  She also discovered an entry predicting how the world of humans would end, with each human devouring the masses in a continual plague of greed and hunger.

  The zombie apocalypse.

  She doubted seriously this was the reason the craze for zombies had spread. She figured it had something to do with the fact that people weren’t stupid. They looked out at the sea of humanity and saw they generally had one thing in common—greed. And how would that greed win out? How would it play out?

  An apocalypse.

  Well, that was all rather riveting, but it just told her one thing.

  She needed to keep her magick out of the ley lines. Plain and simple. Mages needed to be mages. Witches needed to be witches. And it would just be good practice not to mix the two.

  Leslie came down the stairs with ruffled emotions. “Paige.”

  That single word shot out like a bullet. Paige got up, putting the books aside with a groan.

  The great thing about living with a bunch of other people you didn’t hate was that work got shared. Granted, it was bigger with all the people, but it was still done by more than one person. The sucky part of living with a bunch of people was that there were days when every little thing tended to irritate at least one person and that irritation cascaded through everyone else.

  And lately, Paige had been doing a lot of little things to irritate Leslie.

  Like not doing her own laundry. Or failing at dish duty. Or only making one meal a month. Little things.

  Paige was due for a Leslie explosion, so she screwed on her concerned-yet-deflected face and greeted her sister.

  Only to find Kammy walking behind Leslie, mostly naked.

  Taller than the day before.

  “What are your kids doing to mine?” Leslie stomped her booted foot from the last step and faced Paige full-on, her eyes filled with fury.

  “Oh, crap.” Whatever was going on with Bobby didn’t stop at just Bobby. Her to-do list suddenly changed priorities at a high-alert level. “I don’t know. I noticed it with Bobby, but we thought it was a prophet thing.”

  “A prophet thing?” Leslie’s tone rose with both eyebrows. “The kid grows like a normal person for two years and then suddenly shoots up like a beanstalk with a giant, and you think this is a prophet thing?”

  Paige didn’t even understand how she’d been in the same house with Kammy and not noticed he’d grown so much in such a short time. “Did this just happen?”

  “Yes.”

  Okay. So, if this was happening with the babies, what was going on with the other kids? She pulled out her phone and called the school. The receptionist was lovely as always—meaning she wasn’t—and informed her that her kids were fine. Leslie’s kids were fine. And no one was experiencing unusual growth spurts.

  Okay. Well, there went that thought. “They were all sleeping together?”

  Leslie nodded, her eye drooping with exhausted worry. She turned to Kammy, having fun with the stairs he struggled with just the day before.

  Paige herded the larger little boy up to the nursery.

  Bobby was curled up in his toddler bed and was now almost the same size as Tyler, and the twins were the size of three-year-olds.

  “This has to be proximity to the twins.” A thread of terror rolled over Paige. What if there was something wrong with the twins? She’d blown it off earlier, hoping beyond hope they’d be fine, that this was just their normal. But this was not normal.

  Leslie’s angry worry melted into worry-worry. “We
need to quarantine the twins.”

  Paige rubbed her head, not sure what to do or who to call. “I agree. The twins and I will…” Where would she take them? Where could she take them?

  “Pea.” Leslie took Paige’s shoulders and thunked her forehead to Paige’s. “You find a place where those two will be safe that’s far away from other kids. Far away. Totally safe. And then you come back because we can’t win this without you.”

  The full impact of the situation hit her. If she had to choose between leading a war and protecting her kids, she’d choose her kids.

  Leslie knew that and was telling her she understood.

  But at the same time, her kids wouldn’t be safer if Paige hid with the twins. Leslie was asking her to choose her.

  Fuck.

  Leslie’s body shook slightly. “I’ll take care of Bobby and Leah.”

  Paige closed her eyes, trying to find the right solution to this. Any solution.

  Leslie pulled back and gave Paige a look of solidarity.

  But it really wasn’t.

  Paige worked on gathering the twins.

  Bobby was a bundle of nerves and questions, but Leslie worked on wrestling him and Kammy into clothes from Tyler’s room.

  The twins were lethargic, which only fueled Paige’s growing panic. She didn’t know how to fix this. She had to carry them both around in human form. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t help get themselves dressed. She stole clothes from Bobby and Kammy since the twins were now the same size the toddlers had been just a few days ago.

  Who could she go to?

  With them in human form, she needed to take a car. But her car was… she didn’t know where. That was the problem with being part-time shifters. Sometimes, she needed a car to get to one place, and then she didn’t on the way back.

  She borrowed Leslie’s and hoped they had enough gas.

  She did.

  She could go to the Blackmans, but they had kids.

  She could to the Eastwoods, but… okay. She didn’t know they had kids, but she was pretty sure they probably did. It was a big coven.

  Shifters were out of the question. They always had kids. If they didn’t have any of their own, they usually took in strays.

  Dryads?

  She didn’t want to know if her kids would adversely affect other paranormals. Would they abnormally grow to the point that disease would infect the tree?

  No. Where?

  The Vaada Bhoomi. It’d be away from Paige, which she didn’t like. Her emotions were so thick around the idea of “abandoning” her kids again thanks to what had happened to her before. Her mother had taken Leah for five years. The guilt was brutal, but it wasn’t giving her the power of good decisions.

  The best thing for her twins and her other kids was to take them where they’d be safe, which…wasn’t with her. That didn’t make her a bad mom.

  It really didn’t.

  Paige continued to repeat that to herself as she drove to Cyn’s house.

  Cyn and Lynx came out to greet her.

  Lynx was warm and inviting, his cat ears poking out with his black hair pulled back in a manbun. They exchanged pleasant smiles of greeting and then the two of them carried the twins into the massive house.

  Cyn just kinda glared and held the door.

  It wasn’t that the woman was mean. She just really didn’t like Paige.

  She made a concerted effort to not “be an ass,” which was the way some people saw her. She was a focused individual who sucked at small talk, but with some people, like Cyn, that was necessary.

  So, in order to navigate Cyn to important things, they talked about events in town, even though each unfocused word grated on Paige’s already stretched nerves.

  She learned that Steve and Gary had rigged up a power system for the town and that there were sections open to the power grid. They’d already had a solar field and a wind farm nearby, but the locals had been reluctant to tie their city grid to it previously because of loopholes in legislation that no one really understood. But with those things out of the way, it was easy to get people talked into going green.

  Lynx was better at dealing with Paige. He frowned at her and interrupted Cyn with a hand on her thigh. “What’s wrong?”

  Paige filled them both in on what was going on with her twins.

  Cyn’s hand flew to her chest and her blue eyes rounded with alarm. “I’m not babysitting. I’m terrible with kids. Why bring them here?”

  Paige had run this through in her mind on repeat, trying to find a solution—any solution. The only thing that made sense was to send the twins to the spirit animal plane.

  She’d been warned these two were exceptionally powerful. What if the reason their little bodies were growing so much was because he animal spirits they contained were just too powerful for their tiny bodies? “I was wondering if your parents would be able to keep them in the Vaada Bhoomi until this blows over or I can find answers to what’s going on.”

  Cyn frowned, with a different shade of alarm. “You want my parents to watch your kids in the Vaada Bhoomi?”

  “Yes.” No. Paige didn’t have unfettered access to the spirit plane, so she’d have to ask permission to see her twins when she could spare time.

  First, Dexx. Now, this?

  Her heart hurt with emotions she couldn’t allow to rule her. That, in and of itself, pissed her off. “They’re half shape-shifter, so being over there with the other shifters might help stabilize their growth? Or maybe there’s something in the library that might give us some information on what’s going on with them.”

  A different kind of alarm crashed over Cyn’s face. “You’re afraid the growth won’t stop?”

  Paige stared in the face of the possible mortality of her newborn twins with uncertainty. “Yes.”

  Cyn slapped her palms against her thighs and stood up. “Well, that I can help with. I think. Let’s see.”

  Cyn took Rai, who was still sleeping, and Lynx took Ember, who was blinkingly awake. They went to the bedroom and to the closet door, which served as a permanent portal. Cyn opened it and walked through like nothing.

  Paige settled her resolve—she wasn’t a bad mom. She wasn’t—and went through.

  Cyn and her dad greeted each other, and they talked about the things he’d discovered. He was busy cataloguing the many artifacts stored in this castle. The room had changed a lot since the last time Paige’d seen it. It was organized now. Things were labeled.

  And it was a lot bigger, as if it grew with their needs.

  They all walked through the castle to the library, which was huge. How were they going to find anyone in here?

  Cyn and Arthur seemed to be well practiced at this, though. They didn’t ring any bells or announce their arrival. They simply walked in and maneuvered through the stacks and stacks and stacks of books that rose toward the high ceiling and found her within minutes.

  “You want us to…” Charlotte blinked her green eyes and shook her blonde head as if trying to clear the fog from her mind. “I don’t understand.”

  “I just need to see if there’s any information in here that would explain their rapid growth,” Paige said as clearly as possible, her patience thin and growing thinner. “And the growth of the kids around them.” She had to be with her twins, but she also needed to be with Leah and Bobby. “And to see if their lives are in danger.”

  “Just.” Charlotte released a petulant sigh and tipped her head with a frown at Arthur. “And you want us to keep the children here?”

  No. Paige didn’t want that at all. She wanted her twins with her. “We’re at war. So, yes. Unless you think that taking them into battle would be safer while their lives and the lives of their siblings and cousins are already in danger because of this, then sure. Yeah. I’ll take them with me.”

  Charlotte licked her lips and glanced away. “I’m sorry.”

  Paige gnashed her teeth together in frustration. “Sorry. I’m just—” She couldn’t finish what she wa
s about to say because the words were meaningless.

  Charlotte nodded with a big breath, as if settling the weight of responsibility on her shoulders.

  It was a lot for Paige to ask of practically a complete stranger. “I’m hoping they’ll be safer here because of their shifter side. Their animal spirits are very strong.”

  “Thunderbird and rajasi,” Arthur said.

  “Yes.” Maybe that had something to do with this? Their spirit animals needed to get their little bodies big enough to handle them? She didn’t know.

  I will remain here, Cawli’s voice said inside her mind.

  “Who is that?” Charlotte asked, spinning around.

  Huh?

  Paige turned, trying to figure out what Charlotte was hearing.

  And saw a cat. The creature had very interesting markings, an array of dark stripes along its belly and odd spots along its back.

  But those eyes? She knew those eyes. “Cawli?”

  He nodded his little cat head. I can stay here with the twins and help keep them in line.

  “Well, that would be…” Charlotte looked up at Arthur, her eyes wide. “…helpful.”

  “You’re a cat?” Paige couldn’t quite wrap her head around the fact that her big-feeling spirit animal who was so powerful was so… small. He was the same size as a large house cat.

  I am. This is my first form.

  Huh. Well, she could stand there and gape, or she could get on with the business of abandoning her kids.

  She really had to stop saying it like that.

  I agree. You are doing what is best for them. You are not abandoning them.

  Arthur set Ember down and gave Paige an awkward hug.

  She fought it for a moment and then accepted what he offered.

  He pulled back. “We will watch over them and we keep them safe.”

  “And,” Charlotte said, placing her hand on Paige’s arm, her expression filled with caring, “we will look for an answer.”

  “Thank you,” Paige whispered around the knot in her throat.

  Then, she kissed each of her sleeping kids, tears threatening to spill out, sobs threatening to take over—

  And walked away.