Sorcerers & Sumac (Hawthorn Witches Book 2) Read online

  I shifted uneasily. “I’m not a warlock.” Was I?

  Charlie laid a hand on the table and started to toy with the cup stirrer in his coffee. “You make a better warlock than a witch right now, Thorn. But no, not unless you choose to be.”

  I didn’t like the sound of it. Even Charlie had a pretty negative view of warlocks, and he had openly admitted that working for one was a dream job for a demon.

  I didn’t want to be a warlock. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be a witch, or if I even could be a witch, given how little I had actually accomplished in the magical realm. I had decided, in all of the angst-ridden time when Charlie had abandoned me, that all I wanted was to learn was enough. Just enough to set things back the way they were meant to be. Then I was done.

  I wanted to go back to my life before demons and cats and crazy rules about how I had to acquire strange things at inconvenient hours. I didn’t want to worry about my best friend being a cat or my demon wanting to die. I just wanted to go to college and sit up late wondering when Vince was going to call me.

  Charlie sensed my stress and started a casual conversation about how Stonefall was one of the most densely populated towns he had ever encountered as far as Touched people went. I had laughed at first, but then he had explained.

  It was a town that witches had heavily settled, which explained why Kendra had chosen to buy a greenhouse only a couple of hours away. The magical cast-off from all of their activity drew in the others—the werewolves, the vampires, the demons, and every other strange creature in every fairy tale I had ever read. Normal people thought the town was weird…because it was. The people here were eccentric because they lived under their own social covenants, and drug use had only been a convenient cover-up to what was really going on.

  “They keep their lives quiet when they can,” Charlie said. “Warlocks are only one of a handful of predators that they might wish to avoid, so they spend a lot of time trying to look like everyone else.”

  “Demons?” I asked with a hint of a smile. My coffee was nearly gone, and the night was wearing down to a comfortable place. I hated to admit it, but there was some glee in thinking that I didn’t have to drive home. When we were done, Charlie was just going to snap his fingers, and I’d either find myself in bed or a stone’s throw from it.

  “Dragons too,” Charlie smiled back at me. “Even werewolves sometimes prefer a degree of Touched prey. I’ve seen them go after the Fae, for example, and the Fae tend to consume any magical outlet they can find. Especially blessed fauna, which is why the witches tend to protect their gardens so fiercely, and why Kendra chose to build her greenhouse a little out of the way. There’s a whole ecosystem of terror to suppress knowledge of who’s a what. If there wasn’t, then everyone would know about them.”

  I nodded, looking down at my coffee. The world I had fallen into was much bigger and stranger than I had anticipated. It made complete sense that the magical beings of the world had their own magical predators to hide from; it explained why they tried and so often succeeded at looking like perfectly normal people.

  “Why did you ask me to give my number to Vince?” I asked. “I mean, if Walter already felt threatened by me, then it had to look like a suspicious move.”

  “Because of the way you were looking at him,” Charlie grinned. “You need to relax, Thorn. I don’t know who told you that life was a race, but they were wrong. You need to put your enjoyment ahead of your priorities some days. And I was serious about him helping you with your math. He’s really going to enjoy those puns on your underwear. Punderwear. Ha.”

  I cocked my head, unsure if I was more horrified or intrigued. “You didn’t do anything to him, did you?”

  “No. Did you want me to?”

  I busied my mouth with my coffee, trying to think of the best way to say it, but thankfully, Charlie moved the conversation along.

  “I didn’t, anyway. And I won’t tell you if you will or not, since you seem to like surprises where I’m not the feature. We do need to get back, now. You need your sleep before work tomorrow.”

  I had nearly forgotten about work, but he was right. I had watering to do in the morning, and likely inventory and re-stocking, too. I downed the last of my coffee, and then blinked to discover I was back in my dimly lit apartment. Gates had fallen asleep watching a strange late-night infomercial for a device that claimed to make growing lucky bamboo “so easy that a baby could do it.”

  And for the first time, I wondered if lucky bamboo was really lucky. Perhaps only if it was a gift from a witch?

  I turned off the television and left Gates alone, stripping out of my clothes and getting straight into bed. I dozed and worried, staring at the ceiling for a minute or two, and then drifted off into a sweet slumber.

  ~~~~~~~~~

  Work the next day started off badly. I arrived at the greenhouse to find a huge puddle—more like a small pool—in the middle of the annuals. Lyssa’s car was there, but she was nowhere to be seen, so I tracked back the leak to a crack in the casing of the automated watering system we had installed. When all of the craziness with Charlie had happened, we decided the investment was worth it to keep the plants from dying if we were too busy handling a demon to water by hand.

  I turned the water off, removed the automated device, and then took it inside and brought back out some signs and rope barriers to keep people from accidentally walking into the sinkhole.

  Then I went into the office to look for the warranty information, and found Lyssa wearing a bathrobe and sitting at an altar in a circle of lit pillar candles.

  “Did you take care of the hose outside?” she asked.

  “Hi,” I said, carefully stepping around the candles to get to the desk. “Good morning. Nice to see you. What the hell are you doing?”

  But even as the words left my mouth, I saw the crushed marigolds and the melted wax, and I knew.

  “You’re looking for Kendra?”

  Lyssa raised her hands to rub at her eyes, and I wondered how long she had been staring into the crystal.

  “I can’t find her,” she said miserably, raising a knee and resting her arm on it.

  “Well,” I said sourly. “To our knowledge, she is dead, so…”

  “Yeah,” Lyssa laughed a little. “I just… This is too much for me to handle. Have you figured out what he’s really doing with the hair yet?”

  I took a deep breath and sighed. The broken sprinkler had completely occupied my thoughts. “Yeah. He’s trying to kill himself.”

  I dug through a desk drawer, trying to find the little card that had come with the automated timer.

  “He said that?”

  I looked over to see Lyssa watching me.

  I gave a little shrug. “Not in so many words. He said he wants to be human so he can die.”

  Lyssa pursed her lips and shook her head. “Oh, Charlie…”

  “Why do you care?” I furrowed my brow. “You hate him.”

  Shaking her head, Lyssa stood and started to blow out the candles. “You’re right.”

  Finally pulling out the warranty card, I stood up and looked at the circle again.

  “I never used candles when I did it with Charlie.”

  She gave a rueful smile. “Yeah, well, Charlie isn’t exactly teaching you witch magic. He’s a warlock’s aid.”

  I considered that for a minute. “You think I might have more luck using candles?”

  She extinguished the last pillar with a quick blow, and then stood up and laughed at me, gathering her clothes from where they were wadded up in the corner. “Annie, please. You’re years away from being able to do something this complicated.”

  I stepped out of the office so that she could get dressed, and went to the phone at the front to call in my complaint. By the time I was done, the first customers had stepped in and Lyssa had come out looking like a normal, mainstream person again. She handed me a piece of paper and took to the counter to check out a customer.

  “Annie, could
you go and unload that shipment of orchids in the back?” she said with a perfectly charming smile.

  I smiled back and nodded, sliding the piece of paper between my fingers as I went.

  When I got to the back, I opened it to find a list of supplies.

  Collect these for me before the end of today, please.

  5 pink poppy petals

  Orange seed

  Snap dragon roots

  Onion blossoms

  27 evergreen needles

  I raised my eyebrows. We had these things, and it wasn’t going to take me all day to collect them. It was hardly going to take me fifteen minutes. Then I turned the list over.

  Hand-woven natural fiber rope

  Fresh peppermint oil

  An old iron key

  Wind in a jar (just let the wind blow in and then cap it)

  Natural ice (try the river by Sprucely further west, or ask Charlie)

  Living Sumac

  Milk

  Eggs

  Bread

  Bananas

  Diet Soda

  I sighed. This probably would take me all day, or longer. I didn’t know how to test the freshness of peppermint oil, and I was slightly annoyed that the last five items looked like her grocery list.

  Charlie had me collecting supplies, and now Lyssa. I was an intern getting sent on perpetual magic coffee runs.

  Setting my teeth on edge, I turned around to find Charlie standing directly behind me, reading over my shoulder, and it didn’t even make me jump anymore.

  “You rang?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” I grumbled.

  “Lyssa did…” He snatched the list from my hand. “ ‘River by Sprucely…or ask Charlie’…that’s sweet. I’m starting to grow on her.”

  I grabbed the list back. “Have you been teaching me warlock spells instead of witch ones?”

  “You know I have,” he said with a frown. “It’s faster. You’ve told me repeatedly you just want to get this done as fast as possible. Why? You suddenly care about the brand?”

  “Should I?” I asked.

  He crossed his arms and leaned in. “Not if you’re planning to stop using it soon. Are you planning a longer stint, Thorn? A career, maybe?”

  I felt the smile twitch at my lips, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, because it always came back to this question.

  I knew that I didn’t want to be practicing warlock magic, though I didn’t know why. I knew that I didn’t want to use magic at all…though I didn’t know why. Somehow it felt like a forbidden fruit. Maybe it was because the one major spell I had worked had resulted in Charlie, and that made me believe that magic carried a heavier penalty for use than I was willing to bear.

  “No,” I said finally. “But no more warlock spells. Understood?”

  He cocked his head, and his smile only grew. “Understood. Shall we?”

  A cold wind told me I wasn’t in the greenhouse anymore.

  Chapter 7

  I looked down and saw that I was standing on snow, and when I looked up, the glare off of the landscape nearly blinded me. I was staring at a horizon line that was a crisp blue above and shocking white below.

  Charlie shoved a mini cooler and a hand spade at me. “Natural ice, Thorn. Hop to.”

  I raised a hand to cover my eyes, still blinking against the sudden bright light, but another cold blast told me that even though Charlie had given me a cooler and a spade, he had neglected to provide me a coat or a hat and gloves.

  I dropped to my knees and scooped several shovels full into the cooler and shut it, and then felt the air go warm again.

  We were back in the office, and I was kneeling in front of the old refrigerator where we kept our lunches and a selection of cold sodas and bottled water for the hot summer days. I stood up and stowed the cooler in the freezer, and just as I turned around, the lights turned out.

  I was in the Other Side.

  Staring around, I realized that I was in a new room—some new place in Charlie’s vast network of castle that I hadn’t been before. Thick glass panes surrounded me in a rough dome. I must have been in Charlie’s concept of a greenhouse. A few panels stood open on ingenious little hinges, and today, they let in moonlight and brisk night air instead of rain to complement the mood set by the candelabras.

  A heavy wooden door behind me opened silently and then banged against the wall to announce Charlie’s presence. He marched in holding the bag that I had received from the tea house host the night before, and set it on the table, gesturing me over.

  “Moonlight roses are difficult to keep if you don’t have a demon, but fortunately, you have,” he said, opening the bag and withdrawing a small clay pot.

  In it sat one of the saddest little rosebushes that I had ever seen. The leaves looked yellow and stunted, the thorns were massive, and each tiny little bud was a sickly, creamy white. It reminded me of an aquarium of blind cave fish that I had seen once at the zoo in Denver.

  He set it carefully on the table and looked at me.

  “These aren’t doing so well,” he said. “Heal them.”

  I raised my eyebrows skeptically. “Heal them? With what? You said that magic didn’t work in the Other Side.”

  “I said that spellwork couldn’t be performed in the Other Side, and that particularly pertained to the summoning spell I was trying to teach you. One can’t summon people to the Other Side. If one could, then there wouldn’t be much need to go to Earth ever, would there?” He didn’t smile. “You said you wanted to learn witch magic. So heal the roses.”

  “How?”

  “You tell me.” This time, he did relax into just a hint of a grin. “It’s been different for every witch I’ve encountered. Witches don’t tend to congregate or proselytize, so each one is a solo practitioner who creates her own mechanisms to get the job done. Find a way to heal a plant, and you’re on your way.”

  “I’m supposed to be getting that stuff for Lyssa…” I said.

  “I’ll get it,” Charlie said. “She invited me in her note, so there shouldn’t be a problem. You attend to these.”

  I pulled up a nearby stool, and stared down the night-blind roses. “But…how?”

  “You’ll figure something out,” he said, walking away. “You’ve got all the time in the world.”

  I sat down and stared at them again, certain that nothing was going to happen. I was going to sit here all day, get tired, and then Charlie would take me back to Earth just in time to screw up my sleep schedule because I was going to be exhausted enough for a full night’s rest at eight in the morning.

  I didn’t bother staring for long, because I knew from all my time gazing into a quartz crystal that staring didn’t do me any good. Instead, I got up and wandered the greenhouse, looking at the strange collection of things that were all either thriving or dying in the perpetual night of the Other Side.

  There was a table with eggs the size of bowling balls, all sitting in their own glass bowls and surrounded by large wads of gray-green moss. They looked more or less like normal bird eggs, perhaps a little more elongated, but they smelled like burnt toast and seemed to give an unsettling twitch every so often.

  There were vines that grew up one wall and out an open window, and through the transparent side of the greenhouse I could just make out the wobbly, glass-distorted forms of large, orange, star-shaped flowers. Little pots were scattered around beneath the tables on the floor, and each one seemed to hold a different type of fern, flower, or thorny monstrosity.

  Against one wall, there was a patch of ground where the stonework floor had been pushed up and out of the way by a medium-sized tree, which I immediately recognized as some sort of sumac. It had large, bright red drupes all over that seemed to glow spectacularly in the dim light.

  I was drawn to it by the beauty, and saw when I got closer that Charlie had taken all of the stones from the floor up and stacked them in a spot away from the tree, letting the dainty little trunk and roots have more roo
m to grow. I reached out and touched one of the velvety branches, and much to my surprise, each bob on the tree seemed to grow brighter for a moment.

  I withdrew my hand, but the bobs stayed alight, shedding a pink and red light brighter than the candles across the rest of the greenhouse. On the floor around it, the flowers in the little clay floor pots seemed to respond with their own light. It was dazzling.

  “Living sumac.”

  I turned around. Charlie had returned, and he set down a tray with bread, two cups, and a pitcher on the table next to him.

  “It’s on your sister’s list,” he said solemnly. “I’d be happy to let her have some, or else we can find one back on Earth.”

  I turned back to stare at the glowing tree. “This isn’t a normal sumac…”

  Charlie smiled and scoffed a little. “It is. It just knows you’re here. Kendra left that one behind for my collection. Sumac is a common charm for consumables, like tea. Of course, most warlock spells call for the poison variety.”

  “But…” I was having trouble keeping my eyes on Charlie; the tree was just so beautiful. “Why is it glowing?”

  “I told you, it knows you’re here.” He lifted the pitcher and poured both of us a drink, then walked over and set one cup in my hand as we continued to admire the light. “It knows its family. Kendra gave this tree life. It’s welcoming you.”

  “Trees can think?!”

  “Trees grown here can, on a very basic level.” He took a drink from his cup, and I drank from mine. It was a mint tea. “Good work on the roses, Thorn.”

  Frowning, I turned and glanced behind me. The pathetic little primrose bush had deepened in color, and every bloom had opened. It still looked…strange, somehow, but it was beautiful.

  “I didn’t…” I started.

  “I didn’t,” Charlie said. “So you must have.”

  He glanced at me, and then back at the tree, and gave a rueful smirk.

  “Sometimes,” He grabbed a pair of clipping shears stowed with other tools in an old clay pot from a nearby table. “You just need an interpreter.”