The Source (Witching Savannah #2) 7

After the old hospital closed, children began disappearing in the night. My grandfather tracked the source of these disappearances down to Old Candler, and after weaving a protective barrier around the building, sort of a miniaturized model of the line itself, he’d walked away, not realizing that he had built a pressure cooker with no safety valve. Jilo had alerted me to the need to open a tiny hole in the spell, as too much pressure had built up inside the place. She had intended to tap into it, channeling the energy that escaped to replace her then-waning power.

Jilo had agreed to abandon this plan after I gave her enough of my own power to keep her going for another decade or so. If the old hospital had remained as empty and unused as it had been for decades, my family and I would have had plenty of time to work out the logistics of how to free the human spirits trapped there without letting loose whatever dark forces had been responsible for taking the children. The building’s sudden and expedited transformation into a law school was forcing our hand and making us act more quickly than we would have liked.

“Found anything?”

“As a matter of fact I have, but I keep misplacing things just as quickly as I find them. I swear, either these papers have a mind of their own, or I am going soft in the head.” Iris glanced down at a stack of files; her head tilted to the side and she pursed her lips. She appeared surprised by what she saw there, but then casually moved the files off to the side and began riffling thoughtfully through the other papers neatly displayed on the desk’s surface. A foreign word—Lebensborn—had been written on the top file of the stack she’d pushed aside. I didn’t speak a word of German, but I recognized it. Lebensborn was the Nazi breeding program that had aimed to increase the birthrate of their favorite flavor of Aryan. When they hadn’t been able to breed blue-eyed babies quickly enough to feed the Nazi machine, they’d started kidnapping them from neighboring countries.

I reached for the file. “Why would Granddad have a file on Lebensborn?”

“He had a taste for what he considered the oddities of history. You might enjoy looking through his papers when you have time.” She took the file from my hand and put it back where it had been on the stack. “Just please keep them in order if you do.”

“Did he ever mention Mama in his writings?” I watched her closely for a reaction, but rather than betraying any kind of shock, her face relaxed upon hearing my question.

“Of course he did. He mentions all of us, but his journals aren’t like personal diaries. They’re filled with history, ponderings, and his theories about magical processes. All the same, his personal life crept into his writings from time to time. Is there something in particular you were wondering about?”

“No. Just curious.”

She looked at me, and her lips pinched together, causing lines to form around them. If she knew my mother was alive, her face did not betray her. I saw only a well-worn sorrow there. “Here,” she said, handing me a journal bound in marbleized paper. “This is where he wrote about what he found at Old Candler.”

My eyes scanned down the page, taking in bits and pieces of the meticulous script that covered it. “Jilo was wrong in one sense,” Iris said. “She assumed that a collection of minor demons, perhaps even common boo hags, were behind the unpleasantness.” Iris seemed to remember my own unpleasant encounter with a “common” boo hag as soon as the words slipped off her tongue, but it was too late to swallow them. She took the tack of moving on quickly. “But it wasn’t. It was one single entity. A demon called Barron.”

“So this Barron is what Granddad trapped at Candler?”

“It’s all here,” Iris said, taking the journal from me and flipping a few pages, “in your grandfather’s journal. He did a lot of research into this beast before he confronted it. The demon we’re dealing with has quite a pedigree. He was brought to the New World by a slave trader—well, actually, in a slave trader. That’s one superstition with a grain of truth to it. Demons can’t cross running water on their own.”

“Good to know,” I said, meaning it sincerely. “But how did he—it—manage to get into our world in the first place? Isn’t the line supposed to protect us from creatures like him?”

“He was summoned. The line is like a net in more ways than one,” Iris continued. “It protects us from the most intense evil. But if a practitioner of magic—and note that I am not saying a witch—is powerful and determined enough, he can pry open a hole big enough to bring a smaller, less powerful force over the border. Barron was smuggled into our world by Gilles de Rais, an associate of Joan of Arc.”

I can describe what I knew about de Rais in a string of words: aristocrat, war hero, squanderer of one of the greatest financial fortunes of his era, pedophile, and serial killer. I shuddered at the thought of the scores of children he had slaughtered to feed his twisted desires; it was no shock that he’d seek to align himself with a demon. “If Barron was small enough to slip past the line, he should be easy to handle, though, no?”

“Please remember, when we speak of this demon as being small, it doesn’t mean that he’ll be easily managed or dispatched. It means that while he’s a murderer and defiler, he isn’t necessarily capable of ending the world as we know it. Barron’s power has grown during his time in our world. Our goal is to return him to where he originated, but we will not find it easy to send him anywhere he doesn’t want to go. I’m beginning to see why Dad settled for containment versus expulsion. His research led him to the conclusion that it would require the sacrifice of an innocent to even get Barron to appear for the banishing spell.” My hand slid protectively over my stomach. “Precisely,” Iris said.

She returned the journal to the table and went to sit in one of the high wingback chairs. “Enough about this demon for now. How are you doing?” Her body language was textbook perfect. She leaned back comfortably, placed her arms on the chair so that her upper body remained open and her shoulders relaxed. She tilted her head slightly to the right and focused on me. Whether her posture was contrived or sincere, she was showing that she was there for me, present, listening, nonjudgmental.

“I’m fine. I’m good.”

Iris nodded to acknowledge my reflexive response. “It’s only that I sense there’s something you might want to share with me. Unburden yourself, perhaps?” My mind jumped first to my mother, and it took all of my self-control not to parrot Iris’s words right back at her. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that betraying my mother’s confidence to my aunt would bring me harm, but it bothered me more than a little that I couldn’t completely shake the fear—no matter how small—that my aunts might turn my mother over to the families. Whatever Iris’s reason for doing so, be it mendacity on Ginny’s part or duress, she had sided against my mother before. I bit my lip. Hard. Then my memory rewound further to the incident with Peadar. Did Iris know about any of it? Or maybe she was just fishing, like she used to do when Maisie and I were young? She’d sense something wasn’t quite right, and let on that she knew what the issue was, tricking us into spilling the beans.

I smiled and shook my head. “No, I’m good.” I could have, maybe should have, told her about Peadar, but I was afraid of where the discussion might lead. I had begun accumulating all these little bits and pieces of my life that I didn’t feel safe sharing, and I hated that.