Witch Clan: Matriarchs by John Stormm (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📖

to fade away."

“We’re all okay, dear,” she confirmed. “In fact, it’s early in the morning. Let’s all go downstairs and get some breakfast. Maybe some tea and toast. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Leona nodded and Emma helped the girl find her slippers and housecoat to go downstairs. Getting Leona seated at the kitchen table while the teapot was heating, she then went to check on Willard and Johnny.

“Is he okay, Willard?” she asked.

“He was awake when I found him,” Willard replied, holding his grandson close and rocking him gently. “He couldn’t seem to talk and his eyes... I never seen his eyes get like that.”

“What about them?” Emma asked, sidling closer to them both.

“They were black,” Willard said. “Like looking down a deep well.”

“They don’t look bruised or anything,” she muttered to herself while examining her grandson’s tired and tear stained face.

“Not bruised,” Willard insisted. “His eyes had no blue, no whites, only a deep, deep blackness.” He shuddered.

“This sounds like a dream all of us are better to wake from,” she concluded. “Leona’s in the kitchen waiting for tea and toast. Let’s all join her.”

“I’ll make the coffee,” Willard volunteered.

Johnny looked exhausted, as if he had crawled back from the pits of hell. Emma could only wonder at what his young eyes might have seen this night. She helped him into his slippers and robe and relief only came when she saw his tired smile light his face when he saw his cousin at the kitchen table. Some black tea with milk and sugar along with some toast and bramble berry jam were the medicines called for this morning. The invigorating brew and the sweet preserves did much to bolster the children from their lethargy and night terrors. As the sun rose with the new morning, the household was beginning to resume some normalcy. But some issues were demanding to be resolved, and she wasn’t sure of how that was going to happen.

It was a warm Saturday morning and promising to be a beautiful summer day. Willard thought a daytrip to Sea Breeze would be the best thing to clear a child’s mind of the dark dreams that plagued them all. He would let them ride on all the amusement park’s attractions and play in the penny arcade to their heart’s desires. Down the block they could catch a bus that would drop them off at the front gate of the park and then bring them back home later. Emma had elected to stay home and take care of some chores and ponder the situation while Willard and the children enjoyed some quality time together.

Opening all the windows and putting a sprig of rosemary in each pillowcase and a sachet of fragrant herbs on each windowsill sweetened the disposition of the house as she cleaned rooms and made beds. A pinch of salt, flicked off the end of her witch blade along with a whispered prayer at the four corners of her property set her boundaries for protection. Only then did she relax and take tea under the pear tree and considered all the omens.

Elvyra figured heavily into all these dreams and portents. Whether she was warning of a threat, or the actual threat herself was as yet to be determined. Johnny, by his non-human traits, was a key figure in this threat. Crossing over into the Otherworld was where it would all begin... or end. Was it his abduction, or the darkness that might bring about that posed the real threat? Leona was undoubtedly tied into this, though probably as a result of her relationship to her fae cousin and her affinity for faeries. The bottom line that all the Fates drew was that she as Matriarch would be held responsible for whatever came of this and was forearmed as much as forewarned. If she only knew why this was happening, as opposed to what was happening, she would have a better idea of how to prepare to deal with it. Perhaps her mother’s gazing bowl could provide her with some answers.

She found the plain wooden bowl her mother used in a cupboard in her summer kitchen. She took the bowl, a cup of water and a bottle of brandy with her to the living room and set them on the coffee table in front of her favorite chair and pulled the curtains closed to dim the light in the room. Sitting, she relaxed and took a few good breaths and expelled them to center herself, allowing the questions on her mind to come to the fore as she poured water into the gazing bowl. When the water settled and calmed she added a single drop of the brandy. Instantly, the surface changed as the liquor mixed with the water of its own accord.

Instead of the water growing brighter in the bowl as when they had cast so often into the faery world of Gwynydd, it clouded and became dark as ink. This was not the faery Otherworld, nor was it this one. It dawned on her, as the dark and twisted shapes stretched forth in the gazing bowl that this might be Annwn (An-noon), a hellish plane of damned souls and foul spirits. She fought to keep an open mind as she looked deeper into the bowl to find the source of the disturbance to her household. A twisted dark forest of moving phantasmal shapes beckoned her. A black trail tunneled through the agonized trees deeper into the haunted forest to end finally at a cliff before a yawning chasm. A twisted obsidian tower stood at its edge as though it had been, and would be there, for all time. As she scrutinized the inky facing of the tower, a woman’s reflection appeared on the time polished surface. It was definitely not her own. The red haired, green eyed vision of her mother with a white forelock spoke as clearly as if in the next room.

“Go back,” the woman shouted. “Only evil awaits you here!”

Stunned as if she had just touched an electrified fence, Emma fell back in her chair and kicked the bowl over onto the floor. Looking down, she was relieved to see only water on her hardwood floor and not ink. She missed her mother’s presence mightily. Had that desire influenced the vision to appear or was someone or something playing dirty in order to better hurt her? She grabbed an old towel and cleaned up her mess. She put the bowl and brandy away, but not before pouring herself a small libation of the brandy to calm her nerves. But now she had more questions than when she began searching. She sat and meditated a moment or so with her drink and got up to prepare dinner for the family when they would return from their daytrip.

* * *

Emma pulled some muffins mixed with pieces of sweet pear from the oven to add to her fare of breaded pork chops, au gratin potatoes and string beans from her garden when Johnny came bursting in to the kitchen wearing a cowboy hat and shoving a huge calico kitty stuffed toy in her face.

“Grandma,” he yammered excitedly, struggling to hold up his prize. “I won this for you.”

“That’s a pretty big kitty to come from such a little boy,” she exclaimed, accepting his prize. “How did you win this?”

“I shot a bumble bee,” he declared proudly. “And then I shot a whole bunch of ducks too.”

“ Eagle eyed Johnny the Kid--” Willard announced coming in-- “the toughest sharp shooter east of the Genesee River.”

“That’s me,” Johnny said in his cowboy voice, swaggering and tucking his thumbs into the waistband of his dungarees.

“Grandpa taught him how to shoot a BB rifle at the shooting gallery,” Leona said while unloading armloads of kewpie dolls and assorted booty. “and Johnny shot all the ducks for prizes. Then the man told him if he could hit the bumble bee, he could have any toy he wanted. He gave Johnny three tries and he got it in two, so he picked out the big kitty for you.”

“Well, I hope all my wild west heroes have saved some room for supper,” Emma said.

“Grandpa said no more treats after two o’clock and the man at the shootin’ gallery said I couldn’t win no more prizes today,” Johnny explained. “So I’m hungry enough to eat myself a bar,” he said in his cowboy voice.

“Maybe just a little bear for me, Grandma,” Leona said, giggling at her cousin’s antics.

“I was beginning to wonder what those tin ducks might taste like all afternoon,” Willard said, snatching his grandson’s cowboy hat off his head. “Git yourself washed up there, Cowpoke, and set down for some good grub. I’ll race ya to wash off at the horse trough.” Johnny dashed to beat his grandfather to the bathroom sink.

“All afternoon.” Leona sat down at the table and rolled her eyes at her grandmother. “I felt like I was living with a midget Hop-along Cassidy and a full sized Gabby Hayes. I don‘t know how you cope with them, Grandma.”

“Tarnation iffen I kin figure that one out myself, ma’am,” she said, mocking her grandson and tucking her thumbs in her apron strings. “I just runs the chuck wagon and they just runs the doggies.” She and Leona fell to laughing as the sharply contrasted men folk arrived fresh from the proverbial horse trough wondering what they had missed.

Dinner went over well as Willard and the children were all in high spirits from the day’s activities. After the kitchen was cleaned up and everybody had a snack of milk and muffins, Willard and the children went to bed exhausted while Emma sat out on her bench in the garden and wondered into the night. Why would her mother appear to tell her that anything at all, awaited her in Annwn? What would any such thing have to do with Johnny? His ancestry is of this plane of Abred and of Gwynvyd. What could possibly even suspect his existence in that dark and twisted world? Will her