Witch Clan: Matriarchs, John Stormm [great reads txt] 📗

on it with her witch blade. The door opened on a room full of arcane devices, but empty of people.


A Night Of Darkling Heroes

As Leona and Johnny bolted out the door of the black tower, she plunged into the night fallen woods as quickly as she could, in her haste to get any kind of distance or obstacles between them and the Vough. The trail was nearly a hundred yards off to her left, but she thought it best to get out of sight quickly. From the cover of the trees, they watched for a moment to see if the Vough would chase them. It wasn't long before the elongated hag stepped out the door and shrieked her imprecations into the night.

"You think you can violate my home?" she screeched. "You snub my hospitality and steal my orb like the foul fiends your kind has always been. Curse you, wicked witchling brat and Sidhe devil. Curse you all." She shook her fist and ducked back into the tower door.

Leona released her breath she had been holding. Figuring the Vough might likely be along after them later, she would simply have to move through the woods parallel to the trail as opposed to being found easily on it. The forest was nearly black as pitch, and she couldn't negotiate the darkness quite as easily as her little cousin could. The orb in the scepter he carried glowed a dull orange but it was hardly real light to see by. She barely discerned the pisky perched on Johnny's right shoulder in the dim glow.

"Johnny, I can't see in this darkness," she said. "You're going to have to lead the way through the woods and take us to Grandma. She'll be somewhere in that direction and the trail will be over that way," she said, indicating to her left. "But I don't want to get too close until we're sure the Vough or her monster aren't looking for us there."

"Okay," Johnny said. "It's pretty rocky over this way, so we'll have to be careful. I can feel Grandma a long ways that way." He gestured in the direction Leona had originally told him to go.

For all of their intentions of stealth, they rustled branches, snapped twigs and stumbled over stones and logs picking their way through the darkness. This worked somewhat to their advantage as more than one or two forest denizens utilized the advance warning of their approach to leave the area. What doubts or fears she might have, Leona projected them outwards into the dark, and the dark "scratched its itch" and left her alone.

The night was wearing on and her legs were beginning to cramp from exhaustion. They stopped to rest for a while and shared the rest of Johnny’s grape Nehi and some sweet pears as they sat on a log and talked quietly.

“Grandma went back to fight a monster?” Johnny asked incredulously.

“Well, Elvyra is helping us where she can,” she said. “She helped us pack and told us how to find you. She’s a little snippish, but she’s not such a bad lady as I first thought.”

“Grandma was alone when I felt her,” Johnny said. “What happened to Auntie Vy?”

“She probably couldn’t make it across the flooded part,” she said. “The swamp flooded while we were crossing it and nothing can get through.”

“Then the monster can’t get to us either,” Johnny said relieved. “Grandma will be okay then.”

“You don’t think Grandma can kill a monster because she’s not a boy,” she accused him.

“Leona,” Johnny explained, “she is only a grandma with a nice knife, she’s not a hero in shining armor with a great sword. Grandpa would have a fit if he knew about this.”

“Grandpa Willard is probably worried sick about us being gone so long,” she said.

“I hope he’s not thinking that we don’t love him anymore,” Johnny said. “You can’t just get a grandpa like him just anywhere. Grandma says he’s one inna million.”

In the distance, the snap of large branches breaking gave them pause. Through the trees a bright blue light was moving through the forest in the direction of the tower. The sound of something huge followed close behind the light, moving swiftly. Occasionally it would slow and scream like a large cat and resume its chase.

“The monster?” Johnny whispered.

“I think so,” she replied. “I wonder where Grandma is, if he made it across the flood.”

Johnny was quiet for a minute and said, “That way.” He pointed in the direction the blue light had gone. Leona mused for a moment as the ruckus escalated on the distant trail. For a little boy who had just been knocked ten feet into an iron wall with a timber beam and a nail driven into the front of his head, he seemed a little bruised and bloody, but otherwise just fine. Just like Gregory who had been in rough condition when her and Grandma found him tangled in the giant spider web, but he was okay shortly after. Johnny's 'fae-dar' seemed to be intact as well. All he had to do was want his grandma and he knew instinctively just where he had to go. In the faery tales she had read and heard from her mother, the fae would live extraordinarily long lives, nearly immortal, but they could be killed in battle but live on afterwards in a disembodied form. From watching her cousin and their interactions, she surmised that if they weren't killed outright in such a battle, that they were capable of healing at a fairly rapid rate. How old might Johnny live if something didn't kill him first?

“Grandma is fighting the monster,” Johnny broke into her reverie.

“Is she okay?” she asked. “Is she winning?”

“I think she got hurt a little,” he said. “But I hope I never make her as mad as she is at that monster. She didn’t win, but she sure hurt ‘im alot. She’s running away now. Towards the tower. We got to go back to the Vough’s house. Oh, oh.” He finished as the sound of angry buzzing wings approached.

The orb in the scepter Johnny carried, began glowing brightly as if in answer to something in the air. Gregory drew his fighting thorn in his left hand and his new steel sword in his right and crouched on Johnny’s shoulder. His sharp little fangs bared in a fierce smile that burned in his eyes.

“How’d you light that thing?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he replied, glaring with his strange black eyes into the darkness beyond.

“But I did,” the Vough said as she stepped into the light of the orb. She was holding a wicked looking staff with what looked to be teeth and claws sticking out around the top of it. Numerous piskies, armed with thorns and spears surrounded them on all sides. Gregory crouched as if ready to spring, his tiny wings flexed upwards and ready for a strong downbeat. Johnny glared darkly at the Vough, so intensely that Leona even wanted to be somewhere far away from him. The Vough flinched back for a moment and cried for the piskies to attack.

“Strip the flesh off their bones,” the mad fae screamed.

Several of the piskies shook off the wall of fear that Johnny was generating and buzzed in at them with weapons drawn. Gregory leapt at the closest assailant, and twisting at the last instant, avoided the spear thrust. He then whirled around to take off the piskie’s head in a backhand strike with his shining sword. Seeing this strange new development, the piskies paused a moment in their attack, seeming uncertain who they feared most, the Vough or Johnny and their outcast cousin.

Leona took the moment's initiative to swing her staff with Grandma’s medallion still fastened to its top in a broad swing at the fierce piskie tribe. Most had dodged easily out of its path, but the one it caught off guard, exploded in a shower of blue sparks.

“I want them dead or I will feed your families to the spiders,” the Vough shrieked and advanced on them with her wicked staff at the ready.

Johnny, still glaring with one leg propped up on the log, held the glowing scepter in his tiny grip like a baseball bat. His teeth bared in a fierce grimace. Leona had never really noticed before, but her cousin had canines slightly longer than his other baby teeth. She didn’t get to look for long as he sprang off the log into the advancing Vough. Wielding the scepter as a club, he struck down the hag's staff in a blast of green sparks and caught her on the collarbone as he twisted around in midair. The Vough dropped her staff and fell backwards over a stone sprawling in the forest debris. Little Johnny came down on his feet and stood his ground with the glowing scepter cocked for another swing. The dark grin on her cousin’s face was not an expression Leona had ever associated with the sweet, blue eyed boy.

A sharp, burning pain shot through her left arm as an attacking piskie stabbed her with his fighting thorn. She wheeled and swung at it with her staff but he dodged her easily and stuck out his tongue at her. The expression melted away almost