The sweet scent of the gardenias encasing the porch drowsed Olympia like a lullaby. She rocked back and forth in her rocking chair, listening to the summery sounds of nature’s tenants chirping in the trees and buzzing in the grass. On her porch stood several potted hibiscus plants, each sporting blooms of yellow, orange, and pink. Along the balustrades of the porch the sun shone over several overflowing planters of zinnias, brightly colored like the day itself. The potted dahlias in red, yellow, and tangerine sprinkled down the wide front steps. Olympia glanced down from the porch to a patch of lawn where butterfly bushes in high bloom seemed to be attracting far more bumblebees than butterflies.

  She leaned back and thought of the night before when Reverend Collins and his daughter made their hasty retreat from the house shortly after dinner. She thought of the poor girl. Vanessa seemed nice. She appeared to genuinely care for Seth. Olympia understood the child would have quite a battle with her father if she pursued the relationship. Olympia hoped she would. In her own youth, she’d had quite a few rounds with her sister when Olympia chose to marry John Windham. But in the end her sister accepted John. Or pretended to at least. Looking back now, Olympia had to admit that her sister Pastoria was probably right about that union. It had been fraught with conflict. But she acquired three beautiful children from those days which made it all worthwhile.

  In the oak tree by the driveway, a squirrel was being chased away from a nest by a protective mother bird. Olympia smiled as she continued to rock. She thought of her own brood. Her children, her grandchildren, and little Michael. Her first great grandson. She stopped rocking. The feeling which had begun last night was growing now. Salem. Something was terribly off regarding Salem.

  “Artemis! Demitra!”

  “Mother, what’s wrong?” Demitra cried rushing outside.

  “Salem!” Olympia shouted. “Demitra, do you feel Salem?”

  Demitra closed her eyes. “I don’t.”

  “I don’t either,” Olympia said.

  Artemis came outside now, dish towel in hand from the morning wash. “What’s happening?”

  “We need to do a thread,” Olympia said. “Right now.”

  It only took a few minutes to rouse Seth out of bed and get him downstairs to the kitchen table. The other Blanchard’s were at work, but they didn’t need to be physically present for a thread. It would reach them wherever they were.

  “What’s going on?” Seth asked as his aunts clasped his hands in their own and then took Olympia’s.

  “I’m not certain,” his grandmother replied. “Something is off. The balance is off.”

  “I felt it, too, last night,” Demitra said. “I’ve been waiting for a premonition, but it hasn’t come.”

  Olympia closed her eyes. She forced her concentration into the task. As head of the Blanchard coven and the matriarch of her family line, she was the only one who could begin the thread. It was not something she enjoyed doing, for it always left her feeling temporarily drained. Old age made that even more tiring. But there was no other means of discovering what she needed to discover. It must be done.

  Focusing on herself first, reaching deep into her mind’s eye and finding her own spirit within her body, she visualized herself as the first link in the chain. Next, she pictured Artemis as she squeezed her daughter’s hand, allowing her spirit to flow directly into her eldest daughter’s. Olympia could feel Artemis within her, almost as if their two souls had merged for a moment into one being. Artemis felt the connection in the same way as she and her mother became one single entity. The moment their two souls touched it felt as if a radiant light swelled within them. Their bloodline was turning on. Olympia moved to Demitra next, mentally envisioning her second daughter’s spirit linking to Artemis and her own. Within seconds all three of their souls were aligned. There was a break in the flow now--a missing component, like a gap in a road. Nacaria. But Olympia understood that break in the chain. That was not a mystery. She moved on to Seth next. Though he was not the next chronologically in the bloodline—that would be Beryl—he was the closest in proximity, and Olympia needed the strength of the chain to power its ability to travel the distances to everyone else. It only took a moment to connect with Seth’s soul and attach it to her own and his aunts’. Olympia focused on Beryl now. This link would take longer. Beryl was miles away at Daihmler County Hospital, forcing the thread to travel to reach her.

  “I need Mr. Blake’s test results from the lab before I meet with his wife,” Dr. Beryl Blanchard told the nurse as she shuffled the charts clutched to her chest. It had already been a busy morning, but she was nearing the end of her rounds and preparing for her in-office consultations.

  “Here it is Dr. Blanchard,” the nurse said, handing over the file. “Dr. Blanchard. Dr. Blanchard?”

  Dr. Blanchard wasn’t listening. She had her eyes closed. All focus now turned inside herself as she felt the tendrils of her family’s conjoined energy flowing into and through her. Beryl felt the wave hit and invade her body. Her family was connecting to her soul and that was the only thing she could feel at the moment. Why are they performing a thread?

  Olympia found Beryl and passed through her; she was now on her way to Fable. This would take a little longer. Fable’s practice was nearly on the other side of town, but the combined force of her spirit, mixed with Artemis, Demitra, Seth, and now Beryl made the thread move faster now.

  “All right Spritzie,” Fable smiled at the white schnauzer standing on her examination table. “Tell me what hurts.”

  Mrs. Renlap, Spritzie’s owner, always thought it was cute the way Dr. Blanchard would speak to her patients as if they were human. It showed clients a sign of respect for the pets they loved. Mrs. Renlap appreciated that small nicety from her vet.

  “This started after your granddaughter visited yesterday, correct?” Fable said.

  “How did you know my granddaughter came over yesterday afternoon?” Mrs. Renlap gasped.

  Fable was listening to Mrs. Renlap now, and she was no longer speaking mentally with the dog on her table.

  “I’m afraid she fed Spritzie some fruit that isn’t agreeing with her stomach,” Fable told Mrs. Renlap. “That’s why she won’t eat anything today and why she keeps yelping. Spritzie’s stomach is very upset.”

  “How do you—”

  Now Fable’s attentions were turned inward. She did not hear the rest of Mrs. Renlap’s question. She could only feel her sister Beryl’s spirit touch her own. Behind Beryl was her cousin Seth, then her mother and her aunt, Artemis. And at the end of the chain, her grandmother Olympia.

  Olympia continued to move through her family, using their souls like conduit, or perhaps like a vehicle—driving their bloodline as if it were a highway. The next stop would be Salem Blanchard. Olympia pictured her granddaughter in her mind. Salem’s large green eyes and beautiful flowing auburn hair. This connection would take the longest, but not too long. Threading from Alabama to Georgia would normally require a few minutes, but the addition of Fable was speeding things up. She continued to grip her daughter’s hands at the kitchen table, as they held Seth’s. Each of them in full concentration, just as elsewhere Beryl and Fable were doing the same. They were one entity now. One chain flowing through one another, trying to reach the next link. But there was nothing. Nothing. No Salem. Olympia concentrated harder but the thread simply broke where Salem should have been. Just then something small came through. Weaker, tinier, not fully formed yet. Michael. Baby Michael. But something wasn’t right with that connection. It was far too weak, even considering he was merely a baby. His force should have been clearer. Olympia unclasped hands with her daughters. The chain was ended. The surge they’d all been feeling disintegrated, leaving everyone with a feeling of exhaustion. Across town both Beryl and Fable grabbed at a nearby piece of furniture to stabilize themselves as the link broke and rendered them a little wobbly. Olympia opened her eyes at the kitchen table.

  “Salem’s gone,” she said. “It skipped her and found the baby, but Salem is missing.”

  “No!” Seth screamed. “Salem isn’t dead. She can’t be dead!”

  “She’s not dead,” Demitra reassured. “David would have called us.”

  “We should call David,” Seth suggested.

  A few minutes later there was no answer when Seth tried calling his brother-in-law.

  “Hecate?” Seth whispered after hanging up the phone. “Could something have happened to all three of them?”

  “I would have felt it if Salem were dead,” Olympia answered. “I can’t explain why I can’t sense her, but I’m sure she’s alive.”

  “But Michael,” Artemis noted. “Didn’t that feel off? I know he’s a baby, but still it was..”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Muted,” Demitra interjected.

  “Static,” Artemis corrected. “Frozen!”

  Olympia stood up from the table. “Frozen.”

  “Oh my God,” Artemis cried. “But why? What’s going on?”

  Olympia turned to stare at the kitchen stairs. “Artemis go down to the vault and get me the book labeled Time.

  Demitra jumped up from her chair, fully understanding what her mother’s intentions were by retrieving that specific book. “No, Mother. You are too old. I’ll go.”

  “No Dear, I’m going,” Olympia insisted. “Besides, I’ve done this before. I know the way.”

  “You were a lot younger back then,” Artemis pointed out. “Back then when you were active in the Witches Association affairs you were a young woman. And you had Zelda and Aunt Pastoria with you. I’m the next in line as head of this family. I’ll go figure out what’s happened to Salem.”

  Olympia placed her hand on Artemis’ shoulder. “I know you raised her. I know you love her as your own. But you are not her mother. And since her mother isn’t here, it’s going to have to be me.”

  None of them had thought of that. A grandmother was the next best thing to a mother in the bloodline. An aunt wasn’t a direct enough tether.

  “I can go,” Seth offered. “We share the same mother and father. I’ll go find my sister.”

  “Again,” Olympia smiled, “I have done this kind of thing before. Seth, I’m afraid you aren’t skilled enough yet to see this out.”

  “I still say no, Mother,” Artemis replied. “You are far too old to jump through time anymore.”

  “When it comes to legal matters my dear, for instance if and when I should go to a nursing home, you and your sister are in charge of me,” her mother countered. “But in matters of witch business, I am still the leader of this Coven and my word is law. I will go find Salem. Artemis, get the book.”

  Artemis left the table and walked to the kitchen staircase. This was the only way to enter the secret room in Blanchard House known by the family as the vault. The vault was accessed by a secret door hidden under the kitchen stairs. From the kitchen floor there were three stair treads rising up to a small landing whereupon another set of stairs stretched upward behind the kitchen wall leading to the floor above. Standing on the landing and reaching down to grasp the first step of the staircase to the second floor, Artemis lifted the entire tread of stairs—hinged by a rod and piston system. As the staircase rose pivoted into the air, another staircase—leading down—was revealed. She descended the secret staircase down into a basement no one knew Blanchard House had.

  The room under the kitchen was where the Blanchard family kept generations of materials. Books, spells, histories, herbs, talismans— everything needed for their magic. Artemis and Demitra’s father installed this room and its secret entrance when he added the kitchen onto the house right before he married their mother and moved in. It was his bargain with Olympia. If she could keep her supernatural world separate from their marriage, he could manage being married to such a powerful being.

  The vault was not a very large room. Not really any larger than the kitchen itself. It was sparsely furnished with only a wooden table and a couple of matching chairs. All along the walls were shelves housing various volumes of books, diaries, and potion making ingredients. Artemis scanned the shelves for the book labeled Time. She found it on one of the shelves whose contents Olympia forbid the family to touch. The things on those shelves were much too powerful, and the misuse of such items could prove too consequential. The family had learned that lesson the hard way many years ago.

  Artemis returned to the kitchen with the book in hand. It was the first time in her life she had ever touched it. Though the book itself was only a bound collection of notes and spells scrawled by the hand by long-dead ancestors, Artemis could almost feel the power contained within its yellowed, fragile pages.

  It took a little while to get things started. Beryl and Fable had to be called home, as was Yasmine. Such a spell required the whole of the coven. Demitra assembled Seth, Fable, Yasmine, and Beryl on either side of the kitchen table while Artemis withdrew a large pot from the pantry. From the sounds of the clanging, she was busy removing several smaller pots she’d been storing inside it.

  “Seth, you and Fable go out to the garden. Bring me back sprigs of oleander, bloodroot, rosemary, nightshade—here just take the book and grab everything it needs. Beryl, go down to the vault and bring back the jar of bone dust.”

  “Whose?”

  “Grandfather Blanchard’s is probably best. He’s the closest tie to Salem.”

  While Fable and Seth took a large basket outdoors to collect the living ingredients, Beryl went downstairs to a set of shelves near the back of the room. These shelves contained jars of the crushed, ashy remains of cremated Blanchard ancestors. The jars were almost never used in spells. Most spells did not require such potency. Only the most powerful magic required the remnants of a long dead blood-related witch. Beryl could not remember a single time from her life when she’d been aware of anyone using any of these. Perhaps when Aunt Nacaria got into all that trouble years ago with the infamous spell she’d cast, but Beryl wasn’t certain. She’d been a little girl when Nacaria went away. But for Olympia to be using the ashes of her own father in this spell to find Salem, Beryl knew this was serious business.

  “There is still tomato sauce stuck to the sides of this thing!” Demitra yelled when Artemis presented her with the family cauldron.

  “We used it last week when we had spaghetti,” Artemis noted. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “Who washed this pot last time?” Demitra shouted to her relatives.

  “Give it rest Demitra!” Artemis said rolling her eyes. “It’s fine.”

  “Yes, I doubt a little spaghetti sauce will hurt the spell,” Olympia reassured.

  As everyone regrouped around the table, placing their various collections around the pot, a shadowy specter ran rampant back and forth across the walls and ceiling. There was a franticness to its movement. It seemed to be as concerned as everyone else in the kitchen.

  “You are not helping matters!” Seth shouted to the air.

  “Seth!” Artemis scolded. “Be kind.”

  “It’s a distraction,” he huffed.

  “Stay to the far wall,” Demitra commanded the entity. “You may watch from there.” The ghostly thing moved to the wall adjacent to the living room and hovered against it, an opaque shadow obscuring the wallpaper.

  “Maybe I should leave too,” Yasmine offered. “I can’t do anything to help.”

  “You are family, and this is a family problem,” Fable said grasping her cousin’s hand. “Besides, we need someone to hold the book open.”

  “Can we please hurry up and find out what has happened to my sister?” Seth groaned.

  Olympia placed the book on the table and began perusing the pages, pausing every so often in thought. Once or twice, she smiled to herself, as if recalling some memory from her glory days when she, her sister, and their best friend would have used this book on one of their adventures. Olympia continued to scan the frail pages, one after the other, searching for something. The rest of the family watched quietly, although none of them quite understood what she was looking for.

  “Hecate, what is it exactly that you are trying to find in that book?” Beryl asked. “We don’t even know what has happened to Salem.”

  “I’m afraid we do,” Artemis said. “Salem isn’t dead. Mother would have felt that when she performed the thread.”

  “How can we be sure she would?” pressed Beryl.

  Olympia looked pensive for a moment, lost in an ancient memory. “I know what it feels like to thread into someone who has died. It’s how my sister and I learned of our father’s passing. It is a cold blackness that seeps into your soul and doesn’t let go.” She looked as if she might cry, but she steeled herself from it and shook the painful memory away. “I did not feel that with Salem.”

  “But Salem doesn’t appear to be in this world either,” Demitra noted. “And if little Michael has actually been frozen…”

  “Salem has the power to freeze time,” Fable noted.

  “So, are we assuming that Salem froze Michael and then disappeared?” Seth asked.

  “I think she’s left this plane of existence.” Olympia explained. “The spell she must have used is this Withdrawal spell. It removes a person from this plane and places them on another.”

  “But there are a zillion planes, Grandmother!” Yasmine cried. “How are you to know which one she went to?”

  “I don’t,” Olympia admitted. “She could be anywhere. The past, the future, another dimension? I will only be able to find her with the Tether spell. And let us hope my blood tie to her is strong enough to pull me to wherever she is.”

  “It works best if it’s a parent, doesn’t it?” Beryl asked. “You are a generation removed. If we had Salem’s mother here…”

  “Yes, that would have been preferable,” Olympia sighed.

  “Just one more thing my mother fucked up!” Seth snapped.

  “We don’t have time for that now,” Artemis said, smacking the back of his head lightly with the palm of her hand.

  . “My tie is enough,” Olympia assured. “My connection to Salem will work.”

  “Let’s do this,” Demitra announced, lifting the large pot to the kitchen fireplace.

  Artemis closed her eyes, envisioning a fire which immediately ignited within the logs under the pot. Fable poured a pitcher of water into the pot as Yasmine lifted the book and held it open-faced towards her family.

  Olympia read from the book…

  “Gone from this world, gone from this life

  Here is the mother, where is the child?

  Across the oceans and winds of time

  Carry this mother to the arms of her child.”

  Demitra dropped several ingredients from the basket into the pot as Olympia continued her recitation…

  “Bloodroot is my tie, my blood and my child.

  Rosemary is my love, my blood and my child.

  Oleander is my escape, my blood and my child.

  These blossoms are my awakening,

  These bones are my kindred.

  Cast to the ages where time is unlimited.

  Take my blood to the place of my child.”

  “Earth is my element. Communication is my power,” Fable said as she sliced her finger with a dagger and dropped her blood into the pot.

  “Fire is my element. Action is my power,” Artemis said as she sliced her finger as well, dropping the blood into the pot.

  “Air is my element. Prophecy is my power,” Demitra said following suit.

  “Water is my element. Healing is my power,” Beryl said, doing the same.

  “Air is my element. The elements are my power,” Seth said, placing his own blood into the pot.

  “Earth is my element. Time is my power,” Olympia said inserting her own.

  Seth and his grandmother clasped hands. Everyone knew why this final part of the spell required only the two of them. It wasn’t because they were Salem’s nearest blood relations—that part was a coincidence. For Olympia and Seth Blanchard were the only Blanchard witches, besides Salem, who were full witches—undiluted by regular blood.

  Olympia took the large wooden spoon from the table. Still holding her grandson’s hand, she stepped closer to the cauldron and recited…

  “Hecate, Demeter, Artemis, the three.

  Take Hecate to Artemis, over time and sea.

  Blood to blood, time to time,

  Mother and Child

  Take me to mine!”

  “Drink quickly,” Artemis said as her mother dipped the spoon into the pot and drank down the contents.

  Olympia felt the scalding burn to her lips as the liquid touched them. The broth scorched her throat as it ran down. She wanted to scream from the pain, but then it was gone. Everything was gone. She was gone. Olympia was no longer in her body. Seth caught his grandmother’s empty shell before it hit the floor.

  “Is she?” Yasmine couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She knew they all knew what they were doing even if she didn’t quite understand herself what it was like to be a witch. Despite the number of years she’d been with them, she still didn’t understand everything.

  “She’s dead,” Demitra said. “In a manner of sorts, and just for the time being.”

  “Dead?” Yasmine sobbed.

  “Not exactly dead,” Artemis explained as she comforted her niece with a side hug. “Her soul has just left her body and gone to find Salem’s. She will come back to her body once the potion wears off. In the meantime, Beryl will keep her body alive.”

  Seth carried his grandmother upstairs to her bedroom where Beryl had already set up everything she’d need to keep Olympia Blanchard’s lungs breathing and heart pumping. It was handy to have a doctor in the house, especially one who was a witch.