The Witches of Dark Root: Daughters of Dark Root: Book One (The Daughters of Dark Root) (2 page)

Without warning the door opened, startling us both.

The stranger entered, removing his grey felt hat. He looked around the shop, taking it in. I glanced at Eve, wondering how her travel spell could have worked so quickly.

She shrugged in response.

“Well, hello there,” she said, regaining her composure “Our shop is closed but we were just making tea. You are welcome to join us.” She slinked towards the man, offering him the teacup.

The stranger blinked uncertainly, declining the tea with a wave of his hand. He strode past my sister and stood before me.
 

“Actually,” he said, staring at me with mystical eyes. “Maggie Maddock, I’m here for you.”

One: Sister Goldenhair

Woodhaven Compound, Humboldt County, California

September, 2013

If I were a real witch, the kind you read about in story books with black cauldrons and pet frogs, I might have put a curse on Leah for bursting through the door and interrupting us like she did. Not a big curse––according to Michael I already have enough karmic repercussions to atone for––just a little something to teach her to knock before entering someone’s bedroom.

This wasn’t the first time I had wished ill on Leah.

Ever since she had come to Woodhaven Compound two months earlier, I had spent many afternoons daydreaming about what I could do to her: bucked teeth, crossed eyes, thunder thighs. Gout. My fantasies had gotten me through those long days when she was running after Michael, listening to his every word, praising him, pretending to
get
what he was teaching. She wasn’t smart enough to
get
anything but Michael ate it up. Men were so gullible.

Not that any of this mattered.

I wasn’t a witch––not anymore. I had turned in my hat and broom seven years ago when I had followed Michael out of Dark Root, Oregon, and into Woodhaven. Here, witchery wasn’t allowed. The only good magic, Michael claimed, came from God, and unless God had a curse clause I didn’t know about, I was out of luck.

On this particular morning I heard Leah trounce down the corridor outside our bedroom. Clitter-clat. Clitter-clat. Her sandals, one size too big, slapped on the wooden floors as she raced through the hallway.

The urgency of her steps didn’t worry me. Leah never walked anywhere; she scurried. I ignored her, thinking she would move on to one of the other bedrooms in the large house. After all, Michael and I were the leaders here at Woodhaven and she was just a new recruit. She wouldn’t dare intrude upon us in the sanctuary of our private room; that is, if she knew what was good for her.

Michael was sleeping, oblivious to her footsteps.

Perched on elbows, I hovered naked above his body, watching the rise and fall of his chest. I needed him. Badly. It had been three weeks since our last physical encounter and I was starting to feel the hole that comes from a relationship without sex grow into a deep, widening chasm. He had been so preoccupied lately, focused on the issues of Woodhaven, that physical intimacy had taken a backseat to more pressing matters. But even as his desires lessened with his worries, mine had grown exponentially. I wasn’t sure if it was PMS or the Lifetime movies I had been watching on the sly, but something had revved up my estrogen level to DEFCON 1.

Wake Up!

I willed my thoughts into his brain, boring my eyes so deeply into his skull that I was sure I had developed an aneurysm.

Wake up!
I thought again, louder this time, more commanding. I watched for the flickering of his eyes, the change in his breath. I raised a hopeful eyebrow.
 

He snored in response.

I sighed, slumping down upon his chest. Mind control wasn’t one of my gifts.
 

But I was a woman of many talents.

Grasping a hair on his chest––a lone, gray straggler lost in a thicket of black curls––I pulled it taut until his eyelids fluttered open.
Bingo!

“Good morning, sleepy boy,” I purred, running my fingers down his arms until our hands met and fingers locked. “Did you have a good nap?”

Michael responded with a soft grunt and kissed the top of my head, wrapping his free arm around me. His guard was down when he first woke up, his mind less full of worries. I nuzzled closer, tilting my chin up and finding his mouth. His breath was warm and his lips were salty. He didn’t resist.

And that’s when Leah tumbled into the room.

“Maggie, it’s for you,” she said, thrusting a cell phone in my direction as she turned her head away.

After eight weeks at Woodhaven, she still wasn’t used to nudity. This was not unusual. It took most women three months to lose their clothes.

It took most men three hours.

“You should learn to knock,” I said, feeling Michael’s desire wilt beneath me.
 

He gave me a consolatory pat on my back, a pat that said we would try again later, but there would be no later. His time would be sucked up in workshops, politics, and council meetings. Being the leader of a great new religion required all of his time, as he often reminded me.

I blinked, squinting against the soft pink light that shone through the bare window.

Though I had not had a personal call in a very long time, my first thought was not ‘who would be calling?’ but rather, ‘what time is it?’

The tracking of time was frowned upon in Woodhaven, and there was neither clock nor calendar anywhere on the property. Even sundials were taboo. “Do not make time your master,” Michael proclaimed as he gathered up watches, phones and day planners at each initiation ceremony. “The Enlightened Soul lives only in the now.” Rituals like meditating, bathing and eating were done in accordance with hunger pangs, body odors and a crude version of follow-the-leader.
 

Luckily we had the seasons to guide us in our planting schedules, though here in Northern California, the seasons could at times be non-existent.

“Maggie,” Leah fidgeted, just inches inside the doorway. “It sounds important.”

She shuffled from one foot to the next, dancing like she had to go to the bathroom.

I took my time rising, stretching my arms overhead and dropping the white sheet that had covered me. Michael snatched it up and tucked it around his waist. He believed in weaning newcomers slowly. My approach was different. Leah didn’t need to be
weaned
. She needed shock therapy. Though my red hair fell nearly to my waist, long enough to provide some cover, I flung it back and marched, proud as Godiva herself, to take the call.

Leah tossed me the phone and fumbled out the door.

“Hello?” I said, looking for the hole where you were supposed to talk.

I had used the phone only once in the last seven years and that had required considerable assistance from our one-man tech department, Jason.

“Hello?” I said louder, turning the phone upside down. “This is Maggie.”

There was silence at the other end and I wondered if I had accidentally shut it off. I pulled it back to inspect it.

“Maggie! Oh, Maggie. Thank God, I found you.”

“Merry?”

I don’t think I spoke the word out loud.

I looked to Michael for confirmation but he stared blank-faced back at me. I hadn’t talked to my sister Merry since she had left Dark Root to marry Frank, almost a decade earlier. I had let go of the idea of ever hearing from her again.

And here she was calling me. It was almost like hearing from a ghost.

“Merry,” I said, this time out loud. “Is everything okay?”

As much as I wanted to believe that she had found and called me just to talk, I knew better.

Michael sat upright, mouthing the word
speaker-phone
to me.

Even if I knew how to operate the speaker-phone, I wasn’t about to turn it on. I yanked the sheet from him and covered my body, certain Merry could see me across the miles.

Michael pointed to the phone again indicating that he wanted to hear our conversation.

I shook my head and he fell backwards onto the mattress, covering his face with his arms. I heard Merry gasp on the other end, trying to catch her breath. I licked my lips and said very slowly, “I’m listening, Merry. Please tell me what’s going on.”

“Maggie, you need to come home, right away. It’s Mama. We need you.”

“I don’t want to go home,” I said, racing our white van towards Brunsville, twenty-eight miles north of the Woodhaven property line and the closest thing to a town we had.

Michael sat unbuckled beside me, his window rolled down as the wind blew through his thinning hair. His right foot hit an imaginary brake with each car I passed or curve in the road. He hated my driving, but not enough to take the wheel. In the seven or so years I had known him I had never seen him drive anywhere.

He claimed he could, but I had my doubts.

“It can’t be that bad,” Michael said, fiddling with the radio dial as he tried to locate the classic rock station.

I cringed. Having been raised in a house where every song was circa 1970-something I’d had quite enough of that music. Songs from bands like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles were “the only good songs,” according to my mother. Conversely, Michael had grown up in a quiet home where anything other than Bach and Beethoven was considered an assault on the ears.

Lucky for me all he found was static and turned the radio off.

“As I recall,” he continued undeterred. “Dark Root was quite charming.”

 
We passed small trees in all stages of color transformation. Yellow, orange, red, and brown leaves clung uncertainly to thick branches. I turned sharply off the main road and we fell into a forest––a shortcut of mine. The trees were larger here, mighty redwoods with upturned boughs, reaching for the last rays of sunshine before succumbing to another soggy winter. We opened into a clearing, jouncing along a gravel path until we merged again with the main road. The semi-darkness that had swallowed us in the woods was replaced by the white light of morning.

I pushed a pair of cheap sunglasses onto my face, not slowing my speed.

“Don’t ignore me, Maggie,” Michael said. “I hate it when you ignore me.”

I gave him a sideways glance and tightened my hands on the wheel.

Michael had been in Dark Root an entire twelve hours––long enough to use the public restroom, eat a sandwich, and charm me into coming with him. In all the time we had known each other since then, he had never once asked about my family or the town where I had spent the first twenty years of my life.

“Is something burning?” Michael sniffed at the air through the open window.

I inhaled and nodded, uncertain if it were coming from the tires or the engine. Either way, I was not stopping to find out. I rolled up the windows with the button on my door, one of the few gadgets that actually worked in this rolling pressure cooker.

Michael fanned himself but didn’t say anything. Unless he wanted to change a tire he knew better than to complain about the heat.

Finally, our exit came into view and I swerved onto it, kicking up dust and rocks around us.

“You could go for just a few days,” Michael continued as I skidded into a parking space at the grocery store. “...Go help your family and come back.”