Free The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) by J. D. Horn Page A

through the door. “You get on back to bed, you hear?”
    “Mama, we don’t have much time. The power is fading,” Iris said, her voice keening.
    “We will find a way to free you, Mama,” Ellen said. “We will. But you have to tell us why you are . . . where you are.”
    “Because she killed Grandpa,” Maisie said, breaking free of Abby’s grasp and taking a few steps closer to the orb. Her certainty sent a chill down my spine, as it echoed what I somehow also knew to be true. Maisie’s words were answered by my grandmother’s wail.
    “Why?” Ellen’s voice broke. She pushed away, scrambling a few feet back from the apparition.
    “Because he had another family. A family before us.” This time it was Iris who answered. She had seen it all with a single touch of Jessamine’s hand. “Jilo’s little sister.” My mind flashed back to the night I first met Jilo. The night I had gone to her crossroads. She had hated us Taylors. Now I was beginning to understand why.
    “His parents did not approve, but he rebelled.” Iris wrapped her arms around herself. “When he took her to France and married her, they cut him off financially, revoked his access to the family trust. They knew their son was a man who loved his comforts. Eventually he grew tired of the poverty and tired of his wife as well. He never even divorced her. He left her and his children behind and came back to Savannah and married Mama.”
    “When we married, I knew nothing of his first wife and family. When I learned what he had done, how he had deserted them. How he had deceived me. I couldn’t live with knowing he had made me his whore,” the voice raged. “I wanted him to pay. For what he’d done to me. For deserting his children. For abandoning his real wife. I wanted him dead. I just kept driving faster and faster. Then I awoke in hell.”
    “Well,” Abby said, a halo of golden light emanating from the crown of her head. “You’ve been there long enough. If you let me, I think I can lead you out of there.” The light grew brighter around her until it shone like a gold and soothing aura. This halo. It struck me that this was what coming home looked like.
    Abby took a step toward the metallic face, then another. Rather than drawing nearer the manifestation, Abby herself began to change, growing smaller to my eyes, looking as if she were walking down a long straight path into the horizon.
    “Abby, no, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Maisie called, a sense of urgency causing her voice to strain.
    “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Abby said and nodded. “I do. I’m going to help your grandma find her way out of there.”
    “No. You can’t just reach in and pull her out.” Maisie turned to me. “Gehenna isn’t a place. It isn’t a realm or dimension. It is a machine.”
    “Sweetie, we don’t have time to entertain your fancies.” Iris didn’t even look at Maisie as she said the words. Maisie looked at me as if Iris had struck her.
    “This has been too much for you.” Ellen wrapped an arm around Maisie’s shoulders. “You shouldn’t be a part of this. Let me help you back to your room.”
    “I do not need help finding the room I have lived in my entire life,” Maisie snapped. She threw my aunt’s arm off. “You have to listen to me. I know things y’all don’t,” Maisie said, then turned to me.
    The quicksilver face melted away, first returning to its spherical shape then morphing into a bulging disk. It floated out before us as Abby’s form constricted.
    “We have to stop her,” Maisie said, shaking Iris’s shoulders.
    The convex face of the disk distorted into an absolute flatness, then began pressing backward on itself until it became concave.
    “Abby doesn’t understand. We have to bring her back.” Panic had taken control of Maisie’s voice.
    I started circling the gateway, only to realize that while it remained perfectly clear when seen head on, the shape appeared distorted from the side. From