The Witch's Demon book 1

By Pepper Pace

A young girl discovers the truth about the reason that she was found abandoned in a bayou as a child—her mother a black arts witch, was captured by the demon that she had called to enslave. Now Summer Mack is on a mission to find answers-in hell. This book is the first in a series and should be read in order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pepper Pace
• Release date: Mar 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370536733

Pepper Pace

Pepper Pace stories span the gamut from humorous to heartfelt, however the common theme is crossing boundaries.Pepper's unique stories deal with taboo topics such as mental illness and homelessness. Readers find themselves questioning their own sense of right and wrong, attraction and desire.In addition to writing, the author is also an artist, an introverted recluse, a self proclaimed empath and a foodie. Please check out her e-book trailers on this page! You may contact the author at [e-mail] the Pepper Pace Newsletter and receive free stories! http://eepurl.com/bGV4tb

Book preview

THE WITCH’S DEMON

BOOK 1

PEPPER PACE

THE WITCH’S DEMON

BOOK 1

A young girl discovers the truth about the reason that she was found abandoned in a bayou as a child—her mother a black arts witch, was captured by the demon that she had called to enslave. Now Summer Mack is on a mission to find answers-in hell.

This book is the first in a series and should be read in order.

©Pepper Pace Publications

Copyright © 2015, 2016, 2017 Pepper Pace The Witch’s Demon book 1.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except for short excerpts appearing in book reviews. For reprint or excerpt permission inquiries, please contact the author by e-mail at: [e-mail] or http://pepperpacefeedback.blogspot.com

This novel is a work of fiction. Characters – including their names, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are otherwise used fictitiously. Any similarity from this book to events occurring in real life – including locations, or persons living or dead is wholly coincidental. The use of musical titles and the naming of musical artists is not an infringement of copyright per sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work.

The Witch’s Demon book 1 first appeared in print September 2015 on ETSY and then again on Amazon KDP November 2015.

Thank you!

Thanks to my Beta Readers Leslie, Evelyn and Cloggerman for all of your invaluable advice and insight. Thanks also to you, readers and fans for sticking with Pep even when I try something new.

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Everything is Everything Book 1

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The Witch’s Demon book 1

SHORT STORIES

~~***~~

Someone to Love

The Way Home

MILF

Blair and the Emoboy

Emoboy the Submissive Dom

1-900-BrownSugar

Someone To Love

My Special Friend

Baby Girl and the Mean Boss

A Wrong Turn Towards Love

True’s Love

The Delicate Sadness

The Shadow People

The Love Unexpected

The Vinyl Man

COLLABORATIONS

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Sexy Southern Hometown Heroes

Seduction: An Interracial Romance Anthology Vol. 1

Scandalous Heroes Box set

Written under Beth Jo Andersen

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Snatched by Bigfoot!

Bigfoot’s Sidepiece

Mated to the Bigfoot!

Written Under Kim Chambers

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The Purple World book 1

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Chapter One

The abandoned witch

There is nothing more unfortunate than to be a witch with no powers--or perhaps more accurately, a witch whose powers have yet to manifest.

This was not Summer’s fault. She wasn’t exactly born into it—although mama said that she had great power that lay just beneath her skin waiting to come out. It made Summer think about an errant hair or stray pimple; waiting to come out.

The circle didn’t want her, although mama sometimes allowed Summer to help her with small things like drying the herbs and mixing them for use in potions. But Summer was never allowed to sit in the circle with the others and when she asked why mama just said that she wasn’t born into it.

Mama and her sisters all had the talent—but they were born into it. Yasmine wasn’t her real mother and Bethsheba and Ona were not her real sisters. Sometimes people gazed upon her with her pale skin and long black hair that cascaded down the center of her back. They would take in her emerald green eyes and wonder why her mother and sisters were black when she was so obviously white.

People were idiots, Summer would think. Why did they think that family was only comprised of flesh and blood? Family was who loved and took care of you when your own family was nowhere to be found.

Summer’s real mother had lived in a small little house on John’s Island amidst swamp alligators and raccoons that came right up on the porch to eat the dog’s food. Summer remembered the pretty flowers and the thick forest with the water snakes that hung from the trees, and the strange willow trees that looked straight out of fairytale. What Summer didn’t remember is going to school or having friends. She was six and then seven and then eight and the only people she saw were her mother’s customers.

They would come at dusk with their money clutched in their fist and determined expressions on their faces because they knew that the strange white woman that lived in a shack on the water’s edge had a knack to make things happen.

She knew how to work the best gris gris—maybe because she was disconnected from the rest of the community and didn’t allow her own prejudices to interfere with who she worked magic for or against--or maybe her mysterious ways harkened to a darker magic that no one wanted to talk about.

By the time Summer was eight she knew the plants and the magic words and would help her mother with the most rudimentary spells. One morning Summer woke up and her mother wasn’t home. She went to the river and checked the traps and brought back the meat but her mother was still not around. Summer cooked breakfast—at eight she was old enough to make most of the meals.

Her mother; Autumn, did not return and for two terrifying weeks Summer wandered their small house and the surroundings that she so loved. She bathed in the river the way her mother would want her to and took care of the animals. People came for her mother’s magic but Summer hid. But they kept coming and then mama showed up.

Mama called her with a song. Summer peeked at her from where she was hiding from behind a tree. And Mama stood on the porch and in a beautiful light voice called out for the whereabouts of the pretty little bird. But mama was the pretty one. She was true Creole, a tantalizing mixture of Kiawah Indian, French and African. Her long hair fell in waves down her back and Summer remembered that she wore a long dress but was barefoot—yet no dirt seemed to have settled on her feet.

The song mama sang began to make Summer sleepy and before she knew it her feet were carrying her to the strange woman that stood singing on her porch. When mama’s hazel eyes rested upon Summer a broad smile touched her face. She lifted Summer into her arms as if she was a little baby and mama carried her home where she was to live from that moment forward.

It was Ona who brought her an understanding of what had really happened to Summer’s real mother. When Summer was twelve and Ona ten years old, the younger girl had whispered the things that no one had ever dare say aloud.

Your mother is the plaything of a demon.

My mother? Summer said, nearly forgetting that the two weren’t the same flesh and blood.

Your white mother—the one who disappeared.

Summer had looked at Ona with wide eyes. It was not exactly forbidden to speak about Summer’s mother, but such discussions were frowned upon by the family’s matriarch.

Ona continued, her dark eyes serious. I heard them talking. Them meant many different things depending on the context—But Summer knew that in this context ‘them’ meant the ladies of the circle; the witches group that they belonged to.

They didn’t know I was home, Ona continued. I was supposed to be outside collecting herbs but I got thirsty. Miss Genevieve said that your mama got her goose cooked, dabbling in things she shouldn’t. And then mama said that no one deserved to be the plaything of a demon…

Summer frowned images in her head of the many stray cats they sometime took care of that toyed with the captured mice or birds before killing and devouring them.

Do you think my mother is still alive?

Ona looked stricken. Mama thinks so. But if she comes back will that mean you won’t be my sister anymore?

I don’t know, Summer had answered honestly, tossing back one thick black braid. Can we be sisters even if we don’t live together?

Ona shrugged but then another thought struck her, What if your mother is living in hell?

Summer had never thought about that. An uneasy fear began to crawl over her skin.

What if the demon comes back and makes you live with him and your mother? Ona said--her small brown hands clutched in her lap.

Summer shook her head. Mama won’t let that happen.

Ona sighed and the tension began to recede from her small body. You’re right. The circle won’t let anyone take you. But if mama hadn’t come to your house that day, maybe the demon would have come back for you.

By the time Summer turned twenty, Bethsheba had gotten married and Ona had moved to North Carolina to attend college. Summer felt as if her life was at a stand still. Deciding that she would have to be the one to make something happen in her life she decided to visit the empty little house that she had lived in as a child.

No one went there, except maybe on Halloween night when teenagers dared each other to walk up on the porch and call her mother’s name three times before running screeching through the night at the hooting of an owl or the passionate squeal of a wildcat.

Summer had never gone back, at first because she was too young to make the trip by herself, and then later because she was too afraid of seeing the ghosts of what used to be.

Making up an excuse to go to the Farmer’s market, Summer borrowed the car and made the long trek to her old house. She didn’t like lying to her mother—it wasn’t something that she was accustomed to doing. Mama was a white witch, after all and knew things, so it was best to live your life without guile in dealings where she was concerned.

Summer was unable to explain what it is that she wanted but she knew that until she returned to the house, she would not be able to begin the process of putting her past behind her, or moving forward towards a future that was not haunted by her other’s disappearance.

The small house seemed no more than a shack to Summer as she pulled up into an overgrown drive-way. Old beer bottles and cans littered the front yard. However the door to the house remained closed and there was none of the expected graffiti or broken out windows seen in most abandoned homes. Folks around these parts respected the unseen forces even if they claimed not to always believe in them.

Summer wasn’t afraid of the things that prevented others from walking into the house. She didn’t expect Autumn’s ghost to come flying out. Her fear was the simple discovery that she did not belong anywhere.

The front door was locked and Summer hurried to an overgrown flower pot where the key lay nestled beneath it—even after all of these years. She used it to unlock the door and was met by the stifling stench of a closed up house—mildewed furniture, dust and the faint smell of past meals.

Coughing, Summer looked around, taking in the sight of the hazy images of dust covered surfaces. Little footprints of some long lost rodent marred the perfection of the dust covered hardwood floor.

For a long moment she just stood there taking in the sights, which conjured lost memories. How small the house looked, crowded with rickety furniture. An old velvet couch that had looked so grand when she was a child, now she clearly saw that it was threadbare with strategically placed laced doilies that attempted to hide some of the bigger holes.

Next to the sofa was a three-legged cocktail table that held a gaudy lamp with a stain-glassed lampshade. When she was a child she used to lay on the couch and stare at the lamp thinking that it looked like the jewelry of some of her mother’s richer customers. She would think of Miss Remy’s colorful rings whenever she gazed at the lamp and she would think that she and her mother were rich.

Summer’s feet moved the few steps to the shelf that held jars and small wooden boxes that contained her mother’s herbs, amulets and potions. There were spell books lining the shelves and when Summer opened a few of them they appeared to be handwritten by people who had died long before her mother had been born.

She saw one familiar book with a handmade cover. It was the book that her mother used to write in! Summer quickly snatched it off the shelf. It was covered in stiff leather, the stitching all hand done. When she opened it, it creaked as if the pages would fall to the floor.

She wondered if her mother had written it. Were these her spells? Summer carefully leafed through the pages noting the neat script and drawings of plants and herbs, or protective circles.

The writing wasn’t always