My Intended
G. Younger
My Intended
Starbound By Magic
First edition. May 11, 2020
Copyright ©2020 G. Younger
ISBN-13: 978-0-9989413-3-2
Author: Greg Younger
Developmental Editors: XofDallas and Bud Ugly
Line / Copy Editors: Bud Ugly and Zom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All characters depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Notes from the Author
Chapter 1
Caleb
The earsplitting noise woke me with a shock at nine a.m., interrupting a fantastic dream. I reached across the nightstand for the alarm clock and succeeded in knocking over the lamp. Once I turned off the offending alarm, I let my head sink back into my pillow and thought about the dream. I’d found my intended, and she was slowly playing with my hair in the afterglow of our lovemaking.
I woke up with a start. The heat was already coming through my bedroom window; it was going to be another sweltering day. Crud! I’d fallen back to sleep.
Grim, my familiar, stretched and rubbed against my arm for attention. When I was ten, he’d appeared one day, and we’d become fast friends. I’d named my cat Grimalkin after the famous familiar in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. I’d thought the name clever. To this day, no one had picked up on where I’d gotten it.
Familiars are helpful demons that assist witches and warlocks in learning their magic when they are younger. Grim still looked exactly like he did the day he came into my life ten years ago. He was all black with golden eyes.
“Caleb, get up,” Clyde said.
You would think that once you reached twenty, you wouldn’t be mothered anymore. I just grunted to let him know I’d heard and made my way to my bathroom. Already the sweat trickled down my back because it was going to be another hot, muggy, summer day. I stepped into the shower and let the chilly water wake me up.
I lived in a small town in the heart of Florida called Cassadaga. If you Googled it, you would see that it was considered the psychic capital of the world. Only 100 people lived here, and unlike your typical spiritualist and New Age types, everyone in my family was actually a warlock.
A head materialized through the shower curtain.
“You have a customer waiting for the shop to open,” Clyde warned.
“Dude, we talked about this. When I’m in the shower, give me some privacy,” I complained.
Clyde just disappeared. Great! I’d pissed him off, and he might be gone for days. Yep, Clyde was a ghost. When I was little, my family thought I just had a vivid imagination and talked to all my invisible friends. The ability to communicate with spirits is a rare talent, even though some psychics tell you that they can speak with your dead relatives. Don’t believe them.
Talking to ghosts was considered a dark art because it deals with the dead. Most magic practitioners considered it taboo, right up there with necromancy, which I think is way creepier. Most warlocks and witches wouldn’t dream of crossing over to the dark side. I guess I should explain.
I never really had a choice. Our family had traveled to the Americas in the very early years. Witchcraft had gotten a bad name in Europe, and many of our kind escaped to try to build a new life.
Some of them got a little too brazen with their arts, and suddenly you had the Salem witch trials. My ancestry could be traced to one of the twenty who were executed, Alice Heart. Contrary to legend, however, the witches were not burned at the stake. In fact, none of the men, women, or children accused were killed that way. The burning of witches was something done in Europe in the 15th century. Most were hanged at Salem.
Alice’s husband, Timothy, had turned her in to protect himself. The ironic bit was, he was the one with the powers. Alice was a mundane.
Yes, my great-great-great—well, you get the idea—grandfather was a real piece of work. His problem was that Alice’s family found out, and they hired a powerful witch to cast a curse on him and his descendants. It was a bad one. All his heirs’ powers would only manifest as dark arts. This would cause our line to be outcasts. The next part was simply evil. We could only have male children, and the mothers of the children would all die in childbirth. The thought was that our line would die out or become so weak we would eventually be hunted down and eradicated.
Most covens had a matriarch who was in charge, and for a good reason: women were much better in the white magic or natural arts. They were the nurturers. The matriarch was infused with the powers to protect the coven and inherited additional powers when she reached her twenty-first birthday. This was tied to the matriarch finding her intended, and her powers and those of her intended would complement one another. Additional powers would manifest upon her confirmation as the matriarch, or in our case, the patriarch warlock.
Everyone talks about their soul mate. Well, for witches and warlocks, there was one person out there you were meant to be with, sort of like your soul mate, but for us, it was your ‘intended.’ The two of you were drawn together and destined to find each other before you came into your full powers on your twenty-first birthday. When you did get together, binding with your intended made everything better. It touched all five points of the pentagram: flesh, heart, soul, spirit, and magic. It was sometimes called ‘starbound’ because of the pentagram reference. Once bound, you were linked for the rest of your lives.
The fun part was that you didn’t know what these additional powers and strengths might turn out to be. In most instances, they revolved around the protection of the coven and the community they resided in. In our case, that wasn’t always a given, because our dark arts seemed not to follow the norm. Our magic was called dark, not evil.
Because of the curse, I wasn’t exactly eager to continue the line. To have a child would mean that I would, in effect, confer a death sentence upon the mother of my child. That was why my ancestors would often capture a woman and impregnate her. You didn’t want to kill the woman you loved. My fear was that my father, Maxus Heart, would use magic to compel me to participate. If I had my free will, our line would die with me. Believe me, I knew all about birth control from when I was about ten.
Our family had gone into hiding after Salem and eventually founded Cassadaga. It was situated on a source of power, called a ley line, which we used to enhance our own powers, but that also offered us protection. No one who meant us harm could enter our town. The power source also attracted people who might be of service to us and who would keep our secrets. Sometimes magic can be wild, and people find themselves with an ability that may be considered dark. They were turned out of their covens, and we picked them up as new members.
We decided that we would hide in plain sight. What better place to conceal our coven than in a psychic community? Most other covens did the same.
I’d inherited an old building on Main Street that housed my art studio. There were four apartments upstairs, and I lived in one of them. I rented the other three to coven members, including Cassandra Grey, who used a space in my studio to do readings. Cassandra was the sister of my best friend, Jonesy.
I grabbed a bagel and yogurt and hustled downstairs with Grim at my heels. The tourists were out early today. My store sold all the typical occult stuff like tarot cards, crystals, candles, and the like. It also featured my art. My paintings leaned toward the macabre since many of my ideas were supplied by ghosts. The tourists ate it up; the darker and/or creepier, the better.
I felt a twinge of irritation when I saw who waited for me to open: my father. Grim saw him too and slunk off to hide. My father hadn’t forgotten that Grim had caught his familiar, Trickster, who was a rat. I always contended that Grim had done the world a favor by eliminating that particular demon. When I was little, that nasty beast had tormented me at every chance.
I slapped a smile on my face and unlocked the door. Dad looked me over and obviously wasn’t happy that my long hair was wet.
“I know we don’t hold normal hours, but you should be open by at least ten,” he said as he pushed past me.
I looked at the clock and cringed. It was nearly eleven. Usually, Cassandra opened, since I would paint late into the night. There was a reason I’d slept in, but I wasn’t about to share the details with my father.
One of my ghosts had given me a vision of a dark entity. It gave off an evil vibe, but it wasn’t truly of this realm, so it was like a dark shadow. The vision showed me a pale-skinned girl with shocking red hair whom the entity had cornered. The fear in her eyes had haunted me until I got them on canvas. Somehow, I couldn’t seem to see their true color. I’d finally given up in frustration early this morning.
“I was painting, and Cassandra isn’t here today,” I said to explain only what I wanted to.
“Where is she?” Maxus asked.
“She had a reading in a client’s home. She should be back by noon.”
I knew that would’ve been his next question.
He was the patriarch of our coven. It seemed that the title skipped a generation. My great-grandfather had been the previous head of our coven; that meant that my child would one day be the patriarch. I was glad it wouldn’t be me. What it did was make my father look down on me as just a means to an end. I was a necessary evil that he had to put up with, but that didn’t mean he cared about me. I was just a tool to him. Of course, if anything happened to my father … well, I would be forced into taking over.
Railing against my lot in life was futile. No one else cared that I only wanted a normal life. No one else cared that I wanted to go out beyond the city limits, out among people, dancing and laughing with friends. And no one else cared that I was trapped in the role my father chose for me.
“We’re forming a circle tonight. Be on time,” he said, then turned and left.
Well, damn.
◊◊◊
Without my boy Clyde, my little ghost spy network was all in hiding. He must have told them that I was being punished for disrespecting him this morning. Ghosts were fickle at the best of times. Piss one off, and they might desert you for days. Cassandra also wasn’t helpful in clueing me in about why my father had called for a circle. He’d ordered her not to, and Cassandra wasn’t about to challenge him.
Something I’d learned was that if my father gave an order, you obeyed. Over the years, I’d received what he termed ‘discipline.’ I knew full well that I wasn’t the son he’d hoped for. In a lot of ways, my best friend, Jonesy, Cassandra’s brother, was the son my father wished he’d had.
Recently, Jonesy and I’d had a falling out. It had begun on my twentieth birthday; the year that started with that birthday was the time in which I had to find my intended. I’d confided to Jonesy that I had doubts about having children, which would throw a wrench into my father’s plans for the next patriarch of the coven. That would mean I would have to step up. I suspected I would be an old man before I would ever get a chance to fulfill that role because my dad was just stubborn enough to live forever.
Jonesy had betrayed my trust and told my father about my misgivings. Ever since then, I’d had minders keeping track of me. I wasn’t allowed to leave the city limits of Cassadaga without an escort. I fully expected that when I found my intended, I would be compelled magically to complete the binding and produce an heir.
With that in mind, I was nervous about any circles. This was when the coven joined together to perform magic that a single warlock or witch would never be able to pull off alone.
Our circle was on my father’s farm in a wooded area. As I entered the woods, I felt the power of the source calling to me. One of my distant ancestors had tuned it to our family line. Once we came here, no one could harm us as long as we stayed inside the boundaries. I’d had an older brother who’d been caught outside of town. He’d simply disappeared. I knew he was still alive because of my ghost spy network. He would have contacted me if he were able.
The woods always seemed to be shrouded in a fog in the evenings, and especially in the morning. The source generated heat and caused the ground to be warmer than the air temperature. Add the natural humidity of Florida, and you got fog. It gave the woods a haunted-forest vibe. The massive twisted oaks with the Spanish moss shifting in the breeze made it all marvelously creepy. Okay, sue me. I got into that kind of thing.
Cassandra and Jonesy were suddenly on each side of me. I knew better than to say anything and just allowed them to guide me to the circle. My stomach twisted when I discovered we were the last ones to arrive.
Once we’d joined the circle, my father performed the ritual to seal it. This would prevent any outsiders from discovering us, and none of us could leave until the seal was released. It also contained any magic that might escape by mistake. In the center was a pentagram where our magic rituals would be performed. The pentagram was an additional layer of protection. For example, if a demon were to be summoned, he would hopefully be contained within the pentagram.
The hairs on my arms rose as the pulse of power from all those present and the source came together. The first time I could join the circle, I’d almost passed out when I was assaulted with the energy as it flowed through me.
“Tonight, we will invoke the seer’s gift,” Maxus said in his deep baritone. “The time to break the curse is almost upon us. Horus, join me.”
Uncle Horus rarely attended. He and my father had had a quarrel when I was young, which caused my uncle to only show up when forced. To be honest, I was glad he’d decided to keep to himself. Uncle Horus’s ability was as a soul sucker. He could pull the soul out of someone and use it to enhance his magic skills. It was one of the creepiest of the dark magic skills, and it made everyone nervous when he was around.
My father pulled out a chalice that had been handed down since before my family left Europe. My stomach turned because this meant my father intended to perform blood magic. He held the chalice up, and Uncle Horus held his hand over it. My father pulled a knife out and cut my uncle’s hand deeply. I watched as blood poured from the wound into the cup.