The Line

THIRTY-TWO


The drawing of the lots had taken place thirteen days after Ginny’s death, and the investment ceremony would take place today, thirteen days later. Oliver’s prediction had been spot on—other than the few minutes I’d shared with Maisie upon her arrival, the families had kept her pretty much sequestered. What she’d told me had surprised me. I couldn’t believe that some of our family members truly believed that the line had truly chosen me as anchor. I chuckled to myself as I finished packing an overnight bag for my stay at the Mansion, not my ratty old backpack, but one of Ellen’s fancy, honest-to-God overnight bags. She had blanched when I’d told her I was planning on taking my backpack and had practically flung the thing at me. And even though we only lived about ten blocks from the hotel, Oliver had arranged for a town car to pick me up.

There was a rap at my door. “Your coach awaits, Cinderella,” Oliver’s voice called out to me.

“Tell the driver I’ll be right down.” My own reflection caught me by surprise as I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. The woman I saw in the mirror looked happy. In spite of everything that had happened over the past several days, I honestly felt like it would all turn out okay. Once the investment was over, I’d spend time with Maisie. We’d catch up and finish working things out. And then I’d get Iris away from here for a while. My first installment from the trust had hit my checking account on my birthday, and I was astounded by the size of it. There was plenty enough to take us to Paris, or maybe Florence. It would do us both good.

Uncle Oliver had decided to relocate his business to Savannah. He was staying home for good this time. That would be good for all of us, especially Ellen. Oliver might be a tad self-centered, but he would look out for her until she was back on an even keel. Peter, well, we’d work things out. Whether or not we got back together, we’d raise our boy right. Colin Taylor Tierney would be a blessing to this family—he’d be the new start that we all so badly needed. I smiled at my reflection and went down to meet the car. I gave Oliver a quick peck on the cheek on my way out, then winked at the driver as he took the bag from my hand and opened the door for me.

“It’s only a few blocks,” I said. “It feels downright decadent.”

“Nothing wrong with a little decadence now and again. Enjoy it, ma’am.” After closing the door behind me and stowing my bag in the trunk, he got into the driver’s seat and pulled out onto the street, showing much more care than the casual driver. “Scenic route?” he called back to me, glancing at me in his rearview mirror.

“Please,” I said. He turned the car in the opposite direction of the Mansion and zigzagged around so that he could circle the six closest squares.

As we neared Pulaski Square, he looked at me in the mirror again. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, handing me a small but beautifully wrapped package over the seat. “Your sister asked me to give this to you.”

“Thank you,” I said and took it from him. The box was covered in velvety midnight blue paper and tied with a single silver bow. I undid the bow and tugged open the box. On top was a note from Maisie. I unfolded it and read. “Even if you can’t be here with me, I’ll be able to feel your presence if you wear this.”

“Everything all right back there?” the driver asked.

“Yes. Everything is perfect,” I smiled up at him then took the necklace out from the box, kissing the beautiful stone that I recognized as azurite. Rounded and polished, it looked like a small globe of the world. As I slipped the chain around my neck, I closed my eyes and held the stone tightly in my hand, thinking of Maisie and sending her all my love.

When I opened my eyes, the driver was still looking at me in the rearview mirror, but his brown eyes had changed to a sapphire blue. The face beneath the driver’s cap had morphed into a completely different one. I’d know those eyes anywhere. That face. “Jackson?” I said, gasping.

“She told you I’d be back,” he said, throwing me a grin over his shoulder. His eyes were gleeful, crazed, and full of hate. I reached over to try the door, but it was locked.

“I don’t understand,” I said. He turned the car onto Barnard and sped across Liberty Street with the gas pressed to the floor. I screamed as he pulled into oncoming traffic.

He laughed as the vehicles passed right through our car—and us—without so much as a tickle. “Well, I’ll be glad to explain a few things to you. Starting with how we’re just a little out of sync with the world you’re used to right now. Those charms your buddy the golem set up for you ain’t gonna work here. And you can try and run away from me if you’d like, but you’ll never get home without me. See, I kind of like it here. We can see and hear what’s going on in the other world, but nothing and no one there can touch us. Unless that someone happens to be wearing the mate of that necklace you just put around your pretty little neck. Care to guess who that might be?”

“Maisie,” I said, once again astounded by my own stupidity, my willingness to be deceived.

“That’s right, my girl,” he said, continuing to drive. The familiar landmarks we were passing surprised me—we were heading back in the direction we’d come from. “Your sister set you up.”

“But why?” I asked.

“That’s a bit of a long story, but I guess we got the time for it. Unless you’d rather I smear blood on your head and toss you to the shadows like you and Jilo did to me?” He looked back over his shoulder at me again.

“All I ever did was love you, Jackson. That’s what we did to Wren, not you…we had to stop him, ” I said.

“You just don’t get it, do you, girl?” he asked. “I am Wren.”

“You’re Wren?” I asked, completely thrown.

“That’s right,” he chirped in Wren’s falsetto, before his voice broke back into Jackson’s range. “And thanks to your sister, I was finally able to break out of that way too small shell. Maisie helped me grow.” He winked at me. “Of course that’s what any good woman should help her man do, but in this case, I mean it literally.”

As I sat back in wonder, we pulled up in front of my house. It looked fairly quiet from the front, but I knew a world of activity was going on inside. He stopped the car and got out. “Shall we go back in and say hello to the family?” he asked. Flinging my door open, he yanked me out roughly, doing his best to hurt me. I didn’t resist; I let myself coast on his energy, going with the flow instead of fighting.

We walked straight through the door without stopping to open it. I found myself wishing that I’d never told my family that Jilo had linked her realm to the linen closet. If the portal had still existed, I might have been able to use it to escape. The thought of escaping to Jilo’s realm instead of from it struck me as funny, and in spite of my fear, or maybe because of it, I began to laugh.

Jackson shook me like I was a rag doll. “You think this is funny, do you? Well, you’ll stop laughing when you see what we have planned for you.”

My laughter dried up under his hateful gaze. Iris and Oliver passed in front of us, so close that I could have reached out and touched them. I started to call out to them, but the strength of Jackson’s grip made me think twice. It was his turn to laugh. “Go ahead,” he said, shoving me aside. “Scream! Nobody’s going to hear you.”

He jumped right in front of Oliver’s face. “Hey, faggot! Can your niece get a little help here?” Oliver passed directly through him, and Jackson doubled over with laughter. “I guess we’ll have to take that as a no.” He pushed me into the library through the foyer wall, and I landed at the foot of the love seat. “Interesting, isn’t it? You can walk right through walls, but the floor is still holding you up. That, Mercy, is because you are working magic. You’re so sure that the floor is going to support you that it does. Your magic is what’s holding you up.” He reached down and tugged me up. “Have a seat if you want. I’m sure your magic will let you, and you’ll look a little less ridiculous than you do right now.”

I bent my knees until I could feel the material of the love seat underneath me. It felt tangible and real, and it held my weight. “You’re wrong,” I said, despite all evidence to the contrary. “I have no power. I can’t do magic.”

“Oh, spare me the sad tale,” he bellowed. “And let me tell you a little story of my own.” He dragged a chair in front me and straddled it, putting us nearly nose to nose. The eyes looking out of his face weren’t human, the blue in them cold flames.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a very wicked witch named Ginny and a whore named Emily. Now the whore slept with a whole bunch of men. But only one of them was special to her. Problem was, this man already belonged to her sister. Now I know this might sound familiar to you, but you just hang in there with me.” He winked at me. “The whore knew that her sister’s husband wanted children, and for some reason her sister had only managed to give him one. Of course you and I both know that the wicked witch had put an end to the babies, because she was afraid that the children born from of the combination of these particular bloodlines could overpower her, reuniting the thirteen families and turning her back into the nothing she knew herself to be. When the wicked witch learned that the whore had gotten herself knocked up, she bided her time. She pretended to believe that the father of the bastard children was the husband of the whore’s other sister, but she knew the truth all along.

“She knew that the boy born from the legitimate union was powerful but that he posed no real threat. The one who’d been foreseen was a girl. All sugar and spice and sweet and pink as you please. Well, when the witch realized that the whore was going to give birth to two girls, she started to pay a lot of attention. She sensed that the first one wasn’t going to be much of a problem. She had power, all right, but not nearly enough to rock the boat. The second one, though, well, she was something special, even for a Taylor witch. Ginny knew that this was the one whose coming had been foretold, and she was not about to let her live to see the light of day.

She did all she could to end the pregnancies, but that second little one, she was just too strong. She kept both herself and her sister alive and unharmed. And Ginny could feel the little one’s power increasing with each passing day. So she hijacked the power. She had to do it in steps; first she started feeding it from the strong sister to the weaker one and then, once she’d managed to get the energy flowing away from its owner, she sent it away. She grounded it in another dimension, close enough that she could access it herself, but far enough away that it could pass right through a Taylor witch without him or her ever noticing. As a matter of fact, it’s all around us right now. This was where Ginny sent your power. She did her best to starve you to death, and it might have worked if your Aunt Ellen hadn’t given you the boost you needed to survive delivery.”

Ginny had stolen my power and tried to kill me. No wonder my mother didn’t survive our birth. I had a whole new pack of reasons to grieve, but the knowledge that I wasn’t responsible for my mama’s death was like a wave of absolution, freeing me of the guilt that I had carried for as long as I could remember. Oddly, this was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Suddenly the proportions of the room shifted, and Maisie was standing directly in front of me. Jackson was several yards away, hanging at an angle that should have been impossible but wasn’t.

“She kept me under her thumb,” Maisie continued Jackson’s narrative seamlessly. “Not because I was some kind of prodigy, but because she saw me as a time bomb. Picture my surprise last year when I stumbled across her old journals. She kept such careful notes about me. She should have shown more care in keeping them hidden. Breaking the charms on them was child’s play. She couldn’t undo the siphon of power she’d set up between us. She couldn’t just take what she had been pumping into me and shift it somewhere else. She had inadvertently turned me into an anchor for your power. If the power started flowing back to you, the whole dam would have eventually burst, and she was prepared to stop at nothing to keep that from happening. You would be astounded to know just how much she hated you. She wrote about trying to find a way to bend time. To go back and prevent your ever having been conceived.”

“She was crazy. She had to be, but Maisie, how can you be doing this to me? You have got to stop this. You’ve got to let me go.”

“No, actually, I don’t. You see, this is how I’m going to finally get my revenge against Ginny. And you.”

“Against me? But for what?”

“For stealing my life! Ginny trained your power into me. She turned me into a freak.”

“At least she loved you,” I said, not even knowing anymore if that was true. Could Ginny have really have loved Maisie and used her as she had?

“As a reflection of her own twisted self, maybe, but not for any other reason. She didn’t let me out of her sight, and there you were, roaming free, making friends, meeting boys, finding love.” She grimaced at me. “I got to watch as you won the heart of the only man I could ever love.”

I started to protest that Jackson wasn’t even actually real, just a twisted, grown-up version of Wren when the dots suddenly connected. “Peter,” I said.

“Yes, Peter!” Maisie replied, anger spilling over in her voice. “Haven’t you noticed, Mercy? Most regular men won’t even come near us. And even witches are afraid of me because of this thing Ginny turned me into. I could never figure out why, but Peter is completely unfazed by the magic. It flows right over him, and he doesn’t even care. He could have loved me…and he would have if you weren’t around. I tried to take him from you, and the damnedest thing is that he never even noticed I was trying. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

“So you took Wren and started transforming him into Jackson.”

“Yes,” Maisie admitted, shaking her head. “I did, but it took a lot more energy than I possessed. It took your kind of power. A part of you recognized your own energy in him, and you interpreted those feelings as love.”

“Now that’s ironic, isn’t it?” Jackson asked. The distance between us had dissolved, and he was standing right by my side. He leaned in and kissed my cheek, then forced his lips on mine. Repulsed, I pulled back.

“Everything was going great for a while, but Ginny realized what I had done,” Maisie said. “She couldn’t tell the family, so she decided to dissolve Wren on her own.”

“She summoned me there, thinking she could control me.” Jackson said. “But she couldn’t. I really enjoyed killing her.”

“But what do you get from all this?” I asked Jackson.

“I get to live. I get to live in your world, and that’s all I have ever wanted.”

“When the anchor energy settles on me—the same power you told me just yesterday that you’d give me of your own free will—I’ll finally be strong enough to undo what Ginny has done. I’ll unground the power that she stole from you, and with it, I’ll help Jackson fully and finally actualize in our world. And then I won’t just anchor the line, I’ll take control of it. I’ll bring the thirteen families back together, all right, but they’ll be under my thumb. And when I’m firmly in control of our reality, I’ll make Peter love me too.”

“But if you unground my power, what’s to keep it from coming back to me?” I asked and was chilled by the look on my sister’s face. She was astounded.

“You don’t get it do you? When I unground your power, there won’t be a you for it to flow back into.” I was too stunned to speak. “I’m out of time here,” she said, addressing Jackson. “Get her ready and make sure she’s in the correct position.”

As far as I could tell, I didn’t move an inch, but I was suddenly naked and tied to one of the trees that grew in the garden of my own home. My hands were pulled up and tied above my head, a second band of coarse hemp secured me tightly by the waist, and a third was above my knees. The bark of the tree was rough and it dug into the skin of my back. Worse than that was the coarseness of the rope that held me in place.

Jackson stood beside me, smiling beatifically at me. “What a beautiful martyr you’ll make,” he said.

Witches milled around us, walked right through Jackson without even noticing that we were there. Mere yards away I could see Emmet talking to Ellen. Maisie walked over to join them, and Ellen leaned in and whispered something in her ear. An expression of surprised anger flitted across Maisie’s face, but she hid it quickly, smiling and hugging our aunt.

Jackson leered at me as he used his pointer finger to draw symbols and designs on my body with a warm, sticky liquid. Even if I’d been blind, its scent would have told me that it was blood, and I found myself saying a prayer for the spirit of whatever poor creature had been sacrificed. “Your sister is something else, ain’t she?” he asked. “It was pretty amazing the way she handled Connor. He came close to cocking up the whole works when he figured out that Ginny had been sharing her secrets. Maisie managed to deal with him from another dimension without anyone being one bit the wiser.”

“The fire,” I said.

“That’s right,” Jackson beamed at me. “Had to be fire, ’cause we knew it would take him out without harming you. We needed to keep you alive for the ceremony today.”

“But how could you know that the fire elementals wouldn’t harm me?” I asked.

“The protective charms the golem set for you included protection from fire, natural or magical. But in my opinion, the charm was unnecessary. If anyone, including you, had the slightest idea of who you really are, or what you’re really made of, they would have realized there was no need to protect you from flames. Suffice it to say, the fire recognized you as its own. From the looks of things, it healed you up nicer than even Ellen could have. The way you were laid out on that floor, I figured your walking days were over.”

“I can’t believe she’s doing this.” I was talking to myself, but he answered me all the same.

“Oh, believe it,” he said. “But don’t you worry, she isn’t going to get quite the outcome she’s expecting, so you’ll get the last laugh in the end. Well, on second thought, you won’t, ’cause I’ll have to kill you before you can have that laugh, but you’ve been such a good girl, and I’m feeling generous.

“When it comes right down to it, lies are pretty simple. It’s the truth that’s complicated. It’s like an onion, and there’s always another layer if you keep peeling.” He chuckled to himself as he continued making marks on my body. He stopped suddenly. “Well what have we here?” he asked after a moment. “Looks like I’m going to get two for one this time.”

I knew he had sensed Colin, and I felt a deep sense of mourning for my child, who’d never even be born. Tears started streaming down my face, and Jackson wiped them away with his bloody fingers.

“Oh, there, there,” Jackson said. “You won’t live to give birth to this one, but through your death, you’ll become the mother of thousands. You’ve seen your children, Mercy—my brothers and sisters—when you passed through their world on your way to visit Jilo.”

“You’re…you’re one of the shadows,” I managed through my tears.

“Yes,” he said, then placed a gentle kiss on my lips. “Imagine how it felt to almost be destroyed by my own kind. The sweet blood you wiped on me. It excited them, confused them. If they hadn’t been so starved and I so well fed, they might have ripped me apart before they knew what they were doing. See, you are much smarter than that sister of yours. She never even questioned that I might be something other than a little fellow your uncle dreamed up.” He gave me a thumbs-up and a beaming smile that revealed his straight white teeth. “I have to tell you, we’ve been waiting for this day for millennia. Your birth, Ginny’s intervention. It was nothing less than miraculous. We want so badly to live in your world, Mercy. But there’s only enough power for a few of us to get out at a time. When the witches activated the line, we got trapped between worlds, neither entirely in the world the witches created, nor wholly in the one they left behind. When the tunnels near Candler Hospital were dug, they filled up with such sweet despair and misery that we were drawn to them, but even feeding off all of that exquisite agony didn’t allow us to draw a fraction of the power we needed to pierce the veil. There were too many of us, and the line was too strong.

“So we’ve bided our time. Only a few of us could break free at once, and even then only for a little while. We learned that we could draw strength from the dreams of sleeping humans, and eventually we began to meet magic workers who would assist us in return for performing small favors for them. They’d give us skins that we could use to walk in your world, but the skins never lasted for long.”

“The shadows are boo hags?” I asked, every bit as surprised as if he’d told me they were leprechauns.

“Yes, that’s what we’ve come to be called in the low country, but we’ve had a lot of different names. Heck, you couldn’t even pronounce our real name if I told you. There, finished,” he said, then stuck his finger back into the blood and licked it. He tossed the container to the ground. “I got real lucky one day when I met an up-and-coming root doctor named Mother Jilo Wills. She promised me that if I kept an eye on you Taylors and reported back to her, she’d teach me how to weave my own flesh. She’d find a way to feed me enough energy so that I’d never have to go back to the world between.

“Her plan started with tricking the Taylor child named Oliver into believing that I was his special friend. After that, his desire to keep me around would be enough to hold me in your world. Oh, how proud your grandparents were of Wren. They took me as proof positive that their Oliver was the brightest and most powerful little witch ever. I could draw enough energy off the little bastard to live quite well for a while,” he said, standing back to admire the drawings he had made on my body.

“But all little ones must grow up, and soon Oliver lost interest in me. With Jilo’s help, I managed to hang on through the dry spell, but it was like living off grass after years of feeding on cow. Things started looking up when your cousin Paul was born, and then when your mother gave birth to you. Ginny did her best to ground your energy here, but she did a rather sloppy job of it, leaving a bit leaking off here, a little leaking off there. Feeding off your power, I was able to grow strong. You see, ever since you came into the world, you’re the one who has made my existence possible. You should be proud, for I am every bit as much as your child as that clot in your womb. Soon your other children are going to burst free from their prison too. And it is truly all thanks to you and your fantastically screwed up family.”

He held up a dagger before my eyes. “This is the blade that will end your life. Don’t worry, it’s sharp, and I promise to make it as quick and painless as I can. Your death is the grand finale to your sister’s plan, you see. As soon as the investment ceremony takes place and the anchor energy settles into her, she will signal me, and I will drive this blade into your heart. At that very moment she’ll free your magic, and it will unite itself with the closest match to your living blood. In the end, it always comes down to blood, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“Maisie thinks that she’ll be the closest match, but…well, now we’ve reached the part of my plan that is probably going to be the most unpleasant for you.” He took the dagger and sunk the tip of its blade just above my breast. I screamed out from pain, and then from revulsion, as he pressed his lips to the wound, sucking the blood from my flesh.

“I need to do this at each one of these points,” he said, touching a few of the places he had marked on my body. Then he made a quick swipe of the blade at each of them, pressing his mouth to the wounds and drawing in deeply. He moaned in pleasure. “Oh, girl, you do taste good,” he said, his teeth red behind his bloody lips. “Your blood burns in me,” he said, growing intoxicated. His lips sought out the wounds over and over again, and my vision began to blur from the pain and blood loss. And then he suddenly pulled away.

The sounds I could hear from the other dimension weren’t fully audible and were out of sync with the visual images I could perceive, but even though my strength was sapped and my senses were weakened, I could tell that the investment ceremony had started. I felt the sharp blade of Jackson’s dagger poise itself directly above my heart.

I heard Maisie’s voice scream the word “stop” once, twice, and then a third time. Then everything turned to fire.

I felt the power of the line reject Maisie. The ground in both worlds quaked as its energy reverberated around her, causing her image to shimmer like a mirage. Then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone.

The witches who had formed the circle around her looked shocked and horrified, but they held to their discipline, keeping their hands linked together. From the middle of the circle rose up the most beautiful ball of light I had ever seen. It turned at an angle that wasn’t possible in a world with only three dimensions and removed itself from their reality. The ball brushed against Emmet’s side as it disappeared from the witches’ world and entered into mine, growing ever larger and shining ever brighter.

I could still feel the point of Jackson’s blade pressed into my flesh, and with one last desperate move, he tried to stab me. But the orb expanded around us, burning into the shadow that had masqueraded as Jackson. A roar of flames drowned out his cries of rage and anguish and vexation as he disappeared into ash. The dagger he had been holding fell to the ground before me, landing blade first in the earth.

There was a brilliant flash of light, an effulgence that took over my body, and I felt the power of the line enter me, but before it could entirely settle in me, before I could even acknowledge the rapture pulsing inside, a second wave hit me—my own power. I was drowned by a feeling that lay somewhere between ecstasy and coming home.

When the light faded, when the elation subsided, I was no longer tied to the tree. I was in the center of the circle of thunderstruck witches, on a patch of burned earth that would never again grow a blade of grass.