TWENTY-THREE
“Erik was the love of my life, only Ellen found him first,” she said and flushed. Her composed exterior melted, and I saw a flash of the woman she must have been at my age. I understood what she had been through, the pain that cut her on both sides for hurting her sister and not being openly able to love my father. I knew now that I had never “loved” Jackson, that the emotion I’d felt for him was actually my reaction to the power that had been used in his creation, the power that should have been mine. All the same, I didn’t think I stood in any position to judge my mother.
“Here is where it all becomes so terribly complicated and murky,” she said, and her eyes looked beyond me toward an unreachable past. “Do you believe in fate?” she asked me, regaining focus.
“I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess.”
“Sometimes?”
“I guess I use it as a rationalization. When things end up like they did with Maisie, part of me wants to believe that there was no other way for them to turn out. That Maisie never had a choice, and was only playing the role written for her.”
“And the other times, when you don’t believe?”
“When I want to take things into my own hands and make a difference.”
“Like you are trying to do now for Maisie.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“But which would be better? If you had to choose? Control or chaos?”
“Honestly, somewhere in between,” I said and smiled.
She returned my smile. “I see you have Oliver’s way of worming yourself out of committing,” she said, the criticism hit me as a warm one, filled with pride. “But now the line has chosen you. It has made the commitment for you, without giving you a choice in the matter.” She shifted in her chair and leaned forward. “The line is an awesome power, but never for a moment think you control it. It controls you. It owns you.” She let the words hang between us, giving them time to soak fully into my consciousness. I knew she was right. I’d always thought that having access to magic would mean true freedom, but ever since the line had chosen me, my life no longer felt like my own. The families, the other anchors, they all seemed to want a say.
“There are those who chafe against its ruthless control. Those who at one time assisted in its creation, but who would now like to free themselves of its tyranny.”
“The other three families,” I volunteered.
“Yes. Renegade, traitorous, evil. I’m sure you’ve heard these words used to describe the families who have balked.”
“But what they want is evil,” I protested. “To bring down the line, to subject us to the control of monsters.”
She shook her head sadly. “Monsters, indeed. Consider the world around us, Mercy. Wars and famine. People killing one another and ruining the planet to drain it of the last drop of fossil fuel. It hasn’t always been this way. The monsters, the demons, are nothing but bogeymen, created to keep witches, the strong ones like me and you, in place.” She had gotten caught up in her own tale and wasn’t picking up on my growing wariness. “Those beyond the line are not demons. They are creators, teachers, and the most merciful of judges. They placed the thirteen families in positions of trust, but we grew greedy and willful. We betrayed them.” She stood, and paced for a few moments. “Your father, Erik, he came from one of the three families.”
“Yes, I know, but he turned away from them and joined with the other ten.”
“No.” She stopped and faced me. “He never betrayed his family. His allegiance to the ten was a fiction.”
“But why?”
“There had been a prophecy . . .”
“Yes, I’ve heard about the prophecy that was made when the witches created the line. It was said that one day there would rise a witch who would unite the thirteen families again, and together they would bring down the line. That witch would come through a union of Erik’s family’s blood—”
“And the Taylors’.” She rushed over to me and took my hands. “The ten anchors saw this prophecy as a dark and fearful thing, but the other families, including your father’s, saw it as the sole glimmer of hope in a universe gone mad. I’m sorry. I know it makes your father sound cold-blooded and calculating, but he never loved Ellen. Their meeting. Their courtship. The way he disowned his own blood. He was playing his role in a carefully choreographed scheme with the goal of creating a child.”
Calling his behavior merely “cold-blooded” was being generous, and I shuddered at the thought that my father could have been so calculating and heartless. I felt ashamed of my connection to him.
“A child,” my mother continued, not seeming to notice that I’d checked out emotionally, “who could restore order and bring peace. Ellen knew nothing of this prophecy at the time. The few witches who did know of it considered it more or less a fairy tale, but then Erik and Ellen married. The mere possibility was enough to give those anchors loyal to the line pause. They conspired to prevent her from conceiving, but her own power to heal kept setting her body to right. That’s the real reason Ellen’s powers began to fail her for a time. After Paul was born, Ginny turned Ellen’s ability to access the line’s power down to low, low enough that Ellen’s body couldn’t keep the families’ magic from making her incapable of conception. They would never have allowed Ellen to bring her child to term, except that the prophecy called for a female child to be born. Paul owed his life, short though it proved to be, to a Y chromosome.”
“But wait,” I said as I struggled with my own sense of history. “I remember a time when Paul was still alive. A boy was hit by a car outside Ellen’s flower shop. He was dying, and she managed to bring him back. It scared the crap out of me. If Ginny had already been tampering with her powers, how could she have managed it?”
“The adrenaline? The emotion? Something kicked Ellen into high gear and allowed her power to loosen the valve Ginny had put on it.” She paused. “I’m sure you remember that Paul and Erik died only a week or so after the incident.”
“But that really couldn’t have been connected to Ellen’s saving the child.”
“Ellen had proven that she couldn’t be controlled, at least not with one-hundred-percent certainty. The families felt justified in stepping in and dealing with the matter.” The blood drained from my face, and nausea washed over me. “You think that wreck was an accident?” She shook her head. “No, the families arranged the crash to make sure that neither Erik nor Paul would ever sire a daughter.”
My mouth fell open. It was too horrible. I didn’t want to believe a word of it, and yet it explained so much. I weighed the doubt I felt toward what my mother was saying against the way the pieces fit so tightly together. “Did Ginny know about this? Did she help kill them?”
She returned to her chair and took a few moments to collect herself. She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked past me. “I don’t believe so. Ginny was a great many things, but she fell short of being capable of murder.” Her tone seemed to imply that she was being magnanimous in her assessment of my great-aunt. “They would have kept the deed from her until it was done, and then found a way to convince her they’d done it in the line’s best interest. It wouldn’t have taken much convincing, of that I am certain.”
“But what about Maisie and me?” I asked.
My mother relaxed and leaned forward, a mischievous look in her eye. “In spite of all their magic, the ten families and their anchors, they are still just people. They are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. They believed that you were Connor’s daughters,” she said and then shocked me by throwing back her head and laughing. “As if that weakling bastard could ever engender girls like mine, like you or our darling Maisie. Anyone with half a brain could see that your blood is far superior to any Connor had to offer. You come from a much purer stock.”
“But Iris and Ellen knew,” I prompted her.
“Yes, they knew.” She licked her lips. “Your aunts are very much like this house, I’m afraid. What you see on the outside is very different from what you’ll find within. They are capable of actions you might never believe.”
“Such as what?” I asked. She was very likely right that I wouldn’t believe, but I had to know what she’d say. “Tell me.”
“They were both very angry with me. I think it’s fair to say they hated me. Iris blamed me, rather than her own frigidity, for her marital problems. Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth. On the other hand, where Ellen was concerned . . .” She paused. “Please remember that Erik and I had fallen very much in love with each other. Desperately in love, the way I hope you and your Peter are, or at least may someday be.” I remained silent. She kept pointing out similarities between our experiences, as if she was trying to trick me into identifying with her. “We knew it would hurt Ellen, but we had decided to run away together. Leave Savannah and return to Erik’s home in Germany. Raise our children there, where we could protect them, you, from the line’s anchors. Somehow, Ginny learned of our plans, and she put all the pieces together.
“She and my sisters conspired against me. They came to me with the proposal that they would protect you and Maisie. If I left, letting everyone, including Erik, believe that I had died, they wouldn’t turn the two of you over to the ten families. Oh, it worked out great for each of them. Iris could hold on to Connor because he believed himself to be your father. Erik was happy to remain with Ellen, knowing that she would be a good mother to you even though she had divined the truth about your parentage, especially since I had died and could no longer threaten her marriage. Ginny got to get rid of me, the only member of the Taylors who didn’t kowtow to her and accept her slavish support of the line.”
“But they held a funeral. The whole of Savannah came. They buried you,” I said, not as statements but as a demand for explanation.
“It wasn’t me they buried. They buried a doppelg?nger your aunts and Ginny forced me to create. That coffin they buried has been empty for years.”
“How did Tillandsia play into all of this, though? You were trying, weren’t you? You and Erik? You were trying to build up enough juice to bring down the line.”
“Yes,” she said, “your father and I wanted to bring down the line and rip our world out of the anchors’ grasp. To let love and light find its way back in. Now I know that I was na?ve.” She stood and came to me, kneeling before me and placing her hand on my cheek. I felt torn between the impulse to cling to her and the urge to pull away. “The united families, the ten who maintain the line, have shut us off from those who would help us. Those who would teach us how to live peaceably together, heal the sick, feed the hungry. The knowledge and the technology the elders want to share with us would create heaven here on earth. Imagine a world with free energy, without famine or disease. The line supposedly protects us from demons, but the truth is it imprisons us. Tell me, Mercy, where does a real witch, such as yourself, get her power?”
“From the line, of course.”
She looked at me sadly. “So it’s true. The other anchors, they haven’t shared with you how the line was created. They don’t trust you.” She shook her head. “No. True witches never got their power from the line. It is the line that derived its power from witches. That’s the anchors’ big secret. A secret that most witches who support the line pretend not to know, and if they admit to the knowledge, pretend not to believe. Witch magic, our magic, was the gift of the very beings we drove out. They empowered us, entrusted us, and we betrayed them.”
I held up my hands. I had no more patience for politics. “Okay, even if this is true, you haven’t begun to explain why either Iris or Ellen would want to kill Tucker, leave alone frame me for it.”
“I believe Ellen caught wind that Tucker was loyal to me.”
“Or disloyal to her, you could say.”
My mother nodded her assent. “That would be Ellen’s view of the situation.” She took a few steps away from me, and then turned back, holding her hands out toward me, her palms turned upward. “That would be Ellen’s motive,” she said, “at least as far as removing Tucker is concerned.”
“What about where I’m concerned?” I asked.
“My dear, as you know, the line has a taste for Savannah Taylors. With you out of the way, there is at least a thirty-three-percent chance Ellen would be chosen as the next anchor. She couldn’t ask for a better position from which to seek revenge for the death of her son.”
I leaned back and considered what she had said, and as I did, I noticed that the dome above us had been covered with frost. “Look,” I said and pointed up. My mother raised her eyes to look at the dome, and I heard a loud whumpf as if something heavy had been slammed against it. Tiny lines formed across the glass, and the sound of stressed panes cracking echoed all around us in the hexagonal hall. Wordlessly, my mother raised both hands toward me, and a force shot from her that knocked me and my chair several feet back. The chair tumbled over me as I landed a little beyond the entranceway, in a side room. The music of a thousand singing shards nearly drowned out my mother’s gasp. I bounded to my feet in time to watch a transparent stake tumble from above, impaling her through her eye. A total collapse followed, the whole weight of what remained of the dome tumbling down and sending shards like fireworks shooting through the hall. I wasn’t screaming. The sound wouldn’t come. I wasn’t moving. My body wouldn’t budge. I didn’t use magic to protect myself. I could not process thought, let alone channel energy. In the instant before the nearest shards sliced through me, hands reached out from behind me and whisked me from the doorway. I heard the door slam behind me and innumerable strikes as the tiny projectiles embedded themselves into its wooden skin.
Strong arms held me, sheltered me. Shaking, horrified, I looked up into Emmet’s face.