THIRTY-FIVE
I didn’t wake until late afternoon, nearly evening. Peter was already awake but had been lying there still, so as not to disturb me. I opened my eyes to see his eyes, which had returned to their mismatched blue and green color, trained on me, his gentle love and burning passion wrestling within them. I touched him in a way that would give his passion the upper hand, and once again we made love.
Spent, I laid my head on his chest and kissed his scar again. “Tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll go get the marriage license. We’ll go to the justice of the peace.”
“The hell we will.” Peter sat up in the bed and took me in the crook of his arm. “That isn’t good enough for you.”
“It’s good enough. Nothing matters to me except that we’re together.”
He narrowed his eyes and leaned in to peck me on the lips. “Nope. It ain’t gonna happen that way. I’ve dreamed about seeing you come down the aisle to me for too long. You are not going to cheat me out of that.”
“You’ve dreamed about our wedding?”
“Well, honestly I’ve done a lot more dreaming about the honeymoon,” he said. I reached out and gave him a gentle smack. He squeezed me tighter. “But yeah, I’ve been dreaming about it since we were kids, pretty much since the day I met you. Remember that day in Forsyth, when I let you beat me climbing our tree?”
“I remember beating you; I don’t remember you letting me beat you.”
“Well, believe what you want, but I let you win all right. I wanted to see that red head of yours surrounded by patches of green and blue. You climbed higher than I did, and when I stopped, you looked down and stuck your tongue out at me. That’s when I first thought to myself, ‘I am gonna marry that girl someday.’ I’ve been dreaming about that day ever since. So yeah, we’ll go get the license tomorrow, but you gotta plan me a real wedding. One with a monkey suit and a white dress, flowers, and too much champagne. Well, for me at least,” he said and reached over to rub my stomach. “Oh, and cake.” His stomach growled. “I’m starving. You?”
I realized that I was. “Yes.”
“Let’s go out tonight. Somewhere nice. You can wear that pretty dress you left gathering wrinkles on my living room floor.”
“You didn’t seem too concerned about it at the time.”
“Oh, but I was,” he said and leaned in to kiss me. “I was so very concerned.” He kissed my lips again and began working his way down my neck.
“Food,” I said and pushed him away.
“All right, all right.” Another quick peck on my lips, then he pulled his arm out from under me, using his other hand to slide a pillow behind me. “I need to shower”—he ran his hand over his chin—“and shave.” He slid out of bed and stood. “Care to join me?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows. I threw a pillow at him.
“Take your shower and make it quick. Colin and I are hungry.” He lumbered off, and I closed my eyes as I heard the sound of the shower. I felt so grateful that he loved me, that he had not turned me away. I pulled the blanket up around me and breathed in his scent.
In a few minutes he returned and stood before me, wrapped up in a towel. “You still in bed, you lazy thing?” He started rummaging through his closet for some dress pants and a real shirt.
“My, my. A shirt with buttons, we are going fancy tonight.”
“Oh, no. These aren’t buttons. They’re snaps,” he said, pulling the shirt around his shoulders. “It’ll make it easier for you later, so you don’t have to rip another shirt off me.”
“I didn’t rip your last shirt off,” I said and laughed. “You did.”
“Hey, if you get to choose to remember that you beat me fair and square climbing that tree, I get to remember the shirt thing my way.”
“Fine.” I threw the blanket off and swung my feet out of bed. Peter stopped dressing and watched me, smiling. “I’m going to take a quick shower too.”
“You should’ve just hopped in with me. We could’ve saved time and water.”
“If I’d gotten in with you, we would have saved neither.” I got in the shower, at first determined not to get my hair wet, but it felt so good to let the hot water flow over me, washing away the parts of the last twenty-four hours that I didn’t care to remember, and somehow reinforcing the sensuality of the parts that I did.
When I stepped out of the shower, I dried off quickly, and wrapped myself in the towel. The bedroom was empty, although Peter had laid my dress and underwear out on the bed. I was just starting to dress when the door opened a crack. Peter poked his head through it. “You got a visitor.”
“Who is it?”
“A woman. Says her name is something like Rivkuh.”
“Rivkah. Rivkah Levi.” I hadn’t seen or even thought of Rivkah since the day the line had selected me to be an anchor. She had been one of the three witches who’d arrived early to prepare our house for the ceremony, to search for energy leaks or ingresses that might interfere with the investment of the line’s energy in the new anchor. Their efforts had been wildly unsuccessful.
“Yeah, that’s it. You okay? Should I make her leave?”
“Mercy, darling,” Rivkah’s voice came to me from over Peter’s shoulder. “Get dressed and come talk to me.”
I looked at Peter, then shrugged. “I’ll be right out, Mrs. Levi.”
“Rivkah, please, dear. Peter, do you have any wine?” I heard her opening and closing cupboards. “Ah, here’s some red. Corkscrew?”
“I’ll be right there,” Peter said and closed the door behind him.
I towel-dried my hair and wove it into a single braid. It would be a tangled mess later, but Rivkah was not someone you kept waiting. If I didn’t make it out to her quickly, she would invite herself in to join me. I dressed, smoothing out the wrinkles that had collected in the skirt of my dress, and went into the living room to find Peter sitting across from Rivkah at his kitchen table.
“There she is,” Rivkah said, rising and waving me into her arms. I hadn’t expected such an effusive greeting from someone I barely knew. She kissed my cheek. “Mazel tov on the little one.” She released me and reached for her wine glass. “To Colin,” she said, holding her glass out to Peter, who clinked with her.
“To Colin,” Peter echoed, a certain hesitancy in his voice.
Rivkah sat down. “So tell me, darling. What has been going on here with you and this family of yours?”
“Have you spoken to them yet?”
“No, not yet. I came directly from the airport. I wanted to talk to you first.” She leaned back in her chair, stretching into a relaxed and nonthreatening position.
“Who else from the families is coming?”
“No one else. Just me. I insisted it would be better for me to come alone, rather than dozens of us showing up like the Spanish Inquisition. Now tell me what happened last night. What did you all do to set the line clanking like a firehouse bell?”
I sat, trying to gain a little time to get my thoughts together.
“Mrs. Levi, Mercy has been dealing with a lot of stress. It isn’t good for her or our baby. I don’t want her to relive any of what happened. We’re moving on, putting the bad things behind us.”
“Again, call me Rivkah, and don’t you worry about this young woman of yours or your child. They are both much more resilient than you could begin to imagine.”
“All the same—”
“Peter,” she interrupted him, reaching out and patting his hand. “Why don’t you go out for a little bit and take a walk. Enjoy this lovely evening while Mercy and I have a chat.”
“This is my house.”
“And it is adorable.” She held up both hands, palms up, motioning around the room as if she were a game show hostess. She smiled and nodded, her dark curls bouncing. “We don’t need long. Take a spin up to that sweet park I passed on the way here. Daffin, isn’t it? We’ll be all finished by the time you return.”
Peter had to be the most good-natured guy I knew, but even he got a bit peeved when he was ejected from his own home. He looked at me for guidance, and I nodded, doing my best to apologize with my eyes.
He stood. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” he said and gave Rivkah a stern glance.
“That’s a good boy,” Rivkah said. “Oh, Mercy, you two are going to have such a beautiful child.”
Peter frowned, but he headed obediently to the door. “Twenty minutes,” he said and headed out the door.
After the door closed behind him, Rivkah reached out and took my hand. “He loves you very much—you know that, right?”
I nodded. “Yes. I’m very lucky to have him.”
“And he you,” she said and then let go of me. She took another sip of wine. “So Emily has come home.” She waited for my reaction, but I remained silent. “It must have been a terrible shock for you and your family.”
How could I answer that? Seeing the dream of having my mother returned to me changed, bastardized into a bloody nightmare. “How did you know?”
“Emmet,” she said. “He came home to me, to his mama.”
“Mama?”
“Well, I was the only woman involved in his creation, so if that doesn’t make me his mother, I don’t know what else I’d be to him.” She tilted her head and seemed to be taking a moment to consider me. “He’s totally besotted with you as well. You’ve broken his heart.”
“I am truly sorry for hurting him.” I had found myself using variations on that phrase a lot lately. “I didn’t mean to.” Yep. That one too. I wondered if I should aim for the trifecta with “I had no choice.” I decided instead to just stop talking.
Rivkah shrugged. “Well, he’s alive now, and getting your heart broken is part of being alive. You did the right thing in sending him away. Clean breaks heal the quickest. He’ll mend.” She paused. “Now back to business. Maybe it’s your own fault for naming the boy ‘Emmet,’ but he isn’t gifted at dissimulation. He knows you are in over your head, so he shared with me the truth of what happened last night. The whole story. The complete story. Now I am going to tell you the version that I will share with the families when I make my report to them, so you listen up.” She leaned forward on the table and folded her hands.
“Your mother—”
“Please don’t call her that.”
Rivkah nodded, understanding my horror of the woman. “Emily and this Josef fellow kidnapped your Aunt Ellen and forced you to come to this gathering of theirs. Then they trapped you so that they could attempt to use your power and your connection to the line to complete the Babel spell. You opened yourself up, unwittingly exposing the line, in your attempt to escape. This had been Emily’s goal all along. Your Peter stumbled in and forced you and Emmet apart, breaking the hold Emily had on you two.” She paused. “How did Peter know to come when he did? Oliver and Iris obviously would sense the disturbance of the line, but him?”
“His mother.” I came up with the lie on the spot. I could not let Rivkah know of the connection he shared with the baby. I could not let her learn that Peter was Fae. “Claire has the sight. She told him she sensed I was in trouble. That he should come.”
Rivkah nodded. “Good. You think well on your feet. That’s the story we’ll go with.” So Emmet had shared the entire truth with her, including Peter’s true identity. It felt odd that rather than lying to her as I’d intended, I was colluding with her.
“Why are you doing this? Covering for us? For me?”
“Well, my dear, there has been a lot of talk, foolish and reactionary talk, floating around the families since the line selected you. Some of those speaking most loudly and most foolishly are your own cousins. A few of the Ryans have been campaigning against you. Against your whole immediate family even. They want the Savannah Taylors laid low. I, on the other hand, have always felt a strong affection for your family. At least you keep things interesting.”
“Are they all against us?”
“Oh, no, darling. You have many vocal proponents. Especially that charming Taylor woman, oh, what is her name? Abby.”
“She always calls herself a white-trash Taylor,” I said and smiled in spite of my growing sense of apprehension.
Rivkah laughed. “Well, the ‘white-trash’ Taylors are all strongly in your corner. However, the fact that Emily Taylor faked her own death and aligned herself with the three rebel families may give even your staunchest supporters pause when the story gets around.”
“What can I do?”
“There now,” she said and smiled at me approvingly. “That’s a good girl, because it really all does come down to you now. Your next few steps are critical, if you want to protect your family and yourself. The first thing you will need to do is make a public abjuration of your mother. Express your horror about her actions and the choices she has made.”
“Easy enough.”
“Yes, easy perhaps, but still painful. You can handle it. The next step is going to come harder to you. You need to knuckle down. Submit yourself to the will of the other anchors. Be humble. Do as they tell you. Focus on what they feel you have to learn. They have been carrying your weight for long enough. You must thank them and apologize for having been so headstrong.” She raised her hand to prevent any protest. “And ‘headstrong’ is a generous way of putting it. You did put the line at risk last night.”
I nodded to acknowledge this truth. “For my family,” and by that I also meant the man I would soon marry and the child to whom I would give birth in some months, “I can do this.”
“Good. They will also want you to go away for a while, to a place where you can’t interfere with the line. They’ll want you to train directly under Gudrun.”
“No. That I cannot do.” I couldn’t spend time anywhere near Gudrun, the woman who had worked alongside Maria, the conduit, if not the source, of the darkness that had claimed my mother and taken my sister.
“I am afraid you won’t have a choice. If you resist, they will consider a binding. Nobody wants that, especially the other anchors. Show them that you can be reasonable. Besides, the more willingly you submit to the inevitable, the better the impression you will make. I do think we can put this off until after your wedding, though, as long as you lie low and don’t make any more waves.”
“What about the baby? I won’t do anything that will harm him.”
“Nor would I ask you to. He’ll continue to develop normally while you are with Gudrun. I will personally insist that you are allowed to return home before he’s born. At least temporarily.” She smiled and wagged a finger at me. “This will constitute the first time in the history of the line that an anchor gets maternity leave. You might have to spend a little time separated from each other, but from his perspective, he’ll only be without his mama for a few days.” She lifted her glass and polished it off. “Now, I need to know. Are you on board with this?”
I nodded my head just as Peter knocked on his own door, then opened it. “Perfect timing, Mr. Tierney. Now, where are we going for dinner? If I don’t eat soon, I’m going to challish.”