THIRTY-EIGHT
I reached out my magic toward Adam, but he slipped from my grasp. His body plummeted, limp, but bending in the wind. If I couldn’t stop his fall, I could at least cushion it. I envisioned the air between him and the ground condensing, slowing his descent. I watched from above as his fall slowed and he was eased onto the ground. From my height, I couldn’t tell if he was still alive. I concentrated on him, and in the next instant, I was kneeling by his side. I felt for a pulse. “Thank you.” I sighed a prayer of thanks to the universe.
The howl of the wind reminded me that Adam wasn’t my only worry. I needed to find my family, and together we needed to find a way to deal with the storm before the winds found their way to land. Not even counting the damage it could do to Savannah, countless innocent lives lay in its path. It would certainly claim Parris Island and Hilton Head, ravaging on until it had destroyed Daufuskie Island. Didn’t Jilo have family there, as well as on Sapelo?
Oliver had closed on his new house yesterday, and today the winds would wipe it from the map. My own house, where Iris and Ellen were probably still sleeping, would be destroyed if I didn’t make it there to wake them. I wrapped my arms around Adam and focused, but I didn’t feel the tingling sensation that usually hit me before I made one of my leaps. Was Savannah too far away? The usual sliding feeling did not come. Rain began to pelt me like grapeshot. Could the storm be interfering? I opened my eyes. “No,” was all I could say. We were still at the base of the lighthouse. We hadn’t moved an inch, but the storm had. I closed my eyes again. Come on. Come on, I screamed in my own mind.
“What in the hell is goin’ on here?” Jilo’s voice spat into my ear. I felt her cold hand reach out and spin me around. She stood there before me on the beach, dressed in a fuchsia polyester nightgown, a yellow scarf tied around her head. I lunged forward and pulled her into my arms.
“Adam,” I heard Oliver say with a gasp, and looked up to see him drawing near too. He ran up to us, bare chested and wearing drawstring pajama bottoms. He took Adam from me and rolled him over, cradling him in his arms. Iris approached from the opposite direction, wearing a housecoat, and Ellen stumbled a few feet behind her, moving groggily.
“You’ve brought us here?” Ellen asked. She had arrived fully dressed, wearing the same outfit she’d had on yesterday. I knew instantly that she hadn’t slept. She had passed out drunk. Perhaps she was still a bit drunk now. Okay, one disaster at a time. That one would have to wait.
“I hadn’t intended to, but . . .” I said and motioned out toward the approaching storm. “Emily,” I said before emotion choked me. I swallowed hard. “It is heading straight for Savannah. Oh my God”—I remembered Adam—“Adam’s been hurt.”
“Let me have him,” Ellen said to Oliver. She had been shocked sober by the sight of the two men. Oliver laid Adam’s head down gently and slid back to give her room. “They’ve been bleeding him,” she mumbled or maybe said. The wind made it hard to hear without screaming. Either way, the rest of her words were lost.
“We need to do something, push this back out,” I said, “but Emily said the anchors won’t let us.”
Jilo spat on the ground. “The hell you say . . .”
“It’s true,” another voice came, this one totally unexpected. It was sharper. Northern. “The others would stop us. That,” Rivkah said, her dark hair whipping around her face, “is why we have to act now before they register what we are doing.”
“How did you find us?”
“From whom do you think Emmet inherited his tracking skills? I spent two years in the Israel Defense Forces. I sensed you were in trouble, so I came. That’s why I’m here,” she said, anticipating a question I hadn’t even had time to consider. “Now do you want to talk, or do you want to turn this storm around?”
“Of course we want to turn the storm,” Iris said. “But you can’t take part in this. A Taylor caused this. The Taylors will act alone and shoulder the responsibility. This is not your fight.”
“I am not going to stand by and let innocent people die. You let me worry about the consequences.” The blowing wet sand bit at my ankles. Lightning ripped a seam in the sky and thunder shook us.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“How’d she start it?” Jilo asked.
“I don’t know. She just whistled.”
Iris nodded. “Well, the classics are always the best. We need to pull the storm back and then bend its course. I will have to descend into its eye to do that.” She shed her housecoat, the light silk of her nightgown instantly ravaged by the rain. “Jilo, honey, I am so glad you are here.”
“Well, that make one of us.” Jilo’s frail form shivered.
“If any of us knows how to collect and transmit power, it’s you,” Iris said. “It’s going to take all of us and all of our power to stop this storm. We need someone who can borrow everyone’s magic and loan it to me.” The two women looked at each other, an unspoken pact forming between them.
Ellen stood and stepped away from Adam. She looked at her brother and shook her head. “I don’t know, sweetie, I’ve done what I can . . . We’ll just have to wait and see.” Oliver shuddered at the words. “I’m sorry. I caught his essence just in time, but I don’t know. He’s lost so much . . .”
The wind howled even more loudly around us, drowning out the rest of her words. Iris raised her head to the sky and lifted her arms. Amid the flashes of lightening, she spun up into the air, turning her face into the driving wind. I watched in amazement as her body took to the wind, her flight against it a testimony to her strength.
We all pulled closer, huddling around Jilo. Oliver spoke first. “Jilo Wills, I grant you my magic. All of it. It is my power to give, and I give it to you of my own free will.” He paused. “I’m counting on you, you old buzzard. You fix this.”
More surprising than watching Iris take to the sky was witnessing Jilo’s gnarled hand as she reached out and pulled Oliver into her grasp. She pulled him to her and planted a kiss on his forehead. “She do her best.”
Ellen came next. “Jilo Wills, I grant you all of my magic. It is my power to give, and I give it to you of my own free will.” Jilo began to glow, the sole point of light now that dark clouds had devoured the sky.
I stepped forward, but Rivkah grabbed my arm. “Not you, Mercy. We need you as Plan B,” she said and then turned to Jilo. “Jilo Wills. I grant you all my magic. It is my power to give, and I give it to you of my own free will.” Lightning tore at us from the four corners of the sky, merging into a single bolt and striking Jilo as one. At first, I thought she must have been killed, but the old woman of the crossroads shot up and hovered a few feet off the ground. Clasping her hands together, she shot a single blinding arc of energy across the water, transferring what she had collected to Iris.
The wind lessened. The rain eased. Iris was succeeding, I just knew it. Then, the next instant later, she was thrown face down in the surf. Oliver jumped up from Adam’s side and ran toward her, but after a couple of steps, he too collapsed. I used my power to slide over to her and pull her out of the water. I knelt over her and felt for a pulse. I couldn’t find one. I looked up and called for Ellen, only to witness her weave and collapse.
“We’ve been found out,” Rivkah said, falling to her knees, and then onto her side, her left arm sprawling over her head.
A moment of total silence descended upon us, and then wind roared and snapped back onto its original path. The world around us flashed, and Jilo collapsed to the ground as all the magic was drained out of her.
“Sons of bitches,” she screamed and shook her hand at the sky. “You sons of bitches.” She looked at me. “Yo’ other anchors done cut off the magic. They done worked a binding on yo’ family and the Yankee woman. I think they done killed ’em, girl.”
I ran like mad from one to the next. No pulses, but I sensed they weren’t dead. They had been suspended, frozen. “You stop this,” I screamed, knowing full well even a whisper would be heard. They must be observing us after all. “You don’t have the right.” Feeling a sharp pain in my chest, I fell to my knees. The wind lashed stinging sand across my face, and another, sharper pain stabbed into my solar plexus.
Jilo tread toward me across the wet sand. “They workin’ you now. Don’t you let them, Mercy. You give your power to them, you ain’t never gonna get it back. They take yo’ magic. They take you family. Don’t you let them. You fight, girl.” She knelt before me and grasped my hands.
The pain was excruciating, and I almost gave into the waves of darkness that rolled over me, but then I thought of Colin, and I found the strength to fight back. I screamed, not out of pain, not even out of anger, but out of a mother’s primal sense to protect her child. No more. I would be weak no longer. I was no one’s victim, and neither was my child. “I reclaim my magic,” I shouted into the wind. “It is mine, and you may no longer have it. I revoke any permission I granted you.”
As the anchors channeled their combined power together to try to control the magic that belonged to me, my witch’s eyes witnessed multiple vistas, different worlds, encapsulating us, as one reality pressed in against another, competing for supremacy. Beyond them all, a pair of monstrous eyes, as large as moons, as large as planets, closed for eons, winked open, and turned toward us. Not yet fully awake, they still reflected the hunger of hibernation. Were the other anchors really so desperate for me to back down? They had risked everything in their attempt to control me. The fools were playing chicken with the line and stirring up the demons.
The hurricane was almost upon us. Waves lapped farther up on shore and washed over the inert bodies of those I loved. If they didn’t wake soon, the sea would carry them away, and they’d be lost to me forever. Jilo released my hands and faced the sea. I felt my heart slowing, as the other anchors continued their efforts to bind me without collapsing the line. A wave found me and knocked me flat. I struggled to push myself up. When I managed to force myself back to my knees, Jilo had disappeared, but the entire world around me had filled with the sickly, bruised blue light that I’d come to associate with Tillandsia.
I found my feet and turned toward the sea. The source of the light floated out above the ocean, thirty, maybe forty yards from shore, but I would have known Jilo from a thousand yards away. She had drawn the energy of Tillandsia into herself and was doing her best to single-handedly drive the storm away. Even though she knew the power had been poisoned, she had chosen to take it into herself anyway. She had put the well-being of others before her own. She must have known that, even with the power of Tillandsia, it would take a real witch to turn the hurricane away, especially when it would require taking on both the storm and the anchors of the line. She had sacrificed everything just to buy us a little time. To buy me a little time.
“There’s a price for stealing power,” I said softly, calmly. “And you all are stealing my power. Return it to me. Return it.” A searing pain ripped through me, making me cry out. I tried to block out the pain by turning my mind to the power of the line. It had recognized me once before. It had chosen me. If, as I’d sensed at times, it was something more than a tool, more than a mechanism for controlling others, it would hear me. I called out to the line, wrapping my plea in the single grain of hope that hadn’t yet deserted me. I was answered by a pain worse than any other I had felt, a sensation like my solar plexus being ripped wide open, the pain so great that my vision failed and everything around me was swallowed by blackness. During that dark moment, I let myself collapse on the wet earth. It was over. I had been defeated. The line had deserted me; the other anchors had won. For a moment I felt sure my heart would stop beating, but then around me flashed another world, green and cool and lovely. Music trumpeted from every direction, then faded away. The pain in my solar plexus cooled, and my own thundering reality gelled back around me. I felt the line reenergize itself, regain its ground, reinforce its walls, and then I felt a change, a shift, an explosion that felt like joy bursting out of me. Colin had reached out and filled my heart with his own power, one that fell outside any witch’s ability to control. Fae magic, which the anchors could never touch.
With that added ammunition, I stopped the world. Everything around me slowed. Raindrops stopped in their descent. Trees that had been bent by the wind held their tortured poses, even though the wind itself had lost its power to blow. All motion and sound ceased. With my son’s help, I ripped my magic from the hands of the other anchors, pitiful fear-filled souls, and their consciousnesses scurried away from me like Emily’s rats. I broke the binds placed on Rivkah and my family. Then I looked out at Jilo, and with a thought brought her to my side, disconnecting her from the lethal force she had taken into herself. There, frozen in its path, loomed the storm I had feared so. I looked at the suspended hurricane and laughed. I claimed its towering energy as my own, turning its force to my purposes. I sent my awareness out to the line, and it zoomed in every direction around the earth at once. Breathtaking. Beautiful. Strong. Stronger, perhaps, than it had ever before been. Silently, I asked its permission to free my sister, and the line acquiesced. I reached out, like a comet burning not through common space but through fluctuating dimensions, and caught hold of Maisie. Then I brought her home.