THIRTY-NINE
“How’s she doing?” Oliver whispered as he slipped into Maisie’s room. Though she had been home with us for more than a day, she had only opened her eyes once. She hadn’t spoken at all.
“The same,” I said. I hadn’t left Maisie’s side for more than a few minutes at a time. I could barely stand to take my eyes off her for fear she’d disappear. I was afraid the other anchors would do something to steal her from me.
“Any news from Adam?”
Oliver’s face darkened. “Physically he’s fine. He’s shut me out though. He’s shut all of us out.” He tried to muster his patented smile of confidence, but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I think Adam and I are through. I don’t think he’s going to be able to get past whatever it was Emily showed him.”
I would have liked to find some words of encouragement to offer, but I didn’t want to lie. Adam had been so angry, so frightened. So over us Taylors and our magic. He had said that he knew what we were now. I wasn’t sure if he meant the magic, or if he had somehow seen deeper into our true nature. Either way, I couldn’t lie to my uncle. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you may be right about that.”
Oliver kissed the top of my head. “You should take a break. Get some sleep. Your aunts and I will stay with her.”
I shook my head. “No. I can’t. I can’t give them a chance to take her away.”
“No one is going to do that. I promise you.” He stood at the foot of Maisie’s bed and watched her sleeping.
“Did you know Maisie and I have a half brother?” I asked. Oliver’s head bounced like a bobblehead doll in surprise. His jaw dropped, but he said nothing. He had been struck speechless for the first time in his life. “I don’t know the details, but Erik had a son. His name is Joe . . . Josef. He’s been helping Emily.”
“I guess we should tell Ellen, but . . .”
“Yeah, but . . .” How much more could Ellen take? Tucker’s body remained with the county coroner. We hadn’t even had the opportunity to hold a memorial for him yet, leave alone a proper burial. She needed to mourn her fiancé, and hitting her over the head by pointing out another of Erik’s infidelities would not help.
Oliver shifted from one foot to the other, and then sat down on the foot of Maisie’s bed.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.
“You’re getting pretty good at that . . . reading me, I mean,” he said.
“It isn’t magic; you are just terrible at hiding things from me.”
He smiled and took Maisie’s hand, caressing it as he searched her face for signs of life. “Emmet has returned.” His eyes traveled from Maisie’s face to my own.
“I asked Emmet to stay away from Savannah.”
“The families sent him here to negotiate with you.”
“Negotiate?”
“To sue for peace if you will.”
“But I am not the one who declared war.”
“You, Gingersnap, have scared the holy hell out of them. I don’t understand what you did, but you single-handedly changed the line.”
“No. The line changed itself. It simply used me to do it.” I paused, trying to collect my thoughts. “I know it sounds nuts, but I think the line is alive. It’s self-aware. I think it wants to evolve, but it can’t while the anchors hold on to it so tightly. I think that’s why it chose me. I’ve been an outsider to magic my whole life, powerless and overlooked. The other anchors didn’t think I could possibly threaten the way things stand.”
“The other anchors will view any attempt to change the status quo as a sign that you have aligned yourself with Emily. That you, too, want to end the line.”
“That couldn’t be further from the truth,” I said and stood. My limbs had gone stiff from inactivity. I stretched, and felt the blood begin to pump more freely through them. “I’ve seen what it protects us from. Still I don’t think we should fear change. My gut tells me that the line wants to form a partnership with us rather than acting as our master or our slave.” I went to the window and looked out at the gray autumn sky. “Emily’s wrong about pretty much everything . . . except one thing. The anchors maintain a power structure that’s based on secrecy and misdirection, if not out-and-out lies.” I turned back to Oliver so that I could witness his reaction. “To begin with, witches don’t get their power from the line. The line gets its power from us.”
“I don’t understand how that could be,” Oliver said, surprised and uncomfortable to have his own worldview challenged. His right hand smoothed down the thick blond hair of his left arm. As he considered my words, his mouth pulled down into a deep frown, and he looked down at the floor.
“I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s like an alternating current. I doubt if the other anchors will ever share the details of how the witches created the line with me now, so I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure. But I do believe that the magic begins as ours and is fed into the line. From there, it gets parsed back out, in a more even distribution. No witch does without, but no witch can rise to his or her true potential either.”
“No witch who isn’t an anchor,” Oliver said, nodding. “I don’t like it. Your theory makes me uncomfortable, but that tells me you are more than likely on the right track.”
“I don’t like it either. I wish there was a clear and easy way to look at the line and the decisions that the families who built it have made. I mean, yeah, the three rebel families are evil. Their evil is Technicolor, in-your-face evil. I worry, though, that the side we have chosen has its own form of evil too. One path is totally wrong, but what if the other is just a longer, more scenic route to the same hell?”
“Then you will blaze us a new path toward sanity,” Oliver said. “Frankly I think that’s why the line chose you. Most people want easy answers to life. They will agree with whatever the echo chamber around them says as long as it means they don’t have to think for themselves. Only a precious few can cope with ambiguity and carry on.”
A soft knock on the door interrupted us. The door opened a crack, revealing the dark giant on the other side. “I apologize for the intrusion,” Emmet said. His black eyes poked holes into me, probing me. Checking to make sure I was truly unharmed. Checking to see if the experience I’d been through had led to a change of heart. I smiled, as I felt happy to see him, but I did my best to convey without words that nothing had changed between us. He turned from me to look at Maisie. “She will awaken soon. I am sure of it.” I sensed that he had not intended his words as an actual prognostication. He had meant them more as a comfort.
“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded.
“I meant to honor your request,” he said, “that I stay away from your home, but circumstances—”
“I know. The families sent you.”
“Yes. They hope that you will accept a request to meet with the other anchors. Work through any misunderstandings that may have arisen.” Oliver harrumphed, and we rolled our eyes at each other. “Please understand,” Emmet continued, “that even though I agreed to act as emissary of their message, I am in no way neutral, not after the crimes they have committed against you. I have chosen a side, and you, Mercy, have my full allegiance. The families are aware of this, and that is why they asked me to approach you. They hope to prevent the deepening of any schism between you and the other anchors. They ask that you meet with them to see if you can work out your differences in a way that will not harm the line. In return for this meeting, they will make an oath not to interfere with your sister.”
As I considered his words, I listened to Maisie’s steady breathing and turned to look at her beautiful face, blessed in sleep with a serenity I hoped she might one day feel upon waking. I wanted many things from the other anchors, starting with this oath to leave my sister alone as we worked through her issues. For once, though, I found myself in a place of power, and I had every intention to take full advantage of that. “Tell them I agree,” I said. “But I will pick the time and the means.”