FORTY
I learned that the line’s anchors rarely met face-to-face. Of course, due to their duty as anchors, they could not physically venture too far from the places they had been chosen to anchor. Because of this, when they gathered together, they did so virtually, leaving their bodies at home and projecting their minds to the meeting space. I knew the perfect place for the gathering they had requested, one that would allow all of us to meet, perhaps for the first time in the history of the line, in the flesh. I opened new entrances to Jilo’s haint-blue chamber over each anchor’s home. We could all meet together without anyone leaving their territory.
I bent these entryways, though, so that each entrant would have to pass through the world of the endless living shadows, the minor demons that folk in the low country called boo hags before reaching the chamber. These creatures held no fear for me now. I could almost pity their lust for a skin that would allow them to walk in the world of light. Almost.
I laughed at the thought of the other anchors seeing this place, a place that had once terrified me, built by a woman who had once scared me out of my wits. Again and again I found myself taking comfort in the smallness of my past horrors. My skin prickled and turned to gooseflesh as I wondered if there might arrive a tomorrow when I looked back from the vantage point of even greater terrors, feeling nostalgic for today. That kind of thinking would get me nowhere.
The chamber had collapsed to half its previous size, bending and twisting in on itself. The endless cyan was now punctured by bruised plum stains left by the poisoned magic of Tillandsia. I had to maintain my focus and my confidence. Thoughts of Emily and Josef were a threat to both, so I pushed away any remembrance of Tillandsia and took my place at the portion of the room that bent upward. I would claim the higher ground. It might not lend me any true physical advantage, but it would help a lot psychologically. I claimed Jilo’s abandoned cerulean throne and sat in it. This would count as the final time I’d come to the haint-blue room. At Jilo’s request, I’d close the chamber down after this meeting, collapsing it until it became merely a dense, dark point in space. In the quiet before the others came, I allowed myself one long last look.
Just as I finished taking the room in, its edges began to shimmer. A fluctuation in the air here, a quiver there, vibrations announcing the arrival of my magical colleagues. Disappointing was my most prominent thought as they resolved into their full physical forms. They were not as tall as giants, and not one of them had a sunbeam crown or a quiver full of lightning bolts. No, the pantheon of anchors looked like plain old regular folk. African, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and combinations of all the above. True, all of them were witches, and if they were not truly the most powerful witches in the world, they were at least the witches with the greatest access to power. All the same, I swear one of them looked like she had come from dropping her kids off at soccer practice, and another like he had been working in his garden. Calm. Nonthreatening. None of them would even arouse a sense of disquiet, leave alone danger. I suspected this was by design, but this calculated attempt to disarm me brought Hannah Arendt’s phrase “banality of evil” to mind.
Smiles from some, heads lowered in deference from others. Each person’s pose screamed, “We are all friends here!” In spite of that, my intuition shouted at me. I feared that maybe I was growing paranoid or jaded. Maybe the way my own mother had turned on me had colored my perception of the world. I considered the possibility that perhaps these witches weren’t my enemies, but then I remembered how they’d tried to sacrifice the innocent individuals of my hometown in a misguided attempt to look out for what they considered to be the greater good. “All right. Y’all wanted to talk. Well, I’m listening.”
A middle-aged man with an average build and thinning mousey brown hair that framed a friendly and guileless face stepped forward. In my mind, I labeled him Mr. Beige. “If it is all right with everyone, I will volunteer to speak for the group.” The fact that no one protested or even spoke up told me that this decision had long since been made, and that this was in fact nothing more than a show, probably intended to demonstrate how well the rest of the anchors played together. Yep. They were all about the collaboration. All about the team. Individuals need not apply. “Even though we each represent our respective families, we anchors like to think of ourselves as a family in our own right. A family of anchors.” He smiled, holding his hands out toward me. “On behalf of all of us, it is a pleasure to welcome you.” He didn’t introduce himself; no one did. I said nothing, letting the silence thicken around us.
“I regret that our first meeting should occur under the cloud of the regrettable circumstances your mother created.” He accented the last three words, an obvious attempt to goad me, but I didn’t bite. My failure to respond as expected affected his confidence. He seemed a little less sure of himself when he began to speak again. Small beads of sweat started to form on his upper lip. “It’s unfortunate that we had to step in. We merely did what we felt necessary to protect the line. We hope that you will understand that and put aside any ill will you may feel about the actions we felt compelled to take.”
“Tell me,” I said. “What is it you want from me? Are you looking for pardon? Because I have to tell you, I’d only consider forgiving you if I thought you wouldn’t follow the same course again.”
“Well, no,” Beige said, pulling himself up, the air of congeniality slipping away, “we are not looking for forgiveness. We did what we felt we had to do to protect the line.”
“And that makes the fact that you are all attempted mass murderers something I should overlook?”
The other eight began shifting, looking at one another. “I didn’t want anyone to come to harm,” a diminutive Asian woman said. The illusion of cohesiveness crumbled. “I didn’t want to interfere with your efforts.”
“Then why did you?” My own voice surprised me, a venomous hiss pinning the woman to the spot as I leaned forward and struck her with my eyes. “Why did you allow them?”
“I, I was outvoted,” she said, lowering her eyes.
“Listen,” Beige continued, trying to regain momentum, “none of us wanted harm to come to the people of Savannah. Remember we didn’t start the storm.”
“No. Emily did. She did it to prove a point to me. The point that you all would be willing to see an entire city wiped off the map. That you would be willing to bathe in blood, and would pat yourselves on the back for doing so.”
Beige looked around at the others. “This path will get us nowhere. We came here today because we want to put what happened behind us. Yes, you defied us, but we were perhaps in the wrong.”
“Perhaps in the wrong?” I spat back at him.
“Yes, from your perspective, we were wrong. Evidently from the line’s perspective as well,” he allowed, a trace of humility in his voice. “We don’t understand what happened. We know you don’t like the stance we took, but it’s the same stance we anchors have been taking since the creation of the line. And that stance is to protect the line at all costs.”
“Costs that others are left to pay. Well, this time the line kept you from standing on the sidelines and letting people get hurt. The line doesn’t seem to want the kind of protection y’all have been offering.”
With this, Beige’s bluster faded, and the real man stood before me. Middle-aged, balding, dressed in a tan suit and loafers, and suddenly faced with the possibility that for a good portion of his life he had been working under the wrong set of assumptions. “You seem to have a deeper connection to the line than any of us. You communicate with it. It interacts with you as if it were a living entity in its own right.”
It surprised me that my experience of the line was not common to the rest of the anchors, but I did my best to feign disinterest in his disclosure. It would not do to give too much away. “I never assumed it wouldn’t communicate with me.”
The other anchors looked at one another, and I could hear a buzzing of communication between them. They blocked my full comprehension, but I could still pick up snatches of their conversations. The words dangerous and control popped out at me. When the buzzing stopped, Beige addressed me. “We understand that for some reason the line has chosen you to enjoy a special relationship with it. We would like to better understand this relationship, but you must have your own concerns that you would like us to address. Perhaps you can tell us what you would like from us?”
I took a moment to consider. The truth was, all I wanted was for these witches to go away. To leave me and my family alone. To let us live out our lives in peace. But I knew that even if they promised that to me, they would be lying. The line had used me—no, it had used my son—to loosen these people’s stranglehold on it. They would grant me no peace until they could understand what had happened and find a way to dig their claws back in. I could read it in their eyes that this false promise of security was exactly what they wanted me to ask for. They thought I would trade what I knew about the line for their promise to leave me be. They could not have been more mistaken. “Just tell me the truth about one thing. What is the source of the line’s power?”
“I believe you already know the answer to that.”
“I’d still like to hear it from you. Come on. I’m an anchor now. I thought I had earned the right to learn the secret handshake.”
“The sharing of knowledge follows the gaining of trust,” Beige said, stiffening as if he had suffered a personal affront. “And sharing what you know about what happened to the line will go a long way toward gaining our trust.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
“Now you are just being childish,” exclaimed a heavyset woman with a thick Russian accent. Whatever she saw on my face silenced her. She stepped back.
“We don’t know,” the Asian lady spoke up. “We know that the line is stronger than before, but the magic has been modified. There has been a foreign strain added to it. It is somehow less ours.”
Less in their control, she meant. Beige glared at her, willing her mouth to close. “This foreign magic,” he said as he turned to face me, “it is not unknown to us, nor is it totally unrelated to our own. We encounter it occasionally in a burst here and there, but never in such a quantity or concentration as last night.”
Now he had my attention. “How is it related?” I leaned forward, straightening my back and tilting my head. My posture had betrayed my interest. That meant they would never tell me. I felt one pair of eyes pin me with more intensity than the others. Instinctively I turned toward a waiflike young witch, impossibly pale and fair, nearly androgynous with the scale leaning almost imperceptibly toward male. His eyes, white and devoid of either iris or pupil, fell to my stomach.
“The sharing of knowledge follows trust,” Beige repeated. His words were almost drowned out by the buzzing unspoken communications of the other anchors. Beige continued his soliloquy, but I tuned him out. I focused intently on the thoughts of the others, until the words Fae and infant and study twined together and became the common thread. The boy had made the connection between the magic and my son.
“We thank you for this meeting.” Beige’s words broke in through my panic, and shimmers at the edge of the room announced that many of the anchors had already begun to take leave. My heart raced. They had tricked me. They might not completely understand, but they knew the line had tapped into fairy magic, using my baby as the conduit.
“No,” I said, slamming the exits closed before any more could fade. “You will not harm my child,” I said, feeling the intensity of my emotions build. “You will not study my child.” I flew up from Jilo’s throne, grasping it with my magic and hurling it at them. “You will not use my child.”
Beige threw up his arm, and the throne burst into flames in midair, falling as a rain of ashes. “No?” he asked. “And how do you intend to stop us?”
I began shaking, fear and rage combining to tear reason from my grasp. How could I stop them? How could I prevent them from taking Colin from me? Locking him in a laboratory and sacrificing him to the greater good? My feet made contact with the floor, and I was no longer myself when I strode toward Beige. I approached him like an angry lioness, transformed by fear into a living, breathing embodiment of Durga, the very spirit of a mother’s drive to defend her young. Beige’s confident smile slumped, the corners of his mouth turning down as his brow furrowed. As I neared him, he tried to take a step back, but my hand shot out of its own accord and pierced his skin, above the navel, below the heart, right at his solar plexus, right at the point where the line connected its magic to his. I ripped that connection out of him. He screamed, from pain and from powerlessness. I held the ball of light, bright and shimmering, before his eyes and then shoved it back into him and closed the wound.
His knees gave way, and he tumbled forward. “That,” I said as the other anchors rushed in to catch him, “that is how I will stop you. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding furiously as the others helped him balance.
“Good,” I said and reopened the haint-blue room’s exits for the last time. “Now, get out of here and tell the families to stay away from me. Stay away from my child. Stay away from my husband. Stay away from my family. And stay the hell away from Savannah.” The anchors who had remained fled the chamber and rushed into the realm of the living shadows, comforted, I am sure, to face the kind of adversaries to which they felt more accustomed. I made one last turn in the cerulean light, and then watched as Jilo’s chamber folded in on itself, sliding away only at the last possible moment before it disappeared for good.