The Line (23 page)

TWENTY-TWO

By lunchtime, Iris and Connor had returned, having purchased a new kitchen table and chairs that would be delivered in the afternoon. The air was thick with awkwardness. Iris walked in with her head hanging low, her arms pulled tightly against her sides as if she were afraid of bumping into things. Connor was still angry, smarting from having been hogtied and gagged by his own wife, even though she’d been under Grace’s control at the time. Ellen had found him naked in a closet, a sock duct taped in his mouth.

Connor opened a cabinet and grabbed a glass, then slammed the cabinet shut. The remaining glasses rattled against each other. He yanked open the refrigerator and poured himself a sweet tea. He tried to slam the refrigerator door too, but the insulation strip muffled his tirade. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he blamed Iris for the whole situation, glaring at her between each gulp of his tea. Iris clearly blamed herself too; she stayed quiet and braced herself against the counter by the sink, staring blankly out the window. I went over and wrapped my arm around her shoulders, but she pulled away.

“I knew the risk I was taking when I laid hands on Ginny. Especially after you…” Iris stopped short.

“After I what?”

She and Connor looked at each other. “Are you gonna answer her, or do you want me to?” her husband asked, slamming his glass onto the counter. Tea splashed everywhere, and Iris reached for a towel and began dabbing at it without even looking up at us.

I had almost stopped waiting for a response when she turned to me and said, “Your reaction when you found Ginny was rather intense. Your distress destabilized the energies I needed for my reading, and I knew it. I also knew that in all probability you wouldn’t be strong enough to help ground me, to help keep anything from getting into this world.” She paused. “Into me. Connor tried to stop me from doing it, but I wouldn’t listen.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know. I just reacted.”

“Don’t blame yourself, sweet girl. None of this is your fault. I’m responsible for everything that happened here yesterday.” I tried to pull her into my arms, but she wouldn’t allow it. “I don’t deserve your comfort,” she said, shrugging off my embrace.

“You sure as hell don’t,” Connor replied. He grabbed the newspaper off the counter and stomped out of the room, hitting the kitchen door hard enough that it swung back and forth three or four times before settling itself closed.

“Well God save us all from getting what we deserve,” I said, loudly enough for him to hear me. I hugged my aunt anyway. Her body felt different to me today, as if a certain frailness had crept into her bones.

“Amen,” Emmet said, stepping in through the door to the backyard, which was still open.

“Bless you, baby,” Iris said to me and then fled from the room, her face lined with tears.

“She’ll be fine,” Emmet said. “She made a mistake, a huge mistake, but nothing we were not able to rectify. Your family is careless, impulsive when using their powers. They are weak and emotional.”

“Yeah, well thank you for your input,” I said. Whatever my family was, we had been through enough, and the last thing we needed was the criticism of someone who had once been a pile of dust.

“We don’t mean to anger you,” Emmet said. “The fault does not lie with your family. The fault lies with us. An anchor should cultivate the witches around them. Help the weaker powers to grow and learn to function responsibly. Instead of offering guidance and light, Ginny created an atmosphere of darkness. She kept your family weak and you ignorant. In so doing, she failed you all, and we failed you by not seeing that earlier. We are here to rectify these wrongs.”

“What about Grace?” I asked.

“The spirit will not be able to return,” he said. “She can either move on to the next realm or she can remain in the shadows of Savannah as an angry spirit. The choice is hers. But she will not be able to break through and make another attack on Oliver or anyone else in your family.” Emmet closed his eyes and broke into a discordant inner discourse—I’d never get used to that as long as I lived. After a few unnerving moments he looked at me. “We have spoken to Oliver,” he said and held his large hand out to me. “Show us the remnant of wood that you claimed.” I obeyed him without even giving it a single thought, reaching into the pocket of my cutoff sweatpants and handing him the scrap of wood. He hadn’t compelled me to do it, I simply did.

“Glamour and persuasion,” he said as he turned the piece in his hand. The splinter’s sharp edges rounded as he touched them, leaving the piece perfectly smooth. “Those are Oliver’s strong suits, and for a brief while they will be yours too.”

Oliver appeared in the open doorway, as if he had been called by name. He took the piece from Emmet’s hand, and held it silently for a few moments before placing it in my palm. It was warm, and it gave off a tingling sensation. As I watched, three symbols etched themselves onto its face.

“
Gebo
shows that I have given this to you freely,” Oliver explained, “for stealing power comes with a consequence that I could not bear to see you pay.
Uruz
, here,” he said, pointing at the second symbol, “has the double meaning that it is my power that I am giving, and that it is within my rights to do so. The last one is
Dagaz
, and it limits the time the power is available to you to one day. And with that, a share of my powers are yours. Your buddy Emmet here will explain the rest,” he said. “Don’t do most of the things I’ve done with them,” he added and went back outside.

The tingling moved from my hand through my arm and then dispersed in a blink throughout the rest of my body. My knees went weak, and I started to tumble forward, but Emmet caught me in his arms before I could even blink. I righted myself and stepped away from him. I had never felt so powerful or so lost. I had dreamed all my life about having a day, just a single day, to know what it felt like to be Maisie. To have the world at my fingertips. And here I was stumbling around in the kitchen without a clue what to do with the power now that I had it.

“It’s overwhelming,” I said, more to myself than to Emmet.

“This is good for you, Mercy,” he said. “This power you feel overwhelmed by. It is only a tiny fraction of what’s surging inside Oliver, Iris, or Ellen. Even Connor for that matter. And when you compare it to Maisie’s power, it’s nothing. Nothing.” He let the word sink in. “Tell us, Mercy, how does it feel? Does the power frighten you?”

“No,” I said. I stopped and considered how it really felt to have the energy flowing through me. “I feel alive, I feel like a picture coming into focus. It feels good.”

“You are a mystery, Mercy Taylor, to all of us,” he said. “The power slides into you with none of the ill effects that we would have expected to witness in an average human. You fit the power like a glove. It fills you beautifully, as if you had been made to hold it, but still—”

“But still I never did,” I finished for him.

“You do today,” he said. “And now you must show yourself worthy of this gift. Whatever magic you work today, you must work on your own. We wish neither to impede any action your conscience allows you, nor to give you ideas that might distract you from your intuitive course. You are a natural vessel, and the magic is merely awaiting your command.”

TWENTY-THREE

Standing in my room, I could still sense the bit of wood vibrating in my hand. When I looked down at it, it was visibly quivering and giving off faint blue sparks. Everything about me felt changed. No, not changed—heightened, intensified. I tested the power I felt surging through me, using it to bore a small hole in the tip of the shim so that I could wear it as a pendant. I watched as the wood pulled itself apart, cell by cell, leaving a perfectly shaped circle through which I strung some hemp. I knotted the hemp a few times to make sure it would hold, and then pulled the loop around my neck. The string was long enough that the tip of the wood rested near my heart. As the wood slid between my breasts, the vibrations spread all over my body.

Liquid fire coursed through my veins. I slid my hand over the pendant and looked at myself in the mirror, amazed at the self-assured face that was reflected back at me. I felt like a fish that had been tossed into water for the first time after somehow managing to survive its entire life on dry land. I had been waiting for this feeling my entire life. For once, I felt like I could truly breathe.

I was saddened by the knowledge that this power was only borrowed. Tomorrow I would be back to floundering on the shore, even though the river would continue to flow right next to me. One second I regretted ever taking the power into me, and the next I wondered what I’d be willing to sacrifice to hold onto it. The memory of Jilo’s words plagued my conscience. I pulled the necklace up over my head and tossed it down onto the table. I tried to walk away and leave it there, but my hand reached out of its own volition, my fingers hovering over the wood, wanting so badly to touch it, to hold it. I wondered how it would change me if I let it fill me for even a day, if I let myself see the world through the eyes it gave me.

“You need this,” I heard Ellen’s voice. She had been watching me from the doorway. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, but I was sure it was long enough. “You need to feel the magic, if only this once. I know you’ve always wanted this experience, and the other families might not allow it again. This is a special dispensation. This is your opportunity to walk in a witch’s shoes, Mercy. It may make it easier for you to understand your family and forgive us for our gargantuan shortcomings.”

I could have been angry with her for spying on me, but I wasn’t. I was glad that someone was here to share this with me, to be my confessor. “I’m afraid,” I said. “I don’t want to feel this good, this powerful, knowing that I’ll never experience it again. It’s worse than a drug.”

“No, it isn’t a drug at all. It’s the power that naturally flows through a witch…and you sense that it should be flowing through you.”

A few moments had been enough to convince me that my hunger for magic was too great for me to withstand. “But this is too strong,” I still said. “I can’t let it fill me today only to leave me tomorrow. I won’t be strong enough to let it go. I won’t be strong enough to go back to being me after I’ve been…”

“Maisie. After you’ve been Maisie,” she said, and I acknowledged the truth of this statement with a nod of my head. Tears had begun to well up in my eyes, and I couldn’t find my voice.

She reached out and took the necklace, opened the loop wide, and hung it over my head. She lifted my hair up over the cord and then let it fall gently down my back. The wood touched my heart, and once again I was part of the magic and it was part of me.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to let this go,” I said again, but my will to protest faded before I even finished the words. I looked away from Ellen and back at my own reflection. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed that an odd shimmer was dancing around me. Concentrated around my heart, it flitted between red and green, with bits of black speckled throughout. It was as if I were enveloped by a field of living color.

“Try something, anything,” Ellen said. “See how it responds to you.”

I was heartsick for Maisie. I missed her desperately, and I had to let her know that I forgave her for what had happened during the drawing of lots. I needed to see her for myself; I needed to know that she was okay. I held out my hand and touched the mirror. It rippled for a moment and then the reflection changed. I could see Maisie talking with a dark-haired woman I didn’t recognize. I caught the woman’s notice instantly, and with a wave of her hand she broke the connection.

“Amazing,” Ellen whispered. “You shouldn’t have been able to create a portal to Maisie. How did you do it?”

“I just thought of her and how much I wanted to see her,” I said.

“And with a simple thought and only a jigger of Oliver’s power, you were able to reach into another world, another dimension.”

“Dimension?”

“It was felt that it would be best to move Maisie out of contact with the line while she works things through.”

“Who was the woman?”

“Woman? She is less of a woman and more of a force of nature,” Ellen said, the corners of her mouth pulling downward. “She’s the anchor with whom Maisie is training. It would be best for you not to draw her attention again, sweetie.” She smiled at me, but the smile seemed forced. “So what are you going to do today?” she asked, quickly changing the subject. “Surely you aren’t going to waste it by standing in front of the mirror.”

Her question caused me to focus on the red and dappled green aura I had noticed earlier. I hesitated, but then said, “I think I’ve made a mistake,” pointing at the concentration of vibrant colors that hovered near my heart.

“Yes,” she said, stepping closer. “I can scarcely make it out, but I can tell that there is a magic there that’s at odds with your own.” Ellen reached out and brushed away the pendant to place her fingers over my heart, her touch gentle. “This is artificial magic. This is not witch magic.”

I knew we were both sensing Jilo’s spell. I also knew that I needed to use this day to rectify the wrong I had committed by going to her. I needed to find a way to end the spell she had placed on me even if it meant breaking Peter’s heart. I had to believe it was better for him than living a lie. “It’s Mother Jilo’s magic,” I confessed.