The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) (24 page)

THIRTY

I couldn’t let myself panic. I had to keep my head. I knew my only hope was in making it home. Giving myself over to Ellen’s care. She could heal me. She could help me fight. The pain nearly made me black out, but I was shocked by the sight of blood trickling down Emmet’s forearm. It took a moment to realize that I had clenched him so hard my nails had pierced his skin. Another pang nearly carried me away in darkness, but Emmet took my face in one hand and forced me to meet his gaze.

“Fight. Don’t let them do this.”

“I’m trying,” I cried. I was. I really was. I was fighting with my entire being to push the other anchors’ magic from me. A brief respite gave me a second to wonder how they could be doing this to me. How the line could allow them to tap into its power and let them harm my child. I thought it had chosen me. I thought it wanted me to help it grow. How could it have deserted me, betrayed me? I buried my head in Emmet’s shoulder and screamed.

“You must focus, Mercy. You must carry us back to Savannah. We have to reach your family.” Emmet gave voice to the three facts my rational mind already knew to be true, but my rational mind had shrunk until it floated like a tiny island in a vast sea of fear and pain. “For Colin, Mercy, you must do this. He needs you. He needs his mother.”

Something about that word—“mother”—struck me like a magical ward. It connected me to the birth travails of every woman, but it also connected me to every mother’s strength. “I can find my way home,” I panted between throbs. Their attack weakened my magic. “But it’s taking almost everything I have to fend them off. I don’t have the power to carry us both.”

“Then go. Hurry. Take yourself home. I will follow as quickly as possible.” He kissed the top of my head. “Know that I love you, Mercy.”

I wanted to acknowledge his words, but I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I closed my eyes. I blocked out as much of the pain as I could, but still the scream I started before the monument’s stones carried with me all the way back to Savannah.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of my own room, only inches away from where the lifeblood had deserted Teague’s body.
Blood calls to blood
, the incongruous thought landed between convulsions. My water broke and the convulsions gave way to contractions. “Ellen!” I screamed her name.

At first I thought magic was causing the room to flash in and out of existence before my eyes, but as Aunt Iris rushed into the room, I realized it was only that I was dying. Iris fell down to her knees beside me. Her frantic calls to Ellen married with my own wails.

“Dear God,” Ellen said as she knelt near me, raising my torso up so she could wrap her arms around me. Relief. Cooling. The agony subsided.

“They are trying to kill my baby,” I said, grasping hold of Iris’s hand.

“Who is, darling? Tell me, I will make them stop.”

I tried to speak, but they broke through Ellen’s healing wall. “Anchors.” The word was ripped out of me by another angry wave.

“The anchors are doing this?”

The room began to fade in degrees, bending back and growing darker around the edges. I noticed the sound of heavy, masculine footfalls on the stairs, coming down the hall.

“There is something wrong with Oliver.” The sound of Adam’s frightened voice as he burst into the room brought me back. I managed to turn my head so that he was at the center of my fading vision. “We were out in the garden,” he continued without even seeming to notice the strangeness of the scene he’d just walked in on. “Just talking. He collapsed. And then this . . .” Adam stood there, shaking. In his arms he carried an elderly man. An elderly man who wore my uncle’s clothes.

“I can’t let go of her,” Ellen said. My eyes drifted back just enough that I could see her beautiful face staring down at me. She looked so afraid. I wished I could comfort her. Another contraction hit, drowning out everything else in the world other than my own pain.

As the wave subsided, I heard a voice I felt I should recognize say, “Put me down. Put me next to Mercy.” The voice was dry and cracked. It seemed to come from an ancient place.

A hand took mine. It was cold, withered. Still, there was something in his eyes. “Uncle Oliver?”

The old man nodded his head. “Yes, Gingersnap, it’s me.” Adam knelt next to him, holding him up. It seemed without Adam’s support, Uncle Oliver would collapse.

“Was it the photo?”

“Photo?”

“The one you damaged. The one of you and Granddad?” The question cost me a lot. I had to pant to keep from passing out.

I was surprised by the sound of Oliver’s reedy laughter. “No, sweetheart. It’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is it?” Iris demanded. Something in her tone seemed to say she had her hands busy enough with me, she didn’t need any kind of nonsense from her little brother right now. I very nearly laughed, but such an act lay beyond me now.

“You tied your life force to the baby’s, didn’t you, Oli?” Ellen asked. I realized this link had been the cause of the gray hair I’d noticed earlier. He hadn’t added his magic to the runic spell my aunts had drawn on my body—he had given his very life.

“Indeed I did,” Oliver said, giving my hand a gentle squeeze. “Of course, I didn’t count on the little fellow taking quite so much.”

“You have to break off the connection,” Ellen ordered. “The anchors, they are trying to take the baby. They will take you with it, if you don’t cut the tie.”

“And if I do cut the tie, they might just succeed.” Oliver coughed, then wheezed.

Iris approached and loomed over us all. “Oliver. Break the connection. You must. If you let go, we might just be able to save you. Tell him, Mercy. Tell him.”

I wanted to. For his sake. For Ellen’s sake. But mostly for Iris’s sake. She had virtually raised Oliver herself. In many ways, her little brother was less a brother and more of a son to her. She didn’t want to lose her little boy. I understood that, but neither did I.

“Once upon a time,” Oliver said, “I made an unforgiveable mistake. In anger, I made a mistake that took a child’s life.”

Adam’s face convulsed in tears. “I forgive you. I forgive you,” Adam repeated, then buried his face in Oliver’s dwindling shoulder.

“Thank you,” Oliver said, “but when I said ‘unforgivable,’ I meant I cannot forgive myself.” His body trembled. “I know doing this does not make up for the life I took,” he said, and I noticed the hand that held mine had begun to glow. The pain once again faded, and I could focus on his words. “I just hope somehow doing this gives my otherwise pointless life some meaning.”

“Stop it right now,” Iris commanded.

“Shush now, sis,” Oliver said, then focused on me. “How about it, Gingersnap? Will you let me do this for Colin? And if not for Colin, then for me?”

Who knows? If my body hadn’t been nearly ripped apart by pain, if I weren’t so terrified for the life of my baby, maybe I wouldn’t have allowed it. As it was, I nodded. “Thank you.”

I no sooner said the words than the light that had built up around Oliver’s cold and trembling hand shot into my own. Oliver’s body slumped. Someday, when things were better, when Colin was sitting on my knee while I sang him lullabies, I knew my heart would break at the memory of the sight that was going on before my eyes in this moment. Adam clutched Oliver’s frame, but within seconds, it began to dissipate, falling away into powdery dust. Adam tried to grasp at the disappearing residue, but the very act of clutching caused the fines to float away at an even faster rate.

Adam fell back on his elbows, his face betraying the onset of madness. Grief and horror filled his eyes, along with only the finest touch of blame. A wildness took over his features. He spun himself up from the floor, and ran out of the room, along the hall, and down the stairs. Even though I didn’t register the sound of the door, I sensed he had left the house. A small part of me that could see past my own fear and pain worried I’d just watched a man lose his soul.

“Help me get her on the bed,” Iris said. She had moved into crisis mode. She would find Adam. She would mourn Oliver. But her tone told me she had decided to deal with one tragedy at a time.

Ellen’s response came in the form of a whispered prayer for serenity. Would my baby’s fate be one of those things she might still change? Iris circled around to my feet, and I felt Iris and Ellen’s combined magic levitate me and shift me over to the bed. Ever so gently they let me down on the coverlet.

“Did it work? Did Oli’s sacrifice work?” Iris asked as Ellen laid her hands on me.

“I believe it has, but the baby is still coming,” she said, then her voice fell as she whispered something to Iris.

“I see,” was Iris’s response to the unheard comment. She leaned over me and placed her hand on my cheek. “You be brave. Ellen’s gonna see to it that you and that boy of yours will both make it through this. I’m going to go deal with the other anchors.”

“Don’t go.” I reached out and grabbed her arm. “They will kill you.”

Iris gently removed my hand from her arm and let it down gently. “No, darlin’, they are gonna try.” She turned to Ellen. “Take care of her. I am going to put an end to this. I will be back right after I make these sons of bitches pay.” She placed her hand on my shoulder. “Aunt Iris is gonna fix this for you, honey. You just be a good girl and do what Ellen tells you.”

Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she wiped them away with the back of her hand. She turned and hurried from the room. “You’ve got to stop her,” I said.

“There is no stopping her. The other anchors, they’ve taken from the Taylors now. I don’t care how much magic they have, Iris is going to take them all down. All of them.”

“But the line. If Iris harms the anchors . . .” I realized Iris had decided to bind the other anchors, once and for all and all on her own. They would suffer the fate they’d willed for me. Living out their natural lives in a vegetative state until their bodies gave out. Then the line would move on to select their replacements. I was certain nothing like a mass binding of anchors had ever been attempted. How Iris thought she could achieve this was beyond my comprehension. I didn’t have long to try to comprehend. Another wave of agony tore through me.

Ellen lifted my head up and slid another pillow beneath it. “Now, you listen to me,” she said as she moved to the foot of the bed. “It’s a very early delivery by normal human standards, but we both know he’s got a lot of magic in him, from both you and his daddy. And the little guy is a fighter. I feel it.”

“He’s headstrong. Just like me,” I said for my own comfort.

A small smile formed on my aunt’s lips. “That’s right, he is. And you know what? You get that stubbornness from me, and I am telling you that you and I are going to get this baby delivered before they can undo what good Oliver did for us.” She pushed the skirt of my dress up. “You aren’t fully dilated yet, so I need you to focus on helping me make that happen.”

I heard steps coming down the hall. I took a deep breath, filled with relief that Iris had come to her senses. The steps stopped at the threshold of my room. The energy was wrong. It wasn’t Iris. I sensed two there, instead of one. “Ellen,” I whispered and pointed toward the door. She was so focused on me that she had noticed nothing, and looked distractedly up. She turned back to me. She had seen nothing. Was I delirious, or was I simply dying?

Two women, dressed all in black, floated over the threshold and into the room. I blinked, not wanting to believe my eyes.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Emily said, then cackled. Her hair floated around her head as if she were swimming in water. Her skin was translucent. “Mama is home.” She reached out to take Gudrun’s hand. Together they floated to the side of my bed. Together they grasped me and carried me away into the darkening sky.

THIRTY-ONE

Their hands like sharp talons ripped me away from where I lay. I saw my body lying below me, with Ellen in attendance over it, over me, but still I felt the roughness of the witches’ grasp. Gudrun cackled. “Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” I knew these words, but how?

My form beneath me shrunk as we continued to ascend, encountering nothing to impede our rise. Wind buffeted us from all sides, and I could feel myself being pelted with drops of ice. “Am I dead? Is that why you’ve come?” I asked, but my question was only met with shrieks of laughter.

“Ask not for whom
die Glocke
peals,” Gudrun said in her clipped Germanic accent. The two screamed with laughter, enjoying a private joke. They clasped their free hands together, completing a circle between us, and we began to spin faster and faster until the moment we fell.

We plummeted in free fall until the world rose up beneath us to catch us. They released me, and I tumbled to the earth, landing with a heavy thud. I seemed solid enough in that sense. At least I was solid as everything else around me, even though I couldn’t venture a guess as to where they had carried me.

“Stand,” Emily commanded. My eyes darted about, searching for any form of refuge, but I found myself on what appeared to be an endless grassy plain, beneath an eternal and uncurving starlit sky. “I said stand.” She reached for me and jerked me to my feet. Was this what being dead felt like, invisible to those still living, incorporeal but burdened with the memory of your entire body like one enormous phantom limb?

An odd humming like the sound of a bass theremin caused me to turn. Directly behind me a bell-shaped object hovered, spinning slowly enough that I could see the rune-like engravings along its lower rim. I turned back to the dark witches. A thousand questions popped up in my mind.
Where are we? What is that thing?
“Why won’t you just stay dead?” was the one that escaped my lips.

“Now, is that any way to speak to your mother?” Emily said and laughed, her laughter a cold metallic pealing that corrupted the night.

“I saw your body.” I pointed at Gudrun. “She killed you. She used your body to seal a spell. She said she was punishing you.”

Emily folded her arms across her chest. “Oh, my dear daughter, you are so incredibly gullible.” Gudrun floated next to Emily and wrapped her arm protectively around her. “It was no punishment. It was a reward.”

“Indeed, the process is unpleasant, but I believe you agree immortality merits a little agony, no?” Gudrun asked my mother.

“Indeed it does,” Emily said and turned back to me. “Do you hear that, precious one? I am immortal. Truly immortal. And I owe it all to you and my foolish siblings.”

“It takes not only much magic, but a special kind of magic to work the spell I completed for your mother. It takes soul magic.”

“Gehenna . . .” I whispered the name.

“Yes, Gehenna,” Emily said. “Your golem friend kept the door open just long enough for Gudrun to collect all the magic she needed.”

“Then all that about Grandma, it was just a trick?”

“Oh, no, my dear mother was indeed trapped in Gehenna, but that is exactly where she deserved to be.” Emily circled around me to face the humming object that still clung to the horizon. She glanced over her shoulder back at me. “It’s a shame your golem managed to spring her. Don’t get me wrong. She didn’t deserve to be there for killing your grandfather. She deserved to be there because she took the coward’s path and killed herself as well.” She spun back around to me, rushing up angrily until she was immediately before me. “She should have been proud to kill that bastard, that corrupter of pure blood. He with his Negro wife and his half-breed children.” She seemed to catch hold of herself, relaxing and sliding back a few feet. “I’m the one who told Mama, you know. It was your father who told me. Erik saved me. He showed me how to remove the stain of sharing blood with a lesser race.”

“Lesser race?” I found my voice and screamed the words at her again. “Lesser race? You mean all of this has happened because you are a bigot?” Until that very second, I had believed this kind of blind hatred had been relegated to another century.

“Lower your voice,” Gudrun commanded in a hiss. “Your mother, she is a purist. She has dedicated her existence to the return of the rightful order.”

“There is no ‘rightful order,’ ” I said and was suddenly overcome by a great sense of sadness. “There are only people, most of us decent and loving and not caring about anything other than those two qualities.” If Colin and I somehow survived this, I would dedicate my life to raising him to understand viscerally just how wrong my mother had been, not only in action but in heart. Then my heart fell into the pit of my stomach. My hand clasped over my still bloodstained but now very loose dress. I gasped in the night air, as a sharp pain cut through my heart. I fell to my knees, then bowed over on the earth. They had succeeded. They had taken my child from me.
Oh, Colin, Mommy is so sorry she failed you. Mommy is so sorry.
An ever-expanding hole had been ripped through the center of my soul. “They killed my baby.” I looked at my mother, incapable of believing I would not find at least a spark of humanity left in her. “They said my baby was an abomination.” Emily stood as still as a marble statue, as cold and as unmoved.

“You poor, poor dear,” Gudrun said in a singsong voice that sounded of anything other than sympathy. “So much betrayal. So much loss. So much pain.” She knelt beside me and forced me back to my knees. “But it will all be over ever so soon,” she cooed, and began stroking my hair in a caricature of caring.

I slapped her hand away with a satisfying smack, and pushed myself back, finding my feet. “You bitches have left me with nothing to lose.”

“We can’t take all the credit, dear. This was a group effort. You are the one, the one who is uniting all thirteen of the families. The line ends with you.” They looked at each other and burst out in cackles all over again. “She still hasn’t even begun to guess,” Emily said, laughing so hard tears formed in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

“Guessed what?” I felt so much anger at that moment, I might have killed her, killed Gudrun, and put an end to that hovering craft’s annoying humming all in the same blast.

“That you never had anything to lose, dearie,” Gudrun answered for her.

“What are you saying?”

“We”—Emily fought to regain composure—“we’re telling you it is time for you to wake up. Time for you to remember.” She paused as if she were waiting for an epiphany to strike, but none was forthcoming. “Your child was not the ‘Abomination.’ You are.” She began circling me in one direction, while Gudrun began to mirror her steps in the other direction. “Your father and I had such fun creating you. Our early days in Tillandsia were truly magical in so many ways.”

I caught the image of a semitruck slamming into Erik’s car, killing him instantly and flinging Paul from the vehicle. “Did you kill him?”

“I, no,” Emily said. “Ayako did, but I knew it was coming.”

“Ayako always was such a good little soldier,” Gudrun said with a sneer on her lips. “All I had to do was convince her of the truth. That your father was a danger to the line.”

“But why? If he was your ally?”

“Erik was losing faith in the cause. He had grown soft. He had lost sight of the end goal, and was enjoying his role as
père de famille
a bit too well. He wanted ‘out,’ as if he could simply walk away.” She squinted at me, suddenly seeming irritated with having to explain her actions. She shrugged. “Besides, he had already served his purpose. He fathered you.”

I turned to Emily. “You once told me you had loved him. Was that only another lie?”

“You have to understand,” she said, her face smooth and free of any sign of regret. “You are my masterpiece. The line, it has to end with you. I didn’t object because I wanted to make sure the prophecy was fulfilled, and that it would be fulfilled through you, my beautiful Abomination. If I could have squeezed your sister into that pileup, I would have, but Ginny had her claws dug too deeply into Maisie.”

“Maisie is your daughter.”

“Maisie was an unwanted byproduct of
your
creation, and you, my daughter, my Mercy”—she cast another amused glance over my shoulder at Gudrun—“you are merely a container, an envelope if you will, and it is time for that envelope to be opened.”

The low hum of the bell-shaped craft began to race up the octaves. The sound prompted me to look over at it, and I saw it had begun to spin more quickly. “This ‘bell,’ ” Gudrun said with an obvious pride, “is our greatest invention, our greatest weapon. It marries the highest of science with the greatest of magic to open up the dark and empty heart of the void you call God.”

The machine continued gaining momentum until it became nearly impossible for the eye to track. It seemed to be pulling back from our dimension, an intense gravity building around it as it did so.

“It opens up the space where nothing exists, but where anything is possible. The inchoate can be made flesh, and all that has been made flesh can be returned to the nothingness from which it sprang.”

I saw a tremendous flash of light; then in the next instant I was surrounded not by darkness, but by the utter lack of light. I felt myself trapped in the heart of an eternal and unfathomable emptiness. I knew I was now in the center of the void.