by Horn, J. D.
Thinking of Ellen, I realized it was nearing time for her to close up Taylor’s, her new, albeit unimaginatively named, flower shop, so I decided to drop by and see if she’d like to walk home together. It was true I could take care of myself. My newfound magic was strong, and I was mastering it. Quickly. All the same, the reminder in the news that there was a person out there capable of dismembering a woman creeped me out. I wanted the company.
I was a bit surprised to see the lights had already been turned off and the closed sign placed in the window. Another handwritten sign—“Yes, We Have Mistletoe”—caught my eye. The announcement struck me as less of a commercial message and more an admission of defeat. My aunt detested the parasitic plant whose pagan roots were deep enough to allow it to bloom into the Christmas season.
With a little reflection, I recollected why this would be so. When the Norse sun god Baldur’s mother, Frigg, dreamed of his death, she extracted a vow from every hurtful thing in the world not to harm her son. She overlooked the seemingly innocent mistletoe. I guess it struck too close to home for Ellen. A woman who had all the magic in the world at her command, but who still failed to protect her son. “You do your best to protect the ones you love,” I’d once heard her say to Aunt Iris. “You weave spells to ward off the supernatural and dress them against the weather, but still there is always the one event you couldn’t have anticipated, the one person you never suspected would or even could do harm.” I knew the thought of having to peddle the detested plant for a full month sent Ellen into a total funk and led her to close shop early. I touched the glass and hoped she’d have a better day tomorrow.
A movement near my reflection caught my eye. A child’s laugh. High. Crystalline. I spun around to find an impossible sight, an all-too-familiar little boy with deep-blue eyes and blond curls. Wren, the demonic being who had made itself at home with my family for decades, hovered in the air mere feet before me. Wren, the creature my sister had fed with her magic, until he had grown capable of projecting a second and more complex identity. I’d known this version of the entity as Jackson, and I had very nearly given him my heart. The last time I had seen him, he had held a knife to that heart, ready to destroy me so that he could free his brethren from their world of eternal shadow. I had believed him to be gone, blasted from our world by the power of the line. But here the little bastard was.
“Ellen’s going to die, you know.” He laughed again, the sound of icicles shattering as they fell to earth. “They all will. Ellen and Iris and Oliver and Peter and everyone you have ever loved. Then, when you are all alone, we will take you apart, piece by piece.” My mind flashed on the dismembered body, as Wren glided within an arm’s length of me.
“The line destroyed you. I saw it.” I felt an iciness creep into my fingers as my pulse pounded in my neck. I raised a hand to ward him off.
“The line took much from me.” His boyish tenor should have been incapable of carrying the pointed hatred that punctuated his words. A child’s eyes should never be able to hold the rage this false child carried in him. “You have taken much from me, but I have friends who will help me get it all back and more.”
The world began to spiral around us, images blending and blurring, spinning then slowing. We now stood in Troup Square, nearly a mile from where we’d started. The last glints of sunlight touched the armillary and set fire to the golden astrological symbols that adorn it. The sun’s glow provided the demon child with an unmerited halo. I used my hand to block the excess light from my eyes. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Because we want you to remember. It’s time for you to remember.”
“Remember what?”
Wren’s rosebud lips curved up into a wicked smile, then stained to an inky black. Within seconds, all color deserted his features. The demon’s form stretched beyond the measure of its childlike disguise and lost all semblance of solidity. This demon was what the people of the low country call a “boo hag,” and a boo hag was by nature a hungry shadow.
“The future,” it said as it crawled up the armillary, looping the length of its elastic body around the base of tiny turtles and twining around the solstitial colure. I had once witnessed an encompassing darkness woven from these living shadows, but en masse they were indistinguishable one from another. I realized this amorphous shade was the manifestation of the entity’s truest form, and I shuddered at the thought of my sister, Maisie, lying with it in its guise as Jackson, her limbs entwined with this vaporous abomination. Even worse, the impassioned kiss I myself had once shared with it.
The creature’s nebulous form began convulsing; then what I reckoned to be its jaw came unhinged. Something like a watch fob spilled from its mouth and fell tangled among the points of the armillary’s Polaris star. My stomach clenched as I recognized it as Connor’s missing pendulum.
“Perhaps this will help your detective solve his puzzle,” Wren’s ever deepening and darkening voice rasped. Then the demon evaporated, leaving behind the flaccid chain.
TWO
Detective Adam Cook was not a happy man. He sat at our kitchen table without saying a word, tapping the bottom of his phone against the table’s top. Finally he looked directly into my eyes. “I’m really starting to miss the days when you used to lie to me.”
“You were given fair warning,” I said as what remained of Abby’s latest pie winked up seductively at me from its plate. As different as Abby, my self-proclaimed “white trash” cousin, was from my Aunt Ellen, their powers proved complementary. As Ellen could heal the body, Abby could aid the spirit, helping lead those who had lost themselves emotionally back to the light. Abby had given up everything, put her entire life on hold to come and help Maisie through her own homespun brand of magical cognitive behavioral therapy.
Food, especially baked goods, was to Abby as flowers were to Ellen. Abby’s creations were the epitome of comfort food, indulgent and truly magical. The way my maternity jeans were pinching me told me I might have become a tad too reliant on Abby’s form of comfort. I tugged at the elastic band and squirmed in my seat.
“You’re beautiful,” Peter had been telling me several times each day, somehow intuiting that my self-esteem had developed an inverse relationship to my weight. This morning I had rolled my eyes, and he pulled me into his clutches, tickling me. “Say ‘I am beautiful.’ Say it or I’ll keep going.” Laughing and nearly breathless, I finally gave in and said it. “That’s right,” he said and planted a wet kiss on my lips. I found myself smiling at the memory.
Adam was not smiling. He used his index finger gingerly to prod Connor’s pendulum. “So this Wren demon, he said this was the key to solving my investigation?”
“He’s a demon. Demons lie.” Even as Iris spoke to Adam, she couldn’t take her eyes off the fob and chain that had been her husband’s constant companion, nearly an extension of his very personality. The mere mention of Connor’s name could cause the joyous vigor to drain from Iris’s face. Now the sight of his pendulum had caused her to look a decade older, despite the youthful new styling of her honey-blonde hair and her recent habit of borrowing my non-maternity clothes without asking first. Truth was, I enjoyed her enjoying them as much as I enjoyed her relationship with Sam. It was like she was catching up on all the years she had squandered on her departed husband.
She sat next to me, her arms pulled tightly around her sides. “I thought he was gone.”
“I know. I thought Wren was gone too,” I said.
“I meant Connor.” Iris began to tremble. “I thought he was gone. Gone for good. I should have known it was too good to be true.”
Oliver and I shared a guilty glance. I sighed and nodded.
Oliver leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his thick blond curls. “Listen, sis.” Oliver paused as he screwed up his courage. He raised his eyebrows, and his lips puckered and shifted almost comically from side to side. His features relaxed, and he faced
his sister. “Connor is gone. Very gone.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“The night of the wake at Magh Meall,” I jumped in. “I decided to charge the atmosphere of the house, like you all wanted me to,” I added as a quick defense, “to see if I could shake loose any of the house’s memories about Emily and her activities. Connor’s spirit had been trapped here.” I didn’t want to finish, because I knew she wasn’t going to like that I had remained silent on that point.
“Yes?” she prompted as her eyes pulled away from the pendulum and flashed at me.
“Well,” Oliver took over. “He took advantage of Mercy’s own magic to launch another attack against her.”
Iris’s features softened. “I am so sorry. I have been such a fool. I thought we were finally safe.”
Her tone prompted Oliver to repeat the rest of the story with relish. “Oh, Mercy was safe all right. When Connor came out to play, Mercy shoved his sorry phantom ass into a spirit trap the old buzzard—I mean Mother Jilo,” he corrected himself as I glared at him, “taught her to make.”
“A spirit trap?” The way she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye told me she wasn’t really asking a question, merely expressing surprise. “Jilo did have such a flair for the classics.” She drew a deep breath and shrugged, like she was trying to shake off Connor’s taint. “What have you done with this trap? Where is it now?”
I lowered my eyes, not sure how she would react. I didn’t need to worry, as Oliver barreled on, still in full raconteur mode. “I had it sealed in a cement block then compelled the captain of a freight ship bound to Guangzhou to drop it overboard as they passed over the Mariana Trench.” He winked at me, oblivious to the unsettledness of Iris’s mood. “With the cutbacks at NASA, it was the best I could do.”
Iris stiffened in her seat. She turned away from her brother’s grin and looked at me. “When were you going to tell me this?”
I bit my lip. “I meant to tell you the morning after the wake, but you remember, I caught you doing your walk of shame? You’d just connected with Sam.”
Oliver snorted. “ ‘Connected.’ ”
“Shut up, Oliver,” Adam and I said at the same time.
“You’ve blossomed since Connor’s been gone,” I said. “You’ve been so happy. I’m sorry.” I reached out for her, and she patted my hand. “I just didn’t want to risk that.”
“Not to worry. Doing the wrong thing for the right reason is a family tradition.”
“Good. That’s taken care of.” Oliver whisked the pie that had been tempting me from the table and found a fork to dig in. A silent conversation passed between Adam and Oliver. “What?” Oliver asked in response to the unspoken challenge. “I have a fast metabolism. A taste of pie won’t hurt.”
“I was actually wondering how you could stand there eating after learning the demon who seduced one of your nieces and attempted to murder the other has returned and has been practicing some form of vivisection on an innocent woman.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Detective.” Oliver took another defiant bite then pointed at Adam with his fork. “How can you be so sure the two things are connected?”
Adam slid back in his seat and put his forearm on the table. “Well, you and Iris agree magic has likely played a role in the preservation of the body parts we have found, and that this same magic is preventing Iris from doing her touchy-knowy thing.” Until about six months ago, I had believed psychometry, the ability to touch a person or object and know their history, to be Iris’s greatest power. Of course, six months ago I didn’t know she was hiding her abilities in order to protect her husband’s fragile ego. The woman, she could also fly, let the wind lift her to the skies. How she could have lived without that for so long astounded me. I had always assumed that Ellen was the most powerful of my mother’s siblings. Lately, I had begun to question that and wonder what other tricks Iris might have up her sleeve.
Still, that Iris had been unable to pick up any impressions from the body parts was news to me. “Nothing?” I asked her.
“Nothing. It’s like the hand and foot I touched were blank. Like they had been wiped clean of any possible impression.”
Adam raised his eyebrows and angled his eyes at Oliver to deliver an “I told you so” look. Still focused on my uncle, Adam nodded toward Connor’s pendulum. “We know that thing is magic. And we know your crazy evil sister, Emily—” He turned to me. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Our feelings regarding Emily Rose Taylor were much the same, even if my cocktail of emotions was a bit more emotionally complex than his. Emily and Josef had kidnapped Adam, beaten him to a bloody pulp, and then left him to fall to his death from the lighthouse at Hunting Beach. And they had done all this merely to get my attention.
“We know she is still out there,” he continued, “and without a doubt still hell-bent on destruction. So, yeah, my Magic Eight Ball’s sources point to yes. Your demon is connected to this murder.” His hand shot out and clutched the pendulum, letting the fob fall to the end of its chain and swing. He looked at Iris. “Connor used this thing to answer questions and find things, right? Show me how it works.”
“Sorry, but I could never bear to touch the thing, so it’s going to have to be either Mercy or Oli.” Iris’s chair scraped the floor as she pushed back from the table. “But for the record, I think the demon showing up with Connor’s pendulum is either a play for attention if he is, as I suspect, working on his own, or a trap if he does indeed have accomplices.” She crossed the room to our kitchen’s extraordinarily orderly junk drawer and riffled through its contents. “The minor demons, they love to brag, to make themselves seem much more formidable than they are. Most likely Wren collected the pendulum the night Ginny’s house burned.”
“He sure didn’t seem very minor when he was holding a knife to my heart,” I said. “Besides, Wren escaped the line. If he hasn’t found access to some major mojo, he must have some connections with power. He said he had friends.” Even as I made the point, I wanted more than anything for her to offer me an acceptable alternative as an explanation.
“Did he escape by his own means or with the help of these alleged allies? Maybe he did, but maybe the line simply shifted him unharmed, as it did with Maisie, and maybe when you brought Maisie back to us—”
“You got two for one,” Oliver finished Iris’s thought for her. “Little bastard has probably been hanging out, licking his wounds until he was strong enough to try to get a rise out of you.”
Iris pulled a paper rectangle from the drawer. As she began to unfold it, I recognized it as a more-than-decade-old tourist map of Savannah and its environs. I had spent many childhood hours poring over it as I plotted the best routes for my then-nascent Liar’s Tour, on which I trotted inebriated tourists around Savannah and made up the most lurid lies I could come up with on the spot about the landmarks we encountered. No harm done, as the fun lay in the fact that everybody knew I was lying. Still, a few of my fibs had over time worked their way into the fabric of Savannah’s folklore.
Iris lost patience with the folds and shook the chart angrily open to its full size. “I know what you’re hoping for, Adam,” she said as she covered the tabletop with the map. “That Connor’s tiny bauble will magically point to the location where our still-living, if much diminished, victim is to be found.” She leaned toward him and patted his back. “I don’t have the gift of prognostication, but I am fairly certain what you are hoping for will not be our actual outcome.”
“We have to try.”
“Of course we do,” she said. “Still, I feel the need to remind you of two things before we do.”
“I’m listening.” Adam let the pendulum slide from his fingers and fall to the map.
“My first point is that the pendulum itself is not magic. It was never the source of Connor’s tracking abilities. It was a focus for Connor�
�s powers. In our hands, it will probably be nothing more than a brass sinker on a chain.”
Adam nodded. “Understood.”
“The second thing I want you to consider is that if this is a trap, the damned thing might well carry a curse. Mercy, how many pieces of jewelry have you been given in the past year?”
I knew where she was going with this. “Three.”
“How many of those had been enchanted with harmful magic?”
I looked down at my wedding ring. “Only two, I hope.”
Iris’s eyes glimmered at my little joke. “That one, my dear, is blessed with good magic.” Then the moment was over. Her smile faded and her warm gaze turned stern. Iris was back to being all business. She looked at Adam. “So whose well-being should we risk? Oliver’s or Mercy’s?”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “Really, enough drama. I’ll yank the chain, and if anything happens, you two will shoot the winged monkeys.” He reached for the pendulum only to have Adam slap his hand away with a loud thwack. “Ouch. Damn. What’s wrong with you?”
“I believe Adam has decided the risk doesn’t merit the anticipated return,” Iris said.
Anyone else might have crumbled, but Adam had a stubborn streak almost as wide as my own. He grasped the chain and held the pendulum over the map. To our common surprise, it began swinging counterclockwise in a small precise circle.
“Drop it, buster,” Oliver commanded. I knew he would have compelled Adam to obey if he still had that ace up his sleeve, but Oliver had surrendered the option of compelling Adam years ago. Adam had been none too pleased learning Oliver had compelled him to disregard the apprehension a non-witch usually suffered when encountering true magic. To placate Adam, Oliver performed a mini self-binding to prevent himself from being able to influence Adam with magic again. At least Oliver claimed this was the reason behind his action. I believed the truth was that he wanted to be certain that if and when he won Adam’s heart, he would know he hadn’t unconsciously compelled Adam to return his feelings.
