by Horn, J. D.
“Grandma isn’t in ‘hell,’ she’s in Gehenna, and we will get her out of there.”
“Well, if anyone can manage that, I’m sure it will be you.” I noticed he had a large bandage taped on his hand.
“You hurt yourself?”
He examined his hand. “Yeah, a tiny cut. Nothing to worry about.”
“Doesn’t look tiny. You should let Ellen look at it.”
“I will when she gets back. She rushed off this morning. One of her meetings, I guess.”
One of her meetings, I hoped. I pulled out a chair and joined him at the table. He started laughing, but the laughter didn’t really sound happy.
“What’s so funny?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess after all the times I’ve been called a ‘bastard,’ it’s kind of amusing to learn that is indeed exactly what I am.” Tears moistened his eyes, then rolled down his cheeks. He made no attempt to hide them or wipe them away. “I guess I no longer need to feel guilty about letting the family name die out with me.”
I could take it no longer. I made my way around the table and bent over to hug him. He reached up and patted my arm. “Thanks, Gingersnap.”
My eyes fell to the map. “There are more Xs.” I released Oliver and traced the new marks with my finger.
“Yep. That’s the other thing. Adam’s going to be working today. We now have everything but the head.” He tapped the map with his pen. “This morning a jogger in Forsyth stumbled over—literally—a leg across from Old Candler.” He pointed a bit south of Madison Square. “Its partner was left on the sidewalk by the Scottish Rite Temple.” He tapped his pen again. “An arm out by Saint John’s.” He reached out and angled the map a bit. “Last night, a security guard found the missing foot in a cardboard box on the steps of City Hall.”
It all struck me as too much. I felt the blood drain from my face and almost swooned. Swoon, the word struck me as I felt my knees start to give way, and it was only the absurdity of the word that gave me the strength to keep it together and not crumple. Oliver sensed what was happening and jumped up to brace me. In one quick and graceful move, he slid his chair under me and guided my bottom to it. “See?” he said. “Dismembered body. There are worse things in the world than finding out your father was not quite the man you believed him to be.”
I put my elbows on the table and held my head in my hands, fighting the sense of vertigo and its best friend, nausea. I took slow, steady breaths.
Oliver gently grasped my shoulders. “You gonna be okay, there?”
I nodded. I swallowed. “Yes. I’m fine now.”
“Come on, Nancy Drew, pull it together. Take my mind off our family mess. Help me figure this out. Adam needs us. He isn’t a man who asks for help often. This time he’s asked.”
I sighed in capitulation. “Aunt Iris thinks someone is attempting to work a spell.” I pulled the map closer. “But I don’t see any significance to where the parts have been left. There’s no visible pattern. I cannot think of any historical connection to these particular sites and sacrifices.”
“Okay, then.” Oliver seemed strangely enthused by my less-than-insightful participation. “Let’s start with the basics of what we do know.”
“You start. I need some tea,” I said and stood.
“You sit, let me get it,” he offered, but I shook my head.
“No, I’m good now.” I stood and made my way to the cupboard. I opened the door and reached for a mug that had somehow made it from Clary’s Café to our own personal collection. It slipped through my fingers and broke into three heavy shards on the counter. I jumped back.
“You sure you’re all right?” Oliver said looking up from the map.
“Yeah. Yeah. Just clumsy.” I grabbed a towel from the counter and wrapped the sharp-edged pieces in it, carrying them to the garbage can Iris kept in the pantry. I stepped on the pedal to open the lid, and my heart broke. There, thrown out with other items to be forgotten, was the twisted silver of a photo frame. Shards of bloodied glass rested upon a photo, the photo of Uncle Oliver and Granddad on their fishing trip. I reached in carefully and extricated the picture from the detritus. I placed it on a shelf, determined to have it restored for Oliver. Once the pain had faded, once his pride had healed, he’d want it back. I shook the broken mug into the can and let the lid fall closed.
I returned to Oliver. “Unless the killer intends to go all jigsaw on the head too, I think it’s safe to assume the body has been divided into ten pieces,” he said and recorded this point on a legal pad I hadn’t even noticed before. He drew a heavy asterisk next to it. “So far nine of them have turned up. What else do we have?”
“Well, if we are running with the obvious, magic was used to keep the parts fresh, right? I mean, I’m assuming the parts just found are in the same condition as the others.”
“That’s what Adam said.”
“Okay, then, write,” I ordered, and my uncle obeyed. “We know it’s the body of a female.”
He paused mid-scribble and looked up at me. “We know she had red hair.”
“But they haven’t found the head . . . Oh, I see.” The realization of how they knew this was quickly buried under an even more unpleasant realization. Magical correspondences. Voodoo dolls. “Sympathetic magic.” Maybe I was growing paranoid, but lately it did seem like the whole world was out to get me. I flashed back on the earlier discussion I had with my aunts about Alice Riley. Witch. Pregnant. Now we had a dead redhead. I crossed to the table and sat back down, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me. “Has someone murdered this poor woman and substituted her as a proxy for me?”
Oliver said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes. For a few moments he sat drumming nervously with his pen on the pad. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Shelve it for now.” He flushed with anger. “Damn it, I wish Iris would get over herself and come down. She’s the one who’s good at this kind of deduction.” He slammed the pen down, and it flew off the table. “I’m going to go get her. Drag her down here.”
“There is no need for dragging.” The swinging door into the kitchen pulled back to reveal Iris standing there. “And I am doing my best to ‘get over myself.’ ”
Oliver regarded her with a guilty expression. His eyes darted from Iris to me then back to Iris. “You know what I mean. I feel every bit as bad as you do, but you don’t see me hiding my head in the sand like an ostrich.”
“No, little brother, it is much more your style to strut around like a peacock.” A long moment of silence stretched out between them as they stared each other hard in the eye. I was about to crawl under the table in search of shelter, when they both burst out laughing. Iris approached her younger brother and placed a kiss on the top of his head. She reached out and grasped his wounded hand. “What happened here?”
“Just a cut.”
“You show that to Ellen when she gets home.” She stepped back and took my uncle and myself in. “What’s so crucial that you two are plotting to storm the castle and drag me from my turret?”
“They found the rest of the body,” Oliver said. “Well, other than the head. That is still missing.”
“All right, we knew the parts were still out there, and they were bound to show up sooner or later.”
“Mercy’s worried, well, I’m kind of worried too.” Oliver bit his lip. “The woman was a redhead.”
“There’s the connection to Alice Riley. Pregnant,” I reminded my aunt. “Commonly believed to be a witch,” I said, and fearing I hadn’t made my case added, “and let’s don’t forget that half the magical world seems to have an ax to grind with me.”
Iris sat next to her brother. “I’m listening. Go on.”
“We’re afraid,” Oliver took over for me, “that whoever is behind this is, as you thought, attempting to work a spell of some kind using the body as a poppet. A poppet to repre
sent Mercy.”
Iris’s lips pulled into a tight line. She looked drained this morning; the light that had been glowing in her since she slipped out from under Connor’s yoke seemed to have all but faded away. “I see.” She took a few seconds to study the map. “This doesn’t feel like the work of a real witch. It just doesn’t. An attack by proxy. That’s for amateurs.” She reached over and picked up the legal pad. “Ten pieces. Most magic workers get hung up on the numbers six, seven, and thirteen. What is the significance of that number of ten?” she asked, but then answered her own question. “Whoever is behind this knows more than about magic. Perhaps they know something about the ten united families. Something about the line and the families who remain loyal to it.”
There were indeed ten united families who maintained the line. There were originally thirteen, but three families came to regret their participation. They had been perfectly happy to throw off their own masters, but hadn’t taken into account they would lose control of the non-witches who had been subservient to them. My father, Erik, had been from one of these families. When Ellen, his wife, failed to give birth to the daughter the rebel families had hoped would come to destroy the line, Erik began an affair with my mother. Maisie and I were the products of this affair.
“If the person, or people, behind the dismembering of this unfortunate soul is indeed attempting to use the corpse as a magical substitute for Mercy, I suspect it may have absolutely nothing to do with her personally, and everything to do with her role as an anchor of the line.”
Well, that’s a comfort, I thought, drawing my arms around myself.
“You think an ordinary magic worker is out to destroy the line?” Oliver asked.
“This is no ordinary magic work. I’d say more an extraordinary magic worker. Someone on par with Jilo . . .” Her words died as we all shared the same realization.
“Jessamine?” I thought of the anger I sensed coming from her. I could understand her anger, her sense of betrayal, but would she, could she, use magic to attack me? To attempt to harm the line through harming me? Something about this theory didn’t sit right with me. “Jessamine knows Jilo and I were close. I don’t believe she would betray Jilo like that.”
“I haven’t laid eyes on her yet, but to me she sounds like the type who would bank on your thinking that way.”
“I suspect your uncle is right. I think Jessamine might see your affection for Jilo as a weak spot in your defense. Think, Mercy, what better way to extract revenge against your grandfather than by taking down the one thing he had truly been loyal to? He may have been willing to make fools out of his family . . . out of both his families, but he would have gladly laid down his life to protect the line.”
“How do we handle this?” Oliver asked, having already tried and convicted Jessamine.
“Let me think about it for a bit.” Iris crossed to the counter and found her apron. She tied it around her waist. “In the meantime,” she said smiling at me, “you go upstairs and fetch Abby. Tell her she’s got some baking to do.” She held her head high, putting her hands on her hips and striking an intentionally humorous pose. “Thanksgiving has officially returned to the Taylor household.”
Fake it till you make it. One of the slogans Ellen had adopted from her meetings came to my mind. Iris appeared to be doing just that. Still, I felt glad she’d changed her mind. I pushed myself up from the table and exited through the flapping door and into the hall. I climbed the stairs to the upper floor and turned toward Maisie’s room. I’d only taken a step in that direction when from behind me I heard the screech of a hinge thirsty for oil. My heart stopped cold, then began beating wildly to make up for the lost contractions. I knew that sound better than that of my own voice. It was the noise made by the door to the old linen closet, the room that as children, Maisie and I had adopted as our place of secrets. The same room to which Jilo had linked her haint-blue chamber.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt if I turned toward that creaking sound, toward the door I knew had just pried itself ajar, I would see the haint-blue aura of Jilo’s enchanted chamber spilling through the crack into the hall. I knew it would be so, even though I knew it to be impossible. At Jilo’s behest, I myself had destroyed her enchanted chamber, a room capable of straddling both space and time, or perhaps more correctly space-time. The physics of the place was well beyond my ken, and even though I felt I had the power to re-create such a space, I lacked Jilo’s insight into the intricacies of the necessary magic. She might not have been a born witch, but she proved herself a great magic worker many times over.
I turned to see the door open, and the hall was indeed scintillating like sun on a pool. Jilo had figured out how to straddle dimensions. Could she have found a way around death itself? No sooner had the question entered my mind than the impulse to dive into that haint-blue light became an absolute compulsion. I fled down the corridor toward the cerulean glow. I paused at the threshold of the now open door, my intuition suddenly registering a sense of fraud. This magic was counterfeit. I stepped back, away from the light, but it was too late. It reached out to envelop me; then everything around me dissolved in a bright pulse.
TEN
When the flash faded, I no longer stood in my home before the entrance of my childhood playroom. I found myself in Oglethorpe Square, but everything around me was in the wrong place. The familiar landmarks of the world I knew were all present, but they lay reversed. No, they were mirrored in aspect to their natural coordinates. North lay south, east lay west, and the noon sun hung high but shone down from the northern edge of the horizon.
The Owens-Thomas House sat at the park’s southwest corner. I blinked, and upon opening my eyes, the mansion had shifted to northwest, with President and Abercorn Streets having spun around like spokes on a bike wheel. The sun stood high over a Savannah that was not my home. I stopped and turned a full circle, searching the silent world around me for any sign of intelligent life, but there was none. Silent nature stood frozen, without even a breeze to flutter the Spanish moss.
Not knowing what else to do, I began walking toward where my intuition told me my house should be, all the while sensing a growing heaviness, a condensing of the atmosphere. The edges of the sky faded from blue to gray, not to a gray that the sky would naturally wear, but a gray that had never known any color other than black and white. A memory prickled at the back of my mind. I’d seen this sky before. I picked up my pace, but with each step I took closer to where home should lie, I felt an increased sense of menace, as if I were being guided, being funneled into a trap. The streets of Savannah had become a type of kaleidoscopic maze, with my well-worn path home transformed into a dead-end trail.
I sought to escape this feeling by turning away from home, onto Lincoln, testing the reality of what my witch’s senses were telling me. I could only continue a few steps in my new direction; then the air around me seemed to congeal, constrict, and drive me back to this caricature of my customary route.
I was not going to lose my head. If I couldn’t escape on foot, I would turn to magic. The first trick I had learned once my powers had been returned to me was to teleport short distances, simply by concentrating on the place where I wanted to go. I learned quickly to close my eyes when I did so, otherwise the motion would leave me feeling seasick. I closed my eyes and concentrated on home. Instantly I began to feel the now familiar sensation of dropping down and sliding, but this time something struck me as different. I felt as if I were bumping up against a boundary, like I was pushing against an enormous rubber band. I heard a screech like metal scraping against metal, and my eyes flashed open. I still stood some yards away from the Owens-Thomas House and only a few inches from where I had started.
I felt unseen eyes on me. Somebody was toying with me. “I know you’re watching me. Enjoying my fear. But we have arrived at the end of your good time.” I scanned the empty street, the deserted square. “I am an
anchor of the line, and you cannot use its power against me.” I wished I felt more certain of that fact, but my gut told me it was true. At least mostly so. “That means you are tapping into a different source, and the magic you are using is dangerous. It will backfire on you. If you stop now, I’ll help you. I promise. Now show yourself.” Even though my gut told me Iris was too quick to lay blame at Jessamine’s door, I very nearly expected to see her appear before me.
I stood there waiting, but my words were met with silence, and well, that just pissed me off. “I said show yourself.” The words came out in a quiet voice. They didn’t boom through the ether or echo around me, but even I was surprised by the sense of authority they conveyed.
The world around me scintillated; then shadows danced with light. A darkness coalesced and took form before me. The sound of clapping met my ears before my eyes could resolve the figure there.
“Wow, you have gotten really bossy there, cousin.” Teague Ryan stood mere steps away. Teague looked like the kind of guy who reported television sports. Good-looking, but not too much so, with closely cropped hair and broad shoulders. I’d think him handsome if his personality didn’t come so much into play. Teague was a bully. Nothing more, nothing less. I hadn’t seen him, I hadn’t even thought of him, since the night back in early July when we drew lots to see who would replace Ginny as our family’s anchor. Teague worked his square jaw from side to side until it popped, then took a few steps closer. His pulse throbbed in his temple. I stood my ground. “You wanted to see me,” he said, “so here I am.”
Teague had wanted, no, expected, the line to overlook us undisciplined Savannah Taylors, and settle its powers on his own broad shoulders. Of everyone who might have been chosen to replace my Great-Aunt Ginny as anchor of the line, Teague was the angriest I had been chosen. Well, other than Maisie, that is, and she tried to kill me to get her hands on the power. Did Teague hope to succeed where my sister had failed? “What are you playing at here?” I asked.
