by Horn, J. D.
“So what you’re telling me is Genesis was actually a sequel.”
“Yes,” Oliver said with a glint in his eye. “That is exactly what we’re saying.” I was glad to see their anger had faded. I didn’t want them fighting, especially over me.
Adam passed around behind me to look at the map from a different angle. “Tell me, how does any of this philosophy apply to the concrete and actual problem at hand?”
“We,” Iris answered for us, “have been working under the hypothesis that the woman’s murder and dismemberment is an attempt at working a spell. An attempt at invoking sympathetic magic as a means to power the spell.”
“We think,” Oliver continued, “the spell might be aimed against Mercy, perhaps an attempt to weaken the line through harming her.”
“Is it over then, this business with the body? Was it this Teague jackass behind it?”
“No.” I shook my head. “The desecration of Jilo’s grave, the berserker spell. I don’t think that had anything to do with Teague. At least not directly. His goal was to protect the line. He would never knowingly participate in an attack against it. This business with the sephirot, it may be connected or perhaps it’s only intended as a distraction.”
“Someone would kill and dismember an innocent woman as a mere sleight of hand?”
“I don’t know, but I want to visit the places where the parts have been found. I am certain the locations are not random. I want to look at them through the lens of the sephirot. If we can figure out what the spell is attempting, we will know who is actually behind its working.”
“Who do you think is behind it?” Adam asked. A good and logical question everyone else had been afraid to pose.
“That depends on the aim of the spell. We know Emily is out there, but my gut tells me she wouldn’t bother using a dead body as a poppet to come after me, and I doubt she’d have to rely on whatever magic clung to Jilo’s bones. If the spell’s goal is to hurt me, but not damage the line, it could be any number of disgruntled witches trying to work magic without setting off any alarms along the line.”
“This simply doesn’t feel like a witch’s work to me.” Iris leaned toward me. “I sense you don’t want to accept it as a possibility, but Jessamine is so full of rage.” Iris raised her hand to emphasize her words. “She’s Daddy’s granddaughter, the same as you. Who knows how much magic of her own she might have? You know I loved Jilo too, but you and Oliver exposed her to the Tree of Life. Who knows how much of her experience she shared with Jessamine? It may have been Jessamine herself who defiled Jilo’s grave.”
“Do not go there—”
She twisted her palm up as a signal for me to stop. “I am not saying Jilo would have ever intentionally done anything to put you or any of us in danger, but who knows what Jessamine might have gleaned from a careless statement made here or there?”
I sat and let her words settle. I bit my lip as I weighed whether I should dare speak the truth. I didn’t want to hurt my aunt, but for my own sake, I couldn’t afford letting her carry on with blurred vision. “I’m sorry, but I think you want Jessamine to be guilty.”
Iris made a sharp intake of air and stiffened as if I had physically struck her. “I have no desire to pin guilt on the innocent, but—”
“But,” Oliver said, placing a hand on her shoulder, “a part of you wants to get even with her for taking away your sense of self, your regard for our father, for alerting us to the fact Mama has been wasting away in Gehenna for over two decades. Jessamine, innocent or guilty, has turned your world upside down. You want to punish her for that.”
“How could you even say that, Oli?” Iris shook her head.
“Because I feel the same exact way,” he said.
“As do I,” Ellen added weakly. She raised her fingers to her temples. The hangover had set in. Her own healing powers would ensure it wouldn’t pain her long, but I could see it was fierce all the same.
The swinging door eased open, and Maisie stepped quietly into the kitchen. All eyes turned toward her. She moved cautiously to the table and sat, never daring to raise her eyes to meet ours. She reminded me of a photo I’d seen of a wounded soldier returning from Vietnam to an ungrateful hometown. She had wanted to defend me, but I had rejected her as a murderer. Had the line actually preserved her, groomed her, and returned her to me as my protector? No one else here, including myself, would have acted so decisively against Teague.
“I’m not saying Jessamine is innocent.” I focused my thoughts. “I’m saying we need to investigate without prejudice.”
“I am fine with doing that,” Oliver said, releasing Iris and turning his attention back to me. “As long as you are willing to keep an open mind about this sephirot theory of yours.” He folded his hands on the table, reminding me of the many times I’d been called to the principal’s office to receive the message that a bright girl such as myself could do so well if only I would focus. “Yes, there are ten sephirot, but if we are looking for magical correspondences—” He interrupted himself and explained to Adam. “Using like to draw like, as above so below and all that—I don’t see any link between them and the locations on this map. They aren’t laid out in anything resembling the traditional arrangement of the sephirot on the tree. And here”—he tapped on the caricature of City Hall—“they found a foot. Just a foot. Here”—he pointed to Hutchinson Island—“they found a hand by itself.” He looked to Adam for corroboration. Adam nodded. “This doesn’t match the classical correspondences of the parts of the body to the sephirot. You never see the separation of hand from arm or foot from leg.” He ran his fingers through his lengthening gold curls. “I’m sorry, but when it comes to the different sites, I can’t even hazard a guess what the magical correlation to the sephirot might be.” His eyes scanned over the circles once more. “I see none.”
“I think,” Maisie began, her voice cracking. She looked up at me, and I nodded in encouragement. She licked her lips. “I think that’s because you are only considering the positive aspects. Whoever is behind this spell is working dark magic. They would take the left-handed path. You should look for any negative correspondences.”
“And that is exactly what we are going to do,” I said. I reached out and took her hand. “Close your eyes,” I said, and together we slid from the room.
FOURTEEN
I had no reason to begin at City Hall, other than the location was at the top of my mind due to Oliver’s attempt to convince me of the unsoundness of my theory. When I opened my eyes, Maisie and I stood hand in hand at the corner of Bull and West Bay, facing the four-story neoclassical confection. Sun glinted off its gold-plated dome, but it was the gold of the marigolds showing from the flower boxes on the second floor that caught my attention. My eyes followed the lines of the twin Ionic columns up to the sisters who adorned the space immediately beneath the dome.
“Art and Industry,” Maisie said, showing me how connected we still were, even after all that had happened between us. “What was it you used to tell the tourists they were called?”
I smiled in spite of myself. “Fannie and Rita Mae.” I named the statues after my two favorite authors when I was twelve, weeks after I’d started the Liar’s Tour and days after I learned what the word “lesbian” meant. “Well, Uncle Oliver thought it was funny.” Maisie smiled back at me, and I squeezed her hand tighter. I turned back to face City Hall. “What do you think, do you see anything?”
“I think Oliver was willfully ignoring the most obvious correlation.” She reached up with her free hand and pointed at the golden dome. “Looks enough like a crown to me.”
“That’s Kether, right? The crown?”
“Yes, when you are considering the positive aspects, but I suspect it’s Rita Mae and Fannie we should consider. Look at them.” She lowered her hand to the stone ladies. “They are the same but different.”
“Kind of like us, huh?”<
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Maisie dropped her hand, and I turned to face her. “Possibly. I know you are worried the woman’s body is being used as a magical substitute for you, but I was thinking more about how the demonic orders correlate to the sephirot.” She blinked and turned her head at an angle. “See, when you were out destroying Savannah’s reputation, Ginny kept me inside to learn about demonic orders.” Her hand slid from mine as her shoulders sagged. “Maybe I am crazy after all.”
“No.” I grasped hold of her hand again. It seemed impossible that this same soft hand had executed Teague, but I couldn’t let myself dwell on that. “I don’t think you are crazy at all. Tell me. Tell me what you see.”
Maisie’s eyes pointed back up toward the statues. “Like I said, they are the same but different. In its positive aspect Kether represents the crown. In its negative aspect it represents duality.”
“How is duality negative?”
“It stands for duality in what should be indivisible. Duality in God. God . . .” She seemed to ponder something that really had nothing to do with the holy. “They found something out near the Cathedral too, right?”
“Yeah, they found an arm.”
She stood still, but I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. Then she nodded. “What is unique about Saint John’s?”
I considered her question. “Well, it’s big. It’s beautiful.” Our mother had once possessed the body of a tourist on its steps, but I doubted that was what she was looking for. “Savannah didn’t start out friendly toward Catholics.” Savannah had been established as a buffer between the British port of Charleston and the Spanish territory of Florida. Oglethorpe had feared Papists would be more inclined to support Catholic Spain than support Protestant England.
“You’re getting warmer. The squares.”
I realized instantly where she was going. Oglethorpe had laid out Savannah’s squares, and surrounded them with what he termed “trust” and “tithing” lots. Tithing lots were intended for private houses, trust lots for public buildings such as churches. “The Cathedral is on the wrong side of Lafayette Square. It’s on a tithing lot.”
“I suspect the Cathedral might represent ‘Chaigidel’ to our secret sorcerer.”
“Chaigidel?”
“The confusion of the power of God, represented by a church where a church was not originally intended to exist.”
It seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. I had begun to lose confidence in our theory when Maisie turned west. “Wasn’t the other arm found right around here?”
“Yeah.” I pointed left down Bay. “They found the arm somewhere over behind Moon River.” Then I pointed right. “The torso was out by Old Rex.”
“The torso? Not a hand?”
“That’s what Adam and about thirty traumatized tourists said. Why?”
“The lion at the Cotton Exchange fountain,” she said, but I didn’t follow. “Rex? King Cotton?”
“Okay.” I pretended I had caught on.
“The eighth sephira. In its positive aspect it stands for ‘Majesty.’ In the demonic order it represents Adrammelech, the great king.”
“So why the confusion?”
“It’s also known as the ‘left hand of God.’ I would have expected to find a hand, but maybe that only means the correspondence of the part to the site is secondary.”
“Or maybe it means I’ve brought you on a wild-goose chase.”
“I don’t mind if you have. This feels almost like old times, back when you loved me.”
I started to protest.
“Back when you really loved me. Back before I gave you reason not to.”
“I love you. I never stopped loving you. If I had, I would never have risked everything to bring you home. I just worry the sister I’ve loved my entire life never really existed,” I said and instantly regretted my honesty. Still, the truth had come out, and I felt it would be wrong to backpedal. “I’m just trying to figure out who you are.”
“That makes two of us.” She forced a smile and moved on. “What do we know about where they found the arm?”
I wrapped my arm through hers and led her back south on Bull Street, then right onto Bay Lane. “Moon River is haunted. That much I know.”
“Okay, but the arm wasn’t found in the bar. It was found near the bar. What about this area here?” she asked, making a small circle that took in a portion of the street and the sidewalk. “The basement areas and portion below the street here.” She looked up at me. “Don’t you hear it? The sound of abject misery.”
“Before the Civil War, slaves were kept in holding pens down there.”
She knelt on the sidewalk and placed her hands on the concrete. “Yes. Nehemoth. The groaning.” She stood and stared to the east. “They found something by Columbia Square. By the Kehoe Mansion?”
“Yes.”
Her face lit up. “The king of cast iron. Tubal Cain. The lord of sharp weapons.” She tugged on my arm. “Old Candler. It was an asylum for years, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I knew it had been, but I didn’t want to dwell on issues of mental health with her.
“God only knows how many have died there,” she said.
Josef and Ryder had committed murder to free the demon my grandfather had trapped there. Ryder had sacrificed his own girlfriend, Birdy, and their unborn child without a single qualm to draw the demon and its power into himself. My mind flashed on the image of Birdy’s ravaged corpse. I pushed it quickly away.
“Belphegor,” she chirped. “Lord of the Dead who reigns over those who bellow grief and tears.” I would have never imagined I’d hear these words spoken so cheerfully. “You had a circle on the map over by Christ Church.”
I nodded.
“Take us there.”
In the blink of an eye, we stood on the red brick sidewalk before the Episcopal meetinghouse.
Maisie looked the building over as if it were the first time she had seen it in her life. She turned 180 degrees to face Johnson Square then turned back to face me. “This isn’t quite right. It wasn’t here.” She took quick steps to the corner, then turned on Congress and headed east. I struggled to catch up with her, waddling as fast as I could. Suddenly she stopped and pointed up at the parking structure. “It was here, wasn’t it?” She burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, I know it isn’t funny, not really, but this convinces me you are right. There is no doubt this is a spell connected to the sephirot, and whoever is behind it has a sense of humor. The demon Astaroth. His title is ‘One of the Flock.’ ” I waited silently for further explanation, but she looked at me like I was hopeless. Finally she sighed in exasperation. “You have told me a thousand stories about what used to stand here.”
I felt so embarrassed by my thickness I blushed. “Bo Peep’s Pool Hall.” I no sooner said the words than a car horn caused me to turn.
I registered the trident symbol on the front of Oliver’s new Quattroporte; then he pulled up next to us and rolled down the window. “You two need to get home now. Your aunts are worried, and I’m on my way to the airport.”
“The airport?” I echoed.
“Yep. Going to pick up Rivkah and Emmet. Get on home now,” he said and pulled away before the window had even finished closing.
FIFTEEN
I still believed only Emmet could free my grandmother, but a very large part of me regretted telling Iris to contact Rivkah. I didn’t want to see Emmet; I didn’t want to be near him. I didn’t want to feel my pulse rising when I laid eyes on Emmet, but I told myself we had no other option. I hated the butterflies that danced in my stomach as I heard his voice in the hall. I didn’t greet him as he and Rivkah came through the door. I couldn’t risk his seeing just how happy I was to see him. Instead I remained seated at the table, nursing an already lukewarm cup of chamomile.
I was grateful to Uncle Oliver for “inviting” Peter
to spend the evening with his parents. I couldn’t have dealt with having him and Emmet under the same roof. I had alerted Claire to Peter’s suspicions about his parentage, but worked both sides of the equation by making Peter promise not to broach the subject until I could be there with him. I hoped that issue was diffused for now.
The swinging door flung wide. “Darling, it’s so good to see you up and about,” Rivkah said as she pulled Maisie into a tight embrace. Maisie looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes widening as she pulled a face. I’d grown used to Rivkah’s enthusiastic hellos and had already braced myself for my turn. I was warming up my smile when Rivkah released Maisie and turned to look down at me. “What is this nonsense about you wanting to kill my boy?”
“Rivkah,” Emmet said, “you promised you wouldn’t do this.” His face flushed, like a teenager who’d been embarrassed by his mother. Well, perhaps that really didn’t fall too short of the mark. The two had developed a familial bond.
He looked good, having struck a balance between his original overly manicured look and the feral appearance he’d perfected before he left Savannah. Before I sent him away from Savannah. The memory of Tillandsia, how it felt to be in his embrace before everything went so horribly wrong, washed over me.
“Do what? Find out why this girl thinks she has the right to order us to drop everything and attend to her desires? It would be bad enough if she only needed help moving, but she wants to kill you.”
“Not permanently,” I offered, realizing instantly how inept my attempt to diffuse her anger was.
“Not permanently. Not permanently.” She slammed her purse on the table so hard I jumped.
