by Horn, J. D.
“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.
THIRTY-TWO
In the void, there are no cardinal points, no ups or downs, no forward or back. In the void, there are no illusions. No rationalizations. No comforting linear interpretations of cause and effect. In the void, it becomes clear there is no difference between the two. No difference between history and imagination. Both are lies in equal parts.
The greatest lie of my life had not been that my mother had died, or that no one knew who my father was. In a way, those things shone through as the brightest of all truths. My mother had died, on the inside, where it really mattered, and no one, no one, ever knew the man my father had been. No, the greatest lie I’d ever heard had been the ticking of Ginny’s clock, the way it counted off the passing seconds so loudly, proclaiming itself the herald of time, the great god that ruled over us all. In the void, time has no meaning. Within the void it becomes clear that time is merely a side effect, not the great king it pretends to be.
In the void, I had no eyes, and I had no physical mind. Still, images of the illusion I called my life floated around my awareness. No, that implied they could possibly be separate from my awareness, and here, there was no separation. My awareness, and truly that was all I had left, acted upon itself to con
jure images of Emily, memories of Erik. I had been born to monsters, but I, myself, was not a monster. She had called me the “Abomination.” With those words she claimed I had no soul. Still, I felt that soul, that spark, felt I was that spark. I wanted to believe she was wrong about me, as she had been so horribly wrong about everything else.
As above, so below. Infiltrating Tillandsia, a harmless gentlemen’s club, and turning it into a generator of dark magic, Erik and Emily had performed the ultimate act of sympathetic magic, but instead of clay, instead of cloth, they had used their own biology to create a poppet, a living doll capable of containing the essence of the line itself. The blood and the sex of Tillandsia proved to be the exact frequency necessary to capture a small piece of the line, and channel it into a human body. The body I’d thought of as mine. They had determined the best way to topple the line was to destroy it in its smallest expression, because through the laws of sympathetic magic, what can be destroyed on the molecular level will also be abolished in its greatest form.
Now, I found myself within the void, divorced from that body, but still aware of what was happening to it. It had all been such a glorious trick on Emily’s part. The line had been created by the thirteen families, and it required all thirteen working together to destroy it, to destroy me. The ten families who had remained loyal to the line would never have knowingly agreed to unite with the three rebel families, but Emily had sowed the seed of fear in their hearts. They thought they were preventing me from harming the line. They had no idea I was the line.
THIRTY-THREE
The powerless ginger girl they had at first overlooked, then loathed, was the line incarnate. I found myself missing that girl. As the united witch families joined forces to destroy her, I felt the rebel families working to erase her. Here, in the void, I knew that was exactly what was happening. I was being twisted, erased, undone at the point of nothingness. The edges of my awareness grew fuzzier, dissipating into the absolute null of the void. I let my mind float, searching out the happier moments, although it seemed they were among the first to fade.
I was awash in horror. Ginny’s corpse was spread out before me, or was it Teague’s? The two murders blended together now. The fire at Magh Meall. Knowing I’d never see Peter’s parents again. The kick in the gut as Peter leapt without so much as a wave through the portal into the world of the Fae. The realization that Maisie had once turned me over to be sacrificed. The sickening crack of my neck as Connor struck me, flinging me like a ragdoll against the wall of Ginny’s house. The magical fire that consumed him. All things good began to escape me. I had family, family that loved me. There were two women. Sisters. They loved me very much, but I could not remember their names. Two men. They loved me. I knew that. They seemed like family to me, even though they certainly weren’t brothers, but the same word pressed against my consciousness. Then that word was lost to me. I felt a shock and a sense of collapsing, condensing. There existed less of me and more of the nothingness in which I was an island. I could still see her, that girl, or was I simply imagining I did? She lay oh so very still, the red hair on her pillow a near match for the red blood that now clung to her thighs. I wished I could comfort her. I wished I could promise her things would be all right, but I sensed that she, like I, was fading. Another shuddering collapse and the vision failed.
No more images came. There was only darkness. Darkness and a single spark. With the sight of the spark, I regained the memory of color. I recognized it. The color blue. No, it was haint blue.
“Well, if you are just about good and ready to quit feeling sorry for yourself, we got some work to do.”
My awareness, which had been so close to collapse, suddenly exploded, blowing wide open. I knew myself, I knew that color, and I knew her.
“Jilo.” She had no form, she was just a shimmering, but still I recognized my friend.
“That’s right, girl. It’s your Jilo.”
“Are you an angel?”
Laughter shook the darkness around me, the haint-blue light expanding into waves that reflected off themselves into infinity. “Well, the good Lord do work in mysterious ways. Maybe that what he has in mind, but if he do, then he got his work cut out for him.” Another bout of laughter rippled around me. “Jilo’s here for you. She’s here, and she ain’t gonna let nobody hurt her baby.”
“I’m nobody’s baby, I’m not even human.”
“Bullshit.” Her face coalesced before me. “It don’t matter none if you human or you billy goat, you are Mercy, and you are my baby. I love you, girl. I have done ever since that evening I saw you leading your silly tour through Colonial Cemetery. You remember that evening, girl?” The memory of the night rose from the ashes to become real again. With that memory, I somehow became more real again too. “I saw you leading those paunchy crackers around, and there was something about you. Jilo, she thought to herself, ‘You just walk away, Jilo. She just one of them crazy Taylors.’ But Jilo’s heart felt a tug at the sight of you. That’s why Jilo put it in your silly head to come find her at her crossroads.”
The urge to laugh hit me, creating shimmers of light in the void. “You did not.”
“Oh, yes”—she put special emphasis on the word—“Jilo did. You just need to own up to the fact you would’ve been too scared to come if I hadn’t set a conjure on you.”
“Come to think of it, you’re probably right.”
“Hell, girl, ain’t no probably about it.” Jilo paused and seemed to be attempting to measure the endlessness around us. “Now, this here is one hell of a mess you’ve landed yourself in.” Light and color faded as I again felt the hopelessness of my situation. “Oh good Lord, there she go again. Jilo said it a mess, she didn’t say you can’t get out of it.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, wondering if my friend were just something my dying mind conjured to ease the fear of its last few minutes. “This is the void, the empty heart of God.”
Jilo’s cackles dissolved the darkness into a mad rainbow of color. Fandango lights shot forth and circled each other. For an instant I imagined I could see a horizon. “Shoot girl, this ain’t the heart of God. This thing is counterfeit. It is a lie.” Jilo let loose an angry harrumph. “Those fools, they think they can make themselves gods. They mix they science with magic and they come up with this ‘bell’ of theirs.”
“But Emily—”
“But Emily nothing. Who you gonna listen to, that bitch or your real mama?” I didn’t answer. There was no need. “All right. This thing we in. They found a way to mimic the true void, but you need to get it through that red head of yours that this ain’t the true void. Ain’t no man and ain’t no witch either who gets to play in that sandbox.”
“So what do I do?”
“What do you do?” I perceived a mental image of Jilo as she had been before her death, a birdlike old woman, hopping mad. “Ain’t Jilo taught you nothing?” Somehow even her frustration with me came as a comfort. “What is the first thing, the very first thing, Jilo taught you about magic?”
I tried to focus, tried to remember the time we had spent together, her sharing with me everything she herself had learned through trial and error. It all seemed so distant in this place without time, without sensation.
“This void,” Jilo said, “it is a powerful weapon, and those bitches have aimed this power at you.”
The sensation of pain. A small stone bounced off my shoulder. Joy rushed through me. There was a stone, and I had a shoulder. “That’s right, girl. You tell Jilo, who does that power belong to now?”
“The power is mine.” A green and pleasant world flashed into existence around us. I stood before Jilo, who looked at me like she was going to burst with pride.
“And you are going to use it to kick some ass.” She pulled me into her arms. Solid. Warm. Loving. Real. “First, they somebody who wants to say hello.” Jilo released me, and waved her hand, calling someone forw
ard.
She arrived first as a sensation, hesitant to show herself, afraid of my rejecting her. My heart nearly broke realizing the pain I had caused her. All that she had done for me.
“Ginny,” I said, and the image of my great-aunt crystalized before me. She wasn’t the bloodied corpse I’d last laid eyes on. More than a mere memory, a moment out of sync repeated itself.
Jilo smiled like a proud teacher. “That’s right, my girl. You seeing the big picture now. Who would that old woman have accepted her death from? That’s the question you need to be askin’.”
Now, I had the answer to that question. Wren had murdered Ginny, but she hadn’t accepted her death from him. She had accepted it from the line. She had accepted it from me.
“I tried to do exactly as you asked me,” Ginny said, looking at me with wonder in her eyes. Another flash from before. I remembered going to her, not as Mercy, but before Mercy, as the line. The line had warned her Emily and Erik had succeeded. They had completed the Babalon Working and captured a bit of the line itself. “It was so hard to treat that little girl like I did.” Tears moistened Ginny’s eyes.
“You did exactly like I asked you to.” I held my arms wide and Ginny flung herself into them.
“I knew she didn’t understand. I knew she was innocent, but you—”
“I told you to keep her separate, ignorant of magic.” A harder truth hit me. “I asked you to take her magic, and use her sister as an anchor for what you could. To send the rest to a dimension where no one would notice it.” I was the one. I had been the one to betray Maisie. To warp her by channeling power through her that no simple witch could experience without going mad. How strong Maisie must have been to resist as well as she had. Those times I waited in Ginny’s hall, staring at the damned blank wall I had resented so, that was when Ginny had worked so tirelessly to balance the powers that threatened to tear me apart. I realized it had been a blessing in disguise that Ginny had found a way to channel some of that power through Jilo.
