by Horn, J. D.
“Mr. Tierney,” I called out before he could disconnect.
“Yes?”
“Who was he?”
“My Uncle Peadar, my father’s brother. Here for a surprise visit, I guess. We haven’t seen him in decades now, not since Peter was still in diapers, but Claire still felt very fond of the old fellow. Good-bye, Mercy.”
“Good—” I began, but he had already hung up.
SIX
I spent a nearly sleepless night and was haunted by nightmares of Peter’s great-uncle each time I drifted off. When I woke from the one that ended with a cottonmouth snake hissing out through the hole I’d left in the man’s chest, I decided that enough was enough and that I’d rather stay awake to greet the dawn. I found my phone and saw that Peter had texted me at some point while I was wrestling with his relative’s zombie in a dream. Peter’s messages said that he loved me. That his mom was upset. Really upset, considering that they hadn’t even seen Uncle Peadar in over twenty years. Maybe because the police thought he might have been murdered? He’d call after he finished the walkthrough with Tucker at the site of the job he was taking on.
First light found me up and heading to Colonial Cemetery, looking for Jilo. She did her magic a bit farther out, at a crossroads hidden off the dead end of Normandy Street, but she handled the money end of her business here in Colonial.
“Well you been busy, ain’t ya?” she said as she plodded across the field toward me, using the lawn chair she always carried with her to Colonial as a makeshift walker.
“How did you know?”
“Girl, they a police station right next door to this here boneyard, and Mother may be old, but she ain’t deaf. Now you tell her what you been up to.”
“A man showed up after you left the powder magazine,” I confessed, relieved to share with someone. Maybe it was unfair, maybe not, but I couldn’t help resenting my mother for her silence. She had to know I needed her. I touched the chain of her locket and pushed the thought away. “The poor man was sick,” I continued, trying to focus on the story I could share with Jilo. “Confused. I think he might have had Alzheimer’s or something.”
“Mm-hmm,” she prompted me.
“I was talking to him, trying to figure out where he belonged, when he keeled over. He wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse . . .”
“And you thought you would jolt him back to life with a wee touch of magic?”
I nodded.
“And ended up burning a hole clean through the old buzzard,” she said, and then started laughing, that unnerving wheezing of hers that always ended up sounding like a death rattle. She winded herself, and leaned most of her weight against the folded chair while she wheezed. I reached out toward her, but she held up her hand. “Don’t you go helpin’ Jilo none. She done seen what yo’ kind of help leads to, and she ain’t ready to stand outside them pearly gates just yet.”
She burst into another bout of laughter, but managed to gain control of herself again when she took note of the tears that were forming in my eyes. “Shoot. You stop worryin’, girl. You didn’t do nothin’ wrong. Ain’t got a thing to feel bad about. That old fella of yours, he already dead when you put your hands to him.” Jilo did her best to offer me absolution, but it didn’t stick.
“How could you know that? You weren’t there.”
“Did he have a pulse? Was he breathing?”
“No. He had turned blue.”
“Well, there you go then. A blue cracker is a dead cracker.” A smile of encouragement quivered on her lips. She reached out and wiped at my tears with her calloused fingers. “Hell, most folk would have never even stopped and tried to help him anyway. You a good girl. You done all you could for him,” she said, but then gave me the stink eye. “They somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ Jilo, though, ain’t they. Get on with it, girl. You tell Mother.”
She flipped the lawn chair open and eased her way into it. Sometimes she seemed like such a force of nature, but lately I could tell she was growing frailer. I sat down at her feet, and she pulled my head over to her knee, running her gnarled fingers through my hair. I don’t know exactly when it had happened, but over the past few weeks, I’d grown quite attached to the old woman of the crossroads, and I knew that whether she liked it or not, she had come to feel the same way about me.
The secret Jilo sensed weighing on me was the truth about my mother. I wanted so desperately to tell someone. To try to get a bead on what had happened. Jilo knew my family’s history better than anyone else. I felt certain she could help me understand the circumstances, but I wouldn’t betray my mother—at least not yet. She had made me promise to tell no one, and that definitely included Jilo. Besides, I could tell that the help Jilo was giving me in my attempts to find Maisie was taxing her. So until I knew the lay of the land, I couldn’t risk bringing her in on something that might just be more than she could handle. I offered up a lesser truth. “The man. When the police found him, he had a picture of Peter and his parents on him. Turns out he was some long-lost great-uncle. Peadar was his name. I guess they named Peter after him. Sort of, anyway. The Tierneys had no idea he was even in town.”
Jilo cackled softly. “Well, my girl, if that true, then you in for a good surprise.” I looked up at her. “That long-lost uncle you done barbequed? That picture not the only thing they found on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Police ain’t tellin’ nobody yet, but that old man, he had a damn fortune in jewels and coins sewed up in the linin’ of his coat. Unless they prove it stolen, Jilo imagine it end up comin’ to yo’ brand new family, at least what the gov’ment don’ see fit to keep fo’ theyself, that is. The Tierneys, they probably don’t even know ’bout it yet. You know how the police are. They always tryin’ to figure out some motive, never figurin’ that they might be some well-meanin’ girl at the bottom of they troubles.” I tried to glare at her, but she smiled at me warmly. When her eyes looked away from me and up over my shoulder, any kindness faded to concrete.
“Two of my favorite ladies.” A man’s voice came from behind me. I turned quickly to see that Tucker Perry had managed to sneak up on us. Jilo’s hand gave me a gentle but firm push away.
“You best have the rest of my money to go with those sweet words, Perry,” Jilo’s teeth ground together as she spoke. She forced herself up out of her chair and strode toward Tucker, poking him in his chest with her forefinger. She had turned angry in a split second—angry at having been caught in a tender moment, angry at having been seen as anything other than the dark lady of the crossroads.
“You’ve been working spells for him?” I asked in disbelief.
“His money as green as anybody else’s,” she spat over her shoulder at me.
“Oh, Mother and I go a long way back, don’t we?” Tucker asked, stepping around Jilo and coming closer to me. I struggled to stand, and he offered me his hand. I refused, and worked my way up on my own. My center of gravity had changed, and getting around had become a little harder than it normally was. All the same, there was no way I’d let that man taint me with his touch.
Tucker acted as if he hadn’t noticed my refusal. “And now, the two of us have a long and mutually beneficial arrangement to look forward to as well.” I said nothing. I stared at him blankly, determined not to give him any satisfaction. “Thanks to your fiancé,” he continued. “I am sure we will have many opportunities to meet up,” he said and winked at me. “You sure are looking good, Mercy. I like you with a few curves.” I was just about to lay into him but then he turned back to Jilo. He pulled out an envelope stuffed fat with bills and held it out to her.
Jilo snatched it from him. “Pleasure doin’ business with you, Perry. Now get the hell out of here.”
He smiled widely at the two of us. “Yes, a pleasure as always, Mother.” He took his time making an exit, stopping once to examine one of the few remaining headstones.
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“They say this cemetery full, but I’d gladly help free up a spot fo’ that one,” Jilo said, her expression as sunny as ever I’d seen it. Something about imagining the death of those who annoyed her brought out her best qualities.
“Why are you doing any kind of business for him anyway?”
“Like I done say, his money good even if he worthless hisself.”
“But what,” I emphasized the word, “are you doing for him?”
“Don’t you pay that no nevermind. Ain’t nothin’ to do with you.”
I kept my eyes glued on Tucker as he meandered out of the cemetery. “I don’t like it. I don’t like that you’re doing spells for him. I don’t like that Peter’s doing business with him. Don’t pretend you didn’t already know that,” I said, pointing at her.
“Jilo ain’t pretending nothing,” she said, “so you better get that there finger out of her face.”
“I’d hoped to have seen the last of him when Ellen cut him out of her life.”
Jilo looked at me, her expression inscrutable. “So you think Ellen has kicked him out of her bed?”
“Yes, she’s done with him,” I replied.
“Well they is done, and then they is done,” Jilo said. “And you can take what you like and don’t like and put it in yo’ hope chest, ’cause Jilo, she don’t care. She do business with who the hell ever she like.” Right on cue, Tucker circled by in his convertible, honking his horn and waving. Ellen sat by his side. She raised a hand too, but her greeting was halfhearted at best. She lowered her head and turned toward Tucker, probably reading him the riot act. She hadn’t wanted me to know she was spending time with him. Jilo let out one more cackle. “Now ain’t you sorry you made Jilo promise not to kill anyone?”
SEVEN
“Ellen is out with Tucker,” I said, suddenly feeling as if I were tattling on her. I stood in the doorway of our library, remembering a moment from childhood when I had complained to Iris about my sister.
“Yes, I know,” Iris said, looking up from the mahogany writing table where my grandfather’s old journals and files were spread out before her. She no longer wore her long blonde hair in a chignon as she had while her husband, Connor, was alive. Now it hung loose, falling just below her shoulders. She wore very little makeup, which she didn’t need, and had on black yoga pants and a pink hoodie—my pink hoodie, I realized. “I had hoped that she would make a clean break with him,” she said, “but there’s not much I can do about it. God knows I don’t have much room to criticize her taste in men.” Iris had been putting her best foot forward, but she still mourned her husband, or at least the Connor she had thought she knew. There hadn’t been enough time for either of us to process the fact that he’d plotted to kill me. I wasn’t sure there was enough time in creation for me to process it. Iris mourned a double death: Connor’s physical demise and the loss of the false image of him she’d held. Still, unlike Ellen, who clung to her married name, “Weber,” Iris had wasted no time dropping “Flynn” and returning to her maiden name.
I went to her and wrapped my arm around her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
She sighed. “I’m digging through your granddad’s notes, trying to see what he can tell us about the situation at Old Candler.” My first experience with having the power of a true witch, when I had been allowed to borrow Uncle Oliver’s magic, had led me to the old hospital. That was when I had become aware of the spirits that were trapped there by my grandfather’s spell. I guess Granddad counted them as collateral damage in his war to protect the children of Savannah.
After the old hospital closed, children began disappearing in the night. My grandfather tracked the source of these disappearances down to Old Candler, and after weaving a protective barrier around the building, sort of a miniaturized model of the line itself, he’d walked away, not realizing that he had built a pressure cooker with no safety valve. Jilo had alerted me to the need to open a tiny hole in the spell, as too much pressure had built up inside the place. She had intended to tap into it, channeling the energy that escaped to replace her then-waning power.
Jilo had agreed to abandon this plan after I gave her enough of my own power to keep her going for another decade or so. If the old hospital had remained as empty and unused as it had been for decades, my family and I would have had plenty of time to work out the logistics of how to free the human spirits trapped there without letting loose whatever dark forces had been responsible for taking the children. The building’s sudden and expedited transformation into a law school was forcing our hand and making us act more quickly than we would have liked.
“Found anything?”
“As a matter of fact I have, but I keep misplacing things just as quickly as I find them. I swear, either these papers have a mind of their own, or I am going soft in the head.” Iris glanced down at a stack of files; her head tilted to the side and she pursed her lips. She appeared surprised by what she saw there, but then casually moved the files off to the side and began riffling thoughtfully through the other papers neatly displayed on the desk’s surface. A foreign word—Lebensborn—had been written on the top file of the stack she’d pushed aside. I didn’t speak a word of German, but I recognized it. Lebensborn was the Nazi breeding program that had aimed to increase the birthrate of their favorite flavor of Aryan. When they hadn’t been able to breed blue-eyed babies quickly enough to feed the Nazi machine, they’d started kidnapping them from neighboring countries.
I reached for the file. “Why would Granddad have a file on Lebensborn?”
“He had a taste for what he considered the oddities of history. You might enjoy looking through his papers when you have time.” She took the file from my hand and put it back where it had been on the stack. “Just please keep them in order if you do.”
“Did he ever mention Mama in his writings?” I watched her closely for a reaction, but rather than betraying any kind of shock, her face relaxed upon hearing my question.
“Of course he did. He mentions all of us, but his journals aren’t like personal diaries. They’re filled with history, ponderings, and his theories about magical processes. All the same, his personal life crept into his writings from time to time. Is there something in particular you were wondering about?”
“No. Just curious.”
She looked at me, and her lips pinched together, causing lines to form around them. If she knew my mother was alive, her face did not betray her. I saw only a well-worn sorrow there. “Here,” she said, handing me a journal bound in marbleized paper. “This is where he wrote about what he found at Old Candler.”
My eyes scanned down the page, taking in bits and pieces of the meticulous script that covered it. “Jilo was wrong in one sense,” Iris said. “She assumed that a collection of minor demons, perhaps even common boo hags, were behind the unpleasantness.” Iris seemed to remember my own unpleasant encounter with a “common” boo hag as soon as the words slipped off her tongue, but it was too late to swallow them. She took the tack of moving on quickly. “But it wasn’t. It was one single entity. A demon called Barron.”
“So this Barron is what Granddad trapped at Candler?”
“It’s all here,” Iris said, taking the journal from me and flipping a few pages, “in your grandfather’s journal. He did a lot of research into this beast before he confronted it. The demon we’re dealing with has quite a pedigree. He was brought to the New World by a slave trader—well, actually, in a slave trader. That’s one superstition with a grain of truth to it. Demons can’t cross running water on their own.”
“Good to know,” I said, meaning it sincerely. “But how did he—it—manage to get into our world in the first place? Isn’t the line supposed to protect us from creatures like him?”
“He was summoned. The line is like a net in more ways than one,” Iris continued. “It protects us from the most intense evil. But if a practitioner of magic—and
note that I am not saying a witch—is powerful and determined enough, he can pry open a hole big enough to bring a smaller, less powerful force over the border. Barron was smuggled into our world by Gilles de Rais, an associate of Joan of Arc.”
I can describe what I knew about de Rais in a string of words: aristocrat, war hero, squanderer of one of the greatest financial fortunes of his era, pedophile, and serial killer. I shuddered at the thought of the scores of children he had slaughtered to feed his twisted desires; it was no shock that he’d seek to align himself with a demon. “If Barron was small enough to slip past the line, he should be easy to handle, though, no?”
“Please remember, when we speak of this demon as being small, it doesn’t mean that he’ll be easily managed or dispatched. It means that while he’s a murderer and defiler, he isn’t necessarily capable of ending the world as we know it. Barron’s power has grown during his time in our world. Our goal is to return him to where he originated, but we will not find it easy to send him anywhere he doesn’t want to go. I’m beginning to see why Dad settled for containment versus expulsion. His research led him to the conclusion that it would require the sacrifice of an innocent to even get Barron to appear for the banishing spell.” My hand slid protectively over my stomach. “Precisely,” Iris said.
She returned the journal to the table and went to sit in one of the high wingback chairs. “Enough about this demon for now. How are you doing?” Her body language was textbook perfect. She leaned back comfortably, placed her arms on the chair so that her upper body remained open and her shoulders relaxed. She tilted her head slightly to the right and focused on me. Whether her posture was contrived or sincere, she was showing that she was there for me, present, listening, nonjudgmental.
