by Horn, J. D.
“Deal,” he said. “But no one is going to call you ‘Miss Taylor’ for much longer, huh? Claire told me,” he said in response to my unasked question. “When’s the wedding?”
“Soon. Why, you angling for an invitation?”
“I’d be honored,” he said and looked over at Oliver. “I assume your uncle will give you away.”
“Yes, and someday I hope to return the favor.” Cook—Adam—laughed. Disloyal or not, it seemed like the right time to do a little meddling. “So, how much longer are you going to punish him? It’s obvious you still have feelings for each other.”
“Ah, Mercy. If it were only that simple. I’m not punishing him . . .”
“No?”
“No. The world isn’t as simple as you seem to think it is. I’m a policeman, a detective . . .”
“Oh, so you aren’t vindictive, just a coward.”
He stepped back and his eyes widened, filling with fire. He teetered only a thumb’s breadth away from telling me off, then his shoulders slackened and a grin returned to his face. “Damn, you Taylors sure know how to push my buttons.”
“You got such big ones, and they are so darned shiny,” I said.
He took a few more sips of his beer and looked around. We both watched as Oliver grabbed Iris and spun her around the room, expertly landing her into the arms of a dark, much younger stranger. “I’m not a coward, Mercy, but folks around here, hell, folks in this room even, if they knew about me . . .”
“They’d what?” I said and slugged my fist into the rock that was his stomach. “Try to beat you up and take your milk money?”
“They’d lose respect for me. I’ve worked my entire life to become somebody in this town. To use my life as an example for others.”
I had no desire to argue that point. “You’re right. Some will lose respect for you. They’ll call you names. Laugh behind your back. I guess you aren’t a big enough man to handle that, huh?”
“That isn’t fair,” he said. His lips tightened, and he surveyed the room. I watched as he looked around the bar, examining every face, trying to decide how each would react to the gossip.
“No, I guess I’m not being fair. I don’t really understand what you’ve done to get to where you are. I don’t understand what you might have to face or what you might lose. But I do understand one thing.”
“And what is that?” He stopped scanning the crowd and fixed me in his gaze. The tempo of the music fell off a bit. A twin-fiddle waltz brought even some of the shyer folk in the room to their feet, pairing off two by two. It surprised me to see that Iris was still in the arms of her handsome stranger, and by the look on his face, he had no intention of letting go. Oliver had gone behind the bar to take over for Peter, and he was helping Colin fill pints and distribute shots of Jameson.
“That no matter how much he protests to the contrary, Oliver will spend the rest of his life waiting for you unless you do something about it.”
“So what do you propose I do?”
“Make up your mind. Either he’s worth the risk you’ll have to take or he isn’t. If he isn’t, tell him that, and make it clear so that he’ll finally move on. For real.”
“And if he is?”
“I think you can figure that out on your own.”
“That I can,” he said, and then drained the rest of his beer. “You’ll excuse me.”
“Of course.” I watched him as he weaved his way through the dancers and approached the bar. Oliver reached out to take Adam’s glass, but the detective shook his head and took Oliver’s hand. I had never seen my uncle look so completely shocked. His face went white and then flushed red, the goofiest smile possible growing on his face as Adam led him around the bar and took him into his arms. A hush descended on the guests as Adam started to move, but the music grew in enthusiasm if not pace as the two began waltzing.
From behind me I heard a loud snort, and then, “Well would you look at that.” Phil Jones, one of the hard-assed guys from the dock, started laughing so hard that he spilled his beer. I turned, ready to pounce and claw his eyes out. “Looks like Cook finally grew a pair,” he said, shaking the spilled beer off his hand.
“About time,” his buddy answered. “Listen, I got an early morning tomorrow. Do me a favor and say good-bye to Colin and Claire for me, okay?”
“Sure thing,” the other dockworker said. “Take it easy.” Noticing that I was watching them, he smiled and gave a quick wave before tottering off to replace his spilled drink.
Just goes to show, you never know, I thought, kicking off my shoes and wishing that Peter would put down his guitar and ask me to dance. As I watched him play, I did my best to will it to happen, without actually “willing” it to happen—I did have to take care with my newfound powers. That was when I felt someone’s stare on the nape of my neck. It settled there, burning me with its intensity. I turned to face Emmet, his dark glare pinning me, cutting me off from the rest of the crowd.
Without changing his expression, he approached me and held out his hand. “I’ve actually never danced before, but one of my makers teaches ballroom. Will you join me?”
“No,” I said, a tinge of regret coloring my refusal. I wanted to dance, but not with Emmet. It would be unfair to him, and without a doubt, Peter would see it as a betrayal. Besides, I knew Claire would not be happy to see him here, considering how close she’d come to punching him the last time he visited the bar. The waltz ended, and both the pace and the volume of the music jumped way up as the older folk returned to their seats or the bar.
“May I get you something to drink, then?”
“Listen, Emmet,” I shouted over the music, “it’s really nice of you to offer, and very sweet that you would come out tonight, but . . .”
“A little water, then?” He tilted his head and smiled. Any other woman in the place would have gladly been his in exchange for that smile.
A little flame lit up in me. I could use the water. “All right. Yes, thank you.”
Emmet managed to get himself served quickly, probably because he stood head and shoulders over the other patrons. I looked away and focused on the bandstand, on Peter, but from the corner of my eye, I saw Claire heading straight for Emmet from the kitchen. I couldn’t make out what she said to him over the din, but it didn’t take any magic powers to sense her agitation. She knocked the glass from his grip with the back of her hand, but he quickly reached out and caught it, snapping it up with the speed of a cat. I sighed. It looked like I’d have to put my shoes back on.
By the time I’d managed the task, Claire had guided Emmet to the door, following him out of the bar. I forced my way through the crush. “Pardon. Excuse me,” I called, bumping into people, knowing the band was playing too loudly for them to hear my apologies, but making them all the same. I opened the door, surprised to see that Claire had already led Emmet nearly a block away, the two of them too caught up in their conversation to notice my presence.
It had gone dark while we were inside the bar, and I trod carefully as I wobbled my way toward them. Even though Claire was whispering, her words became steadily clearer. “I am warning you.” Claire punctuated each word with a fisted blow to Emmet’s chest. “You stay away. I know who you are. I know what you are.” Emmet’s face remained inscrutable, even though Claire had cornered him under a streetlight. “When I gave my son over to the care of your people, I was promised that he’d have a good, long, healthy life. That I’d get to see him again before I died. And you sent him back a dried-up husk. You murdered him.” Her words came out in a hiss. “But you had better listen up, ’cause I will not tell you again. You aren’t getting Peter, and you sure as hell are not laying a hand on my grandbaby. I will see you and all your kind in hell first.” Emmet stayed silent, undoubtedly as much out of his laconic nature as his apparent confusion. He clearly had no idea what Claire was talking about. His silence infuriated
her. She reached up and brought her nails to his cheek, clawing out five angry red gouges.
“Claire,” I said, coming up and pulling her hand away before she could strike him again. “What are you doing?”
“Stay where you are, Mercy. You don’t understand what’s going on here. You don’t know what this . . .” She hesitated and then settled on the word: “ ‘Man’ is capable of.”
“I assure you, I’d never harm you or your family,” Emmet said, his hand touching his bloodied cheek. “I’d certainly never hurt Mercy.” He drew back his hand, looking at the blood on it like it was a curiosity. Pain, I realized, was a novel experience to him. He was a babe in the woods. In that moment, I felt responsible for him.
“Shut your mouth, you dark devil,” Claire sneered.
“Let me take you back to the bar,” I said, pulling her quivering body to me.
“Stay away from him, Mercy,” she said, her expression akin to that of a cornered and wounded animal.
“All right,” I said. My eyes met Emmet’s. He shook his head to indicate that he had no idea what was wrong with Claire, and I gave him a pointed nod. He understood the meaning: Make yourself scarce. “He’s leaving, and we should go back inside. We’ll get Colin and Peter, and we can talk all about—”
“No. Peter mustn’t know. You can’t tell him.”
“I won’t. I won’t say a word,” I said, mentally crossing my fingers. “We’ll get you inside, and I’ll tell Colin to take you upstairs until you feel better.”
Claire managed to pull herself together. “I’m sorry. I know I must look like a mad woman to you, but you have to listen to me. If you love that child in your womb, hear me. That man. Emmet. I know it sounds crazy, but he isn’t a man.”
“What do you think he is?” I asked cautiously. I had no idea what she believed him to be, but it disquieted me to hear her hitting so close to home.
“Just believe me. He’s . . . he’s something else. I’ve known his kind before, and now I know they are full of lies. I know why he came. They want Peter, and worse, I think they want little Colin.”
“No,” I said, trying to calm her. “Emmet is harmless. I don’t know what you think he is, but I assure you that you are wrong.”
“And how can you be so sure?”
“You’re going to have to trust me on this one,” I said, suspecting that learning Emmet had risen to life from a mound of Georgia dirt would push her completely over the edge.
“I love you, Mercy, like my own daughter, I do,” she said, reaching out and grasping my hand. “I’d trust you with my very life, but I am not willing to trust anyone’s judgment, even yours, when it comes to that baby you are carrying. I’m telling you. If I ever see Emmet near you again, I will find a way to kill him or at least make him wish he were dead. You hear me now?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, trying to calm her. I didn’t think it wise to point out to her at just that moment that Emmet was still living with us, and I couldn’t exactly send him away. I’d save that discussion for when she was thinking a bit more rationally. Great—another wrinkle in my already complicated life. Now in addition to finding my emotionally unbalanced sister, uncovering the truth about what had caused my mother to desert me, and, oh, having a baby, I’d have to find a way to protect Emmet from my future mother-in-law. “I do. I hear you. Now let’s get back inside and find Colin, okay?” She nodded and walked back into the bar with me.
THIRTEEN
At the end of the wake, Peter was not fit to drive, and Iris and Oliver had both disappeared. For some reason, Claire’s meltdown around Emmet left me in no mood to use magic as a means of transportation, so I called for a taxi and made my way home like a regular person. When I arrived, the house felt deserted; I sent out a psychic ping to see if Iris had perhaps beaten me home, but it came back empty. No one was around, not even Emmet. I experienced a strange combination of loneliness and elation; I had not found myself alone in the house in forever. I realized that now was my opportunity to charge the atmosphere to see what memories I could make rise to the surface. My goal would not be, as Oliver had suggested, to try to get to the bottom of what my mother had been attempting through Tillandsia. Uncle Oliver meant well, but I really had no idea where I would even start on that. I suspected I could spend a lifetime sifting through the echoes that the house held, trying to find a few needles in a century-and-a-half’s worth of haystack. No, I had one specific event I needed to witness: my own birth. Once I had found my answers about that, everything else would fall into place. I was sure of it.
Even a novice such as myself should be able to shake a few lingering impressions loose, especially since I had such an exact target. I made sure the doors were locked against any nonfamilial intruder, and then I went a step further, charming all entrances so that no one, including family, could come in without my being alerted. It was a sad state of affairs, but I wanted to make sure my mother’s siblings wouldn’t discover what I was up to until I had answers.
I hoped that by holding something that belonged to my mother, I would have an easier time of honing in on the particular energies I needed to tap into. I would use my mother’s locket. That it had until recently been in her possession should be a plus. Tonight had been the first time that I hadn’t worn the locket since she had given it to me. It would have been too noticeable given the neckline of the dress I was wearing. I didn’t want to risk one of my aunts noticing it, or worse, recognizing it. I had left it in my jewelry box, mixed in with the few other pieces I had: the pearls I had received on my eighteenth birthday, the small diamond studs I’d received two years before that, the smaller blue box that held the engagement ring I still couldn’t bring myself to wear regularly—even tonight. I pushed away the emotions that reached from the ring to grab me and extricated my mother’s necklace. Something about touching it caused me to question my earlier optimism. Could there really be any hope of a familial reconciliation? Could separating a mother from her daughters truly be an explainable, leave alone pardonable, act?
I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. I had to keep an open mind. I couldn’t let my fears prejudice me. Still, my previous exhilaration had turned to a heaviness of heart. I put the necklace around my neck and snapped the lid of the jewelry box closed.
Iris had taken over my mother’s room, the room where Maisie and I were born, as a painting studio. She said she liked the golden late afternoon light that filtered through its windows, but she’d once confessed that being in this space comforted her and made her feel closer to the dear little sister she had lost too soon. I wanted to cry as I remembered how sincere she had sounded when she shared this with me. I pushed the sadness away and took a good look at the space.
My mother’s lesser belongings had long since been given to charity, her more personal and precious items boxed up and stored in the attic for the day when Maisie and I chose how to divvy them up. But Iris had not erased my mother from the room. Far from it. A large, and now I knew firsthand, exquisitely accurate portrait of my mother dominated the room’s southern wall. I didn’t come in here often, but every time I did, I walked away feeling somehow touched by my mother’s presence.
A large easel stood in the center of the room. It held a canvas, but the canvas had been covered with a tarp. I decided to respect my aunt’s privacy. Now I wished I hadn’t so stubbornly refused taking pointers from Ellen. I really didn’t know how to proceed.
Emmet had used a combination of surprise and passion to surface the memory he had helped bring to life. I needed to get in touch with a powerful emotion, but I worried that my confused feelings about my mother’s return might color my perceptions. So nothing about my mother. Probably better to steer clear of anything about my aunts too. My mind floated over my recent history with Maisie. Too fresh. Too painful. These emotions might bulldoze over any more subtle energies.
My feet were tired. I kicked off my shoes and
took a seat in an awkwardly placed armchair. For some reason, Iris had left it turned at an angle, away from the portrait of my mother, away from the easel. The only thing it faced was a bit of blank wall. A sense of familiar resentment started to rise up in me as I reflected on Ginny and her manipulations. I remembered how Ginny made me wait in the entrance hall of her house, staring at nothing but a blank wall for hours. I had dealt with it by making up stories for my own entertainment. Stories that would later serve as the backbone of my Liar’s Tour. The hall and the chair I had been forced to sit in were now both gone, burned away to nothing by the same fire that had consumed Connor. Resentment flared into anger, and then I heard voices behind me.
I whirled about quickly. There was no image, only a murmuring. I strained my ears to try to make out what was being said, but the voices were so faint, seeming to come from worlds away. And then they stopped altogether. I rose and crossed cautiously to the center of the room. Again, I could make out the faint but distorted sound of feminine voices. Was that a cry of pain? Desperation? I recognized Ellen’s voice and could almost make out her words. I caught an image of her and Iris huddled over my mother, but the vision looked like a poorly preserved kinescope being projected onto the room’s current reality. The image froze and then stretched like a rubber band, wrapping around and going through itself, reaching up and feeding into the portrait of my mother. I realized that any emotional imprint made on the day of my birth had long ago been channeled into the painting.
I tried to focus, to tune into the faint energies. I grasped the painting’s frame, pressed my hands against the lacquered oils. I could feel small eruptions of energy flare off the painting, but what I had come for was locked away—the energy that had been channeled into the work had been permanently transformed. I took my hands off the painting and put them over my face. A sob formed in my breast, but I stifled it. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to know the truth.
