THIRTY-THREE
Dawn broke over Savannah, scraping the night sky bloody before letting the sun rise over the horizon. I hadn’t slept at all; each time I tried to close my eyes, another horror was projected on my inner lids. I’d spent most of the night on the side porch, staring east and hoping that by the time morning arrived, I would know how to fix things. Daylight had come, but I had grown no wiser.
“Stand a little company?” Ellen’s voice reached out to me. I nodded, grateful to see her up, grateful that she still wanted to speak with me. She came out and joined me on the porch swing. Her face had been scrubbed clean of makeup, and her hair hung damp and unstyled. She wore one of Oliver’s terrycloth robes rather than one of her own silk wraps. We sat there for a few moments, the only sound that of the glider rocking easily beneath us. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“I am so sorry.”
“Me too.” She raised her face to meet the coming light, to drink it in. “Right here, right now, sitting here with you, I keep thinking it must have been a nightmare. It wasn’t though, was it?”
“No. It happened.” I leaned into her, and she placed her head on my shoulder.
“Was that really her? Was that really my mother?” I felt a sudden burst of hope that this Emily was only an imposter. My childhood dream turned on its head, and I found myself hoping, praying that my true mother had died at my birth. That she had been resting peacefully in Bonaventure for the last two decades.
“I’m afraid so,” Ellen said, and then examined her arms in the morning light. The needle tracks had disappeared, and the bruises had already begun to fade.
“I hate her,” I said.
“To tell you the truth, I really hate the bitch too. Sisters, huh?”
“Yeah, sisters.” I wrapped my arm around hers, careful not to aggravate the bruised tissue. We clasped hands.
“Iris and Oliver are inside. We need to talk before the families start their inquiry.”
“What? Get our stories straight before the long arm of the magical law gets to us?”
“Yes. Precisely that. They can bind us, you know. Iris, Oliver, and me, if they think we have done anything to put the line at risk. They can take away our magic.”
“And what about me? If anyone did anything to hurt the line, it was me.”
Ellen stood and took the quilt from me. She started to fold it. “You are an anchor. They can’t remove you from the line without the risk of bringing the line down, but they could erase your mind. Wipe you clean. Leave your body in place until you expire and the line chooses a new anchor.”
“They could try,” Iris’s voice answered, a cold determination behind her words, “but I will see every last one of them dead and burning in hell first.”
“I second that notion,” Oliver said. “Come on in. I’ve made coffee.”
We followed him into the kitchen. The largest of Ellen’s rose quartz crystals glowed at the center of the table. Next to it sat an old scrapbook or photo album. I suspected that Emily’s return had prompted a search through the old photos. Had Iris spent the night going through them, looking at the old snapshots trying to see if there was something about Emily they had missed? Or had Oliver been trying to figure out whether a different action on his part might have saved his big sister?
Any perceived mistakes of the distant past seemed much less important to me than the ones I’d made myself last night. “How is Peter?” I asked.
“Smarting. That’s how he is,” Oliver said, pouring three mugs of coffee and reaching for an herbal tea bag for me. “I stayed with him until he passed out. He’s probably gonna wake up with a hangover from too much whiskey and skinned knuckles from punching the wall, but he’ll be okay. You two will recover from this. You have a whole lot more working for you than against you.” I wished I could believe that was true. “For now, we need to focus on the matter at hand. There is no doubt that the other anchors felt Emily’s efforts to skirt the line with her Babel spell.”
“How did she do it? How did she catch me up in her spell? I’m an anchor now. I thought witches couldn’t charm me.”
“Witches can’t charm you with the power of the line,” Iris said as she took the seat on my right. “But the magic Emily is channeling comes from a place of pure evil.” I thought of the locket she had placed around my neck. How it had clouded my mind, perverted my judgment. Made me more willing to believe the worst about those who truly loved me.
Oliver gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “The families will be sending representatives to look into what happened here last night. Maybe you could ask the Sandman if he can pick up any rumblings as to whom they are sending and when.”
“He’s gone. Emmet’s gone,” I said. “I sent him away last night.”
“Well, Gingersnap, you did the right thing, but you picked the wrong time to do it.”
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”
“We all are,” Ellen said and sighed. “I’ve got to tell you though. If the worst we had to face was losing our powers, I think I could accept that.”
“Yeah, well, speak for yourself, sis. Besides, if the families judge against us, they won’t satisfy themselves with stripping the three of us of our powers. They’ll want to make an example of Mercy.”
“Maybe I deserve to be made an example of.”
“Bullshit.” I had never in my entire life heard a word of profanity come out of Iris. It had the effect of a lightning bolt shooting through the room. Even Oliver kept his trap shut. “Bullshit,” she said again, this time with less vehemence, but still with all the fire. “The families can send whomever they want. Ask any questions they want. We have done nothing wrong.”
“We have disobeyed . . .” Ellen began.
“Whom exactly? Not the line. I feel it.” Her right hand pounded on her chest. “I feel it in here. The line is on our side. It will protect us.”
“I wish I could be as sure as you are,” Oliver said. “They have been looking for an excuse to bring us down ever since the line chose the first Taylor as an anchor. The Taylors take too many liberties. The Taylors push their own agendas. The Taylors aren’t humble enough.”
“Well, that last bit is probably true,” I said.
“And so what if it is? We let our hearts rule our heads. We like to do things big. We are Celts for goodness sake.”
“I agree with Iris.” Ellen took a sip of her coffee. “The line chose Mercy. It cut through Ginny’s deception. We tried to invest its power in Maisie, and it stood up to us. It wanted Mercy, and I have to believe it wanted you for a reason. I say we call their bluff. Tell them exactly what has been going on and let the chips fall where they may.”
“That sounds great in theory, but Mercy has a lot more to lose than any of us, right, Gingersnap?”
Iris nodded in agreement. “Yes, she does,” she answered for me. “That’s why it’s time for us to come clean with her”—she looked at me—“with you. It’s time for us to share everything we know, and even make a few conjectures, because we don’t know everything. I do believe the line chose you for a reason, so it’s time for you to learn exactly who you are.”
She reached out for the album, but Ellen stayed her hand. “I should do this. He was my husband. I’m responsible for bringing him into the family.” Iris squeezed her sister’s hand and let Ellen take control of the book. Ellen slid it over to me, but didn’t take her hand off it. “This belonged to Erik. To your father,” she said. “He always told me that he kept it as a reminder of the evil he’d managed to escape. He led me to believe that it served as a moral touchstone, something to keep him on the right side of humanity. I now believe he thought of it as more of a brag book. A place he could turn when he needed strength to carry out the mission he’d come to complete.”
“Mission?” I asked. It sounded like such a tactical term. Military.
“He had come to fulfill the prophecy that said a child born to a union of our bloodlines would reunite the thirteen families and bring down the line. Honestly, I had never heard of the prediction before we married.”
“I had,” Iris said, “but I thought the story was one of the many fantasies we witches have developed around the line. I said nothing to Ellen. I didn’t want to ruin her happiness. I regret that now. She should have gone into her marriage with her eyes wide open.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it. Knowing wouldn’t have changed a single thing. I believed in Erik. I loved him, even after I found these clippings.” She took her hand off the scrapbook. “Go ahead.”
A shiver of magical energy flooded my fingers as they touched the cover. I could tell that at one time this book had been enchanted to hide what was within it. The magic had long since faded to a mere spark, but I sensed that the spark had belonged to my father. I wanted to stop for a moment. To let myself experience his magic, remembering him the way I did before I opened the cover and had all my remaining illusions shattered. I closed my eyes and felt him, his pride and sense of purpose, and then I opened my eyes and turned the cover.
A photo had been removed from the first page. “That was the picture of your great-grandmother I gave you,” Ellen said. “I don’t know what possessed me to do that. I guess I did it out of relief that I no longer had to hide that Erik was your father. I wanted us to be relieved from all our secrets.”
She was getting her wish today. Below the place where the rectangular photo had been, my father had written my great-grandmother’s name: Maria Orsic. “Who was she?”
“She was not a witch, but she was known as a psychic medium. There are a lot of non-witches who have the sight.”
“Like Claire,” I said, without meaning to say it aloud.
“Yes. I’ve sensed that about her. Maria was different from most psychics though, in that her psyche had somehow developed the capability to travel outside the line’s protection. Out there, where the demons still wait. They began to court her, for lack of a better term. They gave her insights, glimpses of history—hell, they even gave her diagrams for a flying saucer. They convinced her that they were our loving brothers. Aliens from Aldebaran. She, in return, became their evangelist.”
“They deceived her?”
“They played into her need to feel special and superior. It’s one of mankind’s greatest weaknesses—the need to feel superior to others.”
“But witches kind of feel that way, don’t we?”
“Not the witches in this family,” Oliver said. “And yes, by that, I mean the four of us sitting here. We may be proud of who we are, proud of our skill with magic, proud of our heritage, but we really don’t think that we are somehow innately superior.”
“And that is coming from our selfish peacock of a bastard brother,” Iris said, a smirk on her lips, but pride showing in her eyes.
“Turn the page,” Ellen said and nodded at the book. I found another photo of Maria, this time sitting in a group of women. Beneath the photo my father’s script recorded their names: Maria, Traute, Sigrun. I gasped as my eyes shot back up to the picture. One of the faces had been burned into my mind long ago . . . I knew her without needing to read her name: Gudrun. Erik had added “die Vril-Gesellschaft” beneath the women’s names. I looked up at Ellen, and her expression of sympathy answered my unspoken question. I knew then that Maria had been the leader in an attempt to bring down the line.
I turned back to the album and flipped the page. The next one held two photos of the man I had come to think of as Careu. In the first, he stood next to an old prop-style plane. I felt my pulse thundering in my neck as the face I recognized fell into its familiar context. The next photo showed him, this great American hero, standing flanked on one side by two admiring women, while a man with adoring eyes looked on from the background. Standing before Careu, on the photograph’s right side, stood a man in the process of handing over a sword. He wore a lighter suit with a white kerchief in his pocket. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He had a double chin and wore his hair slicked back. I knew this man. I recognized him from history books. “That’s Hermann Goering,” I said, poking angrily at his face. “He was one of the Nazi leaders.” I felt ill.
Oliver came and squatted down next to me. “Yeah, Gingersnap, I’m afraid it is.” He put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me in for a kiss on the temple. “Do you need a little break?”
“No. I’ve got to know. How did my great-grandparents meet?”
“They never did,” Ellen said. I looked at her, confused. “Your paternal great-grandparents were both great supporters of eugenics and the goal of building, or as they would have it, rebuilding the master race. Goering and his friends created a special project with this aim. They called it Lebensborn, the ‘source of life.’?” My mind flashed back to the file I’d seen among my Grandfather Taylor’s papers. I realized his interest in the Lebensborn program wasn’t a study in historical curiosities, like Iris had told me. The file contained research on his son-in-law, my father.
“Your great-grandparents,” Ellen continued, “each of them donated their genetic materials to the cause for study and duplication. Technological schematics provided by the Aldebaran brothers provided the know-how for your great-grandfather to engineer a process similar to what we now know as in vitro fertilization. The Nazis sought to create a master race, but the Aldebarans wanted to create a thousand Marias. The doctors in the project planted Maria’s fertilized eggs in the wombs of several of the Lebensborn mothers. Erik’s father, your grandfather, was one of the children born from this process.”
I closed the book. My hands felt soiled from having touched it. I wanted to wash my hands. Wash myself. Wash away the filth of the source from which I’d sprung. Now I understood why Ellen and Iris had hidden the truth from me. Paul and Maisie and I, we were all somehow wrong. “We’re the children of monsters,” I said and pushed the book away.