THIRTY-FOUR
“But that doesn’t mean you are a monster,” Iris said. “I raised you right. You know the difference between good and evil.”
“Maisie didn’t,” I said. For the first time, I wondered if Maisie could be saved. Rescued, sure, but redeemed?
Iris looked me dead in the eye, her lips pressed together in a tight line. She nodded. “All right. I failed your sister. I’m not denying that, but I did not fail you. You are no more like your sister than . . .” She stopped herself.
“Than you are like yours,” I finished for her. I hugged myself, fighting a chill and a sense of self-disgust. My hand felt my stomach. “What am I bringing you into, little guy?”
“I wondered the same thing when I discovered I was pregnant with Paul, and I am going to give you the same answer I gave myself. You are bringing him into a loving family. A flawed family, that’s sure, but one that will cherish him.”
“Emily said that the families brought about the accident that killed Paul. Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t believe it is. I pray that it’s not, but I don’t think we should take any chances. They can never know the truth, sweetheart,” Ellen said. “The families. They can never learn that you and Maisie are Erik’s girls. They have to keep believing that Connor is your father. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do. What I don’t understand is how Emily could have been drawn to this darkness. What happened to her to make her capable of everything she has done?”
“I don’t know,” Iris said. “I have never before let myself confess these thoughts about Emily to anyone, not even myself. Sometimes it seems that a person comes into the world with a missing piece. The piece that makes them human just isn’t there. My intuition has always tried to tell me that my sister was born without that piece, but I always buried my concerns before . . .” She paused. “I almost said ‘before she died.’ I still can’t get pieces to line up right in my mind. But before, as I think of it now, it seemed to me that she was playing a role, playing at being a loving sister, a loving daughter. There never seemed to be any true emotion behind it. It felt more like she mimicked others’ emotions, but never had any of her own. I think she came into this world broken.”
“Do you think she really did love my father?” I asked Ellen.
“At one point, I would have guessed that maybe she did, but not after last night. She couldn’t have loved him, or she would never have hurt his child. She would have never tried to channel her evil brand of magic into you.”
“She didn’t care about me at all . . . I just served her as a means to an end.” I’d given it a lot of thought overnight. “She attacked the line by going after its weakest link. She knew that if she could poison me, she’d be poisoning the line.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Iris said. “First of all, you are not the line’s weakest link. Second, even though the rebel families want to end the line, they are still connected to it, an anchor from each family.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that there were still actually thirteen anchors; I’d only ever heard anyone speak about the ten anchors from the united families. “I am sure they were waiting in the wings, ready to spring into action as soon as the line had been damaged, but if it were just a matter of ‘poisoning’ an anchor, the rebels would more than happily sacrifice one of their own.” She leaned back in her chair, her face tightening. “No, Emily knew this Babel spell she was working wouldn’t bring the old ones into our reality. That spell was about taking you to old gods’ realm. I don’t know why, but for some reason the rebel families need you to break the power of the line.”
“Do you think we caused any real harm to it?” I asked. Even though I was an anchor, all of it was still so new to me. I wasn’t sure how the line normally felt. Besides, the other anchors had ensured that I couldn’t draw on its power. I realized that they were probably controlling me in the same exact way they were controlling the anchors from the rebel families.
“No, sweetheart. It feels like it always has. It’s holding just fine.”
“But the families will know that someone has been tampering with it,” Oliver said. “They will send someone around sooner rather than later to look into what we naughty little Taylors have been up to.”
“Well, before they come, there is something I need to do,” I said. “I have to talk to Peter. I’ve got to try to set things right between us. Now, in case the families don’t want to give me the luxury of a later.”
“Don’t you worry, Gingersnap. We will handle the families together. Right now, you get over to that boy’s house and put him out of his misery.”
“How do I know if he even still wants me?”
“An empty fifth of whiskey and a hole in the drywall told me everything I needed to know on that subject. Go on now.”
I showered and stood before my closet, pawing through all the new maternity outfits my aunts had treated me to. What color is best for apologizing to the man who caught you cheating on him? I settled on the simplest of the dresses, a white sleeveless one with a modest scoop neck and a daisy print around the waist. Nothing screams “I’m not a whore” like embroidered daisies.
Peter’s house was in Sackville. Before my pregnancy, I used to grab my bike and pedal over, but I’d already been forced to bid a temporary adieu to my faithful two-wheeled friend, and my stomach had grown another inch since then. I didn’t want to use my magic. I didn’t want to show up on his doorstep suffering from the more and more familiar sense of disorientation. Instead, I called a taxi.
I spent the ride trying to pull my words together. I couldn’t take the tack that Emmet and I hadn’t truly been together, at least physically. Peter knew better; he knew that I had cheated. In the bright light of day, I did too.
We pulled up in front of the small wood-frame house. Even though Peter only rented the place, he had recently given it a fresh coat of paint, a silvery gray color to offset the pewter shutters and door. The house stood next to a towering live oak that hung over it as if it were trying to keep its companion safe. Peter’s truck stood in the drive. I knew he’d be home today. No way would he ever go to the Tillandsia house again, not after what had happened. I doubted that either of us would ever step foot near there again. I paid the driver and got out. Then I stood there and watched as he pulled away, trying to work up my nerve to climb the steps to the door and knock.
“You gonna stand out there all day, or you coming in?” Peter called from the doorway.
“You sure you want me to?” I asked.
He walked away from the door, but left it open. I climbed the few steps and stuck my head inside. He was sitting in the beat-up easy chair he’d bought at Goodwill the day he signed a lease on this place. I stepped in and closed the door behind me, unable to read his expression because my eyes had not yet adjusted to the somber light in his living room. Almost as if I had asked the question, he reached out and flicked on a table lamp.
Dark circles carried his reddened eyes, and sparks of fiery red whiskers lined his cheeks and chin. He still wore the jeans he’d had on last night, but a different T-shirt. Last night’s shirt lay on the floor, now a bloodied ball of rag. “How’s your wound?”
“I can barely see where she stuck me.” He shifted in his seat. “Ellen does good work.”
I stepped up closer, moving into the circle of light. “Peter, I am so sorry.”
“For the injury?”
“Yes, and for everything else too.”
“Pretty convenient summary you got there.”
“I’m sorry.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry for the wound. But so much more than that. I am sorry for the hurt I’ve caused you. I am sorry I cheated on you.” He looked away from me, tears forming in his eyes. He didn’t even brush them away. “I was trying to get ahold of the magic that Emily had stored up in Tillandsia. I convinced myself that we were just performing magic. That it wasn’t physical. It wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about Emmet. It wasn’t sex.”
“What I walked in on, it looked even more intimate than sex. The two of you seemed to be bonded together.”
My pulse raced as I thought of the union. It had felt exactly like that, and in those few moments before Emily’s evil magic had started to flow between us, it had been wonderful.
I knew if I shared this with Peter, I’d crush him. I’d lose his heart forever. “I’m sorry. I truly am. I’ll admit, not only to you but to myself, that it was an act of intimacy. That I did cheat on you.”
He leaned in toward me, his eyes imploring. “But if you needed sex, if you needed intimacy to do what you wanted with Tillandsia, why wouldn’t you come to me? And why would you want to take magic from that place anyway? I felt it, the second I walked in . . . That kind of magic isn’t right. It isn’t . . .” He paused, as he looked for the word. “Wholesome.”
I went and sat on the footstool before him. I’d answer his second question, and pray that the first went away. I could never explain to him why I’d been afraid to expose him to an unknown magic for fear that he’d discover his own true nature and become lost to me forever. “My family has been lying to you. I’ve been lying to you about Maisie. She isn’t in California.”
“I suspected something was up. Every time I asked one of you about her, I’d get the same exact information, like it had been rehearsed.” He had hit it dead on; it had been. “Where is she?”
“She’s trapped. It’s hard to explain.”
“She was practicing some bad mojo, and it got the best of her, right?”
I nodded. “Close enough. I had hoped I could use the power in Tillandsia to get her out of the trouble she’s gotten herself into.”
“But seriously”—he shook his head in amazement, and then reached up to brush the copper curls from his eyes—“you’re telling me that you and your family, you don’t have enough juju to take care of things?”
“We have been . . . forbidden from doing so by the other families. They could sense it if we used the line’s power to try to rescue Maisie. They could and most certainly would shut us down, maybe even permanently.”
“They’d better not try doing anything to you,” he said, the words almost like a reflex. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and touched his unshaven cheek. He took my hand off his cheek, but he didn’t push it away. He held it in his own. “So you thought you could get your hands on power they couldn’t control. Get the job done yourself.”
“I figured it would be much easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Now it looks like I might have been wrong about that.”
“Is that what you’ve done with me? Figured it would be easier to get forgiveness?”
“No.” I shook my head. “It wasn’t nearly that calculated, at least as far as you are concerned.”
“Why did you come here, Mercy? Is it just a pardon you are looking for? ’Cause I’ll give you that. I don’t understand all this magic, but I do know how much you love Maisie. If it’s just forgiveness you’re looking for, you got it. I understand that whatever you did, you did for your sister.”
“I did come here hoping you’d forgive me, but there’s much more than that.”
“Okay. I’m listening,” he said, still clasping my hand in his.
“I wanted to let you know Emmet’s gone. I’ve sent him away from Savannah.”
“Where to?” His grip tightened a little, and he tilted a bit more toward me.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I can understand if you can’t get past the sight of what you walked in on last night. I want you to know, though, that if you will still have me, I want to be your wife.”
“If I will still have you? If I will still have you?” He pushed out of the chair and knelt beside me, nearly crushing me in his embrace. “Oh, God. I thought I’d lost you.” Our eyes met, and then he kissed me. Any connection I had felt with Emmet was a fantasy; this here, the love I had with Peter, was real. His kiss changed, and the feeling of grateful relief melted under the heat of his growing passion. He stood and pulled me up with him, my flesh molding to the solid contours of his body.
“Wait,” I said, pushing away from him. His brow pinched as hurt and disappointment started to show in his eyes. He let go of me and took a step back. “No.” I reached out and grasped his arm. “I need help with my zipper.” His lips curved into the most delicious bad-boy smile that a good man’s face had ever shown. I turned my back to him, and his thick fingers found the delicate pull, his hands shaking. I shivered as he undid the zipper and slid the dress down. I kicked it out of my way, and he leaned in and placed a kiss on the nape of my neck. I slid off my panties and let them fall to the floor beside me, then reached behind my back and undid my bra, tossing it on the sofa. I turned toward him, standing naked before him. My breasts had grown much larger over the last several weeks, and the look in Peter’s eyes told me how much he appreciated the change. I leaned into him, my skin pressing against his T-shirt. He began kissing me, trying to pull off his own shirt using a single hand. He growled as he gave up and pulled hard at the collar, ripping it clean down the front. Without ever taking his lips from mine, he slid his second ruined shirt to the floor.
I pulled away to examine the place where my mother had stabbed him with her foul iron knife. The wound had closed over and pretty much healed, but it looked like there might always be a nearly crescent-shaped scar. I suspected that the wound would never fade completely since it had been made with iron. It would serve as a constant reminder of how close I’d come to losing him. I leaned forward and kissed the scar. He moaned and pulled me into his arms, his stiffness pressing into me, the difference in our heights such that I felt it against my stomach. He reached down and swept me off the floor, carrying me toward his bedroom. He kicked at the door to open it, and carried me to his bed, the same bed where we had first made love, where we had conceived our child. He must have been thinking about our baby too, because he laid me down as gently as if I were made of porcelain.
I watched as he removed his jeans and boxers. He laid down next to me, not talking, not moving, just looking at me with so much love, so much hunger. I straddled him and took him into me, leaning over and kissing him, his large rough hands encapsulating my own. This was the first time we had touched each other this way since my powers had been returned to me. I looked at his beautiful, strained face through a witch’s eyes, seeing evidence of his otherworldly traits. His eyes changed during his passion, no longer showing the mismatch of blue and green I’d come to love, but glowing silver instead. Pulling my hand from his, I pushed back his hair and saw the point of his ear. I leaned in and gently bit its tip. He groaned. As his passion grew, light began to shine from him, a mild luminescence. No, this was no normal man I had chosen, but I had chosen him all the same. My own pleasure overtook my senses. Everything melded together as my eyes closed. My head leaned backward, and his hand reached out and traced down my neck, my breasts. I shuddered once, twice, as he strained up into me, and then I fell forward into his waiting arms.