The Line (29 page)

“Elementals?” Oliver asked.

“Yes. They didn’t burn me, and they carried me out of the fire. Connor had hurt me. Bad. They healed me.”

“But why would Connor have wanted to hurt you?” Iris asked.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Iris,” I said. “I don’t want you to feel any worse than you already do. I know you’re in pain. But you have to believe me. It was the book he wanted—Maisie’s journal. Ginny shared things with Maisie that she shouldn’t have, and her journal contained the secrets of the line. Connor wasn’t satisfied with the power he had, and he thought he could get more by reading it.” My words tumbled out, not lining up the way they should have, but I knew that my family understood.

“And he knew you’d tell us what he was up to if he let you live,” Oliver finished for me.

“But he helped raise you,” Iris said, struggling. The look of resignation on her face told me that she didn’t doubt me. She was just shocked that she could have been so blind to Connor’s true nature for so long. “He was a father to you.”

“No, Iris,” I said, a sense of calm descending over me, courtesy of Oliver no doubt. “He
was
my father. He told me so himself.”

Iris exchanged a quick look with Ellen. They knew the truth too. The shock on Oliver’s face could not be counterfeit. “Oh, come on!” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Ellen sighed and then said, “They’re both gone now, no reason to hide the truth anymore.”

“Then tell her,” Iris responded, her voice resigned. “I can’t find the words, not after everything that happened tonight.”

Ellen reached over and took my hand. “Connor was not your father,” she said softly, and I felt a wave of cool relief wash over me. “But he thought he was. We always let him believe it.”

“Why?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Because you girls needed a father. And I wanted to hold onto my husband,” Iris said. “I let him believe he was your dad so that he’d stick around and help raise you…but I also wanted to give him a reason to stay.”

Sharp words began to line up on my tongue, but Ellen spoke before I could speak them. “But there’s another reason. A more important reason,” she said. She and Iris locked eyes again before she continued.

“We were afraid of what Ginny might do if she knew the truth about you two,” she said. “The truth about your parentage.”

She hesitated for a moment too long. “Spit it out,” Oliver commanded, his face flushed and covered with worry lines I’d never seen before.

“I told you, Mercy,” she began. “I told you how Ginny prevented me from saving Paul, because of the prophecy that foretold that the bloodlines that gave birth to him would give rise to a great witch who would reunite all thirteen families.”

“Yes, and you said that Ginny was dead set against that reunion,” I said.

“We had Paul before Ginny discovered the prophecy. Afterward, she prevented us from having any more children. Just as she limited my healing powers, she tampered with my ability to conceive another child. She didn’t let me save Paul because she didn’t want him to grow up and father children. I honestly think she might have killed him outright herself if the witch in the prophecy hadn’t been female.”

“Maisie,” I said, the pieces coming together.

“I knew that she was Erik’s girl the second I laid hands on her. That you both were,” Iris said. I wondered why it had never occurred to me that her psychometric powers would have told her who our father was, even if my mother hadn’t.

“Yes,” Ellen said. “My husband Erik fathered you and Maisie. We couldn’t let Ginny find out. We just couldn’t.”

“My God, you must hate us,” I said in amazement.

“Oh, no, my darling girl,” Ellen said, beaming at me with nothing but love in her eyes. Her expression was tender as she said, “I could never hate you. You are the daughters Ginny denied me.”

“And the daughters I could never have,” Iris added, approaching us almost shyly. She and Ellen joined together and took me into their arms.

“We forgave your mother years ago,” Ellen said. “She was a weak and willful woman. She went after both of our husbands, if only to show us she could take them away. But in the end, she gave us you and Maisie.” It hurt me terribly to realize again all the harm my mother had done, and I promised myself then and there that I would never be like her.

“And now,” Iris said, her voice catching, “you girls are all I have left.” She hesistated a moment and looked at me through eyes that were filled with tears. “I am sorry Connor died the way he did.” The wind began to creep up around her again, lifting the three of us who’d embraced an inch or so off the ground. “Because I wish I could have killed the son of a bitch myself.”

She let go of Ellen and me, and we landed lightly on our feet. She held up her hand, and a piece of paper flitted into it from the desk. Letters and lines began to fill the once empty page, and as soon as it was full, she turned it to face us. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized Connor’s sprawling signature at the bottom. Iris had written him a suicide note.

“Oliver,” Iris said, “you should call Detective Cook. I just found a letter from Connor. He said he couldn’t live a moment longer with the guilt of what he did to Ginny.”

“And now we need to deal with Wren,” Ellen said, the resolve in her voice a sure sign that all of the fondness she’d felt for the charming illusion had faded forever.

“Let’s slow down a bit and unwind all of this first,” Emmet said, appearing from nowhere. “Your family always falls victim to its passions. You act on the spur of the moment without thinking.”

Without thinking, I crossed over and slapped the smug look right off his face. “You show up when you think it’s time to criticize, but where the hell were you when I needed you?” All nine parts of him were taken aback. “Shut up!” I warned him when he started to move his lips again.

Iris’s face was set as hard as concrete. “Call Cook,” she repeated to Oliver.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I was sent upstairs to wash off the smell of smoke before the police could arrive. Emmet stood guard for me outside the bathroom door in case Wren showed up. I blow-dried my hair so that Cook wouldn’t have any reason to notice that I’d been busy washing away what he would have deemed as evidence. While I showered, Oliver and Ellen searched the house and garden, but neither of them could pick up an impression of Wren. He had gone into hiding.

It was a little after midnight when Detective Cook left our house, Connor’s suicide note carefully preserved in a plastic evidence bag. The tears Iris had shed before the detective were real, although she was grieving the death of her good impression of Connor rather than the man himself. When Cook passed me on his way out, his eyes locked with mine, and his expression shifted in a blink from an “I told you so” to an “I’m sorry for your loss” without ever pressing the clutch.

With Cook gone, it was time to deal with Wren. Iris, Oliver, Ellen, and I gathered in the library, waiting wordlessly for Emmet to corner Wren and bring him to us. It was odd because until tonight I had never suspected that Wren was capable of existing apart from our family. It had never occurred to me that he could leave our house and go out into the world at large.

Ellen sat next to Iris and wrapped her arm around her elder sister’s shoulders. Iris stared straight ahead, her expression revealing her determination to be strong no matter what. Ellen’s face was a jumble of emotions: guilt, sadness, anger, and then more guilt.

Oliver broke the silence. “Mercy, honey, I know it has been one hell of a night,” he said, “but is there any chance that you remember anything about the dissolution spell? It’s just that I’m not sure what we should do. Wren came from my six-year-old psyche. I can barely even remember being six, let alone what I was feeling when he was created.”

“And even if you could,” Ellen said. “You’d never be able to re-create it.”

“Maybe we could just agree to tune him out, starve him off slowly,” Iris proposed, and I knew she was just trying to protect Ellen from the pain of being part of his dissolution.

Ellen understood her motives as well as I did. “No,” she said. “We have to deal with it tonight. We can’t allow him to carry on as he has been. Besides, we’re not even sure that he’s been getting his energy from us.”

“But I thought it was you,” I said, shocked. “I thought you were feeding him the energy.”

“No,” Ellen said. “I’ve been expecting him to fade away for years. Listen, I know…” She paused and swallowed hard. “I know I’ve been using Wren as a crutch to help me deal with Paul’s death. But he was never a substitute; no one could replace my boy.”

“Regardless of where he’s been getting his energy, we need to put him down,” Oliver said. “Can you remember anything at all?” he asked me.

Suddenly I remembered that I hadn’t returned the spell to Connor. I’d tucked it into the pocket of my shorts, the ones I’d just tossed into the hamper. “I have it!” I said. “Connor gave me the spell, and I put it in my pocket. It must still be in there.”

I ran to the upstairs bathroom and riffled through the hamper, pulling out the smoky smelling clothes I had been wearing at Ginny’s. I shoved my hand into the right pocket—nothing—then the left. There it was. Heaving a sigh of relief, I pulled the paper out, and even though it smelled as badly of smoke as my clothing did, the paper unfolded itself with a single shake of the hand, the creases disappearing instantly. Now that I no longer had a witch’s vision, it looked like an empty page, but I knew that my aunts and uncle would be able to read it. Together they could use it to send Wren back into the ether where he’d been formed.

I stepped out of the bathroom and into the hall, surprised to see the pool-like aquamarine light from Jilo’s secret world spilling out onto the walls. The door to the linen closet, the room Jilo had connected with her own chamber, stood wide open, and I walked toward it, keeping my steps as silent as the creaking old floorboards would allow me. I crept up to the door and peeked around it. Jilo sat there on her throne in her haint blue room, her eyes filled with terror. A knife was pressed to her throat. Wren was invisible, but I knew he was the one holding the weapon. It threw me to see someone I’d once thought of as so unassailable looking so old and fragile. Somehow Wren had surprised her, made it past her defenses. I knew about her haint blue room, and how it was connected to my house. But she had
wanted
me to know. She had invited me there. I had a suspicion of how Wren had found his way here. She must have invited him there at some point too. Part of me considered just walking away. Taking the spell down to my aunts and uncle and washing my hands of it all. But I couldn’t bear the thought of witnessing more violence tonight. I stepped through the entrance, and the door slammed shut behind me, shattering my hopes for assistance.

“Drop the knife, Wren,” I said calmly.

“Do as she says,” Jilo squeaked out, only to have her neck pulled further back, the length of her throat even more exposed to the sharp blade.

Wren’s form materialized behind her. He floated in the air at her back, one hand laced through her hair, the other clutching the blade. “That spell Connor gave you will kill me, Mercy,” his child’s voice said pleadingly. “I don’t want to die.” His eyes looked big and were welling up with tears.

“And neither did Ginny,” I started.

“I was only protecting myself. She was going to hurt me,” Wren sobbed, defending himself like a six-year-old who was explaining why he’d punched his sister.

I wanted to tear into him, but I kept my cool for Jilo’s sake. “But I never did anything to hurt you, and you were ready to kill me all the same.”

“I didn’t have a choice. Connor made me promise,” he responded.

“But you have a choice now. Jilo’s never done anything to you. You’ve got no reason to hurt her.”

“I came to her for help,” he said, “but she wouldn’t give me any. I’ve been watching your family for her for years, telling her everything she wanted to know, but she won’t help me anymore now that you know what I did to Ginny.”

“She’s the one who’s been feeding you?”

“Yeah,” was all the boy said.

Jilo had used Wren to spy on my family. I quickly considered the implications of that and decided that although she deserved a good ass-kicking, spying was not a capital offense. “You let Jilo go,” I said, “and I’ll give you the spell. You can destroy it.”

“It’s too late. You’ll tell everyone what I did to Ginny,” he said.

“No,” I lied. “I’ll never say a word, and neither will Jilo. Isn’t that right, Jilo?”

“Yes,” she breathed out cautiously.

“No one has to know. We can go back to the way things were. Ellen’s worried about you. She was asking me if I’d seen you. If you let Jilo go, I’ll give you the spell.” I held the paper out to him. “We’ll have a do over,” I said.

He looked at me warily. “Promise?” he asked.

“I promise,” I said and drew closer to them, holding the spell in an outstretched hand, but keeping it far enough from him that he couldn’t snatch it away. “Just hand me the knife, and I’ll give you the paper. He silently nodded, and I could see the hope return to his eyes. “One,” I said, stepping within reach. “Two,” I said, holding my left hand out for the knife. “Three,” I said, handing him the paper.