The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) (12 page)

FOURTEEN

I had no reason to begin at City Hall, other than the location was at the top of my mind due to Oliver’s attempt to convince me of the unsoundness of my theory. When I opened my eyes, Maisie and I stood hand in hand at the corner of Bull and West Bay, facing the four-story neoclassical confection. Sun glinted off its gold-plated dome, but it was the gold of the marigolds showing from the flower boxes on the second floor that caught my attention. My eyes followed the lines of the twin Ionic columns up to the sisters who adorned the space immediately beneath the dome.

“Art and Industry,” Maisie said, showing me how connected we still were, even after all that had happened between us. “What was it you used to tell the tourists they were called?”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Fannie and Rita Mae.” I named the statues after my two favorite authors when I was twelve, weeks after I’d started the Liar’s Tour and days after I learned what the word “lesbian” meant. “Well, Uncle Oliver thought it was funny.” Maisie smiled back at me, and I squeezed her hand tighter. I turned back to face City Hall. “What do you think, do you see anything?”

“I think Oliver was willfully ignoring the most obvious correlation.” She reached up with her free hand and pointed at the golden dome. “Looks enough like a crown to me.”

“That’s Kether, right? The crown?”

“Yes, when you are considering the positive aspects, but I suspect it’s Rita Mae and Fannie we should consider. Look at them.” She lowered her hand to the stone ladies. “They are the same but different.”

“Kind of like us, huh?”

Maisie dropped her hand, and I turned to face her. “Possibly. I know you are worried the woman’s body is being used as a magical substitute for you, but I was thinking more about how the demonic orders correlate to the sephirot.” She blinked and turned her head at an angle. “See, when you were out destroying Savannah’s reputation, Ginny kept me inside to learn about demonic orders.” Her hand slid from mine as her shoulders sagged. “Maybe I am crazy after all.”

“No.” I grasped hold of her hand again. It seemed impossible that this same soft hand had executed Teague, but I couldn’t let myself dwell on that. “I don’t think you are crazy at all. Tell me. Tell me what you see.”

Maisie’s eyes pointed back up toward the statues. “Like I said, they are the same but different. In its positive aspect Kether represents the crown. In its negative aspect it represents duality.”

“How is duality negative?”

“It stands for duality in what should be indivisible. Duality in God. God . . .” She seemed to ponder something that really had nothing to do with the holy. “They found something out near the Cathedral too, right?”

“Yeah, they found an arm.”

She stood still, but I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. Then she nodded. “What is unique about Saint John’s?”

I considered her question. “Well, it’s big. It’s beautiful.” Our mother had once possessed the body of a tourist on its steps, but I doubted that was what she was looking for. “Savannah didn’t start out friendly toward Catholics.” Savannah had been established as a buffer between the British port of Charleston and the Spanish territory of Florida. Oglethorpe had feared Papists would be more inclined to support Catholic Spain than support Protestant England.

“You’re getting warmer. The squares.”

I realized instantly where she was going. Oglethorpe had laid out Savannah’s squares, and surrounded them with what he termed “trust” and “tithing” lots. Tithing lots were intended for private houses, trust lots for public buildings such as churches. “The Cathedral is on the wrong side of Lafayette Square. It’s on a tithing lot.”

“I suspect the Cathedral might represent ‘Chaigidel’ to our secret sorcerer.”

“Chaigidel?”

“The confusion of the power of God, represented by a church where a church was not originally intended to exist.”

It seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. I had begun to lose confidence in our theory when Maisie turned west. “Wasn’t the other arm found right around here?”

“Yeah.” I pointed left down Bay. “They found the arm somewhere over behind Moon River.” Then I pointed right. “The torso was out by Old Rex.”

“The torso? Not a hand?”

“That’s what Adam and about thirty traumatized tourists said. Why?”

“The lion at the Cotton Exchange fountain,” she said, but I didn’t follow. “Rex? King Cotton?”

“Okay.” I pretended I had caught on.

“The eighth sephira. In its positive aspect it stands for ‘Majesty.’ In the demonic order it represents Adrammelech, the great king.”

“So why the confusion?”

“It’s also known as the ‘left hand of God.’ I would have expected to find a hand, but maybe that only means the correspondence of the part to the site is secondary.”

“Or maybe it means I’ve brought you on a wild-goose chase.”

“I don’t mind if you have. This feels almost like old times, back when you loved me.”

I started to protest.

“Back when you really loved me. Back before I gave you reason not to.”

“I love you. I never stopped loving you. If I had, I would never have risked everything to bring you home. I just worry the sister I’ve loved my entire life never really existed,” I said and instantly regretted my honesty. Still, the truth had come out, and I felt it would be wrong to backpedal. “I’m just trying to figure out who you are.”

“That makes two of us.” She forced a smile and moved on. “What do we know about where they found the arm?”

I wrapped my arm through hers and led her back south on Bull Street, then right onto Bay Lane. “Moon River is haunted. That much I know.”

“Okay, but the arm wasn’t found in the bar. It was found near the bar. What about this area here?” she asked, making a small circle that took in a portion of the street and the sidewalk. “The basement areas and portion below the street here.” She looked up at me. “Don’t you hear it? The sound of abject misery.”

“Before the Civil War, slaves were kept in holding pens down there.”

She knelt on the sidewalk and placed her hands on the concrete. “Yes. Nehemoth. The groaning.” She stood and stared to the east. “They found something by Columbia Square. By the Kehoe Mansion?”

“Yes.”

Her face lit up. “The king of cast iron. Tubal Cain. The lord of sharp weapons.” She tugged on my arm. “Old Candler. It was an asylum for years, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I knew it had been, but I didn’t want to dwell on issues of mental health with her.

“God only knows how many have died there,” she said.

Josef and Ryder had committed murder to free the demon my grandfather had trapped there. Ryder had sacrificed his own girlfriend, Birdy, and their unborn child without a single qualm to draw the demon and its power into himself. My mind flashed on the image of Birdy’s ravaged corpse. I pushed it quickly away.

“Belphegor,” she chirped. “Lord of the Dead who reigns over those who bellow grief and tears.” I would have never imagined I’d hear these words spoken so cheerfully. “You had a circle on the map over by Christ Church.”

I nodded.

“Take us there.”

In the blink of an eye, we stood on the red brick sidewalk before the Episcopal meetinghouse.

Maisie looked the building over as if it were the first time she had seen it in her life. She turned 180 degrees to face Johnson Square then turned back to face me. “This isn’t quite right. It wasn’t here.” She took quick steps to the corner, then turned on Congress and headed east. I struggled to catch up with her, waddling as fast as I could. Suddenly she stopped and pointed up at the parking structure. “It was here, wasn’t it?” She burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, I know it isn’t funny, not really, but this convinces me you are right. There is no doubt this is a spell connected to the sephirot, and whoever is behind it has a sense of humor. The demon Astaroth. His title is ‘One of the Flock.’ ” I waited silently for further explanation, but she looked at me like I was hopeless. Finally she sighed in exasperation. “You have told me a thousand stories about what used to stand here.”

I felt so embarrassed by my thickness I blushed. “Bo Peep’s Pool Hall.” I no sooner said the words than a car horn caused me to turn.

I registered the trident symbol on the front of Oliver’s new Quattroporte; then he pulled up next to us and rolled down the window. “You two need to get home now. Your aunts are worried, and I’m on my way to the airport.”

“The airport?” I echoed.

“Yep. Going to pick up Rivkah and Emmet. Get on home now,” he said and pulled away before the window had even finished closing.

FIFTEEN

I still believed only Emmet could free my grandmother, but a very large part of me regretted telling Iris to contact Rivkah. I didn’t want to see Emmet; I didn’t want to be near him. I didn’t want to feel my pulse rising when I laid eyes on Emmet, but I told myself we had no other option. I hated the butterflies that danced in my stomach as I heard his voice in the hall. I didn’t greet him as he and Rivkah came through the door. I couldn’t risk his seeing just how happy I was to see him. Instead I remained seated at the table, nursing an already lukewarm cup of chamomile.

I was grateful to Uncle Oliver for “inviting” Peter to spend the evening with his parents. I couldn’t have dealt with having him and Emmet under the same roof. I had alerted Claire to Peter’s suspicions about his parentage, but worked both sides of the equation by making Peter promise not to broach the subject until I could be there with him. I hoped that issue was diffused for now.

The swinging door flung wide. “Darling, it’s so good to see you up and about,” Rivkah said as she pulled Maisie into a tight embrace. Maisie looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes widening as she pulled a face. I’d grown used to Rivkah’s enthusiastic hellos and had already braced myself for my turn. I was warming up my smile when Rivkah released Maisie and turned to look down at me. “What is this nonsense about you wanting to kill my boy?”

“Rivkah,” Emmet said, “you promised you wouldn’t do this.” His face flushed, like a teenager who’d been embarrassed by his mother. Well, perhaps that really didn’t fall too short of the mark. The two had developed a familial bond.

He looked good, having struck a balance between his original overly manicured look and the feral appearance he’d perfected before he left Savannah. Before I sent him away from Savannah. The memory of Tillandsia, how it felt to be in his embrace before everything went so horribly wrong, washed over me.

“Do what? Find out why this girl thinks she has the right to order us to drop everything and attend to her desires? It would be bad enough if she only needed help moving, but she wants to
kill
you.”

“Not permanently,” I offered, realizing instantly how inept my attempt to diffuse her anger was.

“
Not permanently. Not permanently.
” She slammed her purse on the table so hard I jumped.

“Rivkah, enough,” Emmet said, putting his hand on her shoulder.

“No.” She turned to face him. “What she’s asking of you is too much.”

“Yes,” Iris concurred. “It is too much to ask, but it isn’t only Mercy who’s asking. It’s our entire family.” She stepped up behind me and gripped my shoulders.

“But he wouldn’t even consider this if it weren’t Mercy asking.”

“However, she has asked,” Emmet said in a calm voice, “and I have said yes.”

“I know you see this as some grand romantic gesture, my boy.” Rivkah spun toward me and flung out her hand. “Look at her. I mean it, look at her. She has another man’s ring on her hand and another man’s child in her womb. She isn’t yours. She never will be yours.”

“I know that.” Emmet lowered his eyes, focusing on the floor a few inches before his toes. “But I will always be hers.” My heart broke at his words. I knew I had taken advantage of his feelings for me to enlist his help. I was using him, asking him to die for me, and when I was finished, I’d send him away. I would have to. I could never give myself to him the way he wanted. I hated myself for bringing him into this.

Rivkah reached up and took his chin in her hand. She started to speak, but stopped herself. Her shoulders rose and then she sighed.

My pulsed pounded in my head and the room darkened. The room felt hot and close. “No.” The word came out before my conscious mind was sure what I was objecting to. “Don’t do this. We won’t do this. I won’t do this. I’m sorry.” I looked up over my shoulder at Iris. “We cannot ask this of Emmet. I’m sorry about Grandma. I am.”

The tension in Rivkah’s face melted. The tightness in her lips released. Her brow descended, and her eyes warmed. “There’s the girl I know and love.”

“However, this is not your choice to make,” Emmet said. “It is mine.” He knelt before me. He had no words for me, but the way he stared at me, the lids of his eyes covering the onyx irises nearly to his already concealed pupils, told me everything he wanted to say. I closed my own eyes as I couldn’t bear his message. I loved my husband. I had no doubt of that in my mind. For the shortest of moments, though, I wished I could split myself in two, setting free the part of my heart this golem-turned-man had claimed. I buried that wish and opened my eyes.

He looked over my shoulder at Iris. “Shall we proceed?”

“I’ll get Ellen and Oli.” Iris started for the swinging door, but stopped and turned back. “Thank you,” she said addressing Emmet.

“I warn you, Iris.” Rivkah pointed at Iris’s face. “I have always loved and supported your family, but if any lasting harm comes to Emmet . . .”

“I appreciate your support and return your affection wholeheartedly. We won’t fail Emmet.”

“But if you do . . .” Rivkah insisted.

“I will give my own life to return him to you.” The two women regarded each other for a moment as the pact between them was sealed. The moment having passed, Iris turned and left the room. I wondered if it were truly possible, to trade one life for another.

“I’ll go run the bath,” Maisie said. “Excuse me.” She followed Iris out of the room, her movements cautious, nearly silent, as if she were afraid to upset the delicate balance we had found.

“Please, my boy. Don’t go through with this.” Rivkah looked at me, commanding me silently to back her up.

“I’m sorry I asked you to do this,” I said. “It was wrong of me. I don’t want you to.”

Emmet stood to his full impressive height, causing me to crane my neck to take him in. “You are lying to yourself,” he said, crossing his arms and looking down at me with his irritating, smug smile. “You want me to help your grandmother, but you don’t want to be the one responsible for my taking the risk of doing so.” He reached down and placed his warm palm against my reddening cheek. “I hereby absolve you. This is my choice,” he said, then regarded Rivkah, “and I would do the same thing even if there were no Mercy.”

“Now, who’s lying to himself?” Rivkah made a huffing sound. “I see you are determined.” She lowered her head.

“Sooner started, sooner done.” Emmet smirked at the cliché. He held out his hand to help me stand.

“No.” I refused both his courtesy and his sacrifice.

“Yes,” he said. “You must be there to serve as my beacon.” He reached down and took my hand. I couldn’t bring myself to look him directly in the eye. “Mercy.” His voice came out sharp and shocked me so that I had to face him. Despite the harshness of his voice, his face was smiling. “Don’t worry. Nothing will keep me from returning. As long as I know you are waiting for me.” Guilt, love, annoyance, gratitude, confusion. In my father’s native German, there was probably a single word to describe the feelings that washed over me. My own vocabulary had no such term. “Come now.” His smile turned back to a smirk. “Many hands make for light work.”

“You two go ahead,” I said. “I’ll come up in a moment.”

They left me alone in the kitchen, Rivkah cackling like a hen at her newly adopted chick. I leaned back in my chair, placing my hands against my lower back and stretching. I ran my hand over my stomach. I halfway expected to feel a reproval coming from Colin, but I only sensed he was at rest.

I took my cup to the sink and emptied it. I washed it by hand and sat it on the drain board. I contemplated the chip in the sink’s porcelain. I pondered the spots on the splash. “They’re ready.” Maisie’s voice startled me. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m a bit jumpy. It isn’t every day you kill somebody, you know?”

“I’m trying to keep it down to two a week.” We caught each other’s eyes, and even though I knew it was wicked of us, we both burst out laughing. “Go on, they’re waiting for you.”

“You’re not coming?”

“No. Rivkah is very happy to see me up and well, not so happy with the thought of my helping to drown her son.” She sensed I was trying to find words to comfort her and held up her hand to stop me. “No, seriously, I’m trying to keep my homicides down to two a week, and I have the feeling I might need to save my second for a day or two.”

“You are terrible,” I said.

“And you can be a pest. Get out of here and leave me alone.”

I reached out and gave her hand a squeeze, then made my way upstairs. I could hear voices—Emmet’s voice, my aunts’ voices—coming from the far side of the door of a rarely used bath at the far end of the hall. I stepped into the doorway, focusing on the floor where the deep claw-foot tub dug into the checkerboard tile. The room would normally have been far too cramped for a crowd of six, but the boundaries had been stretched.

I wondered which of us had become so skilled at borrowing space from other dimensions, until Emmet stretched out his arm to display the expansion. “Not bad, huh?” His pride glowed in his eyes; a wry smile reigned on his lips.

“Not bad at all,” I said and stepped over the threshold.

“Three minutes.” Rivkah’s voice caused me to look up. Emmet began disrobing, laying his clothes out carefully over a defunct towel warmer. I seemed to be the only one of us bothered by the waxing state of his nakedness. He noticed my consternation, and the devil’s own smile curved on his lips.

“Three minutes.” Ellen nodded. “Then I’ll pull him back.” I was glad to see she had recovered from the effects of her latest bender.

“Not a second longer.”

“You have my word, Rivkah,” Ellen said, placing a stopwatch in Rivkah’s hand. “From the second his heart stops until it beats again.”

Emmet caught my eye, then fanned out his large hands to cover his genitals. I begged my eyes not to follow, but they did as they wanted, caressing the patch of hair that began between his hard pectorals and traced a line over the center of his abdominals, fanning out again on his taut lower stomach.

“You are shameless,” Iris said taking note of his flirting.

“Yes, I am. Isn’t that the point of this exercise?” Maybe it was gallows humor, but for the second time in a matter of minutes, I found myself in the middle of an inappropriate laugh. My eyes bounced up and were caught in the dark glimmer of his. Then I looked away.

“We should get started,” Iris said. “Climb in, please.” Emmet turned his back to me, casting one last naughty glance over his shoulder. His suave expression turned to shock as his foot hit the water. “I’m sorry it’s so cold, but it’s going to have to get even a bit colder yet.”

Emmet reached down, grasping both sides of the tub, and put his foot in. A second, and he lifted the other over the rim, touching the water with his toe then pulling it back.

“Mercy,” Iris called, and my head jerked in her direction. “Who is this timid little girl getting in the bathtub?”

Emmet’s face flashed a blend of shame and anger, but then his eyes narrowed. “You almost had me there,” he said, but still he seemed determined to demonstrate his toughness. He bent his knees and slid waist deep into the water. Even though his face remained stoic, he nearly panted from the cold. Finally he settled, his knees poking up high above the water. “It isn’t so bad.”

“Good, then we are ready for the rest of the ice.” Iris turned and opened up the old camping cooler I hadn’t laid eyes on since grade school. Oliver heaved a sack out of the cooler and tore open the bag. The cubes fell first in plops then with one final glacial splash.

Ellen and Iris glanced at each other. “Not quite deep enough,” Iris said. “He’ll have to kick his legs up over the sides so we can hold him under.”

“Why do we have to make the water so cold?” I asked, feeling a sympathetic chill run up my own spine.

“Just a precaution,” Oliver said as he grabbed another plastic bag. “Lowering his temperature may help prevent . . .” He stopped himself and threw a guilty look at Rivkah. “It makes any permanent damage from a lack of oxygen to the brain somewhat less likely.” He dropped the bag back into the cooler without daring to meet any of our eyes.

Iris unhooked the necklace she had been wearing, a gold chain and pendant. She approached the tub and leaned over Emmet. “Here.” She held the necklace out. “This was Mama’s, it still carries her charge. Focus on her energy, and it will help you locate her in the darkness.”

Emmet held up his bluing hand, palm up, and she dropped it into his hand. He clasped his long fingers tightly around the piece. Iris nodded at Oliver, who circled around her to take a place behind Emmet. They each put both hands on one of his broad shoulders. Ellen approached and took his left wrist in her hand. “Before we do this,” Emmet said suddenly, fighting to keep his teeth from chattering. “It’s only that I’ve heard ghosts are often seen wearing what they wore last. If that’s true . . . If I don’t make it back . . .”

“Yes?” Ellen asked.

“Please remember that this water was very, very cold.” He barked out a laugh and plunged his upper body under the water, a wave breaking over the rim as he flung his long legs over the sides. Oliver and Iris combined their weight to help hold him under, lest his body rebel and struggle to break the surface. It was unnecessary. He didn’t struggle. He gave himself up a willing sacrifice.