The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) (25 page)

THIRTY-TWO

In the void, there are no cardinal points, no ups or downs, no forward or back. In the void, there are no illusions. No rationalizations. No comforting linear interpretations of cause and effect. In the void, it becomes clear there is no difference between the two. No difference between history and imagination. Both are lies in equal parts.

The greatest lie of my life had not been that my mother had died, or that no one knew who my father was. In a way, those things shone through as the brightest of all truths. My mother had died, on the inside, where it really mattered, and no one, no one, ever knew the man my father had been. No, the greatest lie I’d ever heard had been the ticking of Ginny’s clock, the way it counted off the passing seconds so loudly, proclaiming itself the herald of time, the great god that ruled over us all. In the void, time has no meaning. Within the void it becomes clear that time is merely a side effect, not the great king it pretends to be.

In the void, I had no eyes, and I had no physical mind. Still, images of the illusion I called my life floated around my awareness. No, that implied they could possibly be separate from my awareness, and here, there was no separation. My awareness, and truly that was all I had left, acted upon itself to conjure images of Emily, memories of Erik. I had been born to monsters, but I, myself, was not a monster. She had called me the “Abomination.” With those words she claimed I had no soul. Still, I felt that soul, that spark, felt I
was
that spark. I wanted to believe she was wrong about me, as she had been so horribly wrong about everything else.

As above, so below
. Infiltrating Tillandsia, a harmless gentlemen’s club, and turning it into a generator of dark magic, Erik and Emily had performed the ultimate act of sympathetic magic, but instead of clay, instead of cloth, they had used their own biology to create a poppet, a living doll capable of containing the essence of the line itself. The blood and the sex of Tillandsia proved to be the exact frequency necessary to capture a small piece of the line, and channel it into a human body. The body I’d thought of as mine. They had determined the best way to topple the line was to destroy it in its smallest expression, because through the laws of sympathetic magic, what can be destroyed on the molecular level will also be abolished in its greatest form.

Now, I found myself within the void, divorced from that body, but still aware of what was happening to it. It had all been such a glorious trick on Emily’s part. The line had been created by the thirteen families, and it required all thirteen working together to destroy it, to destroy me. The ten families who had remained loyal to the line would never have knowingly agreed to unite with the three rebel families, but Emily had sowed the seed of fear in their hearts. They thought they were preventing me from harming the line. They had no idea I was the line.

THIRTY-THREE

The powerless ginger girl they had at first overlooked, then loathed, was the line incarnate. I found myself missing that girl. As the united witch families joined forces to destroy her, I felt the rebel families working to erase her. Here, in the void, I knew that was exactly what was happening. I was being twisted, erased, undone at the point of nothingness. The edges of my awareness grew fuzzier, dissipating into the absolute null of the void. I let my mind float, searching out the happier moments, although it seemed they were among the first to fade.

I was awash in horror. Ginny’s corpse was spread out before me, or was it Teague’s? The two murders blended together now. The fire at Magh Meall. Knowing I’d never see Peter’s parents again. The kick in the gut as Peter leapt without so much as a wave through the portal into the world of the Fae. The realization that Maisie had once turned me over to be sacrificed. The sickening crack of my neck as Connor struck me, flinging me like a ragdoll against the wall of Ginny’s house. The magical fire that consumed him. All things good began to escape me. I had family, family that loved me. There were two women. Sisters. They loved me very much, but I could not remember their names. Two men. They loved me. I knew that. They seemed like family to me, even though they certainly weren’t brothers, but the same word pressed against my consciousness. Then that word was lost to me. I felt a shock and a sense of collapsing, condensing. There existed less of me and more of the nothingness in which I was an island. I could still see her, that girl, or was I simply imagining I did? She lay oh so very still, the red hair on her pillow a near match for the red blood that now clung to her thighs. I wished I could comfort her. I wished I could promise her things would be all right, but I sensed that she, like I, was fading. Another shuddering collapse and the vision failed.

No more images came. There was only darkness. Darkness and a single spark. With the sight of the spark, I regained the memory of color. I recognized it. The color blue. No, it was haint blue.

“Well, if you are just about good and ready to quit feeling sorry for yourself, we got some work to do.”

My awareness, which had been so close to collapse, suddenly exploded, blowing wide open. I knew myself, I knew that color, and I knew her.

“Jilo.” She had no form, she was just a shimmering, but still I recognized my friend.

“That’s right, girl. It’s your Jilo.”

“Are you an angel?”

Laughter shook the darkness around me, the haint-blue light expanding into waves that reflected off themselves into infinity. “Well, the good Lord do work in mysterious ways. Maybe that what he has in mind, but if he do, then he got his work cut out for him.” Another bout of laughter rippled around me. “Jilo’s here for you. She’s here, and she ain’t gonna let nobody hurt her baby.”

“I’m nobody’s baby, I’m not even human.”

“Bullshit.” Her face coalesced before me. “It don’t matter none if you human or you billy goat, you are Mercy, and you are my baby. I love you, girl. I have done ever since that evening I saw you leading your silly tour through Colonial Cemetery. You remember that evening, girl?” The memory of the night rose from the ashes to become real again. With that memory, I somehow became more
real
again too. “I saw you leading those paunchy crackers around, and there was something about you. Jilo, she thought to herself, ‘You just walk away, Jilo. She just one of them crazy Taylors.’ But Jilo’s heart felt a tug at the sight of you. That’s why Jilo put it in your silly head to come find her at her crossroads.”

The urge to laugh hit me, creating shimmers of light in the void. “You did not.”

“Oh, yes”—she put special emphasis on the word—“Jilo did. You just need to own up to the fact you would’ve been too scared to come if I hadn’t set a conjure on you.”

“Come to think of it, you’re probably right.”

“Hell, girl, ain’t no probably about it.” Jilo paused and seemed to be attempting to measure the endlessness around us. “Now, this here is one hell of a mess you’ve landed yourself in.” Light and color faded as I again felt the hopelessness of my situation. “Oh good Lord, there she go again. Jilo said it a mess, she didn’t say you can’t get out of it.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, wondering if my friend were just something my dying mind conjured to ease the fear of its last few minutes. “This is the void, the empty heart of God.”

Jilo’s cackles dissolved the darkness into a mad rainbow of color. Fandango lights shot forth and circled each other. For an instant I imagined I could see a horizon. “Shoot girl, this ain’t the heart of God. This thing is counterfeit. It is a lie.” Jilo let loose an angry harrumph. “Those fools, they think they can make themselves gods. They mix they science with magic and they come up with this ‘bell’ of theirs.”

“But Emily—”

“But Emily nothing. Who you gonna listen to, that bitch or your real mama?” I didn’t answer. There was no need. “All right. This thing we in. They found a way to mimic the true void, but you need to get it through that red head of yours that this ain’t the true void. Ain’t no man and ain’t no witch either who gets to play in that sandbox.”

“So what do I do?”

“What do you do?” I perceived a mental image of Jilo as she had been before her death, a birdlike old woman, hopping mad. “Ain’t Jilo taught you nothing?” Somehow even her frustration with me came as a comfort. “What is the first thing, the very first thing, Jilo taught you about magic?”

I tried to focus, tried to remember the time we had spent together, her sharing with me everything she herself had learned through trial and error. It all seemed so distant in this place without time, without sensation.

“This void,” Jilo said, “it is a powerful weapon, and those bitches have aimed this power at you.”

The sensation of pain. A small stone bounced off my shoulder. Joy rushed through me. There was a stone, and I had a shoulder. “That’s right, girl. You tell Jilo, who does that power belong to now?”

“The power is mine.” A green and pleasant world flashed into existence around us. I stood before Jilo, who looked at me like she was going to burst with pride.

“And you are going to use it to kick some ass.” She pulled me into her arms. Solid. Warm. Loving. Real. “First, they somebody who wants to say hello.” Jilo released me, and waved her hand, calling someone forward.

She arrived first as a sensation, hesitant to show herself, afraid of my rejecting her. My heart nearly broke realizing the pain I had caused her. All that she had done for me.

“Ginny,” I said, and the image of my great-aunt crystalized before me. She wasn’t the bloodied corpse I’d last laid eyes on. More than a mere memory, a moment out of sync repeated itself.

Jilo smiled like a proud teacher. “That’s right, my girl. You seeing the big picture now. Who would that old woman have accepted her death from? That’s the question you need to be askin’.”

Now, I had the answer to that question. Wren had murdered Ginny, but she hadn’t accepted her death from him. She had accepted it from the line. She had accepted it from me.

“I tried to do exactly as you asked me,” Ginny said, looking at me with wonder in her eyes. Another flash from before. I remembered going to her, not as Mercy, but before Mercy, as the line. The line had warned her Emily and Erik had succeeded. They had completed the Babalon Working and captured a bit of the line itself. “It was so hard to treat that little girl like I did.” Tears moistened Ginny’s eyes.

“You did exactly like I asked you to.” I held my arms wide and Ginny flung herself into them.

“I knew she didn’t understand. I knew she was innocent, but you—”

“I told you to keep her separate, ignorant of magic.” A harder truth hit me. “I asked you to take her magic, and use her sister as an anchor for what you could. To send the rest to a dimension where no one would notice it.” I was the one. I had been the one to betray Maisie. To warp her by channeling power through her that no simple witch could experience without going mad. How strong Maisie must have been to resist as well as she had. Those times I waited in Ginny’s hall, staring at the damned blank wall I had resented so, that was when Ginny had worked so tirelessly to balance the powers that threatened to tear me apart. I realized it had been a blessing in disguise that Ginny had found a way to channel some of that power through Jilo.

“Emily never intended for you to grow to an adult. They meant to end you as a baby.” She shuddered at the thought. “If the other anchors had known who you really were, they would have taken you away from me. They would have sought some way to dissolve you as Mercy without bringing down the line. Failing that, they would have locked you away. Tried to contain you. They would have fumbled around until the line was destroyed as sure as if they were working for Emily themselves.”

“As above, so below,” I said. Anything the anchors tried to do would have filtered out through the line as a whole. Dissolve Mercy, end the line. Contain Mercy, trap the line. Either way, their actions would have been the end. They would never have let me be, and as soon as they started in, the rebel families would have piled on. They almost had me as a grown woman. As a small girl, I would have never stood a chance. “The anchors think of themselves as my masters, not as my partners.” I had tried for millennia to free myself from their grasp.

“I had to protect you from them. I had to protect you from Emily.” Ginny’s body heaved with heavy sobs. “I had to let Ellen lose Paul. I couldn’t risk the other anchors finding out about you.” Ginny pushed back from my arms to look at me. “When that other boy got run over in front of her shop, he was hurt too badly. His injuries should have killed him. Ellen didn’t have enough power to bring that boy back like she did. The anchors knew that. What they didn’t know was she drew the magic from you.”

I remembered watching as she laid her hands on the broken boy, wishing she could save him. Willing that she would. And save him she had. She had managed to pull him right back from the tunnel of light that had called him. Afterward, I had avoided Ellen for days, afraid of her awesome power. Now I knew I had been afraid of seeing my own reflection.

“I couldn’t risk letting her draw power from you again. The other anchors were suspicious. We were being watched . . .” Her voice trailed off as she relived that dark day. “Oh, how my beautiful Ellen hated me after Paul’s death. I saw it in her eyes every time she looked at me. The whole family hated me.” Her eyes looked deep into my own. “Perhaps you most of all.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I had to ask you to give up your own life, your own happiness for this.”

“No. I dedicated my life to a cause. A cause I believe in to the very depths of my soul.” She released herself from my embrace. “There is no shame in that. It was an honor to act as your protector. To help you keep the demons who would destroy our world at bay.” With those words, she faded from sight. I reached out, trying to bring her back.

“No, no, no, child,” Jilo said and shook her head. “You let her go now. She’s been waiting to see you this one last time, but that old girl has earned her peace.” All animation left Jilo’s tired face. “I think this old girl is about ready for a little peace herself. You think you can handle things on your own from here?”

“I don’t know what—” I started to protest, but she grabbed my hand in hers.

“
Of course you know what to do. This bell of theirs, it’s counterfeit, but it’s still powerful. They may not have created a sun, but they sure as hell strapped to
gether a pack of atom bombs. Emily, she put you here thinking that its power combined with all those damned anchors trying to put an end to you would whisk the line away, totally undo you. She think this power hers. That she can use it to destroy.”

“She’s wrong, though, isn’t she?”

“Damned right she wrong, my girl.” Jilo pulled me into a tight embrace, her thin arms like bands of steel. I felt it. She never wanted to let me go, but she knew she had to. For her sake, and for mine too. She picked up on the intentions that had begun to form within me.

This place. This void, artificial or no, would allow me to try my own hand at creation, or at least recasting the world that had been. Tiny surgical cuts to the timeline, a changed decision here, a different action there, perhaps I could set things right for those I loved. “Damn, girl. Don’t get all carried away. You can’t reach back and yank the apple out of Eve’s mouth. You can’t reach back any further than when Emily done conjured you into the world.”

“Yes, I understand,” I said.

“And you understand the other bit too, don’t you?”

“Yes.” I understood, even better than she did. The spell had been broken. No matter what else I might manage to achieve, the one fact I couldn’t change was that Mercy Taylor had never really existed.