The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) (29 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

“So tell me, am I dead or not dead?” my cousin Paul asked, his complexion paling as he realized what my return could mean to him.

My aunts had been glued to my side from the moment Adam had walked me into the house. I sat now on the foot of Ellen’s bed, wrapped in one of her light robes. Oliver had spun the chair of Ellen’s makeup mirror around and stared at me in dumbfounded wonder.

I no longer had the nearly omniscient awareness of the line. I was no longer part of the line. I was just me. Mercy. Its secrets were no longer mine, and I was quickly forgetting the few bits of arcane knowledge I had brought back with me. I looked at my cousin, and searched his face for the boy I had known, the boy who had died. Two possibilities—alive or dead—balanced in the flux of what now passed for reality. My mind flashed back for a moment on Schrödinger’s cat. Here was a wave I intended to collapse once and for all.

“If you were dead, I don’t think you would be here to ask me that question.” Somehow Colin had managed to extract me without undoing the changes the line had made on my behalf. At least it appeared so for now, although time might prove otherwise.

“Of course you’re alive. We both are. We all are,” Oliver said as he abandoned his chair to come and stand before me. He put his hand under my chin and drew my eyes up to meet his. He held me there some moments, staring deeply into my soul. Finally he shook the finger of his other hand in my face. “Gingersnap, don’t you ever do that again.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” I said. He smiled and let go of me. I tried to return his smile but I couldn’t. I had to see my son. I had to hold him. My eyes danced over to Ellen’s alarm clock, and I confirmed another half hour had passed. Iris had promised me that Maisie would bring him up an hour ago. “What is keeping Maisie? And where is Peter?” I pushed myself up to my feet, but Ellen grasped my forearm, pulling me back down.

“They’ll be here in just a bit. Oli, why don’t you go see what is keeping them?”

A guilty and worried glance passed between her and Oliver. I tried to project my awareness out, to read their thoughts, but I got nothing. I tried to send out a psychic ping through the house to locate my son. Nothing. My hearing alerted me that the house had many visitors, but my magic failed to return me any knowledge beyond what my human senses could provide.

“Sure thing,” Oliver said, another less genuine smile on his lips. He turned.

“Wait,” I said. “What are you not telling me?”

Iris slid off the bed and knelt at my side near my feet. She looked up at me and took both my hands. “My darling girl, you cannot begin to comprehend how happy we are to have you with us. How grateful we are to whatever force brought you home . . .”

“It was Colin,” I said. In one moment, my consciousness stretched out over the whole globe. I could see and access every point at once, regardless of the miles, regardless of whether the common sense of time said it lay forward or backward. I was the line and nothing more than the line. The construct that had been Mercy Taylor was merely a sleight of hand perpetrated by a heartless witch on an unsuspecting world. Still, the line remembered Mercy, and cherished her memory like a fond dream. But the line had awakened, and the dream was no more.

Then came the call. The inescapable magic of the first word spoken by a little witch who had not forgotten his true mother, no matter how much he loved the woman who had been left as a surrogate. “Mama.” A one-word spell, so charged with my little boy’s hybrid magic that it caused me to surface and break free from the consciousness in which I had been absorbed. I was alive again, and I was myself. Like one bubble rising and breaking off from another, I was again whole. I was myself. “Colin’s magic brought me here. One minute I didn’t even exist. The next I found myself standing at the heart of Jilo’s crossroads.”

“That’s precisely it. It is so wonderful, so magical. But it happened in the blink of an eye. Two very separate paths reunited at the crossroads. One where you never happened, and the other where you lie at the core of our hearts. It’s all so sudden. So terribly disconcerting.”

Her cautious tone sent a chill down my spine. “Where is Maisie? Where is my son?”

Paul stepped over the threshold. “You should tell her—” he began, but a look from his mother stopped him cold.

“Tell me what?” I looked first to Paul to continue, but he lowered his head and left the room. “Tell me what?” I pulled my hands from Iris’s grasp.

“Now, don’t get yourself all worked up,” Oliver said. “Maisie is just a little freaked out right now. Maisie has gone out with Colin, but don’t worry, Peter is with them.”

“She doesn’t want me here,” I said, deflated, worried that we were about to start the same sad story all over again.

“Of course she does,” Ellen said, stroking my hair, “but Maisie is bound to feel conflicted. After all, you gave her your life, and now you’re back.”

Before I could respond, the sound of angry voices carried up the stairs. Most I did not recognize, but one foghorn baritone was unmistakable. “I know she is here. I feel it. I demand to see her.” I bounded off the bed, pushing past Iris and pulling the flimsy material of Ellen’s robe tightly around me. I ran down the hall, arriving at the head of the stairway just as Emmet found the foot of the stairs. He stood head and shoulders over those who were trying to block his access to the upper floor. I wanted to rush down the steps to him, but I stopped, uncertain as to what he would be feeling. Would his anger over what the line had done to him carry over to me? He was still linked as the anchor to the line, but I was no longer a part of the line. Now that I was back to being Mercy—just Mercy—who were we to each other?

“I should have realized,” he said when he first laid eyes on me, “that the little one was the key.” His eyes burned with both love and a passion I found hard to resist. Emmet pushed through those between us and held his hand out to me. I took a step toward him, and he toward me. We met in the middle.

He stared deeply into my eyes. I knew he wanted to touch me, but was afraid to, lest his hand pass clean through. I took his hand in mine. His chest heaved, and his eyes closed as his face smoothed with relief. He squeezed my hand gently and opened his eyes. “I know now is not the time for making decisions,” he said, whisking me up into his arms so that my feet couldn’t even touch the ground. He began carrying me down the stairs. “But when you get around to making those decisions, remember that I am the one who never left. I am the one who never forgot.” Yes, I would remember these things, but once, in another life, I had made a vow, and it was not one I made lightly.

Emmet carried me to our rarely used living room and sat me on a loveseat there. He sat down next to me, his frame taking up most of the loveseat, but I didn’t mind. I loved feeling him close to me. Confusion reigned as my newly extended family circled around us. All eyes were on me, and I watched as the sparks reignited in these eyes, as those who had known me recognized me, and those who hadn’t stretched their awareness to make room.

A handsome young man with more than a passing resemblance to Adam caught my eye. “You must be Jordan.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, but then seemed to find himself at a loss for words. His mother, Grace, so wonderfully alive, so not an angry spirit out for my uncle’s blood, stood next to him, a cautious look in her eye.

“I’m sorry for hijacking your party,” I said.

A smile broke out on Jordan’s face. “No, girl, that is more than all right. I became a doctor. You came back from the dead or whatever. You win.” He didn’t have Paul’s magic. He couldn’t see that he himself had pulled a kind of Lazarus. I for one did not feel the need to alert him to that fact.

A child’s squeal of delight caught my attention, and my eyes darted to the room’s entrance. Peter’s bright-red hair registered first, then the sight of my sister’s tearstained face. I would address her pain. I would. But now all that mattered was the ginger-haired little boy squirming in her arms. Colin reached both arms out to me. “Mama.”

“Let’s give them a bit of privacy,” I heard Oliver’s voice command. Whether it was his magic or just good manners, everyone obeyed. Everyone except Emmet. I placed my hand on his arm and nodded.

He looked at me with narrowed eyes and a tight mouth, but he stood. “I will be in the garden, waiting.”

“While you’re there,” Oliver said, “maybe you could do something about patching that pothole you left in the driveway.” Emmet pulled his shoulders back and glared at Oliver. Oliver threw his hands back in a gesture of surrender. “Just kidding. Just kidding. Grow a sense of humor, Sandman. Trying to diffuse a tense moment. That’s all.”

Emmet turned back and winked at me, then followed Oliver from the room.

Colin began fussing, straining with more force in Maisie’s arms, reaching out toward me. Maisie took a few reluctant steps toward me, looking for all the world as if she were heading to her own execution. Her head was held low. She wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I patted the seat Emmet had vacated, and she joined me. Colin escaped her grasp and pulled himself into my arms. I clutched him tightly to me, closing my eyes and breathing him in. I willed everything else in the world to go away, at least for an instant, so that I could take this experience in, engrave its memory on my soul. For this moment, he was mine and mine alone. Colin cooed happily, placing slobbery kisses on my cheek. Then it was time to open my eyes and learn how to share.

Peter hovered over us, standing nearly at attention. I smiled at him, and his eyes warmed. “God, it’s good to see you.” His eyes slid from me to Maisie and then back to me. “Especially together.” He raised his eyebrows and sighed. “What the hell happened? How did we get here?” I studied his face, wondering what, if anything, he remembered of his journey to the Fae.

“More importantly,” I said, tightening one arm around Colin and reaching out to him with the other, “where do we go from here?” He hesitated, casting a worried glance at Maisie, but took my hand. “I love you so much, Peter. I do.” He acknowledged my words with a bob of his head followed by tears that rolled down his cheeks. He let go of my hand and wiped away his tears. “I’m not trying to cut you out. Believe me. But I need a bit of time alone with my sister. Can you give us that?”

“Yeah,” he said, although I knew he was tapping into his deepest resource of strength to say so. “I’ll wait for you outside,” he said, then seemed to remember Emmet had claimed the garden as his own. “On the side porch.” I noticed his eyes had been on Maisie when he said this. It was Maisie he would be waiting for, and maybe that was right. He turned and exited through the house’s front door.

We sat together without speaking, searching for words, waiting for our feelings to settle enough to allow us to say them.

“I feel like I am Colin’s mother,” Maisie said after a long and uncomfortable silence. I knew Ellen was right. Maisie was bound to be conflicted in her emotions. She finally raised her eyes to meet mine. I could read in them that she was genuinely happy to the root of her soul to have her sister back, but she was worried about the costs. “I feel like I am Peter’s wife.”

“That’s because you are both those things.”

“But you are too.” She wrapped her arms around herself.

I placed a lingering kiss on the top of Colin’s head, and then shifted him over toward her. “Here,” I said, fighting the urge to hold tightly on to my boy.

She reached out for him, and he did not resist. His bright eyes, one green, one blue, filled with laughter. Laughter and knowing. Maisie pulled him into a desperate grasp and cried till she could cry no more.

“I don’t know how,” I said, stroking her hair, “but we will work this all out. There is room in Colin’s life for more than one mother.”

“And in Peter’s life?”

The way Peter’s eyes had remained fixed on Maisie as he spoke led me to think his heart had already made its choice. Still, I decided not to respond right off. It would take a while for things to settle, for us to figure everything out. Peter and Maisie and I, and yes, Emmet too, we would need to have some very honest conversations to decide how we fit now within each other’s lives. But we could start with what we had in common: our shared love for Colin.

In time we would figure everything out. We would find a way to adjust as the two warring timelines, the two sets of memories, settled and made peace with each other. All that mattered now was that we were together. Everything else would eventually fall into place. All I really cared about today was spending time with the most important man in my life, my son.

EPILOGUE

September brought blue skies and bearable temperatures. It also brought a special delivery in a large cardboard box. I ventured into our garage, where my battered old bike, perhaps my first true friend, leaned against the wall waiting for me. I oiled the chain and wheeled it out into the drive, where the box was still sitting. Just for the heck of it, I pointed my finger at the box and willed it to open. I was delighted when it remained sealed and sitting exactly where it was.

When I was returned to this reality, I had been separated from magic. Perhaps that was the price of my return ticket. I was completely and utterly powerless, no longer a magical being. I had come back to this world as an ordinary person, and I couldn’t have been more happy about that.

I went back to the garage and dug out a box cutter and a wrench. The sharp blade cut through the packaging to reveal the neon-orange trailer I had purchased for my boy. It clashed with the pink bike even worse than Jilo’s chair had clashed with her cooler, but we were certain to be visible. I wheeled the trailer around to the back tire of my bike and after a cursory glance at the instructions attempted to connect the two. Then, realizing I had done it all wrong, I went back and read the instructions. Everything by hand now. No more magic, and that made me feel so good I very nearly broke down and cried with relief.

But I didn’t cry. Instead I bundled up the cardboard and put it in with the rest of the recycling. I hopped on my bike and did a quick circle around the block to make sure everything worked right, then returned to the drive. I went inside to wash the oil from my hands, then made my way upstairs to the nursery where Colin sat happily waiting for me. He clapped his hands and laughed as I came through the door.

“We are all set,” I said, reaching into the playpen to lift up my boy. I kissed his cheek, then the top of his head. I pressed my nose against him, breathing him in. Cherishing his realness. My realness.

“Okay, little man,” I said and planted another kiss on his forehead. “Mama hopes you are ready, ’cause she is going to take you on a tour and tell you some black and wicked lies about the people of our dear home.” He squealed happily in response. “Now, you might ask why your mama would make up lies about a city with so many interesting true stories to tell.” I gave his round tummy a gentle poke. “Go on, ask . . .”