The Void (Witching Savannah Book 3) (8 page)

EIGHT

“Your grandparents were never legally married. Big deal. It doesn’t change who you are.” Peter held me tightly to his smooth chest. It was a big deal. Especially to Iris. She had always taken great pride in our family’s history, pride in her pedigree. And it was a big deal to me that my grandfather had been such a moral failure that he could have deserted his first family.

Still, I didn’t protest. Peter was only trying to make me feel better, and it felt so good to lie with him. I pressed my cheek against his skin and breathed in his scent. I was still struggling with Maisie’s assertion Peter had used magic against me as a kind of date rape drug. I had long known he had gone to Jilo for a spell. Heck, I myself had gone to Jilo for a spell that would ignite my passion for Peter, only Peter had placed his order first. Still, Maisie’s interpretation of events showed Peter’s actions in a different light. It was just another one of those horrible gray areas I would have to navigate. One day, soon, Peter and I would have to discuss it, but today was not that day. I filed the thought away for safekeeping.

“Your grandfather’s other family.” Peter’s words pulled me back. “Where are they now?”

“At least one of them is here. Jessamine. The rest I don’t know. I mean, I don’t even know how large my new family is.” A pain twisted in my heart. “I don’t even know if they’d consider me family.”

“Oh, baby.” He nuzzled my hair. “They would be fools not to want to count you as kin.”

“I don’t know about that. If the shoe were on the other foot . . .”

“If the shoe were on the other foot, you’d be making plans for a family reunion. Or would it only be a ‘union’ since y’all haven’t met yet?” He laughed, but his humor didn’t really help.

“How it must have hurt them, to be deserted like that.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it hurt like hell, but it wasn’t you who did the hurting. Don’t you take any of that on.”

“I think Iris has claimed all that guilt for herself.”

“She’s been thrown for a loop by all this.” His large hand ran down my arm, slid to my stomach. “Learning about your grandpa’s lies has made her feel like she isn’t who she always believed herself to be. I think I understand how she feels.”

I stiffened as my heart jumped to my throat. “What are you talking about?”

He sighed. “I’ve been trying to find a way to talk to you about something.”

I could feel his heart beat against my cheek. He seemed to have lost his nerve. “You know you can tell me anything.”

He planted a kiss on the top of my head. “Yeah, I know that. I shouldn’t have even brought it up, though, at least no
t right now. You’ve got so much on your mind already.” A pang of guilt hit me. I hadn’t even broached the topic of my grandmother’s fate, or the more difficult matter of Emmet coming home to Savanna
h.

I placed my hand against his rock-hard shoulder and pushed myself back so I could see his eyes. “Tell me.”

He removed my hand from his shoulder and pulled me back in against him. “Before the baby is born, I think we need to talk to my parents about who I really am.”

I was dumbstruck. What had we done to betray his origin? Had I said something? Had I not said something? Panic nearly caused me to blurt those questions out.

“I mean, look at them,” he said, interrupting me. “Then look at me. Dad’s barely five foot seven. He and Mom are both black Irish.”

I felt myself relax. It was true, only the most miraculous combination of Claire and Colin’s recessive genes could have created my redheaded giant.

“I know what you are about to say.” Peter rocked me gently. “I’ve looked through all the family pictures. I don’t look like any of my relatives from either side.”

“So, you think you were adopted? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I would have thought so, but no, there are plenty of photos of Mom when she was so pregnant she looked bigger than a—” He stopped himself. “Pregnancy didn’t suit her like it does you.”

Relief washed over me. He had no idea that Claire was not his natural mother. “Yeah, nice try there.”

“I’m hers all right, but I don’t think my dad is my father, if you follow me.”

I didn’t have the heart or the energy to lie to my husband actively. “How do you feel about that possibility?”

“Yeah, thanks, Doctor. It’s more than a possibility. I feel it in my gut. I always have. I love my dad so much, it never mattered before, but now . . .” I pulled from his arms so that I could see him. His two-tone eyes, one blue, one green, looked down, as if he were imagining the confrontation he felt he should have with his mother. “I need to know who I am.” He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “I owe it to our son. I mean, there are medical reasons.” This rationalization didn’t ring true, even though logically it sounded valid. He had obviously long suspected his parentage, and that he was becoming a father himself must have sharpened his desire to learn the truth. It hurt me to think I would be one of those forced to hide the truth from him.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll go to visit Claire. Together. We’ll ask her together. All right?”

He nodded, and it broke my heart to see tears well up in his eyes. He brushed them away with the back of his hand, then reached over and turned off the light.

NINE

I awoke to find Peter gone. Again. I rubbed my eyes, amazed to see the clock showed it was past eleven. I should have been up hours ago, helping Iris finish up with preparations for Thanksgiving. I jumped out of bed and rushed through a shower. Makeup could wait. I dried my hair enough so it wouldn’t tangle and threw on drawstring sweatpants and one of Peter’s T-shirts.

I smelled no cloves, no cinnamon, no sage. I rushed downstairs and into a kitchen empty except for Uncle Oliver, who sat at the table examining the old tourist map we had marked with the locations where the body parts had shown up. His eyes were red. He’d been crying. The sight unnerved me. He always shrugged off emotion. Pain seemed to slide off him. To witness Oliver hurting was a new and unpleasant sight. I averted my eyes to the map. So much had happened since I last looked at the map, it seemed like a thousand years had passed.

“Peter’s at the bar. Told me to tell you that you shouldn’t worry, he would hold off on talking to his mom.” That was a relief. I still had time to warn Claire. “Cryptic message delivered, my duties have been carried out.” Oliver looked up and read my expression. “Oh, and Thanksgiving’s been canceled, Gingersnap.” He gave me a sad smile. “At least in the Taylor house.”

“Oh.” I felt somehow cheated and guilty for feeling cheated at the same time. Halloween or Samhain wasn’t a big day for us like it was for our Wiccan friends. For us it was a time to indulge in an overabundance of sugar and dress up the way popular culture told us witches should dress. Iris always went all hippie earth goddess, and Ellen did the pointed hat and green makeup. Fun, but not a big deal by any means. Thanksgiving was going to be my first big family holiday as Peter’s wife. I’d been looking forward to combining our families. Maisie was back and on the mend. We needed to celebrate her return to health. A touch of guilt rose in me. This was to be my first Thanksgiving without having to suffer from Ginny’s vocal, no, vociferous disapproval of my every action. And dang it, we’d faced so many horrible things over the last several months, I just wanted one nice day. A day to have everyone I loved together. To enjoy them before I lost anyone else. “Why?” Even though I essentially knew the answer, I had to ask.

“Something about learning our mother is trapped in hell killed Iris’s spirit of gratitude. On top of that Sam called. He’s decided to spend the day with his family in Augusta. Iris is upstairs in her room and won’t come out for love or money.”

“Grandma isn’t in ‘hell,’ she’s in Gehenna, and we will get her out of there.”

“Well, if anyone can manage that, I’m sure it will be you.” I noticed he had a large bandage taped on his hand.

“You hurt yourself?”

He examined his hand. “Yeah, a tiny cut. Nothing to worry about.”

“Doesn’t look tiny. You should let Ellen look at it.”

“I will when she gets back. She rushed off this morning. One of her meetings, I guess.”

One of her meetings, I hoped. I pulled out a chair and joined him at the table. He started laughing, but the laughter didn’t really sound happy.

“What’s so funny?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess after all the times I’ve been called a ‘bastard,’ it’s kind of amusing to learn that is indeed exactly what I am.” Tears moistened his eyes, then rolled down his cheeks. He made no attempt to hide them or wipe them away. “I guess I no longer need to feel guilty about letting the family name die out with me.”

I could take it no longer. I made my way around the table and bent over to hug him. He reached up and patted my arm. “Thanks, Gingersnap.”

My eyes fell to the map. “There are more Xs.” I released Oliver and traced the new marks with my finger.

“Yep. That’s the other thing. Adam’s going to be working today. We now have everything but the head.” He tapped the map with his pen. “This morning a jogger in Forsyth stumbled over—literally—a leg across from Old Candler.” He pointed a bit south of Madison Square. “Its partner was left on the sidewalk by the Scottish Rite Temple.” He tapped his pen again. “An arm out by Saint John’s.” He reached out and angled the map a bit. “Last night, a security guard found the missing foot in a cardboard box on the steps of City Hall.”

It all struck me as too much. I felt the blood drain from my face and almost swooned.
Swoon
, the word struck me as I felt my knees start to give way, and it was only the absurdity of the word that gave me the strength to keep it together and not crumple. Oliver sensed what was happening and jumped up to brace me. In one quick and graceful move, he slid his chair under me and guided my bottom to it. “See?” he said. “Dismembered body. There are worse things in the world than finding out your father was not quite the man you believed him to be.”

I put my elbows on the table and held my head in my hands, fighting the sense of vertigo and its best friend, nausea. I took slow, steady breaths.

Oliver gently grasped my shoulders. “You gonna be okay, there?”

I nodded. I swallowed. “Yes. I’m fine now.”

“Come on, Nancy Drew, pull it together. Take my mind off our family mess. Help me figure this out. Adam needs us. He isn’t a man who asks for help often. This time he’s asked.”

I sighed in capitulation. “Aunt Iris thinks someone is attempting to work a spell.” I pulled the map closer. “But I don’t see any significance to where the parts have been left. There’s no visible pattern. I cannot think of any historical connection to these particular sites and sacrifices.”

“Okay, then.” Oliver seemed strangely enthused by my less-than-insightful participation. “Let’s start with the basics of what we do know.”

“You start. I need some tea,” I said and stood.

“You sit, let me get it,” he offered, but I shook my head.

“No, I’m good now.” I stood and made my way to the cupboard. I opened the door and reached for a mug that had somehow made it from Clary’s Café to our own personal collection. It slipped through my fingers and broke into three heavy shards on the counter. I jumped back.

“You sure you’re all right?” Oliver said looking up from the map.

“Yeah. Yeah. Just clumsy.” I grabbed a towel from the counter and wrapped the sharp-edged pieces in it, carrying them to the garbage can Iris kept in the pantry. I stepped on the pedal to open the lid, and my heart broke. There, thrown out with other items to be forgotten, was the twisted silver of a photo frame. Shards of bloodied glass rested upon a photo, the photo of Uncle Oliver and Granddad on their fishing trip. I reached in carefully and extricated the picture from the detritus. I placed it on a shelf, determined to have it restored for Oliver. Once the pain had faded, once his pride had healed, he’d want it back. I shook the broken mug into the can and let the lid fall closed.

I returned to Oliver. “Unless the killer intends to go all jigsaw on the head too, I think it’s safe to assume the body has been divided into ten pieces,” he said and recorded this point on a legal pad I hadn’t even noticed before. He drew a heavy asterisk next to it. “So far nine of them have turned up. What else do we have?”

“Well, if we are running with the obvious, magic was used to keep the parts fresh, right? I mean, I’m assuming the parts just found are in the same condition as the others.”

“That’s what Adam said.”

“Okay, then, write,” I ordered, and my uncle obeyed. “We know it’s the body of a female.”

He paused mid-scribble and looked up at me. “We know she had red hair.”

“But they haven’t found the head . . . Oh, I see.” The realization of how they knew this was quickly buried under an even more unpleasant realization. Magical correspondences. Voodoo dolls. “Sympathetic magic.” Maybe I was growing paranoid, but lately it did seem like the whole world was out to get me. I flashed back on the earlier discussion I had with my aunts about Alice Riley. Witch. Pregnant. Now we had a dead redhead. I crossed to the table and sat back down, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me. “Has someone murdered this poor woman and substituted her as a proxy for me?”

Oliver said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes. For a few moments he sat drumming nervously with his pen on the pad. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Shelve it for now.” He flushed with anger. “Damn it, I wish Iris would get over herself and come down. She’s the one who’s good at this kind of deduction.” He slammed the pen down, and it flew off the table. “I’m going to go get her. Drag her down here.”

“There is no need for dragging.” The swinging door into the kitchen pulled back to reveal Iris standing there. “And I am doing my best to ‘get over myself.’ ”

Oliver regarded her with a guilty expression. His eyes darted from Iris to me then back to Iris. “You know what I mean. I feel every bit as bad as you do, but you don’t see me hiding my head in the sand like an ostrich.”

“No, little brother, it is much more your style to strut around like a peacock.” A long moment of silence stretched out between them as they stared each other hard in the eye. I was about to crawl under the table in search of shelter, when they both burst out laughing. Iris approached her younger brother and placed a kiss on the top of his head. She reached out and grasped his wounded hand. “What happened here?”

“Just a cut.”

“You show that to Ellen when she gets home.” She stepped back and took my uncle and myself in. “What’s so crucial that you two are plotting to storm the castle and drag me from my turret?”

“They found the rest of the body,” Oliver said. “Well, other than the head. That is still missing.”

“All right, we knew the parts were still out there, and they were bound to show up sooner or later.”

“Mercy’s worried, well, I’m kind of worried too.” Oliver bit his lip. “The woman was a redhead.”

“There’s the connection to Alice Riley. Pregnant,” I reminded my aunt. “Commonly believed to be a witch,” I said, and fearing I hadn’t made my case added, “and let’s don’t forget that half the magical world seems to have an ax to grind with me.”

Iris sat next to her brother. “I’m listening. Go on.”

“We’re afraid,” Oliver took over for me, “that whoever is behind this is, as you thought, attempting to work a spell of some kind using the body as a poppet. A poppet to represent Mercy.”

Iris’s lips pulled into a tight line. She looked drained this morning; the light that had been glowing in her since she slipped out from under Connor’s yoke seemed to have all but faded away. “I see.” She took a few seconds to study the map. “This doesn’t feel like the work of a real witch. It just doesn’t. An attack by proxy. That’s for amateurs.” She reached over and picked up the legal pad. “Ten pieces. Most magic workers get hung up on the numbers six, seven, and thirteen. What is the significance of that number of ten?” she asked, but then answered her own question. “Whoever is behind this knows more than about magic. Perhaps they know something about the ten united families. Something about the line and the families who remain loyal to it.”

There were indeed ten united families who maintained the line. There were originally thirteen, but three families came to regret their participation. They had been perfectly happy to throw off their own masters, but hadn’t taken into account they would lose control of the non-witches who had been subservient to them. My father, Erik, had been from one of these families. When Ellen, his wife, failed to give birth to the daughter the rebel families had hoped would come to destroy the line, Erik began an affair with my mother. Maisie and I were the products of this affair.

“If the person, or people, behind the dismembering of this unfortunate soul is indeed attempting to use the corpse as a magical substitute for Mercy, I suspect it may have absolutely nothing to do with her personally, and everything to do with her role as an anchor of the line.”

Well, that’s a comfort
, I thought, drawing my arms around myself.

“You think an ordinary magic worker is out to destroy the line?” Oliver asked.

“This is no ordinary magic work. I’d say more an extraordinary magic worker. Someone on par with Jilo . . .” Her words died as we all shared the same realization.

“Jessamine?” I thought of the anger I sensed coming from her. I could understand her anger, her sense of betrayal, but would she, could she, use magic to attack me? To attempt to harm the line through harming me? Something about this theory didn’t sit right with me. “Jessamine knows Jilo and I were close. I don’t believe she would betray Jilo like that.”

“I haven’t laid eyes on her yet, but to me she sounds like the type who would bank on your thinking that way.”

“I suspect your uncle is right. I think Jessamine might see your affection for Jilo as a weak spot in your defense. Think, Mercy, what better way to extract revenge against your grandfather than by taking down the one thing he had truly been loyal to? He may have been willing to make fools out of his family . . . out of both his families, but he would have gladly laid down his life to protect the line.”

“How do we handle this?” Oliver asked, having already tried and convicted Jessamine.

“Let me think about it for a bit.” Iris crossed to the counter and found her apron. She tied it around her waist. “In the meantime,” she said smiling at me, “you go upstairs and fetch Abby. Tell her she’s got some baking to do.” She held her head high, putting her hands on her hips and striking an intentionally humorous pose. “Thanksgiving has officially returned to the Taylor household.”