The Line (27 page)

Connor seemed to understand what I was doing. “There’s nothing down here,” he said. “Ginny kept the important stuff upstairs.” He left me at the foot of the stairs and slowly made his way to the upper story.

I was filled with a giddy uncertainty. Ginny had never allowed me on the second floor. Never. I put my foot on the first step, applying gentle pressure as if I expected it to be booby-trapped. It took my weight without any objections, and the next step beckoned me. Each step I took felt like an act of retribution against the old woman who had done her best to alienate me from my family because I didn’t share their gifts.

A door stood open at the end of the hall. Sensing that it had been Ginny’s room, I crossed the threshold, running my hands over her dressing table, bed, and nightstand, trying to pick up any remaining vibrations. All I felt was Ginny’s absence. Emboldened, I flipped on the light, only to see pictures of Maisie at various stages in her development staring back at me. One of them had originally been a photo of the two of us, but Ginny had cut the picture in half and used thick matting to hide the part of my presence that couldn’t be easily excised. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t hurt, that it didn’t matter. Ginny was gone. Truth was, it hurt like hell.

Connor’s voice called to me from another room, so I extinguished the light and went down the hall. He was standing in the doorway of a pink and girly room that was obviously Maisie’s home away from home. He stepped aside to let me enter.

One full wall was taken up by a built-in bookcase, filled from one end to the other with modern journals and ancient texts. I opened one of the newest looking ones to find notes Maisie had made during a lesson she had received at Ginny’s feet. The idea of Ginny happily training my sister while forcing me to wait downstairs staring at a blank wall angered me. I threw the notebook to the floor and pulled another one out at random. The handwriting in this one was more mature, the spells more complex. Diagrams I couldn’t even begin to understand were traced along the margins, composed of geometric shapes that seemed to defy Euclid’s wildest imaginings and strange symbols that I had never seen before, some of them seemingly astrological. I almost returned it to its shelf, but instead tossed it to the floor in another gust of temper.

Connor sat on the foot of Maisie’s bed, and with a casual gesture of his hand, the chair from her dresser pulled up next to me. “I think you’ll want to sit for the next part,” he said, his voice breaking nervously. I complied without protest. “These books, the knowledge in them, I never wanted to hide any of it from you. Not really. But as long as Ginny had her hands on the reins, none of us dared to defy her, not even Maisie. Now that Ginny’s gone, I’m glad that the families support your education. I never wanted to keep you in the dark. Do you believe me? Do you believe everything I’ve been telling you?” His desire for me to say yes buzzed around him as brightly as a pawnshop’s neon sign.

“Yes, I guess I do at that,” I said, wondering why it mattered to him so much.

He smiled at me again, and seemed to be struggling with how to express what he wanted to say. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, Mercy. A lot of mistakes with you for sure, but a lot of mistakes in general.” He hesitated for a moment, then just dove in. “I married your Aunt Iris for my parents’ sake. I never loved her,” he said, scanning my face for a reaction. I didn’t give him one, but I felt betrayed, not only on Iris’s behalf, but on my own as well. That he could have implicated us all in his lie made my blood boil. I stayed silent, and after a few moments he continued. “My parents were proud that a Taylor woman would have me. They were proud that I was marrying above my station. Iris was beautiful and wealthy and a much more powerful witch than I’d ever be. And she loved me. I thought it would be enough.”

He got up from the bed and began pacing the small room, filling it up with his bulk. “Your Aunt Ellen had just become a teenager when Iris and I married. Your mother was still only a redheaded pipsqueak, skinny as a string bean and as willful as a…” He hesitated and faced me. “Well, as an I don’t know what.”

He returned to the foot of the bed. “You know that Iris and I lived away from Savannah the better part of a decade. We visited often enough, but I never really connected with your grandparents or Iris’s siblings. It was only after Iris’s last miscarriage that your grandparents insisted we come back to Savannah. Iris had almost died in our last attempt to have a baby, and, well, your grandparents decided they wanted their girl home. They held the power, and Iris held the purse strings, so home we came.”

I watched his hand as it alternately worried and smoothed the pink bedspread. “By then your mama was all grown up, and the truth of the matter was that she was more educated about the world than I was in a lot of ways. She knew that I was unfulfilled. She had joined a kind of club here in Savannah,” he said.

My stomach started churning as I anticipated his next words. I wanted to stop him from speaking, but all I could do was listen.

“You see, it was Emily who first started up with Tillandsia, and she brought me into it, with Iris’s acceptance, if that matters to you. After that last miscarriage, Iris wasn’t much interested in marital relations anymore. But I was a normal man, in the prime of life. I had a normal man’s needs, and Iris accepted that.” He patted his stomach. “I know you can’t see it now, but a couple of decades ago, there were plenty of women who wanted to be with me.”

“I don’t care,” I spat out. I was embarrassed beyond belief. The very last thing I wanted to think of was Connor as a sexual being, and I definitely didn’t want to think about him getting his thrills as my mother watched on.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should stick to what’s important.”

“And what is important?” I asked, my patience wearing thin.

“What is important is that I loved your mother. I loved Emily. Completely and with all my soul.”

“I see,” I said. “And do you think she loved you?”

“She gave her life to have my children,” he said and the earth stopped moving in the heavens.

My whole body went ice cold, but I began to sweat in the same instant. His words had knocked the wind out of me. “She
what
?” I asked when I found my breath.

“You girls. You and Maisie. You’re my daughters,” he said.

“Oh, no. That is not possible.” I held out my hand as a warning that he should not try to approach me. “It is not true,” I said, just so I could hear the words and try to believe them.

“Look at me, Mercy. Right now, you have a witch’s power. If you look at me, you can tell whether I’m lying to you.”

I studied him intently, every slight wrinkle on his face, every black mark on his soul, and as much as I loathed the idea, I knew beyond a shadow of any doubt that he was not lying. He was my father, our father. The idea struck me as hilarious, and laughing like a maniac, I stood with such force that I knocked over the chair where I’d been sitting.

“Your aunts made me promise to wait until you turned twenty-one to tell you, so you would be adult enough to handle the truth. I know I’m rushing things by a few hours, but I couldn’t wait another minute,” he said. “I needed you to know that I wasn’t lying. Without Oliver’s power to confirm the truth, a part of you would always doubt me. Hell, I could walk up to you with a DNA test and a signed birth certificate and you still wouldn’t want to believe me.”

“Does Maisie know?” I asked. I felt like screaming and crying. Now it was abundantly clear why Iris would be worried that I’d turn out like my mother, with a taste for other women’s men.

“No,” he responded. “At least I don’t think so, but with all of the power she can access, who knows what she’s learned? I was hoping to tell you both together. At the same time. I never anticipated Ginny’s murder.”

“I don’t think any of us did,” I said, moving toward the door.

Connor’s arm shot out and grabbed mine. “I think you’re wrong there. I think one of us did.”

“Okay, I’m listening,” I said. Releasing my arm, he reached into his pocket and unfolded an oversized sheet of paper. The paper was enchanted, and the creases smoothed themselves out instantly. “I found this among Ginny’s affairs.”

I took the paper from him and scanned it. Without my borrowed magic, the page would have appeared blank, but when I focused on it with a witch’s gaze, words appeared—words so ancient that I would by no honest rights have the ability to understand them. But somehow I did. “It’s a dissolution spell,” I said, turning the paper into the light. At the moment I had no patience for deciphering the scrawls, so I folded the spell and put it into my pocket so that I could examine it more closely later.

“She was going to do it,” Connor said. “Ginny was going to do away with Wren once and for all, and we both know Ellen would never allow that to happen.”

“Ellen would never have killed Ginny!”

“You so sure about that?” he asked. “I’m not. We both know that she’s been holding on by a thread for a decade now. If it weren’t for the whiskey and Wren, she would have quit trying long ago.”

I wondered if he could possibly be right. The pieces all added up, but I wouldn’t let them fit together. Having Connor for a father was bad enough…I wouldn’t believe that my sweet aunt was capable of murder. “No. You’re wrong. I won’t believe it.”

“Don’t believe it if you don’t want to,” he said. “Frankly, I think Ellen did us all a big favor. I sure ain’t going to turn her in to the families. As long as she managed to cover her tracks okay, I’m fine with what she did.”

Connor had revealed more to me tonight than I’d be able to process in a hundred years. “All right,” I said. “You’ve told me what you wanted to. I’m ready to leave now.”

“You can’t go yet,” he said. “I brought you here for a reason. There’s one more thing I have to share with you, but I need to do it here.” He turned and walked over to the bookcase, pulling down one of the newer journals. He held it out to me, and I could see Maisie’s name scrawled across the front. The childishness of her signature clued me in to the fact that it was older than it looked. “I’ve tried to take it from the house, but I can’t. It won’t let me. I had to bring you here to show it to you.” He handed it over.

My hands struggled against the binding, but I couldn’t open it, try as I might. It had been magically locked. I brushed my hand across the cover, and even though it wouldn’t open, some information leaked through the seal. I could tell that the journal contained information far more valuable than all of the Witchcraft 101 manuals on the bookshelf combined. It was sealed because it contained the secrets of the line. Even in my ignorance I was aware that Ginny should never ever have shared these secrets with Maisie; they were only to be passed from one anchor to another.

“You know what’s in there, don’t you? You can sense it,” Connor asked, delight spreading across his face. “I knew the second I touched it.”

“It’s about the line. This journal is full of its secrets—things only an anchor should know.”

“The families would have bound Ginny if they’d known she was telling Maisie these things.”

“Look at the writing on the cover! Maisie was far too young to know what she was getting into.”

“Sure, that’s how we see it, and the families would most likely have agreed. But Ginny, though, that’s a different matter. They would’ve shown the old gal no mercy. She would have been bound and deposited far, far away from any place she could access the line.”

“Okay,” I said. “But she’s dead, and Maisie is going to be the anchor. What’s the point of showing me this?”

He righted the chair that I’d knocked over then sat in it himself. “The point is that this is our chance to learn how to tap into the mainline, yours and mine. You’ve tasted Oliver’s power. Are you telling me you wouldn’t like your own? And not just a touch of it either, but a connection to the source itself? ’Cause I sure do, Mercy. I’m tired of living in your family’s shadow, with just enough of my own magic for parlor tricks. I want more.”

“Then take it. Why share it with me?”

“For two reasons,” he said. “First, you are my beautiful daughter. I want you to have all the power you’ve ever wanted. I’ve watched you since you were little. You’ve always done your best not to be jealous of Maisie, but I know that deep down, a small part of you can’t help but covet her abilities.”

“And the second reason?” I asked, sensing that it would be the true reason he was taking me along on his joyride.

“The book. I can’t take it from the house, and…” he hesitated. “I can’t open it.”

I laughed out loud and fanned myself with the journal. “And you think I can?”

“No,” he said cautiously, sounding like he was worried that he’d moved too quickly and put me off. “Not normally, that is. But I am hoping that maybe, what with you being Maisie’s twin—”

“Fraternal,” I interjected, to remind him of that fact.

“Okay, but you’re still her twin. And you’re full of Oliver’s magic right now. Maybe the combination of those two things will be enough for you to convince the book to open for you. And you have to remember, Maisie wasn’t the one who was chosen as the anchor by the lots—you were.”

“You said it was a mistake.”

“I thought so at the time, but now I’m not so sure. Just try to open it while we still have the chance.” His hands were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. His eyes pinned me in place like a butterfly to cardboard. I could tell how badly he wanted this to work.

“And when it’s open?”

“We’ll copy all of its secrets. And when Oliver’s power leaves you in the morning, you’ll have a bottomless well of your own to draw from.”

“No, Connor. It is tempting. It is so tempting, but it’s too dangerous. I don’t care what Ginny’s reasons were for sharing this with Maisie. We aren’t anchors, and we should not be tampering with the line. God only knows what damage we might unintentionally do.”

“Then you’re willing to let the power go? Or do you think Jilo will honor the little pact you made with her today? Yeah, I know who hides out in that tunnel you snuck out of. The two of you made some kind of blood pact, but I can tell you from personal experience that Jilo does not live up to the promises she makes.”