The Line (5 page)

I had spent a lot of time in this barren entryway. When Maisie and I were children, Ginny had insisted on taking advantage of the yearly break in our formal schooling to teach my sister a witch’s ways. Other than a few family outings like our Fourth of July picnic, she had refused to let Maisie out of sight for very long from Memorial Day until Labor Day. When I’d come over to play with Maisie, Ginny would make me wait in a chair in the hallway until my sister’s lessons were done. That same chair still sat sentinel in the hall, directly across from a blank spot on the wall. I swear Ginny kept that area undecorated with the sole intention of making my wait more painful.

I tried bringing books a few times, but Ginny would always take away the ones she didn’t approve of, which was basically all of them. I tried bringing paper and pencils to draw. “You have no talent, don’t waste the paper,” Ginny would say, tearing my drawings in two. So I’d sit there in that straight-back, wicker bottomed chair with nothing but my imagination to keep me company. It was there that I started making up many of the outrageous stories I now shared on my tours.

I took a couple steps farther in. To the right was Ginny’s rarely used dining room. To the left, a room whose furnishings were so antiquated I could only bring myself to think of it as a parlor. There was absolute silence in the house.

Except for the buzzing of a horsefly. And Great-Aunt Ginny’s discount store clock striking off the seconds louder than a jackhammer striking concrete.

An unexpected odor enveloped my senses. Metallic and alkaline, it was unmistakable, yet impossibly out of place. I registered it as the smell of blood, and then everything slowed way down. I followed the coppery scent into the parlor. There were splatters on the wall. Still red, just turning brown.

Ginny’s body was on the floor, her head cracked clean open. I didn’t feel for a pulse. There was no need. Ginny was still and silent and horrible. I knew she was dead. The top of her skull was lying six inches away from the rest of her. God knows I hated the old biddy, but seeing her here like this…I obviously didn’t know what the word “hate” meant. This here, this picture stretched out before me was hate. There are a lot of gentler ways to take someone out. Whoever did this enjoyed the doing.

The room began to move in and out in waves, and I wished the blackness would just suck me under. More than that, I wished—oh, how I wished—that Ginny’s death would be sucked back into the sea of the things that
might
happen, but never would. Someone was screaming. I realized it was me, and I let myself continue.

The rational part of my mind told me to stop carrying on. To call for help. I told it to fuck off, and continued screaming until I was good and satisfied that the heavens had heard me. Then, and only then, did I reach for my phone.

FOUR

“You did the right thing calling us, sugar,” Aunt Iris said pulling me into her overly perfumed bosom. “You did the right thing calling us before the police. We’d never been able to get a fix on the energy in this room if the sheriff and his bunch of dimwits had been traipsing all over the house, contaminating the scene with their thoughts.”

“She’s done messed up things here enough herself,” Connor muttered. Iris released me and gave him a look that would wither concrete.

“What’s done is done. Right now, we need to put up a concealment around this place to keep people from nosing around until we are done here.” A concealment didn’t make objects invisible or render sounds silent; it just made folks ignore whatever it was you wanted to hide from them. The two set about silently working the concealment spell, although to me their efforts just looked like they were trying to finger paint the air.

“Who could have done this?” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have harmed Ginny. And I don’t mean that in the “who could harm a defenseless old lady” kind of way. I mean it in the “who the hell could have busted through her defenses and slayed the dragon” kind of way. I felt the blood freeze in my veins. Could this be the sacrifice Jilo had promised to make on my behalf?

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, my girl,” Connor said. “But you aren’t helping us any by hanging out here and projecting your thoughts so loudly. Now get the hell outta here while we work.” His right hand adjusted the belt straining over his paunch while the pendulum in his left began to swing in spurts and stops.

“Connor!” Iris exclaimed. “The poor girl is already shaken up enough.”

“And her vibrations are shaking this room apart. Go on, girl. Get out of here before you make it impossible for us to suss out what the hell happened,” he said, returning his attention to the swinging arc of his pendulum. The pendulum was Connor’s connection to power, even if it was a weak one. Most true witches have a few gifts in common—with focus, just about all of them can read the thoughts of non-witches, and most can move things without having to touch them. But witches tend to be particularly skilled in one or two specific areas. Connor was weak as water in most things, but he could use his pendulum to track down just about anything, from a missing pair of glasses to a missing child. I knew without asking that he was looking for the murder weapon.

“Come on, sweetheart. Your uncle’s right. I think it would be best for you to get out into the fresh air. You shouldn’t have had to see any of this.”

I let myself be guided outside and deposited on the squeaky old glider that had been on Great-Aunt Ginny’s porch longer than I’d been alive. Within moments the Savannah heat began to lick around my ankles and up my calves. It took me slowly, but confidently, with the experience of immemorial dawns.

The sun traced a finger up my thigh, the solstice morning in Savannah marking its passage across the sky and projecting the shadow of a weathervane from a nearby house onto me. Leaning back on the glider, I surrendered to the heat, the scent of blood, and the relentless ticking of Ginny’s clock, which I could still hear from the porch. The seat groaned beneath me, the sound lost somewhere between protest and pleasure. A horrible thought occurred to me: The same heat that was warming my skin was beating in through the window and onto Ginny’s body, hastening its decay. I shook the thought out of my head and tried to focus instead on the first tiny bead of sweat that was forming behind my knee. I tried not to imagine what had happened, tried not to corrupt the energies that would help Aunt Iris and Uncle Connor figure everything out.

Through the screen of the open window I heard Aunt Iris say, “She couldn’t help it. She hasn’t been trained.” Her voice carried through the still air like a stage whisper.

“Nothing to train,” Connor snorted in reply. I shot him a look through the window. He and Iris had raised Maisie and me. My mother, Emily, the youngest female in the Taylor tribe, had died giving birth to us, and she’d never seen fit to tell anyone who our daddy was. I would have turned to Connor like a flower toward the sun if he had shown me the slightest modicum of paternal affection. But that had never happened. Far from it; he saddled me with the nickname “The Disappointment” by the time I’d turned six. Our eyes locked as the name crossed through my mind, and for a moment I thought I sensed something like regret in his expression. Was it in the twitch of his mouth or just the way his eyes darted back to the pendulum he carried? The look was there, and then it was gone. He returned his focus to the pendulum, walking around in a seemingly random fashion as the pendulum turned or stopped. “Damned shame it weren’t Maisie here first instead of her sister.”

Maisie had been his darling since birth. She had come into this world with so much strength that the other witch families hadn’t even needed a birth announcement—she’d simply registered on everyone’s radar. Me, I had come in a weak second, kind of like the universe’s afterthought. Most were as shocked to learn of my arrival as they were saddened by my mother’s passing.

“You need to have some consideration for the poor girl. This has been a shock. She knows this goes beyond what happened to Ginny. She knows that the line may have been damaged.”

“Darlin’, I ain’t blaming her. I blame myself. If I’d acted like a real father and taken her in hand, explained things to her…” Connor repented. “Mercy’s a good girl,” he said. “She did the best she could by calling us.” I was surprised to hear a break in his voice. It was the first time he’d betrayed any tenderness for me. “But right now, we only got a few minutes left to figure out who did this to Ginny. Mercy’s panic when she found Ginny was almost fierce enough to overwrite what happened here. We have to try to catch whatever imprint is left, and then we gotta make sure that the line is holding. I need you to focus too. When we’re done, I’ll call Oliver and tell him to get his sweet ass home, and you can start rounding up the rest of the family.”

Connor disappeared from my view, but I could still hear his heavy steps as he shuffled around the ground floor of the house. Then the squeak of a loose stair told me he was heading to the second floor. I focused on Aunt Iris as she knelt over the body and began to sway silently, reaching out for whatever energies might still be lingering. Silence gave way to sobbing as Iris surrendered to her grief. Strange, growing up, I’d often wished Ginny dead. Granted my wish, seeing what her death looked like, my blood called out to hers and screamed for justice. Guess she really was family after all.

“The weapon ain’t here,” a defeated Connor said, returning to the room. I heard him fall noisily into one of the armchairs.

Aunt Iris didn’t respond. She didn’t even seem to register that Connor had spoken. Her sobbing stopped, but she continued to sway over Ginny’s body.

Psychometry was Aunt Iris’s specialty. She could hold any object and tell you about its owner or anyone who had a tangential relationship with it. Not necessarily the most amazing of powers, but much appreciated in a city full of antiques with questionable provenance. If Connor had succeeded in finding the weapon, Iris would have had a good chance of finding out who had used it against Ginny. Holding the murder weapon would have left her open to some pretty fierce energy, but without it, she would have no choice but to lay hands on Ginny herself, which would be exponentially worse. Opening herself up to that degree of dark energy was mighty dangerous. Even when it’s just a regular Joe who’s died, a door gets opened and things that should be kept on the far side of that door sometimes make their way through. Murder compounds the problem, inviting in even darker things. The murder of someone like Great-Aunt Ginny could rip the door right off its hinges. And I realized I hadn’t helped matters any.

“The energy is receding,” Aunt Iris said, opening her eyes and standing stiffly. “It’s now or never.”

“Girl,” Connor called out to me, making me jump. “You try calling your sister. See if she’s on her way yet. And try Ellen again.”

“Maisie’s phone went straight to voice mail when we called,” Aunt Iris replied. “That means she’s out with that boy, and she isn’t going to be picking up. And I don’t begin to guess where Ellen spent the night, but she’s probably still passed out or too hungover to be of any service. We need to do this now.” She paused, as if weighing her options and then called out to me. “Mercy, honey, you come on back in.”

“Ah, hell no,” Connor began to object.

“It’s now or never!” Iris cut him short. “We don’t have time to hunt anyone down, and I have even less time for nonsense from you.” She took a breath and composed herself. “Come on Mercy, I’m gonna walk you through this.” The porch swing sang out like a Greek chorus as I stood. Iris sensed my hesitation. “Don’t be afraid.”

I went back in, averting my eyes from the body on the floor. The perspiration that had formed between my shoulder blades turned cold and trickled down my spine.

“Now I know you have never been shown any of this before, sugar, but you are gonna do just fine.”

“All right,” I replied, but my knees felt like they were going to buckle at any moment, and the scent of decay in the room was making me light-headed. “What do I do?”

“Remember when you girls were little, and you’d play Red Rover with Peter and his friends?” She smiled a little, her own recollection of watching us momentarily taking her away from the horror at her feet. “What we’re gonna do is very much like that. I’m going to call out for a certain energy, but once I open myself up, there may be other forces that try to beat their way in. I just need you to stand here and hold hands with me and Connor. Your strength, your inner light, it’ll help keep anything bad from breaking through.” I stood next to her and took her small, cold hand. Connor stepped forward and swiped up my other hand into his meaty paw. “Okay. Good.” She smiled reassuringly at me and then closed her eyes. “You may see some things. Don’t let them frighten you. They’re only shadows. Keep your mind focused on something real. Something you love. Something that makes you feel safe.”

My mind began to reel like a roulette wheel, clicking past people, places, and things, but not settling on anything that gave me the level of comfort I suspected I would need. My mama had died before I could know her. I had no idea who my daddy was. Aunt Iris had tried to raise us as best she could, but Connor had tainted our relationship. Uncle Oliver, he was great for swooping in with presents and recounting colorful stories, but he spent as little time in Savannah as possible, and he didn’t spell home to me. Aunt Ellen shared what she could with me, but her beauty pageant makeup secrets and the stories of her old romantic conquests were always whispered through the whiskey on her breath. There was Peter, but I was too confused about our relationship to take any comfort from him, and Jackson just made me feel guilty. In the end, there was only Maisie. Despite our differences, and the jealousy I had always felt toward her, she was the one person in this world who made me feel safe and loved.