by Horn, J. D.
He folded his arms against his chest, trying to appear relaxed, and actually doing a pretty good job of it. “I’m not playing at anything. I’m not playing at all. I am here to do what no one else in the family has the spine to do. I’m here to protect the line. I am here to deal with you.”
At that moment I made the connection between the spell he had been working, the dimming of light, the loss of color, the ever-constricting ring, and the attack that had occurred at Jilo’s house. “It was you who attacked Jilo and me,” I said.
He had followed me to Jilo’s home and set the spell in motion that nearly collapsed reality in around us. We’d escaped with our lives, but Jilo’s house had literally been wiped from the face of the earth, just as if it had never been there. The magic he was using was darker even than what I’d seen through Tillandsia. He’d tapped into a magic so toxic I couldn’t even imagine its source.
He smiled. “So what if it was?”
“So what if it was?” I parroted him. I felt my skin flush as my fists clenched into tight balls. “You think it makes you a big man, attacking an old woman? If it weren’t for you, for what you did, she might not have—”
“Not have what? Kicked the bucket? Bought the farm?” He leaned in over me, glared down at me. “That old bat was well past her sell-by date, and you had no business exposing the line to her anyway. She was too smart. Too crafty. What if she had found a way to hook into it? Do you think she would have put the line’s interest over her own? Hell, why should she? You’re an anchor, and you certainly don’t.”
I ignored his gibes and took a step back. He knew he was prodding a very sore spot, and I surmised he was taunting me for his own amusement, trying to push me to the point where I would lose control. A time not so long ago, he might have succeeded at tapping into my famous temper, but not now. Still, he sickened me. His jealousy and greed had made him a fiend. He must have been the one messing around Jilo’s place of rest. “You are a ghoul. Defiling graves. Making deals with demons. Dismembering an innocent woman. Do you even have an idea how lost you are?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve come to protect the line. I got nothing to do with any other mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”
I began to circle him counterclockwise, forcing him to turn with me. I’d learned much from Jilo. Even if my movements created no magical effect, they would affect him psychologically, put him on the defensive.
This was the first time I’d had the opportunity to examine Teague through a witch’s eyes. Before I had my power, he managed to intimidate me, but no longer. For one thing, in spite of what his enormous ego led him to believe, I didn’t sense he had much of his own power to play with. And when it came to smarts, he wasn’t the sharpest point on the pentagram.
My instincts told me he thought himself a leader in the cause, but he was just a dupe, not a person who had the wherewithal to pull this off. “Okay, then. If you aren’t relying on blood magic, how are you working these spells?” I stopped in my tracks and hit him where he was most vulnerable. “I know you don’t have enough power on your own. Whose magic are you using? Whose skirts are you hiding behind, little boy?”
His head shook from left to right; then he lunged forward, erasing the slight space I’d maintained between us. His hands clenched into meaty fists, red sparks shooting out around them. I wasn’t sure if he intended to use magic against me or punch me. Or both. I braced myself, but I’d be damned before I gave up any ground. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he said in a hiss. “But I sure would like to start with you.”
I should have felt frightened, terrified even, but a deep sense of peace descended on me as some important pieces shifted into place. “And you would if you could. If that were all it would take. But you can’t, because if you did, the line would never, ever take you as anchor.” I laughed. “If anything, it would cut you off completely from its magic. You’d be left small. Impotent.” I leaned in further toward him. “That is why you’ve been trying to trap me. You aren’t trying to kill me. You’re trying to contain me.” I realized that even the spell that erased Jilo’s home had been a snare, not a weapon.
His lips curled up into a smile. “Wanna try to bounce yourself home again? It was fun watching the barrier smack you right back down. Hell, keep trying. I could watch it all day.”
He had begun to regain his footing, so I smiled and shook my head as if I doubted he’d thought the whole scenario through. “So what exactly is your plan?” I took another jab at his ego. “You do have a plan, don’t you? ’Cause I got to tell you, only a loser would try to play something like this without a plan.”
He straightened to his full height, and glared down at me through narrowed, contemptuous eyes. He licked his lips. “Of course I have a plan, and this place right where we’re standing is it. I have caught you. You have been contained, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
I looked around, doing my best to appear unimpressed. “What’s so special about Kaleidoscope Land? Sure, it’s a bit disorienting at first, but I’ll figure a way out of it sooner or later . . .”
“That might just be true,” he said and let loose with a howling laugh. “But later will be a hell of a lot later than you think.” He winked at me. “Seems like a big-shot anchor like yourself would have learned a thing or two about how time passes differently in some dimensions than others.”
“Oh, aren’t you clever?” I asked. “Shift me to a place where time moves more quickly. Where I will live out my natural lifespan in months rather than years, so you don’t have to wait long for your next shot. There’s one big problem with that, genius. It looks like you are stuck here with me.”
A lopsided smile came to his lips. “No, you’re wrong there, Red. I’ve got a hall pass.” He turned his forearm toward me, showing me still-inflamed skin that bore a fresh tattoo, a circle composed of symbols that resembled stylized lightning bolts or sharply jointed versions of the letter “s.” He looked at me with such smugness, I should have hated him, but instead my heart broke for him. I recognized the symbol. I’d seen something similar in the file my grandfather had compiled on Lebensborn, the grotesque Nazi breeding project, the source of my very own existence. I had no choice about having Lebensborn written into my DNA, but Teague chose to place its mark on his body. It sickened me, but I couldn’t afford the luxury of pitying him.
“How long have you been working with Emily?” I asked.
He reached up and wiped the smile from his lips with a swipe of his hand. “Who?” His eyes rounded in confusion.
He had to be faking it. “Don’t play stupid. Emily. My mother.” I shook my head at his gullibility. “She isn’t your ally. She isn’t working with you. She’s been tricking you. She wants to end the line.”
His head jerked back and shook involuntarily. “I thought your mother died?” His words had started as a statement, then twisted into a question. He wasn’t pretending. He really didn’t know.
But if he hasn’t been drawing magic from my mother, where is he getting his juice? No sooner had the question formed in my mind than I was struck by a vision of Teague. Stranger still, rather than seeing him from the outside, I experienced that revelation as if I were he. Through his eyes, I watched his reflection in a mirror. He stood alone, in a room lit by a single candle.
Since he was a witch, I should not have been able to pierce his psyche so easily, even if I were much more powerful than Teague. Still, something, an unbidden power, had given me access to his memories. This vision, like a silent movie, continued to unfold in my mind.
Teague’s was the only visible figure, but he wasn’t truly alone. I sensed others, disincarnate intelligences surrounding him, guiding him. One was much stronger than all the others combined. Watching himself in the mirror, he stripped to the waist and drew a sign much like the one found near Jilo’s grave on his own chest, over his heart. I saw an arc of e
nergy appear from nowhere and strike him, driving him down to his knees. I intuited it wasn’t just magic, it wasn’t just power he had accepted into himself. He had welcomed a consciousness into himself. He had offered himself up for possession. No, that wasn’t quite right—he had allowed himself to become an anchor for a power that had lost its rights to be in our world.
Rather than continue as a passive viewer, I decided to attempt to direct his consciousness to open even wider to me. It yielded with ease, and I pushed deeper into his psyche, following the line of dark magic that connected him to the font of his power. What I found there chilled me, for I recognized this entity.
What I uncovered was not a minor demon like Wren, nor even a greater one like Barron, the demon Emily had sacrificed in her attempt to deliver me over to the old ones. The source of Teague’s magic wasn’t a demon in the conventional sense at all. My mind flashed back to my first taste of magic, when I witnessed an image other than my own in the mirror. Then I realized, Teague had somehow joined forces with one of the most dangerous witches this world had ever know, Gudrun, onetime best friend of my own paternal great-grandmother, Maria Orsic.
“Gudrun.” Her name escaped my lips.
Teague trembled when he realized how easily I had breached his defenses. His eyes fell, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
I laughed in his face. “Even if you could hold me here, and watch from some safe and distant perch as my life force failed me, you would still have one big problem with this scheme of yours.” He stared at me, shaking his head as if he were trying to force me out of it. “Haven’t you felt it, Teague? The world has changed. The line has changed. You could wait a thousand lifetimes, and still it will never choose you. Never.”
I took advantage of his confusion and closeness to reach out and snatch his tattooed forearm. “Let me teach you a little blood magic,” I said, sinking my nails deep enough in him to break through his skin. He squealed as his blood covered the tattoo. I claimed the sigil’s magic for my own purpose. “Come on, Pinocchio, let’s go say hello to the puppet master.”
I closed my eyes and slid. This time I felt no resistance; I moved easily beyond the borders of my cousin’s latest trap, this time with Teague himself in tow. When I opened my eyes less than a second later, we stood in my own bedroom. Teague staggered away from me, falling to his hands and knees and vomiting all over my rug. He was going to clean that up himself, once I got through whacking him over the nose. I turned away from the sight of his stricken face, only to catch my own reflection in my makeup mirror.
I hated what I saw there, as the sheen of Gudrun’s foul magic clung to me. I forced myself to shrug off the fear of what my return ticket might end up costing me. “Come on, Gudrun. I got your boy, and I know you can hear me.” For a fleeting moment, I saw her face, ice-blue eyes and perfect nose framed by a black pageboy bob, but as with the first time I had used my mirror to see into her world, she waved her hand and faded instantly. This time, though, I heard a pop, and although the glass remained in its frame, a webwork of cracks shot out from the mirror’s center toward its outer edges. I guess Gudrun had had enough of my popping in uninvited.
To think the families had wanted to send me to this woman for training. If I had acquiesced, if I had gone to her, would I have ever made it home again? The sound of laughter rang out behind me, and I turned to find Teague back on his feet. “You don’t stand a chance, not against her. Not against us.”
“There is no more ‘us’ as far as you and she are concerned,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm but calm. “Get it through your thick head, Teague. Gudrun has been lying to you. Tricking you. She has no interest in protecting the line. If anything, she is the line’s greatest threat.”
“You’re wrong. She’s changed. She’s no longer a threat to the line. You are.”
I held my hand up to him. “Stop. Believe what you want, but I am going to send you home now. You’ve left me without a choice. The families, the other anchors, I will have to tell them what you’ve been up to. That you have been conspiring against me, against an anchor.”
“You are either a liar or a fool,” Teague said. His face was deep red with anger, but then his emotions seemed to turn on a dime. He broke out in raucous laughter, the mirthful outburst causing tears to fall from his eyes. He wiped at them with the back of his hand. “You know, you really are too much. You don’t have as many friends as you think you do. Do you think I approached Gudrun on my own? That we somehow figured out a way to sneak behind the other anchors’ backs so she could use me to host her magic? Some of the other anchors, Mercy, they already know, and they are rooting for me.” Was it my instinct or only my fear that made me believe him? “And I am going to keep coming for you until I get the job done.”
“Your scheming against me has nothing to do with protecting the line. This is all about your pitiable need to feel important.” The hate in his eyes made me wince. “You are going to leave me alone,” I said, but this time the words sounded much less convincing.
“Oh, no. I am going to do no such thing. The only way you are going to get me to leave you alone is if you kill me, and we both know you don’t have it in you.”
“You’re right,” a familiar voice replied. I had been so focused on Teague I hadn’t even noticed Maisie standing in the doorway. “She doesn’t, but I do.”
Before I could even think to stop her, Maisie raised her hand toward my shattered mirror. The largest shard broke free from the frame and whisked around me. It reached Teague and sliced his neck open, clean to the bone. The life shot out from him in a rush of scarlet as he fell to the floor before me. I blinked at the splatter of his blood that touched my face.
When I opened my eyes, Maisie looked up from Teague’s corpse to my face. “Oh,” she said. “Let me grab you a towel for that.”
ELEVEN
I’d seen so many horrors since the morning I’d found Ginny’s body lying in her parlor. In so many ways, the sight of my cousin’s corpse lying on the floor before me was just one more. I wasn’t sure what I should be feeling, but all I did feel was shame. Somehow I knew that in fifty or maybe one hundred years, when my own granddaughter or even great-great-granddaughter charged the atmosphere of this room, searching for memories of me, this one, this sight of me covered in Teague’s blood, would be what rose up before her. Would she feel the horror that remained frozen in my chest?
A scream caused me to raise my eyes. Oh, good. That’s covered. The words went through my mind as my cousin Abigail stood before me hyperventilating. My legs collapsed out from under me, and I landed on my knees. My gaze returned to Teague’s face, which lay turned toward me, his dead eyes glazed over but still full of surprise. I heard the heavy tread of boots running up the stairs, down the hall. Sam found my room before Iris could join him. I hadn’t expected to see him here today. He must have had a change of heart about joining us. I bet he was rethinking that decision right now. He knelt beside me and lifted me, carrying me from the room. Oliver met us in the hall. He dodged into my room, then came back just as quickly, the color having faded from his face.
Iris appeared in the hall, and Oliver grabbed her before she could go into my room. “Don’t,” Oliver said to her. “You don’t need to see this.”
The words that followed blurred together into an indecipherable barrage of meaningless sound. The light around me dimmed, and I closed my eyes. I drew a breath and forced myself to return to the moment. “I’m okay, now. Thank you,” I said. “You can put me down.” Sam shifted me carefully until my feet touched the floor. The room began to spin.
“I don’t think so,” Sam said and bent down to slide his right arm back beneath my knees.
“She killed him. Without a qualm. Her face . . .” A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. Yeats’s words surfaced in my mind. “No feeling. She just . . .” My voice failed me.
“I have a tarp and some duct tape in m
y truck,” Sam said in an even voice. Sweet, handsome, and willing to help hide the bodies without asking a single question. He really was a keeper. I began laughing again even though none of this should have hit me as funny. So this was what hysteria felt like.
Iris stood before us, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should hug Sam or slap him. “Hopefully we haven’t come to that,” she said to Sam.
Maisie reappeared with a dampened cloth. She had washed the blood from her hands, but there were still splatters on her shirt. The sight of her ended my laughter.
“I could see into him,” Maisie said, and I raised my eyes to meet hers. “He hated you, and he was never going to give up until he had taken everything from you.” Her eyes narrowed in disgust. “I saw that he dreamed, no, fantasized, about overpowering you, hurting you, killing you. It gave him pleasure.” The word came out sounding sick and dirty. “While I was gone, while I was wherever the line took me, I found myself in a place of such certainty, such clarity. I knew then if ever I laid eyes on you again, I had to do everything in my power to protect you. I’m sorry if my sense of conviction makes you uncomfortable, but I will gladly kill a thousand Teagues if it means keeping you safe.” I didn’t know whether to feel gratitude or horror as her words hung in the air between us. “Here.” Maisie offered me the washcloth.
“I’ll take it, darling,” Iris responded. “Abby, can you take Maisie back to her room?”
Abigail had followed us into the hall, but she was still pretty much frozen in the same stance. “Yes, I’ll do that, but then I’m packing my bags and going home. I thought I could help, but I’m afraid the girl’s too far gone.” She looked at me as tears brimmed her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t sign on for this.” Maybe it was uncharitable of me after all she had tried to do for us, but I felt disappointed in her. The sight of blood caused her to give up on Maisie, even after Maisie had flung herself into Gehenna to save her.