by Horn, J. D.
For a moment I thought he had settled, but suddenly he lunged at me. “No. I will not accept this,” he said, his face nearly wild, shining with newfound determination. “You ask me to understand. You ask me to accept.” He came so close to me, I could feel his hot breath on me. It was the closest thing I had experienced to a true physical sensation since remembering my true nature. “My answer is no. I will not accept. You are not simply the line, and Mercy was not just a trick Emily played on the world. I will not accept that you, Mercy, never existed. You may be the line, but you are also Mercy. Mercy Taylor. And I will not accept that you, Mercy, are gone.” He repeated the name like an invocation, as if mere repetition could bring her back. His passion was so great, so white hot, that for a moment I almost felt Mercy rise again in the physical world, but no, I knew that to be impossible.
He reached for me, tried to pull me into his embrace, but he tumbled forward as he passed right through me, his knees grinding into the gritty soil. He fell to his hands and knees, nearly howling from his sense of loss. I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t comfort him. I hovered near him, willing, praying, that his heart would heal and heal quickly.
Emmet forced himself up and, stumbling backward, returned to Corinne’s side. He sat some moments and quieted himself. When he could finally bring himself to look my way, his black eyes burned. “Somehow. Someday. I will find a way. I will bring you back. I will bring you back to this world. I will bring you back to your son. And I will bring you back to me.”
He spoke of the impossible, but his devotion touched my consciousness deeply, reaching all the way down to the sacred place that had once been Mercy. Reaching all the way down to the part of me that still believed it might again be possible to be Mercy. In that instant, and only for that instant, she managed to push through. I offered her no resistance. Far from it, I welcomed her. For one last brief moment, Mercy Taylor lived again. She wanted so badly to comfort Emmet, to touch him and to let him feel her touch, that somehow and against all probability, she did. Anyone watching might have thought a breeze off the river had blown in to tousle his lengthening curls, but Emmet, Mercy, and I, we all knew better. It hadn’t been the wind at all.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Two straight weeks of ninety-eight degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity. It was crazy-making weather, and the people of Savannah had begun to snap. Twelve assaults and three murders in forty-eight hours. Adam felt sure that the strain on the power grid that knocked out folks’ air-conditioning had been a conspirator in at least one of the deaths.
“We’re too soft, too spoiled,” he said to a uniformed officer as they left the site of that crime. “We lose a little bit of comfort, and we go off our heads and start killing people.” He felt a tad hypocritical as he cranked the patrol car’s air up to high.
“Maybe, but damn,” the officer replied, “it’s like walking in dog’s breath out there.”
Adam experienced a slight jolt, a memory almost rising but then falling away, lost just beyond his ability to recall. Someone he once knew used to say that, but he would be damned if he could remember who. Sucks getting old, he thought to himself. He checked his watch. Three thirty. He had time to file his report and make it over to the Taylors’ place in time. If Savannah’s citizens could manage not to kill each other for a few more hours, he might just be able to enjoy Jordan’s party.
Grace had originally wanted to hold the event at a fancy restaurant, but Jordan had stepped forward and said he wanted something much more simple. Adam’s wallet had given a sigh of relief. Things had taken a truly odd twist, though, when Iris volunteered to host the get-together, and Grace had agreed. Adam knew happy endings were at least in theory possible, but he had never even let himself begin to hope that Grace’s family and Oliver’s people would not only declare a truce, but start making nice. Of course, it helped that, truth be told, they were all really one big family. Right now, it looked like they might end up as one big happy family, but Adam didn’t feel it was safe to relax just yet. It was still early days, he reminded himself.
Precisely at five, he moved the marker next to his name to show he was off duty. Other municipalities had long since moved over to electronic sign-ins, but Adam appreciated the old name board. Savannah could be infuriatingly slow and resistant to change, but sometimes that reticence seemed like a good thing.
Outside the station, the sky had turned the color of polished steel. Rumbles from distant thunder suggested one hell of a boomer. An enormous streak of lightning ripped apart the sky. Adam’s sense of direction told him that it must have hit somewhere in the no-man’s-land off Randolph Street, near where Normandy Street petered out, north of the cemetery and west of the golf course. He braced himself for a massive clap of thunder, but none came. In fact the world seemed somehow hushed, lying silent in expectation. Another flash lit up the sky, and Adam would have sworn under oath that the bolt had hit in the exact same spot, but again no sound followed it. His skin tingled, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He reached up and wiped the odd sensation away, then bounded across the parking lot to his own car, diving in before he might witness a third strike.
On a nice day, he would have walked. The Taylor house was well within walking distance of the station, but he didn’t want to risk it in this weather. Yeah, it was the weather setting him on edge, not the deepening conviction that this silent lightning was somehow otherworldly in origin.
He pulled up to the house and parked in the street so the driveway would be clear for the other guests. He killed the ignition and applied the emergency brake. He scanned the horizon, and the look of the sky continued to disquiet him. It had turned darker, somehow shinier, like it had been carved from a huge chunk of hematite. Another flash. His internal barometer was telling him that the pressure building up out there had little if anything to do with the natural atmosphere. He got out of the car and was instantly buffeted by a tingling current that filled the air. Well, if this weirdness was due to magic, he was certainly at the right place to find out what was going on.
He took quick steps at first, but then his speed caused him to feel embarrassed and cowardly. He slowed his pace and circled around the house to the kitchen’s entrance. He didn’t bother to knock. He was past that point now; he was family.
He stepped over the threshold to find the usually inhabited room entirely empty. “Hello?” he called. Iris’s best china and polished silver sat on the counter. In spite of the weirdness he felt while on the other side of the door, Adam smiled. It made Adam feel good that Iris was offering the best she had to honor his son. The Taylor women had been busy; the table was covered with various delectable-looking baked goods. He grabbed a cookie on his way past the table, and pushed through the swinging door into the hall.
“Oliver?” he called out. “Iris?” The entire house shook, rattled by the thunder that had until that moment held its peace. It was like the sound of the strikes he had witnessed had held off commenting until that very moment, when they could do so as one. Adam jumped and dropped his cookie. “Damn,” he said and swiped the cookie off the floor. It wasn’t like him to be so jittery.
The rage of the thunder had left him momentarily deaf to any sound other than the ringing of his own ears, but soon another sound, a furious cry, broke through. Adam made his way down the hall to the foot of the stairs. He heard voices coming from above, the loudest of which was baby Colin’s. Another ear-piercing screech followed by the lower sounds of Iris’s and Ellen’s voices.
He shoved the cookie into his coat pocket and made his way upstairs. The nursery lay near the end of the long upper floor, toward the right. He followed the cacophony of the baby’s cries. As he neared, he heard the sound of Ellen’s attempts to console the little guy.
He came up to the door and stood in the threshold. Poor Maisie sat hunched over sobbing in the nursing chair. Iris knelt beside her trying to calm her as Ellen carried Colin around, patting his
back and doing her best to console him.
“He teething?” Adam asked, causing the women to turn quickly toward him.
“No,” Iris said, her hand still resting on Maisie’s back. “We aren’t sure quite what’s wrong with him.”
“He isn’t sick,” Ellen said, just before the child let out another shriek.
“Mama,” Colin cried, and began trying to wrestle himself from Ellen’s arms. She clutched him more tightly, but the boy wanted his freedom. She returned him to his crib, where he pulled himself up. He regarded Adam with a red face and wet angry eyes.
Adam entered and placed his hand on Colin’s head. “What is it, little man?”
Maisie looked up, dark circles under her pained eyes. “He keeps calling for me, but every time I come near him, he starts screaming bloody murder. I don’t know what to do.”
Iris began rubbing large circles on her niece’s back. “There, there. We will figure out what is wrong.”
“Mama,” Colin said and reached up to tug Adam’s hand off his head.
“Do you think it may have something to do with this weather? I don’t know if y’all have been outside, but there is something really weird in the air out there.” As if it meant to punctuate his point, another flash of lightning lit up the window. Colin let loose with another wild shriek.
Ellen came and placed her hand on Adam’s forearm. “It isn’t the weather causing his distress,” she said and paused for a clap of thunder. “It’s his distress causing this weather.”
“Okay,” Adam heard himself saying. Every time he thought he had adjusted to all this witch stuff, every time he thought he had grown inured to the strangeness, the Taylors always managed to whip out one more little surprise. Adam’s phone rang, and he startled. He felt a flush of anger rush through himself. He hated showing his nerves, especially in front of women he had vowed to protect. He looked at the caller ID; it was the station.
He answered it on the second ring. “Cook.”
“Hey, Detective,” the voice on the other end said. It was Miriam, one of his favorite uniformed officers. “I am so sorry to disturb you, I know you are off duty, and this is a big night for you and your boy—”
“What is it, Miriam?” he asked, feeling for all the world like he had just had a lifeline to normality tossed to him. He clutched on to it like a drowning man.
“Can you meet me over at the hospital? We picked up a young woman a few minutes ago. She was wandering around naked and confused.”
“Drug-addled young people are hardly a novelty in Chatham County, Miriam.”
“Of course, Detective, I know that. Only I don’t think this girl is on anything. It’s more like she has been in an accident or something.”
He looked down at his watch. “No, my son’s party starts in less than an hour. I can’t make it right now.” Something struck him as odd. The baby who had been screaming at the top of his lungs had now fallen silent, and was sitting in his crib paying what seemed like very close attention to his phone call. “Why are you calling me about this?”
“Well, when we picked her up over off Randolph—”
“I’m sorry, where?”
“Randolph,” the officer repeated. “Not too far from the Baptist Center. When we picked her up, she asked for you.”
“She asked for me?”
“Yes, sir,” Miriam said; then Adam could hear the sound of the officer conferring with either a doctor or nurse at the emergency room.
“Who is she? What’s her name?”
“She said her name is Mercy. She said you will know her.”
“I’ll be right there.” Adam hung up the phone, never taking his eyes off Colin, who now sat before him cooing happily and clapping his hands.
“Mama,” the child said and giggled.
“Something has come up,” he said. Conflicting sets of memories began to fight it out in Adam’s mind. Somehow, he did know this Mercy, but somehow he knew the world in which he had known her was a very different place from where he now stood. A sense of free fall, the sight of the ground rushing up beneath him gave way to a sense of being caught. Mercy, the name acted like a key, unlocking parts of him that had ceased to exist. He tore his eyes away from the baby and focused on the women. “Tell Jordan and Oliver I will be back as soon as possible.” He knew Grace would be furious with him, but he couldn’t worry about that right now. “This is an emergency. I’ve got to see to it,” he said, backing up. The sky beyond the window caught his eye. In a mere instant it had changed from steel to cerulean. No, that’s not the name he knew that color by. He knew it as “haint blue.”
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?