by Horn, J. D.
“Do you think we caused any real harm to it?” I asked. Even though I was an anchor, all of it was still so new to me. I wasn’t sure how the line normally felt. Besides, the other anchors had ensured that I couldn’t draw on its power. I realized that they were probably controlling me in the same exact way they were controlling the anchors from the rebel families.
“No, sweetheart. It feels like it always has. It’s holding just fine.”
“But the families will know that someone has been tampering with it,” Oliver said. “They will send someone around sooner rather than later to look into what we naughty little Taylors have been up to.”
“Well, before they come, there is something I need to do,” I said. “I have to talk to Peter. I’ve got to try to set things right between us. Now, in case the families don’t want to give me the luxury of a later.”
“Don’t you worry, Gingersnap. We will handle the families together. Right now, you get over to that boy’s house and put him out of his misery.”
“How do I know if he even still wants me?”
“An empty fifth of whiskey and a hole in the drywall told me everything I needed to know on that subject. Go on now.”
I showered and stood before my closet, pawing through all the new maternity outfits my aunts had treated me to. What color is best for apologizing to the man who caught you cheating on him? I settled on the simplest of the dresses, a white sleeveless one with a modest scoop neck and a daisy print around the waist. Nothing screams “I’m not a whore” like embroidered daisies.
Peter’s house was in Sackville. Before my pregnancy, I used to grab my bike and pedal over, but I’d already been forced to bid a temporary adieu to my faithful two-wheeled friend, and my stomach had grown another inch since then. I didn’t want to use my magic. I didn’t want to show up on his doorstep suffering from the more and more familiar sense of disorientation. Instead, I called a taxi.
I spent the ride trying to pull my words together. I couldn’t take the tack that Emmet and I hadn’t truly been together, at least physically. Peter knew better; he knew that I had cheated. In the bright light of day, I did too.
We pulled up in front of the small wood-frame house. Even though Peter only rented the place, he had recently given it a fresh coat of paint, a silvery gray color to offset the pewter shutters and door. The house stood next to a towering live oak that hung over it as if it were trying to keep its companion safe. Peter’s truck stood in the drive. I knew he’d be home today. No way would he ever go to the Tillandsia house again, not after what had happened. I doubted that either of us would ever step foot near there again. I paid the driver and got out. Then I stood there and watched as he pulled away, trying to work up my nerve to climb the steps to the door and knock.
“You gonna stand out there all day, or you coming in?” Peter called from the doorway.
“You sure you want me to?” I asked.
He walked away from the door, but left it open. I climbed the few steps and stuck my head inside. He was sitting in the beat-up easy chair he’d bought at Goodwill the day he signed a lease on this place. I stepped in and closed the door behind me, unable to read his expression because my eyes had not yet adjusted to the somber light in his living room. Almost as if I had asked the question, he reached out and flicked on a table lamp.
Dark circles carried his reddened eyes, and sparks of fiery red whiskers lined his cheeks and chin. He still wore the jeans he’d had on last night, but a different T-shirt. Last night’s shirt lay on the floor, now a bloodied ball of rag. “How’s your wound?”
“I can barely see where she stuck me.” He shifted in his seat. “Ellen does good work.”
I stepped up closer, moving into the circle of light. “Peter, I am so sorry.”
“For the injury?”
“Yes, and for everything else too.”
“Pretty convenient summary you got there.”
“I’m sorry.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry for the wound. But so much more than that. I am sorry for the hurt I’ve caused you. I am sorry I cheated on you.” He looked away from me, tears forming in his eyes. He didn’t even brush them away. “I was trying to get ahold of the magic that Emily had stored up in Tillandsia. I convinced myself that we were just performing magic. That it wasn’t physical. It wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about Emmet. It wasn’t sex.”
“What I walked in on, it looked even more intimate than sex. The two of you seemed to be bonded together.”
My pulse raced as I thought of the union. It had felt exactly like that, and in those few moments before Emily’s evil magic had started to flow between us, it had been wonderful.
I knew if I shared this with Peter, I’d crush him. I’d lose his heart forever. “I’m sorry. I truly am. I’ll admit, not only to you but to myself, that it was an act of intimacy. That I did cheat on you.”
He leaned in toward me, his eyes imploring. “But if you needed sex, if you needed intimacy to do what you wanted with Tillandsia, why wouldn’t you come to me? And why would you want to take magic from that place anyway? I felt it, the second I walked in . . . That kind of magic isn’t right. It isn’t . . .” He paused, as he looked for the word. “Wholesome.”
I went and sat on the footstool before him. I’d answer his second question, and pray that the first went away. I could never explain to him why I’d been afraid to expose him to an unknown magic for fear that he’d discover his own true nature and become lost to me forever. “My family has been lying to you. I’ve been lying to you about Maisie. She isn’t in California.”
“I suspected something was up. Every time I asked one of you about her, I’d get the same exact information, like it had been rehearsed.” He had hit it dead on; it had been. “Where is she?”
“She’s trapped. It’s hard to explain.”
“She was practicing some bad mojo, and it got the best of her, right?”
I nodded. “Close enough. I had hoped I could use the power in Tillandsia to get her out of the trouble she’s gotten herself into.”
“But seriously”—he shook his head in amazement, and then reached up to brush the copper curls from his eyes—“you’re telling me that you and your family, you don’t have enough juju to take care of things?”
“We have been . . . forbidden from doing so by the other families. They could sense it if we used the line’s power to try to rescue Maisie. They could and most certainly would shut us down, maybe even permanently.”
“They’d better not try doing anything to you,” he said, the words almost like a reflex. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and touched his unshaven cheek. He took my hand off his cheek, but he didn’t push it away. He held it in his own. “So you thought you could get your hands on power they couldn’t control. Get the job done yourself.”
“I figured it would be much easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Now it looks like I might have been wrong about that.”
“Is that what you’ve done with me? Figured it would be easier to get forgiveness?”
“No.” I shook my head. “It wasn’t nearly that calculated, at least as far as you are concerned.”
“Why did you come here, Mercy? Is it just a pardon you are looking for? ’Cause I’ll give you that. I don’t understand all this magic, but I do know how much you love Maisie. If it’s just forgiveness you’re looking for, you got it. I understand that whatever you did, you did for your sister.”
“I did come here hoping you’d forgive me, but there’s much more than that.”
“Okay. I’m listening,” he said, still clasping my hand in his.
“I wanted to let you know Emmet’s gone. I’ve sent him away from Savannah.”
“Where to?” His grip tightened a little, and he tilted a bit more toward me.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I can understand if you can’t get past the sight of
what you walked in on last night. I want you to know, though, that if you will still have me, I want to be your wife.”
“If I will still have you? If I will still have you?” He pushed out of the chair and knelt beside me, nearly crushing me in his embrace. “Oh, God. I thought I’d lost you.” Our eyes met, and then he kissed me. Any connection I had felt with Emmet was a fantasy; this here, the love I had with Peter, was real. His kiss changed, and the feeling of grateful relief melted under the heat of his growing passion. He stood and pulled me up with him, my flesh molding to the solid contours of his body.
“Wait,” I said, pushing away from him. His brow pinched as hurt and disappointment started to show in his eyes. He let go of me and took a step back. “No.” I reached out and grasped his arm. “I need help with my zipper.” His lips curved into the most delicious bad-boy smile that a good man’s face had ever shown. I turned my back to him, and his thick fingers found the delicate pull, his hands shaking. I shivered as he undid the zipper and slid the dress down. I kicked it out of my way, and he leaned in and placed a kiss on the nape of my neck. I slid off my panties and let them fall to the floor beside me, then reached behind my back and undid my bra, tossing it on the sofa. I turned toward him, standing naked before him. My breasts had grown much larger over the last several weeks, and the look in Peter’s eyes told me how much he appreciated the change. I leaned into him, my skin pressing against his T-shirt. He began kissing me, trying to pull off his own shirt using a single hand. He growled as he gave up and pulled hard at the collar, ripping it clean down the front. Without ever taking his lips from mine, he slid his second ruined shirt to the floor.
I pulled away to examine the place where my mother had stabbed him with her foul iron knife. The wound had closed over and pretty much healed, but it looked like there might always be a nearly crescent-shaped scar. I suspected that the wound would never fade completely since it had been made with iron. It would serve as a constant reminder of how close I’d come to losing him. I leaned forward and kissed the scar. He moaned and pulled me into his arms, his stiffness pressing into me, the difference in our heights such that I felt it against my stomach. He reached down and swept me off the floor, carrying me toward his bedroom. He kicked at the door to open it, and carried me to his bed, the same bed where we had first made love, where we had conceived our child. He must have been thinking about our baby too, because he laid me down as gently as if I were made of porcelain.
I watched as he removed his jeans and boxers. He laid down next to me, not talking, not moving, just looking at me with so much love, so much hunger. I straddled him and took him into me, leaning over and kissing him, his large rough hands encapsulating my own. This was the first time we had touched each other this way since my powers had been returned to me. I looked at his beautiful, strained face through a witch’s eyes, seeing evidence of his otherworldly traits. His eyes changed during his passion, no longer showing the mismatch of blue and green I’d come to love, but glowing silver instead. Pulling my hand from his, I pushed back his hair and saw the point of his ear. I leaned in and gently bit its tip. He groaned. As his passion grew, light began to shine from him, a mild luminescence. No, this was no normal man I had chosen, but I had chosen him all the same. My own pleasure overtook my senses. Everything melded together as my eyes closed. My head leaned backward, and his hand reached out and traced down my neck, my breasts. I shuddered once, twice, as he strained up into me, and then I fell forward into his waiting arms.
THIRTY-FIVE
I didn’t wake until late afternoon, nearly evening. Peter was already awake but had been lying there still, so as not to disturb me. I opened my eyes to see his eyes, which had returned to their mismatched blue and green color, trained on me, his gentle love and burning passion wrestling within them. I touched him in a way that would give his passion the upper hand, and once again we made love.
Spent, I laid my head on his chest and kissed his scar again. “Tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll go get the marriage license. We’ll go to the justice of the peace.”
“The hell we will.” Peter sat up in the bed and took me in the crook of his arm. “That isn’t good enough for you.”
“It’s good enough. Nothing matters to me except that we’re together.”
He narrowed his eyes and leaned in to peck me on the lips. “Nope. It ain’t gonna happen that way. I’ve dreamed about seeing you come down the aisle to me for too long. You are not going to cheat me out of that.”
“You’ve dreamed about our wedding?”
“Well, honestly I’ve done a lot more dreaming about the honeymoon,” he said. I reached out and gave him a gentle smack. He squeezed me tighter. “But yeah, I’ve been dreaming about it since we were kids, pretty much since the day I met you. Remember that day in Forsyth, when I let you beat me climbing our tree?”
“I remember beating you; I don’t remember you letting me beat you.”
“Well, believe what you want, but I let you win all right. I wanted to see that red head of yours surrounded by patches of green and blue. You climbed higher than I did, and when I stopped, you looked down and stuck your tongue out at me. That’s when I first thought to myself, ‘I am gonna marry that girl someday.’ I’ve been dreaming about that day ever since. So yeah, we’ll go get the license tomorrow, but you gotta plan me a real wedding. One with a monkey suit and a white dress, flowers, and too much champagne. Well, for me at least,” he said and reached over to rub my stomach. “Oh, and cake.” His stomach growled. “I’m starving. You?”
I realized that I was. “Yes.”
“Let’s go out tonight. Somewhere nice. You can wear that pretty dress you left gathering wrinkles on my living room floor.”
“You didn’t seem too concerned about it at the time.”
“Oh, but I was,” he said and leaned in to kiss me. “I was so very concerned.” He kissed my lips again and began working his way down my neck.
“Food,” I said and pushed him away.
“All right, all right.” Another quick peck on my lips, then he pulled his arm out from under me, using his other hand to slide a pillow behind me. “I need to shower”—he ran his hand over his chin—“and shave.” He slid out of bed and stood. “Care to join me?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows. I threw a pillow at him.
“Take your shower and make it quick. Colin and I are hungry.” He lumbered off, and I closed my eyes as I heard the sound of the shower. I felt so grateful that he loved me, that he had not turned me away. I pulled the blanket up around me and breathed in his scent.
In a few minutes he returned and stood before me, wrapped up in a towel. “You still in bed, you lazy thing?” He started rummaging through his closet for some dress pants and a real shirt.
“My, my. A shirt with buttons, we are going fancy tonight.”
“Oh, no. These aren’t buttons. They’re snaps,” he said, pulling the shirt around his shoulders. “It’ll make it easier for you later, so you don’t have to rip another shirt off me.”
“I didn’t rip your last shirt off,” I said and laughed. “You did.”
“Hey, if you get to choose to remember that you beat me fair and square climbing that tree, I get to remember the shirt thing my way.”
“Fine.” I threw the blanket off and swung my feet out of bed. Peter stopped dressing and watched me, smiling. “I’m going to take a quick shower too.”
“You should’ve just hopped in with me. We could’ve saved time and water.”
“If I’d gotten in with you, we would have saved neither.” I got in the shower, at first determined not to get my hair wet, but it felt so good to let the hot water flow over me, washing away the parts of the last twenty-four hours that I didn’t care to remember, and somehow reinforcing the sensuality of the parts that I did.
When I stepped out of the shower, I dried off quickly, and wrapped myself in the towel. The bed
room was empty, although Peter had laid my dress and underwear out on the bed. I was just starting to dress when the door opened a crack. Peter poked his head through it. “You got a visitor.”
“Who is it?”
“A woman. Says her name is something like Rivkuh.”
“Rivkah. Rivkah Levi.” I hadn’t seen or even thought of Rivkah since the day the line had selected me to be an anchor. She had been one of the three witches who’d arrived early to prepare our house for the ceremony, to search for energy leaks or ingresses that might interfere with the investment of the line’s energy in the new anchor. Their efforts had been wildly unsuccessful.
“Yeah, that’s it. You okay? Should I make her leave?”
“Mercy, darling,” Rivkah’s voice came to me from over Peter’s shoulder. “Get dressed and come talk to me.”
I looked at Peter, then shrugged. “I’ll be right out, Mrs. Levi.”
“Rivkah, please, dear. Peter, do you have any wine?” I heard her opening and closing cupboards. “Ah, here’s some red. Corkscrew?”
“I’ll be right there,” Peter said and closed the door behind him.
I towel-dried my hair and wove it into a single braid. It would be a tangled mess later, but Rivkah was not someone you kept waiting. If I didn’t make it out to her quickly, she would invite herself in to join me. I dressed, smoothing out the wrinkles that had collected in the skirt of my dress, and went into the living room to find Peter sitting across from Rivkah at his kitchen table.
“There she is,” Rivkah said, rising and waving me into her arms. I hadn’t expected such an effusive greeting from someone I barely knew. She kissed my cheek. “Mazel tov on the little one.” She released me and reached for her wine glass. “To Colin,” she said, holding her glass out to Peter, who clinked with her.
“To Colin,” Peter echoed, a certain hesitancy in his voice.
Rivkah sat down. “So tell me, darling. What has been going on here with you and this family of yours?”