As this thought registered, it made me feel a twinge of guilt. Peter was trying so hard to step up and be a good father and provider. In addition to his regular job, he’d gone back to working nights at his parents’ tavern, and he was doing his best to start up his own construction business, taking on smaller jobs that he could do on weekends with a couple of buddies from his regular crew. I had reminded him that money was not a problem—ever since I had turned twenty-one, I’d been receiving a monthly stipend from the family trust—but he would have none of it.
“No,” he had told me, holding up his palms toward me. “I can’t take money from you. I don’t want to take money from you. I want to know that I can take care of my wife, or soon-to-be wife, and my child. Without your money and without your magic.”
It was a display of arguably antiquated male pride, but instinct and intuition told me not to challenge him on it. I simply nodded and smiled. “All right. I respect that,” I said at the time, even though I was only humoring him. After taking some weeks to reflect on it, though, I had come to realize how much respect I did have for him. “You are one lucky boy to have a daddy like that,” I told Colin, running my hand over the small bulge beneath my shirt.
I leaned into the enormous door, intent on opening it under my own steam. The seven-by-four-foot slab of steel cracked open with great difficulty. When I was a little girl, someone had managed to steal the massive door, taking it right off its hinges. That’s about as far as they got, though, its weight causing them to abandon it by the side of a dirt road, leaving the city of Savannah with the task of rehanging it.
I considered using my magic to open the door, as Jilo had done, but while I might manage to swing the door open, I might just blow it off its hinges and into the next county. I decided to use my hands. I leaned into the steel, and was nearly blinded by the light that rushed in to fill the dark space behind and around me.
The day was a fabric woven from heat and humidity, the noises of nature, and the drone of traffic on Ogeechee Road. My bike was where I’d left it, propped up against the building. I could have used my magic to bring myself to the magazine, but had decided against it. The one “spell,” for lack of a better term, I had managed to master so far was teleporting short distances. Not all witches could do it, but I could, and I could do it well. All the same, I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Each time, there was an odd sensation that the person I’d been at Point A wasn’t necessarily the same as the one who’d ended up at Point B.
“Mama needs her practice, but she also needs her exercise,” I rationalized aloud to my son. A thrill ran through me as I sensed for the first time an intelligence on the other end of the conversation. Colin was there, connected to me. A feeling of love, unequal to any I had ever known, flooded through me. I realized that I would do anything to keep my baby safe. Anything. Then I wondered whether “anything” included giving up the search for Maisie. I decided to leave that an open question for now, but determined that I would find a cleaner and safer place to meet Jilo from now on.
I started for my bike, but then a noise came from behind me. Something close. I turned. A lonely clump of Georgia pines stood a few feet ahead on my right, and an older—no, incredibly old—man stumbled through them. He staggered and almost tripped, but then righted himself. He turned around in a circle, seemingly intent on finding his bearings. The air felt way too hot and sticky for the overcoat he was wearing, especially since the garment was several sizes too large. The hem nearly brushed the ground. In spite of his diminutive size, I began to feel uneasy. Something wasn’t right.
This fear of strangers had only come upon me recently; I was no longer protected by any charms. When the line chose me, its power blended with my own, unraveling the protections that Emmet and my family had woven for me. Regular witches can’t charm the line’s anchors for good or bad. Now I had to stand on my own.