Any perceived mistakes of the distant past seemed much less important to me than the ones I’d made myself last night. “How is Peter?” I asked.
“Smarting. That’s how he is,” Oliver said, pouring three mugs of coffee and reaching for an herbal tea bag for me. “I stayed with him until he passed out. He’s probably gonna wake up with a hangover from too much whiskey and skinned knuckles from punching the wall, but he’ll be okay. You two will recover from this. You have a whole lot more working for you than against you.” I wished I could believe that was true. “For now, we need to focus on the matter at hand. There is no doubt that the other anchors felt Emily’s efforts to skirt the line with her Babel spell.”
“How did she do it? How did she catch me up in her spell? I’m an anchor now. I thought witches couldn’t charm me.”
“Witches can’t charm you with the power of the line,” Iris said as she took the seat on my right. “But the magic Emily is channeling comes from a place of pure evil.” I thought of the locket she had placed around my neck. How it had clouded my mind, perverted my judgment. Made me more willing to believe the worst about those who truly loved me.
Oliver gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “The families will be sending representatives to look into what happened here last night. Maybe you could ask the Sandman if he can pick up any rumblings as to whom they are sending and when.”
“He’s gone. Emmet’s gone,” I said. “I sent him away last night.”
“Well, Gingersnap, you did the right thing, but you picked the wrong time to do it.”
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”
“We all are,” Ellen said and sighed. “I’ve got to tell you though. If the worst we had to face was losing our powers, I think I could accept that.”
“Yeah, well, speak for yourself, sis. Besides, if the families judge against us, they won’t satisfy themselves with stripping the three of us of our powers. They’ll want to make an example of Mercy.”
“Maybe I deserve to be made an example of.”
“Bullshit.” I had never in my entire life heard a word of profanity come out of Iris. It had the effect of a lightning bolt shooting through the room. Even Oliver kept his trap shut. “Bullshit,” she said again, this time with less vehemence, but still with all the fire. “The families can send whomever they want. Ask any questions they want. We have done nothing wrong.”
“We have disobeyed . . .” Ellen began.
“Whom exactly? Not the line. I feel it.” Her right hand pounded on her chest. “I feel it in here. The line is on our side. It will protect us.”
“I wish I could be as sure as you are,” Oliver said. “They have been looking for an excuse to bring us down ever since the line chose the first Taylor as an anchor. The Taylors take too many liberties. The Taylors push their own agendas. The Taylors aren’t humble enough.”
“Well, that last bit is probably true,” I said.
“And so what if it is? We let our hearts rule our heads. We like to do things big. We are Celts for goodness sake.”
“I agree with Iris.” Ellen took a sip of her coffee. “The line chose Mercy. It cut through Ginny’s deception. We tried to invest its power in Maisie, and it stood up to us. It wanted Mercy, and I have to believe it wanted you for a reason. I say we call their bluff. Tell them exactly what has been going on and let the chips fall where they may.”
“That sounds great in theory, but Mercy has a lot more to lose than any of us, right, Gingersnap?”
Iris nodded in agreement. “Yes, she does,” she answered for me. “That’s why it’s time for us to come clean with her”—she looked at me—“with you. It’s time for us to share everything we know, and even make a few conjectures, because we don’t know everything. I do believe the line chose you for a reason, so it’s time for you to learn exactly who you are.”
She reached out for the album, but Ellen stayed her hand. “I should do this. He was my husband. I’m responsible for bringing him into the family.” Iris squeezed her sister’s hand and let Ellen take control of the book. Ellen slid it over to me, but didn’t take her hand off it. “This belonged to Erik. To your father,” she said. “He always told me that he kept it as a reminder of the evil he’d managed to escape. He led me to believe that it served as a moral touchstone, something to keep him on the right side of humanity. I now believe he thought of it as more of a brag book. A place he could turn when he needed strength to carry out the mission he’d come to complete.”
“Mission?” I asked. It sounded like such a tactical term. Military.
“He had come to fulfill the prophecy that said a child born to a union of our bloodlines would reunite the thirteen families and bring down the line. Honestly, I had never heard of the prediction before we married.”
“I had,” Iris said, “but I thought the story was one of the many fantasies we witches have developed around the line. I said nothing to Ellen. I didn’t want to ruin her happiness. I regret that now. She should have gone into her marriage with her eyes wide open.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it. Knowing wouldn’t have changed a single thing. I believed in Erik. I loved him, even after I found these clippings.” She took her hand off the scrapbook. “Go ahead.”
A shiver of magical energy flooded my fingers as they touched the cover. I could tell that at one time this book had been enchanted to hide what was within it. The magic had long since faded to a mere spark, but I sensed that the spark had belonged to my father. I wanted to stop for a moment. To let myself experience his magic, remembering him the way I did before I opened the cover and had all my remaining illusions shattered. I closed my eyes and felt him, his pride and sense of purpose, and then I opened my eyes and turned the cover.
A photo had been removed from the first page. “That was the picture of your great-grandmother I gave you,” Ellen said. “I don’t know what possessed me to do that. I guess I did it out of relief that I no longer had to hide that Erik was your father. I wanted us to be relieved from all our secrets.”
She was getting her wish today. Below the place where the rectangular photo had been, my father had written my great-grandmother’s name: Maria Orsic. “Who was she?”
“She was not a witch, but she was known as a psychic medium. There are a lot of non-witches who have the sight.”
“Like Claire,” I said, without meaning to say it aloud.
“Yes. I’ve sensed that about her. Maria was different from most psychics though, in that her psyche had somehow developed the capability to travel outside the line’s protection. Out there, where the demons still wait. They began to court her, for lack of a better term. They gave her insights, glimpses of history—hell, they even gave her diagrams for a flying saucer. They convinced her that they were our loving brothers. Aliens from Aldebaran. She, in return, became their evangelist.”
“They deceived her?”
“They played into her need to feel special and superior. It’s one of mankind’s greatest weaknesses—the need to feel superior to others.”
