J. Horn - The Line

He laughed as the vehicles passed right through our car—and us—without so much as a tickle. “Well, I’ll be glad to explain a few things to you. Starting with how we’re just a little out of sync with the world you’re used to right now. Those charms your buddy the golem set up for you ain’t gonna work here. And you can try and run away from me if you’d like, but you’ll never get home without me. See, I kind of like it here. We can see and hear what’s going on in the other world, but nothing and no one there can touch us. Unless that someone happens to be wearing the mate of that necklace you just put around your pretty little neck. Care to guess who that might be?”

“Maisie,” I said, once again astounded by my own stupidity, my willingness to be deceived.

“That’s right, my girl,” he said, continuing to drive. The familiar landmarks we were passing surprised me—we were heading back in the direction we’d come from. “Your sister set you up.”

“But why?” I asked.

“That’s a bit of a long story, but I guess we got the time for it. Unless you’d rather I smear blood on your head and toss you to the shadows like you and Jilo did to me?” He looked back over his shoulder at me again.

“All I ever did was love you, Jackson. That’s what we did to Wren, not you…we had to stop him, ” I said.

“You just don’t get it, do you, girl?” he asked. “I am Wren.”

“You’re Wren?” I asked, completely thrown.

“That’s right,” he chirped in Wren’s falsetto, before his voice broke back into Jackson’s range. “And thanks to your sister, I was finally able to break out of that way too small shell. Maisie helped me grow.” He winked at me. “Of course that’s what any good woman should help her man do, but in this case, I mean it literally.”

As I sat back in wonder, we pulled up in front of my house. It looked fairly quiet from the front, but I knew a world of activity was going on inside. He stopped the car and got out. “Shall we go back in and say hello to the family?” he asked. Flinging my door open, he yanked me out roughly, doing his best to hurt me. I didn’t resist; I let myself coast on his energy, going with the flow instead of fighting.

We walked straight through the door without stopping to open it. I found myself wishing that I’d never told my family that Jilo had linked her realm to the linen closet. If the portal had still existed, I might have been able to use it to escape. The thought of escaping to Jilo’s realm instead of from it struck me as funny, and in spite of my fear, or maybe because of it, I began to laugh.

Jackson shook me like I was a rag doll. “You think this is funny, do you? Well, you’ll stop laughing when you see what we have planned for you.”

My laughter dried up under his hateful gaze. Iris and Oliver passed in front of us, so close that I could have reached out and touched them. I started to call out to them, but the strength of Jackson’s grip made me think twice. It was his turn to laugh. “Go ahead,” he said, shoving me aside. “Scream! Nobody’s going to hear you.”

He jumped right in front of Oliver’s face. “Hey, faggot! Can your niece get a little help here?” Oliver passed directly through him, and Jackson doubled over with laughter. “I guess we’ll have to take that as a no.” He pushed me into the library through the foyer wall, and I landed at the foot of the love seat. “Interesting, isn’t it? You can walk right through walls, but the floor is still holding you up. That, Mercy, is because you are working magic. You’re so sure that the floor is going to support you that it does. Your magic is what’s holding you up.” He reached down and tugged me up. “Have a seat if you want. I’m sure your magic will let you, and you’ll look a little less ridiculous than you do right now.”

I bent my knees until I could feel the material of the love seat underneath me. It felt tangible and real, and it held my weight. “You’re wrong,” I said, despite all evidence to the contrary. “I have no power. I can’t do magic.”

“Oh, spare me the sad tale,” he bellowed. “And let me tell you a little story of my own.” He dragged a chair in front me and straddled it, putting us nearly nose to nose. The eyes looking out of his face weren’t human, the blue in them cold flames.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a very wicked witch named Ginny and a whore named Emily. Now the whore slept with a whole bunch of men. But only one of them was special to her. Problem was, this man already belonged to her sister. Now I know this might sound familiar to you, but you just hang in there with me.” He winked at me. “The whore knew that her sister’s husband wanted children, and for some reason her sister had only managed to give him one. Of course you and I both know that the wicked witch had put an end to the babies, because she was afraid that the children born from of the combination of these particular bloodlines could overpower her, reuniting the thirteen families and turning her back into the nothing she knew herself to be. When the wicked witch learned that the whore had gotten herself knocked up, she bided her time. She pretended to believe that the father of the bastard children was the husband of the whore’s other sister, but she knew the truth all along.

“She knew that the boy born from the legitimate union was powerful but that he posed no real threat. The one who’d been foreseen was a girl. All sugar and spice and sweet and pink as you please. Well, when the witch realized that the whore was going to give birth to two girls, she started to pay a lot of attention. She sensed that the first one wasn’t going to be much of a problem. She had power, all right, but not nearly enough to rock the boat. The second one, though, well, she was something special, even for a Taylor witch. Ginny knew that this was the one whose coming had been foretold, and she was not about to let her live to see the light of day.

She did all she could to end the pregnancies, but that second little one, she was just too strong. She kept both herself and her sister alive and unharmed. And Ginny could feel the little one’s power increasing with each passing day. So she hijacked the power. She had to do it in steps; first she started feeding it from the strong sister to the weaker one and then, once she’d managed to get the energy flowing away from its owner, she sent it away. She grounded it in another dimension, close enough that she could access it herself, but far enough away that it could pass right through a Taylor witch without him or her ever noticing. As a matter of fact, it’s all around us right now. This was where Ginny sent your power. She did her best to starve you to death, and it might have worked if your Aunt Ellen hadn’t given you the boost you needed to survive delivery.”

Ginny had stolen my power and tried to kill me. No wonder my mother didn’t survive our birth. I had a whole new pack of reasons to grieve, but the knowledge that I wasn’t responsible for my mama’s death was like a wave of absolution, freeing me of the guilt that I had carried for as long as I could remember. Oddly, this was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Suddenly the proportions of the room shifted, and Maisie was standing directly in front of me. Jackson was several yards away, hanging at an angle that should have been impossible but wasn’t.

“She kept me under her thumb,” Maisie continued Jackson’s narrative seamlessly. “Not because I was some kind of prodigy, but because she saw me as a time bomb. Picture my surprise last year when I stumbled across her old journals. She kept such careful notes about me. She should have shown more care in keeping them hidden. Breaking the charms on them was child’s play. She couldn’t undo the siphon of power she’d set up between us. She couldn’t just take what she had been pumping into me and shift it somewhere else. She had inadvertently turned me into an anchor for your power. If the power started flowing back to you, the whole dam would have eventually burst, and she was prepared to stop at nothing to keep that from happening. You would be astounded to know just how much she hated you. She wrote about trying to find a way to bend time. To go back and prevent your ever having been conceived.”