J. Horn - The Line

“She was crazy. She had to be, but Maisie, how can you be doing this to me? You have got to stop this. You’ve got to let me go.”

“No, actually, I don’t. You see, this is how I’m going to finally get my revenge against Ginny. And you.”

“Against me? But for what?”

“For stealing my life! Ginny trained your power into me. She turned me into a freak.”

“At least she loved you,” I said, not even knowing anymore if that was true. Could Ginny have really have loved Maisie and used her as she had?

“As a reflection of her own twisted self, maybe, but not for any other reason. She didn’t let me out of her sight, and there you were, roaming free, making friends, meeting boys, finding love.” She grimaced at me. “I got to watch as you won the heart of the only man I could ever love.”

I started to protest that Jackson wasn’t even actually real, just a twisted, grown-up version of Wren when the dots suddenly connected. “Peter,” I said.

“Yes, Peter!” Maisie replied, anger spilling over in her voice. “Haven’t you noticed, Mercy? Most regular men won’t even come near us. And even witches are afraid of me because of this thing Ginny turned me into. I could never figure out why, but Peter is completely unfazed by the magic. It flows right over him, and he doesn’t even care. He could have loved me…and he would have if you weren’t around. I tried to take him from you, and the damnedest thing is that he never even noticed I was trying. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

“So you took Wren and started transforming him into Jackson.”

“Yes,” Maisie admitted, shaking her head. “I did, but it took a lot more energy than I possessed. It took your kind of power. A part of you recognized your own energy in him, and you interpreted those feelings as love.”

“Now that’s ironic, isn’t it?” Jackson asked. The distance between us had dissolved, and he was standing right by my side. He leaned in and kissed my cheek, then forced his lips on mine. Repulsed, I pulled back.

“Everything was going great for a while, but Ginny realized what I had done,” Maisie said. “She couldn’t tell the family, so she decided to dissolve Wren on her own.”

“She summoned me there, thinking she could control me.” Jackson said. “But she couldn’t. I really enjoyed killing her.”

“But what do you get from all this?” I asked Jackson.

“I get to live. I get to live in your world, and that’s all I have ever wanted.”

“When the anchor energy settles on me—the same power you told me just yesterday that you’d give me of your own free will—I’ll finally be strong enough to undo what Ginny has done. I’ll unground the power that she stole from you, and with it, I’ll help Jackson fully and finally actualize in our world. And then I won’t just anchor the line, I’ll take control of it. I’ll bring the thirteen families back together, all right, but they’ll be under my thumb. And when I’m firmly in control of our reality, I’ll make Peter love me too.”

“But if you unground my power, what’s to keep it from coming back to me?” I asked and was chilled by the look on my sister’s face. She was astounded.

“You don’t get it do you? When I unground your power, there won’t be a you for it to flow back into.” I was too stunned to speak. “I’m out of time here,” she said, addressing Jackson. “Get her ready and make sure she’s in the correct position.”

As far as I could tell, I didn’t move an inch, but I was suddenly naked and tied to one of the trees that grew in the garden of my own home. My hands were pulled up and tied above my head, a second band of coarse hemp secured me tightly by the waist, and a third was above my knees. The bark of the tree was rough and it dug into the skin of my back. Worse than that was the coarseness of the rope that held me in place.

Jackson stood beside me, smiling beatifically at me. “What a beautiful martyr you’ll make,” he said.

Witches milled around us, walked right through Jackson without even noticing that we were there. Mere yards away I could see Emmet talking to Ellen. Maisie walked over to join them, and Ellen leaned in and whispered something in her ear. An expression of surprised anger flitted across Maisie’s face, but she hid it quickly, smiling and hugging our aunt.

Jackson leered at me as he used his pointer finger to draw symbols and designs on my body with a warm, sticky liquid. Even if I’d been blind, its scent would have told me that it was blood, and I found myself saying a prayer for the spirit of whatever poor creature had been sacrificed. “Your sister is something else, ain’t she?” he asked. “It was pretty amazing the way she handled Connor. He came close to cocking up the whole works when he figured out that Ginny had been sharing her secrets. Maisie managed to deal with him from another dimension without anyone being one bit the wiser.”

“The fire,” I said.

“That’s right,” Jackson beamed at me. “Had to be fire, ’cause we knew it would take him out without harming you. We needed to keep you alive for the ceremony today.”

“But how could you know that the fire elementals wouldn’t harm me?” I asked.

“The protective charms the golem set for you included protection from fire, natural or magical. But in my opinion, the charm was unnecessary. If anyone, including you, had the slightest idea of who you really are, or what you’re really made of, they would have realized there was no need to protect you from flames. Suffice it to say, the fire recognized you as its own. From the looks of things, it healed you up nicer than even Ellen could have. The way you were laid out on that floor, I figured your walking days were over.”

“I can’t believe she’s doing this.” I was talking to myself, but he answered me all the same.

“Oh, believe it,” he said. “But don’t you worry, she isn’t going to get quite the outcome she’s expecting, so you’ll get the last laugh in the end. Well, on second thought, you won’t, ’cause I’ll have to kill you before you can have that laugh, but you’ve been such a good girl, and I’m feeling generous.

“When it comes right down to it, lies are pretty simple. It’s the truth that’s complicated. It’s like an onion, and there’s always another layer if you keep peeling.” He chuckled to himself as he continued making marks on my body. He stopped suddenly. “Well what have we here?” he asked after a moment. “Looks like I’m going to get two for one this time.”

I knew he had sensed Colin, and I felt a deep sense of mourning for my child, who’d never even be born. Tears started streaming down my face, and Jackson wiped them away with his bloody fingers.

“Oh, there, there,” Jackson said. “You won’t live to give birth to this one, but through your death, you’ll become the mother of thousands. You’ve seen your children, Mercy—my brothers and sisters—when you passed through their world on your way to visit Jilo.”

“You’re…you’re one of the shadows,” I managed through my tears.

“Yes,” he said, then placed a gentle kiss on my lips. “Imagine how it felt to almost be destroyed by my own kind. The sweet blood you wiped on me. It excited them, confused them. If they hadn’t been so starved and I so well fed, they might have ripped me apart before they knew what they were doing. See, you are much smarter than that sister of yours. She never even questioned that I might be something other than a little fellow your uncle dreamed up.” He gave me a thumbs-up and a beaming smile that revealed his straight white teeth. “I have to tell you, we’ve been waiting for this day for millennia. Your birth, Ginny’s intervention. It was nothing less than miraculous. We want so badly to live in your world, Mercy. But there’s only enough power for a few of us to get out at a time. When the witches activated the line, we got trapped between worlds, neither entirely in the world the witches created, nor wholly in the one they left behind. When the tunnels near Candler Hospital were dug, they filled up with such sweet despair and misery that we were drawn to them, but even feeding off all of that exquisite agony didn’t allow us to draw a fraction of the power we needed to pierce the veil. There were too many of us, and the line was too strong.