The Line (Witching Savannah, #1)(11)
“Come on, sweetheart. Your uncle’s right. I think it would be best for you to get out into the fresh air. You shouldn’t have had to see any of this.”
I let myself be guided outside and deposited on the squeaky old glider that had been on Great-Aunt Ginny’s porch longer than I’d been alive. Within moments the Savannah heat began to lick around my ankles and up my calves. It took me slowly, but confidently, with the experience of immemorial dawns.
The sun traced a finger up my thigh, the solstice morning in Savannah marking its passage across the sky and projecting the shadow of a weathervane from a nearby house onto me. Leaning back on the glider, I surrendered to the heat, the scent of blood, and the relentless ticking of Ginny’s clock, which I could still hear from the porch. The seat groaned beneath me, the sound lost somewhere between protest and pleasure. A horrible thought occurred to me: The same heat that was warming my skin was beating in through the window and onto Ginny’s body, hastening its decay. I shook the thought out of my head and tried to focus instead on the first tiny bead of sweat that was forming behind my knee. I tried not to imagine what had happened, tried not to corrupt the energies that would help Aunt Iris and Uncle Connor figure everything out.
Through the screen of the open window I heard Aunt Iris say, “She couldn’t help it. She hasn’t been trained.” Her voice carried through the still air like a stage whisper.
“Nothing to train,” Connor snorted in reply. I shot him a look through the window. He and Iris had raised Maisie and me. My mother, Emily, the youngest female in the Taylor tribe, had died giving birth to us, and she’d never seen fit to tell anyone who our daddy was. I would have turned to Connor like a flower toward the sun if he had shown me the slightest modicum of paternal affection. But that had never happened. Far from it; he saddled me with the nickname “The Disappointment” by the time I’d turned six. Our eyes locked as the name crossed through my mind, and for a moment I thought I sensed something like regret in his expression. Was it in the twitch of his mouth or just the way his eyes darted back to the pendulum he carried? The look was there, and then it was gone. He returned his focus to the pendulum, walking around in a seemingly random fashion as the pendulum turned or stopped. “Damned shame it weren’t Maisie here first instead of her sister.”
Maisie had been his darling since birth. She had come into this world with so much strength that the other witch families hadn’t even needed a birth announcement—she’d simply registered on everyone’s radar. Me, I had come in a weak second, kind of like the universe’s afterthought. Most were as shocked to learn of my arrival as they were saddened by my mother’s passing.
“You need to have some consideration for the poor girl. This has been a shock. She knows this goes beyond what happened to Ginny. She knows that the line may have been damaged.”
“Darlin’, I ain’t blaming her. I blame myself. If I’d acted like a real father and taken her in hand, explained things to her…” Connor repented. “Mercy’s a good girl,” he said. “She did the best she could by calling us.” I was surprised to hear a break in his voice. It was the first time he’d betrayed any tenderness for me. “But right now, we only got a few minutes left to figure out who did this to Ginny. Mercy’s panic when she found Ginny was almost fierce enough to overwrite what happened here. We have to try to catch whatever imprint is left, and then we gotta make sure that the line is holding. I need you to focus too. When we’re done, I’ll call Oliver and tell him to get his sweet ass home, and you can start rounding up the rest of the family.”
Connor disappeared from my view, but I could still hear his heavy steps as he shuffled around the ground floor of the house. Then the squeak of a loose stair told me he was heading to the second floor. I focused on Aunt Iris as she knelt over the body and began to sway silently, reaching out for whatever energies might still be lingering. Silence gave way to sobbing as Iris surrendered to her grief. Strange, growing up, I’d often wished Ginny dead. Granted my wish, seeing what her death looked like, my blood called out to hers and screamed for justice. Guess she really was family after all.
“The weapon ain’t here,” a defeated Connor said, returning to the room. I heard him fall noisily into one of the armchairs.
Aunt Iris didn’t respond. She didn’t even seem to register that Connor had spoken. Her sobbing stopped, but she continued to sway over Ginny’s body.
Psychometry was Aunt Iris’s specialty. She could hold any object and tell you about its owner or anyone who had a tangential relationship with it. Not necessarily the most amazing of powers, but much appreciated in a city full of antiques with questionable provenance. If Connor had succeeded in finding the weapon, Iris would have had a good chance of finding out who had used it against Ginny. Holding the murder weapon would have left her open to some pretty fierce energy, but without it, she would have no choice but to lay hands on Ginny herself, which would be exponentially worse. Opening herself up to that degree of dark energy was mighty dangerous. Even when it’s just a regular Joe who’s died, a door gets opened and things that should be kept on the far side of that door sometimes make their way through. Murder compounds the problem, inviting in even darker things. The murder of someone like Great-Aunt Ginny could rip the door right off its hinges. And I realized I hadn’t helped matters any.