The Line (Witching Savannah, #1)(81)

“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.”

“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.”