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“I see,” I said. “And do you think she loved you?”
“She gave her life to have my children,” he said and the earth stopped moving in the heavens.
My whole body went ice cold, but I began to sweat in the same instant. His words had knocked the wind out of me. “She what?” I asked when I found my breath.
“You girls. You and Maisie. You’re my daughters,” he said.
“Oh, no. That is not possible.” I held out my hand as a warning that he should not try to approach me. “It is not true,” I said, just so I could hear the words and try to believe them.
“Look at me, Mercy. Right now, you have a witch’s power. If you look at me, you can tell whether I’m lying to you.”
I studied him intently, every slight wrinkle on his face, every black mark on his soul, and as much as I loathed the idea, I knew beyond a shadow of any doubt that he was not lying. He was my father, our father. The idea struck me as hilarious, and laughing like a maniac, I stood with such force that I knocked over the chair where I’d been sitting.
“Your aunts made me promise to wait until you turned twenty-one to tell you, so you would be adult enough to handle the truth. I know I’m rushing things by a few hours, but I couldn’t wait another minute,” he said. “I needed you to know that I wasn’t lying. Without Oliver’s power to confirm the truth, a part of you would always doubt me. Hell, I could walk up to you with a DNA test and a signed birth certificate and you still wouldn’t want to believe me.”
“Does Maisie know?” I asked. I felt like screaming and crying. Now it was abundantly clear why Iris would be worried that I’d turn out like my mother, with a taste for other women’s men.
“No,” he responded. “At least I don’t think so, but with all of the power she can access, who knows what she’s learned? I was hoping to tell you both together. At the same time. I never anticipated Ginny’s murder.”
“I don’t think any of us did,” I said, moving toward the door.
Connor’s arm shot out and grabbed mine. “I think you’re wrong there. I think one of us did.”
“Okay, I’m listening,” I said. Releasing my arm, he reached into his pocket and unfolded an oversized sheet of paper. The paper was enchanted, and the creases smoothed themselves out instantly. “I found this among Ginny’s affairs.”
I took the paper from him and scanned it. Without my borrowed magic, the page would have appeared blank, but when I focused on it with a witch’s gaze, words appeared—words so ancient that I would by no honest rights have the ability to understand them. But somehow I did. “It’s a dissolution spell,” I said, turning the paper into the light. At the moment I had no patience for deciphering the scrawls, so I folded the spell and put it into my pocket so that I could examine it more closely later.
“She was going to do it,” Connor said. “Ginny was going to do away with Wren once and for all, and we both know Ellen would never allow that to happen.”
“Ellen would never have killed Ginny!”
“You so sure about that?” he asked. “I’m not. We both know that she’s been holding on by a thread for a decade now. If it weren’t for the whiskey and Wren, she would have quit trying long ago.”
I wondered if he could possibly be right. The pieces all added up, but I wouldn’t let them fit together. Having Connor for a father was bad enough…I wouldn’t believe that my sweet aunt was capable of murder. “No. You’re wrong. I won’t believe it.”
“Don’t believe it if you don’t want to,” he said. “Frankly, I think Ellen did us all a big favor. I sure ain’t going to turn her in to the families. As long as she managed to cover her tracks okay, I’m fine with what she did.”
Connor had revealed more to me tonight than I’d be able to process in a hundred years. “All right,” I said. “You’ve told me what you wanted to. I’m ready to leave now.”
“You can’t go yet,” he said. “I brought you here for a reason. There’s one more thing I have to share with you, but I need to do it here.” He turned and walked over to the bookcase, pulling down one of the newer journals. He held it out to me, and I could see Maisie’s name scrawled across the front. The childishness of her signature clued me in to the fact that it was older than it looked. “I’ve tried to take it from the house, but I can’t. It won’t let me. I had to bring you here to show it to you.” He handed it over.
My hands struggled against the binding, but I couldn’t open it, try as I might. It had been magically locked. I brushed my hand across the cover, and even though it wouldn’t open, some information leaked through the seal. I could tell that the journal contained information far more valuable than all of the Witchcraft 101 manuals on the bookshelf combined. It was sealed because it contained the secrets of the line. Even in my ignorance I was aware that Ginny should never ever have shared these secrets with Maisie; they were only to be passed from one anchor to another.
“You know what’s in there, don’t you? You can sense it,” Connor asked, delight spreading across his face. “I knew the second I touched it.”
“It’s about the line. This journal is full of its secrets—things only an anchor should know.”
“The families would have bound Ginny if they’d known she was telling Maisie these things.”
“Look at the writing on the cover! Maisie was far too young to know what she was getting into.”
“Sure, that’s how we see it, and the families would most likely have agreed. But Ginny, though, that’s a different matter. They would’ve shown the old gal no mercy. She would have been bound and deposited far, far away from any place she could access the line.”
“Okay,” I said. “But she’s dead, and Maisie is going to be the anchor. What’s the point of showing me this?”
He righted the chair that I’d knocked over then sat in it himself. “The point is that this is our chance to learn how to tap into the mainline, yours and mine. You’ve tasted Oliver’s power. Are you telling me you wouldn’t like your own? And not just a touch of it either, but a connection to the source itself? ’Cause I sure do, Mercy. I’m tired of living in your family’s shadow, with just enough of my own magic for parlor tricks. I want more.”
