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“And what? You thought you’d find her in his coat pocket?”
“We can explain if you’ll allow us,” Emmet said, managing to stand and regain a bit of his sense of decorum.
“You shut up before I shut you up.” Peter’s voice quivered. “What’s wrong with you?” he addressed me. “I thought we had this settled once Jackson took off, that we had decided it was going to be you and me. Now here I find you doing I don’t know what with this guy. I mean, for God’s sake, Mercy, he isn’t even real. He isn’t even a man.”
I looked at Emmet, begging him with my eyes not to retaliate with the knowledge he held about Peter. Nodding slightly, he lowered his head and stepped away. “It isn’t like that,” I said, even though my conscience took little nips at me as I said it. “You don’t understand what’s been going on.”
“Well, how about you break it down for me? Nice and slow and easy so I can get it.”
I stood there trying to find the words to say to him, to explain how my life had turned upside down and nothing at all felt like it was under my control. The words would not come. He started shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was from rage or heartbreak. I wanted to say something, to make it right, but a movement in the corner of my eye drew my attention. I looked away from Peter to see my mother coming toward us. I reached out to Peter to get him to turn and look, but he stepped back from me.
“To hell with it,” he said and turned to leave, but in that split second, my mother appeared directly behind him and drove a blade deep into his chest. He convulsed and coughed up blood.
“There,” she addressed me. “Mama just made it an easy choice for you. That one”—she nodded toward Emmet—“looks good in a tux. This one works my last nerve.” She pushed Peter away, and he fell to the floor.
“What have you done?” I broke from my rigor and threw myself down at Peter’s side.
“That blade is made from iron, you know,” she said. “Iron through the heart is the one sure way to kill a fairy.”
I knelt next to Peter and, my hand trembling, pulled the blade from his chest. I threw it aside, and it melted in midair. Emmet tried to run to my side, but Emily raised one hand, palm out, toward him. An unseen magic flung him up and backward, pinning him to the wall. He struggled, but couldn’t release himself.
“Why?” I asked that woman, the woman who only seconds before I had still thought of as “Mama.”
“Call it ‘Plan B’ if you like,” she said and stepped toward us. She moved her foot gingerly forward and kicked Peter’s body. “Go on. I’m curious to see what you can do. There’s still a little life in him. Let’s see if you can save him. That is, if you want to save him.” She smiled and leered at Emmet. “Quickly now, before I change my mind.”
“I’m not Ellen. You saw what happened when I tried a healing before.”
“Yes, I did. Your efforts proved delightfully amusing.” She laughed. This had to be a nightmare. Peter couldn’t be dying next to me. My mother could not be such a monster. She read my thoughts. “Oh, baby. This is real. This whole night has been real. Maybe not on the plane that you’re used to, but real all the same. We came so, so close. You and your golem here, with all your beautiful power blending in with mine. It was lovely. Lovely. We came so close to completing the Babel spell. So, so close to building a tower that reaches beyond the line, all the way to the old gods. The line may keep them from coming to us, but it can’t keep us from going to them. This one”—she glared at Peter—“caused us to waste a perfectly good demon. Barron’s power has been expended, and I can’t get it back.” She delivered a savage kick to Peter’s side. “I knew you’d bring the golem rather than risk your changeling, but he still just had to show up and interrupt. It must be the magic in his fairy blood that allowed him to break the spell.” Her eyes focused on my throat, as tightly as if the look were intended to strangle me. “If you’d been wearing the locket I gave you rather than your aunt’s tatty pearls, he might not have managed it even then.”
She mocked me by pulling her lips into a pout. “That’s right. Mama put a spell on her little gift.” She shook her head as the exaggerated expression turned into a true frown. “You do have some power in you, little girl. There was enough magic in that locket to charm a normal witch into believing anything I wanted her to. You, it only made a little more amenable.”
I was an anchor. She shouldn’t have been able to charm me at all, but that was the last thing I had time to contemplate right now. I pressed my palm over the wound on Peter’s chest. Half praying, half reaching out for my own magic, I tried my best to close the hole, to will a beat back to his heart. She circled us once, as if taking a moment to consider. “All right, you are a novice, so I’ll let you have a little help. Josef,” she called into the darkness, “bring her.”
Joe entered, dragging Ellen’s naked form with him. His hands dug into my aunt’s shoulders, bruising the skin around the points of contact. He flung her to the ground next to us.
“There,” Emily said. “There’s your precious Ellen.”
Ellen lay there barely conscious. Blood from multiple needle pricks had trickled down her arm and dried. “A tenth of what’s in her could kill a platoon of regular men,” Joe said. “It’s so nice to have a toy you can’t break, no matter how hard you are on it.”
“Tick tock, tick tock, my girl,” Emily said. “It makes no difference to me if he lives or dies, but your leprechaun’s running out of time.”
“He isn’t a leprechaun.”
“And in a few moments more he won’t be anything at all.”
Ellen lay on the floor, barely able to move. She tilted her head toward me, but I wasn’t sure if she actually registered my presence, or if her effort was simply a reflex. But then she reached her hand out to me, and I took it. There shone only a glimmer of awareness in her eyes, but when our hands connected, I watched the aunt I knew and loved surface, like a swimmer breaking through the water. She inhaled sharply and let go of my hand, rolling over and pushing herself to her hands and knees. She crawled to Peter’s side, placing her right palm across his forehead and her left over the wound on his chest. She closed her eyes, and then her lips began moving in silent prayer.
As she knelt over him, as her golden light began to spread through him, I focused in on his face, that face I’d loved but taken for granted since I was a little girl. Now that I was at risk of losing him forever, I realized how much I needed him, how much I loved him. Ellen opened her eyes and looked at me. She had difficulty speaking, her mouth still dry from the drugs that had been pumping through her body. “I’ve found him,” she said. His eyes opened a crack, and he drew a breath.
“Brava. Brava, my darling.” Emily applauded. “You saved the boy.” She turned to face me. “It’s a shame you can’t do the same for that Negro of yours.”
The joy that had reached my heart ran cold. “What have you done to Mother?”
“That darky is not your mother. I am your mother.”
“No, not anymore. I guess maybe even never. What did you do to Jilo?”
