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He tugged at his coat, freeing it from the brush, and took another step toward me. He began rubbing his left arm with his right hand. “It’s only that I am not quite sure where I am,” he said.
“You are off Ogeechee Road,” I replied. “Do you live around here?”
His answer came in the form of a short, sharp laugh. The laughter died as quickly as it had come. “I don’t know.” His knees buckled, and he fell to the ground. I ran to him, nearly tripping over my own feet, and knelt by his side. I gave him a gentle shake. He did not respond. I rolled him over with some difficulty. His skin was blue, and the radiance I had noticed only moments before had disappeared. Whatever magic had clung to him had deserted him.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I said and opened his coat, surprised to discover how slight his body was beneath it. I loosened his collar. He smiled up at me, but then his eyes glazed over. I felt for a pulse. There was none. I had taken a CPR certification course a couple of years before, and I did my best to remember the steps. Placing my right hand over his chest and my left hand over my right, I began compressions. Two inches deep, one hundred compressions per minute.
“Help!” I screamed, hoping that someone in one of the nearby businesses might hear. “Call an ambulance.” I kept counting compressions as I listened for any response. There was none. I called out again. I had picked this place for my work with Jilo because the noise of a busy road drowned out most other sounds, and even though there were businesses in the area, large trees hid the powder magazine entirely. Now I cursed the noise and camouflage. He only had six minutes even with CPR. How long had I been pressing into his chest? Maybe only thirty seconds, but it seemed like forever. Should I stop CPR and call for an ambulance myself?
I gasped as a sudden realization shot through me—I was a witch now, but I was thinking like a human. What would a witch do? I knew that my resuscitation efforts alone would not bring him back. At best, the CPR would keep oxygen flowing to his brain until a defibrillator could be used. His heart needed to be restarted with a shock of electricity.
The moment this thought came to mind, a pulse of light shot down my arm, bright and blue like a tight ball of lightning. I hadn’t consciously commanded it. My magic had interpreted my confused thoughts and taken over for me. The bolt shot into the man’s body, and for an instant, his eyes flashed open, full of astonishment. His body lifted a few inches off the ground, and as I tried to pull my hands away, it followed me, the electricity between us attracting him like a magnet. Then the link broke at last, and he dropped to the ground, his eyes fluttering shut for the last time. The stench of burning meat rose to my nostrils, and I grew sick. The part of his chest where the energy had entered him had been burned black, and a gaping tunnel had been blasted through the space that once held his heart.
What had I done? I clawed at the sandy soil, scraping away the residue that clung to my palm, my fingers. My breath failed me, coming only in short gasps that couldn’t fill my lungs. Hands reached out from behind me and held my shoulders. A calm, feminine voice spoke to me. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. But you have to come with me. We have to get you away from here.” I had never heard that voice before, but I had known it all my life. I began shaking, my skin cold. The light reaching my eyes alternated between impossibly dim and painfully bright. I felt like the world had fallen away beneath me. I had to be hallucinating. I looked away from the damaged corpse I had created. My head turned slowly, knowing that once I laid eyes on her, nothing would ever be the same again. I looked up. A smile. Loving green eyes. A face so very much like my own.
“Mama?” my voice squeaked out of me, forcing its way between the walls of amazement and disbelief.
“Yes, baby. It’s me,” she said, and then seemed to read the next thought pressing on my mind. “It’s me. I’m alive.”
TWO
My mother guided me through the scrub-filled ravine that separated the powder magazine from the parking lot servicing the nearby businesses. A limousine waited there, and a liveried driver who was standing by its side jolted to attention, then opened the car’s door. Together, my mother and he eased me into the air-conditioned cocoon, and then my mother slid in next to me. A dark privacy glass separated us from the driver’s area, and even blacker windows, nearly onyx, protected us from the world outside. The car began moving, but I had no idea where we were going. Frankly, I didn’t care. I held on to my mother’s hands, grasping them so tightly it must have hurt. Her face held my eyes. It seemed so much like a mirror of my own, except that it held a couple decades more of experience, of sadness.
“I know you must have so many questions.” Her words began to make their way through the haze. “And,” she said as her eyes caressed me, “there are so many things I need to say to you. But we don’t have time now.” A pained smile formed on her face. She managed to extricate her right hand from mine, and ran her fingers through my hair. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. I didn’t want to just fall into your world, but I tracked you down at the powder magazine, and I had to get a look at you.” She pulled my head to her bosom, pressing her cool palm against my cheek. “If only I’d arrived a few moments earlier, I could have helped, but I discovered you too late. The old gentleman had already . . . expired. You were so distraught, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave you there.”
“But how could you?” I asked. “I mean, how could you have left me before? Left Maisie?” I pulled back from her, a sharp and stinging anger cutting me to the quick. “How could you let us grow up believing you had died?”
“I had no choice,” she said. “She wouldn’t let me near you. She was working against me long before she plotted against you.”
My mother didn’t need to supply the name. “Ginny,” I said. A slight nod confirmed my thought. “But why?”
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. Only not right now. I’ve waited all your life to have a chance to explain things to you, and it isn’t a story that can be rushed.” She reached forward and pulled me into her again. I felt intoxicated by her scent—it reached all the way through the years and brought me right back to the cradle. For a moment, I let go of everything and just let my mother hold me. “I have to let you go for now,” she whispered. “But I’ll be near, and we’ll talk soon. Very soon. I promise.”
“No,” I looked up to her, my heart in my throat. “No, you have to come home,” I pleaded. “Come home now. We have to tell Iris and Ellen and Oliver that you’re still alive. They are going to be so—”
Her body tensed and her eyes narrowed, small lines forming at their corners. “No,” a barbed refusal tore from her lips. She drew a breath, forced her shoulders to relax. “No,” she said more calmly. She pushed me away gently, but then patted my hand. “They can’t know I’ve returned. Not yet.”
“But they have to . . .” My words died in the air as the look on her face told me more than I wanted to know.
Her eyes had turned downcast and distant, as if she were reliving an unpleasant memory. A tremble danced at the corner of her mouth, and she clenched her jaw to regain control of the tic. “Oh, they know, my darling girl. My sisters know very well that I’m alive.” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “I’m not sure what they have told Oliver, but your aunts, they know.” She leaned in and pinned me with her gaze. “Iris and Ellen took you and Maisie from me at Ginny’s bidding.”
“I cannot believe they would do something so terrible,” I heard my own voice pleading with my mother. “Why would they?”
“The same reason Ginny stole your power and worked to turn your twin against you—yes, I know all about it. The line. Ginny justified all of her crimes by saying she committed them to protect the line. And in separating my children from their mother, Iris and Ellen were her willing accomplices.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to believe, but there was something about my mother’s words that I found so compelling.
She continued. “You think you know them, but you don’t. Not really. You only know the side they have allowed you to see. If they realize you know . . . if they learn I am back, I fear for your safety.” I started to protest that they would never do anything to hurt me, but she held up her hand to stop me. “They have always put the line before your well-being, and they always will. Deep down you know that, or you wouldn’t be sneaking around with the old root doctor trying to find out what the line has done with Maisie. My sisters will not think twice about alerting the united families if they find out you know about me. The other anchors already have it in for you simply because you are my daughter. If they learn that I have made contact with you, they will make a preemptive move against you. I fear they may work a binding on you.”
She waited until her warning had fully registered. Now that I was an anchor, a binding wouldn’t merely strip me of my powers. It would leave me to live out the rest of my life in a vegetative state—the power of the line would consume me, leaving me as nothing more than a receptacle. “You must say nothing. Tell no one. If you do, we will lose each other again, and this time it will be forever.”
>I gasped as a sudden realization shot through me—I was a witch now, but I was thinking like a human. What would a witch do? I knew that my resuscitation efforts alone would not bring him back. At best, the CPR would keep oxygen flowing to his brain until a defibrillator could be used. His heart needed to be restarted with a shock of electricity.
The moment this thought came to mind, a pulse of light shot down my arm, bright and blue like a tight ball of lightning. I hadn’t consciously commanded it. My magic had interpreted my confused thoughts and taken over for me. The bolt shot into the man’s body, and for an instant, his eyes flashed open, full of astonishment. His body lifted a few inches off the ground, and as I tried to pull my hands away, it followed me, the electricity between us attracting him like a magnet. Then the link broke at last, and he dropped to the ground, his eyes fluttering shut for the last time. The stench of burning meat rose to my nostrils, and I grew sick. The part of his chest where the energy had entered him had been burned black, and a gaping tunnel had been blasted through the space that once held his heart.
What had I done? I clawed at the sandy soil, scraping away the residue that clung to my palm, my fingers. My breath failed me, coming only in short gasps that couldn’t fill my lungs. Hands reached out from behind me and held my shoulders. A calm, feminine voice spoke to me. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. But you have to come with me. We have to get you away from here.” I had never heard that voice before, but I had known it all my life. I began shaking, my skin cold. The light reaching my eyes alternated between impossibly dim and painfully bright. I felt like the world had fallen away beneath me. I had to be hallucinating. I looked away from the damaged corpse I had created. My head turned slowly, knowing that once I laid eyes on her, nothing would ever be the same again. I looked up. A smile. Loving green eyes. A face so very much like my own.
