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“If what I read from Jessamine is true, Gehenna is exactly where he should be.” Iris raised her arms so that her wrists bent in toward the light. Angry gashes formed there, letting her blood shoot forward to feed the spinning quicksilver globe. It swallowed the blood hungrily. “Blood calls to blood. Spirit calls to soul. Return.” Her eyes flashed at us. “Say it. Chant it. Repeat after me. Blood calls to blood. Spirit calls to soul. Return.”
I was afraid of what might happen if I obeyed Iris, but more afraid of what might happen to her if I didn’t. I joined in. “Blood calls to blood. Spirit calls to soul. Return.”
I glanced nervously at Ellen. She nodded and began the chant. “Blood calls to blood. Spirit calls to soul. Return.”
“This is wrong,” I heard Abby protest weakly, but a stern look from Iris squelched her dissent. Soon she added her voice, her magic to the spell Iris was weaving. “Blood calls to blood. Spirit calls to soul. Return.”
“Edwin Wallace Taylor,” Iris called out over our chanting, “I command you by this blood . . .” Iris focused all her power on the sphere in the circle’s center as another spurt of blood left her and rushed into the orb. Without warning we were pulled in another step closer. The orb contracted, becoming smaller but remaining at the exact center of our constricting circle. For a short time it remained a perfect sphere, but in the next instant that sphere began to elongate, forming a recognizably human shape. A mannequin-like head with only the sug
gestion of features hung in the air between us.
“Show yourself, you cowardly bastard.” Iris spat out the words, but the shape began to grow smoother, nothing more than a furrowed oval. The spirit fought the summons, evidently preferring damnation to facing its angry daughter. Another rush, another pull of gravity tugged at us, bringing us all within arm’s length of each other. Without willing it, my hands reached out, one clasping Abby’s hand, the other Iris’s. We fell silent as a shock of energy shot through us.
“I said show yourself.” Iris’s words came out almost like a growl, and my heart jumped at the sight of her face. Her lovely clear eyes glowed with a red light. The pupil and iris had been erased, leaving only two shining rubies. “Return.”
The gravity that had been centered on the shape at the middle of our circle suddenly reversed, repulsing us, knocking Ellen and Abby on their backsides. I was able to keep to my feet, but the wind had been knocked out of me. As I struggled to reclaim my breath, the shape in the center continued its metamorphosis. It was clearly in the shape of a human head, but the skin of bruised quicksilver remained mirrorlike. I could see my own features warped in its reflection. I was reminded of the horrid chandelier my mother had created from the heads of those who had stopped being of any other use to her. I’d lost my mother to this kind of magic, I would not lose Iris.
“What have you done?” Ellen asked Iris as Abby helped her back to her feet.
We all looked to Iris, and I breathed a sigh of relief to see her eyes had returned to normal. Then I felt a wave of anger. She knew better than to invite this kind of dark magic into herself, into our home.
I didn’t focus on her for long, though, as it was impossible to ignore the floating cranium at the center of the library. Its eyes opened, but they too shone smooth and reflective; there was no difference between the composition of the eyes and the lids that had covered them. Its lips separated slowly, a thin film of bluish mercury covering the mouth, then popping inward like an imploding balloon.
“My girls, my beautiful daughters, are you to be my greatest torment?” The voice that came from the form had no intonation; it sounded flat, nearly mechanical. No, worse than that, it had been robbed of all hope. Still, it was clear the voice did not belong to a man; it resembled a woman’s soft alto.
“Mama?” Ellen blanched. She broke the circle and approached the suspended figure, nearly touching it, but stopping shy of actual contact.
Iris walked a complete ring around the form. “Where is he? Was he too much of a weakling to face us himself?”
“Your father is not here. Only I. I am alone.”
Ellen fell to her knees before the chrome apparition. “Mama, I have missed you so much.” The look of wonder on her face told me she didn’t give a damn about Iris’s intended interrogation. “What happened, Mama? They said you ran the car off the road on purpose.” This was news to me.
Ellen’s question was met by silence then a heartrending moan. “No choice. I had no choice.”
Abby had moved softly around the edge of the room to get a better view of the entity’s face. The quicksilver face took a moment to register our presence, focusing first on Abby then turning toward me. Rather than looking at me dead on, she seemed confused by something on the periphery of her vision. “What kind of magic is this?”
Iris lowered her head in shame. “I’m sorry, Mama, I know it was wrong to use blood magic . . .”
“No,” she said and turned her empty eyes on me. “This girl. She’s wrong.”
A touch on my shoulder nearly caused me to jump out of my skin. I looked back over my shoulder to find Maisie had come into the room unnoticed. I remembered that she had been resting. She wore a gray oversized T-shirt. Her hair was mussed. The room flashed with a pop then darkened. The smell of ozone wafted around us.
“I told you to stay in your room,” Abby chastised her, but only mildly. She pulled Maisie away from me, trying to maneuver her through the door. “You get on back to bed, you hear?”
“Mama, we don’t have much time. The power is fading,” Iris said, her voice keening.
“We will find a way to free you, Mama,” Ellen said. “We will. But you have to tell us why you are . . . where you are.”
“Because she killed Grandpa,” Maisie said, breaking free of Abby’s grasp and taking a few steps closer to the orb. Her certainty sent a chill down my spine, as it echoed what I somehow also knew to be true. Maisie’s words were answered by my grandmother’s wail.
“Why?” Ellen’s voice broke. She pushed away, scrambling a few feet back from the apparition.
“Because he had another family. A family before us.” This time it was Iris who answered. She had seen it all with a single touch of Jessamine’s hand. “Jilo’s little sister.” My mind flashed back to the night I first met Jilo. The night I had gone to her crossroads. She had hated us Taylors. Now I was beginning to understand why.
“His parents did not approve, but he rebelled.” Iris wrapped her arms around herself. “When he took her to France and married her, they cut him off financially, revoked his access to the family trust. They knew their son was a man who loved his comforts. Eventually he grew tired of the poverty and tired of his wife as well. He never even divorced her. He left her and his children behind and came back to Savannah and married Mama.”
“When we married, I knew nothing of his first wife and family. When I learned what he had done, how he had deserted them. How he had deceived me. I couldn’t live with knowing he had made me his whore,” the voice raged. “I wanted him to pay. For what he’d done to me. For deserting his children. For abandoning his real wife. I wanted him dead. I just kept driving faster and faster. Then I awoke in hell.”
