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“Okay, then, write,” I ordered, and my uncle obeyed. “We know it’s the body of a female.”
He paused mid-scribble and looked up at me. “We know she had red hair.”
“But they haven’t found the head . . . Oh, I see.” The realization of how they knew this was quickly buried under an even more unpleasant realization. Magical correspondences. Voodoo dolls. “Sympathetic magic.” Maybe I was growing paranoid, but lately it did seem like the whole world was out to get me. I flashed back on the earlier discussion I had with my aunts about Alice Riley. Witch. Pregnant. Now we had a dead redhead. I crossed to the table and sat back down, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me. “Has someone murdered this poor woman and substituted her as a proxy for me?”
Oliver said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes. For a few moments he sat drumming nervously with his pen on the pad. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Shelve it for now.” He flushed with anger. “Damn it, I wish Iris would get over herself and come down. She’s the one who’s good at this kind of deduction.” He slammed the pen down, and it flew off the table. “I’m going to go get her. Drag her down here.”
“There is no need for dragging.” The swinging door into the kitchen pulled back to reveal Iris standing there. “And I am doing my best to ‘get over myself.’?”
Oliver regarded her with a guilty expression. His eyes darted from Iris to me then back to Iris. “You know what I mean. I feel every bit as bad as you do, but you don’t see me hiding my head in the sand like an ostrich.”
“No, little brother, it is much more your style to strut around like a peacock.” A long moment of silence stretched out between them as they stared each other hard in the eye. I was about to crawl under the table in search of shelter, when they both burst out laughing. Iris approached her younger brother and placed a kiss on the top of his head. She reached out and grasped his wounded hand. “What happened here?”
“Just a cut.”
“You show that to Ellen when she gets home.” She stepped back and took my uncle and myself in. “What’s so crucial that you two are plotting to storm the castle and drag me from my turret?”
“They found the rest of the body,” Oliver said. “Well, other than the head. That is still missing.”
“All right, we knew the parts were still out there, and they were bound to show up sooner or later.”
“Mercy’s worried, well, I’m kind of worried too.” Oliver bit his lip. “The woman was a redhead.”
“There’s the connection to Alice Riley. Pregnant,” I reminded my aunt. “Commonly believed to be a witch,” I said, and fearing I hadn’t made my case added, “and let’s don’t forget that half the magical world seems to have an ax to grind with me.”
Iris sat next to her brother. “I’m listening. Go on.”
“We’re afraid,” Oliver took over for me, “that whoever is behind this is, as you thought, attempting to work a spell of some kind using the body as a poppet. A poppet to repre
sent Mercy.”
Iris’s lips pulled into a tight line. She looked drained this morning; the light that had been glowing in her since she slipped out from under Connor’s yoke seemed to have all but faded away. “I see.” She took a few seconds to study the map. “This doesn’t feel like the work of a real witch. It just doesn’t. An attack by proxy. That’s for amateurs.” She reached over and picked up the legal pad. “Ten pieces. Most magic workers get hung up on the numbers six, seven, and thirteen. What is the significance of that number of ten?” she asked, but then answered her own question. “Whoever is behind this knows more than about magic. Perhaps they know something about the ten united families. Something about the line and the families who remain loyal to it.”
There were indeed ten united families who maintained the line. There were originally thirteen, but three families came to regret their participation. They had been perfectly happy to throw off their own masters, but hadn’t taken into account they would lose control of the non-witches who had been subservient to them. My father, Erik, had been from one of these families. When Ellen, his wife, failed to give birth to the daughter the rebel families had hoped would come to destroy the line, Erik began an affair with my mother. Maisie and I were the products of this affair.
“If the person, or people, behind the dismembering of this unfortunate soul is indeed attempting to use the corpse as a magical substitute for Mercy, I suspect it may have absolutely nothing to do with her personally, and everything to do with her role as an anchor of the line.”
Well, that’s a comfort, I thought, drawing my arms around myself.
“You think an ordinary magic worker is out to destroy the line?” Oliver asked.
“This is no ordinary magic work. I’d say more an extraordinary magic worker. Someone on par with Jilo . . .” Her words died as we all shared the same realization.
“Jessamine?” I thought of the anger I sensed coming from her. I could understand her anger, her sense of betrayal, but would she, could she, use magic to attack me? To attempt to harm the line through harming me? Something about this theory didn’t sit right with me. “Jessamine knows Jilo and I were close. I don’t believe she would betray Jilo like that.”
“I haven’t laid eyes on her yet, but to me she sounds like the type who would bank on your thinking that way.”
“I suspect your uncle is right. I think Jessamine might see your affection for Jilo as a weak spot in your defense. Think, Mercy, what better way to extract revenge against your grandfather than by taking down the one thing he had truly been loyal to? He may have been willing to make fools out of his family . . . out of both his families, but he would have gladly laid down his life to protect the line.”
“How do we handle this?” Oliver asked, having already tried and convicted Jessamine.
“Let me think about it for a bit.” Iris crossed to the counter and found her apron. She tied it around her waist. “In the meantime,” she said smiling at me, “you go upstairs and fetch Abby. Tell her she’s got some baking to do.” She held her head high, putting her hands on her hips and striking an intentionally humorous pose. “Thanksgiving has officially returned to the Taylor household.”
Fake it till you make it. One of the slogans Ellen had adopted from her meetings came to my mind. Iris appeared to be doing just that. Still, I felt glad she’d changed her mind. I pushed myself up from the table and exited through the flapping door and into the hall. I climbed the stairs to the upper floor and turned toward Maisie’s room. I’d only taken a step in that direction when from behind me I heard the screech of a hinge thirsty for oil. My heart stopped cold, then began beating wildly to make up for the lost contractions. I knew that sound better than that of my own voice. It was the noise made by the door to the old linen closet, the room that as children, Maisie and I had adopted as our place of secrets. The same room to which Jilo had linked her haint-blue chamber.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt if I turned toward that creaking sound, toward the door I knew had just pried itself ajar, I would see the haint-blue aura of Jilo’s enchanted chamber spilling through the crack into the hall. I knew it would be so, even though I knew it to be impossible. At Jilo’s behest, I myself had destroyed her enchanted chamber, a room capable of straddling both space and time, or perhaps more correctly space-time. The physics of the place was well beyond my ken, and even though I felt I had the power to re-create such a space, I lacked Jilo’s insight into the intricacies of the necessary magic. She might not have been a born witch, but she proved herself a great magic worker many times over.
I turned to see the door open, and the hall was indeed scintillating like sun on a pool. Jilo had figured out how to straddle dimensions. Could she have found a way around death itself? No sooner had the question entered my mind than the impulse to dive into that haint-blue light became an absolute compulsion. I fled down the corridor toward the cerulean glow. I paused at the threshold of the now open door, my intuition suddenly registering a sense of fraud. This magic was counterfeit. I stepped back, away from the light, but it was too late. It reached out to envelop me; then everything around me dissolved in a bright pulse.
