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TEN
When the flash faded, I no longer stood in my home before the entrance of my childhood playroom. I found myself in Oglethorpe Square, but everything around me was in the wrong place. The familiar landmarks of the world I knew were all present, but they lay reversed. No, they were mirrored in aspect to their natural coordinates. North lay south, east lay west, and the noon sun hung high but shone down from the northern edge of the horizon.
The Owens-Thomas House sat at the park’s southwest corner. I blinked, and upon opening my eyes, the mansion had shifted to northwest, with President and Abercorn Streets having spun around like spokes on a bike wheel. The sun stood high over a Savannah that was not my home. I stopped and turned a full circle, searching the silent world around me for any sign of intelligent life, but there was none. Silent nature stood frozen, without even a breeze to flutter the Spanish moss.
Not knowing what else to do, I began walking toward where my intuition told me my house should be, all the while sensing a growing heaviness, a condensing of the atmosphere. The edges of the sky faded from blue to gray, not to a gray that the sky would naturally wear, but a gray that had never known any color other than black and white. A memory prickled at the back of my mind. I’d seen this sky before. I picked up my pace, but with each step I took closer to where home should lie, I felt an increased sense of menace, as if I were being guided, being funneled into a trap. The streets of Savannah had become a type of kaleidoscopic maze, with my well-worn path home transformed into a dead-end trail.
I sought to escape this feeling by turning away from home, onto Lincoln, testing the reality of what my witch’s senses were telling me. I could only continue a few steps in my new direction; then the air around me seemed to congeal, constrict, and drive me back to this caricature of my customary route.
I was not going to lose my head. If I couldn’t escape on foot, I would turn to magic. The first trick I had learned once my powers had been returned to me was to teleport short distances, simply by concentrating on the place where I wanted to go. I learned quickly to close my eyes when I did so, otherwise the motion would leave me feeling seasick. I closed my eyes and concentrated on home. Instantly I began to feel the now familiar sensation of dropping down and sliding, but this time something struck me as different. I felt as if I were bumping up against a boundary, like I was pushing against an enormous rubber band. I heard a screech like metal scraping against metal, and my eyes flashed open. I still stood some yards away from the Owens-Thomas House and only a few inches from where I had started.
I felt unseen eyes on me. Somebody was toying with me. “I know you’re watching me. Enjoying my fear. But we have arrived at the end of your good time.” I scanned the empty street, the deserted square. “I am an
anchor of the line, and you cannot use its power against me.” I wished I felt more certain of that fact, but my gut told me it was true. At least mostly so. “That means you are tapping into a different source, and the magic you are using is dangerous. It will backfire on you. If you stop now, I’ll help you. I promise. Now show yourself.” Even though my gut told me Iris was too quick to lay blame at Jessamine’s door, I very nearly expected to see her appear before me.
I stood there waiting, but my words were met with silence, and well, that just pissed me off. “I said show yourself.” The words came out in a quiet voice. They didn’t boom through the ether or echo around me, but even I was surprised by the sense of authority they conveyed.
The world around me scintillated; then shadows danced with light. A darkness coalesced and took form before me. The sound of clapping met my ears before my eyes could resolve the figure there.
“Wow, you have gotten really bossy there, cousin.” Teague Ryan stood mere steps away. Teague looked like the kind of guy who reported television sports. Good-looking, but not too much so, with closely cropped hair and broad shoulders. I’d think him handsome if his personality didn’t come so much into play. Teague was a bully. Nothing more, nothing less. I hadn’t seen him, I hadn’t even thought of him, since the night back in early July when we drew lots to see who would replace Ginny as our family’s anchor. Teague worked his square jaw from side to side until it popped, then took a few steps closer. His pulse throbbed in his temple. I stood my ground. “You wanted to see me,” he said, “so here I am.”
Teague had wanted, no, expected, the line to overlook us undisciplined Savannah Taylors, and settle its powers on his own broad shoulders. Of everyone who might have been chosen to replace my Great-Aunt Ginny as anchor of the line, Teague was the angriest I had been chosen. Well, other than Maisie, that is, and she tried to kill me to get her hands on the power. Did Teague hope to succeed where my sister had failed? “What are you playing at here?” I asked.
He folded his arms against his chest, trying to appear relaxed, and actually doing a pretty good job of it. “I’m not playing at anything. I’m not playing at all. I am here to do what no one else in the family has the spine to do. I’m here to protect the line. I am here to deal with you.”
At that moment I made the connection between the spell he had been working, the dimming of light, the loss of color, the ever-constricting ring, and the attack that had occurred at Jilo’s house. “It was you who attacked Jilo and me,” I said.
He had followed me to Jilo’s home and set the spell in motion that nearly collapsed reality in around us. We’d escaped with our lives, but Jilo’s house had literally been wiped from the face of the earth, just as if it had never been there. The magic he was using was darker even than what I’d seen through Tillandsia. He’d tapped into a magic so toxic I couldn’t even imagine its source.
He smiled. “So what if it was?”
“So what if it was?” I parroted him. I felt my skin flush as my fists clenched into tight balls. “You think it makes you a big man, attacking an old woman? If it weren’t for you, for what you did, she might not have—”
“Not have what? Kicked the bucket? Bought the farm?” He leaned in over me, glared down at me. “That old bat was well past her sell-by date, and you had no business exposing the line to her anyway. She was too smart. Too crafty. What if she had found a way to hook into it? Do you think she would have put the line’s interest over her own? Hell, why should she? You’re an anchor, and you certainly don’t.”
I ignored his gibes and took a step back. He knew he was prodding a very sore spot, and I surmised he was taunting me for his own amusement, trying to push me to the point where I would lose control. A time not so long ago, he might have succeeded at tapping into my famous temper, but not now. Still, he sickened me. His jealousy and greed had made him a fiend. He must have been the one messing around Jilo’s place of rest. “You are a ghoul. Defiling graves. Making deals with demons. Dismembering an innocent woman. Do you even have an idea how lost you are?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve come to protect the line. I got nothing to do with any other mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”
I began to circle him counterclockwise, forcing him to turn with me. I’d learned much from Jilo. Even if my movements created no magical effect, they would affect him psychologically, put him on the defensive.
This was the first time I’d had the opportunity to examine Teague through a witch’s eyes. Before I had my power, he managed to intimidate me, but no longer. For one thing, in spite of what his enormous ego led him to believe, I didn’t sense he had much of his own power to play with. And when it came to smarts, he wasn’t the sharpest point on the pentagram.
My instincts told me he thought himself a leader in the cause, but he was just a dupe, not a person who had the wherewithal to pull this off. “Okay, then. If you aren’t relying on blood magic, how are you working these spells?” I stopped in my tracks and hit him where he was most vulnerable. “I know you don’t have enough power on your own. Whose magic are you using? Whose skirts are you hiding behind, little boy?”
His head shook from left to right; then he lunged forward, erasing the slight space I’d maintained between us. His hands clenched into meaty fists, red sparks shooting out around them. I wasn’t sure if he intended to use magic against me or punch me. Or both. I braced myself, but I’d be damned before I gave up any ground. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he said in a hiss. “But I sure would like to start with you.”
I should have felt frightened, terrified even, but a deep sense of peace descended on me as some important pieces shifted into place. “And you would if you could. If that were all it would take. But you can’t, because if you did, the line would never, ever take you as anchor.” I laughed. “If anything, it would cut you off completely from its magic. You’d be left small. Impotent.” I leaned in further toward him. “That is why you’ve been trying to trap me. You aren’t trying to kill me. You’re trying to contain me.” I realized that even the spell that erased Jilo’s home had been a snare, not a weapon.
His lips curled up into a smile. “Wanna try to bounce yourself home again? It was fun watching the barrier smack you right back down. Hell, keep trying. I could watch it all day.”
He had begun to regain his footing, so I smiled and shook my head as if I doubted he’d thought the whole scenario through. “So what exactly is your plan?” I took another jab at his ego. “You do have a plan, don’t you? ’Cause I got to tell you, only a loser would try to play something like this without a plan.”
He straightened to his full height, and glared down at me through narrowed, contemptuous eyes. He licked his lips. “Of course I have a plan, and this place right where we’re standing is it. I have caught you. You have been contained, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
I looked around, doing my best to appear unimpressed. “What’s so special about Kaleidoscope Land? Sure, it’s a bit disorienting at first, but I’ll figure a way out of it sooner or later . . .”
“That might just be true,” he said and let loose with a howling laugh. “But later will be a hell of a lot later than you think.” He winked at me. “Seems like a big-shot anchor like yourself would have learned a thing or two about how time passes differently in some dimensions than others.”
