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“Oh, aren’t you clever?” I asked. “Shift me to a place where time moves more quickly. Where I will live out my natural lifespan in months rather than years, so you don’t have to wait long for your next shot. There’s one big problem with that, genius. It looks like you are stuck here with me.”
A lopsided smile came to his lips. “No, you’re wrong there, Red. I’ve got a hall pass.” He turned his forearm toward me, showing me still-inflamed skin that bore a fresh tattoo, a circle composed of symbols that resembled stylized lightning bolts or sharply jointed versions of the letter “s.” He looked at me with such smugness, I should have hated him, but instead my heart broke for him. I recognized the symbol. I’d seen something similar in the file my grandfather had compiled on Lebensborn, the grotesque Nazi breeding project, the source of my very own existence. I had no choice about having Lebensborn written into my DNA, but Teague chose to place its mark on his body. It sickened me, but I couldn’t afford the luxury of pitying him.
“How long have you been working with Emily?” I asked.
He reached up and wiped the smile from his lips with a swipe of his hand. “Who?” His eyes rounded in confusion.
He had to be faking it. “Don’t play stupid. Emily. My mother.” I shook my head at his gullibility. “She isn’t your ally. She isn’t working with you. She’s been tricking you. She wants to end the line.”
His head jerked back and shook involuntarily. “I thought your mother died?” His words had started as a statement, then twisted into a question. He wasn’t pretending. He really didn’t know.
But if he hasn’t been drawing magic from my mother, where is he getting his juice? No sooner had the question formed in my mind than I was struck by a vision of Teague. Stranger still, rather than seeing him from the outside, I experienced that revelation as if I were he. Through his eyes, I watched his reflection in a mirror. He stood alone, in a room lit by a single candle.
Since he was a witch, I should not have been able to pierce his psyche so easily, even if I were much more powerful than Teague. Still, something, an unbidden power, had given me access to his memories. This vision, like a silent movie, continued to unfold in my mind.
Teague’s was the only visible figure, but he wasn’t truly alone. I sensed others, disincarnate intelligences surrounding him, guiding him. One was much stronger than all the others combined. Watching himself in the mirror, he stripped to the waist and drew a sign much like the one found near Jilo’s grave on his own chest, over his heart. I saw an arc of e
nergy appear from nowhere and strike him, driving him down to his knees. I intuited it wasn’t just magic, it wasn’t just power he had accepted into himself. He had welcomed a consciousness into himself. He had offered himself up for possession. No, that wasn’t quite right—he had allowed himself to become an anchor for a power that had lost its rights to be in our world.
Rather than continue as a passive viewer, I decided to attempt to direct his consciousness to open even wider to me. It yielded with ease, and I pushed deeper into his psyche, following the line of dark magic that connected him to the font of his power. What I found there chilled me, for I recognized this entity.
What I uncovered was not a minor demon like Wren, nor even a greater one like Barron, the demon Emily had sacrificed in her attempt to deliver me over to the old ones. The source of Teague’s magic wasn’t a demon in the conventional sense at all. My mind flashed back to my first taste of magic, when I witnessed an image other than my own in the mirror. Then I realized, Teague had somehow joined forces with one of the most dangerous witches this world had ever know, Gudrun, onetime best friend of my own paternal great-grandmother, Maria Orsic.
“Gudrun.” Her name escaped my lips.
Teague trembled when he realized how easily I had breached his defenses. His eyes fell, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
I laughed in his face. “Even if you could hold me here, and watch from some safe and distant perch as my life force failed me, you would still have one big problem with this scheme of yours.” He stared at me, shaking his head as if he were trying to force me out of it. “Haven’t you felt it, Teague? The world has changed. The line has changed. You could wait a thousand lifetimes, and still it will never choose you. Never.”
I took advantage of his confusion and closeness to reach out and snatch his tattooed forearm. “Let me teach you a little blood magic,” I said, sinking my nails deep enough in him to break through his skin. He squealed as his blood covered the tattoo. I claimed the sigil’s magic for my own purpose. “Come on, Pinocchio, let’s go say hello to the puppet master.”
I closed my eyes and slid. This time I felt no resistance; I moved easily beyond the borders of my cousin’s latest trap, this time with Teague himself in tow. When I opened my eyes less than a second later, we stood in my own bedroom. Teague staggered away from me, falling to his hands and knees and vomiting all over my rug. He was going to clean that up himself, once I got through whacking him over the nose. I turned away from the sight of his stricken face, only to catch my own reflection in my makeup mirror.
I hated what I saw there, as the sheen of Gudrun’s foul magic clung to me. I forced myself to shrug off the fear of what my return ticket might end up costing me. “Come on, Gudrun. I got your boy, and I know you can hear me.” For a fleeting moment, I saw her face, ice-blue eyes and perfect nose framed by a black pageboy bob, but as with the first time I had used my mirror to see into her world, she waved her hand and faded instantly. This time, though, I heard a pop, and although the glass remained in its frame, a webwork of cracks shot out from the mirror’s center toward its outer edges. I guess Gudrun had had enough of my popping in uninvited.
To think the families had wanted to send me to this woman for training. If I had acquiesced, if I had gone to her, would I have ever made it home again? The sound of laughter rang out behind me, and I turned to find Teague back on his feet. “You don’t stand a chance, not against her. Not against us.”
“There is no more ‘us’ as far as you and she are concerned,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm but calm. “Get it through your thick head, Teague. Gudrun has been lying to you. Tricking you. She has no interest in protecting the line. If anything, she is the line’s greatest threat.”
“You’re wrong. She’s changed. She’s no longer a threat to the line. You are.”
I held my hand up to him. “Stop. Believe what you want, but I am going to send you home now. You’ve left me without a choice. The families, the other anchors, I will have to tell them what you’ve been up to. That you have been conspiring against me, against an anchor.”
“You are either a liar or a fool,” Teague said. His face was deep red with anger, but then his emotions seemed to turn on a dime. He broke out in raucous laughter, the mirthful outburst causing tears to fall from his eyes. He wiped at them with the back of his hand. “You know, you really are too much. You don’t have as many friends as you think you do. Do you think I approached Gudrun on my own? That we somehow figured out a way to sneak behind the other anchors’ backs so she could use me to host her magic? Some of the other anchors, Mercy, they already know, and they are rooting for me.” Was it my instinct or only my fear that made me believe him? “And I am going to keep coming for you until I get the job done.”
“Your scheming against me has nothing to do with protecting the line. This is all about your pitiable need to feel important.” The hate in his eyes made me wince. “You are going to leave me alone,” I said, but this time the words sounded much less convincing.
“Oh, no. I am going to do no such thing. The only way you are going to get me to leave you alone is if you kill me, and we both know you don’t have it in you.”
“You’re right,” a familiar voice replied. I had been so focused on Teague I hadn’t even noticed Maisie standing in the doorway. “She doesn’t, but I do.”
Before I could even think to stop her, Maisie raised her hand toward my shattered mirror. The largest shard broke free from the frame and whisked around me. It reached Teague and sliced his neck open, clean to the bone. The life shot out from him in a rush of scarlet as he fell to the floor before me. I blinked at the splatter of his blood that touched my face.
When I opened my eyes, Maisie looked up from Teague’s corpse to my face. “Oh,” she said. “Let me grab you a towel for that.”
ELEVEN
I’d seen so many horrors since the morning I’d found Ginny’s body lying in her parlor. In so many ways, the sight of my cousin’s corpse lying on the floor before me was just one more. I wasn’t sure what I should be feeling, but all I did feel was shame. Somehow I knew that in fifty or maybe one hundred years, when my own granddaughter or even great-great-granddaughter charged the atmosphere of this room, searching for memories of me, this one, this sight of me covered in Teague’s blood, would be what rose up before her. Would she feel the horror that remained frozen in my chest?
