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“The fire. It was a wolf that started it.” The ambulance whisked us away to the tune of its shrieking siren. I held tight to Peter’s free hand, but my eyes remained fixed on the ruins of Magh Meall until we turned the corner, and there was nothing left to see except the smoke that rose up to blot out the stars.
NINETEEN
I’m sure the anchors would have counted themselves as lucky. Even though Gudrun had broken out of her dimensional prison and was once again free to wreak havoc on our world, from their vantage, Gudrun’s escape had so far been bloodless. Of course, they wouldn’t count the scavengers Gudrun had turned to ash. Nor would they overly concern themselves with the losses to my family.
I sat alone at the kitchen table, watching an easy rain fall on Savannah and painting my nails a demure pink. Seemed as good a shade as any for a funeral. Rather than the jagged grief I would have expected to descend on me, I just felt numb. I couldn’t really comprehend that Peter’s parents were both gone. Murdered by my own half brother.
I should have realized how vulnerable the Tierneys had been. Done something more than weave a few protection spells against a magical attack. I should have realized that if those who wished us harm were prevented from attacking using magic, they would rely on everyday violence.
Colin had died directly at Josef’s hands, or should that be claws. Josef was a skin-walker. He had chosen to make his attack in lupine rather than human form. A wolf capable of human treachery. The thought made me shudder.
Josef hadn’t touched Claire. She had succumbed to a beam that fell in during the explosion. Peter had carried her lifeless body as far as he could before giving in to smoke inhalation. He broke his arm in the fall and was concussed by debris dropping from the Tierneys’ apartment on the floor above the bar.
Part of my mind kept telling me that there was no way any of t
his could be real. That soon, I’d wake up and realize it had only been a nightmare. But the world around me kept moving.
I blew on my nails to help dry the lacquer, then reached for my chamomile tea. The heat of the cup warmed my right hand, while the fingers of my left hand examined the cool smoothness of my best pearls. White pearls, black maternity shift dress. My feet were too swollen even for my flats: early onset swelling, another perk of my unconventional pregnancy. At least I finally had a practical use for my worthless magic: I’d spell them into fitting.
I’d have to go up soon and rouse Peter. He had barely left our room for three days now. He hadn’t shaved or showered. Iris had done her best to see Peter was fed, cooking all his favorites and stopping just short of spoon-feeding him herself. Oliver had tried both drinking with him and leaving him to drink alone. Peter wouldn’t even let Ellen come near him. She wanted to heal his arm; he said he needed to feel the pain. Me, he was barely even talking to.
He didn’t want to blame me, of that I was sure, but how could he not? He’d look around me rather than at me. I spent what seemed like days on my knees, begging my husband to turn toward me in his pain and not away. He didn’t want to talk. He blamed me for his parents’ death, and honestly, I blamed myself too. I set my mug on the table and applied polish to the fingers of the other hand.
I studied the back of my hand as the fresh lacquer dried, making a connection between the number of fingers and the five deaths my family had endured in six months. I counted Ginny in that number, because part of me said I had to. I included Jilo, and even Tucker, because my heart told me it was true. I certainly did not count Connor or Teague.
Nor did I include my mother.
The uniformed officer at the site of the fire, the one who had been so anxious to catch Adam’s attention, had found Emily’s head in a satin-lined chest outside the ruins of Magh Meall. Why Josef had turned against her we might never know. She had chosen to align herself with a sociopath, undoubtedly believing she could control him, certainly never suspecting that his violence might one day be turned against her. Josef had aligned himself with Gudrun, and this alliance had proven deadly to my mother.
“The burning bodies, the last sephira,” Maisie whispered when Adam revealed the find to us. Emily’s dismembered parts, a nightmarish jigsaw, were being held at the medical examiner’s office under the name “Jane Doe 42.” We had not stepped forward, nor did we plan on stepping forward, to claim her. As far as the world was concerned, Emily Taylor had been dead for more than two decades. I for one was more than happy to have them go on thinking that.
At first I was certain this was just another of her tricks. She had the power to create doppelgängers of herself and send them out into the world to carry out her subterfuge. I myself had witnessed one of them being impaled with a shard of glass from a crumbling dome. But Iris and Oliver visited the morgue and worked a spell capable of disintegrating anything created using magic. The spell had no effect; the parts that had been strewn over Savannah proved to be of organic, not magical, origin. It was indeed my mother’s body.
It was so confusing. All along I had feared Emily had been the one behind the spell; I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact she had been the sacrifice that would allow Gudrun to free herself and wage a new war against the line. None of this made any sense. Had her murder been a punishment for failing to entrap me with Tillandsia, or had she given herself willingly to the cause of destroying the line? Maybe the truth lay somewhere between these possibilities. Perhaps she had no choice about dying, but she’d been allowed to go about it in a way that took the most from me?
Yes, even with her head in a box, my gut told me Emily had machinated the attack against Colin and Claire as a way to punish me for siding against her and her insane scheme to bring down the line. Unlike Gudrun, Emily had never been one to risk a full-on frontal assault. Her preferred method of war was to wear away at the edges and sow seeds of uncertainty and doubt. She removed the people who were important to you, eating away at any sense of security and doing whatever she could to unsettle you. It was so like her to attack on the periphery, even as a parting shot.
The purpose of the spell for which Emily was sacrificed was now evident, even if the workings behind it remained unclear to me. Gudrun had freed herself from the dimension that had held her since the end of World War II. I knew it was too much to hope that Gudrun intended to escape to my great-grandmother Maria’s Aldebaran Aryan paradise. Now that she had freed herself, and returned to our world, I knew Gudrun’s ultimate goal would be finally to bring about an end to the line. Common supposition held that if she succeeded in falling the line, the old ones would reward her, and reward her well. She would probably end up the queen of us all.
The other anchors were holding emergency summits. The united families were preparing for war. My family and I had been excused from participation as we were considered part of the problem, not the solution. The fact that my paternal great-grandmother had helped Gudrun orchestrate a world war didn’t help me when it came to being considered guilty through association.
Witches around the world now shared a common opinion about me. I was indeed the Scarlet Woman of prophecy, the witch who would cause the line to fall. The only surprise for them was that I had never intentionally tried to harm the line. They saw my attempts to save my family and my hometown as immature, impulsive, hardheaded, and selfish. They agreed it would prove to be my numerous character flaws rather than any intentional evil that would bring about the end of the world. That opinion had developed as the general consensus even with Oliver handling my PR. I halfway expected an inquisition to arrive on our doorstep at any given minute. Probably the only thing standing between me and that fate was that every witch in the world whose last name wasn’t Taylor was terrified of me, due in part to my uncle’s efforts. When he realized he couldn’t inspire loyal support for me, he decided abject terror of me might prove our next best hope. “Just until things blow over,” he had said to me with a confident, if unconvincing, smile.
Truth was I couldn’t give a damn what the other witches thought of me. I’d been on the outside of magic my entire life, one way or another. I didn’t care about them. I could count the people I loved, truly loved, on my fingers, and now I’d lost two more of them. Maybe three. I didn’t know if Peter would ever recover emotionally, if he could ever forgive me for what my mother and brother had done. Intellectually he knew the fault didn’t lie with me; emotionally he knew his parents would still be alive if he had never laid eyes on me.
Emily had kept at least one promise to me. She had taken the truth regarding Peter’s Fae origin to the grave. Still, even though she had kept her word regarding not alerting Peter to his true nature, Emily had certainly driven a huge and splintered wedge between us. Peter had shut me out, and the only other woman on earth who might have been able to tell me how to reach him, well, we were burying her charred remains alongside all that could be found of her husband in Laurel Grove in about three hours.
Perhaps if Abigail were still around, she might have found a way to help ease his emotional pain, take the edge off a bit, like she had done for Maisie early on in her healing process. No, I realized, I would have turned any such offer down. I wouldn’t feel right about going behind his back. Besides, what with the whiskey he’d been downing, that edge should be pretty blunted already.
“Arson Turns Deadly” was the headline of the newspaper the day after the fire. The article noted that even though the cause of the fire was still under investigation, a police spokesman confirmed that evidence of an accelerant had been found. The paper made no mention of the discovery of the silk-lined box. The department had decided to keep that quiet until identification had been made.
Still, people talk, and when allegations that the Tierneys might have set the fire themselves began to surface, Adam attempted to have himself recused from the case. To me he had confessed, “It pisses me off more than you can begin to imagine that I know who was behind this, but I can’t do anything about it. I can’t just walk in and tell the chief that the fire was an exercise in magical correspondences.” Since Adam couldn’t admit the link between my family and the dismembered corpse, his request to be removed from the case had been denied. The official reason given was it would eat up too much valuable time getting another detective up to full speed. The real reason was that Adam’s superiors had hoped it would put a fire in his belly; now it had all turned personal for him due, of all things, to his relationship with my uncle.
Adam insisted that all rumors be squelched by informing the press that the Tierneys had been victims of an as yet unidentified assailant, and that neither Peter nor his parents had anything to do with setting the deadly fire. Seeing his parents’ names cleared seemed to help Peter. A little at least. But not for long. He fell quickly back into a dark and unreachable chasm. I took another sip of tea and steeled myself before going upstairs to wake him.
I felt a tingle, a vibration I had come to associate with Maisie. I turned to face her before she could even physically enter the room. She looked like a lovely librarian, all done up in understated mourning garb.
“I hope it’s all right,” she said softly, creeping up to me as if she were afraid the slightest noise would cause me to take flight. “I loved Claire and Colin. I want to say good-bye to them. Please say I can come.”
