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“You’re scaring me.” I tried to pull my hand free as he tugged on me with his right hand, pointing to the sky with his left. I realized his broken arm had healed, and the cast had disappeared. All this in the short time since he had run away from the graveside. He might not be working magic, but magic was certainly working on him. In the same instant, I felt Adam grasp my right arm in his viselike grip. I stumbled backward into him as Peter, oblivious to my fear shifting into anger, let my arm drop.
“It’s right there, Mercy,” Peter said as his left arm slid back to his side. I fought against my desire to grab him by the hair and pull him back to safety.
I took a breath. “What’s there, sweetie?”
My heart melted as he turned his face up toward me, and smiled at me then down at my stomach. “Hey there, boy,” he said addressing our son. His eyes rose back to my face. “It’s going to be all right now.” He nodded, but his eyes shone silver.
“Yes. Yes it will,” I said, working with my fingers to loosen Adam’s grip on me. I took a step closer. “Everything is going to be fine, but it’s time to go home now.”
“Which home?” He looked away and scanned Savannah’s low skyline, then peered straight ahead in the direction of the river’s flow. “There’s my home. It’s right there. It’s just a bit out of reach. My real home. I know that now. Our little Colin told me so.”
“Mistletoe.” The incongruous thought rose up from my subconscious, even though my r
ational mind had no time to process its meaning. My hands jumped reflexively to my stomach; then for a brief moment I caught sight of the thing on the horizon that had been the source of my husband’s fascination. A window, a portal that shone into a glimmering green world where a sun still shone and it was always midsummer. None of the non-magical crowd even noticed it; I scanned Adam’s face and surmised he didn’t have a clue it hovered there, just out of reach. I had caught a glimpse of this world once before, when the line reached out and mingled its magic with the bit of Fae magic growing inside me. Peter slid an inch or so forward, and I nearly screamed as he teetered forward. He righted himself at the last possible moment.
“Do you want to go there?” I called to Peter. He turned to face me. In this moment, I had his complete attention.
“I want to go home. More than anything.” His words scraped a layer off my heart. More than being present for the birth of our son. More than sharing a life with me.
“I can do that for you,” I said. “I can help you go home. You know if anyone can, it’s me.”
Enraptured. That was it. That was the only word to describe his expression.
“I’ll help you, but you have to come to me.” Yes. I can help you leave me. I can help you leave your son. I felt a sharp and icy blade cut through my heart, but I held out my hand. “You have to come.” He stood, nearly losing his balance for a breathless moment, but then found sure footing. He jumped down off the barrier wall and grabbed me, swinging me up in the air. The first responders were ready to fall on him and pull him off me. “No,” I said to stop them. “We’re okay.” Peter held me tightly in his arms, kissing the top of my head, my forehead. He pressed his face into my hair and breathed in deeply, then kissed my lips, my brow, my cheeks, never noticing the tears that were running down them. I allowed myself to step away from my emotions, to turn off my feelings and to switch to automatic pilot. People say no one has ever really died from heartbreak, but even if that were true, in that moment I was sure I would be the first. I would handle what needed to be dealt with now. I would process the feelings later. Peter lowered me to my feet and kissed me on the forehead, then once more on the lips. It wasn’t a kiss that spoke of passion or love. No, this kiss said good-bye.
He stepped back and docilely allowed himself to be led to the back of a waiting ambulance. His second in a matter of days. I allowed myself to take a breath, watching as the EMT shone a light into his eyes. “What are you on, buddy?” Was it her voice I heard, or had I only read what she’d been thinking?
I stood back and watched it all happen. An officer approached the ambulance and, after a quick consultation with the tech, cuffed Peter to the gurney. “Seventy-two-hour psych eval.” Variations of the clipped jargon rose up from the minds of several of the officers and firemen, the words weaving themselves into a near chant. On the periphery, I became aware of Maisie and my aunts, working their way past the protesting police officers. “We’re family.” I picked out Iris’s voice saying, as if her statement reflected a much older and more essential law than any they represented. Maybe it did.
Adam stood near me, a little bit behind, a little to the right. He was on his phone. The “love you, too” told me he was speaking to my uncle rather than to the station.
The sound of the siren surprised me. The ambulance began pulling away, and I turned to chase after it. Adam reached out to catch me. “I want to go with him.” I tugged against his strong grasp.
“I’ll take you. Don’t worry, he’ll be okay now. This will all work out fine.”
“No,” I said, watching Ellen, Maisie, and Iris thread their way through a field of first responders. The ambulance took off at full speed, lights and sirens blaring full blast. “It won’t.”
TWENTY-TWO
What is magic? Once I believed it was the key to belonging, a shortcut to all success, safety from danger, and security from loss. I was wrong. Like with all other things in life, magic is just a solution that offers its own set of complications.
It isn’t true that magic is everywhere you look, but the potential for magic is. Everything is made up of energy, and where there is energy, there is potential. Magic is nothing more than unlocking potential and molding it to your own use. Real witches carry the ability to tap into the well of potential right in their DNA.
Magic workers, people who are born without power of their own but who find ways to tap into the stream of magic, people such as my dear friend Jilo had been, have to work at it harder, relying on correspondences and attunements to achieve their goals. But even real witches, at least the smart ones, had learned a thing or two from those who had to earn their magic rather than inherit it. When working big magic, a spell you dared not risk going wrong, even real witches would use tools or props to help focus their intentions. They would choose the most auspicious time and place for the working.
We stood at Jilo’s crossroads, my family and I. This spell we were now to attempt called for a location that was both natural and enchanted. The crossroads stood hidden in a grove and had served as the locus of Jilo’s spell work for decades. Besides, being here, in a place that had been hers, made me feel stronger. Tonight, I would need all the strength I could beg, borrow, or steal. I pointed toward the earth with my index finger and drew a circle-bound pentagram. The white light from which it had been composed shone up on Oliver’s face in a way that accentuated his skull. Death and loss. Growing up I had been so hungry for magic, openly accepting but secretly envious of my family’s abilities. I’d been such a fool. Magic had brought me no happiness. All I had gained from magic was loss. Now I was being called on to use that magic to cast the spell that would take Peter from me.
After the incident on the bridge, the county had held Peter for three days. Certainly Oliver could have finagled an earlier release, but he and my aunts had spent days and sleepless nights poring over every available source, desperately trying to find a way to undo the harm my baby had inadvertently caused while trying to comfort his father. I let them only because I knew for them to find their own peace, they would need to know they had done everything they could have.
I’d been allowed to visit Peter, although I suspected the liberal visitation policy had been the result of Oliver’s influence. I sat with him, hour after hour, watching him pull back from our world. He had grown more silent as the days wore on, until there were no words between us, no communication other than his pleading eyes.
For their part, the doctors tried to be reassuring. They ran tests and consulted. They provided medications. They questioned and rationalized away any outlying answers. What was wrong with my husband didn’t fall within their frame of reference. They were good people, these doctors. They did what they could. Still, I knew all along they were only delaying the inevitable. Peter had been more than a mere part of my life, he had been my life for more than half of it. We had been inseparable since childhood; we had played, explored, broken rules, and at times broken each other’s hearts. I loved him to the core of my soul. I couldn’t really imagine my life going on without him. I felt somehow betrayed it could. Still, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of denying we’d come to the end of our adventures together. I had tried to prepare myself. I had tried to brace myself for impact.
Now in the moment of that crash, I felt the world should stop. That my heart should stop beating and my soul should be sucked into an insensate void, but that was not to happen.
Without a word, we assumed our natural points in the star. From my perspective, our lovely Ellen stood at the star’s lower right leg. She had the greatest ability to unlock the potential of the earth, the material world. Diagonally across from her at the star’s left hand stood Oliver, our family’s golden boy, blessed by what seemed to be a nearly eternal youth and the ability to get his way no matter what. His was the essence of water, the patience and energy by which it grinds rock to sand. He met my gaze. He smiled at me to reassure me, but I saw the fear i
n his eyes. He was afraid I wouldn’t survive this, or if I did I wouldn’t be recognizable. He was right to worry. His heart was breaking for me, but I couldn’t let myself feel the pain. Not yet. I had to do this. I turned to face Iris, who stood next to me at my right, the point of the pentagram associated with the potential of air. She could fly; the thought that she could take to the sky at will never ceased to amaze me, even in moments such as this.
