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“We wanted you to see this monument. To realize how close to your seat of power the enemies of the line have staked their claim.” He motioned to the monument like it were a game show prize. “The men who commissioned these stones were enemies to the line.” He took a few steps closer, leaving his back exposed to Emmet and me. He had evidently decided we were not a threat to his well-being. So far, he was right. So far. He turned back almost as if he had picked up on my thought. “Those who funded this monument dreamed of a ‘New World Order’ in which these suggestions would stand as absolute law, but there is nothing new in the hierarchy they would wish to impose on the earth. These ‘guidelines’ are based on the memory of the commandments that were handed down to us by the old ones. The old ones are the closest thing to God this world has ever witnessed.” He craned his neck to take the stone in. “Of course, what you see here has been corrupted, sanitized, but judge for yourself. I believe you can get the gist.”
I read the first guideline. “?‘Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.’ This isn’t sanitized. It’s a call for a global genocide.”
“The enemies of the line, they would consider this a wise culling, not a genocide.”
“Oh, I’m sure the seven billion surplus people will take great comfort in that.”
“Indeed. Number two is golden too. ‘Guide reproduction wisely,” he read in a stentorian voice, “improving fitness and diversity.’?” Fridtjof barked out an abrasive laugh. “Diversity indeed. Diversity within an incredibly limited spectrum. This is nothing more than the perennial call for the building of a ‘master race.’?”
“Eugenics is a crime against humanity.” I took a few steps back. I wanted to go home. I wanted to get away from this odd man. I wanted to get away before he stated the obvious.
“You, Mercy, are the product of eugenics.”
Well, too late to get away. He’d hit me in a very sore spot. “Yes, thank you very much. I am well aware of that.”
“I too am a product of eugenics.” His head tilted, and he seemed to be taking my full inventory. “Does that surprise you?” To my senses he appeared a freak, rather than the end product of a misguided breeding experiment aimed at achieving even the most twisted sense of perfection. “I am the idealized aim of these laws. My blood is so pure I have been left unable to breed with anyone other than my other half. Once I breed, I give birth and die.” He turned back to the stones. “So perhaps you should stop feeling so sorry for yourself.” He looked back over his shoulder at me, with an actual and bona fide smile on his ashen lips. “We know you have entertained Gudrun.” He began walking away, circling the stone posts. He seemed to be giving me time to consider the implications of my having been caught fraternizing with the enemy. He finished the circuit then stopped directly before me. “We only want you to be cognizant of who she is”—his shoulders fell—“the degree of duplicity of which she is capable.” He straightened up. “If she has managed to charm you, remember you are not the only anchor to have
fallen for her lies. Ayako”—I heard regret in his voice as he said her name—“worked with her and your cousin Teague. Gudrun had convinced them both that they were acting in the line’s best interest.”
“No, she made no pretense of wanting to preserve the line.” The emotion he betrayed when speaking of Ayako humanized Fridtjof to me. Had Ayako faced a binding, contrary to what Gudrun had claimed? Without considering the wisdom of doing so, I lowered my defenses. This man, person, I corrected myself, lost a friend. I could empathize with him over that loss. “She asked me to join with her to bring down the line.”
Fridtjof nodded, lowering his jaw and fixing me with his blank gaze. “Yes, go on.”
“The spell she cast to free herself. She said she could have used anyone’s body to fix it, but she used Emily’s.”
The corners of Fridtjof’s mouth pulled down, and his head jerked. “This spell you speak of, please explain.”
“I don’t know how it worked. Gudrun freed herself by invoking the demonic orders of the Tree of Life. She said I was special, and she sacrificed Emily to punish her for trying to harm me.” Emmet’s hand on my shoulder prompted caution. I fell silent for a moment. “That was all.”
“I must warn you that Gudrun has lied to you. She had no need of invoking any of the sephirot’s aspects to effectuate her return to this plane. She had tricked Teague into using a variant of a berserker spell to accept both her magic and her essence. Whatever use she had for your mother’s corpse was outside her escape.” He looked over my shoulder at Emmet. “Gudrun did speak the truth about one thing, though. You are special, and not only in the way your golem thinks of you as special.” He lowered his blank gaze to meet mine. “You are special in that you are indeed a danger to the line. However, I do not believe it is your desire to do damage. None of us believe you want to risk ending the world as we know it.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “That’s mighty big of you.”
“Oh, now, Mercy. No need to take umbrage. I felt we had begun to develop an understanding of each other, you and I. Perhaps I was wrong, but then again, we have not given you much reason to trust us. We have kept you ignorant of things you have the right to know. Without this knowledge our actions must strike you as erratic at best, or more likely monstrous.”
Yes, monstrous. Ding. Ding. We have a winner. Forbidding us to turn the hurricane Emily had aimed at Savannah back to sea. Expecting us to stand down and watch our home be destroyed as they had forced our cousins the Duvals to do when Katrina took New Orleans. Declaring war on us when we refused to capitulate. Binding my entire family, leaving them to drown, paralyzed and unconscious, beneath the incoming waves. Attempting to bind me, even though they knew that as an anchor, if I survived at all, I would be left to live out the rest of my life in a vegetative state. I was certain they never gave my child a second thought in this decision either. And afterward, when we had stopped them from wiping Savannah and its Taylors from the map, they turned their sights on my son.
I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know. The other anchors had even kept me ignorant of the line’s origins. Had they done so out of caution, as Fridtjof seemed to imply, because they too shared Gudrun’s opinion that I was the witch who would bring about its end? Or had they kept the story from me out of shame? They knew the ripples of carnage the line’s creation had set loose across God only knew how many realities. The anchors had convinced themselves that the ends justified the means. Were they afraid I might somehow challenge this assumption and aggravate their heavy consciences? Perhaps the truth lay somewhere in between.
“We had hoped to keep you innocent, to protect you from the full onus of what you had been chosen for until you had time to adjust to being a witch. We acted solely out of concern for you, but you misread our intentions and acted wildly. I fear we can no longer afford the luxury of providing you with breathing space. There are too many forces trying to take advantage of your ignorance. An ignorance”—he rushed on lest I had time to take offense—“I and your fellow anchors have engendered. For your own good, but in truth for our own comfort as well. I cannot deny it, you have frightened us.” This admission felt like the first bit of real truth I’d ever gotten out of the other anchors. “You are as yet still unaware of the stupendous power surging through you. You suppose you are a harmless flame, when you are in truth a nuclear blast. You know our grasp on the line has been loosened. I’m sure you sense that it has bent around you. Only once before has the line been shifted in this way.”
“If the line seems to like me so much, why are y’all so afraid I’ll cause it harm?”
Fridtjof raised his hand and pointed at me. “That is an excellent question, but before I address it, I must provide you with some context.” He relaxed his hand and lowered his arm to his side. “We know you have learned of the fate of the Fae. We know how their story affects you personally. However, you must believe me when I say their world was doomed before they themselves had even been created. It had been doomed from the second the old ones discovered our planet. It is true that at one time our worlds were touching. No”—he pressed his hands together—“interlaced.” He let his fingers slide together then tugged his hands to demonstrate the connection. “The proximity of our realities was not an accident. Witches, fairies, humans, we all owe our existence to the old ones and their experiments with breeding.”
He looked at my waistline. “You of all people must realize that. How else could you have successfully mated with a Fae? We all come from the same source, just with slightly different balances of DNA. The Fae were engineered first, but they proved far too capricious, too willful. They would certainly have been destroyed outright had the old ones not found their appearance very pleasing. The Fae were spared the grunt work and found themselves set aside as concubines and entertainers.
Then came humans. Useful for heavy lifting, and per the remembrances left by the old ones, quite tasty when young. We witches came last, the product of unsanctioned matings between the two groups.” The word “unsanctioned” spoke to me on two levels regarding control the old ones had held, or at least imagined they held, over the creatures of this world. The old ones felt themselves within their rights to determine our mating patterns, as if we were to them as cattle are to man. Still, the existence of witches showed the creatures of this world were a slippery group they couldn’t completely control. Had this intermingling been the “original sin” that still colored so many people’s perception of sex?
“Despite their early attempts to wipe witches out, our creation proved a happy coincidence for the old ones. Animal lust created the functional compromise between Fae and man for which they had been striving. Eventually witches were co-opted into the old ones’ plans and were placed in functionary roles, overseers at the lowest of levels, monarchs at the highest. Our job was to keep the human population in line, in balance,” he said, pointing up at the standing stone whose presence I’d nearly forgotten. “The Fae were slid slightly out of sync with the human reality, to prevent any further interbreeding between the two populations. The barrier between the worlds was largely impermeable, but not entirely impenetrable.”
“Until the creation of the line nearly wiped the Fae out, then sent their reality drifting away from ours.” I shifted my weight as much for comfort as for emphasis, widening my stance. I folded my arms over my chest. I was not going to let him simply gloss over our destruction of the Fae’s world.
“The decision to act as we did was not made lightly, I assure you. No one feels the pain caused by the line’s creation more deeply than we anchors. That’s why we keep the dirty details behind its creation to ourselves. We bear the guilt so our friends and family can go about their lives, unfettered by the knowledge of the line’s true costs.” His face turned away from me. He looked toward the ground as if he were wishing he too could have been spared. “However, your ignorance is a luxury we can no longer afford. Tell me, what do you know of the creation of the line?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Maisie had once suggested that deep down I knew the secret of the line’s creation, but I’d never been able to pull the disjointed images into a coherent narrative.
