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“You are wrong! He isn’t a demon. I won’t let you harm him.” I held my hands before me, ready to strike him with every ounce of power I could muster. My magic was so full of desperate anger it showed as obsidian sparks dancing on my fingers. A rumbling formed in the earth beneath my feet and rippled out. In my peripheral vision, I could see the Guidestones begin to sway.
Fridtjof’s head leaned to the left, but he did not seem threatened by my show of strength. He held his hand up before me. “Then I truly am so sorry . . .”
I prepared myself, as I knew the next thing I heard would be the united voices of my fellow anchors condemning me to a living death. I closed my eyes and pulled Emmet’s arms even more tightly around me.
Then Emmet laughed. My eyes flew open and I looked back at him. “Don’t you see it, Mercy? You have nothing to fear from this white waste.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, but Emmet did not answer.
Instead he addressed Fridtjof. “Go ahead. Bind her. Go on, we are waiting.”
Fridtjof’s hand dropped to his sides, and Emmet released me from his grasp. He stomped over to Fridtjof and lifted him off the ground with one hand. Emmet looked back at me. “They can’t bind you, or they already would have.” He threw Fridtjof to the ground, where he landed with a thud.
Relief gave way to rage. Red, angry fire flew unbidden from my fingertips and burned a path to Fridtjof, tracing a circle around him. He reached out to extinguish the flame, but it shot up into a solid curtain around him. “You would trick me into harming my child?” The voice I heard hardly sounded like my own. This, this had to be the final betrayal. That these people could be mad enough, driven enough by their fears, to attempt to trick me into murdering my own child. I wanted the fire to take Fridtjof, to burn him to ash and feed back through him into every single anchor who stood against me. I knew if I willed it, it would do just that, but reason told me the line still needed these impossible people. As long as this remained true, I would not act against them. I would not seek revenge.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Fridtjof’s snowy complexion managed to blanch even further. His nostrils flared and his eyes were wide. Perspiration beaded above his upper lip. This man feared that in the next instant, he would see not only the end of his own life, but his entire line as well. Still, I sensed his greatest agony would be knowing that his other half would be left forever alone. “You have no idea how lucky you are,” I said and dropped the circle of flames. I reached out with both hands and shot the bastard all the way back to Sweden.
I held out my hand toward Emmet. “We need to get home,” I said.
“Of course.” He took my hand in his.
I closed my eyes and focused on home, but a sudden burning agony filled my body, causing every nerve ending to feel as if it had caught fire. I would have collapsed had Emmet not moved quickly to scoop me up. I tried not to scream, but it felt like my insides were being pulled out. Along with the pain came a warm trickle. I smelled the coppery blood before I saw it, but more than the pain, more than the smell, it was the sight of my blood staining the material of my dress that told me the other anchors were actually trying to do it. They were trying to kill my baby.
THIRTY
I couldn’t let myself panic. I had to keep my head. I knew my only hope was in making it home. Giving myself over to Ellen’s care. She could heal me. She could help me fight. The pain nearly made me black out, but I was shocked by the sight of blood trickling down Emmet’s forearm. It took a moment to realize that I had clenched him so hard my nails had pierced his skin. Another pang nearly carried me away in darkness, but Emmet took my face in one hand and forced me to meet his gaze.
“Fight. Don’t let them do this.”
“I’m trying,” I cried. I was. I really was. I was fighting with my entire being to push the other anchors’ magic from me. A brief respite gave me a second to wonder how they could be doing this to me. How the line could allow them to tap into its power and let them harm my child. I thought it had chosen me. I thought it wanted me to help it grow. How could it have deserted me, betrayed me? I buried my head in Emmet’s shoulder and screamed.
“You must focus, Mercy. You must carry us back to Savannah. We have to reach your family.” Emmet gave voice to the three facts my rational mind already knew to be true, but my rational mind had shrunk until it floated like a tiny island in a vast sea of fear and pain. “For Colin, Mercy, you must do this. He needs you. He needs his mother.”
Something about that word—“mother”—struck me like a magical ward. It connected me to the birth travails of every woman, but it also connected me to every mother’s strength. “I can find my way home,” I panted between throbs. Their attack weakened my magic. “But it’s taking almost everything I have to fend them off. I don’t have the power to carry us both.”
“Then go. Hurry. Take yourself home. I will follow as quickly as possible.” He kissed the top of my head. “Know that I love you, Mercy.”
I wanted to acknowledge his words, but I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I closed my eyes. I blocked out as much of the pain as I could, but still the scream I started before the monument’s stones carried with me all the way back to Savannah.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of my own room, only inches away from where the lifeblood had deserted Teague’s body. Blood calls to blood, the incongruous thought landed between convulsions. My water broke and the convulsions gave way to contractions. “Ellen!” I screamed her name.
At first I thought magic was causing the room to flash in and out of existence before my eyes, but as Aunt Iris rushed into the room, I realized it was only that I was dying. Iris fell down to her knees beside me. Her frantic calls to Ellen married with my own wails.
“Dear God,” Ellen said as she knelt near me, raising my torso up so she could wrap her arms around me. Relief. Cooling. The agony subsided.
“They are trying to kill my baby,” I said, grasping hold of Iris’s hand.
“Who is, darling? Tell me, I will make them stop.”
I tried to speak, but they broke through Ellen’s healing wall. “Anchors.” The word was ripped out of me by another angry wave.
“The anchors are doing this?”
The room began to fade in degrees, bending back and growing darker around the edges. I noticed the sound of heavy, masculine footfalls on the stairs, coming down the hall.
“There is something wrong with Oliver.” The sound of Adam’s frightened voice as he burst into the room brought me back. I managed to turn my head so that he was at the center of my fading vision. “We were out in the garden,” he continued without even seeming to notice the strangeness of the scene he’d just walked in on. “Just talking. He collapsed. And then this . . .” Adam stood there, shaking. In his arms he carried an elderly man. An elderly man who wore my uncle’s clothes.
“I can’t let go of her,” Ellen said. My eyes drifted back just enough that I could see her beautiful face staring down at me. She looked so afraid. I wished I could comfort her. Another contraction hit, drowning out everything else in the world other than my own pain.
