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“Mercy did exist.” His voice boomed with a desperate rage. “You did exist.” He trembled before me. “I know you existed, because I loved you.”
I reached for him, but stayed my hand, realizing its impalpable touch might bring him even greater distress. His eyes flashed first with anger, then dimmed with an utter lack of hope. He wiped away his tears.
I had forced Emmet to share my sacrifice. I didn’t have a choice. “The line must have its anchor. There wasn’t a single pure heart among my former anchors, and yours was the purest heart I knew.”
“And so”—his voice turned gravelly—“I am to be punished throughout eternity for my ‘pure’ heart.” He kept his eyes averted, focusing on the sandy gray soil at the base of the monument.
I had thought myself past the ability to feel pain. I guess I was wrong. At the end, I trusted Emmet more than anyone else on earth; that was why I had chosen him as the final anchor. He would never age, never die, as long as the line existed. He had wanted eternity with me; this was the closest to that I could give him. I had chosen Emmet as my anchor, for he had more than proven himself as my rock. Anchor might not have been the role he had wanted, but it was the only part I had left for any man to play. Words alone would never allow him to understand, but his heart would someday come to realize that in his own unlucky way, he had gotten the girl.
For a moment I thought he had settled, but suddenly he lunged at me. “No. I will not accept this,” he said, his face nearly wild, shining with newfound determination. “You ask me to understand. You ask me to accept.” He came so close to me, I could feel his hot breath on me. It was the closest thing I had experienced to a true physical sensation since remembering my true nature. “My answer is no. I will not accept. You are not simply the line, and Mercy was not just a trick Emily played on the world. I will not accept that you, Mercy, never existed. You may be the line, but you are also Mercy. Mercy Taylor. And I will not accept that you, Mercy, are gone.” He repeated the name like an invocation, as if mere repetition could bring her back. His passion was so great, so white hot, that for a moment I almost felt Mercy rise again in the physical world, but no, I knew that to be impossible.
He reached for me, tried to pull me into his embrace, but he tumbled forward as he passed right through me, his knees grinding into the gritty soil. He fell to his hands and knees, nearly howling from his sense of loss. I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t comfort him. I hovered near him, willing, praying, that his heart would heal and heal quickly.
Emmet forced himself up and, stumbling backward, returned to Corinne’s side. He sat some moments and quieted himself. When he could finally bring himself to look my way, his black eyes burned. “Somehow. Someday. I will find a way. I will bring you back. I will bring you back to this world. I will bring you back to your son. And I will bring you back to me.”
He spoke of the impossible, but his devotion touched my consciousness deeply, reaching all the way down to the sacred place that had once been Mercy. Reaching all the way down to the part of me that still believed it might again be possible to be Mercy. In that instant, and only for that instant, she managed to push through. I offered her no resistance. Far from it, I welcomed her. For one last brief moment, Mercy Taylor lived again. She wanted so badly to comfort Emmet, to touch him and to let him feel her touch, that somehow and against all probability, she did. Anyone watching might have thought a breeze off the river had blown in to tousle his lengthening curls, but Emmet, Mercy, and I, we all knew better. It hadn’t been the wind at all.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Two straight weeks of ninety-eight degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity. It was crazy-making weather, and the people of Savannah had begun to snap. Twelve assaults and three murders in forty-eight hours. Adam felt sure that the strain on the power grid that knocked out folks’ air-conditioning had been a conspirator in at least one of the deaths.
“We’re too soft, too spoiled,” he said to a uniformed officer as they left the site of that crime. “We lose a little bit of comfort, and we go off our heads and start killing people.” He felt a tad hypocritical as he cranked the patrol car’s air up to high.
“Maybe, but damn,” the officer replied, “it’s like walking in dog’s breath out there.”
Adam experienced a slight jolt, a memory almost rising but then falling away, lost just beyond his ability to recall. Someone he once knew used to say that, but he would be damned if he could remember who. Sucks getting old, he thought to himself. He checked his watch. Three thirty. He had time to file his report and make it over to the Taylors’ place in time. If Savannah’s citizens could manage not to kill each other for a few more hours, he might just be able to enjoy Jordan’s party.
Grace had originally wanted to hold the event at a fancy restaurant, but Jordan had stepped forward and said he wanted something much more simple. Adam’s wallet had given a sigh of relief. Things had taken a truly odd twist, though, when Iris volunteered to host the get-together, and Grace had agreed. Adam knew happy endings were at least in theory possible, but he had never even let himself begin to hope that Grace’s family and Oliver’s people would not only declare a truce, but start making nice. Of course, it helped that, truth be told, they were all really one big family. Right now, it looked like they might end up as one big happy family, but Adam didn’t feel it was safe to relax just yet. It was still early days, he reminded himself.
Precisely at five, he moved the marker next to his name to show he was off duty. Other municipalities had long since moved over to electronic sign-ins, but Adam appreciated the old name board. Savannah could be infuriatingly slow and resistant to change, but sometimes that reticence seemed like a good thing.
Outside the station, the sky had turned the color of polished steel. Rumbles from distant thunder suggested one hell of a boomer. An enormous streak of lightning ripped apart the sky. Adam’s sense of direction told him that it must have hit somewhere in the no-man’s-land off Randolph Street, near where Normandy Street petered out, north of the cemetery and west of the golf course. He braced himself for a massive clap of thunder, but none came. In fact the world seemed somehow hushed, lying silent in expectation. Another flash lit up the sky, and Adam would have sworn under oath that the bolt had hit in the exact same spot, but again no sound followed it. His skin tingled, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He reached up and wiped the odd sensation away, then bounded across the parking lot to his own car, diving in before he might witness a third strike.
On a nice day, he would have walked. The Taylor house was well within walking distance of the station, but he didn’t want to risk it in this weather. Yeah, it was the weather setting him on edge, not the deepening conviction that this silent lightning was somehow otherworldly in origin.
He pulled up to the house and parked in the street so the driveway would be clear for the other guests. He killed the ignition and applied the emergency brake. He scanned the horizon, and the look of the sky continued to disquiet him. It had turned darker, somehow shinier, like it had been carved from a huge chunk of hematite. Another flash. His internal barometer was telling him that the pressure building up out there had little if anything to do with the natural atmosphere. He got out of the car and was instantly buffeted by a tingling current that filled the air. Well, if this weirdness was due to magic, he was certainly at the right place to find out what was going on.
He took quick steps at first, but then his speed caused him to feel embarrassed and cowardly. He slowed his pace and circled around the house to the kitchen’s entrance. He didn’t bother to knock. He was past that point now; he was family.
He stepped over the threshold to find the usually inhabited room entirely empty. “Hello?” he called. Iris’s best china and polished silver sat on the counter. In spite of the weirdness he felt while on the other side of the door, Adam smiled. It made Adam feel good that Iris was offering the best she had to honor his son. The Taylor women had been busy; the table was covered with various delectable-looking baked goods. He grabbed a cookie on his way past the table, and pushed through the swinging door into the hall.
“Oliver?” he called out. “Iris?” The entire house shook, rattled by the thunder that had until that moment held its peace. It was like the sound of the strikes he had witnessed had held off commenting until that very moment, when they could do so as one. Adam jumped and dropped his cookie. “Damn,” he said and swiped the cookie off the floor. It wasn’t like him to be so jittery.
The rage of the thunder had left him momentarily deaf to any sound other than the ringing of his own ears, but soon another sound, a furious cry, broke through. Adam made his way down the hall to the foot of the stairs. He heard voices coming from above, the loudest of which was baby Colin’s. Another ear-piercing screech followed by the lower sounds of Iris’s and Ellen’s voices.
He shoved the cookie into his coat pocket and made his way upstairs. The nursery lay near the end of the long upper floor, toward the right. He followed the cacophony of the baby’s cries. As he neared, he heard the sound of Ellen’s attempts to console the little guy.
He came up to the door and stood in the threshold. Poor Maisie sat hunched over sobbing in the nursing chair. Iris knelt beside her trying to calm her as Ellen carried Colin around, patting his
back and doing her best to console him.
“He teething?” Adam asked, causing the women to turn quickly toward him.
“No,” Iris said, her hand still resting on Maisie’s back. “We aren’t sure quite what’s wrong with him.”
“He isn’t sick,” Ellen said, just before the child let out another shriek.
“Mama,” Colin cried, and began trying to wrestle himself from Ellen’s arms. She clutched him more tightly, but the boy wanted his freedom. She returned him to his crib, where he pulled himself up. He regarded Adam with a red face and wet angry eyes.
