The room began to move in and out in waves, and I wished the blackness would just suck me under. More than that, I wished—oh, how I wished—that Ginny’s death would be sucked back into the sea of the things that might happen, but never would. Someone was screaming. I realized it was me, and I let myself continue.
The rational part of my mind told me to stop carrying on. To call for help. I told it to fuck off, and continued screaming until I was good and satisfied that the heavens had heard me. Then, and only then, did I reach for my phone.
FOUR
“You did the right thing calling us, sugar,” Aunt Iris said pulling me into her overly perfumed bosom. “You did the right thing calling us before the police. We’d never been able to get a fix on the energy in this room if the sheriff and his bunch of dimwits had been traipsing all over the house, contaminating the scene with their thoughts.”
“She’s done messed up things here enough herself,” Connor muttered. Iris released me and gave him a look that would wither concrete.
“What’s done is done. Right now, we need to put up a concealment around this place to keep people from nosing around until we are done here.” A concealment didn’t make objects invisible or render sounds silent; it just made folks ignore whatever it was you wanted to hide from them. The two set about silently working the concealment spell, although to me their efforts just looked like they were trying to finger paint the air.
“Who could have done this?” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have harmed Ginny. And I don’t mean that in the “who could harm a defenseless old lady” kind of way. I mean it in the “who the hell could have busted through her defenses and slayed the dragon” kind of way. I felt the blood freeze in my veins. Could this be the sacrifice Jilo had promised to make on my behalf?
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, my girl,” Connor said. “But you aren’t helping us any by hanging out here and projecting your thoughts so loudly. Now get the hell outta here while we work.” His right hand adjusted the belt straining over his paunch while the pendulum in his left began to swing in spurts and stops.
“Connor!” Iris exclaimed. “The poor girl is already shaken up enough.”
“And her vibrations are shaking this room apart. Go on, girl. Get out of here before you make it impossible for us to suss out what the hell happened,” he said, returning his attention to the swinging arc of his pendulum. The pendulum was Connor’s connection to power, even if it was a weak one. Most true witches have a few gifts in common—with focus, just about all of them can read the thoughts of non-witches, and most can move things without having to touch them. But witches tend to be particularly skilled in one or two specific areas. Connor was weak as water in most things, but he could use his pendulum to track down just about anything, from a missing pair of glasses to a missing child. I knew without asking that he was looking for the murder weapon.
“Come on, sweetheart. Your uncle’s right. I think it would be best for you to get out into the fresh air. You shouldn’t have had to see any of this.”
I let myself be guided outside and deposited on the squeaky old glider that had been on Great-Aunt Ginny’s porch longer than I’d been alive. Within moments the Savannah heat began to lick around my ankles and up my calves. It took me slowly, but confidently, with the experience of immemorial dawns.
The sun traced a finger up my thigh, the solstice morning in Savannah marking its passage across the sky and projecting the shadow of a weathervane from a nearby house onto me. Leaning back on the glider, I surrendered to the heat, the scent of blood, and the relentless ticking of Ginny’s clock, which I could still hear from the porch. The seat groaned beneath me, the sound lost somewhere between protest and pleasure. A horrible thought occurred to me: The same heat that was warming my skin was beating in through the window and onto Ginny’s body, hastening its decay. I shook the thought out of my head and tried to focus instead on the first tiny bead of sweat that was forming behind my knee. I tried not to imagine what had happened, tried not to corrupt the energies that would help Aunt Iris and Uncle Connor figure everything out.
Through the screen of the open window I heard Aunt Iris say, “She couldn’t help it. She hasn’t been trained.” Her voice carried through the still air like a stage whisper.
“Nothing to train,” Connor snorted in reply. I shot him a look through the window. He and Iris had raised Maisie and me. My mother, Emily, the youngest female in the Taylor tribe, had died giving birth to us, and she’d never seen fit to tell anyone who our daddy was. I would have turned to Connor like a flower toward the sun if he had shown me the slightest modicum of paternal affection. But that had never happened. Far from it; he saddled me with the nickname “The Disappointment” by the time I’d turned six. Our eyes locked as the name crossed through my mind, and for a moment I thought I sensed something like regret in his expression. Was it in the twitch of his mouth or just the way his eyes darted back to the pendulum he carried? The look was there, and then it was gone. He returned his focus to the pendulum, walking around in a seemingly random fashion as the pendulum turned or stopped. “Damned shame it weren’t Maisie here first instead of her sister.”
Maisie had been his darling since birth. She had come into this world with so much strength that the other witch families hadn’t even needed a birth announcement—she’d simply registered on everyone’s radar. Me, I had come in a weak second, kind of like the universe’s afterthought. Most were as shocked to learn of my arrival as they were saddened by my mother’s passing.
“You need to have some consideration for the poor girl. This has been a shock. She knows this goes beyond what happened to Ginny. She knows that the line may have been damaged.”
“Darlin’, I ain’t blaming her. I blame myself. If I’d acted like a real father and taken her in hand, explained things to her…” Connor repented. “Mercy’s a good girl,” he said. “She did the best she could by calling us.” I was surprised to hear a break in his voice. It was the first time he’d betrayed any tenderness for me. “But right now, we only got a few minutes left to figure out who did this to Ginny. Mercy’s panic when she found Ginny was almost fierce enough to overwrite what happened here. We have to try to catch whatever imprint is left, and then we gotta make sure that the line is holding. I need you to focus too. When we’re done, I’ll call Oliver and tell him to get his sweet ass home, and you can start rounding up the rest of the family.”
Connor disappeared from my view, but I could still hear his heavy steps as he shuffled around the ground floor of the house. Then the squeak of a loose stair told me he was heading to the second floor. I focused on Aunt Iris as she knelt over the body and began to sway silently, reaching out for whatever energies might still be lingering. Silence gave way to sobbing as Iris surrendered to her grief. Strange, growing up, I’d often wished Ginny dead. Granted my wish, seeing what her death looked like, my blood called out to hers and screamed for justice. Guess she really was family after all.
“The weapon ain’t here,” a defeated Connor said, returning to the room. I heard him fall noisily into one of the armchairs.
