“Maisie,” I responded.
She acknowledged the name with a slight nod of her head. “Between you two, she got all the power, ain’t she? That mean you gotta do the work just like Mother herself.”
It was true, Maisie, my fraternal twin, was capable of performing just about any miracle she set her mind to. I couldn’t even move a pen without using my fingers. Between the two of us, Maisie had won the genetic lottery, there was no use denying it. Along with her blond hair and bottomless blue eyes, she had gotten all of the power. “It’s true,” I said. “I don’t have any power. I’m not a natural born witch.”
She moved in close to me, so close I could smell her sour breath. “Jilo ain’t no natural born witch, but you think she ain’t got no power?” she asked, her eyes fixing on me. They were black, I noticed now—the irises and pupils merged together into bottomless, burning pits. “You need her to show you what she can do?”
“No,” I responded quickly. The fear in my voice placated her, and she smiled. “It’s just that you know how to tap into the power. I don’t.”
“Girl, ain’t your family never taught you nothing?”
“They taught me that the power isn’t something you can simply draw into yourself. It’s the other way around. A true witch springs from the power. The people who borrow the power, they aren’t real witches. They can steal it from time to time, but the power escapes quickly when it’s clenched in a fist.”
“Oh, that is old Ginny Taylor talkin’ there. No doubt about it,” she said. Her gnarled hand clenched and released as if it were aching to strike out.
“You saying it isn’t true?” I asked, taking a step back.
“No, no. It true enough. That old auntie of yours, she ain’t been lyin’ to you. But it ain’t the whole picture. Just ’cause you don’t own something, don’t mean you gotta steal it. Nothin’ stopping you from borrowing it from time to time. And ’sides, Jilo ain’t never claimed to be any kind of witch.”
“But you can work magic…” I started.
“Of course Mother know how to work the magic. You ain’t gotta be no witch to work the magic. It just take a bit longer. And you gotta be willing to make a few sacrifices.” She shook the burlap sack at me and laughed again as the creature inside began to gyrate frantically. “For a girl like you, it simple enough to learn a trick or two, so why then your family not teach you like Jilo done taught herself?” She didn’t wait for a response. “Jilo tell you why. They look down on Jilo ’cause she has to borrow the power. They’d rather you be ignorant than you be like Jilo.”
I said nothing, as I knew she was right. My family, especially my great-aunt Ginny, did look down on the old woman of the crossroads. Jilo stayed silent too, coiled up as if she were waiting for me to argue with her.
The silence grew too much for me. “Ginny says your kind of magic is dangerous. That it weakens the line.”
“Oh, Jilo heard your Ginny going on about her precious line,” she said, her tension fading. “How it’s what keeps the monsters from crawling up out from under Jilo’s bed and eating her.” She chuckled. “But Jilo ain’t no little girl to scare with talk of demons.”
“They’re real—you know that, right?” I asked, modulating my voice so that she wouldn’t think I was talking down to her.
“Course they real,” Jilo shot back at me. “Jilo know that. But keeping them out of our world, that yo’ people’s problem, not Jilo’s.”
I wondered how much the old woman knew about what the line was, or how it was created. Probably not a whole lot more than I did. The details about the creation of the line were a tightly kept secret from those of us who weren’t born of the power. We only got the story in broad strokes, if we ever learned about it at all. All I knew was that it was the witches, people like my family, who saved our reality from the monsters who had once ruled it. Religion calls these beings “demons”; science might call them “interdimensional entities.” But whatever you call them, they came to our world. They made us their slaves. They fed on us like cattle. They meddled in the evolution of humans, and even more so in the evolution of witches. But they underestimated their own creations. Eventually we rebelled.
Witches used their magic to change the frequency we live on. Kind of like when you switch the station on the radio to tune out a song you don’t want to hear, they swung our world just out of the demons’ reach. They modulated the energy of our world just enough so that the scary things don’t get picked up. Of course the witches who moved us out of harm’s way couldn’t pick and choose which magical beings to allow into our reality. In order to get rid of the demons, we lost the unicorn. Most magical creatures didn’t make it through the great energy shift with us. Given the demons’ taste for human newborns, though, I figured it was a fair trade-off.
Once our world was out of harm’s way, the witches raised the line, a safety net of energy that prevented our former masters from burrowing their way back in. The witches who maintained the line were called anchors, and only these anchors know how the line was created or how it might be destroyed. Originally there were thirteen anchors at a time, one from each of the witch families, but three of the families came to regret their part in the rebellion. Now the line was maintained by anchors from the remaining ten united families.
Ginny was the only anchor I had ever met. I didn’t really know what being an anchor entailed, but I knew that it had left Ginny bitter and alone, even though she was surrounded by family.
“The world lost a lot of its magic when they shifted us,” Jilo said. “The witches, like yo’ family. They try and act like they did some noble thing for the rest of us. But all they did was take every last bit of the magic left in this world for themselves. They built a kingdom where they the kings, and they can do whatever the hell they want with the rest of us. And Jilo s’posed to act like they doin’ her a favor.”
I disagreed with her interpretation, but Jilo didn’t give me the chance to respond. She had already shifted gears anyway. “Jilo sure love to see that Ginny’s face right now. The look she get when she see you standing here before Mother Jilo asking her for help to steal yo’ sister’s man.” She cackled and spat on the ground.
“You don’t understand. I don’t want to take Jackson from Maisie,” I said. “There’s another boy. His name is Peter. He’s my…I’m not sure what he is. Outside of Maisie he’s the best friend I ever had. He’s wonderful. He’s perfect. He should be my boyfriend. He loves me, and I want you to make me fall in love with him.”
Jilo tore the night apart with her amused screech. The night birds stopped their calls, and even the insects fell silent in wonder. Although we stood in the moon’s low light, I could still see the tears streaming from her eyes. It took some moments for her to pull herself back together. I felt the blood rush to my face, the heat of embarrassment changing into anger. “You want Mother to work a love spell on you?” She shook her head incredulously. “You ain’t got no idea how magic work, do you?” she asked, but the sharpness in her tone had given way to something like sympathy.