“I didn’t know they were related,” I blurted out when the silence got too heavy for me.
“Mmm” was Oliver’s only response.
“I didn’t . . . not at the time. He showed up from nowhere, and he needed help.”
“And you tried to help him, but you aren’t in control of your power yet, so you overdid it.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“But rather than taking your time to learn how to control your power, you’re blowing off Emmet, whose sole purpose at this point is to train you, so that you can hang out with Mother Jilo.” I pulled my hand out of his, ready for a fight.
“There’s that redheaded temper again,” he said with a smile. “What? You’re surprised that I have been keeping tabs on you?”
“No, I am not surprised. I am downright pissed.”
His laughter made me even angrier. “I know what you’re up to. You and that old scarecrow.”
I just glared at him.
He turned and started walking away. “You aren’t going to find Maisie. Not on your own, and not with Jilo’s help either.”
“Well I can’t just forget her,” I snapped. “I can’t turn my back and walk away like all of you have done.”
“I haven’t walked away,” Oliver turned back, his face flushed red, his fists clenched by his sides. “I have been doing everything in my power to find her.”
I crumpled. Maybe my hormones had gotten the best of me. Maybe I just felt relieved to know that Maisie hadn’t been completely deserted. Oliver reached out and pulled me into his arms as I started sobbing.
“I could never walk away from Maisie. Any more than I could walk away from you. Neither can your aunts.”
“But Iris said—”
“You forget what Iris said,” he interrupted me. “And you forget what Ellen said too. There’s a difference between what we say around the house, where we suspect the families are listening, and what we say when we are pretty sure they aren’t.” He paused. “We will find her. We will,” he said, tilting up my chin so that my eyes met his.
I was thrilled by this proof that my aunts were willing to put Maisie’s welfare before their allegiance to the families. There had to be a reason why they’d separated my mother from us. One that even my mother herself didn’t understand.
“But you do need to prepare yourself,” Oliver said, perhaps mistaking my relieved reaction for overconfidence, “because we really do not know what shape she’ll be in when we do.”
“But how will we find her?”
“We’ll start with the one thing that should have been obvious to that old root doctor, Jilo. Dirt.”
“Dirt?” I knew that Jilo often used soil in her mojo bags, using the energy to draw like to like. Soil from a bank for money, soil from a graveyard for death.
“That’s right. The dirt from where Maisie was standing when she disappeared. Why do you think I dug it up? Why do you think I put a sundial out there?” I shook my head. “Have you ever really looked at it?”
“No, not really,” I replied. Honestly, I’d avoided the spot altogether.
“Take a good look when we get home. You’ll notice something interesting.”
“Tell me,” I begged him.
He smirked and raised his eyebrows. “The shadow never moves. It isn’t a sundial. It’s a time lock that’s keeping that little patch of earth nice and fresh and as close to how it was the moment Maisie disappeared as possible. Now tell me, do you feel a little more like celebrating?”
I went up on my toes and kissed his forehead. Maybe, just maybe, everything would end up all right after all.
EIGHT
We needed a large space, one where we could work magic without attracting the prying eyes of the other witch families. To my surprise, Jilo volunteered the use of her haint-blue chamber, a magical hall that existed just outside our dimension but could still connect to any place within it. It stood as a testament to Jilo’s skill that she, a non-witch, could use borrowed power to build such a thing. For years, she had secretly connected it to a room in our own house, making her capable of coming and going as she pleased. Not that she’d snooped around too much on her own. She’d relied on the boo hag who had camouflaged himself first as Oliver’s imaginary friend, Wren, and then as Jackson. Wren had manifested himself in our home for decades, but my family had never caught on to his true nature, assuming he was a tulpa, or a thought-form, a thing so well imagined that it had separated itself from the one who’d originally envisioned it.
I hadn’t been inside Jilo’s haint-blue room since the night I’d found Wren there holding a knife to Jilo’s throat. Walls, floor, everything had been colored the same aquamarine that was prized for its efficacy in repelling unfriendly spirits. That being said, if you invited the spirits in, the way Jilo had done when she’d made her pact with the boo hag, the haint blue wouldn’t do you much good.
Today, Jilo’s cerulean throne was missing, and in its place Oliver had drawn a chalk sigil. The etching consisted of a crisscrossed combination of lines and circles that took up a good portion of the room. Walking around it, I counted ten circles, and I noticed that a pentagram had been inscribed in the centermost one.
“Jilo told him, he oughta use blood, not chalk, but that sweet uncle of yours would have none of it.” Jilo’s voice echoed around me, although my eyes couldn’t get a fix on her yet. To me, the room looked completely empty. Then the air in one corner rippled, like August heat coming up off the highway, and there she stood. “He,” she said, punching the word into the air, “say he know what he doin’, though, so Jilo need to stand back and let the expert handle things.”
“What is it supposed to be?”
“He say it the ‘Tree of Life,’ but it sure don’t look like no tree Jilo ever lay eyes on. We didn’t talk much. He just pranced in here, made his scribbles, and took off.”
Disdain for my uncle dripped from her every word. That Jilo would ever allow Oliver into her sanctuary, that she and Oliver would or even could work together, amazed me. “Thank you for helping us, Jilo. Thank you for letting us use your . . .” I struggled for a term. Room? No, it wasn’t a room. Rooms remained stationary, but this space could coexist with any other point on the earth. Right now it hovered over our own garden. The pentagram at the center of Oliver’s drawing overlaid the point where he’d placed the sundial. “Well, just thank you. And thank you for putting up with Oliver’s ego too.”
Jilo’s creased face smoothed as much as her advanced years would allow. “You welcome, girl. All the same, Jilo like to buy you uncle for what he worth and sell him for what he think he worth.”
A humming filled the air, and the lines on Oliver’s diagram began to glow. I was focusing so intently on them, I didn’t notice the shimmering air that signaled his arrival. I sensed his presence—a tingling that ran down my spine—and looked up. He stopped dead in his tracks and took a moment to absorb the haint-blue chamber. “I failed to say so last time, but this truly is impressive, Mother.”
I was grateful that he’d used the term of respect when addressing Jilo.
