“Kind of like Wren.”
“Kind of like my parents supposed Wren to be. They weren’t at all shocked when Oliver showed up with his new playmate. Projecting energy as matter was something they had already seen from me. Maisie used a similar skill when she helped Wren grow into Jackson. Yes,” she said after a pause, “I am aware of it all.”
I squirmed as she reminded me of what Maisie had done to me. I had very little solid emotional ground to stand on, and now this stranger, my mother, was causing it to quake.
“I’m sorry,” she continued. “I know it’s unpleasant for you to dwell on that, but I have so many unpleasant things that I must share with you.”
I nodded. “Connor?”
“Yes.” She paused. “Connor. You know what he was like. Weak, greedy, and lecherous. It’s true Iris wasn’t meeting his needs. She’d had so many miscarriages, and she reacted by shutting him out. When they returned to Savannah, Connor became fixated on me. Always there. Always reaching out to touch me. I tried to divert his sexual energies into Tillandsia.” She paused and gave me a cool look. “You know I participated in the group. I will get into my reasons shortly, but for now, please understand that I did all I could to turn Connor from me. In spite of my best efforts, he only grew more eager. I think it was more than sex, more than obsession. He had caught on to what I was trying to do with Tillandsia.” She paused. “But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”
“I spoke to Iris. I reasoned with her. I pleaded with her to handle her husband. She refused to believe me. One morning I woke up to find him sitting at the foot of my bed. Staring at me and . . . well, touching himself.” Her face tightened with distaste. “I moved out that very day. Rented a little place near the river, but he followed me there too. Always waiting for me the second I came out the door. Telling me how I was the one he loved, not Iris. Going on about how deeply he needed me. I knew what he felt for me was not love; what he called ‘love’ was the desire to possess. Finally I decided that the only way to get rid of him was to give him what he wanted. I hoped he would eventually tire of me and move on to someone else.” A smile curved only the right side of her mouth. “I created a double, and I sent her to him. Once he had satiated himself and was asleep, she, it, would dissipate. He carried on a hot little affair with a series of my doubles, but he never touched me.”
“And Erik?” I asked and watched her face soften at the mention of my father’s name.
“Erik was different,” she said. “I am guilty of having an affair with Ellen’s husband, but I’m not ashamed. The times I spent with Erik were the happiest of my life. I never meant to hurt Ellen, but as I hope you will understand, I was in love with Erik and he with me.”
TWENTY-THREE
“Erik was the love of my life, only Ellen found him first,” she said and flushed. Her composed exterior melted, and I saw a flash of the woman she must have been at my age. I understood what she had been through, the pain that cut her on both sides for hurting her sister and not being openly able to love my father. I knew now that I had never “loved” Jackson, that the emotion I’d felt for him was actually my reaction to the power that had been used in his creation, the power that should have been mine. All the same, I didn’t think I stood in any position to judge my mother.
“Here is where it all becomes so terribly complicated and murky,” she said, and her eyes looked beyond me toward an unreachable past. “Do you believe in fate?” she asked me, regaining focus.
“I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess.”
“Sometimes?”
“I guess I use it as a rationalization. When things end up like they did with Maisie, part of me wants to believe that there was no other way for them to turn out. That Maisie never had a choice, and was only playing the role written for her.”
“And the other times, when you don’t believe?”
“When I want to take things into my own hands and make a difference.”
“Like you are trying to do now for Maisie.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“But which would be better? If you had to choose? Control or chaos?”
“Honestly, somewhere in between,” I said and smiled.
She returned my smile. “I see you have Oliver’s way of worming yourself out of committing,” she said, the criticism hit me as a warm one, filled with pride. “But now the line has chosen you. It has made the commitment for you, without giving you a choice in the matter.” She shifted in her chair and leaned forward. “The line is an awesome power, but never for a moment think you control it. It controls you. It owns you.” She let the words hang between us, giving them time to soak fully into my consciousness. I knew she was right. I’d always thought that having access to magic would mean true freedom, but ever since the line had chosen me, my life no longer felt like my own. The families, the other anchors, they all seemed to want a say.
“There are those who chafe against its ruthless control. Those who at one time assisted in its creation, but who would now like to free themselves of its tyranny.”
“The other three families,” I volunteered.
“Yes. Renegade, traitorous, evil. I’m sure you’ve heard these words used to describe the families who have balked.”
“But what they want is evil,” I protested. “To bring down the line, to subject us to the control of monsters.”
She shook her head sadly. “Monsters, indeed. Consider the world around us, Mercy. Wars and famine. People killing one another and ruining the planet to drain it of the last drop of fossil fuel. It hasn’t always been this way. The monsters, the demons, are nothing but bogeymen, created to keep witches, the strong ones like me and you, in place.” She had gotten caught up in her own tale and wasn’t picking up on my growing wariness. “Those beyond the line are not demons. They are creators, teachers, and the most merciful of judges. They placed the thirteen families in positions of trust, but we grew greedy and willful. We betrayed them.” She stood, and paced for a few moments. “Your father, Erik, he came from one of the three families.”
“Yes, I know, but he turned away from them and joined with the other ten.”
“No.” She stopped and faced me. “He never betrayed his family. His allegiance to the ten was a fiction.”
“But why?”
“There had been a prophecy . . .”
“Yes, I’ve heard about the prophecy that was made when the witches created the line. It was said that one day there would rise a witch who would unite the thirteen families again, and together they would bring down the line. That witch would come through a union of Erik’s family’s blood—”
“And the Taylors’.” She rushed over to me and took my hands. “The ten anchors saw this prophecy as a dark and fearful thing, but the other families, including your father’s, saw it as the sole glimmer of hope in a universe gone mad. I’m sorry. I know it makes your father sound cold-blooded and calculating, but he never loved Ellen. Their meeting. Their courtship. The way he disowned his own blood. He was playing his role in a carefully choreographed scheme with the goal of creating a child.”