“I’m not Ellen. You saw what happened when I tried a healing before.”
“Yes, I did. Your efforts proved delightfully amusing.” She laughed. This had to be a nightmare. Peter couldn’t be dying next to me. My mother could not be such a monster. She read my thoughts. “Oh, baby. This is real. This whole night has been real. Maybe not on the plane that you’re used to, but real all the same. We came so, so close. You and your golem here, with all your beautiful power blending in with mine. It was lovely. Lovely. We came so close to completing the Babel spell. So, so close to building a tower that reaches beyond the line, all the way to the old gods. The line may keep them from coming to us, but it can’t keep us from going to them. This one”—she glared at Peter—“caused us to waste a perfectly good demon. Barron’s power has been expended, and I can’t get it back.” She delivered a savage kick to Peter’s side. “I knew you’d bring the golem rather than risk your changeling, but he still just had to show up and interrupt. It must be the magic in his fairy blood that allowed him to break the spell.” Her eyes focused on my throat, as tightly as if the look were intended to strangle me. “If you’d been wearing the locket I gave you rather than your aunt’s tatty pearls, he might not have managed it even then.”
She mocked me by pulling her lips into a pout. “That’s right. Mama put a spell on her little gift.” She shook her head as the exaggerated expression turned into a true frown. “You do have some power in you, little girl. There was enough magic in that locket to charm a normal witch into believing anything I wanted her to. You, it only made a little more amenable.”
I was an anchor. She shouldn’t have been able to charm me at all, but that was the last thing I had time to contemplate right now. I pressed my palm over the wound on Peter’s chest. Half praying, half reaching out for my own magic, I tried my best to close the hole, to will a beat back to his heart. She circled us once, as if taking a moment to consider. “All right, you are a novice, so I’ll let you have a little help. Josef,” she called into the darkness, “bring her.”
Joe entered, dragging Ellen’s naked form with him. His hands dug into my aunt’s shoulders, bruising the skin around the points of contact. He flung her to the ground next to us.
“There,” Emily said. “There’s your precious Ellen.”
Ellen lay there barely conscious. Blood from multiple needle pricks had trickled down her arm and dried. “A tenth of what’s in her could kill a platoon of regular men,” Joe said. “It’s so nice to have a toy you can’t break, no matter how hard you are on it.”
“Tick tock, tick tock, my girl,” Emily said. “It makes no difference to me if he lives or dies, but your leprechaun’s running out of time.”
“He isn’t a leprechaun.”
“And in a few moments more he won’t be anything at all.”
Ellen lay on the floor, barely able to move. She tilted her head toward me, but I wasn’t sure if she actually registered my presence, or if her effort was simply a reflex. But then she reached her hand out to me, and I took it. There shone only a glimmer of awareness in her eyes, but when our hands connected, I watched the aunt I knew and loved surface, like a swimmer breaking through the water. She inhaled sharply and let go of my hand, rolling over and pushing herself to her hands and knees. She crawled to Peter’s side, placing her right palm across his forehead and her left over the wound on his chest. She closed her eyes, and then her lips began moving in silent prayer.
As she knelt over him, as her golden light began to spread through him, I focused in on his face, that face I’d loved but taken for granted since I was a little girl. Now that I was at risk of losing him forever, I realized how much I needed him, how much I loved him. Ellen opened her eyes and looked at me. She had difficulty speaking, her mouth still dry from the drugs that had been pumping through her body. “I’ve found him,” she said. His eyes opened a crack, and he drew a breath.
“Brava. Brava, my darling.” Emily applauded. “You saved the boy.” She turned to face me. “It’s a shame you can’t do the same for that Negro of yours.”
The joy that had reached my heart ran cold. “What have you done to Mother?”
“That darky is not your mother. I am your mother.”
“No, not anymore. I guess maybe even never. What did you do to Jilo?”
Emily narrowed her eyes, leaned her head at a coquettish angle. “We dosed her.”
“You and Joe drugged her?”
“Oh no. Not Josef and I. You and I. The magic you asked her to collect for you. It had a little bit of something extra in it. Something so fine that your old ‘digger’ would never notice it,” she said and laughed. “All right, it’s true that puns are the lowest form of humor, but I couldn’t resist. Your Jilo, your ‘Mother,’ I knew she could never resist tasting the magic you sent her way, so I added a little something special just for her. She was dead within seconds of touching the power. I do hope her passing was peaceful.”
The word no sooner escaped her lips than a loud bang sounded on the door. Emily turned, surprised. As soon as she lost focus, out of the corner of my eye I noticed Emmet moving. He launched himself across the room and placed himself as a protective barrier between Emily and—bless his heart—Peter and Ellen.
Another bang. Emily shot a look at Joe, and he took a step toward the door, but halted in his tracks as a third bang rang out, sending a reverberation through the entire house. A final bang sent the black-and-red door bursting open with such vehemence it broke free from its frame. It spun through the air, just missing Joe’s head as it flew over him. He fell to the floor as it passed, scurrying over to Emily on his hands and knees. When he rose to stand, he positioned himself strategically behind her, letting her shield him.
“Next time you’ll open the damn door when Jilo knock.” Jilo crossed the threshold into the entranceway, her walking stick still held high. As she stood framed in the door opening, several bolts of angry lightening ripped across the sky, backlighting this fury in a purple turban, lilac floral-print housecoat, and crocheted slippers.
“You are as hard to end as the cockroach,” Emily said, crossing the room to face Jilo.
“That right, Jilo a cockroach.” Jilo lowered her cane to the floor and leaned her weight into it as she bent toward Emily. “And she be here long after you dead and gone.”
Emily raised her hand in the air, a ball of red light forming at her fingertips. She screamed in anger, hurling the ball at Jilo, who dropped her cane and opened her arms wide the instant before the power hit her. Her anguished face showed that it hurt like hell, but in a moment, her expression changed from one of pain to one of victory. She clapped her hands together, and as the energy danced on her fingertips, it transformed in color from red to royal blue. She pulled her hands apart and shot the ball right back at Emily. It hit her dead on. The smell of singed hair rose up around her, but she remained standing.
“You gonna have to do better than that if you want to take out Jilo.” The old woman cackled. Her laughter caused Emily’s face to twist with rage. “Jilo been borrowing power all her life, and now she ready to learn you a thing or two for messing with her girl.” She motioned toward the ground, and her cane popped up into the air. She grasped the stick between both hands as a delighted gleam lit up her eyes. “Come on, batter up, bitch. Let Jilo see what you got.”