“But witches kind of feel that way, don’t we?”
“Not the witches in this family,” Oliver said. “And yes, by that, I mean the four of us sitting here. We may be proud of who we are, proud of our skill with magic, proud of our heritage, but we really don’t think that we are somehow innately superior.”
“And that is coming from our selfish peacock of a bastard brother,” Iris said, a smirk on her lips, but pride showing in her eyes.
“Turn the page,” Ellen said and nodded at the book. I found another photo of Maria, this time sitting in a group of women. Beneath the photo my father’s script recorded their names: Maria, Traute, Sigrun. I gasped as my eyes shot back up to the picture. One of the faces had been burned into my mind long ago . . . I knew her without needing to read her name: Gudrun. Erik had added “die Vril-Gesellschaft” beneath the women’s names. I looked up at Ellen, and her expression of sympathy answered my unspoken question. I knew then that Maria had been the leader in an attempt to bring down the line.
I turned back to the album and flipped the page. The next one held two photos of the man I had come to think of as Careu. In the first, he stood next to an old prop-style plane. I felt my pulse thundering in my neck as the face I recognized fell into its familiar context. The next photo showed him, this great American hero, standing flanked on one side by two admiring women, while a man with adoring eyes looked on from the background. Standing before Careu, on the photograph’s right side, stood a man in the process of handing over a sword. He wore a lighter suit with a white kerchief in his pocket. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He had a double chin and wore his hair slicked back. I knew this man. I recognized him from history books. “That’s Hermann Goering,” I said, poking angrily at his face. “He was one of the Nazi leaders.” I felt ill.
Oliver came and squatted down next to me. “Yeah, Gingersnap, I’m afraid it is.” He put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me in for a kiss on the temple. “Do you need a little break?”
“No. I’ve got to know. How did my great-grandparents meet?”
“They never did,” Ellen said. I looked at her, confused. “Your paternal great-grandparents were both great supporters of eugenics and the goal of building, or as they would have it, rebuilding the master race. Goering and his friends created a special project with this aim. They called it Lebensborn, the ‘source of life.’?” My mind flashed back to the file I’d seen among my Grandfather Taylor’s papers. I realized his interest in the Lebensborn program wasn’t a study in historical curiosities, like Iris had told me. The file contained research on his son-in-law, my father.
“Your great-grandparents,” Ellen continued, “each of them donated their genetic materials to the cause for study and duplication. Technological schematics provided by the Aldebaran brothers provided the know-how for your great-grandfather to engineer a process similar to what we now know as in vitro fertilization. The Nazis sought to create a master race, but the Aldebarans wanted to create a thousand Marias. The doctors in the project planted Maria’s fertilized eggs in the wombs of several of the Lebensborn mothers. Erik’s father, your grandfather, was one of the children born from this process.”
I closed the book. My hands felt soiled from having touched it. I wanted to wash my hands. Wash myself. Wash away the filth of the source from which I’d sprung. Now I understood why Ellen and Iris had hidden the truth from me. Paul and Maisie and I, we were all somehow wrong. “We’re the children of monsters,” I said and pushed the book away.
THIRTY-FOUR
“But that doesn’t mean you are a monster,” Iris said. “I raised you right. You know the difference between good and evil.”
“Maisie didn’t,” I said. For the first time, I wondered if Maisie could be saved. Rescued, sure, but redeemed?
Iris looked me dead in the eye, her lips pressed together in a tight line. She nodded. “All right. I failed your sister. I’m not denying that, but I did not fail you. You are no more like your sister than . . .” She stopped herself.
“Than you are like yours,” I finished for her. I hugged myself, fighting a chill and a sense of self-disgust. My hand felt my stomach. “What am I bringing you into, little guy?”
“I wondered the same thing when I discovered I was pregnant with Paul, and I am going to give you the same answer I gave myself. You are bringing him into a loving family. A flawed family, that’s sure, but one that will cherish him.”
“Emily said that the families brought about the accident that killed Paul. Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t believe it is. I pray that it’s not, but I don’t think we should take any chances. They can never know the truth, sweetheart,” Ellen said. “The families. They can never learn that you and Maisie are Erik’s girls. They have to keep believing that Connor is your father. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do. What I don’t understand is how Emily could have been drawn to this darkness. What happened to her to make her capable of everything she has done?”
“I don’t know,” Iris said. “I have never before let myself confess these thoughts about Emily to anyone, not even myself. Sometimes it seems that a person comes into the world with a missing piece. The piece that makes them human just isn’t there. My intuition has always tried to tell me that my sister was born without that piece, but I always buried my concerns before . . .” She paused. “I almost said ‘before she died.’ I still can’t get pieces to line up right in my mind. But before, as I think of it now, it seemed to me that she was playing a role, playing at being a loving sister, a loving daughter. There never seemed to be any true emotion behind it. It felt more like she mimicked others’ emotions, but never had any of her own. I think she came into this world broken.”
“Do you think she really did love my father?” I asked Ellen.
“At one point, I would have guessed that maybe she did, but not after last night. She couldn’t have loved him, or she would never have hurt his child. She would have never tried to channel her evil brand of magic into you.”
“She didn’t care about me at all . . . I just served her as a means to an end.” I’d given it a lot of thought overnight. “She attacked the line by going after its weakest link. She knew that if she could poison me, she’d be poisoning the line.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Iris said. “First of all, you are not the line’s weakest link. Second, even though the rebel families want to end the line, they are still connected to it, an anchor from each family.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that there were still actually thirteen anchors; I’d only ever heard anyone speak about the ten anchors from the united families. “I am sure they were waiting in the wings, ready to spring into action as soon as the line had been damaged, but if it were just a matter of ‘poisoning’ an anchor, the rebels would more than happily sacrifice one of their own.” She leaned back in her chair, her face tightening. “No, Emily knew this Babel spell she was working wouldn’t bring the old ones into our reality. That spell was about taking you to old gods’ realm. I don’t know why, but for some reason the rebel families need you to break the power of the line.”