She did all she could to end the pregnancies, but that second little one, she was just too strong. She kept both herself and her sister alive and unharmed. And Ginny could feel the little one’s power increasing with each passing day. So she hijacked the power. She had to do it in steps; first she started feeding it from the strong sister to the weaker one and then, once she’d managed to get the energy flowing away from its owner, she sent it away. She grounded it in another dimension, close enough that she could access it herself, but far enough away that it could pass right through a Taylor witch without him or her ever noticing. As a matter of fact, it’s all around us right now. This was where Ginny sent your power. She did her best to starve you to death, and it might have worked if your Aunt Ellen hadn’t given you the boost you needed to survive delivery.”
Ginny had stolen my power and tried to kill me. No wonder my mother didn’t survive our birth. I had a whole new pack of reasons to grieve, but the knowledge that I wasn’t responsible for my mama’s death was like a wave of absolution, freeing me of the guilt that I had carried for as long as I could remember. Oddly, this was one of the happiest moments of my life.
Suddenly the proportions of the room shifted, and Maisie was standing directly in front of me. Jackson was several yards away, hanging at an angle that should have been impossible but wasn’t.
“She kept me under her thumb,” Maisie continued Jackson’s narrative seamlessly. “Not because I was some kind of prodigy, but because she saw me as a time bomb. Picture my surprise last year when I stumbled across her old journals. She kept such careful notes about me. She should have shown more care in keeping them hidden. Breaking the charms on them was child’s play. She couldn’t undo the siphon of power she’d set up between us. She couldn’t just take what she had been pumping into me and shift it somewhere else. She had inadvertently turned me into an anchor for your power. If the power started flowing back to you, the whole dam would have eventually burst, and she was prepared to stop at nothing to keep that from happening. You would be astounded to know just how much she hated you. She wrote about trying to find a way to bend time. To go back and prevent your ever having been conceived.”
“She was crazy. She had to be, but Maisie, how can you be doing this to me? You have got to stop this. You’ve got to let me go.”
“No, actually, I don’t. You see, this is how I’m going to finally get my revenge against Ginny. And you.”
“Against me? But for what?”
“For stealing my life! Ginny trained your power into me. She turned me into a freak.”
“At least she loved you,” I said, not even knowing anymore if that was true. Could Ginny have really have loved Maisie and used her as she had?
“As a reflection of her own twisted self, maybe, but not for any other reason. She didn’t let me out of her sight, and there you were, roaming free, making friends, meeting boys, finding love.” She grimaced at me. “I got to watch as you won the heart of the only man I could ever love.”
I started to protest that Jackson wasn’t even actually real, just a twisted, grown-up version of Wren when the dots suddenly connected. “Peter,” I said.
“Yes, Peter!” Maisie replied, anger spilling over in her voice. “Haven’t you noticed, Mercy? Most regular men won’t even come near us. And even witches are afraid of me because of this thing Ginny turned me into. I could never figure out why, but Peter is completely unfazed by the magic. It flows right over him, and he doesn’t even care. He could have loved me…and he would have if you weren’t around. I tried to take him from you, and the damnedest thing is that he never even noticed I was trying. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”
“So you took Wren and started transforming him into Jackson.”
“Yes,” Maisie admitted, shaking her head. “I did, but it took a lot more energy than I possessed. It took your kind of power. A part of you recognized your own energy in him, and you interpreted those feelings as love.”
“Now that’s ironic, isn’t it?” Jackson asked. The distance between us had dissolved, and he was standing right by my side. He leaned in and kissed my cheek, then forced his lips on mine. Repulsed, I pulled back.
“Everything was going great for a while, but Ginny realized what I had done,” Maisie said. “She couldn’t tell the family, so she decided to dissolve Wren on her own.”
“She summoned me there, thinking she could control me.” Jackson said. “But she couldn’t. I really enjoyed killing her.”
“But what do you get from all this?” I asked Jackson.
“I get to live. I get to live in your world, and that’s all I have ever wanted.”
“When the anchor energy settles on me—the same power you told me just yesterday that you’d give me of your own free will—I’ll finally be strong enough to undo what Ginny has done. I’ll unground the power that she stole from you, and with it, I’ll help Jackson fully and finally actualize in our world. And then I won’t just anchor the line, I’ll take control of it. I’ll bring the thirteen families back together, all right, but they’ll be under my thumb. And when I’m firmly in control of our reality, I’ll make Peter love me too.”
“But if you unground my power, what’s to keep it from coming back to me?” I asked and was chilled by the look on my sister’s face. She was astounded.
“You don’t get it do you? When I unground your power, there won’t be a you for it to flow back into.” I was too stunned to speak. “I’m out of time here,” she said, addressing Jackson. “Get her ready and make sure she’s in the correct position.”
As far as I could tell, I didn’t move an inch, but I was suddenly naked and tied to one of the trees that grew in the garden of my own home. My hands were pulled up and tied above my head, a second band of coarse hemp secured me tightly by the waist, and a third was above my knees. The bark of the tree was rough and it dug into the skin of my back. Worse than that was the coarseness of the rope that held me in place.
Jackson stood beside me, smiling beatifically at me. “What a beautiful martyr you’ll make,” he said.
Witches milled around us, walked right through Jackson without even noticing that we were there. Mere yards away I could see Emmet talking to Ellen. Maisie walked over to join them, and Ellen leaned in and whispered something in her ear. An expression of surprised anger flitted across Maisie’s face, but she hid it quickly, smiling and hugging our aunt.
Jackson leered at me as he used his pointer finger to draw symbols and designs on my body with a warm, sticky liquid. Even if I’d been blind, its scent would have told me that it was blood, and I found myself saying a prayer for the spirit of whatever poor creature had been sacrificed. “Your sister is something else, ain’t she?” he asked. “It was pretty amazing the way she handled Connor. He came close to cocking up the whole works when he figured out that Ginny had been sharing her secrets. Maisie managed to deal with him from another dimension without anyone being one bit the wiser.”
“The fire,” I said.
“That’s right,” Jackson beamed at me. “Had to be fire, ’cause we knew it would take him out without harming you. We needed to keep you alive for the ceremony today.”