ONE
“Hold the fire in your hand now, girl.” Jilo’s whisper washed over me. “Don’t let it just take you in. You control it this time. Don’t you enter its world till you ready to control your time there.”
The small flame didn’t burn me, even though I knew its heat must have been intense. It danced in my palm as it tried to pull my consciousness back—back into a memory of myself and my sister. Maisie had given me these enchanted flames, tongues of fire that allowed me to relive experiences from our childhood in vibrant detail. Now she was lost to me, torn not only from this world, but from our very reality. No one knew where she was, or even if she was.
These bright flickers were the last of her magic left on our plane, and they strained to touch their source like iron shavings reaching toward a magnet. They were my only hope of finding Maisie. I struggled against the flame’s tug, trying to descend into the past, step-by-step, this time without getting lost in the memory. We had already used a dozen of the flames; the lights had given their lives one by one as they tried to guide me to her. They burned so brightly, but they flickered out too quickly for me to find the connection, to understand where I was being led. Counting this one, the flame that quivered in my palm, only five remained.
“Hold on to the light in your right hand, and you listen to Jilo’s voice, hear?” She grabbed my free hand and squeezed it tightly. I squeezed back. “Let Jilo’s voice be yo’ anchor in this world. No need to rush, my girl, no need to rush.”
Jilo’s language and her insistence on speaking about herself in the third person belied her education. I knew for a fact that she had graduated from Spelman College with a degree in chemistry, but due to her sex and skin color, she had been born about two decades too early to follow her dream of becoming a medical doctor. Instead she became a Hoodoo root doctor, building a persona around herself that matched both the expectations and superstitions of those who sought her services. I was one of the few who had ever been allowed a peek behind this mask.
Jilo took a deep, slow breath, reminding me to emulate her. The waves of power washed up against me, but each came with less strength, and their frequency was diminishing. I resisted the gravity of the world that had begun to grow before me, trying to divert the energy of Maisie’s spell from its intended use, turning it toward my own ends. The energy slowed and began to stretch out before me, bending. Frustrated by my resistance, it began to turn, stretching out and glowing like a comet nearing the sun. Just as I’d intended, the magic began to seek its source, reaching out in all directions until it found Maisie. I honed my consciousness, following the flame’s path, but it was too late. The flame incandesced, expanding and brightening like a nova. An instant later it died. So, resisting the flames’ pull caused them to burn out more quickly . . . This time, I didn’t even get the joy of reliving a beloved childhood memory. Just blackness.
“We got closer that time,” Jilo said, even though we both knew it was a lie. We’d made it this far twice before. She stood and hobbled over to the table where the Ball jar that held the remaining four flames sat and closed the lid tightly on them. “I can’t do no more today. I ain’t as young as you are,” she said, but all the while her eyes never left my midsection. I knew she worried that too much of this walking between worlds might be bad for the baby growing there. I worried too, but I was also worried that I was running out of time to find Maisie.
“I appreciate what you are doing for me,” I said, rubbing my palm over my ever-expanding stomach. I was just three-and-a-half months along now, but I could already tell that my Colin would arrive a very big boy.
“Jilo know you do, girl,” she said, and then said again in a tender voice, “She know you do.” She put her hand on her hip, rubbing away at some ache. “Jilo still think you should tell yo’ family what you up to. They witches, they have a much easier time helpin’ you find your sister than Jilo.”
“I don’t want to involve them. The other witch families won’t even listen to a whisper about trying to bring Maisie back into our dimension. She damaged the line, they say, weakened it.” Millennia ago, powerful witches, including many of my own ancestors, had woven a web of magical energy to protect our world. We called this barrier “the line.” The beings who’d once ruled the earth—call them demons if you are religious, or trans-dimensional entities if you put your faith in science—had set themselves up as gods, meddling in human evolution, even more so in the genesis of witches than in that of regular folk. Eventually we witches rebelled, chasing the serpents out of Eden. The line prevented them from ever coming back. “My aunts and uncle would stop me too. They’d feel obliged to,” I said, fearing that they might not have helped me even if the other families hadn’t been opposed to finding my sister.
While my Aunt Iris wanted nothing more to do with Maisie, saying that she’d earned any punishment that had befallen her, Aunt Ellen was offering her usual blind allegiance to the united witch families. She didn’t want to risk making waves. Uncle Oliver wasn’t as dead set against finding Maisie, but he didn’t think there would be much of her left to find. He had spent days ripping out the patch of lawn where Maisie had last stood before the power of the angry line threw her far from our world. He said the earth there had been burnt black several feet deep, and it wasn’t even worth trying to plant anything. He’d returned the damaged soil, laid down pavers to cover the spot, and added a sundial. I guess it constituted his own form of a memorial. No, I knew my family would not support my clandestine efforts, and even if they did, the other anchors—the witches like myself who had been chosen to maintain and protect the line—had forbidden any efforts to bring Maisie back into our reality, fearing she would do more damage to the line.
“Jilo think maybe they should stop you. This sister of yours, she tried to kill you.”
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” I objected. “She was under the influence of a demon, a boo hag. The boo hag you yourself nurtured and used to spy on my family.” Maisie was more than a sibling, she was my twin. Fraternal twin, yes, but still we’d come into the world together. If I didn’t look for a reason to forgive her, who else would?
“Jilo done told you she sorry about that. She had no idea that yo’ sister had got messed up with that thing.”
I still felt sick when I thought about how Maisie had taken the shadow entity and given it a form. Named it Jackson and took it as her lover. Allowed it to cut me and taste my blood. I felt even worse when I remembered how I myself had fallen in love with Jackson. A shudder ran down my spine.
“That right,” Jilo continued as if she had read my thoughts. “That the sister you trying to find now. Jilo says you better off leaving the bitch wherever she landed. Sometimes you just gotta cut the cord, blood or no.”
“Well, that sure isn’t going to happen,” I said sharply, but then regretted my tone. “I can’t do this without you, Mother.”
She shook off my frustration without even a grimace. “The families still chokin’ off yo’ power supply?”
“Yes,” I said. “They don’t think I’m ready to control it.”