The mere thought of his smile brought one to my own face. “Somehow . . . and I don’t know how,” I said sliding myself off the barstool and crossing to Claire, “it will be okay. I promise.”
I kissed her cheek, and she dropped the cloth she had been using on the table. She pulled me into her arms. “I’m holding you to that, my girl.” Her lips arched up into a tremulous smile.
“I should be going,” I said. I had dropped by the tavern hoping to see Peter before opening, but Claire had sent him out on errands, and I was due home. “Y’all need to finish getting ready to open, and I promised Aunt Iris I’d help her and Ellen do the shopping for Thanksgiving. This year we’re pulling out all the stops, since Iris has someone special to impress.”
“She still seeing that young lad of hers, then?” Colin called out from behind the bar.
I laughed. “She sure is, and I think it’s turning serious.” Sam was not a witch, and he was twenty years younger than my aunt. All the same, he was sincere and sweet and doted on her. He had been at her side practically since the night of Peadar’s wake, when Oliver had spun Iris into his arms. Iris was totally besotted with her black-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed beau. After she had wasted so many years married to Connor, I was thrilled to see her experience this exciting, new, and very much requited love with Sam.
“You’re not worried about her?” Claire asked. “I mean, he isn’t like you. These things usually don’t last long between a normal person and a witch, do they?”
“Ah, my dear, don’t be the dark cloud to one of our few silver linings.” Colin leaned against the bar.
“A regular person and a witch,” I corrected her, flashing back to a similar conversation I’d had with my Aunt Ellen a few months, no, a lifetime ago. I smiled at Claire to let her know I wasn’t really offended. “And you are right. Things like this usually don’t even get started between a regular person and a witch. When they do, they don’t usually endure.” Something about a witch’s otherworldliness usually prevented a regular person from forming a lasting liaison with her. Adam and Oliver were one of the few exceptions I knew of, and the only reason their relationship didn’t suffer was because Oliver had long ago compelled Adam not to sense the oddness that might have otherwise driven the two apart. “Sam had a motorcycle accident a few years back. He was wearing a helmet, but his head still got smacked pretty hard. He lost his sense of smell, and it looks like the aversion most folk have to magic too.”
“Keep Ellen away from him then. We don’t want her patching up his snoot and breaking his heart at the same time,” Colin said and chuckled. He’d meant it as a joke, but Ellen and I had already had a very serious conversation about that very possibility.
“I’ll make sure she keeps clear of him,” I said. “I’ll see you all later.”
Claire reached out to give my hand a slight squeeze. “I wish you’d wait till Peter gets back to drive you home. I don’t like the idea of you traipsing around out there by yourself these days.”
I smiled and held my hand up before her eyes, letting blue sparks of magic dance along my fingertips. “I can take care of myself.”
“Yes, I guess you can at that.” Her shoulders relaxed. I knew she saw my magic as a mixed blessing. A very large part of Claire wished she could have had a normal son who would have married a normal girl. Then there was the side of her that didn’t give a damn about normal. “We love you. We really do,” she said, and her eyes crinkled.
“And I really love you two too.” I rubbed my stomach and winked at her. “We both do.” Her fingers wiggled in the air as a true smile returned to her lips. She grasped my bulging stomach gently. “Good-bye, my little love.” She leaned in and pecked my cheek then released me.
I went to the door and pushed back the deadbolt. I turned back, my eyes suddenly hungry for one more look at them. I raised my hand and gave them a slight wave.
“Our best to Iris,” Colin called out as I let the door close behind me.
Savannah was enjoying an unseasonably warm stretch this autumn; the thermometer had even hit eighty degrees. The air from the river was cooling things off a bit now. Still, the late afternoon was beautiful. Even though I was enjoying the walk, I realized how much I missed my faithful bike, the same beat-up old thing I’d been riding since I’d turned twelve. I missed the woven basket and the jammed and worthless warning bell. I’d stored the bike away a couple months ago, once I had grown too ponderous to ride.
I was only now coming to the end of my second trimester, but I was as big as if the pregnancy had already reached full term. I patted my precocious bump. “Mama’s gonna buy you a bike trailer, little man,” I said to my baby, my little Colin, dreaming of taking him on long rides, giving him his first views of his hometown, beautiful Savannah.
It worried me when I first began to balloon that there might be something wrong, but Ellen assured me that she sensed the baby’s development was coming along fine, if a tad more quickly than anyone might have expected. “Little Colin seems to be perfectly healthy, but he is part witch and part fairy,” Ellen had reminded me. “We have no reason to believe the pregnancy will unfold along a human timeline.”
Thinking of Ellen, I realized it was nearing time for her to close up Taylor’s, her new, albeit unimaginatively named, flower shop, so I decided to drop by and see if she’d like to walk home together. It was true I could take care of myself. My newfound magic was strong, and I was mastering it. Quickly. All the same, the reminder in the news that there was a person out there capable of dismembering a woman creeped me out. I wanted the company.
I was a bit surprised to see the lights had already been turned off and the closed sign placed in the window. Another handwritten sign—“Yes, We Have Mistletoe”—caught my eye. The announcement struck me as less of a commercial message and more an admission of defeat. My aunt detested the parasitic plant whose pagan roots were deep enough to allow it to bloom into the Christmas season.
With a little reflection, I recollected why this would be so. When the Norse sun god Baldur’s mother, Frigg, dreamed of his death, she extracted a vow from every hurtful thing in the world not to harm her son. She overlooked the seemingly innocent mistletoe. I guess it struck too close to home for Ellen. A woman who had all the magic in the world at her command, but who still failed to protect her son. “You do your best to protect the ones you love,” I’d once heard her say to Aunt Iris. “You weave spells to ward off the supernatural and dress them against the weather, but still there is always the one event you couldn’t have anticipated, the one person you never suspected would or even could do harm.” I knew the thought of having to peddle the detested plant for a full month sent Ellen into a total funk and led her to close shop early. I touched the glass and hoped she’d have a better day tomorrow.
A movement near my reflection caught my eye. A child’s laugh. High. Crystalline. I spun around to find an impossible sight, an all-too-familiar little boy with deep-blue eyes and blond curls. Wren, the demonic being who had made itself at home with my family for decades, hovered in the air mere feet before me. Wren, the creature my sister had fed with her magic, until he had grown capable of projecting a second and more complex identity. I’d known this version of the entity as Jackson, and I had very nearly given him my heart. The last time I had seen him, he had held a knife to that heart, ready to destroy me so that he could free his brethren from their world of eternal shadow. I had believed him to be gone, blasted from our world by the power of the line. But here the little bastard was.
“Ellen’s going to die, you know.” He laughed again, the sound of icicles shattering as they fell to earth. “They all will. Ellen and Iris and Oliver and Peter and everyone you have ever loved. Then, when you are all alone, we will take you apart, piece by piece.” My mind flashed on the dismembered body, as Wren glided within an arm’s length of me.
“The line destroyed you. I saw it.” I felt an iciness creep into my fingers as my pulse pounded in my neck. I raised a hand to ward him off.
“The line took much from me.” His boyish tenor should have been incapable of carrying the pointed hatred that punctuated his words. A child’s eyes should never be able to hold the rage this false child carried in him. “You have taken much from me, but I have friends who will help me get it all back and more.”
The world began to spiral around us, images blending and blurring, spinning then slowing. We now stood in Troup Square, nearly a mile from where we’d started. The last glints of sunlight touched the armillary and set fire to the golden astrological symbols that adorn it. The sun’s glow provided the demon child with an unmerited halo. I used my hand to block the excess light from my eyes. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Because we want you to remember. It’s time for you to remember.”
“Remember what?”
Wren’s rosebud lips curved up into a wicked smile, then stained to an inky black. Within seconds, all color deserted his features. The demon’s form stretched beyond the measure of its childlike disguise and lost all semblance of solidity. This demon was what the people of the low country call a “boo hag,” and a boo hag was by nature a hungry shadow.