“That’s my girl.” Peter beamed down at me. I wouldn’t feel a lick safer in the tavern where I’d been attacked by Ryder than in the house where Teague had attacked me, but Peter wanted to believe he could help by taking me where he himself felt more secure. One more lie, a little white one, perhaps, but still another lie between us. All of a sudden, Oliver and Adam began verbally tearing into each other. Their words came too quickly and overlapped each other. I couldn’t make out what had been said, but the anger came through loud and clear. “We’ll go out the back way,” Peter said and took my hand to lead me through the kitchen.
He eased the swinging door open and closed, and ushered me past the table toward the back door.
As I passed, something caught my eye. “Wait,” I said, my hand slipping from his grip.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure.” I crossed to the table where the map of Savannah still lay open. A mug of coffee sat on it. The ring of a coffee stain showed a few inches to the left of the mug’s current placement. A perfect dark circle had been made over one of the marks Adam had made on it, so that his X stood at the circle’s exact center. I lifted the still warm mug to find a second, lighter stain had formed there also. The perfect circles. The crisscrossed lines. “Go get Oliver.”
“Are you sure? I think you should take a break from all this.”
I shook my head. My heart began to thud. It was all so clear now. “No. Please go get my uncle.” When Peter didn’t move, I looked up at him. “Please. Now. Tell him I’ve found the Tree of Life.”
THIRTEEN
My aunts filed into the kitchen, with Oliver and Adam on their heels. “I sent Sam home,” Iris answered before I could ask. I nodded as Peter slid out a chair for me. “I worry about how he is doing with all this,” she said. “It’s true he doesn’t share the antipathy most civilians feel for us witches, but if things get too complicated, too strange . . . Well, he is only a man after all.” Iris pulled out a chair and sat across from me.
“If he loves you, he’ll handle it just fine,” Peter said and beamed at my aunt. “Look at me. There isn’t any amount of weird that could come between Mercy and me.”
“Yes,” Iris said and offered a drawn smile. “But you two are blessed to have found each other. I don’t seem to share your luck in love.”
I reached out and took her hands in mine. I clasped them tightly, and did my best to send every ounce of love I could to her through that physical connection. I couldn’t lie to her, and I didn’t want to diminish her concerns by whitewashing the truth. Sam had taken the sight of my standing over my cousin’s corpse with aplomb; then in the next moment, he seemed overwhelmed by the high strangeness that was our life. He behaved as if the very thought of Iris’s touch reviled him. Adam had almost walked away from Oliver. God knows he had reason enough to. Until Adam showed up at my wedding, I’d thought for sure he’d had enough of the Taylors and our magic, which had over time cost him his son and very nearly his own life.
A new wave of gratitude for Peter washed over me. I was lucky to have him, especially after the way I let myself get confused first over Jackson—again I shuddered at the thought that I had let that demon touch me. Then again, there were the mixed messages I’d sent to Peter over Emmet. I suddenly realized I still hadn’t told him about Emmet’s impending return to Savannah.
“I wish I could somehow compartmentalize my life,” Iris said, pulling her hands from mine. “Put Sam in a comfortable, safe place, where he wouldn’t be at risk. As we all know, though, no amount of magic will allow that.”
Adam grunted. “It takes a tough man to love a Taylor.” He patted Iris on the back. “If he isn’t strong enough to hang in there, then he doesn’t deserve you.”
“That’s right,” Peter said and smiled.
“If you two are through congratulating yourselves on your grit,” Oliver said, trying to look cool, but not doing a very good job of covering the fact Adam had once again swept him off his metaphorical feet, “Mercy can tell us what sh
e means about finding the Tree of Life.”
I pointed at the coffee rings on the map. “Make you think of anything?”
“Hmmm . . . maybe.” He fished a compass I hadn’t seen since high school from the same drawer that had housed the map and drew nine neat circles with the Xs at their centers. He sat down and stared at the map for a few moments, considering the marks he’d just placed on it. “You may very well be right, Gingersnap,” Oliver said and laid down the compass, “but I don’t see any correspondences between the placement of the body parts and the sephirot.”
“The what?” Adam loomed over me, staring over my shoulder.
“The sephirot.” I touched each of the nine circles, and looked back at him. “In Kabbalah—” I began, but the way he raised his eyebrows and looked down his nose at me told me he had no idea what that was either. “It’s a kind of Jewish mysticism. The sephirot circles represent the ten attributes of the infinite mind. Together with some connecting lines”—my finger traced the marks Adam himself had made on the map—“they combine to form the Tree of Life.”
Oliver looked at Adam. “Not much of a tree really, more like a mystical Twister mat. When the head turns up, we’ll have the tenth sephira.”
“?‘Ten Sephirot of Nothingness, ten and not nine,’?” Iris quoted although I had no idea of her source, “?‘ten and not eleven.’ The Sepher Yetzirah, the Book of Creation.” She scooted her chair closer to her brother’s. As she did so, it struck me that this was our Thanksgiving. Other families would be sitting down to candied yams and pumpkin pie. Not us; we were gathering around a murder map.
Adam stared at me blankly. “I’m sorry, I evidently don’t speak witch.”
“God is eternal. God is indivisible,” Ellen said, brushing back the hair from her reddened but sobering eyes. “God is perfect.” She focused over my head at Adam. “Where God is, there is no need or even room for change or growth. For God to create, he, she, it . . . whatever you want to call God, had to get out of the way. God created ten blank spaces, ten points both within himself and yet where he was not. Together these points form the great void, where all realities come into existence.”
“So what you’re telling me is Genesis was actually a sequel.”
“Yes,” Oliver said with a glint in his eye. “That is exactly what we’re saying.” I was glad to see their anger had faded. I didn’t want them fighting, especially over me.
Adam passed around behind me to look at the map from a different angle. “Tell me, how does any of this philosophy apply to the concrete and actual problem at hand?”
“We,” Iris answered for us, “have been working under the hypothesis that the woman’s murder and dismemberment is an attempt at working a spell. An attempt at invoking sympathetic magic as a means to power the spell.”