Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she wiped them away with the back of her hand. She turned and hurried from the room. “You’ve got to stop her,” I said.
“There is no stopping her. The other anchors, they’ve taken from the Taylors now. I don’t care how much magic they have, Iris is going to take them all down. All of them.”
“But the line. If Iris harms the anchors . . .” I realized Iris had decided to bind the other anchors, once and for all and all on her own. They would suffer the fate they’d willed for me. Living out their natural lives in a vegetative state until their bodies gave out. Then the line would move on to select their replacements. I was certain nothing like a mass binding of anchors had ever been attempted. How Iris thought she could achieve this was beyond my comprehension. I didn’t have long to try to comprehend. Another wave of agony tore through me.
Ellen lifted my head up and slid another pillow beneath it. “Now, you listen to me,” she said as she moved to the foot of the bed. “It’s a very early delivery by normal human standards, but we both know he’s got a lot of magic in him, from both you and his daddy. And the little guy is a fighter. I feel it.”
“He’s headstrong. Just like me,” I said for my own comfort.
A small smile formed on my aunt’s lips. “That’s right, he is. And you know what? You get that stubbornness from me, and I am telling you that you and I are going to get this baby delivered before they can undo what good Oliver did for us.” She pushed the skirt of my dress up. “You aren’t fully dilated yet, so I need you to focus on helping me make that happen.”
I heard steps coming down the hall. I took a deep breath, filled with relief that Iris had come to her senses. The steps stopped at the threshold of my room. The energy was wrong. It wasn’t Iris. I sensed two there, instead of one. “Ellen,” I whispered and pointed toward the door. She was so focused on me that she had noticed nothing, and looked distractedly up. She turned back to me. She had seen nothing. Was I delirious, or was I simply dying?
Two women, dressed all in black, floated over the threshold and into the room. I blinked, not wanting to believe my eyes.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Emily said, then cackled. Her hair floated around her head as if she were swimming in water. Her skin was translucent. “Mama is home.” She reached out to take Gudrun’s hand. Together they floated to the side of my bed. Together they grasped me and carried me away into the darkening sky.
THIRTY-ONE
Their hands like sharp talons ripped me away from where I lay. I saw my body lying below me, with Ellen in attendance over it, over me, but still I felt the roughness of the witches’ grasp. Gudrun cackled. “Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” I knew these words, but how?
My form beneath me shrunk as we continued to ascend, encountering nothing to impede our rise. Wind buffeted us from all sides, and I could feel myself being pelted with drops of ice. “Am I dead? Is that why you’ve come?” I asked, but my question was only met with shrieks of laughter.
“Ask not for whom die G
locke peals,” Gudrun said in her clipped Germanic accent. The two screamed with laughter, enjoying a private joke. They clasped their free hands together, completing a circle between us, and we began to spin faster and faster until the moment we fell.
We plummeted in free fall until the world rose up beneath us to catch us. They released me, and I tumbled to the earth, landing with a heavy thud. I seemed solid enough in that sense. At least I was solid as everything else around me, even though I couldn’t venture a guess as to where they had carried me.
“Stand,” Emily commanded. My eyes darted about, searching for any form of refuge, but I found myself on what appeared to be an endless grassy plain, beneath an eternal and uncurving starlit sky. “I said stand.” She reached for me and jerked me to my feet. Was this what being dead felt like, invisible to those still living, incorporeal but burdened with the memory of your entire body like one enormous phantom limb?
An odd humming like the sound of a bass theremin caused me to turn. Directly behind me a bell-shaped object hovered, spinning slowly enough that I could see the rune-like engravings along its lower rim. I turned back to the dark witches. A thousand questions popped up in my mind. Where are we? What is that thing? “Why won’t you just stay dead?” was the one that escaped my lips.
“Now, is that any way to speak to your mother?” Emily said and laughed, her laughter a cold metallic pealing that corrupted the night.
“I saw your body.” I pointed at Gudrun. “She killed you. She used your body to seal a spell. She said she was punishing you.”
Emily folded her arms across her chest. “Oh, my dear daughter, you are so incredibly gullible.” Gudrun floated next to Emily and wrapped her arm protectively around her. “It was no punishment. It was a reward.”
“Indeed, the process is unpleasant, but I believe you agree immortality merits a little agony, no?” Gudrun asked my mother.
“Indeed it does,” Emily said and turned back to me. “Do you hear that, precious one? I am immortal. Truly immortal. And I owe it all to you and my foolish siblings.”
“It takes not only much magic, but a special kind of magic to work the spell I completed for your mother. It takes soul magic.”
“Gehenna . . .” I whispered the name.
“Yes, Gehenna,” Emily said. “Your golem friend kept the door open just long enough for Gudrun to collect all the magic she needed.”
“Then all that about Grandma, it was just a trick?”
“Oh, no, my dear mother was indeed trapped in Gehenna, but that is exactly where she deserved to be.” Emily circled around me to face the humming object that still clung to the horizon. She glanced over her shoulder back at me. “It’s a shame your golem managed to spring her. Don’t get me wrong. She didn’t deserve to be there for killing your grandfather. She deserved to be there because she took the coward’s path and killed herself as well.” She spun back around to me, rushing up angrily until she was immediately before me. “She should have been proud to kill that bastard, that corrupter of pure blood. He with his Negro wife and his half-breed children.” She seemed to catch hold of herself, relaxing and sliding back a few feet. “I’m the one who told Mama, you know. It was your father who told me. Erik saved me. He showed me how to remove the stain of sharing blood with a lesser race.”
“Lesser race?” I found my voice and screamed the words at her again. “Lesser race? You mean all of this has happened because you are a bigot?” Until that very second, I had believed this kind of blind hatred had been relegated to another century.
“Lower your voice,” Gudrun commanded in a hiss. “Your mother, she is a purist. She has dedicated her existence to the return of the rightful order.”
“There is no ‘rightful order,’?” I said and was suddenly overcome by a great sense of sadness. “There are only people, most of us decent and loving and not caring about anything other than those two qualities.” If Colin and I somehow survived this, I would dedicate my life to raising him to understand viscerally just how wrong my mother had been, not only in action but in heart. Then my heart fell into the pit of my stomach. My hand clasped over my still bloodstained but now very loose dress. I gasped in the night air, as a sharp pain cut through my heart. I fell to my knees, then bowed over on the earth. They had succeeded. They had taken my child from me. Oh, Colin, Mommy is so sorry she failed you. Mommy is so sorry. An ever-expanding hole had been ripped through the center of my soul. “They killed my baby.” I looked at my mother, incapable of believing I would not find at least a spark of humanity left in her. “They said my baby was an abomination.” Emily stood as still as a marble statue, as cold and as unmoved.