“You poor, poor dear,” Gudrun said in a singsong voice that sounded of anything other than sympathy. “So much betrayal. So much loss. So much pain.” She knelt beside me and forced me back to my knees. “But it will all be over ever so soon,” she cooed, and began stroking my hair in a caricature of caring.
I slapped her hand away with a satisfying smack, and pushed myself back, finding my feet. “You bitches have left me with nothing to lose.”
“We can’t take all the credit, dear. This was a group effort. You are the one, the one who is uniting all thirteen of the families. The line ends with you.” They looked at each other and burst out in cackles all over again. “She still hasn’t even begun to guess,” Emily said, laughing so hard tears formed in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“Guessed what?” I felt so much anger at that moment, I might have killed her, killed Gudrun, and put an end to that hovering craft’s annoying humming all in the same blast.
“That you never had anything to lose, dearie,” Gudrun answered for her.
“What are you saying?”
“We”—Emily fought to regain composure—“we’re telling you it is time for you to wake up. Time for you to remember.” She paused as if she were waiting for an epiphany to strike, but none was forthcoming. “Your child was not the ‘Abomination.’ You are.” She began circling me in one direction, while Gudrun began to mirror her steps in the other direction. “Your father and I had such fun creating you. Our early days in Tillandsia were truly magical in so many ways.”
I caught the image of a semitruck slamming into Erik’s car, killing him instantly and flinging Paul from the vehicle. “Did you kill him?”
“I, no,” Emily said. “Ayako did, but I knew it was coming.”
“Ayako always was such a good little soldier,” Gudrun said with a sneer on her lips. “All I had to do was convince her of the truth. That your father was a danger to the line.”
“But why? If he was your ally?”
“Erik was losing faith in the cause. He had grown soft. He had lost sight of the end goal, and was enjoying his role as père de famille a bit too well. He wanted ‘out,’ as if he could simply walk away.” She squinted at me, suddenly seeming irritated with having to explain her actions. She shrugged. “Besides, he had already served his purpose. He fathered you.”
I turned to Emily. “You once told me you had loved him. Was that only another lie?”
“You have to understand,” she said, her face smooth and free of any sign of regret. “You are my masterpiece. The line, it has to end with you. I didn’t object because I wanted to make sure the prophecy was fulfilled, and that it would be fulfilled through you, my beautiful Abomination. If I could have squeezed your sister into that pileup, I would have, but Ginny had her claws dug too deeply into Maisie.”
“Maisie is your daughter.”
“Maisie was an unwanted byproduct of your creation, and you, my daughter, my Mercy”—she cast another amused glance over my shoulder at Gudrun—“you are merely a container, an envelope if you will, and it is time for that envelope to be opened.”
The low hum of the bell-shaped craft began to race up the octaves. The sound prompted me to look over at it, and I saw it had begun to spin more quickly. “This ‘bell,’?” Gudrun said with an obvious pride, “is our greatest invention, our greatest weapon. It marries the highest of science with the greatest of magic to open up the dark and empty heart of the void you call God.”
The machine continued gaining momentum until it became nearly impossible for the eye to track. It seemed to be pulling back from our dimension, an intense gravity building around it as it did so.
“It opens up the space where nothing exists, but where anything is possible. The inchoate can be made flesh, and all that has been made flesh can be returned to the nothingness from which it sprang.”
I saw a tremendous flash of light; then in the next instant I was surrounded not by darkness, but by the utter lack of light. I felt myself trapped in the heart of an eternal and unfathomable emptiness. I knew I was now in the center of the void.
THIRTY-TWO
In the void, there are no cardinal points, no ups or downs, no forward or back. In the void, there are no illusions. No rationalizations. No comforting linear interpretations of cause and effect. In the void, it becomes clear there is no difference between the two. No difference between history and imagination. Both are lies in equal parts.
The greatest lie of my life had not been that my mother had died, or that no one knew who my father was. In a way, those things shone through as the brightest of all truths. My mother had died, on the inside, where it really mattered, and no one, no one, ever knew the man my father had been. No, the greatest lie I’d ever heard had been the ticking of Ginny’s clock, the way it counted off the passing seconds so loudly, proclaiming itself the herald of time, the great god that ruled over us all. In the void, time has no meaning. Within the void it becomes clear that time is merely a side effect, not the great king it pretends to be.
In the void, I had no eyes, and I had no physical mind. Still, images of the illusion I called my life floated around my awareness. No, that implied they could possibly be separate from my awareness, and here, there was no separation. My awareness, and truly that was all I had left, acted upon itself to con
jure images of Emily, memories of Erik. I had been born to monsters, but I, myself, was not a monster. She had called me the “Abomination.” With those words she claimed I had no soul. Still, I felt that soul, that spark, felt I was that spark. I wanted to believe she was wrong about me, as she had been so horribly wrong about everything else.
As above, so below. Infiltrating Tillandsia, a harmless gentlemen’s club, and turning it into a generator of dark magic, Erik and Emily had performed the ultimate act of sympathetic magic, but instead of clay, instead of cloth, they had used their own biology to create a poppet, a living doll capable of containing the essence of the line itself. The blood and the sex of Tillandsia proved to be the exact frequency necessary to capture a small piece of the line, and channel it into a human body. The body I’d thought of as mine. They had determined the best way to topple the line was to destroy it in its smallest expression, because through the laws of sympathetic magic, what can be destroyed on the molecular level will also be abolished in its greatest form.
Now, I found myself within the void, divorced from that body, but still aware of what was happening to it. It had all been such a glorious trick on Emily’s part. The line had been created by the thirteen families, and it required all thirteen working together to destroy it, to destroy me. The ten families who had remained loyal to the line would never have knowingly agreed to unite with the three rebel families, but Emily had sowed the seed of fear in their hearts. They thought they were preventing me from harming the line. They had no idea I was the line.
THIRTY-THREE
The powerless ginger girl they had at first overlooked, then loathed, was the line incarnate. I found myself missing that girl. As the united witch families joined forces to destroy her, I felt the rebel families working to erase her. Here, in the void, I knew that was exactly what was happening. I was being twisted, erased, undone at the point of nothingness. The edges of my awareness grew fuzzier, dissipating into the absolute null of the void. I let my mind float, searching out the happier moments, although it seemed they were among the first to fade.
I was awash in horror. Ginny’s corpse was spread out before me, or was it Teague’s? The two murders blended together now. The fire at Magh Meall. Knowing I’d never see Peter’s parents again. The kick in the gut as Peter leapt without so much as a wave through the portal into the world of the Fae. The realization that Maisie had once turned me over to be sacrificed. The sickening crack of my neck as Connor struck me, flinging me like a ragdoll against the wall of Ginny’s house. The magical fire that consumed him. All things good began to escape me. I had family, family that loved me. There were two women. Sisters. They loved me very much, but I could not remember their names. Two men. They loved me. I knew that. They seemed like family to me, even though they certainly weren’t brothers, but the same word pressed against my consciousness. Then that word was lost to me. I felt a shock and a sense of collapsing, condensing. There existed less of me and more of the nothingness in which I was an island. I could still see her, that girl, or was I simply imagining I did? She lay oh so very still, the red hair on her pillow a near match for the red blood that now clung to her thighs. I wished I could comfort her. I wished I could promise her things would be all right, but I sensed that she, like I, was fading. Another shuddering collapse and the vision failed.