No more images came. There was only darkness. Darkness and a single spark. With the sight of the spark, I regained the memory of color. I recognized it. The color blue. No, it was haint blue.
“Well, if you are just about good and ready to quit feeling sorry for yourself, we got some work to do.”
My awareness, which had been so close to collapse, suddenly exploded, blowing wide open. I knew myself, I knew that color, and I knew her.
“Jilo.” She had no form, she was just a shimmering, but still I recognized my friend.
“That’s right, girl. It’s your Jilo.”
“Are you an angel?”
Laughter shook the darkness around me, the haint-blue light expanding into waves that reflected off themselves into infinity. “Well, the good Lord do work in mysterious ways. Maybe that what he has in mind, but if he do, then he got his work cut out for him.” Another bout of laughter rippled around me. “Jilo’s here for you. She’s here, and she ain’t gonna let nobody hurt her baby.”
“I’m nobody’s baby, I’m not even human.”
“Bullshit.” Her face coalesced before me. “It don’t matter none if you human or you billy goat, you are Mercy, and you are my baby. I love you, girl. I have done ever since that evening I saw you leading your silly tour through Colonial Cemetery. You remember that evening, girl?” The memory of the night rose from the ashes to become real again. With that memory, I somehow became more real again too. “I saw you leading those paunchy crackers around, and there was something about you. Jilo, she thought to herself, ‘You just walk away, Jilo. She just one of them crazy Taylors.’ But Jilo’s heart felt a tug at the sight of you. That’s why Jilo put it in your silly head to come find her at her crossroads.”
The urge to laugh hit me, creating shimmers of light in the void. “You did not.”
“Oh, yes”—she put special emphasis on the word—“Jilo did. You just need to own up to the fact you would’ve been too scared to come if I hadn’t set a conjure on you.”
“Come to think of it, you’re probably right.”
“Hell, girl, ain’t no probably about it.” Jilo paused and seemed to be attempting to measure the endlessness around us. “Now, this here is one hell of a mess you’ve landed yourself in.” Light and color faded as I again felt the hopelessness of my situation. “Oh good Lord, there she go again. Jilo said it a mess, she didn’t say you can’t get out of it.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, wondering if my friend were just something my dying mind conjured to ease the fear of its last few minutes. “This is the void, the empty heart of God.”
Jilo’s cackles dissolved the darkness into a mad rainbow of color. Fandango lights shot forth and circled each other. For an instant I imagined I could see a horizon. “Shoot girl, this ain’t the heart of God. This thing is counterfeit. It is a lie.” Jilo let loose an angry harrumph. “Those fools, they think they can make themselves gods. They mix they science with magic and they come up with this ‘bell’ of theirs.”
“But Emily—”
“But Emily nothing. Who you gonna listen to, that bitch or your real mama?” I didn’t answer. There was no need. “All right. This thing we in. They found a way to mimic the true void, but you need to get it through that red head of yours that this ain’t the true void. Ain’t no man and ain’t no witch either who gets to play in that sandbox.”
“So what do I do?”
“What do you do?” I perceived a mental image of Jilo as she had been before her death, a birdlike old woman, hopping mad. “Ain’t Jilo taught you nothing?” Somehow even her frustration with me came as a comfort. “What is the first thing, the very first thing, Jilo taught you about magic?”
I tried to focus, tried to remember the time we had spent together, her sharing with me everything she herself had learned through trial and error. It all seemed so distant in this place without time, without sensation.
“This void,” Jilo said, “it is a powerful weapon, and those bitches have aimed this power at you.”
The sensation of pain. A small stone bounced off my shoulder. Joy rushed through me. There was a stone, and I had a shoulder. “That’s right, girl. You tell Jilo, who does that power belong to now?”
“The power is mine.” A green and pleasant world flashed into existence around us. I stood before Jilo, who looked at me like she was going to burst with pride.
“And you are going to use it to kick some ass.” She pulled me into her arms. Solid. Warm. Loving. Real. “First, they somebody who wants to say hello.” Jilo released me, and waved her hand, calling someone forw
ard.
She arrived first as a sensation, hesitant to show herself, afraid of my rejecting her. My heart nearly broke realizing the pain I had caused her. All that she had done for me.
“Ginny,” I said, and the image of my great-aunt crystalized before me. She wasn’t the bloodied corpse I’d last laid eyes on. More than a mere memory, a moment out of sync repeated itself.
Jilo smiled like a proud teacher. “That’s right, my girl. You seeing the big picture now. Who would that old woman have accepted her death from? That’s the question you need to be askin’.”
Now, I had the answer to that question. Wren had murdered Ginny, but she hadn’t accepted her death from him. She had accepted it from the line. She had accepted it from me.
“I tried to do exactly as you asked me,” Ginny said, looking at me with wonder in her eyes. Another flash from before. I remembered going to her, not as Mercy, but before Mercy, as the line. The line had warned her Emily and Erik had succeeded. They had completed the Babalon Working and captured a bit of the line itself. “It was so hard to treat that little girl like I did.” Tears moistened Ginny’s eyes.