Fatal Circle

by Linda Robertson

  “You make it sound like some hallowed initiation. Like a baptism. I didn’t think lofty spiritual conventions were supposed to include this much muck.”

  He laughed.

  I gave up trying to be cleaner. For now. “I’m not sure why I’m in a new place.” The sun was dipping across the lake preparing to set. Fingerlike rays stretched through the moss and the slender willow branches. It was a peaceful scene and, although I was caked with mud, it evoked serenity in me. Or maybe I felt grounded because I was covered in it.

  “Examine where you are.”

  “The mud capital of the world,” I muttered.

  Amenemhab turned away, muzzle closed. Totems didn’t suffer fools who evaded answering their questions.

  “By a lake. Near a willow tree. There’s moss. And a rock that nearly smashed my skull.”

  He sat patiently.

  “The river, now a lake, threw me out.” And the stone.

  I pushed back the curtain of lance-shaped leaves. A snapping sound preceded the dropping of a small branch onto the stone. “Sorry,” I mumbled to the tree. I hadn’t meant to break anything.

  Shadows swung across the surface of the rock as the breeze rustled the drooping branches on the other side. There was a texture to the stone, mostly hidden under the mud. Dropping to my knees, I crawled under the low branch again to examine it better. The fallen branch had landed across the rock, and pieces of moss wound around the stick’s length. I reached out and pushed it from the stone top.

  My fingers tingled.

  I touched the stone lightly again. Nothing. I laid my palm on it. Nothing. “Hmmm.” Drawing closer, I wiped at it, smearing the mud over it. After cleaning it as best I could, I saw that the dark matrix of interlocking cubes binding it together was obvious, but the color was lost to the mud. The stone’s roughness meant it hadn’t been a river stone for long. I tilted the stone toward the light.

  It didn’t help.

  I wondered if the water would have thrown just me out if I’d let go of the stone, or if it was meant to be ejected, as well.

  Laying the stone over on the ground again, intending to see its underside, I brushed the fallen branch again. The tingle returned.

  Intrigued, I lifted the branch. It buzzed happily in my palm, warm and friendly. It was nearly straight and resembled a wand. But I already had a wand.

  The happy energy settled into a pulse, not unlike the purr of a cat.

  I resumed my spot beside Amenemhab. His ears pricked expectantly.

  “It’s a willow branch.”

  “And? The symbolism?”

  “Willow is a very emotional wood.” The events of the last few days had frequently elicited shielding against my natural emotions, to be strong and emotionally uncluttered, in order to keep moving forward.

  But emotions are fluid; they kept rising like floodwaters. Water. “Of course, water is the metaphor. That’s what the suit of cups in Tarot is all about. How the cups are placed, how the water is contained, or not, means something. If fluidity is absent, you have apathy. And apathy isn’t me; it scares me. So I fought.”

  “Fought what?”

  “I’ve been stifling my emotions.”

  “What represented your emotions?”

  I thought about it. “The stream. When I destroyed the shield damming me, it became a gushing river.”

  “So the emotions, the current, grew stronger.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you set your sights on something, Persephone, you are not removed from it. Your will is iron. Willow respects that, enhances that.”

  “I held back tears tonight, because of the waerewolves. Because they would see it as a sign of weakness. I want to be strong enough to not fear the repercussions of letting my true feelings show.” I was fighting for my right to have my emotions without being deemed weak.

  He cocked his head. “Ah. As I recall, the last time we spoke feelings were at issue then, too.”

  “This time people have died. Good people.”

  “I told you the hurt you felt over Johnny would fade or fester depending on how you chose to feel about it. Correct?”

  “Yes.” I’d been reeling, thinking Johnny had used and betrayed me. Amenemhab had reminded me that this was who I’d been chosen to be and that all of my experiences, even the hurtful ones, had been creating and would continue to hone the warrior I must become to be the Lustrata. He’d made me understand when and how I had transformed the vampire stain into a hex. There was some divine influence to that, to be sure, but I still had the choice. I chose to bear the pain and remain true to who I was. Who I am.

  “And how did you choose to feel about it?”

  “I let it go. I suppose you’re going to tell me to do the same thing this time?”

  “Did you? Or did you deny it?”

  “I denied it the ability to hurt me. It’s faded.”

  Amenemhab watched me.

  I searched my heart. He was right. “Fine. I wanted to dish out some just ‘desserts,’ as in Retaliation Pie, when I knew it was Cammi confronting me at The Dirty Dog. She was challenging me. Sure, her motive had been Johnny’s new status and making an opposing stand over a witch getting the Domn Lup’s affections. That was a territorial pack thing. Not specifically a Cammi-versus-Persephone thing. I could have been anyone and it would have been the same.”

  “You have accurately accounted for her motive. What was yours?”

  “I didn’t seek her out, but when I had the chance, I was glad to give her some comeuppance.”

  “What had she done?”

  I knew what the jackal was digging for. To shorten this conversation—there was no avoiding it anyway—I gave it to him. “She challenged me. Not a challenge to the Lustrata, but a challenge to me personally, a challenge to my heart.”

  “Just making sure you recognize it. We’re likely to do a lot of work on this before we’re through.”

  I swallowed, hard.

  “And where are you now?” he asked.

  “By a lake.”

  He waited, ear pricked.

  It hit me: a bigger body of water. “A larger pool of emotions.”

  “This lake is fed by mountain streams. By old water. It is not dammed, but it is surrounded by wilderness.”

  I looked around me more closely than I had before.

  “You were given a trial by fire,” Amenemhab continued. “You fought for who you are, saved the core of yourself from being burned at the stake. I daresay that was the moment the fire forged your iron will.” He put a paw on my thigh. “Now, you have experienced a trial by water. The mirrorlike surface shows us what we know, what we are conscious of. But that water can be deep under the glassy surface wherein lies the subconscious. You broke the dam. You dove in. You chose to drown in your negative emotions rather than to let them pull you along. You made quite a statement.”

  My attention fell to the branch in my lap. It was perhaps nine inches long, finger thick and tapered at the end. I reached to clear the moss off it.

  “Don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Moss is protective. Do you know its other name?”

  He wouldn’t mean the scientific name, he’d mean the witch name. I could think of no such name for Spanish moss. “Bat’s wool refers to the short green kind of moss.”

  “There’s still a mental moss connection there. Bats represent what?”

  “They reveal secrets. Through those revelations, initiation and transition occur.” That was how it was worded in my Book of Shadows.

  His paw lifted from my thigh to gesture at the branch I held. “The very essence of magic lives in willow wood, a wood strong with the element of water—”

  My thoughts flashed on Aquula.

  “—and of the element of spirit. This tree has honored you because you honored yourself and matured beyond your old emotional stream, to be born at her feet into a deeper emotional world.”

  When I roused, still in the tub, I instantly raised my hands so
I could gauge how long I’d been in here by how pruny my fingers were. I forgot all about the time, however, seeing I held a willow wand with moss coiled around the length.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I woke up to Johnny calling my name softly. He was on his knees beside the couch. “Why’d you move out here?”

  Fog lifting slowly, I sat up. “I couldn’t sleep so I took a bath. Then”—after I’d stashed the wand in the bed table with the spell items Beau had given me—“I had the thought that it would be rude to climb into bed beside you with wet hair.” I unwound the towel from my head and finger-combed my hair. “What time is it?”

  “Just after nine.”

  So my three hours of sleep had expanded to about six. That should be enough.

  Johnny yawned and stretched. My eyes rested on his shirtless chest, on the half-dollar-sized pentacle on his sternum. Wings spread from it across his pectorals, and the tail caressed the top two of his six-pack abs. The wings were black, and white ink created highlights, with a deep blue seeming like a sheen on the feathers. The seven-pointed fairy star was lower down. Next, my attention shot to the Celtic armbands, stylized dogs. Or wolves.

  “What is it?” he whispered, fingertips stroking the line of my jaw.

  “The place I had to go yesterday. Wolfsbane and Absinthe. Beau, from The Dirty Dog, he runs it.”

  “I thought you were going to a witch supply shop?”

  “It is a witch supply shop.”

  Johnny went still. “But he’s not a witch.”

  “Well … not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He used to be, but he isn’t anymore.”

  Johnny rubbed sleep from his eyes. “I don’t understand. How does somebody stop being a witch?”

  I studied his Wedjat tattoos with an all-new wonder. What was that ink keeping from him? “Beau was Bindspoken.”

  “Bindspoken,” he repeated, rising from the floor. I bent my legs up to make room for him on the couch. “Still. Why would a Bindspoken witch hang with waeres?” His warm hands rubbed down my lower leg and tickled across the top of my foot, then slid upward again.

  “The witches can’t associate with him; my touch had a shocklike effect on him. Maybe it’s camaraderie, a sense of being a social outcast he shares with waeres.”

  Johnny shrugged. “Did you get what you needed?”

  “Yeah. More than I thought I would.”

  He grinned merrily. “That’s what happens when women go shopping.”

  Spoiling anyone’s good mood first thing in the morning was terrible, but I had to tell him. No delays. “Johnny, he told me something about you that you don’t know.”

  “What?”

  I sat closer to him, wrapping my arms around my bent legs, trapping his hand under mine. “He said someone long ago must have figured out that you were the Domn Lup. He suggested that this person had you tattooed as a means to make your magic relinquish its power into the art and colors of the pictures, thereby locking that power up. He said we’d have to find out who did it and persuade them to unlock it.”

  He let that sink in.

  “Is my memory locked up, too?”

  “He didn’t mention that specifically, but it seems logical to think so. If all of this is unlocked, it could come back along with your ability to change at will without the struggle and pain.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” His voice was clipped.

  “Beau said that, being Bindspoken, he knows what it’s like to have your power cut off from you. He said it was pointless to tell you until someone who could help you, someone like the Lustrata, showed up.”

  “He knows that’s you?”

  I nodded. “I’m supposed to be able to help you figure this out.” Gripping him tighter, I went on. “He said there’s a spell in the Codex that we must do.”

  “A spell?” he echoed indignantly.

  “Yes. Magic is not the same threat to you since you’re Domn Lup. Beau said that’s because you are magic. And the ‘we’ I referred to is you and Menessos and me.”

  “Why’s the vamp got to be involved in finding out who did this to me?”

  I bit my lip. “This won’t directly find out who did your tattoos. That’s going to be a multistep process. This is step one.”

  Johnny snorted disapproval. “What does this spell do—wait, let me guess. There’s binding involved.”

  “It takes from each of us two pieces of our soul—”

  “Soul?” Johnny stiffened.

  “Beau said that in order to maintain our own ‘soul balance’ within ourselves, we’d have to take pieces of each other even as we gave up pieces.”

  Johnny stood, his hand falling away from mine as he strode across the room.

  I bit my lip waiting, studying the dragon and foo-dog tattoo on his back.

  Finally, he paced back. “I’ll do anything you ask, but don’t tell me I’m supposed to give part of my soul to the vamp, and take part of his in trade.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to do this. I’m going to tell you what’s been presented as the solution. Either you volunteer, or you don’t. If the three of us don’t agree on this, it won’t happen at all.”

  “And if this spell doesn’t happen?”

  Having to be the one to present him with the first of his unpleasant choices of real leadership hurt my heart. “If this doesn’t happen, then I can’t stop WEC from rendering me Bindspoken. If I can’t tap into the energy and magic, then I can’t help you find the person who tattooed you, and your power and your memory may stay locked up forever.”

  He sighed heavily and paced away again.

  “I’m sorry, Johnny. I know. Doing this will cost you; not doing it will cost you. You just have to decide which of these two evils is more acceptable than the other.”

  “This is why I didn’t want to be pack leader,” he muttered. “This shit sucks even on small-time local pack levels.” He didn’t return for a long, long minute. “How does this stop them from harming you?”

  “If I’m correct, then if pieces of my soul are elsewhere, as in my soul is incomplete, they cannot bind it down. Like they can’t close the door because there’s other things in the way, the pieces of yours and Menessos’s souls.” Instantly, I was willing to bet that the gateway the fairies used, the one Xerxadrea wanted me to seal shut, worked on the same principle.

  “Why wouldn’t they just work their Bindspoken ritual on us all?”

  “How would waeres everywhere react to learning that WEC had damaged their Domn Lup?”

  “Good point.” He resumed his place on the end of the couch and drew my legs across his lap. He draped one arm over the couch back, ran the fingers of the other up and down my shins. “But how will waeres everywhere react to learning that their Domn Lup is bound to some vampire?”

  “He’s not just any vampire.”

  “Oh, right. He’s the lord of the northeastern quarter of the U.S.A.”

  “He’s more than that.”

  His mouth crooked up on one side, unimpressed. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Do you want to bear the burden of another ultimate secret that cannot be revealed unless he reveals it first?”

  Johnny studied me, silently earnest. His hand rested on my knee, heavy and hot.

  Yes, I haven’t told you everything.

  Then Johnny looked away.

  Yes, you know what a burden a secret can be. Do you want the knowledge, and the responsibility?

  I waited. It was his decision. I wondered if Johnny, through the deeper bond Menessos had implemented between Johnny and me, had somehow heard those thoughts. I could almost hear him weighing the pros and cons of his answer: he didn’t want to know anything more about Menessos. But I needed him to voluntarily agree to soul-sharing with the vampire.

  And the stakes are too damn high to even consider making that decision without knowing all the facts.

  He shifted, brought down the arm draping the couch back. “Tell me.” />
  “He is the original vampire and he is yet alive.”

  I watched him struggle with this information. Surprise. Disbelief. Waiting for the punch line. Suspicion rose, followed by doubt. Rejection of the idea came next. Then deliberation. Concession of plausibility. Conversion. Acceptance. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “I’m not.”

  His hands were both in motion then, stroking me, knee to ankle. “Not centuries old. Millennia old?”

  “And alive. That’s why he doesn’t smell like the rest of them.”

  “And how he moves around during the day!”

  I nodded. “He doesn’t die. He really sleeps.”

  He covered his face with his hands and groaned. “That’s just … mind-blowing.”

  “Johnny, do you see what the three of us are to each of our own respective kinds?”

  “Oh, I see it.” His hands fell limp into what little of his lap wasn’t covered by my legs. “I see a binding between the three of us makes it all tidy, and this soul-sharing is the means to force us to work together as we have pieces of our very souls lodged in each other. I can never strike at him, and he can never strike at me.

  “Menessos and I will be each side of the scales the Lustrata must balance. You’ll always be in the middle.” I couldn’t tell if he was just working it out audibly or if he was getting angry, so I stayed silent. “This isn’t just about today, either. I mean, sure, it’s about the needs we have right now. But this will project into the future. It keeps us from striking at each other. And what if the day comes when we need to? You said the old witch claimed the red fairy was mad. What if the vamp goes mad? We’d be stuck.”

  “You’re right.” I hadn’t thought in fast-forward. I put my feet on the floor and scooted closer to him, took his hands in mine. “You have a valid point. I’ll give it some more thought. I wish we had more time.”

  He squeezed my hands. “Do you want this? Do you want to be rooted between the original vampire and the king of waerewolves?”

  “I am already there. It’s inevitable. I didn’t want to leave my home and leave Nana and Beverley behind. I didn’t want to out myself to the world, or become Erus Veneficus. I didn’t ask for any of this, but it was appointed to me and—”