Vicious Circle

by Linda Robertson

  Betsy sniggered, pushed her glasses back up her nose. “What’s with her? She on the rag or something?” She looked at me for the answer.

  I considered asking Betsy if she was truly that brainless, but I didn’t. If she worshipped anything, it was Olivia. So, yeah, I guessed she was brainless. “We gave her no reason to stay,” I said.

  “She found her ‘faith,’” Olivia said, making quotations in the air with her fingers.

  “No,” I said. “She lost it. Her faith in us, I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Nancy will be better off without feeling indebted to us for something even as small as a twice-yearly meal.” Hell, so would I.

  I was ready to let go of my past, of the friends I had grown up with and knew well. I was ready to embrace the future alone, because they could not go where I had to go. They’d let various fears fence them inside their comfort zones. Not a bad thing, but a limiting thing. I wasn’t that different, really.

  I guessed I’d just grown up enough to know when to let go.

  I said, “I gotta go.”

  “You gonna be next?” Olivia asked, her tone accusing. Betsy peered at me curiously.

  “To walk Nancy’s path?” I laughed softly. “No. I’m in for a different kind of trial by fire.”

  “Oh? Have another coffee. Do tell.”

  My leg started bouncing impatiently. “No, Olivia.” Give her nuggets of information and she’d chew them up and spit them out like high-powered bullets, wounding me. “I have to go.” I pushed my chair back.

  “No, you don’t. You’re rejecting us like Nance did.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe you’ve got it backwards, Olivia? Maybe Nancy kept coming back because she didn’t reject you. She just wanted to share something with you that gave her great peace. And isn’t that what friends should do? You, however, wouldn’t let her breathe without making a snide comment to her. Maybe things could have been different if you hadn’t pushed so damn hard. If you ask me, you rejected her.”

  “Well, I didn’t ask you.”

  In high school, kids become friends because they have the same classes or ride the same bus. Because they like the same band or they play a sport together. The four of us had become friends because no other cliques would have us. “What we knew of one another stopped being relevant years ago,” I said. “We’ve all changed. Our brunches are like strolls in the past. Nice, but meaningful only to us.” I paused, looked at Betsy, then looked back to Olivia. “Somehow, I know you two will still be hanging out a decade from now, retelling stories about the same stupid things we did at prom or at the homecoming game. And it won’t matter. Your future is being halted, dragged back toward a false glory in the past. You’re using Betsy to uphold the importance of it. Neither of you has any goals anymore. Opportunities stagnate around you. And I’m glad it’s not me.” At least the wæres in my life all seemed to be progressing in a positive manner, despite their lunar affliction.

  I opened my purse as I stood. I tossed down a hundred-dollar bill like I did it all the time. Olivia’s eyes almost bugged out of her head. “This last brunch is on me. Have a nice life, ladies. And don’t call me.”

  With the bridge to my old life in flames, I left.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Since Beverley didn’t visit anymore, my TV was used only for news and weather. With all the people in my house, however, a little entertainment seemed wise. So, before leaving Columbus, I dared the traffic nightmare known as Polaris Parkway. In the DVD section of the Best Buy, I tried to decide on some titles. After the breakup with my high school sisters, I was not in the mood for a chick flick and picked up a handful of action movies in utter defiance of emotional mushy stuff. I steered clear of monster flicks for the obvious reasons and headed for the checkout. As I waited, however, the screens in the television section caught my attention. It was a local newsbreak between shows, and as they showed clips of the upcoming news for the night, there was Beverley’s face. She was crying “No, no, no…” and shaking her head. It was like footage shot yesterday at school.

  Where the hell was Vivian? Why wasn’t she protecting Beverley from this? Why was Beverley even at school?

  In the Avalon, with my purchases in the passenger seat, I stopped at the next gas station and pulled up to the phone. I didn’t have enough coins, so I had to run in and buy a can of Pepsi and get change.

  “Hello?”

  “Vivian, it’s Persephone Alcmedi.”

  “Miss Alcmedi,” she said. “Have you completed your work already?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

  “Where’s Beverley?”

  “Asleep. Thank the Goddess. I couldn’t take one more minute of her incessant crying.”

  “She’s mourning!”

  “Of course she is. But she doesn’t have to do it so loudly.”

  Bitch. “She was on the news.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s all you have to say? It looked like reporters were mobbing her!”

  “Her mother was killed. Of course they want her on camera. It makes people tune in.”

  “Vivian,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Oh I get it! You’re calling to give me parental advice! How many pups have you squeezed out for your pack friends? That’s right. None.”

  All the way to the gas station I’d thought about how to say what needed saying without being judgmentally “you should this” and “you should that.”

  “Ignoring her won’t work,” I said bitterly. “Grief doesn’t just go away after a certain amount of tears have been shed. She needs help. Being her guardian obligates you to see that she gets it. And letting reporters mob her at school isn’t going to cut it.”

  “You’re so responsible, Miss Alcmedi. What with all your commendable hobbies, column-writing, kenneling, killing. This is just one little girl. I think I’ll manage.”

  “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “I know Beverley. And I know grief.”

  “Thank you for your advice. If that’s all—”

  “It’s not. You didn’t tell me my mark was a vampire.”

  Vivian laughed condescendingly. “Goddess, you are a novice if you think I’d offer you two hundred thousand for a mortal.”

  “You could have warned me. I had someone gather background info for me and that person nearly paid for it with her life.” Vivian didn’t need all the details.

  “That’s so sad. You don’t even know how to do your own work and friends are paying for it. You must feel awful.”

  Why had I agreed to help this bitch?

  “I clearly made a mistake in hiring you,” Vivian whispered. “I realize that now. You can back out of our deal, Miss Alcmedi. Because I, too, have erred; I will allow it. Just return the cash—”

  “Shut up.” She was pissing me off. And I didn’t want to talk about the cash because I’d spent a tenth of it on Theo, who was out a vehicle as well. Not that she’d be driving any time soon, but I owed her. “I’m calling because of Beverley. I told you I’d be watching you. Now I’m telling you: you’re fucking up. If you like, you may think of me as Social Services, without laws to restrain me…but then, you know how loose my interpretation of the Rede is.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Miss Alcmedi.” There was a thin thread of fear in her tone.

  “Then do the right thing by that child and don’t give me cause to feel another face-to-face meeting is in order.”

  * * *

  “Nana, are you even listening to me?”

  She sat in her rocking chair and listened to my brief description of what I had said to Vivian about Beverley. Her rocking never sped up or slowed, and her attention remained focused on the wooden hoops that had locked together the fabrics of the quilt she was sewing. Though I’d closed the door behind me, lest the wæres hear and ask questions I didn’t want to answer, I was now unsure she even kn
ew I’d come in. Could her hearing have gone that fast?

  “What business is that of yours?”

  I rose from her bed and paced. I didn’t want Nana to know details. “I saw Beverley bombarded by reporters on the news. Vivian’s not helping that little girl, and she needed a wake-up call.”

  “Again, what business is that of yours?”

  I stammered, “I care. I seem to be the only one who does.” I had to get Beverley out of Vivian’s house.

  “Leave it to the authorities.”

  “You mean the same system that would have sent Theo to a State Shelter to die? I can’t do that.” I snorted. “I won’t do that.”

  “You called and threatened this Vivian, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Nana stopped rocking and let the hoops rest in her lap, and only then did she glance up at me. “I’ve raised a bully. How in the name of Athena’s sweet justice did I do that?”

  I could’ve given her a list. She had been a hard-as-nails authority figure in my youth. If I reminded her of that now, though, she’d just deny it. I stopped and crossed my arms. “I’m not a bully.”

  “I suppose you have another name for it? Like Public Attitude Manager. You young people make everything so difficult.”

  Where had that come from? My anger slipped a little toward worry. What had Nana done now? “Make what difficult?”

  Nana put her quilting aside and picked up her cigarette case. “You’re either overanalyzing or overemphasizing. Can’t you ever oversimplify anything?” She put a cigarette to her lips and readied the lighter.

  I eased down on the bed, rubbing my forehead. “What are you talking about?”

  She took a long draw off the cigarette and released it slowly. She crossed her legs and started rocking again. “You know, you probably wouldn’t be so rash and dramatic if you put your passions where they were supposed to be and let that young man smooth you out a little.”

  “What?” The shriek leapt out of me as I stood.

  “It would do you good, you know. Goddess knows he wants to.”

  “Nana! I’m trying to talk to you about the safety of a little girl I was getting rather attached to before her mother moved to the city! What Vivian’s done is totally against the Rede—damn! I wish I’d thought of that when I was on the phone!”

  “Go cleanse your chakras and meditate. You’ve got it so bad you can’t think straight.”

  “Got what? What do you think I’ve got, besides the insanity in my gene pool?”

  She just rocked and stared at me. Her usually expressionless face had changed. Her cheeks rounded just a little, narrowing her eyes in the scariest way—she was amused. At me. At the thought of me having a boyfriend. It made me feel embarrassed and small.

  “He’s a wære, Nana. He’s probably the one who tossed the trash you griped about on my lawn. What happened to the ‘witches and wolves aren’t meant to mingle’ bit you always preach at me?”

  “They don’t make good friends, but it’s my understanding that for an occasional tryst they’re all right.”

  I walked out. Nana encouraging me to have a tryst with a wærewolf caused my creep-o-meter needle to spike.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I was on watch with Theo.

  The regular creak of Nana’s rocker told me she was still quilting. Celia and Johnny were in town getting groceries. Erik was sleeping on the third floor—I could hear his regular snores faintly through the ceiling.

  The wæres had the IV bag–changing down pat; I wouldn’t have to do it on my watch. I checked Theo’s toes. They were cold, and the greenish color now had some yellow to it. Still swollen.

  She was damn lucky to be alive at all. And very unlucky to be my friend.

  I washed her face and cleaned dried blood from between her fingers and from the cuticles of her nails. The professional shaping and painting of them had been ruined in tearing her dashboard apart.

  Guilt overwhelming me, I sat in the window seat, as far from Theo as I could be while still being in the room. I drew a small circle around me in the air and meditated. Cleansing my chakras, as Nana had suggested, would have entailed energy work, and that wasn’t safe around Theo. A full transformation would cure her and save her life, but a partial transformation would doom her irreparably. So I kept this meditation to a mental exercise and refrained from sticking my toes in the stream. I didn’t need to wash the negative energy away immediately; I could do that later. Besides, my guilt over Theo’s condition was tightly wound up in that energy, as it should be. I deserved to bear that guilt.

  “Let it go.” Amenemhab padded to the water’s edge, a few yards upstream, and began to drink. After a moment, his ears pricked forward and his head came up. Water dripped from his muzzle. His attention focused across the stream.

  The buckskin mustang galloped through the woodland. Sunbeams shining through the branches flashed on her hide, making the dun glow golden. Her thick black mane and tail flounced, accentuating her graceful and majestic strides—fast but unhurried, or at least not urgent. As evidenced by every flexion of her sinewy limbs and sleek form, she ran for the joy of running.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  Amenemhab stared after her so long I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Then he said, “She is the One who called to you. Who comforted you in the cornfield.”

  “The Goddess? Is a horse? In my meditation?”

  “She can be anything, anywhere. Today, in this hour, She is here and She has taken the form of a horse. Today She feels the current of energy and moves with it, perhaps stirs it and guides it along the proper paths as She guides us all.”

  “I must have lost my way, then.”

  The jackal cocked his head at me. “Why do you say this?”

  “I don’t feel like I’m treading a path, but a rocky mountainside that isn’t supposed to be traveled. I have taken steps away from the Rede, away from Her guidance. And away from common sense. That’s why She was there,” I pointed, “and not here.”

  “Just because you cannot see the path beneath your feet does not mean it isn’t there. It is simply a road less traveled, as it were.”

  “Ah. A bumpy road designed to tame the more stubborn, no doubt.”

  “Or a path meant to show the more resilient that they are capable of more than the average task.” When I didn’t respond, he continued: “She relishes what She can do and takes the form that accomplishes Her task with the most efficient grace. Shouldn’t all living things relish what they are, what they can do and be and create? Wouldn’t happiness and peace be attained if everyone did?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why do you try to limit what She can call you to do?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  Knowing what he was getting at, I disagreed emphatically. “She wouldn’t want me to be an assassin. To break the Rede.”

  “Those who choose not to abide by the laws of the Rede, those who subscribe to no laws that would censure them, will not be stopped by any laws. Justice may come in the afterlife, but sometimes they need to be stopped in their present life, stopped before they interfere with greater plans.”

  I hoped that didn’t mean the Goddess wanted Vivian on the Elders Council. “You’re saying She would want me to be a killer?”

  “Is that so inconceivable?”

  I smirked. “So I’m the lucky one who gets to fuck up my karma, right?”

  The jackal opened his mouth in what had to be a smile. “Perhaps you have it backwards. Perhaps this charge is the opportunity to exculpate trespasses in the past.”

  “Karma doesn’t work that way.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  This was like braiding thorny branches; every twist had painful possibilities.

  “She wasn’t here as a brilliantly white unicorn or a midnight mare,” he said. “She showed Herself to you in the colors of mild tarnish, in the wilder form of a mustang.”

  The stream trickled by,
the only sound between us for many minutes. I thought Amenemhab would lope off and leave me with that thought, but he didn’t. He sat and watched the play of light on the water, patiently waiting for me to figure it out. Fine.

  This was bigger than me, my easily bruised ego, or my karmic future. Still, I did not have to like any of it. And the weight on my shoulders felt impossibly burdensome. How could I be that important? I never stood out anywhere else in my life; I wasn’t ready to think there was any place that I should. So I said the words he probably knew were coming: “I don’t want to be a killer.”

  “You’ve already accepted the money. Spent some.”

  “I can pay it back.”

  “Or you can do the job.”

  “A vampire is too much for me.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No.” I paused. “Yes.”

  “Fear isn’t weakness, you know.”

  I looked at him sharply.

  “Giving in to fear is. But then you are not likely to give in to it, because you are not alone.”

  Was he dropping notes to Celia? “Neither is my intended target.” The Reverend Kline had said his brother worked for another vampire. I made a face; last year the vampires had come out with another public relations campaign, trying to further soften their image. They thought changing all the “master vampires” into “executive vampires” made them seem less like evil slavers and more like reasonable businessmen.

  “You’re right; Goliath is not alone. But you know someone breaking the Rede who is very alone.”

  “Vivian.” Of course. “Will she hurt Beverley more to get at me?”

  “Do not worry about this. The child is not leverage in her eyes, but a burden she wants to be rid of.”

  I frowned at him. “Why would Lorrie have wanted her as Beverley’s guardian anyway?”

  “Financially, Lorrie struggled; Vivian doesn’t. What mother doesn’t want to see her child have everything she could want?”

  “But it isn’t working out that way!”