Vivian hmpfed. “You don’t look half as good, either.”
“My insides aren’t tarnished, though.” The wæres howled approval for Nana again. Beverley giggled. I admit, it was entertaining, in a masochistic kind of way. And that was why it disturbed me for Beverley to be seeing this. I got Celia’s attention and gestured toward Beverley. She understood.
“Hey Beverley, why don’t you and I take these Oreos and go sit with Theo for a while? She shouldn’t be alone too long.”
“But—” Beverley looked at me, and I pointed to the ceiling to indicate “upstairs.” “Okay,” she yawned. “But leave the Oreos unless you want ’em. I’m too sleepy.” She hugged me on the way out. “Tell me tomorrow how this went, okay?”
“I promise.” When they had gone, I lifted up the stake that had sent Goliath into a hissing conniption. “Explain this.”
Vivian bit her lower lip, hesitating.
“If you don’t tell them, I will,” Nana reminded her.
“Fine. Fine.” She drew a breath. “With a knife used for the killing blow to a mortal, a knife that stayed in the man until his body was cold, I cut a branch from an ash tree inside of a graveyard—a tree whose roots fed, basically, on the dead. I bored holes into its thickest, strongest parts. I empowered that branch in the full light of the sun and blooded it from my own veins. I stole dirt from Menessos’s pillow, mixed it with blessed water, and coated the stake with it, then set it in the light of the sun again and again to dry the mud.”
“Explain the significance,” I pressed.
“Stoker’s nice little tale said you could release someone who hadn’t yet died from the curse of Dracula by killing Dracula. That’s bullshit. Killing the maker doesn’t release the spawn. Through connections, there would be pain—the greater the bond, the greater the pain—but death or release from the curse would not happen. However, this, with its blessed water and sun empowerment, is a tool every vampire would fear. When you’re inoculated against something, they inject you with a weakened form of whatever disease they’re saving you from, right? Similar idea. With my blood and his home earth mixed with holy water, it’s a tool designed to kill Menessos with great suffering.”
My thoughts ran to Samson Kline and how much he would love to get his hands on this thing. “Because of your blood?”
“It would be reintroducing a diseased part of him into him—connected through his home earth and my blood, which is bound to him, and diseased in that it is mixed with holy water and infused with sunlight. He could not reject it or fight it, because it is him.”
Johnny shifted, and my attention went to him. He smiled at me, his focus flicking between my face and the stake in my hands. “Lustrata,” he said.
“Lustrata,” Nana repeated, breathlessly. “Yes. Sweet crone, yes!” She stared at me like she was seeing me for the first time ever. It creeped me out.
“Okay, everybody wait.” I put my hands up, the stake too, and looked directly at Johnny. “You have to explain this word to me right now.”
He hesitated, and it was the doctor who said, “Latin lustro, ‘purify.’ The nominative singular feminine form would be lustrate. The ancient Romans had the lustrum, a purification of the people…”
“Getting close, Doc,” Johnny said. “More precisely, in this case it’s a woman who cleanses by sacrifice, as in purifying the vampire body by sacrificing it.”
“You mean vampire assassin?” I said flatly. “Thanks, but the regular English words will work for me. I don’t need to candy-coat things with archaic Latin terms. Besides, my conscience won’t be tricked into thinking it’s okay.” When I finished, Johnny and Nana shared a telling glance. I didn’t like it.
She said, “Not ‘a’ Lustrata, Persephone. ‘The’ Lustrata. It’s not a candy-coated term; it is a title.”
“Oh, you guys are so full of shit,” Vivian said. “She cannot be the Lustrata.”
Nana flipped the gag back into Vivian’s mouth.
Everybody knew what we were talking about but me. “More information, please!” The note of panic in my voice bugged me, but I was sure it was only there because of the lack of sleep and fading adrenaline. I hadn’t gotten much coffee either.
Johnny let his crossed arms drop, and he stopped leaning on the counter. “I wrote a song about her. The lyrics are:
A pure-blood witch, a caster of spells
An element master and ringer of bells.
As impurity rises from under the world
The dead above ground, diseases unfurled.
Call upon her, upon the witch of old,
Delivering justice, voicing truths untold,
Fauna and flora’s mighty daughter
The Purifier! The Lustrata!”
Hearing Johnny saying the words, sincere as any poet reciting his own work, was beautiful. It touched me. But…“So, the Lustrata is some kind of glorified vampire killer?”
“There are legends…aren’t there always?” Nana said quietly, the croak of her voice softer than usual. “Legends about the beginning of time, the ending of it. Every culture, every religion has their stories about it—ours is no different. And there are always secret societies, keepers of knowledge hidden from the general populace. There are enemies. There are heroes. The pendulum of power swings.” Her focus sharpened on me, and I felt it like a cold blade at my throat. Nana stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “She who can maintain the balance despite the swinging is the Lustrata.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt buried under all the responsibility I already had: a live-in Nana, a growing puppy, a terribly injured friend, a grieving little girl, and a newspaper column with a weekly deadline. Add maintaining the balance of the world, and whose knees wouldn’t be knocking? It seemed an alarm went off in my head, one more substantial than the triggered wards had been.
“Dr. Lincoln!” Celia cried from the top of the stairs. “The EKG monitor’s alarming!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It had not been an alarm in my head warning about the news I’d just been given, but a real warning that Theo’s life was in danger. The doctor scooped up his bag and hurried off before Celia had finished shouting. Johnny followed him. My focus stayed on Nana, but the question in my eyes changed. She understood, but said, “No. You need time to prepare to do this spell.”
“Then let’s do it! What do we need?”
“Persephone, this isn’t elementary witchcraft; it’s sorcery.”
I fled from her, angry that there was nothing I could do to help Theo right then. I took the steps two at a time. I had to do something. Standing in the doorway, I scoped out the scene.
Theo was wheezing and sweating, and her skin looked ashen. The doc was listening to her chest with his stethoscope. It seemed so rudimentary what he was doing, so passive. My panic rose. I wanted him to act, since I could not. “What’s happening?” I demanded.
“Pulmonary embolism,” he said calmly, “if I had to guess.” He dug into his bag, pulled a hard-shell case out, opened it, removed a vial, and started prepping a syringe.
“What does that mean? What are you doing?”
“She must have had a thrombus—a blood clot—because of her fractured leg or pelvis. It’s come loose and hit her lung.” He pushed the syringe into the IV. “This should break it up.”
“Should?”
Celia wrung her hands and shifted her weight over and over. Behind her, Beverley stood stock-still, face pale, staring at Theo as tears flooded silently down her cheeks.
“Beverley,” I said, maneuvering myself behind her and guiding her with firm hands on her shoulders. “This way.”
In the hall, I turned her toward the room we were to share and shut the door behind us. She took a few steps more after I released her shoulders. With hardly any sound at all she said, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re doing everything we can for her.”
Goliath had done all this, caused so much pain. Ho
w did Beverley know him? I wanted to ask, but this wasn’t the right time. “You better get some sleep.” It sounded stupid: Someone in the next room is dying, but you just shut your eyes and sleep. Dream something nice while you’re at it. I couldn’t be that condescending to Beverley. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t a time for sleep. I just…I don’t know.”
Beverley sat beside her box and started pushing things around inside of it. “Why do you think Goliath hurt Theo?”
“On the trip from the hospital, Theo woke up enough to tell me he ran her off the road. Vivian claims he killed your mom too.”
She stiffened. “No. He wouldn’t do that. None of that.”
“Theo saw him, Beverley. She identified him.”
“He wouldn’t do that!”
I sat in the middle of the room. Maybe now was as good a time as any. “How do you know him?”
She turned away and pulled a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt out of the box. “He was dating my mom.”
It was a good thing she wasn’t looking at me. I winced hard enough to give myself whiplash. “What?” I just barely managed not to sound as stunned as I felt.
“Whenever he came to the apartment, he was always nice to me. He actually talked to me like I mattered. Always brought me something too. Not like he was trying to buy me off or anything like that, but like he was thoughtful.”
Every fiber of me said that was impossible, but at the same time, I didn’t think Beverley would lie.
“He told me once he loved my mom and asked me if I was okay with that. Only a guy who really cares about a woman would bother to ask her kid something like that. He wouldn’t have killed her. I know it. I don’t believe that he and Vivian were lovers either. I like your nana, but she’s got to be wrong about that. Vivian is so mean, and she’s just saying mean things.”
“I don’t understand so much of this, Beverley.” We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“I’m going to change into these.” Beverley moved for the door.
“I’ll step out,” I said. I didn’t want her to go to the bathroom to change, it’d mean she would have to walk past the room where Theo was.
“Okay. But don’t leave.”
“I won’t.”
In the hall, I heard Celia say, “Blood pressure’s still dropping!”
Dr. Lincoln responded tersely, “I know!”
My eyes squeezed shut and I whispered another prayer. Finally, the door opened and Beverley said, “I’m done.”
I stepped back into the room with her. She now wore the sweat suit as pajamas, and she sank down onto her inflatable mattress with pink flannel sheets and a quilt. The stuffed animal, still wearing her mother’s shirt, was lying on her pillow.
“Did he come over a lot?” Don’t think about Theo. Don’t fall apart in front of Beverley.
She shrugged. “About once a week, I think. But he might have come over more after my bedtime.”
“What kinds of things did he bring you?”
“Goliath always brought Mom flowers, and he always brought me a little bouquet of colored daisies or tiger lilies for my room. He gave me some books, helped me with homework, and played video games with me. Once he brought me a glass figurine of a unicorn with gold etched into the spiral of the horn. He always had a goofy joke to tell me, and he even gave me an iPod already loaded with a bunch of neat music and super-good earbuds, but that was just to—” She stopped and bit her lip.
I just couldn’t picture Goliath, or any vampire, being so considerate of a human’s needs and wants. Theo had identified him as the one that had run her off the road; to me, that only reinforced his guilt in Lorrie’s murder. “Just to what?”
Beverley blushed. “To keep me from hearing them. But I took the earbuds out sometimes and listened to them. See, he couldn’t be Vivian’s lover, ’cause he was my mom’s lover. He made her so happy. She said she couldn’t date human men anymore because she’d hurt them, but she didn’t have to worry about hurting Goliath. He wouldn’t have killed her. I know it!” She grabbed the stuffed cat and pushed her face into her mother’s shirt. Her shoulders jumped as she cried.
I reached out and rubbed her back, fighting the urge to rush down and question Vivian again, but she wasn’t going anywhere, so I had time for that later. Vivian had said Lorrie had been killed as a warning from some out-of-control Council enforcement agent. But Goliath was a vampire, not an Elder, and the idea that he worked for anyone besides Menessos was ludicrous. Would Menessos have sent Goliath as a favor for some Elder? What would a vampire want from an Elder? Maybe he was trying to get Vivian on the Council despite her stained status. Maybe the Council was politically in bed with the vampires more than I wanted to believe.
There was another possibility—well, okay, there were probably lots of other possibilities, but this one was bright on my radar. What if Beverley was right and Goliath hadn’t killed Lorrie? I had taken Vivian’s word as proof. Now I knew her word was worthless.
But if Goliath wasn’t the murderer, then who was? I didn’t even know where to start if I needed other suspects. What if Vivian had just used this awful situation to her advantage because she could? Because I was that naive?
“Persephone?”
I realized I’d stopped rubbing Beverley’s back. She’d stopped crying, at least.
“Sorry. I’m trying to figure this all out.” I stood. “It’s so…frustrating.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me everything you find out.”
“I promise. I won’t hide anything from you.” At the door, I reached for the light.
“Leave it on. Please.”
* * *
Theo’s heart monitor showed a fast but regular rhythm. Dr. Lincoln and Johnny were talking in hushed tones, but stopped when I stepped into the room. Nana was coming up the stairs and followed me in. Celia sat on the edge of the bed holding Theo’s hand. “What do we know?” I asked.
“She had a blood clot; it’s common with leg or pelvis injuries. She ‘threw’ it; it hit her lung. We need an ambulance to get her to the State Shelter where they can perform the emergency surgery she needs.”
“No,” Johnny said. “They have a spell.” He gestured at Nana and me.
“How soon can you do this forced-change ritual?” the doctor asked.
I glanced at Nana. She went to the window seat, leaned and looked up, then stepped back and looked out through the skylights, positioned herself by Theo’s bed, calculating. “About twenty hours from now, the waning moon will be shining through those skylights again. Or we could move her to where the rising moon shines on her.”
“No. Don’t move her.” Dr. Lincoln pursed his lips, and his fingers twitched as he figured in his head. “Look, you have to understand. Without proper radiological testing—” He stopped himself, obviously remembering his audience wasn’t savvy with medical terms. “Without an X-ray or scan, I can’t begin to guess the size of the clot.
I can guess at the location because I can hear the obstruction, but…” He took a deep breath, then said, “Best case: this thing breaks up on its own in the next few hours, but I know for a fact the chances of that are slim.”
“How can you be so sure that’s a fact?” Johnny pressed.
“A pulmonary embolism killed my wife.” His tone was bitter. “The right ventricle of the heart pumps blood to the lungs to get oxygen, and with the clot there, the ventricle will start to fail as it tries to push blood past the blockage. This kind of scenario has a ninety percent mortality rate. Or she could keep throwing clots.” He rubbed his brow.
Johnny took the doc’s biceps in his hand and stared down at him. “What can you do to give her twenty hours?”
The doc considered it. “She needs surgery, but I can’t perform it. Short of that, she needs oxygen. I have tanks, and I think the nasal cannula for a large dog will work for her.” He looked at me. “I’ll stay here and try to buy her a day.”
“But should we wait,” I asked, “until she’s a little stro
nger?”
“She’s not going to get any stronger.”
Johnny released the doc and took me by the shoulders. “Either she makes it or she dies trying, Red. She’d risk it, and you know it. All or nothing—that’s how Theo has lived her life.” He released me. “And that’s how she’d want to die.”
I looked at Theo’s face, my eyes burning. “I don’t know if—”
“You have to try,” he whispered. “She’ll die for sure if you don’t.”
Did we have what it took to turn away death?
* * *
I woke around ten, but I didn’t feel rested. That sucked, because there was so much work to do.
Downstairs, Dr. Lincoln snored loudly in my cozy chair, and Johnny lay stretched over the ends of my couch. Vivian’s chair had been moved to the living room and lowered to its side; one of my worn tan pillows was under her head. She smelled vaguely of valerian. I’d told Johnny about the bottle, and he’d spritzed her with it.
Nana was sitting in the kitchen studying the Codex. A cigarette rested in an ashtray beside her, and the whole of it was one continuous piece of ash. She’d found something so interesting that she’d forgotten the Marlboro.
The aroma of coffee enticed me immediately. As I fixed a bowl of microwave oatmeal, I saw the valerian bottle sitting by the stove. I opened a drawer, took out a marker, and wrote 40 Winks on the bottle. Didn’t want anyone drinking that. With my favorite coffee mug (with Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” on it) and my oatmeal, I sat across from Nana. “Find something interesting?”
Nana reached for her cigarette and swore when she saw it was wasted. “Did I find something interesting,” she repeated slowly, sitting back in her chair in a way that said she was stiff from hours hovering over the book. I don’t think she’d returned to bed. “You don’t appreciate what this book is,” she added angrily. Her leg had started bouncing in irritation; I guessed it was an action I was genetically engineered to copy.
Vicious Circle Page 16
