“I’m a preacher, Ms. Alcmedi. Telling people the status of their soul is my job.”
“Not anymore.”
He glared at me.
Maybe I should drop the phone in the grove and run like hell, to break the binding. Let the Eldrenne know. Let her make me do another. It couldn’t be as torturous as this. “Why aren’t you and your soul in heaven, Sam? Why are you here in this phone, if your soul was so sanctified?”
Samson laughed. “Already figured that out, girly. The afterlife is different if you’re murdered. And pondering the how-and-why of my being here doesn’t change that I am here and you’re stuck with me.” Glowering, he continued in a prissy tone, “I can’t go anywhere. Where you go, I have to follow. We’re in this together.”
He was right. Damn it.
“Good-bye, Sam.” I shut the phone and shoved it into the back pocket of my jeans. Nana wasn’t going to be able to keep quiet much longer. I started counting in my head. I got to four.
“Persephone, Johnny stopped in yesterday morning,” Nana reached across the table and wrapped her warm old hand around my wrist.
Having anticipated she’d go on about the phone, I wasn’t ready for the shot of regret her words left ricocheting around my heart. I stared at her hand, the skin like parchment, and wondered what, if anything, Johnny had told her.
She squeezed my wrist. “He took his things with him.”
Some secret part of me had hoped there was some logic in Johnny’s actions, something I didn’t understand. Just then, that part of me shattered. And I realized that I wouldn’t have been more stunned by Nana’s words if she’d pulled out a gun and declared herself Jesse James.
“Persephone?”
“Good,” I said.
With her other hand, she put the cigarette in the ashtray, then reached into her pocket. She pulled out an envelope and pushed it across the table toward me. “He said to give you this.”
I stared at the rectangle of white. My heart wouldn’t beat; it felt like a cold rock in my ribcage.
Ripping open the envelope, I removed the paper. It read:
Lustrata you are … and yet not.
You’ve come so far!
You are what I’ve sought.
Lustrata you see and are blind.
Your answer won’t be inside your mind.
It’s inside your heart.
It’s in knowing yourself.
It’s inside your heart.
Recognizing yourself.
Seein’ it.
Believin’ it.
You create your bound’ries. Will they be lines?
Lines you won’t color outside of? Do you have a spine?
Lines you can step across? Can you not redefine?
You create your bound’ries. Will they be walls?
Walls to keep you safe within? Locked inside lonely halls?
Walls that must be scaled to escape? Don’t fall. Don’t fall.
Lustrata, you choose the limit.
The scope of your truths and your mental intent.
Disclaim it or acclaim it!
Blame me or reclaim me!
But know yourself … see yourself.
Know yourself … trust yourself.
It’s inside your heart.
It’s in knowing yourself.
It’s inside your heart.
Recognizing your Hell.
Seein’ it.
Releasin’ it.
Seein’ it
… and letting it go, letting go.
There were little marks, chords and notations, to the right of the page. It was a song. It was how he expressed himself best. Musicians.
Eyes burning, I folded the paper and replaced it in the envelope.
Nana was watching me intently. “You okay?”
No. Nope. Not at all.
I felt the hurt churning, turning. My heart burned and began to beat again. Angrily. Those shattered pieces, those fragmented shards melted and ran together, congealing and hardening like one big scab over a wound I’d never admit having. This song indicated I needed to rethink my perceived self. How I saw things? My boundaries were fine; his needed to be reexamined.
So what if he’s supposed to teach me about fighting. I’d find someone else.
I was not about to cry over him leaving. After what he did, why would I even want him around? He better have gotten his shit and left. He saved me the trouble of throwing it out by the road.
“Persephone?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
I faced Nana squarely. “Yes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“What happened, Persephone?”
“I don’t want to talk to you about it.” I kept my tone even and polite.
“Fine. I’ll do the talking,” she said cheerily. “Earlier, you said the only thing you can’t do is keep a boyfriend. You knew he was gone, or was planning to go, before I gave you that letter. You’re thinking about him, and whatever was in that letter. Am I right?”
I frowned at her. “He went wrong. It’s not fixable.”
She opened her cigarette case and lit another. “I need you to tell me what happened.”
“I already know what went wrong, so we don’t need to analyze it.”
She took a long draw on the cigarette. “And?”
“And it’s done.”
“What’s done?” Beverley asked, coming to the doorway.
I stammered. Nana said, “Her column. What do you need, honey?”
“I want to take Ares outside.”
“Stay in the back,” Nana said.
I watched Beverley head for the garage door, Ares following closely. “Still wearing your necklace?” I asked.
“Yup. I love it.”
As soon as the door shut, Nana said tersely, “So long as you’re thinking about him, it isn’t done.”
“He left, Nana. Whether or not I think about him, whether I’m glad he saved me the trouble of hauling his shit to the road, or whether I regret it, it’s done.” I left the table and carried my mug to the sink. I rinsed it out, wishing I could wash him from my mind and heart by turning on the tap. I smirked; I could try crying him out. But I hated crying.
“He’s a wolf, Persephone.”
I turned to her. “Duh.”
“So stop thinking of him like a man. He isn’t just a man. Even when he’s not furry. He’s still part wolf.” She half-rose in her seat, checking on Beverley through the window. “And not just any wolf,” she added.
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the counter. “What does that mean?” I hadn’t told her about the at-will partial change. Wait—the morning after we changed Theo, he and the other wolves had a discussion that made him uncomfortable. Had Nana overheard? “You mean his maintaining his human sensibilities while in wolf-form?”
Nana got up and shuffled over to open the refrigerator, and started rambling around. “You know so much about wæres. They tell you much and you’re perceptive, you see a lot. But it’s just the surface of things. The surface that the world, such as it is, can accept. They still haven’t let you in. Not with your column.”
“What about my column?”
“You’re helping them. With things as they are.” She set ground beef and vegetables on the counter.
My column created sympathy and humanized wæres despite much of society wanting to make them monsters. “Are you saying the wæres are using me?”
She pulled a deep pot from the low cupboard and a frying pan from the stove drawer. “No more than you use them to make your living.”
“Now wait just a darn minute—”
“Persephone, the time for being naive has passed!”
My jaw clamped shut, teeth grinding tight to keep in the angry words wanting out.
What was wrong with me? Was my anger amped-up from the stain as well? If it was, then all my emotions were affected.
Aw, hell! Why wasn’t there a You and Your New Stain
handbook? Or a “Ten Things to Know about Your Stain” pamphlet?
Nana dumped the meat into the pan, then turned to chopping the peppers and onion. Her old fingers went through the motions methodically, dicing the vegetables precisely, deftly. It made me reflect and wonder: was she preparing me as deftly?
Maybe this was one of those times when I should just shut up and listen to her.
She put the lid on the meat, drained a little of the grease off into a second skillet, then added the pepper and onions to that one and stirred. I prompted her. “What do I need to know?”
Nana tapped the wooden spoon on the side of the pan and put it in the spoon rest. She shuffled back to the ashtray and lifted her cigarette. “I went to Columbus while you were gone yesterday. Beverley went with me and we did some research on the Lustrata.”
“I thought we were talking about the wæres—wait. You went to the Archives?” There were dozens of witch archives across the country; Columbus was the closest one. “You drove all that way?”
“Oh, it’s right down I-71. Straight shot.”
“No one’s going to be suspicious of me, are they?” So much for me shutting up.
“Don’t worry. I told them I was pulling up the old legends to tell Beverley stories.” She shrugged. “It’s true.”
Even if I wasn’t certain that would negate any suspicion, it was already done and I couldn’t change it. “And? How does that fit with me being naive about the wæres?”
She blew smoke at the ceiling and put the cigarette back in the ashtray. Shuffling back to the cupboards, she sorted through the variety of spices Johnny had bought. “Regardless of what else has happened, you need to get Johnny back over here. As soon as possible.”
I held off saying it as long as I could, then, “I can’t, Nana.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
I looked away.
Nana proceeded to open two cans of garlic-and-herb spaghetti sauce. She dumped them into the pot and added more chopped garlic. I resolved to wait for her to expand on her words, but she didn’t. She stirred and stirred, leaning over the mix.
“Why? So he can cook?” I asked, hoping this was going to be that simple and knowing full well it wasn’t.
“That would be another reason,” she said, adding coarsely ground pepper to the mix before facing me with a critical expression. “But not the main one.”
She checked the simmering meat and veggies, poured off grease again, then added them to the pot and stirred more. When she finally tapped the spoon off and laid it in the spoon rest, she adjusted the burner.
“If you want me to consider trying, you need to tell me why first—and it better be a hell of a reason,” I said. When her critical face hardened with disapproval, I added, “What did you find?”
Nana returned to her cigarette and stared out the window. Her eyes darted this way and that, following the girl and the dog racing around the yard. She didn’t answer.
“What does that have to do with the wæres not ‘letting me in’? And why is this not the time for me to be naive?”
She sank back into her seat, ran a hand over her beehive hairdo. Only then did she face me.
“Sit down,” she said, gesturing to the bench across from her. “You’re not going to like this.”
I sat.
“You’ve seen a coven, seen people come to a sabbat. Just regular people seeking a spiritual connection, a moment of solace, or a party. Whatever they are searching for, they can find it and go home and on about their way happily. You knew from the stories that the council was convoluted, but now that you’ve seen WEC Elders at work, do you think you’ve seen the deepest depth of their complex machinations?”
“Hell, no. With the lengths Desdemona and Vilna-Daluca went to simply to test a high priestess, I can’t imagine what they do to certify an Elder, let alone an Eldrenne.”
“Yet those ‘practitioners’ who simply come to sabbats to worship the Goddess … most of them never aspire to know more, never seek to see what you have seen.”
“What’s your point?” If spirituality was their goal and they received it, that wasn’t a bad thing.
“You’ve glimpsed the wyrd of the Witch now, and you’ve come to know a little of the intricacies of the vampires.”
“More than I want to, actually.” I thought of Menessos making blood oath to Xerxadrea. Their history could be a part of those intricacies.
“You go in the light of day and peer into a stream and you’re going to see your reflection. But you go in the dark of a moonless night and all you’ll see is the stream bed. You’ve been exposed to the dark, so you’re seeing below the surface, now, Persephone. You’re seeing the beauty in the smooth stones and feeling the slime covering them. Slime that, if you’re not mindful of your footing, will cause you to slip and plunge under the surface with them.”
My thoughts turned to my namesake and her descent into the underworld.
“Do you think, Persephone, that the world of the wærewolves is any different?”
Sitting there, speechless and feeling small, my fingers gripped the edge of the bench seat. “I hadn’t given it any thought.”
“Celia and Erik were turned how long ago?”
“Five years.”
“They were camping, so it was summer, right?”
“Late spring.”
Nana’s fingers twitched as she calculated. “Last year in the late spring or early summer … I assume they took a six-week vacation, right?”
How’d she know? My breath caught. “It wasn’t a vacation?”
Nana shook her head. “Every wære I’ve ever known of started a six-week vacation that encompassed their fortieth and forty-first full moons, or the beginning of their fourth year as a wære.”
“I thought you avoided wæres.”
She rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t know of things going on with the wæres other witches knew and befriended.”
“Okay. And?”
“And, as we have covens, their kind have dens. Like us, they have a network much deeper than the surface shows and they must be indoctrinated in it. So, they maintain a ‘normal’ life, being guided and prepared by their den-keeper. It makes the surface reflect wæres as they would have themselves seen. It’s no different for us. Witches want the non-magic-using humans to see us as beautiful and spiritual when young and as sweet, cookie-grannies when we grow old. But you and I know the truth is more complicated. The wæres want to be seen as average folk, but stronger and”—her voice mocked casualness—“oh, so what if they shed their skin for fur once a month? They kennel, so all is well.”
Tone back to normal, she went on, “The vampires want to be seen as intelligent and gorgeous, as the wealthy elite, and they buy their blood to stem the slaughter. It’s just business and everyday humans benefit, of course. While the fey, they’re tooth-fairy delicate and harmless.”
She poked her cigarette at the ashtray, pushing the ashes into a mound. “Even the non-magic-users. They puff up against us all like they have the law on their side. But it’s not truly the laws that have kept the rest of us at bay. They’re organized and we aren’t … or weren’t.” She took a raspy breath. “We’re people with power or wings or fur or fangs. But they’re the people with weapons of mass destruction. The balance is so tenuous.”
I was thrust back, to the memory of the vampire protocol test at the Eximium. When Heldridge asked, “Does your Goddess never cause harm?” I’d thought to myself that by allowing unpleasantness to transpire in small doses, a tenuous balance would be maintained. After spending a few heartbeats arguing with myself that this couldn’t mean I was supposed to tolerate what Johnny had done and see it as “unpleasantness in a small dose,” my voice came softly, if irritably, “What does this have to do with getting Johnny back here?”
She stubbed out the cigarette. “Bear with me; I have to set the stage a little. The Lustrata legend has two ancient documents to support it, but neither are whole. The Stellatus T
ablets are broken, and the Lux Scrolls partially burned. The information is not complete and it is not perfect. Elders dispute over the translations and the guesses made concerning the fragments and the missing parts. They’ll never know so they’ll never agree because their agendas are all different.”
“Okay,” I said. “Your disclaimer is noted. What do we know?”
“There have been two previously documented Lustratas.”
“Only two?”
“Are you going to interrupt every point?”
My mouth shut and my expression turned beatific.
Nana continued. “Stories are told, updated, and retold through bards, like Johnny. Though such references are few and mostly nonfactual, they remain far more numerous than the actual relics. Much of what bards and storytellers have told has come to be taken as fact, although it shouldn’t be, as such folks do take liberties. Poetic license. These bard-stories mostly romanticized the Lustrata. Johnny, a wære, wrote of you as an enemy of the vampires. His lyrics went something like:
Impurity rising from under the world,
Dead above ground, diseases unfurled.
“But the vampire bards see you as the enemy of the wære. I found one who said:
Lustrata walks,
unspoiled into the light.
Sickle in hand,
she stalks through the night
Wearing naught but her mark and silver blade.
The moonchild of ruin, she becomes Wolfsbane.
“They see what they want to see, do you follow? They see you as the justice they want, not true justice. It’s not simply these two either. I even found fairy references! And as I said, the Elders have conflicting takes on it—and Xerxadrea won’t be oblivious to either side.”
“You mean not even the witches agree?”
“They all have their own motives, their own agendas.”
“So you’re saying the different sides will try to get the Lustrata to choose them over another side or other sides?”
Nana made an uncomfortable face. “Yes and no.”
“Nana.”
“It’s not that simple. It’s not like two or three or five different factions will toady to you to gain your service. I mean, after they see the sign, some will, but—”
Hallowed Circle Page 22
