Vicious Circle c-1 Read online

  That was probably why Vivian had called me. She wanted someone uninvolved to do a more objective Tarot reading.

  Not that my current state could be termed “objective.”

  I’d been eyeballing every woman who walked in for the last fifteen minutes. Downtown Cleveland at eight A.M. was a hub of hurrying businesspeople. Many women came and went, tidy in their office wear and comfort-pumps. I expected Vivian to be among them, incognito with a secretarial-type day job and a real life. But when I was finally approached at eight-fifteen, it wasn’t by an executive assistant.

  “Miss Alcmedi?”

  She’d been here all along. As soon as the crowd thinned, she came to my little table and called me by name. Her name badge read Vivian, Manager.

  With her blond curls fastened up and the ends wildly spraying out, she reminded me of a doll from my childhood; I’d dunked the doll’s head in the toilet whenever I wanted to “wash” her hair. It had taken a toll. Vivian’s hair, however, looked soft, and the style suited her much better than it had my doll. Her makeup was flawless and, as she bit her lip, her too-white smile glistened. No way she actually drank what she served unless she had those teeth professionally bleached.

  My knee stopped bouncing. “Hello.”

  Under her apron, Vivian wore a pretty cream-colored blouse with long sleeves and sensible cuffs. Combined with tan corduroy slacks and trendy shoes, the outfit made her look like one of her more businesslike customers. Her jewelry, though, was overdone: Diamond stud earrings, a matching necklace and bracelet set in gold, and at least one ring on each finger. Apparently, Vivian took her last name as an accessorizing decree.

  “Sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. One of the girls didn’t show up. I’d have said something to you, but you went through Mandy’s line.”

  What I knew of Vivian Diamond had come secondhand from Lydia, an elderly witch from whom I’d bought my house and land and who still lived about ten minutes from her former home. Lydia attended every meet-up and coven ritual without fail, then always found a reason to call or stop by and give me a report. Not that I asked her to; Lydia wanted me to get involved. She told me once that I’d make a better high priestess than Vivian. It was flattering, but I’d never been interested in the role or the exposure that came with it. Lydia was one of those sweet old ladies who were nearly impossible to say no to, but I managed, citing my youth as a disadvantage.

  Still, here Vivian was, and she didn’t seem that much older than me if I was correct in gauging her at thirtyish. And she led the WEC-endorsed coven? Had been leading it for maybe eight years? From Lydia’s reports, I’d assumed Vivian would be fifty-plus.

  Though most witches in the big cities aren’t as secretive about their path as their counterparts in smaller towns, Vivian wasn’t wearing any pentacles or goddess-symbol jewelry. I thought speaking quietly in code would be prudent. With a quick, room-sweeping glance, I lowered my voice and asked, “You wear the garter in the group?”

  “Yes, but only when we’re doing a specifically Stregan ritual.”

  I frowned; she’d taken my question literally. Strega is the Italian Wiccan tradition; in it, the high priestess wears a garter to show her status, the way kings wear crowns.

  Vivian’s expression darkened then, as she seemed to understand why I had asked. “I started young,” she snapped. Questioning her authority must have hit a touchy spot.

  A small, sad smile curved her lips a fraction as she noticed my newspaper. “Let’s go to my office, shall we?” She turned without waiting for my reply.

  I gathered my purse, newspaper, and velvet Tarot bag and followed her through a door marked Employees Only. She removed her apron, placed it on a wall hook, and slid into a standard office chair behind a desk so neat it didn’t seem used. The small space was well organized, with oak filing cabinets and shelves adorned with bookends bearing the shop’s logo. On the highest shelf was perched the only thing that seemed out of place: a wooden box. It had rust-speckled iron workings and an old lock. I liked it; it seemed very Arthurian, like a cross between a suitcase and a pirate’s treasure chest. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said it probably held some kind of successful-business-spell items. Or maybe a charm that kept her rent from rising beyond a point that allowed for profitability.

  I lowered myself into the folding chair positioned opposite her. The newspaper and purse went underneath the chair; the Tarot bag stayed on my lap.

  “Obviously you know about Lorrie’s death,” she said.

  “Yes.” I smoothed the fringe on the velvet bag.

  “I know who did it.”

  My head snapped up. I hadn’t expected that.

  Vivian’s chin dropped. Her fingers came up and fluttered about as if her shaking hands could wipe away the words she’d just said. Trying to cover the awkwardness, she shifted and almost put her face in her hands, but seemed to decide against it. Doing so would have messed up her impeccably applied cosmetics.

  I waited for her to go on, but she remained silent. I didn’t need the cards to tell me what to say. “You have to go to the police.”

  “I can’t.” She opened a drawer and pulled a tissue from a pocket pack. She dabbed at her perfectly lined blue eyes. “Look, if I start butting into police business, the police will start butting into coven business. I know how that game works, and my coven is far too important to me.”

  I was right. Her ability to be impartial and objective had totally evaporated. “You could call in an anonymous tip,” I suggested. The police had already had one of those. If she wouldn’t be talked into it, I was confident that the cards would convince her to do the right thing in the interest of justice.

  Vivian exhaled a trembling breath. “This is not an issue for the police, Miss Alcmedi.”

  “I beg to differ. Lorrie’s dead. She was murdered!”

  “Even if I told them everything,” she said, “the police would never find the killer. It will go unsolved. They think it’s random because it looks random.”

  “Random? Occult symbols were scrawled on her walls with her own blood!”

  Her voice came small and scared. “I know.”

  No more excuses. “Would you like me to do a reading and see what input the cards have as you make your decision?” I was careful to word it that way. People always have to make their own choices.

  “Oh, please!” She threw the soiled tissue into a wastebasket. Then she started to laugh. “You think I asked you here to read my cards?”

  My knee started bouncing again. “That is what I’m best known for among witches.” A coldness was forming in my stomach that had nothing to do with the iced mocha. “Ms. Diamond, I’m not into gossip. If you don’t want your cards read, then I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”

  Vivian assessed me, her blue eyes icy. “Lorrie told me how you helped her last year. Help her again.”

  I froze. My heart leapt to my throat.

  Had Lorrie told my dark secret? She’d vowed to never speak of it! And she’d told Vivian?

  I’d done some Tarot readings for Lorrie last year. A real creep had been stalking her, and his dangerous intentions were clear in the cards. She didn’t have time or the grounds to get a restraining order so, to protect her and her daughter, I resolved to help. I confronted him. The situation with him got out of hand, though, and…I accidentally killed him. It wasn’t intentional or premeditated. The police never solved the case. I suspected they hadn’t tried too hard. The guy turned out to be a druggie and a convicted rapist, released from the pen on a legal technicality. Still, he was a human being, and I’d taken his life.

  I put on a confused smile. “I’m sorry; I don’t understand. How is helping her move to Cleveland relevant?”

  “Miss Alcmedi, I’m not talking about you moving her knickknacks.”

  “Then what did Lorrie tell you I helped her with?”

  “She told me enough to know that your interpretation of the Rede is, shall we say, looser than most witches’
.”

  The Witches’ Rede is a code of ethics written in the twentieth century but based on older documents and traditions. Due to my lineage—traceable back to ancient Greece—I considered myself more of a pagan, but I generally accepted the Rede’s standard.

  I stood. “That’s not true.”

  “Well, you’re obviously not as concerned about your karma as I am about mine. Besides, Lorrie’s murderer would anticipate me taking action. I’d be burning myself at the stake to even think about trying to confront him. But you…you, he’d never suspect.” She smiled confidently. “You’re only a name on the rosters, someone who won’t even attend local meet-ups. An inactive solitary.” The last sounded demeaning.

  I wanted to retort something nasty, but I didn’t. First, what I had done would cost me, karma-wise. Second, I chose to be solitary and refused to let her make me feel like it was a bad thing. A slow breath escaped me. Vivian knew about a very criminal action of mine, an action never publicly known or prosecuted. That made me extremely nervous. In fact, my legs felt weak. I wanted to sit down, but sitting might indicate I was interested and wanted to hear more.

  “Her killer must be stopped,” Vivian stated.

  “I’m sure the police will see to that if you go to them.” I said it confidently, but I knew it was a lie. Lorrie had been a wære. Out of fear, and probably power envy, otherwise fine police officers conveniently forgot their “Serve and Protect” oaths when a wære was involved. They even had a shoot-first policy. The police were protected by self-defense claims, and frightened human juries—suspiciously, such cases were all scheduled so a full moon would expose jury members who were wæres—readily and regularly agreed with the police.

  When officers refused to investigate a crime involving a wære, it was tolerated by their superiors and supported through “paperwork” claims. This meant that until the insurance companies, currently in litigation, reached an agreement with the individual states about police coverage, the officers could refuse wære-related duties because the risks were “higher than normal.” The legal battles were spearheaded by lawyers for families of deceased officers who had been left without financial compensation due to carefully worded loopholes.

  I’d written in my column about the insurance companies wanting premium payments from a specialized task force created for crimes involving wæres and vampires. Likewise, the states were accusing the insurance companies of taking advantage of the times. Both sides argued vehemently because the coverage reached too deeply into their financial pockets.

  Privately, I feared both sides would find a mutually agreeable solution: declare open hunting season on all wæres.

  I didn’t blame people for being fearful of something they didn’t understand. After a couple of decades, humanity as a whole was still adjusting to the fact that vampires, witches, wæres, fairies, and other supernaturals had lived among them for thousands of years. They would probably never have known if it hadn’t been for a freak mutation of wære genes or, some said, a military experiment that had gone bad. Up until then, if anyone heard a tale of someone being bitten by a “werewolf,” they assumed it was fiction. After the wære “virus” appeared, it became a fact to fear.

  When things changed, all kinds of other-than-humans had to come out of the paranormal closet. Just like all downtrodden minorities, they had to organize to protect themselves. For the wæres, the extermination threat was immediate. They reacted with a wære-enforced responsibility policy. They broadened their kenneling approach and developed a local-level system that identified all wæres to an area pack leader. The system went through some restructuring and refining processes, but it was all handled by their own kind, and proven sympathetic folks like me, so they could trust the security of their identities. It was working. In the last few years, instances of wære attacks had become rare.

  Vampires, thanks to their magnificent and well-funded propaganda machine, had a head start: humans bought into their alluring image long before the virus. The fairies convinced citizens they were benign in a brilliant-if-utterly-false public relations campaign and weren’t considered as threatening as wæres. Neither were witches, for the most part.

  But with the change of a word or two in certain laws, we’d all be lumped into a single “shoot on sight” category. Large portions of every group organization’s dues went to cover costs for political lobbyists and legal eagles trying to keep that from happening.

  That complex cycle of legal logic was just the human side. WEC’s machinations were infinitely more intricate and ambiguous. That was why I stayed away from them.

  “No,” Vivian said. “If the American justice system decided to deal with the murderer, influential people would find a way to free him. But we both know what a joke that idea is. The laws won’t touch him. We’re on a precipice here, Miss Alcmedi. If we don’t show people that we witches will police our own like the rest of the unnatural population, this world is going to get very ugly very soon.”

  I agreed with that theory, but I didn’t intend to tell her that.

  Carefully, she said, “The murderer needs to be stopped immediately and permanently.”

  “And you want me to stop him ‘immediately and permanently’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lord and Lady!” I continued, feigning confusion. “I don’t think we’re on the same page here.”

  “Don’t be coy, Miss Alcmedi. It doesn’t become you.”

  I wanted to smack that smug smile off her smirking face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do. As a solitary, perhaps you don’t realize how information and details sometimes come out during spiritual discovery. It can be like hypnosis and therapy and confession all rolled into one. And you’re not a good liar.”

  I stared. My meditations were like confessional therapy, but they were private.

  “I know what you did to Lorrie’s stalker. Simply do it again.” She shrugged. “This guy deserves it even more. He didn’t just threaten her; he murdered her.”

  I could not believe what she was proposing or the gall it took to propose it. “Who the hell are you to be pushing for this? You’re not an Elder. You’re just a high priestess in Cleveland.”

  “A high priestess with goals, Miss Alcmedi. And a plan. WEC can’t deny me a seat if I save their asses, now can they?”

  Still I would not acknowledge anything to her. “Contrary to whatever Lorrie may have told you—”

  “I pay well. Say…a hundred thousand?”

  I tried to keep my eyes from bugging out of my head. This witchy coffee-shop manager had a hundred grand of disposable income? What the fuck was in the coffee here?

  The mention of the dollars jazzed me and cooled the heat of her earlier insult. Nana had very little money—enough, basically, to keep her in cigarettes and blood-pressure pills. Since college, I’d made a fluctuating income as a freelance writer. After landing a few well-paying magazine articles and doing some sporadic technical writing, and through constant frugal living, I had managed to buy a house on twenty very rural acres. I could keep it only because farmers rented the acreage and my little column was running in multiple newspapers now. It had been nine papers until last week; now it was six. A certain newspaper conglomerate had been acquired by another, whose owner had lost family to a wære attack a decade ago and had no intention of running a column designed to create sympathy for those afflicted with the virus. I could’ve handled the resulting decrease of income, but now that I would be providing for Nana too, it would hurt.

  Vivian’s money would be a welcome financial cushion—but no. I wasn’t a killer for hire, nor did I want Vivian to have leverage of any kind on me. Lorrie’s story was hearsay, and Vivian had no proof. If I admitted it, she might try to blackmail me. If I didn’t, she had nothing. I wondered if her office was bugged or if I was being filmed by a hidden camera.

  I slung my purse and velvet bag over my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ms. Diamond. I think you clearly mis
understood Lorrie.”

  “Two hundred thousand?”

  After giving her a nasty look, I turned to leave.

  She didn’t let me get far. “What about poor Beverley?”

  I stopped with my back to her, my hand hovering over the knob. Grab it, turn, and stay out of this. My conscience was torn. You have to help Beverley! No one else will!

  I turned back to Vivian. “If you were Lorrie’s friend, you’d tell the police what you know. But you’re a coward who’s chosen to hide instead.”

  “I’m not hiding!” Vivian stood. “Lorrie’s will names me as guardian for Beverley. I have an appointment with the Department of Social Services at ten.” She sank back into her chair. It rolled a few inches, though she didn’t seem to notice. “Granted, it indicates more of a connection to her than I’d like the public to be aware of, but…I never thought I’d get custody. Nobody ever thinks the worst will actually happen.”

  I wasn’t willing to sympathize with her. In fact, I was wondering how Lorrie could have come to think so much of Vivian as to make her Beverley’s guardian. I felt a stab of jealousy that Lorrie hadn’t picked me.

  “You don’t understand.” Vivian sniffled and wiped her nose with another tissue. “I can’t raise Beverley like this. Not with me being the reason her mother’s dead!”

  Chapter 3

  You’re the reason Lorrie’s dead? Explain.”