Shattered Circle c-6 Page 8

  The temperature had dropped since we left my home. I shut my door softly, afraid of the echoing sound it would make. I crossed the road and jogged along the empty trail. It ran right beside the road, but not far ahead the path snaked through the woodland a few yards from the road. I heard Zhan behind me but didn’t argue about her following. Sensing the ley was well within the tree line, I had the urge to plow into the woods, but the leaves and twigs that would crunch underfoot would also give me away.

  After about five hundred yards, I guess, my eyes detected the light of a bonfire ahead.

  I hurried onward, ignoring Zhan’s whispered protests for me to slow down. I kept jogging along the trail as it curved back toward the road then arced deeper into the woods toward the blaze, which had been built near a large fallen tree.

  A hooded figure sat before that blaze and I could hear the singsong chant of a male voice. The smell of burning sage filled the air.

  Creepy?

  Pissed off, I stepped off the trail then, glancing back and forth between the ground and the fire, trying to make my approach as unnoticeable as possible. If it was him, I was going to need the element of surprise. Please let that fire crackle and pop and the hood dampen other sounds from his ears.

  Then I saw Beverley. She lay as if sleeping upon the ground before the figure.

  He raised his hands high. A green glow claimed the fire, and bolts like laser beams jumped into the air and circled a few feet over the flames. A purple swirl spiraled up from underneath the fire—from the ley line—and slithered into the fire, rising through it like a serpent, snapping onto the ends of the green bolts and swallowing them down. All the colors glinting and sparkling were mesmerizingly beautiful.

  He lowered his hands over Beverley.

  My hesitation evaporated. I plunged forward, heedless of the noise I made.

  Abruptly, the figure turned, hood falling back.

  Menessos!

  His eyes widened and his head shook back and forth. His voice filled the woodland around me, shouting, “Don’t break the circle!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Johnny pulled into the driveway and saw Celia’s CX-7. Though several lights were on in Mountain’s trailer out by the barns, none were on at the house. Using his key, he let himself in and stood in the darkened hall with the open door at his back and sniffed.

  Red wasn’t here.

  He detected nothing to indicate that she had been there recently, either. She still hadn’t replied to his text. Did she make it home?

  He jerked on his loosened tie, removing it altogether.

  He breathed in the smells again. The kiddo. Celia. Mountain. That was it.

  Moving closer to the stairway, he draped the tie over the handrail as he stared up at the unlit second floor. Aurelia said he needed to move, to live somewhere else. After what he’d done, Red might not let the Big Bad Wolf back in her home. He couldn’t blame her if she asked him to leave, but he wasn’t about to go up and preemptively pack his stuff, either.

  Returning to the door, he put his hand on the knob and scanned the darkened house once more over his shoulder. He walked out and shut and locked the door behind him, heading for the trailer. His dress shoes were slick in the dew-damp grass.

  Through the window, he saw Mountain open his refrigerator and remove something. As he approached the door, he saw the large man hand Celia a can of 7UP. He figured Celia and the kiddo must’ve been visiting the unicorns again.

  At the same moment, Celia and Mountain turned. The wærewolf and the Beholder had both detected him; he hadn’t been trying for stealth. Mountain approached to open the door. He didn’t look happy.

  “Johnny.”

  “Where’s Red?” Johnny asked, glancing around as he entered.

  Mountain said, “She and Zhan left a few minutes ago.”

  She’s avoiding me. Guess I deserve it after what I did and then standing her up at the coffee shop.

  “He doesn’t know.” Celia sounded miserable as she dropped into one of the kitchen’s folding chairs with much less grace than was usual for her.

  “I don’t know what?”

  “Beverley found and used Great El’s slate,” she said, pointing toward the woods outside the trailer. “She used it in the grove. Now she’s . . . well, according to Seph, she’s in the line.”

  Johnny tipped his head, squinting slightly. “You mean Beverley is inside of a ley line?”

  When Celia’s chin dropped to her chest, Johnny’s gaze shifted to Mountain, who answered with a nod.

  “The lines are just energy, right? How is that possible?”

  Mountain shrugged. Celia began to cry.

  Mountain headed into one of the trailer’s back rooms.

  Johnny knelt. “Celia?”

  “I was supposed to be watching her,” she said. “She was supposed to have come out here to see Errol. I didn’t even know she’d gone upstairs and taken the slate.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it. Kids can be sneaky.” He had the urge to put his hand on her knee to comfort her, but she was the wife of his former best friend, Erik. He folded his fingers together over his own bent knee.

  “But a kid shouldn’t be able to sneak like that around a wærewolf.” She wiped her eyes. “I guess it’s for the best that I’m not a mother.”

  “Celia.” His hand slipped onto her knee then. He felt the spark of energy that flared up whenever he touched a female wærewolf. Their eyes met for an instant and her mouth opened. Before she could speak, Mountain returned with an unopened box of Kleenex and offered it to her. “Did Red say where they were going?”

  “No,” Mountain answered. “Her phone rang, she answered it, and two seconds later, she told Zhan they had to go.”

  Johnny took out his phone and hit the speed dial for Persephone’s satellite phone. It rang and rang, but she didn’t answer. When it clicked over to voicemail, he swore. Loudly.

  Johnny paced. She has to come back here. Unless it was Menessos that called. Then she’d end up at the haven. He didn’t know if he should stay or go. Lifting his phone before him again, he stopped walking and texted Kirk: Inform whoever we have watching the haven that he or she is to report to you immediately if Red is seen there. You notify me at once.

  When he hit Send, the pacing resumed. Moments later, when Kirk acknowledged the text, he didn’t even break stride.

  Mountain walked into the kitchen, then returned with a short glass. “Here,” Mountain said, pushing the glass at Johnny, who gave him a questioning look. “Captain and Coke. You need it.” He put it into Johnny’s hand. “I’ll go see that all the animals are inside.”

  Johnny watched the vampire’s Beholder go, aware that he was making an excuse to give the wærewolves time to talk privately. His gaze fell and he stared down into the short glass, watching the ice cubes slowly spin but not drinking.

  “At least you stopped pacing,” Celia said softly.

  He tore his eyes from the glass to meet her gaze.

  “What else is wrong?” she asked. “You’re wrapped in tension like a field of static.”

  Not wanting to answer her, he drank.

  Celia rose from her seat and drew close. “Erik misses you,” she said. A gentle smile claimed her lips. “He’d never admit it but I know. He feels guilty about taking the money.”

  Under order of the old Rege, the Omori—the Zvonul’s version of the Secret Service—had bribed the two other members of Johnny’s band with twenty-five grand each. They had told Erik and Feral they were “no longer in Lycanthropia with Johnny.” The band was officially dead, and the cash was their severance pay. The former Rege meant to undermine Johnny in every way he could.

  “He shouldn’t,” Johnny said. “When the Omori show up at your door, you comply.” He’d said those words before, but he hadn’t been the Domn Lup then. Now he wondered what else the old Rege might have had the Omori do. . . .

  Celia started to put her hand on his forearm, then stopped. “Johnny, he’s
not even playing his drums. He needs to. It . . . it gets the aggression out. He’s bottling it up and it’s feeding that guilt. You guys have to get together and play, if not for shows, then for the fun it was for all of you.”

  He wondered if she’d felt that flare of energy as well, and if that was why she refrained from touching him.

  “You don’t have to give up the music,” she said. “You can still play as a band.”

  “The hell he can!”

  They spun as one toward the trailer door. Aurelia jerked the door open wide, straining the hinges with her ferocity. “You don’t have time for this girlfriend drama, John. In the coming weeks you will be crowned the Domn Lup.” She stomped right up to them and glared into his eyes. “You are about to become the single most powerful wærewolf in the world. You don’t know the standard security protocols for your own transport, let alone the codes to the mainframe of our intelligence data and personnel files. How can you even hope to lead if you don’t know these things?” The angry accusations rose in volume until she was shouting, “How will you learn them if you keep running off to be with the damned witch?”

  She’d been pushing him since she arrived, working to control him one way or another. The viciousness of her voice and the dominance conveyed in her low tone stoked a rage that threatened to consume him. He’d had enough; he gave in to the fury.

  In one hyper-fast fluid motion, Johnny grabbed Aurelia by the shoulders. Fur sprouted on his hands as he backed her across the room and rammed her into the wall beside the door. The trailer shook with the force of the impact. Something glass in the kitchen fell and shattered.

  He growled, “Beverley is missing!”

  Aurelia dug her fingers around his now furry and clawed hands, struggling to loosen his grip. “Is the girl more important than your own son?”

  With a furious howl he threw her to the floor, revealing cracks in the paneling of the wall.

  “How do you know about him?” Johnny shouted.

  Aurelia must have been dazed and didn’t answer. But Celia whispered, “You have a son?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I pulled up short, throwing myself backward and down onto the leaves. I was breathless, panicked, my mind racing.

  Menessos had Beverley.

  She was out of the line.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You must stay back until I’m done!”

  I had a terrible thought that maybe her body was out, but not her mind. “What are you doing?” I asked again, hating the sound of fear in my voice.

  “Her gift isn’t complete!”

  He turned back to his work and began chanting again.

  Gift? Gift? Where have I heard this before?

  Without taking my eyes off of them, I crab-walked backward, then Zhan was tugging at my arm to help me stand. Hanging on every syllable, I tried to decipher his chant, but these strange words sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. They must have been in his original language, Akkadian.

  I could see now that he’d drawn a very large circle and used mounds of ash to mark it. My skidding steps had stopped not three inches from breaking this powdery power enclosure. There was another circle within the first ash-drawn circle, marked by nine pegs in the ground and burning smudge sticks in white saucers between the pegs, the source of the sage smell. In ritual it was meant for purifying the space and repelling negative energies. Closer now, I detected some dragon’s blood in the mix.

  Inside the middle circle was a third ash-drawn one.

  A triple circle was cast as a means of ensuring protection, keeping in what’s inside, and keeping out what’s outside. These precautions indicated to me that he’d taken intense measures.

  It hit me: He was doing to her what he’d done to Liyliy, Ailo, and Talto so long ago.

  He was drawing a gift into Beverley, bestowing her with a specific power. But according to Menessos’s tale, the sisters had possessed a latent power within them, and the blood of a fey grandmother ran through their veins. He’d said it didn’t often work on magic-bearing humans.

  I jerked out of Zhan’s grasp and stalked around the circle. Even through my shoes I could detect the thrum of the line beneath my feet, far below. Some lines are electric, meaning they stimulate energy. Some are magnetic, meaning they attract energy. Some, electromagnetic ones, do both. This portion of the line was clearly electromagnetic.

  Inside the circle, the bonfire was positioned right on top of the ley. As I stared at him across the fire, Menessos’s eyes closed. His head slowly fell back.

  The purple serpent writhed in the fire. It had finished eating the green bolts he had made for it. Now it was searching for more.

  Menessos drew smaller bolts from the fire and brought them to circle Beverley’s head. He set them at a swifter pace. His hand hovered above her forehead, and the bolts swirled between him and Beverley.

  I ground my teeth. He’d baited the line.

  As that serpentine extension of the ley partook of the energy it had attracted here, it hovered above the child, sensing those smaller bolts, waiting to ascertain the new pattern before attacking.

  As it dove in, Menessos slapped his hand down on Beverley’s forehead and screamed words I did not understand. Her mouth opened. The green bolts dropped into her throat, and the purple serpent followed them down. Instantly, parts of her body began to glow purple. Her head was first, then her neck. The glow eased down her arms, and then, though that light was dimmed by her shirt and jeans, it moved down her torso and her legs. When the radiance beamed out from her bare toes, Menessos slid his hand at her brow to the top of her head, and the other smacked her under the chin, shutting her mouth roughly.

  The part of the line that was reaching into her was severed by his action. It flopped wildly as it recoiled into the line. Her body began to shake as if an epileptic fit had overcome her.

  Menessos kept his hands on her little head, kept her mouth shut, and murmured over her until the fire sputtered and sparked before him. It died down low.

  He watched the fire intently, and kept murmuring.

  The moment lingered on. She was shaking badly. I was about to shout—

  “Now!” he cried.

  The flames burst upward with a shimmer of white sparks that rained down upon the child, avoiding contact with him.

  As the sparks hit her, they seeped through her skin, through her clothes, and, little by little, her trembling abated.

  When she was still, Menessos removed his hands from her hesitantly, then grinned at me.

  I sighed. My shoulders relaxed, but I knew a hot and lengthy shower was the only thing that would truly ease the tension out of me.

  He drew a breath—I thought for another sigh—but instead he again began speaking words that were unknown to me.

  This wasn’t over yet.

  Suddenly, I could feel the line’s energy thrumming along my skin. It felt like I was sitting astride Johnny’s Night Train, feeling the deep vibration that rumbled out from the engine and through the pipes to reverberate through my whole body.

  Menessos was drawing the line up to the surface.

  What in Hell is he thinking?

  Drawing a line to the surface was like putting kinks in a garden hose—magic being the water and the witch being the hose. Depending on the witch, the flow of magic would be controlled, or the hose would bubble and burst.

  The vibration resonated into my bones and my whole body buzzed from the inside out. It made me feel dizzy. The temperature where I stood was rising fast. It must have increased fifty degrees in the few seconds I deliberated before leaping away and falling face-first into a pile of dew-damp leaves. As I picked myself up and stood farther away from the warmth, the leaves within the circle—leaves that had dried from the heat contained within the circle—fluttered and danced, pushed aside as the ground bucked underneath the bonfire.

  The logs bounced. One rolled right toward Beverley.

  Then the ground under the bonfire sp
lit open and the logs tumbled into the hole. The rolling one reversed its direction and fell in as well.

  I would have felt relieved if Beverley wasn’t right on the edge of the opening.

  My first instinct was to reach out, dive in, and pull her back from that edge, but I couldn’t break the circle. If Menessos didn’t draw me a door to let me in, I couldn’t help. Instead, I backpedaled and ran frantic hands through my hair. His eyes were closed. Maybe he didn’t know she was about to fall in. Distracting him might be a bad thing.

  Beverley’s body slid an inch toward the crevice.

  I took the risk. “Menessos!”

  My cry was lost as light exploded up from underground in a beam. It split the night like the megawatt finger of some gigantic god. It knocked me down, but I kept my eyes fixed on the girl.

  Beverley’s body slid another inch, then another, and I scrambled up—

  Some gentle force lifted her, hovering, into that light. Air tossed her dark hair about. Her arms spread outward as if she were floating peacefully in a pool.

  It was beautiful, ethereal, and angelic. My mouth fell open.

  Something began floating up in the beam; it looked like pieces of ash rising from a campfire, blackened fragments with edges glowing red-orange. These pieces swirled and fluttered around the child, gathering around her hands, bulking up until it covered her arms like extra-long oven mitts.

  There was a pulsing to the ash-like substance and the fiery glow grew brighter and brighter. Hotter.

  “Menessos . . . ”

  The ash condensed, tightening down on her. Her back arched and her high, piercing scream engulfed my world. Heedless of the circle, I shot forward.

  Time slowed down.

  Hands held me back. “No!” I screamed.

  Zhan put her knee into the back of mine, throwing me down a few feet from the ashen circle. With her weight centered on my spine, she pinned me to the ground. Still, I struggled to move onward, reaching, clawing at the grass, straining for purchase in the earth.

  Heat warmed my hands and blew across my cheeks. A few feet away, I’d been on soggy land, but here the heat of the circle was rapidly drying the nearby vegetation. The temperature kept rising until it felt like I was trying to reach into a blazing hearth. Beside me, outside of the circle, dried leaves began to smolder and burn from the heat.