Hallowed Circle (5 page)

“Someone’s out there.” I rolled onto my back.

“I know, I can smell ’em. Erik.” He nodded at Erik—the drummer for Johnny’s band Lycanthropia—whom I hadn’t noticed until then. The stalks rustled as Erik stormed into the field.

“Are you all right?” Johnny crouched beside me.

“Yeah.”

He grinned and said, “Yeah! The way you came across that field—holy shit! I didn’t know you were a
speed-demon. I bet you could outrun a wære. Does the U.S. Olympic Committee know about you?”

Fighting to catch my breath, I couldn’t laugh at Johnny’s wisecrack. Besides, all I could think was: the speed, the hearing, that extra sense—Goddess knew what else—were undeniably “gifts” of Menessos’s stain.

“Hey, what’s with the frown? You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Just catching my breath.”

“Frowns always happen for a reason,” he said. Straightening up from his crouching position, he stared down at me and crossed his arms. “Fess up.”

“Just winded and scared.” I sat up, in the damp grass, still breathing hard. “It’s nothing.”

That wasn’t true. There was plenty to frown about. Johnny didn’t realize I still carried Menessos’s stain. He thought the stain had been burned away by the pain and consequent empowerment the stake had brought me. Johnny was partially right: I
could
have been unstained, but the vampire’s bonding had fused itself to pieces of me I didn’t want to part with.

Johnny didn’t know the stain was now integral to my being. I could not be free of it without losing too much of my self.

I hadn’t told him because he was still licking his wounds over his fight with Menessos. While I knew Johnny genuinely cared for me, he wasn’t fond of the flowers and art and not-so-small fortune’s worth of other gifts that the master vampire sent me after I destroyed the stake rather than use it to end Menessos’s existence.

How could I say to him, “By the way, Johnny, I can still feel Menessos in the marrow of my bones”?

Maybe if I understood more about this Lustrata thing . . . but all I had were questions and no answers. Nana said the Lustrata was supposed to have a stain in order to have a reason to be a part of the vampire’s world. Maybe Johnny thought I’d just pick one up from a more agreeable vampire later.

“C’mon, tell me what’s causing that furrow in your brow or I won’t help you up.” Johnny stood over me, somehow combining his teasing smile with stubborn concern as only he could. His eyes, tattooed with the markings of the ancient Egyptian god Horus—the Wedjat—twinkled in the light that came from the house. He wore tight black jeans and an unbuttoned black-on-black shirt, flat black with stripes that were just a bit shinier. Under it, a white tank clung to his lean body, revealing the curve of pectorals, the dip under the sternum, the wave of abs. In the near-dark, it was all just levels of shadow, but those contours made me yearn to touch him, to rip off the shirt and reveal the myriad tattoos underneath so I could trace them with my fingers, with my tongue. The tight jeans with their pocket accent chains and scarlet wolf’s-head patches paired with the leather biker boots completed Johnny’s bad-boy rocker style. Oh. Yeah.

“I can’t tell you. If I do it’ll just embarrass me and you’ll rub it in.”

“Oh, I’ve got something I want to rub in all right.” His pose faded and he reached down to give me a hand up, but somewhere in the stalks Erik gave a loud yelp. Johnny twisted away, ready to charge to the rescue of his drummer.

“Fucking spider bit me!” Erik shouted from somewhere in the field.

Johnny turned back and offered me his hand up again. “Anyway, Red, that run was impressive.” He had started calling me Red—as in Red Riding Hood—a few weeks ago, when Nana moved in. He joked that visiting me “at Grandma’s house” made him feel like the big, bad wolf. Except it was
my
house and Nana hated to be called “Grandma.”

I slipped my hand into his and he easily had me back up on my feet.

With a devious smile, Johnny said, “Oh, look! You’re covered in grass.” He began brushing the little green blades off the arms of my flannel shirt, then stepped behind me and fluffed my dark hair gently. It made a shiver flow through me. Wiping debris from the back of the shirt, his hands swept lightly all over me. “It doesn’t want to get off,” he said. I could practically feel him thinking,
But I do.
He returned to my front and crouched, one hand brushing down the outer leg of my jeans while the other rested—surely only for the sake of balance—high on my inner thigh.

As he worked, I watched his face, remembering how swollen his eye had gotten after the encounter with Menessos. He’d earned it, lying to me by omission. But I couldn’t forget his earnestness, his sincerity. Johnny believed in me more than I believed in myself.

And he wanted me. For all these months, he’d kenneled alone. And according to Celia and Erik, he hadn’t even responded to the advances of any females—and there were plenty who advanced—at the band’s live gigs.

So.

It seemed he’d been waiting for me. Hopelessly heart-challenged, relationship-disabled me.

Me
.

Now we’d lived under the same roof for two weeks and although he made his desires clear every chance he got, he’d never forced the issue, never been overbearing or less than a gentleman, albeit a seductive gentleman with an unending talent for innuendo-laden conversation.

For a wære, sexual abstinence was ridiculous. Their libidos were stuck on hyperdrive—and he’d been denying himself, mastering himself. Or taking a lot of cold showers waiting for me to wake up.

Well, I had fully roused, and so had my yearning for physical satisfaction. Long ago, while in emotional pain, I dealt with a broken heart by convincing myself that my libido had overdosed on sleeping pills and would never get me into such hurtful trouble again. But my desires had awakened from the long coma and now seemed intent on making up for lost time. Problem was … had Johnny awakened them or had my stain been the blaring alarm clock?

The rain-wet waves of his hair beckoned and my fingers strayed to those misplaced tendrils at his brow, caressing them away, lifting the cedar and sage scent of him to my nostrils. I wanted to touch so much more of him. Right now I yearned to—

No. He deserved my anger for the danger he’d put Nana and Beverley in!

I almost groaned aloud in frustration. For the last two
weeks, that had been the biggest battle in my personal mental war about Johnny.

No one was harmed, my conscience reminded me. That was true—Nana was indignant about the whole thing and Beverley had spent her “hostage” time playing video games so she seemed no worse for the incident—but that wasn’t the point. They
could
have been harmed, even killed, due to Johnny’s deceit.

And I was also still waiting for him to explain to me how he’d managed an at-will partial transformation. He’d turned his hands to claws during his brief confrontation with Menessos. A wære just shouldn’t be able to do that.

Under any other circumstances, it meant a wære had gotten close to a witch’s spell energies and stirred up an incomplete transformation. Incompletes invariably lost their minds and never got them back. They remained stuck in a state between human and animal, crazed and vicious. Because of this, police officers were expected to shoot them on sight.

In addition to that un-wære-like talent, Johnny always kept his human sensibilities while transformed. He was unique in many ways.

We’d been becoming more than “just friends” since saving the life of our friend Theodora, but when he pulled a fast switcheroo with the stake, I learned he was willful to the point of deceit if he thought it necessary. I couldn’t fully trust him.

And furthermore, if he was deserving of trust and discovered I was still stained and would forever be controllable by Menessos, could he trust
me
?

The Wedjat tattoos sharpened as he squinted slightly,
his focus intensifying. Surely he detected my pheromones. Desire. Anger. A scent cocktail that a wære would crave.

Our mutual sexual attraction was trying ardently to overwhelm rational thought. I clung to my shield—made of trust issues that
should
keep us divided and that fear in me that was unsure which part of me spawned this deep yearning—but my grip weakened more each day.

“Such a sad smile from my Lustrata,” he whispered. He stood, hands sliding up my legs, hips, then under the flannel to rest at my waist. The aroma of cedar and sage grew stronger, then as his hands came to my neck I detected something else.

“I smell metal.”

He smirked. “It’s from the guitar strings.”

“I never noticed it before.”

The damn stain had amped my sense of smell too.

It was a vaguely familiar scent to me, now that he named it. I’d tried to learn to play on an acoustic guitar as a teen, and I’d picked up a dorm neighbor’s electric one occasionally when the weather kept us all inside. I knew some chords; that was all.

Johnny leaned in, ready to kiss me.

Erik burst from the field at a run. When he saw us, he stopped, realized what he was interrupting, and said a quiet, “Oh. Uh. Sorry.”

“Well?” Johnny looked at Erik.

“Whoever they were, they were fast. Practically flew outta here.”

Flew?
My spine stiffened.

Johnny’s hands squeezed me reassuringly. “The scent?”

“Nothing I could identify,” Erik said. “You?”

Johnny shook his head. “No.”

“I’m going to increase the perimeter of my wards,” I said.

“Good idea,” Johnny said to me, then to Erik, “You okay?”

I slipped away from them and started gathering my cut stalks.

“Just a spider bite,” Erik answered.

“Aww,” Johnny teased, “little vampire-bug sink fangs into you?”

“That spider,” Erik retorted, “was fucking mega-ginormous.”

“Mega-ginormous?” I asked.

“Beyond giant and enormous,” Erik replied.

“He drums
and
makes up his own words,” Johnny said proudly.

Erik snickered. “It
is
a word.”

“Right,” we both said in response.

Defending himself, Erik said, “It is! I saw it on the Web.”

Poking fun at him, I said, “If that spider was named Charlotte and she was writing on her web, I hope you didn’t squash her.”

“On the
Internet,
” Erik clarified.

I turned to them with the stalks in one hand, the sickle in the other.

“Holy Hecate,” Johnny said.

“Huh?” Erik asked.

“Look at her!” Johnny pointed.

I turned to look behind me.

“Not behind you—
you
,” he said, laughing at me. “You look like Hecate with her sickle and stalks.”

“Yeah, right, because Hecate is
always
depicted in plaid flannel.” Switching subjects to one I knew they’d not ignore, I said, “You guys hungry?”

“Of course,” Erik said, still rubbing at the spider bite. “What do you think we’re doing here?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Demeter promised to monitor the beef roast I put in for dinner and save some for us to eat after practice.” He grinned broadly as he joined me and picked up a few stalks from the ground that I’d missed.

Though I’m a happy vegetarian, I know wæres need red meat. “I knew something was up with all that meat.”

“If you want to know about the meat that’s up—” Johnny whispered.

“I don’t need to hear about your kielbasa.”

“Okay, so rather than an oral description, you’d prefer actual hands-on experience with my ‘ball-sa.’ I’m good with that.”

Even after a few weeks of this kind of innuendo, I still marveled at how quickly he could invent it. No clever reply came to mind. I went for the mundane. “How was practice? Got ‘Debauchery’ worked out?”

“Yup. So much so, we headed out to an open jam night at Peabody’s.” Johnny slipped half the stalks from my grip. We started walking around to the front of the house.

“What did the crowd think?”

“Kicked ass!” Erik said.

Approaching the porch, I pulled the lengths of twine I’d pre-cut from my pocket. Johnny passed his portion of
fodder-shocks off to Erik so he could assist in the tying. Of course he had to put his front to my back and reach around me to “properly” bind the stalks to the porch posts. His body and his hands were very warm against mine.

“I didn’t know you were familiar with Hecate,” I said.

“Any goddess with a fondness for big black dogs is one I like,” he replied.

I directed his rearranging of the few pumpkins I had, making sure I got a good view of Johnny’s backside as I did, then announced, “All right. We can head inside now.”

“What if I want to put more than my head inside?” Johnny asked, his voice lowering.

“Will you two just get a room already?” Erik complained, pushing past us with a groan.