Shattered Circle (11 page)

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?”

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 split 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.

It couldn’t be as hot within the circle—both of them would be blistering by now.

Menessos had to be displacing that heat magically.

Inside the circle, he rose to his feet. His hands remained arched, and his features were lined with the effort of containing the power of the ley, transferring the heat, and sustaining the spell. Earth fell away around the crevice edges. The light was expanding. He had to step back to keep from falling in.

He couldn’t hold it.

I stopped struggling. Head down, concentrating hard, I tried to send energy to him through the magical bond
we shared, but his shields were clamped tightly with all that he was trying to accomplish.

I could help him if—

Something dark cast shadows in the beam from below. Black mist rose, followed by a huge opaque black hand. The fingers caressed Beverley’s spine. It was a tentative touch, the way someone strokes an animal when they are uncertain if it is tame. The next touch was braver, longer. Then the fingers slithered around her and clasped her tight. It was like watching King Kong grab Fay Wray.

“No!” I shouted. My voice was not nearly as loud as I hoped, as my lungs were compressed by Zhan’s weight on my back.

The giant hand tried to pull Beverley down into the opening in the earth. Judging by Menessos’s hand gestures, he was fighting against letting that happen.

Remembering how I’d used the elements to aid me against Liyliy, I called the mantle around me. I could link the elements readily when it was glowing soft around me.

Zhan gasped and wisely got off of me.

With Menessos having taken the time to triple-cast the circle I was willing to bet he had called the elements to guard his circle. I could use my power to manipulate the elements inside the barrier of the circle.

What I needed mastery of right now was earth. With it I could close that crevice—but that was the
one
element that hadn’t yet tested me. Fire, water, and air—those I could command.

Air
.

Rising to my feet I pointed my index fingers heavenward.

“Hurricane force and twister speed,

Air gust forth and lift her free.

With whirlwind strength but zephyr soft

Hold the child Beverley aloft!

Windstorm fly her straight to me.”

I couldn’t bring her out of the circle, but I wanted it to bring her to this edge and away from the hole in the world.

But it wasn’t to be that easy.

Whatever held her did not want to let go.

Menessos continued fighting from within the circle. He cried out, “Water!”

“Water?” I questioned.

Zhan shouted, “The stream!”