Linda Robertson - Shattered Circle

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?”

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.