Linda Robertson - Vicious Circle

This book is dedicated to…

my parents, of course.

Mom, thanks for being an avid reader yourself, and for keeping imaginative little me supplied with books. More moms should be like you.

Dad, I know you’re proud of me.

And to my boys.

See? Dreams can come true with hard work and perseverance.

Red-Caped Hero Thanks

to Mr. Thomas Grandy, my high school creative writing teacher. Because of you, I kept on believing in myself all these many long years.

and to Linda Partlow. Not all friends are created equal, but writing friends are the best kind. You not only read but offered support, critiques, sarcasm, witty ridicule (whether or not I deserved it), and the occasional “now-I-really-think-you’re-weird” shrugs. How cool is that?

Java-n-Chocolate Thanks

to my writing group, the Ohio Writers Network. Michelle, Laura, Melissa, Rachel, Emily, Faith, and Lisa. This bunch is so cool they even have a mascot….

Margarita Thanks

to my editor, Paula Guran.

Where’s my thimbleful? José!

Howling Thanks

to Jim Lewis. You love me exactly as I am. Wow.

Reverent Gratitude

to my Muse who has many names.

Half past six A.M. A ruggedly handsome man…Arthur, yes, Arthur…held me in his strong arms, gazing into my eyes with sensitivity and understanding and desire, and he was about to kiss me, and—

The sound of the garage door opening ruined my perfectly romantic dream. Blissful slumber broken, I shot out of bed ready to defend my home.

With a baseball bat in my white-knuckled grip, I eased an erratic path—to avoid the squeaky spots—down the stairs. I crept toward the kitchen; the eastern windows were still dark. Ahead, a door on the right connected the house to the garage. I could hear someone starting up the steps out there.

Holding my breath, I hefted the bat.

The door opened.

“Damn wærewolves dumping Krispy Kreme boxes on the lawn.”

“Nana.” I sighed, relaxing and lowering the bat. I slipped it behind the door.

She didn’t even glance my way as she stepped in with the newspaper and a ragged-looking pastry box. Grass blades clung to her pink fuzzy slippers. The paperboy must have missed the driveway again.

She’d just moved in yesterday, so I wasn’t used to her being here yet. Clearly, an eighty-four-year-old woman didn’t need as much sleep as I expected.

With a Marlboro pinched in the corner of her mouth, she shuffled across the kitchen and asked, “So you get up early nowadays, Persephone?”

I snorted. “No. And I didn’t know that you stopped sleeping in.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, the crack of dawn is my new alarm clock.”

“You’re still early.”

“Blame the nurses,” Nana said. Then she muttered, “They act like it’s a boarding school. Get up. Take your medicine. Eat. Exercise. Play bingo. I’m paying for it, I should get to sleep and smoke whenever I want.” She grumbled all the way to the trash can, where she shook the doughnut box hard enough to make its cellophane top crackle. “This sat out there for at least two goddamned days, you know.” This time she spoke louder, so I knew she was talking to me.

“I’ve been busy,” I said, “moving your things from Woodhaven.” Mentioning the moving reminded me my muscles were sore. The rude awakening and my tense acts of stealth hadn’t helped.

She looked at me and frowned, but I wasn’t sure if her dour expression was due to my words or my choice of pajamas—lavender panties and a cutoff purple tank top with the words Round Table Groupie in ancient-style letters on a shield. It’s an accurate description. I’ve seen every movie and documentary ever made about Arthur Pendragon and amassed a collection of books and artwork based on Arthurian legends. No artist or actor has ever come close to capturing Arthur the way my dreams have, though. Funny that.

Nana tsk-tsked. “Where’s your nightgown?”

I had a flashback of the long flannel gowns she’d made me to sleep in as a child. They were straight out of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” I wondered if, in her youth, she’d won a lifetime membership to a secret club called Clothiers for the Frumpy Woman. “These are my pajamas.”

“That’s all you sleep in?”

“I lived alone until yesterday, Nana, so what I sleep in hasn’t been an issue.” Still, the cold October air swirling in made me wish I were wearing my robe. I shut the door she’d left open.

Nana shoved the pastry box into the trash. Little pieces of cut grass cascaded to the kitchen floor. “Damn filthy animals anyway.” As she shuffled back to me, her hand smoothed priggishly up and over her mound of white hair. I knew what was coming next. I would have mocked her as she said it, but she was looking right at me. “Witches and wolves aren’t meant to mingle.” Nana still held to the old adage from long before the public emergence of other-than-human communities.

“Stop it,” I said. “They’re my friends.”

She took the cigarette from her lips and blew smoke up at the ceiling, then pointed the ash-end at the box in the trash can. “Some friends.”

I gave her an apathetic look and put my hands on my hips. I had started this day ready for a fight.

“They obviously don’t think much of you,” Nana added. She turned down the hallway.

That wasn’t true. “I can’t help that you don’t like wæres. You’re entitled to your own opinions, but don’t expect me to feel the same way.”

She snorted.

I suddenly realized that I had picked up that rude response from her.

Nana shuffled from the kitchen into the dining room, then into the living room, newspaper still folded under her arm. “To them, you’re just some weirdo version of a confessional priest.”

Despite being fully aware I was being baited, I followed her. Not because I wanted a fight; I really didn’t. But I also didn’t back down when someone picked a fight with me. I felt compelled to stop this now, before it became a routine. I’d been forced to listen to her spout her anti-wære opinion repeatedly during my years growing up in her house. Now, well, this was my house.

I stopped in the doorway. My old saltbox farmhouse was decorated in an eclectic attempt at Victorian. The living room—with its deep-red walls, stone hearth, and bookshelves filled with everything I own on Arthur—was my sanctuary. Posters of Camelot-themed paintings by John William Waterhouse, Sir Frank Dicksee, and other artists hung in big black-and-gold frames. This was usually a soothing room for me, but not this morning. “Confessional priest? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She waved me off, then answered anyway. “You kennel them, alleviating their consciences so they can ‘go on.’” Despite the pseudo-drama she added to the last two words, she might have sounded somewhat sage-like but for her verbal stumbling over the word “consciences”—adding a few more syllables than needed. In an attempt to recover, she quickly added, “Besides, friends don’t leave garbage on your lawn. Real friends are more respectful than that.”

Nana’s slippers had tracked cut grass through my house. Sore muscles made me cranky. I snarled, “I’d have thought that family, more so than friends, should be respectful.”

“They should.”

“You’re not.”

She turned. “What?”