Arcane Circle

CHAPTER THIRTY

Eris dropped whatever magic she’d been calling when I knocked her to the floor. She lay stunned and groaning under me.

Crouched over my mother, I craned my neck to check on the wæres. Todd, stricken, rubbed at his arms. Kirk shivered and resettled his overcoat. Behind me, Johnny was standing in the hall, where he could monitor the knocked-out artist and his customer. “You two okay back there?”

They nodded. Thank the Goddess it hadn’t been enough to cause either Todd or Kirk to go into a partial shift.

A hand jerked my hat and wig off. “Persephone!”

I must have been a frightful sight as I glowered down at her. “If you try a spell or call any energies, before I’m through with you, you’ll wish your curling iron had set a faster fire.”

After I let Eris up, she checked on her artist, then his client. She relieved the man of the buzzing thing in his grasp and set it aside. “Ray, you better just go on home.”

“But … are you okay? Is Lance?”

“They’ll be fine,” Johnny said.

Ray’s dirty fingernails made me peg him as a mechanic, and he sized Johnny up like he was considering whether or not he could take him.

I tore the bobby pins from my hair and shook it out, but maneuvered the metal hair fasteners around my fingers with the pointy sides out, just in case.

“Let me bandage your arm then you can flip the closed sign and lock the door on your way out,” Eris said as she pulled bandaging items from a drawer. When she put the last piece of tape on him she patted his shoulder. “You know the drill, keep it covered, blah, blah, blah. And don’t forget to turn the sign and lock the door.”

“B-but,” Ray stammered. He clearly hadn’t made up his mind yet that he couldn’t lick Johnny.

“No buts, Ray,” she said. “And no fighting. Just go. Lance will finish you up soon and I’ll pay for your next tattoo.”

“Walk me out?” he asked.

“I’ll be your escort,” Johnny said. Ray stood, and the defiant glimmer in his eyes made his intentions clear. “Try it, Ray, and you’ll leave with some part of you broken.”

“Ray,” Eris snapped. “We’re fine. They just want an explanation and I owe them that. Don’t do anything stupid, just go home and fuck Julie. Come back tomorrow.”

Johnny walked Ray out. Eris crouched over her artist and smacked Lance’s cheek with increasing force. Lance looked like he’d barely graduated high school. “Shake it off, bitch boy.” His eyelids fluttered. “There you go, show me those baby blues.” He moaned, then blinked and focused on her. “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked as she flipped him off.

“One,” he groaned.

She stepped back, offered him a hand up. On his feet, Lance moaned again, fingers inspecting the back of his head. “Holy shit.” He nearly toppled over. Eris grabbed him and kept him on his feet by slipping her arm around his waist.

“Whoa. I’m glad I never tried out for the football team. What hit me?”

“I did,” Johnny replied, rejoining us.

Lance faced him, then his gaze fell past Johnny.

Nana and Zhan stepped into view. Nana summed up the situation—and Eris’s clinging to the young man—in a glance. “Robbing the cradle now, Eris? I thought you didn’t like kids.”

Eris plopped Lance down in the nearest seat when she entered the break room. Lance propped his elbows on the table in front of him, face in hands. We were right behind her.

To one side sat a trio of tall stainless steel storage cabinets that would be the pride and joy of any car enthusiast’s garage. A refrigerator, a section of countertop with a sink, and a narrow dishwasher were lined up across the opposite wall.

“I’ve known this reckoning would find me sooner or later,” she said as she gave Lance an ice pack. Todd, Johnny, and I claimed the seats on one side of the table; Nana and Zhan sat opposite us. Kirk remained on his feet where he could take quick action if need be. Eris strode around to the table’s other end, her boot heels clacking authoritatively. She sat, then stood again immediately and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray from the drawer.

She shook the pack until one stuck up from the others. After putting it to her lips, she offered the pack to Nana, who refused, muttering, “Menthol shit.”

Eris lit up, took a long drag on it, blew smoke slowly at the ceiling, then rejoined us, her seat slightly angled from the table, her legs crossed.

“When I left you with Nana, I stayed with Larry. He was an armorer and blacksmith who trained horses and jousted at Renaissance Faires. We traveled constantly. I read palms and picked up tattooing from a woman I befriended on the circuit.

“About nine years ago, Larry was cited for felonious assault outside a bar in San Diego, again at a bar in Oakland, and, a few months later, he did the same shit a third time in Sacramento. You cause someone serious bodily harm with a weapon three times back-to-back in Cali, and they send you up for twenty-five years. That’s what they did to him, anyway.”

She shrugged like it was no big deal, but her crossed leg had begun bobbing to a nervous rhythm.

“His sister took the horses and the equipment. She sold them all at auction, and the bitch left me with nothing.” She seemed to be talking to her employee now more than me; he was the only person in the room who wasn’t giving her a pissed-off stare. “My last bit of cash was spent on a hotel room and that night I ran up a tab in the bar even though I hadn’t any hope of paying it. Lucky me, the bartender hadn’t checked to see that my room wasn’t secured with a card. Just before last call, a stranger approached me and asked if he could cover my tab. I figured he wanted sex.” She clicked her tongue. “Instead, he wanted magic.”

She swallowed hard enough to be heard and appeared to be mustering some inner resolve. I thought she was just being melodramatic.

She looked up at Johnny. “This guy paid me—in cash—to perform the magic on you.” She breathed false calm from the cigarette again. “I knew it was unethical, but I had nothing. I was desperate. I bought this with it.” Her index finger made a circle meant to indicate the building around us. “Opened AIE. I’d never known independence before … I couldn’t resist.”

Johnny asked, “Who was the stranger?”

“I don’t know. He never gave me a name.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Convenient.” His tone was mocking.

Eris leaned over the table. “I. Don’t. Remember. What I did to you was awful and I washed it out of my mind. I never wanted to remember, damn it.”

“But I do. I want to remember.”

The palpable glares they exchanged made it clear that neither intended to back down. So I interjected my question. “How did you do it?”

Again, she took a hit of nicotine before answering. “It was done over seven days. Arms first, eyes second, navel, then thighs. Each was bound to an element, set to a purpose. The chest was next, binding the previous four together through it.”

“Thought you washed it from your mind,” Johnny accused.

“Some of it won’t come clean.” She flicked the cigarette in the ashtray. “Your memories were bound down with that one, like an offering to seal the first five together and locking your past away. I’d worked a little on the foo dog and dragon each of the previous days, because the detail was too great to achieve in a single day. On the sixth day, I completed the foo dog. On the seventh day, I completed the dragon. The last three were more spiritual in the purposes I assigned them. And after the last tattoo was empowered and sealed, I locked each tattoo to a chakra point as an extra precaution.”

“How is that even possible?” I demanded.

She pushed the ashes around with the burning end of her cigarette. “Perhaps I misspoke when I said the stranger wanted magic. He wanted sorcery.”

“Who taught you sorcery?” Nana asked.

“The woman I knew on the Faire circuit.”

Silence filled the room for half a minute, then Johnny asked, “Did I talk while you did this to me?”

“You were unconscious.”

“For a whole week?”

“He was drugging you.”

Johnny took another long pause. “Why the variation of cultural symbolism in the tattoos?”

“For the strength in the diversity. Bringing so many pantheons to the task … I’d never even considered doing anything like this. So in my planning, I was thorough. I wanted to be certain. It’s still holding, isn’t it?”

“I can transform in spite of it.”

“The moon’s curse claimed you first, nothing I could do would stop that.”

“Perhaps I misspoke,” he mocked her. “I can still transform at will in spite of it.”

Eris’s leg stopped bobbing. She didn’t even seem to breathe. “At will?”

He nodded.

“Bullshit.”

Johnny stood and approached her end of the table. He put the heel of his hand on the corner and leaned over her so the room’s lights cast his shadow across her. “I’m the Domn Lup, Eris.” As he spoke, his hand darkened and fur sprouted, his nails thickened, black and sharp. “And now you’re going to unbind it all.”

“I can’t.”

“You fucking better figure out how,” he growled, nails piercing into the wooden table top.

“I’m not prepared. I need supplies, and … and … even if I was, I couldn’t guarantee that I could undo it. Spells can be broken, but this was sorcery.”

That wasn’t exactly true, but I wanted to know how long she’d lie.

Johnny shifted to rest his hip on the table edge and held his hand up between them, letting the transformation reverse. “Make a list of what you need.” He snapped his fingers. “Todd. I saw paper and pens at the front desk.” Todd retrieved the items.

Eris studied my boyfriend, who had switched on his intimidating persona like a true master, comfortable in his own power. Her features were stiff with fear. “It’s sorcery,” she repeated.

“I hear tell that witchcraft is like sand that touches the sea and the air and stretches along the coast and inland to the soil. Like waves of power that represent the gods and goddesses of the various pantheons, the tide touches the energy of nature, influencing and shaping it to a witches’ will through rituals and spells. And I’m told that sorcery digs through witchcraft, burrowing deep into places unseen to find the buried treasure—the power—below the surface. Sorcery consumes that power, creating a change then and there, not just influencing a future one.”

It was how I’d explained it to him.

Eris said, “You know a lot for a wærewolf.”

“I’m not just any wærewolf.”

Todd thrust the paper at her and slapped three pens down in front of Eris. “Don’t try anything,” he growled at her. “The other witches here will know if your ‘supplies’ are accurate for your purpose.”

Eris’s look of surprise zeroed in on Nana. “I thought witches and wærewolves weren’t meant to mingle? How the hell did you end up with these guys?”

“If you’d had the guts to stick around, I might respect you enough to answer that.” Nana stood and shuffled away to the front room.