Arcane Circle

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I forgive you, Mother.”

Anger, resentment, pain, and anguish hardened on my skin like a thin film. I expelled the rest of my breath away, and all of that film cracked, flaked off, and fluttered away from me. I was free of all of it.

Sometimes only forgiveness will do.

The dragon released Eris, flipped and uncoiled its body, sinking back into Johnny’s flesh as it had been. Hecate’s touch faded away from me. She strolled back into the vortex, disappearing and taking the darkness of the circle, the wind, and howling dogs with Her.

Johnny stirred again. I lifted my hands; without pressure on Eris’s hands, both dropped to her sides—the right hand completely dark. The hematite tumbled to the floor.

I took up the athame and gestured the tip at the circle edge. “I cut now a door.” To my mother I said, “Go.”

Zhan took my mother out through the space.

While I completed the ritual, thanking the deities, releasing the watchtowers, and taking up the circle, the paramedics put Eris on a gurney and strapped her down, then left.

Johnny sat up and seized me in an embrace. “I am so proud of you.”

I squeezed him tight. “How do you feel?”

“Tingly. Weird.” Then he stiffened, staring at the mangled carcass on the floor. “Who was it?”

I pointed to the rings.

Between the police taking statements and the arrival of Arcane Ink Emporium’s other employees—one of whom showed up for the evening shift and called the rest when he learned what had happened—the next few hours weren’t boring.

Nana made a call to Celia, who was delighted to have Beverley for another night.

I’d wanted to ask Johnny about the spell, about how he felt, but the wæres and Omori had commandeered him, citing that their world was about to be rocked in an unprecedented way. Johnny had simply said, “Yup. Rock is what I do.”

The AIE employees set about getting a new door put on their boss’s apartment. Once the police were done gathering statements, Zhan drove Lance, Nana, and me to the hospital following my brother’s directions.

I can’t believe I have a brother.

He sat up front. I observed him the entire way. He was worried about her, we all were, but I was judging him by other standards.

He’d responded to the initial threat by having his client hold the tattooing mechanism and keep it running so he could get the jump on Johnny. Had to respect the intelligence that had taken. And the courage.

“How old are you, Lance?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“You look older,” I said.

The awkward silence that followed was broken by Nana. “You’ll graduate this year, then?”

“I took advanced courses and graduated last year. I go to the Art Institute now.”

By the time we’d arrived at UPMC Mercy, parked, and found where we needed to be, we were told that Eris was in surgery. We waited for about an hour, then I sought out the vending machines. I bought sodas and goodies that I placed on the coffee table in our midst. No one touched them. There didn’t seem to be anything to talk about. Interrogating Lance would be rude and insensitive and he wasn’t in any shape to question us.

After another hour had passed, I had to take a walk around the hospital just for something to do. I ended up in another waiting area, one with big windows and a view across the parking lot and beyond the highway to the river.

“Ever since she saw you on TV, she’s been talking about you a lot. She told me a long time ago I had an older half-sister who lived with her mother. Also made it clear she had no contact with you or her. Said it was for the best. Then she saw you with the vampire.”

Over my shoulder I saw Lance, arms crossed and holding himself. He was so young. Overwhelmed. On TV, emergency surgeries are wrapped up by the end of the episode. Waiting like this was interminable.

I should have guessed he was Eris’s son. The movies by the DVD player screamed “young man” more than “mid-life crisis.” I doubted now that there was a trucker boyfriend who’d be “home” later in the week. “I don’t know what to say.”

“She was nearly broken when she returned from Ohio a few days ago.” He walked over and stood beside me. We stared out the window together. “Say you’ll give her a chance. It’s all she wants.”

I faced him; he mirrored me. My little brother.

“My life is … complicated at best.”

“She doesn’t care. She just wants to make things right with you.” He frowned. “The guilt is eating at her. And now … after this, if you don’t …” He didn’t finish.

I wrapped him in my arms.

His arms lifted in hesitant jerks, then surrounded me and, for a long minute, he gave up the tears he’d been fighting. He sniffled and eased away. “I hate crying.”

“Must be a family trait.”

He found a box of tissues beside a stack of magazines on a coffee table. After pulling a few he blew his nose. He rejoined me at the window.

“Why does she call you ‘bitch boy’?”

He gave a half-laugh. “When I enrolled at the college I wanted to live in a dorm. She said that as long as she’s paying for my classes and books, I had to live at home. I told her I didn’t want people to think I was a bitch boy. She didn’t know what it meant. I told her it was a rich kid, spoiled, who lives with his mom. She thought that was funny and … it kind of stuck after that.” He drew a shaky breath. “Will you give her a chance?”

They hadn’t seen or heard what was said while Hecate was present. So I told him, “I will.”

When the surgery was concluded, a nurse ushered us into a private waiting room. “The doctor will be in shortly.” He arrived minutes later, his grave expression cluing me in that this was going to be bad. “Ms. Alcmedi came through the surgery fine and has been taken to the recovery area. However, I have some unfortunate news.”

The room was silent as we each held our breath.

“I was told that the emergency crew was forced to wait some fifteen or twenty minutes before Ms. Alcmedi agreed to be transported.”

“That’s correct,” I said softly, thinking of how dark her hand had been.

“The bullet that entered her shoulder”—he touched the spot on his own shoulder to indicate—“transected the medial cord of the brachial plexus—”

“In English?” Nana demanded.

He reworded, unflustered. “The nerves were severed. The brachial artery was also severed. There was no blood flow in her arm for the time that it took for the medics to arrive, none while they waited, none while they transported her here.”

“What are you saying?” Lance was rigid, his voice tight.

“The arm was dead, son.”

Hecate’s words haunted my memory: Now she will sacrifice for him.

The doctor continued, “We couldn’t save it … we removed it.”

I was stunned. Zhan maneuvered Nana into a chair before her knees gave. Lance had paled again.

“She will be moved to her room in an hour—”

“Can we see her then?” Lance’s voice cracked as he cut the doctor off. He was in tears again.

The doctor continued directly to Lance, conveying sincere pity, and I could tell he hated this part of his job. “For now we’re going to keep her sedated. She’s not going to be awake tonight.” He paused, his own voice thickening. “Go home and get some rest.”

Through gritted teeth Lance declared, “I’m not leaving.”

The doctor left.

“I can’t leave her,” he said. “I’m all she’s got. She wouldn’t leave me and … she’s all I’ve got.”

I put my arm around Lance’s shoulder. “No, she’s not.”

We stayed until Eris was moved from the recovery area to her room. Seeing her all bandaged up, with tubes and an IV, was terrible.

And yet, somehow, it was good. We all got to see her, see the new and strange shape of her without her watching us back, judging the pity and tears that inundated us. It would have been worse for us all if she had to endure our first reactions.

In time, weariness set in for everyone. I reasoned with Lance and, though he resisted at first, he eventually relented and agreed to go home. Zhan went to get the car for us.

Lance kissed Eris’s forehead and whispered something to her, then let Nana lead him slowly from the room.

I glanced from my mother to Nana walking down the hall, arm in arm with Lance.

This was the family I was born into.

Some families you join by way of vocation, location, or spiritual preference. And others are forced upon you when Fate decides to throw you into a niche societal group.

None of them are ever perfect.

I could see now that, for whatever reason, Eris had yearned to be valued by the opposite sex. She was the kind of woman whom men like the Rege chewed up and spit out. She sought her validation in the eyes of men when she should have looked inside—but she hadn’t trusted her own judgment. She wouldn’t back up and choose a different path, either. She kept stumbling forward, blindly. She chose a life that was awkward and thorny … a life fueled on nicotine, eyeliner, and alcohol … a life that made her travel the long road, the hard road, and it had quickly worn the soles right off her metaphorical shoes. But in the end—with nothing and closing in on self-destruction—she’d kept going. I had to respect that she did, if not the methods she’d used.

In spite of all that was wrong with the choices that led my mother to the brink of suicide, Fate gave her a fighting chance. And she fought.

I wondered what thoughts actually occurred to her when she had all that cash—payment for the terrible things she’d done to Johnny. I doubted reclaiming her life was the first thought, or even the second. But it had occurred to her at some point and she’d recognized it as the right thing to do.

Successful self-employment had taught her how to have self-worth, as opposed to believing her personal value was determined by the opinion of whatever man she was currently with. But that self-value had been bought with someone else’s life. She’d carried the guilt, and because of it, doubt.

I had to believe that guilt over all the damage she’d done to me as a child was in there, too. And now she’d been absolved on both counts. It cost her, literally, an arm … the one that had made her alter ego, Arcanum, famous.

But I had seen in her eyes, as she gave back to him whatever it was that she had taken, that she’d finally proven to herself that she had her own value and deserved her own respect.

About damned time.

The drive back to their apartment was silent, and long enough that I began to wonder what Eris had given back to Johnny and whether I would detect a difference. Will he be different with his powers free?

When we arrived, we saw that a new door had been installed, the Rege’s carcass had been removed, and his blood cleaned from the floor. The wæres and Omori were camped around the kitchen table playing poker. A bottle of whiskey sat open and everyone had a glass.

But my boyfriend wasn’t with them. “Where’s Johnny?”

“Kitchen,” Kirk said, pointing. He had an impressive stack of quarters in front of him.

I stepped around the table and was surprised to find that Johnny wasn’t cooking. He was leaning against the counter, staring into a glass of whiskey he held. I stopped in the doorway. Without looking up he asked, “She gonna be all right?”

I told him the news. I kept it brief. He nodded, but still didn’t meet my eyes. It was beginning to worry me.

“The Rege put a tracer in your satellite phone.”

I removed it from my purse.

“Inside the battery cover.”

When I opened it, there was a little square of a feltlike material with wires running through it. I jerked it free, dropped it to the floor, and ground my heel on it. I picked it up and dropped it into the garbage can conveniently right next to me.

Johnny swirled his glass, making the ice cubes clink together, then finally his chin lifted. “Any chance my memories will kick in later?”

I remembered the golden key snapping in the lock. Damn it. “That tattoo was denied,” I said. “It wouldn’t unlock, but not because of us. The phoenix’s claws must have damaged the magic.”

He drained the glass. “That’s what I was afraid of.” He put the glass down and motioned me over to him. I approached, expecting a hug.

Instead he took me by the shoulders and turned me around. The wall I couldn’t see because I had been standing in the doorway now filled my sight. My jaw dropped. My face stared back at me, made of, I think, ketchup and mustard.

“I dunno what came over me,” he said. “But it’s a good likeness, huh?”