Fatal Circle

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The river dragged me, yanking me desperately along, mocking me, heaving me to my feet and permitting me to slosh a few steps toward the bank. I retched and gagged. Then another wave pounced, shoving me under the surface again. I fought to rise above it, but the water quashed me, twisted and wrung me, stifling every attempt.

These emotions are too powerful. You don’t want them.

Immersed, drowning, I grappled with the rushing current, too stubborn to surrender. Surfacing amid white rapids, I gasped once before plummeting over a high falls. I was pinned at its base, buried under the weight of the water pouring down on me.

Yes. I. Do. They’re mine!

All I had left was this fight. I curled into a ball and scrabbled for the edges of large rocks to hold on to. Using them, I wrenched myself away from the imprisoning, crushing weight of the falls. Then the current plucked me loose and whisked me away again. This time it wouldn’t let me surface.

I thought of what I’d said to Menessos about being his master, about accepting it. The good and the bad. But I hadn’t accepted the good and the bad emotions of my own life. How could I balance a world if I couldn’t balance myself, couldn’t accept the good and the bad of what I had, inevitably, to face?

I kicked my feet and stretched for the bottom, raking already bleeding hands along the riverbed searching for something heavy enough to anchor me. I clung to the first large stone I could keep a grip on.

The current tugged at me, wrenching me and the stone free, dragging me slowly along the bottom, scraping my fingers against other rocks. But still, I would not let go.

I will not be swept away. Not by any emotion! I accept what it means. The good and the bad. The good and the bad!

The river hurled both the stone and me onto the muddy embankment. I landed on my back. My arms flew over my head guiding the stone to thunk into the soft ground there.

A tree leaned over me, branches low. I started to sit up, but the stone rested heavily on a portion of my hair. After slithering around in the mud, struggling without enough leverage to roll away the offending rock, I finally managed and sat up. I wanted to rise and stomp away, but the branches of this mighty tree made standing up impossible.

I lingered, considering. The river had deposited me under a willow tree laden with some kind of wispy moss. As my awareness of the area spread further, what I saw before me was no longer a river, but a lake with water so blue and smooth it made me calmer just to see it. The picturesque lake was framed by distant forested mountains. The sharp shapes revealed a particularly jagged glacier had carved this land.

Nearer to me, a craggy, sun-bleached face of stone thrust up from the water like a giant’s spearhead rammed into the earth. The white reflection of the bare stone on the water’s surface was the only break in the blue, like a single cloud in the sky.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

I twisted in the mud. “Amenemhab!”

“Hello, Persephone. Needed a change of scenery?”

I crawled out from under the low branches and sat near the jackal who served as my totem animal. “I hear mud is supposed to be good for your skin, but I can’t say I like it.” I couldn’t wipe my face clean, my hands were covered in it. I tried to get one hand mostly clean with the other. It wasn’t working. With a glare at the placid and benign surface of the lake, I decided not to attempt washing it off just yet.

“I’m putting this to memory so I can always remember you this way.”

“Naked and covered in mud. Gee, thanks.”

“I see you more as bathed in the element of water, and coated with earth for good measure.” His nasal-haughty and matter-of-fact tone meant he was being literal; totems aren’t typically sarcastic. Didn’t keep me from letting loose my own cynical humor, though.

“You make it sound like some hallowed initiation. Like a baptism. I didn’t think lofty spiritual conventions were supposed to include this much muck.”

He laughed.

I gave up trying to be cleaner. For now. “I’m not sure why I’m in a new place.” The sun was dipping across the lake preparing to set. Fingerlike rays stretched through the moss and the slender willow branches. It was a peaceful scene and, although I was caked with mud, it evoked serenity in me. Or maybe I felt grounded because I was covered in it.

“Examine where you are.”

“The mud capital of the world,” I muttered.

Amenemhab turned away, muzzle closed. Totems didn’t suffer fools who evaded answering their questions.

“By a lake. Near a willow tree. There’s moss. And a rock that nearly smashed my skull.”

He sat patiently.

“The river, now a lake, threw me out.” And the stone.

I pushed back the curtain of lance-shaped leaves. A snapping sound preceded the dropping of a small branch onto the stone. “Sorry,” I mumbled to the tree. I hadn’t meant to break anything.

Shadows swung across the surface of the rock as the breeze rustled the drooping branches on the other side. There was a texture to the stone, mostly hidden under the mud. Dropping to my knees, I crawled under the low branch again to examine it better. The fallen branch had landed across the rock, and pieces of moss wound around the stick’s length. I reached out and pushed it from the stone top.

My fingers tingled.

I touched the stone lightly again. Nothing. I laid my palm on it. Nothing. “Hmmm.” Drawing closer, I wiped at it, smearing the mud over it. After cleaning it as best I could, I saw that the dark matrix of interlocking cubes binding it together was obvious, but the color was lost to the mud. The stone’s roughness meant it hadn’t been a river stone for long. I tilted the stone toward the light.

It didn’t help.

I wondered if the water would have thrown just me out if I’d let go of the stone, or if it was meant to be ejected, as well.

Laying the stone over on the ground again, intending to see its underside, I brushed the fallen branch again. The tingle returned.

Intrigued, I lifted the branch. It buzzed happily in my palm, warm and friendly. It was nearly straight and resembled a wand. But I already had a wand.

The happy energy settled into a pulse, not unlike the purr of a cat.

I resumed my spot beside Amenemhab. His ears pricked expectantly.

“It’s a willow branch.”

“And? The symbolism?”

“Willow is a very emotional wood.” The events of the last few days had frequently elicited shielding against my natural emotions, to be strong and emotionally uncluttered, in order to keep moving forward.

But emotions are fluid; they kept rising like floodwaters. Water. “Of course, water is the metaphor. That’s what the suit of cups in Tarot is all about. How the cups are placed, how the water is contained, or not, means something. If fluidity is absent, you have apathy. And apathy isn’t me; it scares me. So I fought.”

“Fought what?”

“I’ve been stifling my emotions.”

“What represented your emotions?”

I thought about it. “The stream. When I destroyed the shield damming me, it became a gushing river.”

“So the emotions, the current, grew stronger.”

“Yes.”

“When you set your sights on something, Persephone, you are not removed from it. Your will is iron. Willow respects that, enhances that.”

“I held back tears tonight, because of the waerewolves. Because they would see it as a sign of weakness. I want to be strong enough to not fear the repercussions of letting my true feelings show.” I was fighting for my right to have my emotions without being deemed weak.

He cocked his head. “Ah. As I recall, the last time we spoke feelings were at issue then, too.”

“This time people have died. Good people.”

“I told you the hurt you felt over Johnny would fade or fester depending on how you chose to feel about it. Correct?”

“Yes.” I’d been reeling, thinking Johnny had used and betrayed me. Amenemhab had reminded me that this was who I’d been chosen to be and that all of my experiences, even the hurtful ones, had been creating and would continue to hone the warrior I must become to be the Lustrata. He’d made me understand when and how I had transformed the vampire stain into a hex. There was some divine influence to that, to be sure, but I still had the choice. I chose to bear the pain and remain true to who I was. Who I am.

“And how did you choose to feel about it?”

“I let it go. I suppose you’re going to tell me to do the same thing this time?”

“Did you? Or did you deny it?”

“I denied it the ability to hurt me. It’s faded.”

Amenemhab watched me.

I searched my heart. He was right. “Fine. I wanted to dish out some just ‘desserts,’ as in Retaliation Pie, when I knew it was Cammi confronting me at The Dirty Dog. She was challenging me. Sure, her motive had been Johnny’s new status and making an opposing stand over a witch getting the Domn Lup’s affections. That was a territorial pack thing. Not specifically a Cammi-versus-Persephone thing. I could have been anyone and it would have been the same.”

“You have accurately accounted for her motive. What was yours?”

“I didn’t seek her out, but when I had the chance, I was glad to give her some comeuppance.”

“What had she done?”

I knew what the jackal was digging for. To shorten this conversation—there was no avoiding it anyway—I gave it to him. “She challenged me. Not a challenge to the Lustrata, but a challenge to me personally, a challenge to my heart.”

“Just making sure you recognize it. We’re likely to do a lot of work on this before we’re through.”

I swallowed, hard.

“And where are you now?” he asked.

“By a lake.”

He waited, ear pricked.

It hit me: a bigger body of water. “A larger pool of emotions.”

“This lake is fed by mountain streams. By old water. It is not dammed, but it is surrounded by wilderness.”

I looked around me more closely than I had before.

“You were given a trial by fire,” Amenemhab continued. “You fought for who you are, saved the core of yourself from being burned at the stake. I daresay that was the moment the fire forged your iron will.” He put a paw on my thigh. “Now, you have experienced a trial by water. The mirrorlike surface shows us what we know, what we are conscious of. But that water can be deep under the glassy surface wherein lies the subconscious. You broke the dam. You dove in. You chose to drown in your negative emotions rather than to let them pull you along. You made quite a statement.”

My attention fell to the branch in my lap. It was perhaps nine inches long, finger thick and tapered at the end. I reached to clear the moss off it.

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Moss is protective. Do you know its other name?”

He wouldn’t mean the scientific name, he’d mean the witch name. I could think of no such name for Spanish moss. “Bat’s wool refers to the short green kind of moss.”

“There’s still a mental moss connection there. Bats represent what?”

“They reveal secrets. Through those revelations, initiation and transition occur.” That was how it was worded in my Book of Shadows.

His paw lifted from my thigh to gesture at the branch I held. “The very essence of magic lives in willow wood, a wood strong with the element of water—”

My thoughts flashed on Aquula.

“—and of the element of spirit. This tree has honored you because you honored yourself and matured beyond your old emotional stream, to be born at her feet into a deeper emotional world.”

When I roused, still in the tub, I instantly raised my hands so I could gauge how long I’d been in here by how pruny my fingers were. I forgot all about the time, however, seeing I held a willow wand with moss coiled around the length.