Vicious Circle

Chapter 16

From the box, Nana pulled a wooden stake caked with dried mud.

Goliath hissed—not the kind of theatrical vampire hiss that Hollywood directors make actors embarrass themselves with. This was a hiss that took ten full seconds to build and occur. It started deep in his gullet and rose with such force that Goliath’s entire body shook in a growing convulsive wave. His mouth barely opened, but the sound was hellish: fear and loathing and vengeance with a voice.

After that, he fled in an otherworldly blur.

“What the hell is that thing?” I asked, pointing at the stake.

“This is the product of a spell from the Codex. Come back to the kitchen.”

“Excuse me,” Dr. Lincoln said to Johnny. “Would you, uh…” he stammered, and finally said, “Is he gone for good?”

“Probably for tonight, anyway. Why?” Johnny asked.

“Oh,” I said, getting it. “He needs his stuff to fix up a bag for Theo.”

“A bag of what?”

“To help her body have enough energy to change.”

He clasped the doctor’s shoulder. “I’ll fetch it. A real doctor bag, right?”

“Yeah.” He squinted apologetically. “But I didn’t mean you should fetch, I mean, you’re…and that would be…you know.”

“Red, straighten him out, would you?” Johnny went outside.

Nana headed through the dining room.

“C’mon.” I motioned to the doctor. “You’re a brain with the medical stuff, but you don’t talk with people very well.”

He shrugged and followed. “With owners of patients it’s almost like a script repeating over and over. When it’s not a script…you know. More so with him; he’s so…intimidating.”

“Johnny? I know. I used to think so too.” The words came out and made me realize that I truly felt as if I was over that personal hurdle. Then I thought of something and stopped. “He recommended you because you treat wæres. I thought you two knew each other well.”

“Not ‘well.’ I treated him once, a long time ago. He made it hard to refuse him.”

I studied the doc. “I think that’s a story I’m going to want to hear someday. For now, you helped Theo and you came by at—what? — four in the morning. Nobody here is going to hurt you or intentionally let you get hurt.”

“That’s reassuring.”

It didn’t sound sarcastic, so I led him on to the kitchen, saying, “We had a break-in, doc. We’ve tied the culprit up, so don’t be too alarmed. We’re handling it.” Beverley sat beside Nana at the table, with her head on her arms. She yawned. I wondered how she knew Goliath. There was so much going on, though, and I had to focus on the enemies right now.

Nana had the book open before her and a page of very modern notebook paper in her hand. “Vivian modified a spell of protection for the human servant of a vampire, transforming it from increasing the vampire’s protection into binding the vampire’s own power to use against him,” she said.

Johnny entered with the black leather bag. Dr. Lincoln immediately took it to the counter behind me and rummaged through it. “I need one of the cans of protein supplement I gave you to use in the feeding tube,” he said.

“I’ll get it.” Celia left.

Vivian moaned as if she had something important to say. I pushed her gag down. “What?”

“You guys are so stupid. He’s not about to let that thing slip away. He’ll come back, you know.” Vivian glanced at the clock. “It may be too late for action tonight, but he’ll be back tomorrow. Menessos will be with him. You can’t possibly stand against him.” The last comment she aimed at me.

“We have your stake,” I reminded her.

“But you’re muddling through the motions, guessing. You don’t know anything. All he has to do is torch your house. Bye-bye stake, and his buddies suck dry anyone who comes running out and throw the body back in, disposing neatly of all his threats at once.”

“This is when you bargain information to stop him from doing that in exchange for our untying you, right?”

Vivian smiled. “What a good idea,” she said mockingly.

“Dr. Lincoln?” Johnny said, making Wedjat squints at Vivian. “Do you have any sodium pentothal in that bag?”

“Truth serum?” the doctor asked back with a laugh. “No. I don’t usually need to question my patients.”

“Well, I don’t need science or pharmacology,” Nana said. She left the book and shuffled over to stand behind Vivian. “Might be easier this way anyhow.” She placed her hand atop Vivian’s head, burrowing her fingers through Vivian’s hair to touch her scalp. “Now her protection charm won’t jolt me. Ask her what you want to know.”

“Do you think pulling my hair will make me tell you the truth, you old crone?”

Nana yanked her hair hard. Vivian squealed and shouted, “Bitch!”

Nana smacked Vivian’s face with her free hand. “You were told not to use that language in front of the child.” She leaned closer to Vivian’s ear and said, “And no, I don’t think pulling your hair will make you tell the truth, but it would make me very happy to see your bald, bleeding scalp if you don’t lose the attitude immediately.” She straightened and gave me a firm nod.

Celia returned then with her eyes wide and her expression otherwise surprised but agreeable as she smiled at Nana. I knew her wolf-hearing had picked up what Nana had said. She handed the protein supplement to Dr. Lincoln. He began reading the label and cross-checking it with a book from his bag. I was interested and wanted to watch, but had other, more pressing things to do. “How are you connected to Goliath?” I asked Vivian.

“None of your business.”

With two fingers, Nana tapped Vivian’s brow in the area of the forehead chakra or “third eye.” “They were lovers,” Nana said.

Beverley straightened. Vivian’s mouth flew open. She recovered and said, “Lucky guess.”

“You think so?” Nana indicated I could proceed.

“How are you connected to Menessos?”

“I used to do divination for him,” Vivian said.

Nana tapped her again. “True.” Vivian gave me a curt, unpleasant smile. Nana went on. “And they were lovers, as well. For a long, long time.”

“At least,” Johnny quipped, crossing his arms as he leaned on the counter beside me, “we know how the vamp’s condescending manner actually got rubbed off onto her.”

“How are you doing that?” our prisoner demanded.

Sounding like Mrs. Claus on a shopping mall’s center-court stage, Nana said, “Why, don’t you know? With magic, dear.”

Vivian sneered at her. In unison, the wæres all ooooo’d their approval of Nana’s insult like professional Jerry Springer audience members. I had never been as proud of my grandmother as I was just then. And now I knew why she had always wanted to fuss with my hair when I was a teenager and she was upset with me. It was comforting to know I’d never lied to her, but discomforting to know that, in a way, she was a mind reader.

“Which of them marked you?”

Vivian clamped her mouth shut. Nana tapped her and said, “Menessos.”

I was surprised. If Menessos had stained her, she needed him killed, not Goliath.

“Not Goliath?” I asked. “Are you certain?”

Nana said, “Very. She couldn’t have been marked by Goliath; she’s much, much older than he is. Older than me, even.”

Vivian hmpfed. “You don’t look half as good, either.”

“My insides aren’t tarnished, though.” The wæres howled approval for Nana again. Beverley giggled. I admit, it was entertaining, in a masochistic kind of way. And that was why it disturbed me for Beverley to be seeing this. I got Celia’s attention and gestured toward Beverley. She understood.

“Hey Beverley, why don’t you and I take these Oreos and go sit with Theo for a while? She shouldn’t be alone too long.”

“But—” Beverley looked at me, and I pointed to the ceiling to indicate “upstairs.” “Okay,” she yawned. “But leave the Oreos unless you want ’em. I’m too sleepy.” She hugged me on the way out. “Tell me tomorrow how this went, okay?”

“I promise.” When they had gone, I lifted up the stake that had sent Goliath into a hissing conniption. “Explain this.”

Vivian bit her lower lip, hesitating.

“If you don’t tell them, I will,” Nana reminded her.

“Fine. Fine.” She drew a breath. “With a knife used for the killing blow to a mortal, a knife that stayed in the man until his body was cold, I cut a branch from an ash tree inside of a graveyard—a tree whose roots fed, basically, on the dead. I bored holes into its thickest, strongest parts. I empowered that branch in the full light of the sun and blooded it from my own veins. I stole dirt from Menessos’s pillow, mixed it with blessed water, and coated the stake with it, then set it in the light of the sun again and again to dry the mud.”

“Explain the significance,” I pressed.

“Stoker’s nice little tale said you could release someone who hadn’t yet died from the curse of Dracula by killing Dracula. That’s bullshit. Killing the maker doesn’t release the spawn. Through connections, there would be pain—the greater the bond, the greater the pain—but death or release from the curse would not happen. However, this, with its blessed water and sun empowerment, is a tool every vampire would fear. When you’re inoculated against something, they inject you with a weakened form of whatever disease they’re saving you from, right? Similar idea. With my blood and his home earth mixed with holy water, it’s a tool designed to kill Menessos with great suffering.”

My thoughts ran to Samson Kline and how much he would love to get his hands on this thing. “Because of your blood?”

“It would be reintroducing a diseased part of him into him—connected through his home earth and my blood, which is bound to him, and diseased in that it is mixed with holy water and infused with sunlight. He could not reject it or fight it, because it is him.”

Johnny shifted, and my attention went to him. He smiled at me, his focus flicking between my face and the stake in my hands. “Lustrata,” he said.

“Lustrata,” Nana repeated, breathlessly. “Yes. Sweet crone, yes!” She stared at me like she was seeing me for the first time ever. It creeped me out.

“Okay, everybody wait.” I put my hands up, the stake too, and looked directly at Johnny. “You have to explain this word to me right now.”

He hesitated, and it was the doctor who said, “Latin lustro, ‘purify.’ The nominative singular feminine form would be lustrate. The ancient Romans had the lustrum, a purification of the people…”

“Getting close, Doc,” Johnny said. “More precisely, in this case it’s a woman who cleanses by sacrifice, as in purifying the vampire body by sacrificing it.”

“You mean vampire assassin?” I said flatly. “Thanks, but the regular English words will work for me. I don’t need to candy-coat things with archaic Latin terms. Besides, my conscience won’t be tricked into thinking it’s okay.” When I finished, Johnny and Nana shared a telling glance. I didn’t like it.

She said, “Not ‘a’ Lustrata, Persephone. ‘The’ Lustrata. It’s not a candy-coated term; it is a title.”

“Oh, you guys are so full of shit,” Vivian said. “She cannot be the Lustrata.”

Nana flipped the gag back into Vivian’s mouth.

Everybody knew what we were talking about but me. “More information, please!” The note of panic in my voice bugged me, but I was sure it was only there because of the lack of sleep and fading adrenaline. I hadn’t gotten much coffee either.

Johnny let his crossed arms drop, and he stopped leaning on the counter. “I wrote a song about her. The lyrics are:

A pure-blood witch, a caster of spells

An element master and ringer of bells.

As impurity rises from under the world

The dead above ground, diseases unfurled.

Call upon her, upon the witch of old,

Delivering justice, voicing truths untold,

Fauna and flora’s mighty daughter

The Purifier! The Lustrata!”

Hearing Johnny saying the words, sincere as any poet reciting his own work, was beautiful. It touched me. But…“So, the Lustrata is some kind of glorified vampire killer?”

“There are legends…aren’t there always?” Nana said quietly, the croak of her voice softer than usual. “Legends about the beginning of time, the ending of it. Every culture, every religion has their stories about it—ours is no different. And there are always secret societies, keepers of knowledge hidden from the general populace. There are enemies. There are heroes. The pendulum of power swings.” Her focus sharpened on me, and I felt it like a cold blade at my throat. Nana stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “She who can maintain the balance despite the swinging is the Lustrata.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt buried under all the responsibility I already had: a live-in Nana, a growing puppy, a terribly injured friend, a grieving little girl, and a newspaper column with a weekly deadline. Add maintaining the balance of the world, and whose knees wouldn’t be knocking? It seemed an alarm went off in my head, one more substantial than the triggered wards had been.

“Dr. Lincoln!” Celia cried from the top of the stairs. “The EKG monitor’s alarming!”