Vicious Circle

Chapter 17

It had not been an alarm in my head warning about the news I’d just been given, but a real warning that Theo’s life was in danger. The doctor scooped up his bag and hurried off before Celia had finished shouting. Johnny followed him. My focus stayed on Nana, but the question in my eyes changed. She understood, but said, “No. You need time to prepare to do this spell.”

“Then let’s do it! What do we need?”

“Persephone, this isn’t elementary witchcraft; it’s sorcery.”

I fled from her, angry that there was nothing I could do to help Theo right then. I took the steps two at a time. I had to do something. Standing in the doorway, I scoped out the scene.

Theo was wheezing and sweating, and her skin looked ashen. The doc was listening to her chest with his stethoscope. It seemed so rudimentary what he was doing, so passive. My panic rose. I wanted him to act, since I could not. “What’s happening?” I demanded.

“Pulmonary embolism,” he said calmly, “if I had to guess.” He dug into his bag, pulled a hard-shell case out, opened it, removed a vial, and started prepping a syringe.

“What does that mean? What are you doing?”

“She must have had a thrombus—a blood clot—because of her fractured leg or pelvis. It’s come loose and hit her lung.” He pushed the syringe into the IV. “This should break it up.”

“Should?”

Celia wrung her hands and shifted her weight over and over. Behind her, Beverley stood stock-still, face pale, staring at Theo as tears flooded silently down her cheeks.

“Beverley,” I said, maneuvering myself behind her and guiding her with firm hands on her shoulders. “This way.”

In the hall, I turned her toward the room we were to share and shut the door behind us. She took a few steps more after I released her shoulders. With hardly any sound at all she said, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re doing everything we can for her.”

Goliath had done all this, caused so much pain. How did Beverley know him? I wanted to ask, but this wasn’t the right time. “You better get some sleep.” It sounded stupid: Someone in the next room is dying, but you just shut your eyes and sleep. Dream something nice while you’re at it. I couldn’t be that condescending to Beverley. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t a time for sleep. I just…I don’t know.”

Beverley sat beside her box and started pushing things around inside of it. “Why do you think Goliath hurt Theo?”

“On the trip from the hospital, Theo woke up enough to tell me he ran her off the road. Vivian claims he killed your mom too.”

She stiffened. “No. He wouldn’t do that. None of that.”

“Theo saw him, Beverley. She identified him.”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

I sat in the middle of the room. Maybe now was as good a time as any. “How do you know him?”

She turned away and pulled a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt out of the box. “He was dating my mom.”

It was a good thing she wasn’t looking at me. I winced hard enough to give myself whiplash. “What?” I just barely managed not to sound as stunned as I felt.

“Whenever he came to the apartment, he was always nice to me. He actually talked to me like I mattered. Always brought me something too. Not like he was trying to buy me off or anything like that, but like he was thoughtful.”

Every fiber of me said that was impossible, but at the same time, I didn’t think Beverley would lie.

“He told me once he loved my mom and asked me if I was okay with that. Only a guy who really cares about a woman would bother to ask her kid something like that. He wouldn’t have killed her. I know it. I don’t believe that he and Vivian were lovers either. I like your nana, but she’s got to be wrong about that. Vivian is so mean, and she’s just saying mean things.”

“I don’t understand so much of this, Beverley.” We sat in silence for a few minutes.

“I’m going to change into these.” Beverley moved for the door.

“I’ll step out,” I said. I didn’t want her to go to the bathroom to change, it’d mean she would have to walk past the room where Theo was.

“Okay. But don’t leave.”

“I won’t.”

In the hall, I heard Celia say, “Blood pressure’s still dropping!”

Dr. Lincoln responded tersely, “I know!”

My eyes squeezed shut and I whispered another prayer. Finally, the door opened and Beverley said, “I’m done.”

I stepped back into the room with her. She now wore the sweat suit as pajamas, and she sank down onto her inflatable mattress with pink flannel sheets and a quilt. The stuffed animal, still wearing her mother’s shirt, was lying on her pillow.

“Did he come over a lot?” Don’t think about Theo. Don’t fall apart in front of Beverley.

She shrugged. “About once a week, I think. But he might have come over more after my bedtime.”

“What kinds of things did he bring you?”

“Goliath always brought Mom flowers, and he always brought me a little bouquet of colored daisies or tiger lilies for my room. He gave me some books, helped me with homework, and played video games with me. Once he brought me a glass figurine of a unicorn with gold etched into the spiral of the horn. He always had a goofy joke to tell me, and he even gave me an iPod already loaded with a bunch of neat music and super-good earbuds, but that was just to—” She stopped and bit her lip.

I just couldn’t picture Goliath, or any vampire, being so considerate of a human’s needs and wants. Theo had identified him as the one that had run her off the road; to me, that only reinforced his guilt in Lorrie’s murder. “Just to what?”

Beverley blushed. “To keep me from hearing them. But I took the earbuds out sometimes and listened to them. See, he couldn’t be Vivian’s lover, ’cause he was my mom’s lover. He made her so happy. She said she couldn’t date human men anymore because she’d hurt them, but she didn’t have to worry about hurting Goliath. He wouldn’t have killed her. I know it!” She grabbed the stuffed cat and pushed her face into her mother’s shirt. Her shoulders jumped as she cried.

I reached out and rubbed her back, fighting the urge to rush down and question Vivian again, but she wasn’t going anywhere, so I had time for that later. Vivian had said Lorrie had been killed as a warning from some out-of-control Council enforcement agent. But Goliath was a vampire, not an Elder, and the idea that he worked for anyone besides Menessos was ludicrous. Would Menessos have sent Goliath as a favor for some Elder? What would a vampire want from an Elder? Maybe he was trying to get Vivian on the Council despite her stained status. Maybe the Council was politically in bed with the vampires more than I wanted to believe.

There was another possibility—well, okay, there were probably lots of other possibilities, but this one was bright on my radar. What if Beverley was right and Goliath hadn’t killed Lorrie? I had taken Vivian’s word as proof. Now I knew her word was worthless.

But if Goliath wasn’t the murderer, then who was? I didn’t even know where to start if I needed other suspects. What if Vivian had just used this awful situation to her advantage because she could? Because I was that naive?

“Persephone?”

I realized I’d stopped rubbing Beverley’s back. She’d stopped crying, at least.

“Sorry. I’m trying to figure this all out.” I stood. “It’s so…frustrating.”

“Promise me you’ll tell me everything you find out.”

“I promise. I won’t hide anything from you.” At the door, I reached for the light.

“Leave it on. Please.”

Theo’s heart monitor showed a fast but regular rhythm. Dr. Lincoln and Johnny were talking in hushed tones, but stopped when I stepped into the room. Nana was coming up the stairs and followed me in. Celia sat on the edge of the bed holding Theo’s hand. “What do we know?” I asked.

“She had a blood clot; it’s common with leg or pelvis injuries. She ‘threw’ it; it hit her lung. We need an ambulance to get her to the State Shelter where they can perform the emergency surgery she needs.”

“No,” Johnny said. “They have a spell.” He gestured at Nana and me.

“How soon can you do this forced-change ritual?” the doctor asked.

I glanced at Nana. She went to the window seat, leaned and looked up, then stepped back and looked out through the skylights, positioned herself by Theo’s bed, calculating. “About twenty hours from now, the waning moon will be shining through those skylights again. Or we could move her to where the rising moon shines on her.”

“No. Don’t move her.” Dr. Lincoln pursed his lips, and his fingers twitched as he figured in his head. “Look, you have to understand. Without proper radiological testing—” He stopped himself, obviously remembering his audience wasn’t savvy with medical terms. “Without an X-ray or scan, I can’t begin to guess the size of the clot.

I can guess at the location because I can hear the obstruction, but…” He took a deep breath, then said, “Best case: this thing breaks up on its own in the next few hours, but I know for a fact the chances of that are slim.”

“How can you be so sure that’s a fact?” Johnny pressed.

“A pulmonary embolism killed my wife.” His tone was bitter. “The right ventricle of the heart pumps blood to the lungs to get oxygen, and with the clot there, the ventricle will start to fail as it tries to push blood past the blockage. This kind of scenario has a ninety percent mortality rate. Or she could keep throwing clots.” He rubbed his brow.

Johnny took the doc’s biceps in his hand and stared down at him. “What can you do to give her twenty hours?”

The doc considered it. “She needs surgery, but I can’t perform it. Short of that, she needs oxygen. I have tanks, and I think the nasal cannula for a large dog will work for her.” He looked at me. “I’ll stay here and try to buy her a day.”

“But should we wait,” I asked, “until she’s a little stronger?”

“She’s not going to get any stronger.”

Johnny released the doc and took me by the shoulders. “Either she makes it or she dies trying, Red. She’d risk it, and you know it. All or nothing—that’s how Theo has lived her life.” He released me. “And that’s how she’d want to die.”

I looked at Theo’s face, my eyes burning. “I don’t know if—”

“You have to try,” he whispered. “She’ll die for sure if you don’t.”

Did we have what it took to turn away death?

I woke around ten, but I didn’t feel rested. That sucked, because there was so much work to do.

Downstairs, Dr. Lincoln snored loudly in my cozy chair, and Johnny lay stretched over the ends of my couch. Vivian’s chair had been moved to the living room and lowered to its side; one of my worn tan pillows was under her head. She smelled vaguely of valerian. I’d told Johnny about the bottle, and he’d spritzed her with it.

Nana was sitting in the kitchen studying the Codex. A cigarette rested in an ashtray beside her, and the whole of it was one continuous piece of ash. She’d found something so interesting that she’d forgotten the Marlboro.

The aroma of coffee enticed me immediately. As I fixed a bowl of microwave oatmeal, I saw the valerian bottle sitting by the stove. I opened a drawer, took out a marker, and wrote 40 Winks on the bottle. Didn’t want anyone drinking that. With my favorite coffee mug (with Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” on it) and my oatmeal, I sat across from Nana. “Find something interesting?”

Nana reached for her cigarette and swore when she saw it was wasted. “Did I find something interesting,” she repeated slowly, sitting back in her chair in a way that said she was stiff from hours hovering over the book. I don’t think she’d returned to bed. “You don’t appreciate what this book is,” she added angrily. Her leg had started bouncing in irritation; I guessed it was an action I was genetically engineered to copy.

She hadn’t slept and she was grumpy, so I made an extra effort to stay calm. “I don’t understand what it is. Explain it to me.”

Nana put her hands on the pages reverently. “In layman’s terms, this book is, to witches, the equivalent of the Holy Grail or the Cauldron of Annwfn.” She overpronounced the funnily-spelled Celtic word: An-OO-ven.

Okay, that impressed me. That I understood; I mean, Arthur and his men had sought the powerful pearl-edged cauldron, and he had considered the Grail one of the holiest of holy relics. “But I’ve never heard of the Trivium Codex.” Or the Lustrata, for that matter.

“That’s my fault, I suppose.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. I mean it. I never told you our legends and fables, witches’ lore.”

“Why not?”

She sighed heavily, and I could feel her anger dispersing with the sigh. “That was your mother’s job.” She put her hand on mine. Nana wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of person. Not that she never hugged me; she did. She’d just never been overly physical with her affections. So the simple gesture meant a lot. “I did the best I could by you, y’know.”

“I know, Nana.” But I hadn’t known she resented my mother’s leaving as much as I did.

“If I’d known…if I’d seen then what you could become, I’d have prepared you better.” She pulled away and carefully took another cigarette out of her case.

“I’m not sure I believe this whole Lustrata thing anyway.”

She stared at me as she lit the cigarette. The angry bounce of her leg had returned. “I can only take so much guilt, you know.” She blew smoke at the ceiling. “If I’d told you the stories, you’d be proud to step into the role, but as it is—you’re blind.” She paused. “The Elders Council will never believe it. The Codex and the Lustrata in the same day.”

At the mention of the Council, my appetite disappeared. “You haven’t called anyone, have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t.” I stood and took my bowl to the sink.

“But Seph—”

“Don’t, Nana. I mean it. Just don’t. Swear to me.”

“But why not?”

“The last thing I need right now is more people staring at me like I just sprouted tentacles and they’re not sure if they should be fascinated or horrified. And Vivian indicated that there were less-than-honest members among the Elders, that they were involved in Lorrie’s murder. I don’t need to blatantly identify myself to them.”

“I don’t believe a word she says.”

“Just keep it to yourself. All right?” Without waiting for an answer, I walked away. I might have felt better if Nana had at least scolded me for accepting the contract on Goliath. Did being the Lustrata nullify the need for guilt? If so, that was proof that I wasn’t the Lustrata. And if not, then the Lustrata must learn not to feel anything. If that’s the case, count me out.

Nana followed me. “What is wrong with you?”

“I feel like I’m playing some nightmarish game of tag. Everyone keeps telling me I’m it and nothing can undo the fact. I don’t want to be it. Being it scares me.” As a kid, playing that game, I’d always hated being it. When running after the others and trying to tag them, I always felt like we were running from some monster and I was in the back, the first one the monster was going to get.

“Why does that scare you?”

“I don’t know.” It sounded weak because I did know: I didn’t want the responsibility. “Even in my ignorance, I know there’s a lot that comes with that title.” I shouldn’t have said it—I mean, on some level I knew what saying it would lead to—but my totems had me in the habit of being honest.

“Like what?”

“Like responsibility. I don’t know if I’m ready for—”

Nana interrupted me with abrupt laughter. “If you were voted the class clown, it would be because you already were the clown. This is no different, Persephone. You already were you. You already took justice into your own hands with Lorrie’s stalker and were prepared to do it again to avenge her. You know that if you do something once, it’s a mistake, but do it twice and it’s either a habit—” She took another drag from the cigarette.

I rolled my eyes. I really hated that old saying.

“—or a vocation,” she finished.

My head shook back and forth.

“Why are you doubting yourself now? You agreed to the contract. You—”

“I screwed up! Theo may die because of it!”

“You have already taken on the responsibility for that mistake, and you have learned from it. I’m confident you’ll perform the ritual accurately and save her.”

That stunned me. “Me? But I thought you would lead and I would support you—” I stopped when she smiled.

Johnny had told me this, had said I had to do it. I’d thought he meant “you have to do it” as in “you witches have to perform the ritual.” But they all expected me to run the circle, and it had been obvious to everyone but me until just now.