Vicious Circle

Vivian’s eyes went wide and she tried to complain or plead or something, but her head just dropped forward.

I threw the empty syringe into the trash and turned to leave.

“You’d better empty out your room,” Nana said. “So there’s space to make the circle.”

Her words made my stomping steps halt. One life had already been taken, and justice would be served one way or another. But a second life waited. I’d forgotten that. “Yeah,” I agreed, anger washing out of me. “I want to check on Beverley first; then I’ll see to it the room’s ready.”

“I’ll check on the girl,” she said, rising stiffly from the table. “You tend to your room.”

Joh

“Everything” included a dresser and side tables. “In Nana’s room or the hallway.”

They moved the dresser out into the far end of the upstairs hall. Then they came back and Erik went for the far bedside table while Joh

“Hey. Be careful with that picture. The hinge is loose on the back.”

“Right,” he said, assessing it. “Who is it?”

“My dad.”

He started to say something but stopped. Nana came in. “The child is resting.”

“Goddess, she’s been through so much.”

Nana patted my arm. “Don’t worry so much for her. Children often cope better than adults.” She paused as Erik excused himself around her. “They have the ability to accept things more easily because they’re growing and learning and everything is always changing with them anyway. It’s when we stop growing and stop learning that we start forgetting how to ride with the changes.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Nana, but she lost her mother. It’s not like she’s just changing schools or some individual thing is changing. It’s everything.”

Her hand withdrew slowly. “I suppose you know what that’s like.”

Focusing on her steadily, I said, “I do.”

“I can see i

“I hope so.”

“I’m sorry I missed it in your eyes. I’m sure the evidence of your strength was there, I just…I wasn’t looking.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Nana smiled. “I better get back to my own preparations.”

I strolled to Theo’s right side, where I would stand for the ritual, and looked up through the skylights. Not yet. My attention turned to Theo, and I took her hand. “I’ll do all I can,” I whispered.

Erik and Joh

“You’re sure this won’t make the rest of us change too?” Erik asked.

“I’m sure.” My voice sounded weary.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Seph. I do. We all do, or we wouldn’t be doing this. It’s just that I can’t seem to wrap my head around how witches do what they do.”

“It’s not any different from how you guys change back and forth. I mean, the light of the sun shines on the whole surface of an orbiting heavenly body, which reflects that light, triggering something inside of you, and your entire physical body changes. Not because of a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion, not because of technology or a spoken power word. Because of the volume of sunlight reflected into the darkness. It is magic.”

“I gotta write that down,” Joh

“Why doesn’t it initiate partial changes, then, when it’s not full but still shining?” Erik asked.

“Because it’s not the whole surface, it’s not magic. Moonshine isn’t enough to change you or even start a change. But there is a universal reaction, an elemental and magical reaction, when the entire face of the lunar surface is reflecting. It’s like it amplifies a hundredfold because everything is in place to allow it.”

“When you put it like that, I do kind of get it,” he said.

“Persephone,” Nana called from the bottom of the stairs.

“Yeah?” I went into the hall, my thoughts for her knees. I hoped she wasn’t climbing the stairs again, especially this late. We were all so tired.

“We have a problem. You better come down here.”

It didn’t surprise me when Joh

“The root word is pecco, so that is ‘to do wrong’ here, then here: venia, ‘pardon’ or ‘forgive’—”

“Hey Doc, hold the Latin and try it in plain English,” Joh

“It means,” the doctor said, “that Goliath must be present during the ritual and ask Theo to forgive him.”

The emotion in the room sank in the silence that followed. My heart and my hope for Theo sank with it.

“You’re saying in order to save Theo, we have to get the vamp asshole who did this to her to participate in the ritual to heal her,” Joh

“That’s how I read it,” the doc shrugged.

“My Latin is rusty,” said Nana. “He minored in Latin at OSU. Trust his interpretation.” She looked at me like she was going to be sick.

“I thank you for that, Demeter,” Dr. Lincoln said, “but my education didn’t cover local dialects and distinctions that witch Latin or even medieval Latin might be laden with.”

“You’re all missing the point,” I stressed. “We can’t move Theo. To do this means I have to ask the vampire to enter my home.” Damn! That was, literally, a violating thought.

The collective sigh that followed thickened the gloom. Silence followed. Celia ventured, “Well, that’s stupid.”

“What?”

“You can’t have a vampire in your ritual anyway. They’re dead.”

“Actually,” Nana said, “they are not.”

“What?” Joh

“For the night hours, they’re alive,” Nana stated.

“They’re just reanimated,” I said. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it?” Nana said.

Tension suddenly replaced the defeated feeling in the room. “Explain.”

“The living dead, Persephone. You saw how Goliath treated the girl. He’s a conscious creature for the night hours. At the very least, a vampire’s brain stem functions. Maybe we all need to look at them differently, if just for tonight. See them as the cursed people they are.” She gestured at the book. “Cursed by the sun—cursed to die every single day, to lose the reassurance of the warmth of sunlight on their faces. Cursed people, but people nonetheless.”

“People who eat other people,” I insisted.

“No,” Joh

I rubbed my forehead. Getting the vampires to help was not what I wanted to do. But I had no time. Theo had no time. “The problem,” I said, “is this: I’ll have to give up the very thing defending us. I’ll have to ask them to enter.”

“Only Goliath,” Joh

“And once he’s in, all he has to do is invite his master, so I might as well ask them both and hope that my courtesy wins me some brownie points.” No one argued with that. “And once I’ve uttered those powerful words, once I ask them into my home, there’s nothing stopping them from simply coming in, taking Vivian and the book, and leaving.”