Wicked Circle (14 page)

Not long after, he learned that the king had arranged to marry three of his daughters to neighboring princes in one large wedding. Menessos snuck into the girls’ shared chamber. All three were primed for the power trying to manifest within them. He tapped a ley line and bespelled them, drawing a Gift into them.

I interrupted his story. “What do you mean you drew a Gift into them?”

“The fey taught me. It must be done while the power is still nascent. Though it does not often work on magic-bearing humans, the maternal grandmother of the girls had fey blood.”

With pure-blooded fey, he explained, the Gift is decided by hereditary factors. When fey blood is weakened by human, a wizard must use a ley line to “jump-start” the Gifting. This enabled him to choose what kind of power they received.

Because their father had lied to him—and to many others—he gave the girls “truth-sight.” By touch, they could sense the wicked truths a person would otherwise hide.

“You made them the shabbubitum,” I said. To myself, I wondered if the
in signum amoris
was anything like the Gifting spell. It had enabled us telepathically.

“Not then.” He resituated himself on the couch. “I wanted them to embrace their father and to see what he was planning for their husbands. They would learn whatever nefarious plans he had in mind and that he was not the benevolent man he pretended to be. That was to be my revenge.”

I was tired and wanted to sit down but was afraid that if I did, I’d be asleep in minutes. “You purposely turned them against their father?”

“I assumed they would flee from him. I could then put myself conveniently in their path and initiate their training.”

“Heh.” Johnny sat forward. “What went wrong?”

“I had not counted on them being their father’s daughters, cunning and cruel even in their youth. I later learned they discovered their father planned to marry them off and have convenient accidents befall their new husbands, thereby claiming their lands for his own. They also learned the men they were betrothed to had similar thoughts of murdering their father-in-law.”

“Oooo,” I said. “Tragedy, tragedy and more tragedy.”

“The more they used their Gift, the sharper it grew. They learned to detect not only the wicked truth hidden in the mind, but mundane truths and lies.”

“They were mind readers?”

“Close to it.”

He continued the story. The eldest sister plotted a dire course of action. She and her sisters dressed as commoners and secretly visited an old witch at the edge of town. They asked for poison to “kill the vermin in their father’s barn.”

The witch recognized
royalty, even dressed in rags. When she told them she had no poison, the eldest, named Liyliy, grabbed the witch and read her. Liyliy learned that years before, the witch had sold poison to a soldier. Using the art of scrying, the witch eventually discovered the poison had been for the king, who’d used it to kill one of his wives—the mother of the three sisters. The witch felt guilty for her part in the fate that befell the woman and her unborn son.

“This glisten-guy killed his own queen?” Johnny asked. A sinister shiver fluttered down my spine.

“Neriglissar. He had several wives, all of them ‘queens,’ I suppose. His mystics had told him this particular wife would bear a son who would someday kill his father and take his throne. To avoid the fulfillment of this prophecy, he poisoned his wife as she lay in labor.”

My mouth gaped open in shock and disgust.

Menessos told us the sisters had known their mother died in childbirth, and that their little brother had died with her. When Liyliy learned what had truly happened, her rage drove her mad. She struck the old witch and searched the cupboards, meaning to steal the poison. The witch called her by name and the girl was deterred, aware their identities were known.

The witch told them she knew they were up to no good and she wanted no further guilt. The eldest sister lied and said the poison was truly to destroy vermin.

The witch was not sure if this was the truth, but she agreed to make them a poison with the warning there would be consequences if they lied.

“Truth became a part of them when they were Gifted,” Menessos said. “For them to tell lies was like dripping poison on their own souls.
But Liyliy lied repeatedly. She lied to cover their actions, to redirect suspicions, and to protect her sisters when they accidentally revealed too much. Every time, it cost her.”

She again swore to the witch the poison would only be used on the vilest vermin, and she held her sisters’ hands as the witch bound them to their words. The old woman promised the poison would be ready when the sun rose.

At dawn, they found a basket at the witch’s door. Inside it was a small bottle filled with liquid. The cottage was empty and the witch was gone.

During the wedding feast, the sisters served their father and new husbands wine. Liyliy poured poison into her father’s cup and her husband’s cup. Her sisters each poisoned their husbands’ wine. The king toasted his new sons-in-law, and all drank.

The sisters’ lies came to fruition and the witch’s curse descended. A black halo of mist surrounded the sisters as the men died, and by it they were changed. Their beauty was stolen, their bodies transformed. Screeching and terrible, much like the creatures that were later called harpies, they flew away.

“So you didn’t get to claim them and teach them after all,” Johnny pointed out.

“Things would be quite different if I had.”

“They did it to themselves,” I said.

Menessos added, “It gets worse.”

There was a price for living with betrayal and vengeance, for doling out death and despair. Bound in magic and curses as they were, the tormenting of others became the outlet for their suffering. No longer was their touch a gentle purloining of information; it evolved into a painful kind of thievery.
Those from whom they were taking truths were excruciatingly aware of what was being done. The sisters learned quickly how to make the pain last. That was when they became known as the shabbubitum.

They were not immortal, but somehow the combination of curse and magic gave them very long lives. Over the span of the centuries they also learned how to change between human and bird forms.

Eventually, during the Byzantine era, the sisters were employed by a powerful Greek vampire who found it entertaining to let them read her enemies. After a decade of loyal service—and more than a thousand years of countless lies to their victims—they were Made.

The vampire had no idea what she was Making. The latent power awakened with their Gifting was scarred by their curse. Their lies infused it with madness and instability that made them treacherous . . . and in undeath, their treachery would never cease.

After they “read” their Maker to death, Menessos was asked to intervene. He chose to anchor their spirits in three of the six caryatids of the famous porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis at Athens.

“Those marble maidens were as lovely as the sisters once were, but I chose them because I felt they would safely exist for as long as mankind.” He paused. “At the time, a friend warned me that someday the shabbubitum would serve me comeuppance.”

My thoughts centered on the pagan’s Threefold Law:
What you do comes back to you in triplicate.

“Congratulations,” Johnny said, his tone a little too happy. “Someday has arrived.”

J
ohnny listened to the story but heard only how the vamp was setting himself up to play the wounded hero. Persephone was eating it up, too. He was going to have to apologize or something to show her he was concerned about her, too.

Then Persephone yawned.

She had given Menessos what he needed: blood. She’d given Johnny what he needed: sex. In return, he’d pissed her off. Now what she needed was sleep, and it was obvious.

Johnny rose from his seat. “Those of us who have shit to do during the day tomorrow need to go to bed.” He approached her, letting his genuine concern for her show. He reached up gently and massaged her shoulders. She exhaled contentedly, so he positioned himself behind her to massage more efficiently, all the while giving the vamp, who was still holding the hand that fed him, a pointed glare.

“Indeed,” Menessos said, releasing her. “You must rest.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I will ponder my tactics until the dawn forces me to retire.”

“But shouldn’t we—”

“No,” Johnny said with a squeeze.

“The two of you must kiss and make up, Persephone,” Menessos said.

Johnny felt her shudder
when the vamp said her name.

“I will plan for the safety of us all, then retire here. Go. Rest.”

Persephone nodded in acquiescence. Johnny guided her away from the vamp, and the two of them headed up the stairs.

Menessos called, “You will go with me to the haven tomorrow, yes?”

Johnny ground his teeth.

“Yes,” Persephone said.

Johnny didn’t answer. The vamp wouldn’t care if
he
accompanied them or not.

In the bedroom, Goliath lay reclined on Seph’s bed, toying with the cell phone. Johnny glared at him. “Out.”

Silent but wearing a broad smirk, Goliath complied.

Johnny shut and locked the door behind him, then wrapped his arms around Seph and nuzzled into her hair. The smell of her was so sweet that he couldn’t help tasting the tip of her earlobe.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Sorry we had words, or sorry that jealousy made you act like an asshole?”

“Both.” She waited expectantly, as if he should expound on the subject, so he did. “There’s a whole lot of shit going on that I can’t control.”

“The rest of us have that too.”

“I know. I know.” He sat on the edge of her bed. No one in the pack, male or female, would dare presume to make a decision that affected the pack without consulting him.
But Red’s not pack.
That was part of the allure and part of the problem. He wanted a similar authority over her, yet he knew he’d never have it. “You got bent when Menessos put that
spell on us because he didn’t get permission, but it let us talk telepathically, and that was kind of cool. Then you go and get rid of it without asking me.” He gave himself a point for keeping his tone even, and went on. “I get it that you had reason, but you did the same thing he did, and even on top of all the current hubbub, I want you to let me be part of the decision-making process.”

At the last, her face fell. She sat on the bed beside him. “I did a ritual with my mom and Nana. It didn’t go like I’d planned, and the short version is I ended up in meditation and I discovered what Menessos had done, and I acted while it was there before me to be dealt with. The way it happened, I didn’t have the option to ask you.
But
.” She bit her lip. “You remember what I told you about Michael LaCroix?”

The name caused a new pang of jealousy in his heart. “I remember he’s your ex-boyfriend from college and our adevar’s big brother.”

“We broke up because I wanted to be kept in the loop of his business decisions. I didn’t want to make his decisions, but he opened a whole second location without so much as a ‘Hey, the business is doing well.’ I knew we couldn’t have a future like that.” She touched his leg. “I want to have a future with you. I’ll consult you as much as I can, but sometimes I have to make on-the-spot decisions. So do you. I trust you, Johnny, or you wouldn’t be in my bedroom right now. Don’t you trust me?”

That was a loaded question. There was no way to say anything except yes. He did trust her, but the vamp would use any opportunity he could to muscle his way between them. With his self-control wavering, he wasn’t sure if all these
doubts were all in his head or if they were based in some reality.

Clearly troubled by his hesitation, Seph seemed like she might cry.

Johnny put his arm around her shoulders and answered, “Yes. Yes, of course I trust you.”

At 10:00 a.m., Johnny’s cell phone rang. He scrabbled at the bedside table, came up with nothing and figured out it was still in the pocket of the jeans he’d dropped on the floor before crawling into bed. Leaning over the mattress edge, he snatched the bottom of one pant leg and dragged the denim close enough to dig into the pocket. “Hello?”

“You asleep?” Todd asked.

“Not anymore,” he told the local pack’s second-in-command.

“The Zvonul made their official announcement a few hours ago. CNN picked up the story for their around-the-world snippets, and ten minutes ago they flashed your picture and name full screen. Thought you should know the world has gotten a glimpse at the Domn Lup.”

Johnny grunted in reply.

Todd hung up.

“Could you do the forced-change spell for the men today?”

Persephone blinked away sleep. “Huh? What happened to Monday?”

Johnny had just finished showering. He rubbed a towel over his head and said, “I checked, and the moon will be midsky about four o’clock today. If you and the men go to the roof of the
den, you could do the spell and be done before Menessos even rises. And the den is closer to the haven than here.”

“Menessos said he wanted us to go to the haven together.”

“No, he said he wanted
you
to go with him. Personally, I think you’d be better off to stay the hell away from the haven and the shabbubitum.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

He knew he couldn’t talk her out of it, but he had to try. “It’s not safe. They’re going to blame you no matter what.”

“Menessos said he’d have a plan.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“I do.”

Of course she did.

“Those harpy things are coming tonight,” she argued. “I need to get ready for them.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“I left most of my supplies in Pittsburgh. I thought I’d run to Wolfsbane and Absinthe to restock, charge up my charms and maybe work up a potion, in case I need it tonight.”

“But
Menessos
will have a plan.”

She frowned at him.

“Look, you were going to do magic anyway. This is just one more thing.”