Vicious Circle

Chapter 32

I heard screaming.

I sat up, turning to the sound and thinking, Not again.

Menessos writhed on my floor, folding in and out of the fetal position.

“Red?”

I turned around. Johnny grinned at me. Even with the swollen eye and dried rivulets of blood on his face, he was charming. I reached up to where the eyebrow ring had been torn out.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “You okay?”

Though I felt pain distantly, as I had that morning, I grinned. “Never better.”

He stood and extended his hand to me. “Then let’s finish this.” He helped me up and eased nearer to the agonized vampire. I moved forward, and Menessos rolled away from me. He crawled from my advance like a worm. I followed him through the dining room and into the living room, where he rolled up against my couch. He could retreat no farther. I stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Johnny asked.

“Nothing.”

“Go on, then. Stake him!”

I twisted the stake in my grip. Spun it between my fingers and stopped with the pointed end in a downward position. My grip tightened.

Menessos continued to moan and scream and writhe. I understood his pain; I’d felt it. He could not even beg for his existence. For the first time he was suffering everything he deserved.

I watched him, wondering if anything he’d said to me tonight had been sincere. Yes, probably some of it had been. The problem was time. What he meant sincerely tonight might be entirely different under the next moon.

Women, especially witches, didn’t let things like that slide. I smiled to myself. Menessos was feeling the wrath of a witch whose scorn he’d earned.

I wondered if he’d killed Vivian. I didn’t care if he had; she’d killed Lorrie. But I thought I could understand how Vivian had become the seriously unhinged person she was. Menessos could be charming, could be delightful, but he could drive even a devoted partner away with the hoops he expected them to jump through, the orders he expected to be obeyed.

“Red,” Johnny urged. “Do it.”

“No.”

“What? We’ve come too far not to kill him now!”

I strode straight to the living room hearth.

“Red! Red, no.” Johnny followed me. “I beg you! Think about what you’re doing! This is the weapon. Stake him, and then you can wear it on your belt and be a threat to every other vamp on the planet. It’s the weapon you should wield.”

I looked him in the eye and tossed the stake into the flames.

Immediately, Menessos’s moans ceased.

Johnny crouched before the hearth, hand poised to snatch the stake from the flames, but it had caught fire as if it were paper. The orange flames licked over it, devouring it like a child with a delicious candy. Johnny gave up on rescuing it. He stood and grabbed my shoulders. “Why did you do that, Red? Why?”

I jerked out of his grasp, but didn’t retreat.

“I’m the Lustrata,” I whispered. “If I wanted him all the way dead, I wouldn’t need that to kill him.”