“Fought what?”
“I’ve been stifling my emotions.”
“What represented your emotions?”
I thought about it. “The stream. When I destroyed the shield damming me, it became a gushing river.”
“So the emotions, the current, grew stronger.”
“Yes.”
“When you set your sights on something, Persephone, you are not removed from it. Your will is iron. Willow respects that, enhances that.”
“I held back tears tonight, because of the waerewolves. Because they would see it as a sign of weakness. I want to be strong enough to not fear the repercussions of letting my true feelings show.” I was fighting for my right to have my emotions without being deemed weak.
He cocked his head. “Ah. As I recall, the last time we spoke feelings were at issue then, too.”
“This time people have died. Good people.”
“I told you the hurt you felt over Johnny would fade or fester depending on how you chose to feel about it. Correct?”
“Yes.” I’d been reeling, thinking Johnny had used and betrayed me. Amenemhab had reminded me that this was who I’d been chosen to be and that all of my experiences, even the hurtful ones, had been creating and would continue to hone the warrior I must become to be the Lustrata. He’d made me understand when and how I had transformed the vampire stain into a hex. There was some divine influence to that, to be sure, but I still had the choice. I chose to bear the pain and remain true to who I was. Who I am.
“And how did you choose to feel about it?”
“I let it go. I suppose you’re going to tell me to do the same thing this time?”
“Did you? Or did you deny it?”
“I denied it the ability to hurt me. It’s faded.”
Amenemhab watched me.
I searched my heart. He was right. “Fine. I wanted to dish out some just ‘desserts,’ as in Retaliation Pie, when I knew it was Cammi confronting me at The Dirty Dog. She was challenging me. Sure, her motive had been Johnny’s new status and making an opposing stand over a witch getting the Domn Lup’s affections. That was a territorial pack thing. Not specifically a Cammi-versus-Persephone thing. I could have been anyone and it would have been the same.”
“You have accurately accounted for her motive. What was yours?”
“I didn’t seek her out, but when I had the chance, I was glad to give her some comeuppance.”
“What had she done?”
I knew what the jackal was digging for. To shorten this conversation—there was no avoiding it anyway—I gave it to him. “She challenged me. Not a challenge to the Lustrata, but a challenge to me personally, a challenge to my heart.”
“Just making sure you recognize it. We’re likely to do a lot of work on this before we’re through.”
I swallowed, hard.
“And where are you now?” he asked.
“By a lake.”
He waited, ear pricked.
It hit me: a bigger body of water. “A larger pool of emotions.”
“This lake is fed by mountain streams. By old water. It is not dammed, but it is surrounded by wilderness.”
I looked around me more closely than I had before.
“You were given a trial by fire,” Amenemhab continued. “You fought for who you are, saved the core of yourself from being burned at the stake. I daresay that was the moment the fire forged your iron will.” He put a paw on my thigh. “Now, you have experienced a trial by water. The mirrorlike surface shows us what we know, what we are conscious of. But that water can be deep under the glassy surface wherein lies the subconscious. You broke the dam. You dove in. You chose to drown in your negative emotions rather than to let them pull you along. You made quite a statement.”
My attention fell to the branch in my lap. It was perhaps nine inches long, finger thick and tapered at the end. I reached to clear the moss off it.
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
“Moss is protective. Do you know its other name?”
He wouldn’t mean the scientific name, he’d mean the witch name. I could think of no such name for Spanish moss. “Bat’s wool refers to the short green kind of moss.”
“There’s still a mental moss connection there. Bats represent what?”
“They reveal secrets. Through those revelations, initiation and transition occur.” That was how it was worded in my Book of Shadows.
His paw lifted from my thigh to gesture at the branch I held. “The very essence of magic lives in willow wood, a wood strong with the element of water—”
My thoughts flashed on Aquula.
“—and of the element of spirit. This tree has honored you because you honored yourself and matured beyond your old emotional stream, to be born at her feet into a deeper emotional world.”
When I roused, still in the tub, I instantly raised my hands so I could gauge how long I’d been in here by how pruny my fingers were. I forgot all about the time, however, seeing I held a willow wand with moss coiled around the length.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I woke up to Johnny calling my name softly. He was on his knees beside the couch. “Why’d you move out here?”
Fog lifting slowly, I sat up. “I couldn’t sleep so I took a bath. Then”—after I’d stashed the wand in the bed table with the spell items Beau had given me—“I had the thought that it would be rude to climb into bed beside you with wet hair.” I unwound the towel from my head and finger-combed my hair. “What time is it?”
“Just after nine.”
So my three hours of sleep had expanded to about six. That should be enough.
Johnny yawned and stretched. My eyes rested on his shirtless chest, on the half-dollar-sized pentacle on his sternum. Wings spread from it across his pectorals, and the tail caressed the top two of his six-pack abs. The wings were black, and white ink created highlights, with a deep blue seeming like a sheen on the feathers. The seven-pointed fairy star was lower down. Next, my attention shot to the Celtic armbands, stylized dogs. Or wolves.
“What is it?” he whispered, fingertips stroking the line of my jaw.
“The place I had to go yesterday. Wolfsbane and Absinthe. Beau, from The Dirty Dog, he runs it.”
“I thought you were going to a witch supply shop?”
“It is a witch supply shop.”
Johnny went still. “But he’s not a witch.”
“Well . . . not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“He used to be, but he isn’t anymore.”
Johnny rubbed sleep from his eyes. “I don’t understand. How does somebody stop being a witch?”
I studied his Wedjat tattoos with an all-new wonder. What was that ink keeping from him? “Beau was Bindspoken.”
“Bindspoken,” he repeated, rising from the floor. I bent my legs up to make room for him on the couch. “Still. Why would a Bindspoken witch hang with waeres?” His warm hands rubbed down my lower leg and tickled across the top of my foot, then slid upward again.
“The witches can’t associate with him; my touch had a shocklike effect on him. Maybe it’s camaraderie, a sense of being a social outcast he shares with waeres.”
Johnny shrugged. “Did you get what you needed?”
“Yeah. More than I thought I would.”
He grinned merrily. “That’s what happens when women go shopping.”
Spoiling anyone’s good mood first thing in the morning was terrible, but I had to tell him. No delays. “Johnny, he told me something about you that you don’t know.”
“What?”
I sat closer to him, wrapping my arms around my bent legs, trapping his hand under mine. “He said someone long ago must have figured out that you were the Domn Lup. He suggested that this person had you tattooed as a means to make your magic relinquish its power into the art and colors of the pictures, thereby locking that power up. He said we’d have to find out who did it and persuade them to unlock it.”