“Help! Help me!” the dark figure called.

I turned sideways and slipped between two of the red-cloaked figures. Both turned to me then and held me back. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Please! Please help me!” The figure in black struggled more as the flames neared. The hood fell away, and I beheld my own face.

I backed away.

“No! No! Help me!”

The bound me began screaming as the flames caught her black robe. She struggled harder, more desperately. The chest of the cloak opened and revealed a bloody ankh on her chest. This was me, burning at the stake, a stake that I now realized was shaped like the one Vivian had created as a weapon against Menessos. That was me up there, the stained part of myself, the shadowed part of me, being destroyed.

I watched, numb, aghast at the barbaric execution. That people had once done this, brought their children and came to the town squares to watch someone be burnt alive as entertainment, horrified me.

The black robe burned in earnest now, and the other me’s hair was smoking. Her head whipped back and forth as if she could put out the flames, but she couldn’t. The exposed ankh on her chest turned to ash. The flames burned her feet directly, blackening her skin. The weakening screams of the other me became a renewed frenzy of shrieks. The stench of burning hair and flesh wafted toward me, and I gagged.

If only I could blot out the pitiful sound of her! Even as I thought it, her voice weakened, her throat becoming raw and her voice hoarse. I knew the flames were eating the air, leaving nothing but smoke for her to breathe.

I was witnessing the death of a part of me that I loathed and wanted gone. But not like this. No, not so cruelly as this.

She, the one bound there, was more than Menessos’s mark. She was the part of me that had slain a stalker. The part of me that kept a baseball bat for defense and smarted off to people who deserved it. She was the part of me that had agreed to kill Goliath. Together, we were one. I was not complete without her.

I would not let the stake take more of me than I was willing to give. I would not let it destroy all the parts of me that Menessos had attached himself to.

I am Persephone Isis Alcmedi. And I am all that my roots have made me.

I yanked down the hood of the nearest red-cloaked figure. Again, I saw myself. I punched this me in the face and kicked her feet from under her. As another me turned to stop the assault, I faked to the right and rushed past her and leapt up onto the burning timbers. The flames died. The ropes binding the dying me turned to dust in my hands. I took this other me into my arms and fled.

The red-cloaked me’s did not try to stop our retreat. I cradled my other self to my chest and returned to the stream, thinking the Goddess would be there and would know what to do.

By the time I arrived, the night was full and only the soft glow of the moon provided any light. I eased down at the edge of the water. “Where are you?” I called across the stream. “I need you!”

I looked at the horribly burned me now shivering in my arms. She was unrecognizable. So pitiful. Her hair gone, her skin a mass of blisters and blackness. She breathed shallow, wheezing breaths, and I knew I’d acted too late. I’d hesitated too long. I’d stopped and thought when I should have acted! I knew it was wrong.

“I’m so sorry.” Tears filled my eyes. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” I reached to the water and let drops from my hand moisten her lips.

The other me moved—fingers only, but she touched my arm. The swollen blisters that were her fingers dragged sickeningly across my skin. “You know now,” she whispered.

“I do. I know now. I know I need you.” And I knew what I had to do. “I won’t let you go.”

My palm rested lightly on her chest where the ankh had been. “Come,” I said. “Come back to me.” Our blood surged. Our bodies trembled.

She melted into me—slowly, weakly. I took her burns into me, unafraid, for they had always been mine. “You are mine.”

An inner glowing overtook me, but it was not like the pompous rays of the sun. This was a cooling, luminous light, the moon’s light. This light filled me from the inside out—cool, soothing, and healing, like aloe. I marveled to know that it was no accident, the names given me at birth. Both Persephone and Isis are lunar goddesses, and tonight the Moon embraced me and healed me and told me I was Her own.

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.”