Walking Dead

“Your grandma had good taste.”

Amusement danced in Mel’s eyes. “Or a good sense of smell.”

Gary chortled. I made a face. Melinda, pleased, walked around the perimeter of the room, lighting a handful of candles that had been blown out when the door opened. I came farther in, stopping at the edge of the chalk outline. “I don’t know what I expected,” I said after a minute, “but this isn’t it.”

“You expected a pentagram,” Melinda said amiably. “It’s the only power circle anybody ever uses on television, but it’s not the only one available to us. You should know that, Joanne.”

I closed my hand over the necklace pendant at the hollow of my throat. “I guess I should.”

The drawing inscribed on her temple floor—because that was the only word I could use for the room, temple—was the same quartered circle I wore. It was a symbol used by both sides of my disparate heritage: for the Cherokee it was a power circle, embodying the directions, the elements and the shape of the world. Actually, as far as I could tell, it represented exactly the same things for the Irish, though it had also been adopted as a particularly Celtic symbol of Christianity. My mother’s grave was marked with a Celtic cross, as were many others far older than hers. “What does it do?”

Melinda shrugged. “Protects. Captures. Honors. The same thing the pentagram does, really. They call the pentagram the devil’s circle, but it’s only a symbol. This one could be used for corruption, too. Anything can be, and almost nothing is so weighted by external perception that it leans toward good or evil on its own.”

“Almost nothing?” That was Gary, asking the question I wanted to. I sort of felt like I should know this one.

“Traditional Christian crosses, Stars of David, the star and crescent.” A smile flashed across Melinda’s face. “Buddha statues. Even with so much religious strife and conflict in the world, those symbols are nearly impossible to use as focal points for wicked things. It’s why they’re reversed in so many hate rituals, the cross upside down, the star with its point toward the ground.” She wobbled a hand. “Not that the Star of David can be reversed, but a true devil’s circle puts the spire of a five-point star at the bottom. It’s only by altering their aspects somehow that darker magics can gain a hold on them.”

“What about people who do evil in the name of those symbols without reversing them? How can they do that without staining the original?” I had never thought about any of this. I was a little in awe that Melinda had.

“They can’t.” She shrugged. “But through the millennia, there have been more good people, with good hearts and good faith, who have stood beneath these shapes and put their trust in them, than there have been evil. Sometimes the balance comes very close. A token of peace can be corrupted in a single generation, if enough people come to see it as a representation of evil.”

“The swastika,” Gary said. Melinda nodded, and a sort of guilty surge of relief raced through me. That one, at least, I knew. It had been a symbol of healing, kind of an ancient Red Cross, and now it was the universally recognized sign of one of the worst evils man had ever done. If there was ever a symbol that needed rehabilitating, the swastika was it, but I wasn’t sure it should be. Maybe it was better to have it always raise hairs on the arms and give a prickle of discomfort, to remind us of how badly we could go wrong.

Billy came down the stairs, surprisingly light-footed for a guy as heavy as he was. “Robert wheedled another half hour of reading time out of me. The rest of them are asleep.”

“Robert would’ve read for another half hour whether you gave him permission or not.” Melinda smiled and stood on her toes to kiss her husband, who grinned.

“I know, but now he feels like we’ve entered a conspiracy. It’s a male-bonding thing.”

Mel rolled her eyes in my direction, then tipped her head at the door. I shut it. The room warmed up noticeably within a few seconds. Maybe sweating was an important part of summoning a goddess, although that sent my mind down paths I didn’t think it should follow. I mean, candlelight, sweat and deity-summoning all went together if you were summoning a particular sort of goddess, but Mel’d never mentioned being a disciple of Aphrodite. Of course, she’d never mentioned being anybody’s disciple, so what the hell did I know?

“Since we have four of us, we might as well make use of that. Two men and two women.” Mel dimpled. “That works out well.”

Gary and I exchanged glances. “I keep telling people it’s not like that, but nobody believes me.”

“I don’t tell ’em any such thing. Who’m I to shatter their illusions, ’specially when their illusions set me up with a pretty girl?”

“You could do worse,” Mel told me. “I mean, not that you’ve done badly with Edward.”

The smile that’d come up at Gary’s flattery fell away again while Billy made a small no! stop! gesture toward Mel that I probably wasn’t supposed to see. She looked between us in bewilderment. I muttered, “Yeah, that thing with Thor didn’t turn out so well in the end. We broke up tonight.” Chasing ghosts and cauldrons was a pretty good distraction, but the reminder made me want to crawl in a hole and pull the earth over my head for a while.

Dismay washed over Melinda’s face. “Oh, Joanne. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. What happened?”

“It…” Pulling the world over my head wasn’t going to work, and I had more important things to do than dwell. “It doesn’t really matter very much right now. Let’s deal with the zombie-producing cauldron first.” I caught Gary’s frown and exhaled in exasperation. “Look, teacher-man, I know you don’t like me running away from problems, and I promise I’ll get all maudlin and heartbroken tomorrow, okay? This is more important.” While that was true, it didn’t stop my head from stuffing up like somebody’d filled it with cotton bandages. I snorted snot into a thick murky sinus cavity and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Yeah, that was me, Joanne Walker, Tough Girl. “What do we need to do, Mel?”

She said, “Choose a direction,” and while she was probably talking to all of us, I said, “North,” without thinking about it, which made her smile. Defensive, I said, “What?” and her smile broadened.

“Nothing. It’s just that north is the direction usually associated with finding wisdom.”

Oh, God. My esoteric self was making Meaningful Choices in the midst of my minor emotional breakdown. I hoped the Maker of the world, or whoever’d mixed me up, found that kind of thing amusing, because I didn’t. Melinda pointed to the bar of the circle that pointed north, and I stomped over to it and folded my arms like a sulking child. Which I was.

“East,” Gary said, and I couldn’t help notice that when we were both facing the center of the circle, that put him on my left, beside my heart. Apparently not even the universe believed it wasn’t like that. Jeez.

Melinda was smiling again. “Sunrise, the opening of the ways, the opening of the heart. Bill, I think you’d better take west. It’ll balance us man and woman, and you can be the guide to closing what Gary’s opened.” She stepped up to the circle directly across from me, and power danced over my skin as Billy took his place to my right.

“I thought we were going ask a goddess for help,” I said uncomfortably. “How come this feels a little too much like it’s about me?” I didn’t think I was being egocentric, not when Melinda’d arranged the circle around my initial choice.

“You’re the strongest of us.” Somehow Melinda managed to be reassuring, placating and teasing all at once. “Besides, I could have come up with something equally impressive-sounding if Gary’d chosen somewhere else. Youth to age, if he’d taken the south, man to wife if Billy and I were facing each other. Want me to go on?”

A blush curdled my cheeks. “That’s okay, thanks. What now?”

“We may as well sit down. This can take a while.” Melinda did as she suggested, tugging a pillow beneath herself. Gary and Billy followed suit, but I froze halfway into my own crouch.

Light shimmered at the heart of Melinda’s power circle before she even began speaking, so faint I called up the Sight in hopes of seeing more clearly. For long seconds nothing resolved, only scattered bits of brilliance, like the last rays of sunset on the water. Without really thinking, I knelt and put my fingertips on the chalk outline. Magic sparked as if I’d touched a live wire, a gentle shock that pulled silver-blue power from me. It bolted around the circle, hiccuping with recognition as it touched first Gary and Billy, then whisked around to greet Melinda and meet itself.

Silver shot up, crashing into the ceiling. I looked up for the first time, finding another circle inscribed above us, capturing the magic that poured out of me. A nattering little part of my mind thought I should be afraid: spilling power like that was usually a bad sign. This time, though, it felt more like healing; like it had when I’d tried to breathe life back into Cernunnos’s forest, or like when I shared a bit of my own strength with Gary to shore up his weakened heart. Encouraged, I leaned in to it, pressing my fingers against the concrete.

Magic cracked, an audible sound of thunder, and slammed through the quartered cross. Hints of color that