Persephone Alcmedi 00 - Wicked Circle

front and center of her view.” The men chuckled.
    Johnny stood at the front with his best men: the Omori, Kirk, and the men who’d volunteered to stand with him and face the fey on the shores of Lake Erie. While they undressed, Persephone used her broom to sweep a huge circle enclosing them all. She called the elements and used candles in tall beakers of colored glass. Then she said,
Persephone and Isis, goddesses whose names I bear,
Artemis, Inanna, and Ishtar, your lunar purpose I share.
Hathor and Hera, be present here this hour,
Hecate! Come now, lend my rite your power.
Encourage the elements to participate
As we seek their man-minds to liberate
Reward the courage these men have shown
I beseech you, O wise and wonderful crone.
    With her arms over her head for the last line, she formed a triangle with her thumbs and index fingers. She lowered her arms so she could see the moon through that open triangle, and remained thus for a long minute. Then she sang strange words.
    Energy stirred around them and Johnny detected the men shifting uneasily behind him. He saw second thoughts betrayed in some eyes. “Steady, men. I feel it too,” he said to them calmly. “This is normal. She must call the power and contain it away from us until there is enough to fully change us all. Only then will that power descend.”
    He saw one man’s mouth open, ready to ask for reassurance, then he clamped it shut, thinking better of letting his peers know he was worried.
    Johnny added, “She is able to hold that much power, and more. Otherwise I wouldn’t allow this. I stand with you.” But I will change back as soon as I get you all to your kennels.
    His skin abruptly itched, like he’d been dipped in icy water and coated in sand. She’s tapped the ley. He remembered that when she’d transformed him and Celia and Erik and Theo, she’d sung this hauntingly beautiful song, and her power had erupted as her voice had found the high note of the melody’s crescendo. She was building to that note now.
    He rolled his shoulders. “Relax, men. Don’t fight it.”
    “Look up,” someone whispered.
    Everyone turned their faces skyward, where, ten feet above their heads, a mass of energy was forming. It swirled, shimmering like glitter on waves of heat. As the mass developed color, four arms stretched downward, one to each candle. When the energy-arms reached the candle flames, the center above them exploded, and that energy snapped into the candles like a tape measure recoiling.
    Then, except for the single note Persephone was sustaining, there was silence.
    Johnny remembered what Menessos had said during the first spell. He’d whispered, “Rise cone of power. Rise to our call. Deliver lunar energies, to one and all.”
    In the sky, the exposed moon flashed, and a focused beam of reflected lunar light fell, encompassing Persephone’s circle. Her voice wavered. Her knees gave.
    Johnny felt his skin crawl, felt it scrub against his raw muscles like coarse sandpaper. His beast growled savagely, exultantly, as it burst through his flesh.
    His change was fluid and fast, and he stood on all fours in a beam of cold light, while the others’ transformations were more prolonged. He felt electrified and invigorated, yet a hunger gnawed at him, a hunger that had nothing to do with his stomach.
    Change back.
    He sniffed the air. He could smell well with his human nose, but with his wolf nose—it was like every molecule in the air was amplified, akin to a blast from an aerosol spray. So many compelling scents mingled at once.
    Change back.
    Nostrils flaring, he stared down his elongated black nose and sorted through the smells.
    Human. Wolf. Sweat. Rooftop. Brick. Metal. Cotton. Candle wax. Fire. Car exhaust. Lavender.
    Persephone was on her knees directly ahead and leaning to one side, unsteady in the buffeting wind. Her hair flapped about. She pitched forward—caught herself on her hands.
    Change back.
    He could smell her sex. He recalled their shower, the bubbles cascading over her ass, the water dripping off her tits. He’d made her writhe and scream when he’d been inside her. He’d made her wear his scent. He could smell that too.
    Change back now.
    The beast whimpered, stationary and ready to withdraw . . . then a new scent filled his nostrils. A scent that seduced him. A scent that seized his ambiguous hunger and made his jaws drip saliva. A scent that stupefied his man-mind, silencing his thoughts and leaving only the beast