Persephone Alcmedi 00 - Wicked Circle

“I offer this food for the Supper of Hecate, for the Lady of the Crossroads.” The bowl quickly floated out of sight in the mist.
    “I am the mother,” Eris said.
    She awkwardly surrendered the red bowl to me. In the transfer, I couldn’t help seeing the red ink now embedded in Eris’s palm. That, too, had happened when she’d reversed the spellwork on Johnny.
    The red bowl contained a round loaf of bread and a fresh log of goat cheese. As I placed it into the river Eris said, “I offer this food for the Supper of Hecate, for the Queen of Witches.”
    “And I am the crone,” Nana croaked.
    When she placed the black bowl in my hands I saw that it bore three Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.
    The drive-thru contribution lacked the charm an offering should have. Rolling my eyes up at her I whispered, “Really?”
    “I wasn’t about to stink up the apartment cooking fish.” She flapped her hand at me. “That’ll do just fine.”
    I took the black bowl to the water.
    “I offer this food for the Supper of Hecate,” Nana said, “for the Dark Mother of the Underworld.”
    The river carried Nana’s offering away. Finished, I held the hem of my skirt up, put my foot on the slope, and dug my toes in. It felt secure, so I took the step.
    The loose gravel shifted and gave way. My balance was ruined. I flailed my arms trying to steady myself as I backpedaled. My forearm smacked against one of the torches, and something sharp pierced my already injured foot. The torch fell toward the water. I tried to catch it, pivoted wrong, and my ankle wrenched.
    Pitching backward, I kept the falling torch in my view, aware it had a burning wick and a container full of lamp oil. Landing on it would be very bad.
    It smacked on a rock protruding from the water. The edge cracked. Lamp oil spilled, and light flared as the flame caught it. A gush of heat shoved me, then I was down, too, and I briefly felt the river’s cold embrace just before the agonizing pain of my skull striking stone.

CHAPTER THREE

    I stood on a mist-shrouded shore in the dark. Not the shore of the rivers in Pittsburgh, however. The willow tree to my right meant this was the shore of my meditation world.
    My view was limited to about a dozen yards in any direction. I made a full revolution, searching the thick white air for a telltale sign of Amenemhab, my totem animal, but the jackal was nowhere to be seen.
    What am I doing here? I couldn’t remember slipping into what I called my “alpha state” and prompting this visualization. The white dress I wore didn’t help clarify anything for me. Am I dreaming?
    A strange, trumpeting bellow made me spin toward the water again. It was not a sound I could readily identify.
    The heads of two black dragons materialized from the mist before me. They floated side by side with their necks arched like swans, wings tucked down. Nothing like the eel-ish and smooth-skinned creatures at home in the barn, these dragons had scales and horns and gills. Silver crowns adorned the bases of their horns, and I saw a flash of crimson embedded in the metal. Strands of rubies and diamonds draped to a ring hooked on their rhinolike snout horns. A silver yoke linked them to a wide plank that ran between their long bodies.
    It was connected to a tree they towed through the water. Not a log floating behind them, but a branched tree, upright. Squinting, I tried to make sense of what I saw. The trunk was dark, gnarled and angled, as if it had grown in shadow and had had to reach for light. As it neared I saw it was actually a cluster of trunks. In some places, the trunks were like stacked drainpipes, in other spots the bark had smoothed over like scarred skin.
    By that, and the evergreen foliage, I identified it as a yew tree. The branches stretched twice as wide as it was high, and enclosed lanterns were hung along the outer perimeter. In their soft glow, black veils hung closer to the trunk and fluttered eerily, defining the base of the rectangular boat.
    I noticed a woman sitting on the sloping tree trunk. Her somber pose reminded me of Waterhouse’s Ophelia . Her head was down, the gray hood of her cloak raised. Dark hair spilled down her chest like ink. Her fingers trailed in the water beside her, and her pale, smooth skin had the barest trace of phosphorescence.
    The dragons neared the shoreline and lurched suddenly. As they sloshed forward I realized that in addition to their wings, they had four limbs! The dragons I knew didn’t have