Huge thanks to Kalika and Daenerys for their comments on thelast part - nice to know I'm headed in the right direction!

Kelekona Part Eight

 Matt Wolff was forcing down lunch, one eye on Circle Strange.

 "Any reason you're checking out the leper colony?" asked Ellie Saxoine, across from him. There was a distinct edge to her voice; she'd had a run-in with Chatoya a couple of years ago, and was still hanging onto her grudge.

 "New leper," pointed out Ben around a mouthful of food. "The goth girl. Turned up in our biology class. Bit your head off, didn't she, Rob?"

 Rob Slivan looked up from a forkful of pasta, his goodtime-boy smile muted down to something sour. "She had a good try. Stroppy cow."

 Matt agreed whole-heartedly. If Dragon Tiamat could wind up Rob, who was one of the most laidback people he knew, her nasty attitude obviously extended to all humans, not just him. Maybe she was good at her job - cult-busting, or whatever it was - but her brand of prejudice didn't sit well with him.
 
 But all he said was, "I doubt she'll be spending much time with them."

 "No kidding," muttered Rob. "I'm surprised Redfern hasn't tipped over the table and tried to throttle her yet. They're both egos on legs."

 "Hers are nicer though," decided Ben, squinting over at Dragon Tiamat. Even at the close crush of the Circle's table, she'd cleared herself space, and the chatter flowed around and across her while she picked at her food.

 "Debatable," put in Tam Slone. With her black hair loose around her shoulders and a half-smile slanting on her mouth like that, she looked soft and sweet. Good deception. "Say what you like about Cougar Redfern-"

 "Prick," said Ben feelingly.

 "Asshole." Rob shot a brief glare at the vampire's back.

 "Jerk," put in Matt helpfully. Cougar had never forgiven him for walking away from the Circle, and during the daily corridor cram, he'd endured a plethora of elbows in his back, kicks to the shin and pithy insults.

 Tam shushed them. "-but you have to admit he's gorgeous."

 "I do not," objected Rob. "He's an almighty pain in the ass. Which is why he's never going to get on with that Dragon girl. Though I don't get why she's even talking to them. Don't seem like her kind of people, do they?"

 "No. And we all know who does," remarked Tam, voice subdued. As ever, her dark, liquid eyes gave little away. "You think she's a friend of Bella's?"

 "I think she wants to be," Matt answered. Might as well give Dragon's plan a helping hand.

 "Yeah?" Ben Skykes wasn't paying attention to his lunch anymore. His face was hard: Livia Sanders had been one of his close friends, and Matt knew he blamed Bella. "I don't think that crazy bitch needs any more friends."

 Matt swapped worried looks with Rob. They'd had this discussion before, and every time, it was getting harder to stop Ben picking up the nearest blunt instrument and going postal. "What are you suggesting?"

 "I'm suggesting we stop her hooking up with Bella," Ben said shortly.

 Oh no, thought Matt glumly. That's not the plan at all. "What makes you think she'll listen?"

 Those all-American blue eyes were hard. "We'll make her listen."

 Matt felt his stomach sink. He didn't want to have this conversation again. "And if she doesn't?"

 "We'll make her," Ben repeated, his voice as flat and empty as his expression. "By force, if we have to."

 "Oh, great answer, idiot," cut in Tam, the sarcasm in her words as rich and heavy as syrup. "Solve violence with more violence. Let's scare away the psycho by proving we can be just as insane and brutal! That'll solve everything."

 "And what do you suggest?," hissed Ben, his face livid with fury. "It's us against her. We can't just sit back and let her kill people!"

 "Did I say that?" Tam answered coolly, meeting rage with unflappable logic. Matt had to admire her; he wasn't sure he could have withstood Ben's rage. "Something should be done. But by the police, not by us. Jesus, Ben, they're murderers."

 "You think I don't know that?" His mouth was a tight white line, and Matt prayed Ben wasn't going to lose his temper. The last thing they needed was a commotion. "I've waited for the police to solve this, Tam, I turn on the radio every day waiting for them to tell us that bitch did it. We all know she did - why won't they lock her up?"

 She reached over to put a hand on his. Ben twitched but didn't move away. "This stuff takes time. They want to make sure everything's watertight - so she can't get off on a technicality. I'll bet they're watching her, Ben."

 Matt, who knew very well that the local police force was controlled by Ryars Valley's Elders, was willing to bet that Tam was wrong. But she seemed to be calming Ben down, and he wasn't about to interrupt.

 "Be patient," she implored, her eyes gentle and unexpectedly wise. "You haven't even talked to this new girl - it's not likely she even knows who Bella is. Leave her alone, and just...have a little faith. Please?"

 Ben looked away, but Matt saw surrender as his expression melted into confusion. Tam had won, for now. "Fine," he muttered. "I guess I was being stupid. It's just...it was Livvy, Tam. I thought this sort of crap stayed in the headlines. Cults aren't meant to be real."

 Neither are vampires or witches or werewolves, thought Matt. But they're out there; all the myths and legends, walking around looking like anyone else. It's just that we've glamorised them and made them dark, beautiful things: we've forgotten the horror stories that remind us that they can be monstrous too. We've forgotten to keep watch for them.

 And we're paying the price.

~*~

 Love, the wanderer was always told, was complex.

 Strange then that he found it so simple. He had recognised it for what it was at once: a shackle, a malleable, movable, intangible trap. Learn to mimic love, and you could incarcerate whosoever you wished, and they would be blind to their prison, thinking it a palace.

 Once bound, chained by soft words and remembered moments, they were loath to escape.

 The wanderer had been young when he first realised this: that he could have his dark pleasures, and if he was careful, clever, if he wove his web with the instruments of love - caresses, conversation, timing - they would never realise it was merely lust that motivated him.

 Lust, and base, primal hungers for the pieces of them he would be otherwise denied.
 
 And so he spoke to his prey of love, courting them with meticulous care. He made them need him.

 In times such as his, fraught with strife and the omnipresent threat of war, many sought security. Fearful, desperate creatures who were willing to uproot themselves to follow him somewhere else, to safety and seclusion and peace. Never did it occur to them that they would never leave.

 Amidst political anarchy, he switched names and pasts, luring fresh prey back to his sanctuary, back to the underground lair with all those little oubliettes.

 Funny, really. He never needed to lie to them.

 I'll be yours until death, he'd promise, meaning every word, shading close to love in those moments. We'll never leave here. Just you and me, together, as no one else will ever be. No one can find us here...no one.

 Yes. So sweet. Truth soaked his every word.

 And there in the dank little rooms, he unmasked them, peeling off their facades with their skin, picking away at them until they were revealed to their screaming core.

 And when they were bloodied vessels in his arms, when he was saturated by the taste and smell and sound of them, he would lie content and whisper that he'd never loved them until this moment. God yes, this thick, delicious moment as they quivered under his hands, completely his, voiceless, passive, terrified.

 Love and fear, side by side, shining from them until the very end. The best part of it all: that as they spiralled into death with the soundless grace of a moth consumed by fire, they could not abandon the love he had created. To the end, they were consumed by him: to the end, they were cannibalised by love.

 How glorious, how beautiful. They dazzled him, these fragile things he had crafted, stripped down to raw emotions, waiting to be devoured. Let it go on, he would think in the hours while they loved and feared, let it never end.

 But it always did. He was always bereft: so he began the seducer's game again, waiting for the rapture of love and fear.

 And in the Burning Times, he had thought himself a phoenix, rising anew. But then it had all gone wrong.

 ~*~

 At the table, Dragon was doing her best to feign disinterest: hard to do when she was engaged in a lively telepathic discussion with Lisa and Jepar. They were deep in a debate about the differences in shapeshifter and vampire society when she felt it: a clarion call on the edge of her senses.

 It was so different from anything else she'd felt that she paused to try and focus on it. It was coming nearer, but was barely more than an amorphous shimmer of power. A person, she realised. That was someone's aura, but it was vast and so bloated with magic she could barely recognise it.

They resonated unpleasantly on her psychic senses, demanding her attention. Whoever it was felt turgid and smoky, as if they sought to choke her by their mere existence.

 No. Not it: her, Dragon corrected, and with that, she knew who was coming closer, power billowing before her. Bella Khordad.

 Her suspicions were confirmed as the rest of the Circle fell silent, staring past her shoulder - and the naked emotions on their faces startled her. Violent anger flared in Cougar's face, while Zara's chilly eyes held a glittering hatred. Chatoya didn't look up, but Dragon thought the revulsion on her mouth wasn't for the unappealing food.

 "Here we go again," said Cougar through gritted teeth. "Dragon, meet the cause of all our trouble."

 Slowly, she turned, as if only just noticing the newcomer. But her mind was clouded by the toxic smog that Bella emanated. If malice had form, thought Dragon, this is what it would feel like.

 Well, she'd conformed to the dress code: Bella was dressed in black from top to toe, revealing slices of iridescent flesh. Black hair was piled up elaborately on her head, while her eyes appeared so pale as to be white; her mouth was a plush, dark purple, and tipped into a wanton's smile. Layers of illusion, Dragon suspected: in the drab room, Bella was luminescent as the moon, and last time Dragon checked, no one had phosphorescent skin.

 "That is the scariest damn attempt at seduction I have ever seen," she muttered, and heard someone snigger nearby.

 "Wait till you hear her pick-up lines," Cern recommended.

 "If I said you had a great body, would you let me cut it open and remove your vital organs?" quipped Cougar. Dead silence greeted him. "Too early for tasteless jokes?"

 "Far too early," answered Lisa, barely moving her lips. All of them were fixated on Bella, drawing them like lodestone.

 Is that part of the magic too? wondered Dragon, trying hard to retain her detachment. Make sure we're focused on her so we can't think rationally, can't do anything but sit here waiting for her decision.

 Bella moved with ominous slowness. And it became quickly apparent where she was going: to where Matt Wolff sat with his friends, doing his best to act as if nothing untoward was happening.

 She leaned between two of his friends, her palms flat on the table, neatly blocking Dragon's view of him.

"Hello, Matt."

 She'd bespelled her voice somehow: those two words poured forth like perfume, designed to rub on the libido in a promise of sex and slow satiation.

Dragon glanced at the boys: Jepar had a sheen of sweat on his face, while Cougar was gripping the table so hard his knuckles were white. Not aimed just at Matt then, but at men. Cern's eyes were glazed, but his lips were moving. As he sketched a sign on the table, whatever spell he'd cast rose around them like a bubble, dissipating the effect of Bella's voice. The tension in the air eased.

 "Thanks," muttered Jepar, wiping his brow. "I was having the most disturbing thoughts."

 Around the room, others were not so lucky. Men stared at Bella as if she was the sun blazing from the core of the solar system, their eyes vacant except for a blank, shining worship. Talk about overkill.

 "Bella," croaked Matt.

 "You know, the other night, it was such a shame you couldn't come out to play." She lingered on the last word, and outside the cocoon Cern had created, Dragon felt the spells revving up.

 "I...I know..." Matt's voice was thick and sleepy. "I was wrong. That was selfish of me."

 "Yes. I was lonely, you know," purred Bella. Across the table, Cougar gagged theatrically. "You wouldn't leave me alone again, would you, Matt? I get so afraid. That big empty house..."

 Half-listening, Dragon began to extend her own magic into the fog hanging over the room, searching.

 "I'd never leave you alone," breathed Matt, sounded young and horrified. That was some cleverly scribed spell if it could warp his will so completely.

 "I hoped you wouldn't." Bella paused, more for dramatic effect than anything else. "And you wouldn't leave me alone on an important night, surely..."

 "No, no, I couldn't..."

 "Then..." Bella sounded unexpectedly coy. "You'll go with me to the Samhain Ball."

 There. Something she recognised. Dragon followed the thread of magic through the fog, back, back, back...to the bracelet Bella wore. Stones for love and binding, runes for dedication and worship, a semi-precious cage. And put together hastily: powerful, but shaky.

 Do I wait? she wondered. Or do I break the bracelet and let him agree of his own will?

 She wavered, but only for a moment. If Matt agreed freely, Bella would be suspicious. No. She would break it afterwards - a message from one witch to another.

 Part of her whispered Fireblade would have done the same. The part that whispered: puppeteer.

 Yes, she told herself, I am - but it's her who'll dance to my tune, not him. This is necessary.

 "Of course!" he stammered, all the smoothness of his voice lost under boyish eagerness. "It'd be an honoured, a massive honour. To go with you, I... I'll remember it for the rest of my life..."

 "Oh yes." Her voice was husky and molten. "You will."

 Enough of this, thought Dragon. You have what you want. Now let's get what I want.

 She called her power to her, gathering it. And then she wove it into Bella's spell like bindweed, surrounding the magic. It wasn't elegant, but it was fast: with one brief gesture, she tore the spells on the bracelet apart, pulling her magic back to her like a net and dragging the shattered spell with it.

  Bella spun, her face livid and malevolent - and Dragon met her eyes with an arrogant smile. Behind the witch, Matt was shaking his head, seeming dazed and lost.

 Dragon stood and stepped away from the table. Disassociating herself from the Circle, as they had planned; for safety, and to make it clear she acted alone and made her own choices.

 She walked towards the witch with a cat's saunter, slow, steady, challenging. Just short of her, Dragon stopped and before Bella could say a word, murmured only, "Interesting, but I could do far better."

 There was no chance for Bella to reply before she strolled away, feeling that intense stare on her exposed back, but safe in the knowledge that she had set the trap.

 Overtures of friendship would never have worked. But competition...yes.

 Come and find me. Let's see who's the better witch here.

 Or the worse witch.

 ~*~

 Matt rubbed his forehead. Had those been his words, stumbling from his lips? He'd had spells cast on him before, but none of them had been like that - as if all his world was consumed by Bella, who had seemed tall and radiant and rapturous as a goddess. It had felt as if pleasing her had been all that mattered.

 And he said those stupid, suicidal things.

 Stupid suicidal things that you would have said anyway, he reminded himself. At least this way it saves you having to try and worm your way into her good graces.

 Bella blew him a kiss, but there was a tightness to her gesture that made him think Dragon had unsettled her. Before he could make any return gesture - not that she would have appreciated the one he had in mind - she was gone in a swish of black and white, his monochrome succubus.

 Matt was left feeling shaken and hollow. Suddenly this plan didn't seem such a bright idea.

 If she can make me do anything she wants...how am I going to fight her? How am I supposed to stop her?

 Realisation was no relief: rather a dull, bleak sensation. I'm not. That's why I'm the bait. I have to trust Circle Strange and Dragon Tiamat to stop her...and hope they don't leave it too late.

 "Did you..." Ben squinted at him, all his usual rancour dimmed down to a wobbly tenor. "Did you just agree to take our friendly raving psycho to the ball?"

 "I think so," he said weakly.

 "What happened?" Rob looked as shaken as he felt. "I mean...she was there, and I was thinking all this crazy stuff - I wanted to...to...I don't know."

 Ben shuddered. "I think if she'd asked me to tear out my heart and give it to her, I would have done it. It was insane. Did she drug us or something?"

 "Not that I could see." He understood Tam's bemusement as she gazed at them. "But you...you were staring at her with this look on your faces. Like you'd do anything for her. Anything. God, that creeped me out."

"Believe me, seeing it was nothing to feeling it," muttered Matt.

 "I'm starting to believe in black magic." Ben stared at his hands. "I don't know what else that was."

 Tam shook her head briskly. "No. There's another explanation. Maybe it was hypnosis." She didn't sound convinced though. Even her practical nature was having trouble explaining away the bizarre events that occurred when Bella Khordad was around.

 No, that was black magic all right. And I'm going to be seeing a lot more of it. Unfortunately.

~*~

 Outside, Dragon perched on the wall, and sent a query back to Jepar. ~ You okay in there? ~

 ~ Yeah, she's gone. Didn't look pleased, ~ came his reply, tinged with approval. ~ What did you do? Toya and Cern say that was a nice piece of work, by the way. ~

 ~ Thanks. I wouldn't mind getting my hands on that spell Cern used to shut off her ninja-sex powers, or whatever that was. ~

 ~ Sex ninjas, ~ he replied, amusement quivering through the message. ~ Intriguing. ~ Pause. ~ Cougar says he thinks he met one once. Apparently she could disable you with one good blow- ~ Jepar cut off abruptly, and then returned in a flurry of embarrassed remorse. ~ I'm not repeating that. If you want to hear it, you can ask him. ~

 ~ I think I can guess. ~

 ~ I think we all can. Anyway, Toya says she's going to head down to one of the murder sites tonight - she got her hands on the right spell last night, thanks to a bit of begging, and Lisa's going with her to keep away trouble. ~

  ~ Good. Can you get hold of the hu- I mean, Matt? We need to check that Bella didn't put any other spells on him, and make sure he's still prepared to go through with this. ~

 ~ Sure. You think he'll change his mind? ~

 Who knew what humans thought? ~ It's easy to agree to something when you don't really know what you're dealing with. He might feel differently after that little incident. That was a hell of a hex. ~

 ~ I noticed. ~ Jepar's voice was grim, and she caught a brief flash of fear before he concealed it. ~ Can Bella do that any time she wants? Control us like that? ~

 ~ That took a lot of power, and if she wanted to do it properly, you're looking at a couple of weeks of work. ~ Dragon didn't tell him that the spell she'd broken seemed to have been cobbled together in a few days. It wouldn't reassure him. ~ Any witch worth their salt wouldn't be fooled, and you could definitely protect yourself from it- ~

 ~ Might be something to look into then, ~ he pointed out.

 ~ I'll put it on my 'to do' list, ~ she said wearily. ~ In fact, I'll go back to my hotel and start working on it. Can you ask Cern to give me a copy of that spell he used? It might come in handy. ~

 ~ Shall do. See you later - take care. ~

 Her answer was brief and forceful. ~ I intend to. ~

Pucker up for heaven's sake.
There's never been so much at stake.
I serve my head up on a plate.
It's only comfort, calling late.