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I will do.” Xerxadrea’s mouth formed a thin, hard line.
    “I will have Goliath investigate, as well,” Menessos interjected. “He will find out who has betrayed us and silence them permanently.”
    “Hold on, Menessos,” I said. “Let the witches handle this. They have the means to do so through the blood seals. Goliath doesn’t.” Goliath Kline was, among other things, Menessos’s second in command and head of security.
    “She is correct, Menessos,” Xerxadrea said. “Moreover, with the bloody cloth gone, that threat to you is destroyed. The threat remaining within our ranks is to Persephone . . . and to those she must protect.”
    Beverley. Nana.
    Menessos tilted his head and raised one walnut-hued brow. “If the threat to her is in your ranks, perhaps she’d be better off in mine.”
    Xerxadrea considered it for a moment and then started nodding her head. “Now there’s an idea.”
    Uneasy, I looked first at one then the other. “What?”
    “Erus Veneficus,” Menessos said.
    I knew “Erus Veneficus” meant “Master’s Witch.” Some witches became servants of vampires, but doing so didn’t go over well with WEC because their loyalties were indisputably divided.
    “Yes,” Xerxadrea repeated. “It would force the council to cut her off.” That sounded like a very bad thing to me. “And it would reinforce the idea that you are the master, not her.”
    Menessos shot me a surprised look.
    “Yeah, I told her.” Then I asked Xerxadrea, “Why is it important to reinforce that?”
    Though I asked Xerxadrea, Menessos answered. “If we show the world that you serve me, and make even the fairies believe it, they will think I commanded you to kill Cerebrosus and blame me.”
    “Okay. Not that I’m not grateful to have them pointing their little fingers at you instead of me, but what difference does that make?”
    “To kill any fairy royalty is punishable by torture and death.”
    “Torture and death?” Cerebrosus was bound to Menessos. He was a royal. I killed him! “Oh, hell.” My gut went so cold.
    “Exactly.”
    “Going after you, Persephone, doesn’t give them what they truly want, but they’ve already used you once to put WEC in the middle,” Xerxadrea said. “If we use you, too, then the negotiations will go much easier for the witches.”
    “How so?” I didn’t like being used once, let alone willingly signing up for a second go-round.
    “What they want is me, truly dead, in order to release them from their bonds,” Menessos said. “They’ll jump on the chance to demand that WEC turn me over to them.”
    “And WEC can pressure her to deliver you in order to gain the council’s favor as the Lustrata.” Xerxadrea’s expression was delighted. “This will work.”
    “Hold on,” I said to the Eldrenne. “I’m not going to deliver Menessos to fairies who will kill him!” I turned to the vampire. “Hell, Menessos, just let them loose. Sever the binding and let all this be done!”
    “If it were that simple, I would have done so already.”
    I’d had the option to be unbound from Menessos—and chose not to be. Fear rose up like a hand around my throat. The words croaked out, “Why isn’t it that simple?”
    “They are bound in my life, Persephone.”
    As I began to feel that there was no way out of this, my panic exploded. “My life was bound to you, initially. Just do what I did—”
    “Persephone!” His soft voice calmed me. “You clung to who you are, Persephone. You couldn’t pay that price,” Menessos said. “What makes you think I can ?”
    The hammer of realization finally hit. Inverting the binding would simply mean the fairies would sever it by killing Menessos. I was his master, but my ignorance showed just how unready I was to truly fill the role. I struggled to cage my fear and tuck it away somewhere deep.
    Menessos gripped my arms, a soothing gesture, sincere and innocent, but my shields were down. At his touch my body resonated and filled