Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (16 page)

“Temporary license.”

“Then you drive.”

“I don’t know how to drive!” Yvette burst out wailing, while Jason shushed and patted her shoulder from the back seat.

I drove up the road to a big shopping center, where at this hour of the morning the most remote parking lot was almost empty. I showed her how to shift gears, and we switched places. I winced while she stripped the gears over and over, I braced myself as we jerked our way down the aisles, while Jason poured helpful advice, admonishment, praise, and swear words from the back until I threatened to bite him. Yvette shifted from first to second, to first, and to second again and again, and finally snapped at Jason so he shut up. Then she got into third, and the smoothness of the ride straightened her shoulders and relaxed her death grip on the wheel. Her turns became more assured, and when Jason ventured to make another comment, and she threw back a reply while turning, shifting, and remembering to signal, I told her to drive us on back to Whittier. And she did.

It wasn’t time yet for me to go back to my apartment, so Yvette cruised down Greenleaf, negotiating the traffic with growing confidence, until Jason spotted a diner that promised meat, and asked her to find a parking place.

“I’m buying,” he told me, as we walked back to the restaurant. He stared down my look of astonishment. Bears are very good at not being the ones to pay. “You made her happy,” he said, looking at Yvette, leading the way. And it was true, she seemed taller. She seemed hardly to be touching the ground when she walked. And her smile must have been hurting her face by then. I let Jason buy my burgers.

As we wandered down Greenleaf after lunch, ducking into the bookstore, the antique stores, the clothing store where Jason tried on one hat after another—bears are vain—and then left without buying anything, I saw Richard across the street. That was interesting. Sooner than I expected, too. I didn’t look at him directly. I was wondering what he would do. Richard was straight and fine, with short blond hair and blue eyes. He was modeled by the magician John Dee when he captured him, and commanded him to assume the form of a beautiful young man. This version didn’t quite walk like Richard. I looked away, and he was gone when I looked again. I was fairly certain he would be back. This was going to be fun.

Then Yvette spotted the music store. It hadn’t been there very long. One of the windows was empty. The other held an artful display of gleaming violins hung around a large dark cello. A couple of drums lapped at the cello's foot, so of course we had to go in. The door stood wide open, but the store was just a shell, in the early stages of being stocked. Two of the walls had been primed, and waited to be painted. Newly varnished empty shelves were lined up on newspaper. Stacks of boxes stood against the far wall. The other wall was already painted and hung with brass instruments on specialized hooks against a black curtain. Several drum sets were already set up on the floor. Yvette made for the shiniest of them. She stopped when we heard the voices from the back.

“Get out of here! Get out!”

“You don’t mean that.” The second voice was sly, and it evoked a laugh from several others.

“Please… !”

Three men, young men, had crossed this way recently. Two nervous, one excited, and all just a bit rank. Jason started toward the back. I held out a hand and he stopped and looked at me, his brow raised.

“My town,” I said. “My lead.”

Jason smiled. He bowed and gestured me to the back room.

The woman's voice rose, suddenly fierce, “Don’t touch that! No!”

“Nothing's going to happen to it,” sly-voice said. “It's so beautiful—and expensive.”

I walked through the door to the big back room—no wards had been laid, no surprise there, considering—and took in the three heavy-set youths, standing a little too close to the slight woman with the long dark braid. She wore smudged jeans and a paint-spattered work shirt. They had pinned her, by their positions, against a stack of crates and boxes, on the far side of the room from the land line that stood nearly buried under piles of papers on the desk. Her body was taut with fear and anger, her eyes were riveted on the violin in the hand of the tallest one, as though the intensity of her gaze could keep it safe. This guy spun around as I entered, holding the violin by the neck with one hand, and brandishing the bow with the other. This must be sly-guy, the excited one, and I marked him also as the danger man. His henchmen were slower to turn. One was almost as big as sly-guy, but more nervous. The other guy was heavier, and as his eyes fell on me, an unpleasant interest rose in them.

“Hi!” I said brightly, to everyone in the room. “Can I buy a drum? Are you open? Can I buy one today?”

“Get out,” the big henchman said. He glanced at sly-guy for approval, and then moved to loom over me. “She's not open.”

I’m five foot nothing on two feet. I look about as threatening as a glass of fruit juice. Until I smile. Then, I look disconcertingly as though I have too many teeth, and that's a little scary.

“Oh,” I said, chipper and friendly, “oh, what a nice violin!” I walked up to danger-man and reached for the instrument, and as I did so I tried out Jonathan's trick. He’d been in human form, but his growl was pure bear, which meant he had to change just this much, just there—the sound vibrated deep in my throat and chest, too low for the human ear to register as sound, but I felt the reaction of the four humans in the room, and I plucked the violin and the bow from danger-man's hands before he could stop me. I stepped back a few steps, and then he reacted.

“Give that here!”

And then I smiled. Just for him. I felt my eyes turn gold. He stopped. The music lady shuffled to one side behind him, and the henchmen looked from him to me.

“But it's beautiful!” I said, to give her time, and hold their attention. “Don’t you think so?”

“Girl, give that back before I—”

And that's when the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being racked came from behind the guys, and they all turned, mouths open. She held it pointed at the sly-guy's stomach. He put his hands out between the muzzle and his body, as though that would do any good. I took a long step to one side, just in case she was inspired to let loose.

“Get out of my store,” she said, and her voice had a growl in it too, good for her! “Now. Or I will kill you.”

Sly-guy paused just as long as he dared. He gave her a look that meant, “This isn’t over,” and “we’ll be back,” and he turned and shoved his way past his two henchmen, punching the second one hard in the shoulder just so everyone in the room knew that he was a really tough guy. The store lady's hands started shaking as soon as their backs were turned, but she clutched the gun and stalked after them to the doorway. She was stopped by shrieks and howls coming from the store. When we got through the door, the guys were gone, Jason was standing by the front door radiating innocence, and Yvette had a smirk on her face that meant she had just enjoyed a good show. There was a tiny tang of piss in the air. I gave Jason the eye.

The shop lady sat down heavily on a box by the door, cradling the shotgun.

“What did you do?” I demanded of the bear.

“Who, me? Nothing!”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you can put your head on straight now.”

He looked up, guiltily. He was the one who’d taught me the trick of wearing both my aspects, one superimposed over the other. I saw again how impressive it looked. I didn’t tell him, though. It had been my hunt, and I would have figured out how to finish it in another moment. Probably. And anyway, bears are vain enough.

“I’m sorry,” the shop lady said, and now her voice was shaky with reaction. “Are you people all right?” She heaved herself to her feet. “I’m not quite open yet. I’m sorry you had to see that. I called the police the last time they were here, but they said they couldn’t do anything. Not until something happened. But if something happened it would be too late.” Her voice was rising. She was babbling to let her fear and rage run out, and that was fine.

“Don’t worry,” Yvette told her cheerfully. “They’re not going to be back. Because—you scared them off with the shotgun, yeah. They went out of here so fast.” She caught Jason's eye and they both stifled a laugh.

“I’m Ariadne Pierson. I’m just opening up this week—oh, I’m sorry.” She realized she was still holding the shotgun, and went into the back room to put it away.

“Cool shop!” Yvette told her when she came back. “Are you going to have more drums? I have a drum, a djembe, it's from Ghana.”

I offered Ariadne the violin. “Thank you,” she said. She took it from me, and the bow, holding them delicately. “Thank you for coming in just when you did. That was lucky.” She gave a laugh. “If I’d lost this…” She set the violin under her chin, and her body changed. She took on a posture that was practiced, certain, as different from her previous stance as though, like one of the wolf kind, or the bear kind, she had changed form. Then she drew the bow along the strings and the violin sang out with passion and fury, in beauty and marvelous joy. When she lifted the bow from the strings after just this brief music, each of us took a breath. We’d been holding ours.

“Oh!” said Yvette. “Do that again! Do it some more.”

Ariadne broke into a smile so sweet, it was like an echo of the music that still hung in the air. She raised the violin and again she changed, again the music rang out, soaring, searing, delightful, but this time she did not stop. Yvette sat at her chosen drum set and tapped lightly on the edge of one of the drums, adding bits of percussion as she followed the music. I leaned against the wall, listening in Whittier, but seeing again, and smelling again, the forest at home, strips of foggy light among the dark trees, a long hunt with my dad, who’d been missing a long time now, and life the way it used to be, when I was younger and we were happy. Jason stared out the window, thinking in the manner of the bear kind. He came over to Yvette, laid a huge hand on her shoulder and bent and kissed her head. I missed Richard then. Richard, my dad, the life I’d expected, everything changed and difficult and uncertain… Tears welled in my eyes. I looked away. It was the music, that's all. That woman was good.

Yvette had us helping Ariadne move boxes around, the two of them talking up a storm, before we got away from the place. Not even the offer of letting her drive up to my place tempted Yvette from her enthusiasm for a ground-floor part in a local music store operation. When I offered to leave her there while I went back to my apartment, and come back for her later, she finally tore herself away, promising the music lady to come back and help another time. Yvette chattered on about the possibility of local drumming classes all the way to my place. I drove.

Van sat on the steps that led up to my apartment, her bags packed neatly at her feet, glasses perched on her nose, reading from one of those electronic books as we came around from the carport where I’d parked my car.

“Ah!” she exclaimed when she saw us. “Good timing, I just finished up. Here.” She handed me my key. “You open it and walk in, and that will set the wards into play.”

I could feel a strong organization of energy as I approached my door. I concentrated, and tried to track the energy to its source, but it wandered like little individual winds, leading my concentration astray. I thought this might really work. I shot her a glance, and she gave me a smug look. It was true, she was good.

“Maybe you should stay out,” I said to Yvette and the bear. “You shouldn’t get caught up in this working, or you might get scryed if someone was looking for me.”

Jason raised one quizzical brow. “And this would be a problem, why?”

You can’t tell a bear not to do something that might endanger him. They don’t know the meaning of the word. I hesitated in front of my door. Bringing down trouble on your friends is a good way to lose them, and I didn’t have any to spare.

“Me, too,” Yvette said. “I’ll go in too. ‘Cause if they’re scrying for you and they come up with me, they’ll know they’re a loser.”

“We should all go through,” Van agreed. “It will help to keep things confused. And if someone wants to try and scry me…” She left off there, but her smile was wicked.

So I opened the door, and we all trooped in to my little apartment where I hadn’t set foot in a week. Van had lit candles in all the rooms, though they were gone now. She had sprinkled water scented with bay, and burned sage. The swirl of energy was stronger here, a little tangled, and even more distracting. We all trooped through the living area, which became the dining area because the table was there, which became the kitchen, demarked by the linoleum. We took turns going in and out of the bathroom, because we wouldn’t all fit in there, and they all went into my bedroom, where there's a bed, by which time the energy Van had set loose in the place was sufficiently stirred up.

Beneath the traces of Van's presence this afternoon, Richard's scent was still everywhere. In the kitchen, where he had rearranged everything to his liking, there were traces of not only him, but of everything he’d cooked for me in the weeks we’d been together. Yvette wandered through, opening the larder door, looking out the window at the view of the building's back patio, discovering the linen cupboard, where the extra blanket lives, and going back into the bathroom and closing the door. Most of the apartments on this whole street were designed to be rented to students at Whittier College living off-campus, so they were partly furnished with battered, hardy furniture. Mine was just the same, and aside from the jumble of special kitchen equipment that Richard had insisted we acquire, there was nothing personal in the place.

Van finished her circuit and said she was off. She was going back to Costa Mesa to have dinner with Tamara and her friends, and wanted to beat the traffic. I thanked her again, but she waved it off. Her smile was still smug at the job she’d done. Jason said he would catch a ride with Van. Yvette wanted to go back to the new, local music store. She and the bear indulged in some cuddling on my front stoop while Van pointedly looked away, but then Yvette walked down to Van's car with Jason's arm draped over her shoulders, gave him another kiss, and headed back down to Greenleaf.