Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (28 page)

“Watch me,” I’d replied. I thought he meant I wasn’t going to keep my word. It made me angry, because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to lose him, I wanted our love, our companionship, to go on like this forever, when I knew that four days from now he would be gone forever, and I had made it happen. I had set him free.

I climbed the hill as though charging an army. Richard kept pace. He always kept pace. “I mean,” he said quietly, “you will still know my name. And as long as you know my name, you will always possess me. Whether you call me or not, I am still yours to command.”

I stopped and turned to him. His pale hair gleamed in the reflected light from the streetlamp up the road, but his face was in shadow, and his eyes were dark. “I know,” I said. “I was planning to forget it.”

“Oh.” He didn’t move. After a moment he added, “Do you think that will work?”

“No,” I admitted. I started toward my place again, and then stopped. “Can you make me forget it?” I turned to him. This time his face was in the light. He nodded once, as though he was afraid to speak. “Then, that’s what we’ll do.” I headed for my steps.

“Amber…”

I turned.

“Do you mean it?”

I came back to him. I took the edges of his worn leather jacket in my hands, and looked up at his face, not much above mine. A stray lock of his hair lay askew on his brow. I breathed in his scent, better than Christmas, and leaned up and kissed him on the lips. “When you go,” I said, “take your name with you. Right out of my head. Gone.”

In his eyes, hope flamed, like a glimpse of heaven. He closed them, leaned forward and gently kissed my forehead. “It shall be as you say.” He held me close then, and before he let me go he said softly in my ear, “We’ll think of another name, that you can call me by.”

“Why?” I straightened.

“Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case you need me. Just once.”

We climbed the steps together. “How about DeNinny?” I suggested.

Richard aimed a punch at my head, and I ducked away, laughing.

Now, on the stage of the Festival Amphitheatre, I drew a pentagram centered in the inside circle, whose five points touched, but did not cross, the second, outer circle. When I had done this, I got out a box of cornmeal, and poured it in a circle around the center of the pentagram. I heard whispers in the audience. I hoped they were all taking notes.

Next, I got out my packs of candles, and the new set of little glass bowls I’d bought. I set a candle in a glass bowl at each point of the pentagram. Then I got out the small, colored chalk, and drew signs on either side of each point. There are runes of protection, deflection, guard and ward, but I don’t know them. I know a few signs that my kind use, so I drew the ones that said Safety, Friendship, Welcome, Good Food, Health, and Fair Dealing. I drew Watch Out for Traps a few extra times. If anyone in the audience knew the signs, they could figure out for themselves what they meant in this context. What they actually meant was that raising the demon needed to look complicated, it needed to look like an art that I had mastered with great effort and endless diligence. The fact was, this was all just distraction. When I knew the demon’s name, I could summon him by pronouncing it correctly, and he was compelled to come by the last breath of the last syllable. But most of my audience probably didn’t know that, and if they did, it was better to confuse the issue for them. In any case, I no longer knew the demon’s name. I was relying on the good will of a being that no longer actually existed in the form I had known. I hoped that the demon I was about to call would keep the bargain I had made with Richard, who was only a tiny construct of itself.

And then I did a few things just so that, if anyone else tried this, they’d look as silly as I did. I lit the candles. I got out a silver bell, and a golden whistle. It was brass, really, and I’d borrowed it from the music store, but it looked golden, and that was good enough. I walked around the outer ring of the circle, intoning nonsense syllables under my breath. Every five steps I stopped, held up the bell, rang it, and blew a blast on the whistle. I repeated this until I’d gone all the way around the circle. Then, I pocketed the instruments and stepped between the two circles. I raised my arms, intoning some more nonsense words. I turned in a circle, and clapped my hands three times. And then, in a clear voice, I pronounced the name that Richard and I had agreed on.

“Bellsandahisnlianamene!” I clapped three times. I turned around again. I raised my voice. “Bellsandahisnlianamene!” Not a word you’d ever say by accident, under any circumstances. I clapped, turned, wove a weird pattern in the air with my hands, turned, and clapped again. Who said this couldn’t be fun? I raised my voice once more. “Come to me! I summon you! Bellsandahisnlianamene!”

Silence. The people in the audience behind me seemed not to breathe. Then, just as a tiny, impatient rustle began among them, the air in the theater tightened. The space in the center of the pentagram darkened. Again I heard the audience breathe, this time in gasps. The darkness within the pentagram thickened, as though a different kind of density erupted there. Behind me, I heard exclamations, and a few swear words. The darkness took on shape, and then it took on size. The hair on my nape rose. The air tingled with energy. My eyes tried to figure out the shape of the darkness, even as it kept changing, even as my stomach tightened and my heart began to race. I’d seen that darkness within darkness before, and I knew to be afraid.

I stood between one circle and the other, not in the demon’s part, nor outside the circles, where the watchers sat. We’d agreed on that, too. I could hear a wind blowing. The candles at the points of the pentagram burned steadily, as though nothing touched them. But the lights above and behind me in the amphitheater danced, bouncing on the cable that held them, and the shadows trembled, but where I stood, there was no wind.

We hadn’t agreed that the demon wouldn’t eat me. We hadn’t agreed that it wouldn’t turn me inside out for the fun of seeing all the living colors blend. I hoped that my surviving this was implicit in our understanding. At that moment, I wished we’d talked about this just a little more.

And then the demon was there. He was enormous. It was impossible that he fit in the space defined by the center of the pentagram, but he was there, he didn’t cross those lines, and yet I could see that he was huge. I felt his will, his power, as my mind was drawn in to the layers of darkness that seethed, that emerged, fell away, and erupted again, as though another universe lay open before me, and I had only to step in to understand it all. I felt my panic rise, as every hair on my body stood on end and signaled that I should run, run now, run very fast away. I stiffened with fear, I let my panic show, because this, too, was for my audience.

Just when I thought he could grow no larger or he would somehow collapse the tiny space I stood in, and the whole theater, and perhaps the city as well upon himself, the form coalesced, and seemed to kneel before me.

“YOU SUMMONED ME!”

He roared, and the sound seemed to come as much from inside my head as from the being before me. It reverberated in the air as though sound itself could hold a shape in the darkness, drawing meaning and form out of my mind, and it was angry. Panic rose in my body. I braced myself against the assault of sound and fury, and held my ground.

“Yes—”

“YOU SWORE YOU WOULD NOT!”

“I did, but—”

The shape that whirled within the darkness within darkness, emanating from a deeper darkness beyond, coalesced into a form that seemed to suggest a head, which bent in my direction, the eyes flaring like distant red suns in the grip of a massive solar storm, his face in a rictus of fury.

“YOU GAVE ME YOUR WORD! YOU SAID I WAS FREE!”

I bent backwards, aware of the edges of the circles I stood between, knowing that it would be better not to find out what would happen if I was forced over either of the concentric lines. I looked him in the eyes, holding myself up even though my legs, like my voice, were shaking. “I did give you my word. You are free,” I managed to pronounce, just as the face coalesced for a brief moment in front of me, and one suggested eyelid dipped in a wink, and the eye flared a heavenly, remembered blue. I held on to my fear so that my overwhelming relief would not show, as the pandemonium of sound mounted, and the figure rose like a towering storm above me.

“THEN WHY AM I HERE?” it demanded, and the concrete floor beneath me, and the walls of the theater trembled in the torrent of sound.

“Shut up!” I shouted, and my voice broke as I raised it, “and I will tell you!”

A silence, as though the demon was transfixed by my effrontery. Behind me I felt as much as heard the terror, the attention, the heavy breathing of the amazed audience. “Oh, shit,” someone said, very softly.

The demon gathered itself in a whirlwind of gyrating darkness, and shaped itself into something suggesting human form, over which was imposed, spinning leisurely, a depthless hole into the darkness. The human form seemed to diminish in size, while the vast dark layers it emanated from grew, pulsing, collapsed, spinning, and grew again.

“SPEAK!”

“All right. These power raisers of this great city—”

“PAH!”

For a thing that didn’t, couldn’t, spit, it sure could make the sound.

“Stop that!” The form stilled itself. “The power raisers of greater Los Angeles want to know from you what you did about the World Snake. They’re still worried that it might come here and destroy the city.” I glanced back as I said this, and caught a satisfying glimpse of the whole audience pressed back in their seats, agape, figuratively if not literally, at the stage. The wind might not be blowing where I stood, but it sure was blowing them around. So much for their wards. Ha. At the top of the theater, all four bears were on their feet, in their bear forms, braced against the gale. Yvette knelt between the legs of one of them, holding on to the back of the seat in front of her.

The darkness whirled again. I seemed to be staring out into layers of reality, a being of darkness, a greater, denser being of layers of darkness, a mouth of deeper darkness from which all of this emanated, and a view as wide as a new, lightless universe, all impressed itself upon my sight at once, dizzyingly. But more than that, the sense of the being’s consciousness, the power of its will, was like being pressed by huge stones.

“I DID AS YOU COMMANDED. I TURNED THE WORLD SNAKE. I ALTERED ITS PATH SO THAT IT WILL NOT DESTROY A HUMAN CITY IN ANY TIME TO COME. I DID THIS, AND YOU SET ME FREE.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know. But they don’t believe me.”

And now the shapes all exploded outwards, and the demon’s wrath blasted out in a storm of force, that flayed senses I didn’t know I had. “BELIEVE!” a wind of other worlds screamed. “BELIEVE!” And now I felt the wind, I felt the cyclone erupt in the amphitheater. The demon’s face rose huge, its eyes red, its jaws wide. “OR SHALL I BRING ALL NON-BELIEVERS TO THE PATH OF THE GREAT SNAKE, SO YOU CAN MARK IT FOR YOURSELVES FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL EONS?”

Silence. With a huge effort, I turned again to look at the audience. They were shrunken, clinging to their seats, their hair and robes flung every which way. Food and wrappers, cloths and utensils flew through the air and piled up against the walls of the theater. Above the amphitheater, the structure that held the lighting cables rocked ominously. The Goth kid with the camera lay on the ground by his seat. The other Goth kids were piled up, clutching each other. Tamara sat straight, but held her hands together very hard. She looked grave. She also looked angry. Kat McBride clutched her broken singing bowl with tears tracking her face.

“Anyone still not believe me?” I asked. Silence. I waited, just to be sure. “Anyone at all?” No one spoke, and no one moved. “All right then.”

I turned back to the demon. Only he could see me grin. “Bellsandahisnlianamene, I thank you. You are no longer in my service. I swear, by my name, never to call upon you again. You are free to go.”

“MISTRESS,” the voice hissed, like the roar of the sea, like the distant sound of cannons, like the susurration of wind, all at once, “I HEAR YOU.” Then the voice rose like a siren, as though a million voices in a million paths of air spoke the words, “AND I WILL HOLD YOU TO YOUR WORD.”

And at the last sound of the last syllable, he was gone. I almost staggered in the vacuum of sound and form he left. The absence of noise rang in my ears. The stillness in the theater was like a death.

And that was it, then. It was over. I would never see him, in any of his forms, again. I stood there for a moment, staring at the place where something, at any rate, had been. And then I remembered to breathe again.

I turned and brushed at the chalk of the outer circle with my foot, and stepped out of the circle. The audience still sat there, though the bears had changed back to their forms as men. Yvette was holding hard to Jason. I didn’t blame her.

I took another deep breath. “Any questions? Anyone think the World Snake is still coming? Anyone not believe me now?”

I saw some people shake their heads. The Goths at my feet got up, several of them still clutching each other. The one on the ground got up, holding his phone. He poked some buttons, shook it, poked at it some more. Ha. I was as sure as I could be that this working was not going to be the one that made it onto film.

Madam Tamara stood. Somehow, she had straightened her clothing and her turban, and looked as grand and impressive as ever. She pitched her voice so that everyone could hear it, and it did not tremble. “Thank you. That was certainly most impressive.”

Kat McBride piled the pieces of her shattered bowl together, and fit them into her cloth bag. She stood up next to Tamara and wiped her tears with her sleeve. “I heard only truth. Did anyone else hear otherwise?”

The audience made very little response. It was as though they were all recovering from a storm, one that had blown them from the inside as well as from without. And I knew exactly how they felt. Not much like discussing the phenomenon, for one thing.