Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (29 page)

People got to their feet, smoothed their hair, re-draped their clothing, and then clambered around the theater gathering their scattered belongings and the debris from their suppers. Then they climbed down the steps of the aisles toward the exit. The Goth kids were among the first to leave. The Thunder Mountain Boys escorted Marlin away gently in their midst. Tamara’s friend with the keys of the theater finished supervising the picking up of all the litter, and climbed down to the floor of the amphitheater. His hair was puffed and tangled by the wind, though he didn’t seem to have noticed. He walked over to the stage and glared across it. “Are those marks going to come out?”

I’d blown out the candles and gathered them up with the bowls. The theater guy brought me a bucket of water and a mop, and I slopped over the circles and the pentagram, and scattered the cornmeal until nothing was left while he watched, stalking the stage as I worked. When I was finished I passed the mop and bucket back to him, and he took them away.

Tamara stood on the theater floor in front of the stage, talking to some of the power raisers, while others threaded past them toward the exit. The guy with the sword stopped, caught my eye, drew his sword, and lifted it in salute. I nodded to him. He nodded back, sheathed the sword and headed out.

Tamara turned to me. “Thank you. We are finished here. That was a very convincing demonstration.”

“So, you think that will do it?”

“I think—”

But I never found out what she was going to say. A scream erupted outside the theater, in the direction of the parking lot, followed by a number of rising shrieks, and we all charged out there to find out what the hell had happened. I knew, though. In fact, it was part of the plan.

I’d bet myself that the Thunder Mountain Boys would be the ones to do it, but my second guess would have been one of the Goth kids, and in fact, it was. The four remaining wand-wavers stood by a blackened hole in the pavement, three of them still shrieking, one lying down at the edge of the hole, trying to get up the nerve to reach inside. One of the bears got to her first and hauled her up away from there.

The yelling and demands and the attempted explanations, all drowning each other out, came to a stop when Tamara’s voice cut across the noise.

“What have you done, you stupid children?”

The kid with the camera told her, “It was Keith. He said the name. That’s all he did. He was making a joke about remembering it, and he said it—”

“You dared him!” the Goth girl who’d been on the ground screamed at him, right from the edge of hysteria. Her long hair had been dyed silver, and tied up in little braids adorned with stars. Her make-up was smudged. “I heard what you said, Joel! You dared him to say the name out loud, and you made fun of him that he couldn’t remember it! But then he did!”

“No I did not!” the Goth boy choked out, but his voice was shaking.

The three other Goth kids stepped away from him, looking down on him. The silver girl, breathing hard, pointed her wand at him. “You did. I never want to see you again.”

“That’s not what happened!” Joel cried.

“What did happen?” Tamara asked.

The other Goth girl wore a coronet beaded with tiny skulls under the hood of her black mantle. Her fingernails were very long and black. “They were walking ahead of us, and they were joking and everything. And I heard Joel dare Keith to say the demon’s name. And Joel said Keith couldn’t remember it, and Keith said he could, and then Keith said it.”

“And there was a crack—” Silver Goth girl took up the story.

“And there was a roar—”

“The ground exploded,” Joel said. “Right next to me. And Keith was there, right beside me, and then he was gone, and now…” He turned and gazed down at the hole. “He’s gone.” He gazed at the other Goth kids. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do anything! I don’t know what happened to Keith but—” He spied me, standing beyond Tamara. “It’s her fault! She brought the demon here! She knew he’d have to be fed.”

One of the bears—I saw it was Jonathan—went over to loom above the Goth kids. His voice was so low it rumbled. “Don’t be a fool. You did it yourselves. Your friend summoned a powerful demon without taking the slightest precautions.”

“We’re still at the theater! You warded the theater, I saw you!” Joel accused Tamara.

Jason came up then and joined Jonathan. “You can’t ward against stupidity,” he said. “You want to call the demon and ask for your friend back?”

Tamara turned to me. I shrugged. “I thought it would be one of the Thunder Mountain Boys. Richard had it in for them.”

“Yes. Well, it may still be. Only they may be wise enough to wait until they can choose their ground and fortify a circle before they call the name.”

I shrugged again. I could hope. Because I’d made sure they had the wrong name, they would invite the demon in, but then have no more control over him than their wards could give. And the best wards that Tamara and her friends together could produce hadn’t kept out the storm.

Tamara turned back to the Goth kids. “You were told of the dangers. You agreed that you understood them before you were let inside. You each one gave your oath not to do what one of you has done. Go home. Put away your toys. Learn some wisdom. If you can.”

I thought I would do the same. Yvette went off with Jason in Tamara’s friends’ car. I got in my Honda Civic and drove home through the deepening night alone. Road work on the 405 brought traffic down to a crawl for a short time. As I passed the scorching bright lights illuminating the guys and equipment tearing up the highway, I wondered what would happen if I called that name again now. Would there be an explosion, and a big black hole in the road? And what would be the explanation? But I kept my word. I did not even think the name.

When I turned up the alley to pull into the carport behind my apartment building, my headlights swept the steps leading to my apartment, and I saw him standing there. My heart clenched. I felt breathless with hope, and at the same time, stiff with fury. If that imposter had come to my place again then he was going to die tonight.

I parked my car and walked around to my steps, the bag of stuff banging against my leg in my hurry. I stopped when I saw him. It’s never quite dark on my street, but the moon was behind me, and I could see his face, his form, his boots, his old black leather jacket. He tipped his head at me, smiling a little, and his eyes gleamed. I began to smile. I opened my mouth, and it was there. The scent of him, clean and new, the spice of his sweat like an aftertaste, and the musk of his hair.

“Well,” he said. “Wasn’t that fun?”

“Richard!” I breathed. I ascended the steps, my smile growing, breathing him in. “Did you come to say good bye?”

“We already said good bye.” His eyes took me in like a lover’s. “I came to say thank you.”

“I’m taller,” I told him. I was grinning like a fool.

“I’m sure you are.”

I laughed then, and hugged him, and he kissed me, and both our scents changed, and I took him inside.

M
y lover was enslaved for four hundred years to a succession of human masters, and sex was one of his best weapons to control the conditions of his servitude. So my lover is patient, and he is thorough. Since he was raised by the magician John Dee, who specified his looks point by point to a demon who was required to obey him, my lover is beautiful, from the shape of his toes, to the muscles of his thighs, the planes of his belly, the bones of his chest. His fingers are long, his face as fine and fair as a Greek hero, his skin smooth and pale.

When I first knew him, he smelled of fear. He played me the way a slave must always play its master, to get the best deal for himself. Now he smelled of himself, and sex, and joy, and his eyes lit with the pleasure of it.

I put away my memory of the towering being of darkness and power I had raised on the stage in Garden Grove, because Richard was back, of his own accord, and what I could see and touch and taste, I loved.

When I lay spent, adrift in delight, my head on his chest, his arms loose on my back, I asked him, “Why did you come back?”

I felt his smile as his hand lightly moved along my spine. “You can’t tell me now that you aren’t pleased to see me.”

“Of course not.” I brushed my fingers down his belly, to the hair on his groin, and stroked him there softly, just so that his scent would change again. “But I wasn’t going to see you again. You said so.”

“Yes,” he said. “Stop that, or stop talking.”

“Mm,” I said. “I’m listening.”

And then there was some laughing and some wrestling, and I let him win.

“Time is different there,” he told me, when we lay relaxed again. He lay holding me against him, both of us lying on our sides. Richard spoke softly, almost into my ear. “And so is form, and senses don’t precisely translate. I looked back on a wearying and miserable interlude on this plane, in this form, and a few things stood out. Here, and in this form, I can touch you.” He kissed my shoulder and his arms tightened around me.

“What’s it like? Where you come from?”

He breathed out, considering. “It is a universe as infinite as yours, where I am the darkness, the wind, and the stones, all at once. I can wear it like a cloak, if it pleases me, or reach out to other worlds and enter them like bees, all their minds my own.”

I turned around in his arms, so I could see his face. “Can you take me there?”

He smiled. “I could, but then you wouldn’t be what you are now. You would be changed, and there would be no returning.”

“You came back.”

“For the pleasure of it.” He bit my nose, gently. “I had to stay nearby for a while anyway, until you called. After this,” he lay back, drawing me with him, until my head lay against his shoulder again, “I’m going far away. Ha.” He said the words again, as though tasting them. “I am going far away, which is one way to put it. You won’t see me again. And so, I came to see you, of my own free will, under no compulsion or geas, but one.”

I raised myself up to look at him. “And that is?”

He smiled. “For the joy of it. For the joy of love.”

I walked out of my room the next morning, dressed for work in my party clothes, my heart expanding with joy at the smell of the breakfast Richard had cooked. Just like old times. Brief, happy times.

“That’s new,” he said, looking at my outfit, an admiring glow in his eyes, and I preened. So this was why women buy clothes. Huh.

Over buttery French toast, fresh orange juice, fried eggs and peaches with cream, I got up the nerve to ask him, “How long are you staying?”

He sat down across from me, his plate as laden as mine, and passed me the syrup. “Three days. When you wake up, day after tomorrow, I’ll be gone.”

“I have to go to work,” I said, testing the words, to see if I really did. I’d lost my last job over Richard, and it seemed like a good plan. But I wanted to keep my job at the music store. “My boyfriend’s back in town,” just wasn’t going to cut it, when Ariadne’s staff was just me and Yvette.

“I’ll bring you lunch,” Richard said, “if you show me where it is.”

Ariadne’s shop was open from nine in the morning until nine at night. I was there from eight-thirty until five, and Yvette came at one, so I could take a lunch break, and then she and I covered the store while Ariadne gave music lessons in the back room, and couldn’t be interrupted. I didn’t tell Yvette that Richard was back. Yvette had seen Richard briefly a few times at Tamara’s, during the two weeks before I’d set him free. Today, Yvette wanted to talk about the cyclone of darkness that spoke both inside her head and out of it, about the smashed picnic basket, and the beer cans that had been turned into strange shapes, about the blackened hole in the parking lot, and the fact that Goth-boy Keith hadn’t been seen since. Obviously, she had a bigoted and prejudiced idea of what a demon was really like, and wasn’t going to look at Richard, in his current form, with any kindness.

Yvette wore her African shirts and beaded hats to the store. She’d sold two drum sets to customers simply by playing them with all her passion and verve, which drew the customers in, and then encouraging the customers to try one themselves. Ariadne suggested gently that Yvette try any of the instruments she liked, and had started giving her lessons on the flute as well as the violin, whenever a regular pupil did not show up.

That morning, Ariadne had brought her cat, Minto, to work. I caught the scent the moment I came through the door, and knew exactly what she was. It didn’t surprise me that Ariadne spent the morning searching for the cat, who was keeping out of my way.

I met Richard for lunch and he brought meat pies he’d found somewhere. We ate them in the park and then wandered the streets until I had to go back to work.

Ariadne had gone for a walk, thinking the cat might have gotten out when the door was open. I went in the back and found the heavy gray tabby stretched out in her fur-lined box on the shelf Ariadne had built for her, with her cream saucer and her food bowl, and her toys within reach. I was going to ask her if she ever changed to her human form, but I knew the answer as soon as I met her eyes. If she changed, Ariadne might make her open her own cat food cans. I told her what I thought of her, and then went out and informed Ariadne where the cat had got to. The cat made a big show of hating me after that.

When I got off work, Richard was waiting outside. He took me to a second-hand clothes shop he’d scoped out. Clothes shopping with Richard was like playing dress-up. I bought him a new red shirt, just because I could, and we found a couple more outfits so I wouldn’t just have one to wear to work.

When we got home, Richard made dinner, his chicken with a golden mushroom sauce that I’d asked for. After we ate, we headed up to Hellman Park, and there we both changed form and charged straight up the steep hillsides, just two little dogs off leash when we met people, but farther out, deeper into the open country, we ran as wolves, and played and hunted, long into the night. And that was my night, the night that I would remember always. All Richard’s beauty, and all his wiles, had not been able to seduce me, when he took service with me. But when by chance I ordered him to change, and he took on a wolf form, then it was like meeting myself. And how could I say no? Richard in his human form is beautiful, clever and fun. Richard as a wolf is my mate.