The Summoning (10 page)

When he didn’t finish, I prompted, “Why?”

His voice was low. “I’d gotten a skin disease. He’d given it to me, but he didn’t like it. So he cured me.”

“Ah.” I thought for a moment. “That would be the earl?”

“That’s right.”

“I hope he died hard,” I said.

“No such luck,” Richard said, but his voice was lighter. “In his bed, at a ripe old age, with me at his feet.”

“Damn. Makes you want to believe in Hell.”

“Oh, I do,” said Richard fervently.

I counted. “And the fourth time you were killed? What was that?”

There was a long silence. I looked over at him, and he was staring straight ahead, his jaw working. He looked pale. “Richard?” I said.

He looked at me, and his eyes looked so weary that for a second I felt sorry I’d asked. But he was already answering. “The fourth time… that was the Eater of Souls.”

He looked out the window, and I decided not to ask him anymore just then.

We got off on Mission to look for the car wash, and almost at once I felt a surge of energy. “Whoa!” I said, as we crossed it. “Did you feel that?”

I looked over at him. He’d gone white. “That… was a very strong ward.”

“Someone around here is sure scared of something.”

“Someone who knows what they’re doing,” he agreed. His hand was over his jacket pocket. “I couldn’t cross that ward, before I had this.”

I glanced at him. “Someone worth talking to?”

“If you please.”

“We’ll look around, later,” I said. The idea of someone that strong marking territory anywhere near mine got my hackles up. I had to know who it was. I had to see what they were made of.

We trolled along until we found the dollar car wash with the little park next to it. There was an eye-searingly colorful play structure in one corner. Next to the car wash some old trees leaned heavily over a couple of picnic tables. I passed it up, turned down the next street, and parked. I opened my mouth slightly as we walked through the heavy grass toward the picnic tables. I itched to change and get a better sense of what I was smelling. An old lady was walking her two little pugs along the edge of the park, where a hedge divided it from the dilapidated front of a tire store. The dogs stopped to snuffle deeply along the ground. I shook my head.

“Is something wrong?” Richard asked me.

“If those little dogs start digging,” I told him, “we’re going to have half a dozen police cars here in no time.”

He looked across the park. Fortunately, the old lady was dragging her little darlings away. “What is it?”

“There’s a body down there,” I told him. “A human.”

“What should we do?” Richard asked.

“Let it rest,” I told him. “It’s old. Maybe as old as this park. Where’s your guy?”

When the lady and her pugs had trotted off, there was no one but us in the park. I sat on the bench while Richard crossed the street and went in to the little twenty-four-hour grocery and taqueria on the corner. He came back a short while later with two bags of food and half a dozen bottles of water. He opened one bag and laid out napkins and a big burrito for each of us, and I was suddenly hungry.

I was halfway through my beef burrito when I noticed the guy hovering behind us. I stiffened, and glanced over at Richard. I hadn’t felt the guy coming up to us. And that was really annoying. It wasn’t like the burrito was that good. I’m not usually an easy stalk. I wondered if the guy was just that hard to sense.

Richard was slowly unpacking the second bag, piling wrapped-up burritos and a couple of tacos on a napkin. The guy smelled gritty, and fearful. He was hesitant, poised for flight. He was not a predator. I finished my burrito. As I was wiping my fingers the Rag Man came around and slipped onto the bench across the table and a little ways down, smiling and nodding. Richard gently pushed the napkin with the food toward him, and the guy lit into it.

He was lean and weathered, with lank stringy hair under a knit cap, a long face, and a straggly beard. I couldn’t tell how old he was. He wore layers of clothes from which rose a fascinating array of odors. I looked at him in appreciation while he fitted food into his mouth in efficient bites and chewed quickly. His hands were stiffly wrapped in rags, leaving only the fingers protruding. Then I noticed the traces of smells coming from his hands. Burned flesh, oozing sores, old and new blood. I opened my mouth slightly and breathed in.

“He’s hurt,” I said to Richard quietly.

Richard lifted his hand slightly, glancing over with a look that asked me to let this meeting play out. All right, I thought. I sat back and waited to see why we were talking to the Rag Man.

“So Stan, hey Stan, long time,” the Rag Man said to Richard. He picked at the bits of lettuce and cheese left on his burrito wrapper. He slid a glance at me, and stopped. He stared, frowning hard. “Uh…” He moved his head closer, then raised a hand over one eye. “Uh, ma’am. No offense. Do you have two heads?”

Well, that was one way to put it. “Yes.”

“Yeah. All right.”

He kept staring at me, shifting from side to side. I damped down my passion. I closed off my senses. I drew in my spirit, the way we learned to when they bussed us over the hill to middle school, where people didn’t know what we were. “Better?”

He stopped moving, and just stared, just above my head. “I saw them, right?”

“You saw them,” I agreed.

“Okay. Okay. So, Stan, you found her, then. I told you—” He leaned forward. “I told you danger would walk by your side.” He nodded, sat back, and his eyes slid to me again. “No offense, ma’am.”

I nodded. I do like respect.

Richard looked startled. That was fun. “You told me—”

“You were running to danger, and would walk by its side. There you go.” He picked up the wrapper from one of his tacos and began to shred it into narrow strips.

“Then she’s the right one?” Richard sounded relieved.

“Just don’t let her take you home to her folks.” The Rag Man was still, staring at his fingers. They twitched. I was possessed of a brief vision of me walking in the door with Richard in tow, and all the heads turning to look at him, and scent him. Yes, that would be a problem. I almost laughed. The Rag Man shook himself, glanced at me. “Just don’t do it.”

“Okay.” I looked quizzically at Richard. He didn’t get it either.

The Rag Man pointed at Richard with both hands. “The last time I saw you…”

“It was on Wilshire. I looked for you later, but you had gone.”

“Oh, yeah, I am so out of there. That place is history, man, I told you. I saw you there. I saw…” The Rag Man’s eyes changed, and for a moment he seemed to stare into another world. “Darkness,” he breathed. He looked up at Richard again. “You… I saw…”

Richard, his hand over his jacket pocket, smiled at the Rag Man, and seemed to be trying to look as harmless, as normal, as human, as he possibly could. “I’m fine now,” he told the guy gently. “I was sick.”

“I know what I saw,” the Rag Man said.

“Look at me,” Richard insisted. “I’m better now. I’m just the same.”

The Rag Man didn’t look at him. He gathered up the strips he’d made and began meticulously to shred them into tiny squares. “What do you want, Stan?”

Richard said quietly, “You left after the earthquake. I just wanted to know why.”

The Rag Man looked up, surprised. “You know why! The Worm, she’s coming. Man, I had to get out of there, that’s like, prime target uno, that’s where she’s heading for.”

“Will it be soon?”

“I don’t know. Time…” He tried to make a shape with his hands, as though to illustrate his point. “Time isn’t real. It moves. You can’t nail that down.” He stirred the little squares he’d made. “But where she’s coming, I seen that.”

Richard said to me, “He can scry anything. He scryed a handful of glass once, on the sidewalk.”

“No, no, not like that. I’ll show you. I can show you. You can see it. Anyone can see it.” He got up, brushing a handful of his little paper squares into a pocket of his coat. He pointed to a shallow hill rising to the east. “Up there.”

Richard let the Rag Man into the backseat of my car, which annoyed me. I don’t like someone I don’t know hanging out that close behind me. He rode leaning right up between us, pointing the way. Good thing I like a lot of strong smells.

As we drove toward the ridge, heading north, we passed through that surge of energy again. “Wow!” the Rag Man said, like he’d hit a blast of cold water on a hot day. Richard leaned back hard in his seat.

“What was that?” I asked the Rag Man.

“Comes from the church back over there. I don’t know how they do it. They got them all around.”

“The church?” Richard said. “What church?” He turned around to the Rag Man, his voice sharp. I looked at him, and he subsided.

“I don’t know,” the Rag Man said. “You know, the one with the tower.”

“It may be the parish boundaries,” Richard told me. “They used to ward the parish against evil, back in the day. I didn’t know anyone was still doing that.” I heard the suggestion in his voice.

“We’ll go talk to them,” I said.

We headed uphill on a road that wound up to a reservoir through a county park. I stopped when we got to a tollgate.

“No, no, not that way,” the Rag Man said. “Turn right, up there.”

Further up the hill on the right we came to another gate. As we drove up to it, the Rag Man was unrolling the backseat window on my side. A big, heavy-set guy in sunglasses came out of the booth, but before he could speak, the Rag Man leaned out his window.

“Hey, man, it’s just me, I want to show these guys something.” And darned if the big guy didn’t wave us through.

There was a tingling of energy up there on the hill. The grass was green and manicured, and everywhere, in neatly marked spaces, divided by perfect green lawns, were parked big, handsome, clean, new RVs. “Someone’s been doing a working,” I said, tasting the air.

“Oh, yeah,” the Rag Man said. “They’ve been up here for months, these guys. Heilige Arbeiters, they call themselves. The Holy Workers. There’s been a gathering every night.”

We passed a few heavy-set, slow-moving men and women grouped beside barbecues or stretched out in deck chairs. They were dressed like people on vacation from somewhere else. They looked up when we drove by, but then lost interest when the Rag Man waved and called out a greeting. Some of them waved back. A few of them smiled.

We got out on the far side of the park and stood on the verge where the hill dropped away, and we could see across the great bowl that held greater Los Angeles. And if the air weren’t so hazy, we could have seen all the way to the ocean.

“There,” the Rag Man said. “I saw it in my dreams. I saw it in the fire. I saw it in my goddamn oatmeal, for God’s sake. This hill. This view. So finally I found this place, and this is what I saw.” He pointed down to the foot of the hill. “Waves crashing right down there. And out there…” His arm swept across the greater Los Angeles basin. “The ocean. No city. Nothing left. The bottom of this hill—that’s going to be her bite mark.”

Richard and I took in the view. That was going to be a lot of missing city. That Worm had one enormous bite.

“You saw it more than once?” Richard asked.

“Over and over. I came up here, I recognized the view. Check it out, man. From here, down that way, all along that ridge down to Diamond Bar and the Chino Hills, this is going to be the new coast line.” He held up his hands. “Why do you think I stayed out here, hanging out in old Pomona? Come on!”

I looked across at the farther ridgeline and realized, “There’ve been workings up there as well.”

“Oh, yeah,” the Rag Man said. “The Holy Workers here, the Air Dragons up along there, and Eddie Mack’s tai chi group down that way. All along the high points, they’re all doing their thing.”

“Can they deflect her?” Richard asked.

“They might. Sure, they could. But there’s folks up north along the coast working for the Worm to swallow L.A. and leave their cities alone. The Buddhists up on Mt. Baldy are chanting all the time these days, but no one can figure out what they’re trying to do. Maybe they just don’t know. And the folks here aren’t working stop her. They’re just trying to keep the Worm from going any further inland than here. And guess who they’re drawing some of their power from? Guess!”

I sensed the air, the remnants of currents, and the patterns that lay on the currents, still in motion from recent workings. “These people are drawing some of their power from the magic users in L.A.”

“Not just them,” the Rag Man added.

“Huh,” I said. “No wonder the bears were laughing.”

“Power wielders working together,” Richard said. “That would be a miracle.”

I stared out over the city that was my home. The city I had chosen. I could, after all, just start driving. I’ve heard Colorado is really nice. But here, in this city, I was still in my family’s greater territory. Once I left California, if I staked out territory on some other pack’s mountain, I wasn’t going to be anonymous anymore. Also, my chances of survival might not be very high. Besides. I’d claimed territory here, in this city, and it’s not in my nature to give that up without a fight. Not without doing whatever it takes. Not, in fact, at all.

“So what do we do to save her?” I asked. “How do we beat the World Snake?”

The Rag Man shook his head. “That’s what they keep asking me. And I look and I look, and all I see is darkness. Deep, strange darkness.” He turned and looked at Richard. “Like I saw in you.”

“Look again,” Richard asked him earnestly. “Please. Not for the Worm,” he added, as the Rag Man shook his head. He stepped closer to the man and dropped his voice. “Look for the Eater of Souls.”

“Oh,” said the Rag Man. “That.”

“I must know if it is coming. I must know… if I am to be taken.”

He gave a side-long glance at me, and I had the answer to my question. This is why we were consulting the Rag Man. The city was on the verge of being annihilated, but what Richard wanted to know about was his own personal fate. The Eater of Souls must have done quite a number on Richard. Besides killing him, at least once.

“All right, yeah. I’ll do it.”