The Summoning (12 page)

He held up a hand. “I will help you if I can, my son,” he said. “Sister Catherine, thank you. You may go.”

“But Father—”

I stayed on the offensive. “We came to ask Father Joseph a few questions. Is that some kind of crime?”

“Please,” Father Joseph held out his hand. “Forgive me. I acted hastily. And Sister Catherine is very sorry for what she did. Aren’t you, Sister?”

Sister Catherine was still staring at me. “But—she—I saw—”

I looked at her and let my eyes go gold. My head didn’t hurt yet, but I could feel where it was going to. Sister Catherine choked and stopped talking. Then I looked away and very kindly stopped smiling.

“It’s all right,” Father Joseph said. “You may go, Sister. I’ll be a few minutes with these young people.”

“Perhaps I should stay and—”

He said to us, “Please come and sit down, and we will talk. You won’t be assaulted again.” He waved Sister Catherine out of the garden. We heard her shoes clicking on the stones as she hurried away. By then my eyes were mostly green again. Father Joseph looked right at me, and right through me, and I was pretty sure he knew exactly what he’d seen. He moved toward his chair and stumbled a little, and Richard took his arm. The priest said, “Thank you, my son.” He opened his hand. “Will you come and sit?”

Father Joseph resumed his chair. Richard brought another chair from near the wall and set it across from the priest’s. He was going to stand there holding it for me until I pointed, and made him get another one for himself.

Father Joseph looked at me warily. “Have you come to me for help? Are you under a curse?”

Oh, those myths! I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“I know what I saw,” he said. “You cannot deceive me. And yet…” He lifted his hand toward me, with that gesture Tamara had made when trying to suss out Richard. “Who are you?”

He meant, what was I? I told him, “I’m called Amber. He’s called Richard, and he’s the one who wants to ask you some things.”

Reluctantly, Father Joseph turned his attention to Richard. He was shrunken with exhaustion, now that the power had left him. He sank back in his chair. His face was long, and his features stood out beneath his wizened skin. His brows were heavy, his nose long and bent partway. His mouth was habitually tight, habitually turned down, but his eyes were knowing and unafraid. His large hands gripped the arms of his chair. “What do you wish to ask me?”

Richard shot a quick glance at me, and then said to him, “A hundred years ago there was a priest who, it is said, was a great student of the ancient arts. He studied so deeply that he thought he could make a pact with a demon, and bind its power to use against evil, against itself.”

Father Joseph’s head went back in his chair as Richard spoke. “Oh,” he said, “oh, is that story still told?” He put his hand on his brow.

“It is said,” Richard continued, “that the demon turned tables on the priest, so it was the priest who was bound, never to leave this world, until the demon should release him.” Richard waited a moment until Father Joseph lowered his hand again. “Is it true?”

“No,” the priest said. His voice became firm, admonishing. Funny to hear him sound so certain when, of course, he was lying. “Of course not. Devils are simply a metaphor for the evil Man finds on this Earth. But the greatest battle each of us must fight is against the evil within ourselves.” He shot me a look then, which I did not appreciate.

Richard shook his head impatiently. “There are worlds that exist beyond our own, as numerous as the bubbles in the sea. And some of the denizens of these worlds can cross over from one to another, especially when a way is made for them, especially when they are called by name.”

Father Joseph laughed. “Oh, my son, you’ve been reading too much.”

I said, “Then what did you think you saw when you looked at me?”

The priest stopped smiling. I met his gaze, but he didn’t look away.

Richard said, “There have been those who have called demons into their service. Many great scholars in the past—”

“No,” the priest interrupted him, waving his hand. “Vanity! Pride! Those who traffic with the demon kind learn to their cost: all the studies of a lifetime cannot stand between them and the darkness, the power of the darkness.” He shook his head, banishing inner visions of his own, and looked over at Richard. “Do you know why you do not find demon wielders on this Earth? Because the evil they call forth consumes them.”

“But you survived.”

“Oh, my son…” He closed his eyes, and pressed his head back against his chair. “It did not eat me because it was too busy laughing at me.”

“I need to know,” Richard told him, “not how to call a demon, but how to dismiss one.”

That got the priest’s attention. “How’s that?” he asked sharply.

Richard leaned forward toward the priest. “There is a demon trapped on this Earth. It has no powers to speak of, but because it was ineptly raised, it is bound here until the world ends, and perhaps beyond.”

“Oh, that,” the priest said. He leaned back again. “I’ve heard of it. The one in Loch Ness.”

“No,” said Richard, reaching to touch his jacket pocket.

The priest continued, “That was a bad business. But as long as the demon is held harmless, it doesn’t matter how long it is here, does it? We needn’t worry about it.”

“It matters to him,” Richard said darkly.

“Do not meddle with such matters,” the priest’s voice sharpened. He looked at me. “You have meddled in the dark arts enough already. Abjure it! For your soul’s sake.” He glared again at Richard. “Leave the demon kind to their own devices.”

“I only wish to know—” Richard tried.

“You do not know what you’re asking. You don’t know what could happen. Do you know how long it was before they let me out of that monastery? Before they let me speak again? Before I was allowed to return to this parish that I swore to defend?”

“Against what?” I asked. I was wondering if the World Snake had been on its way for a long time.

His eyes shot to me again, and his voice dropped. “I was a fool. I thought the devil was coming here in his legions from China. The Chinese, you see, there were so many of them. Raise a devil to fight a devil, I thought! They were so different. They had such strange magic…” He shook his head. “Now, of course, one realizes…” He gave a ghost of a smile. “I was a fool. Don’t you be one.”

“Father Joseph!” Sister Catherine’s voice called across the garden. She had opened the double doors to the house and was advancing upon us with half a dozen others. Four were nuns in traditional habits, one was the gardener we’d passed earlier, and one was a security guard. “Father Joseph, it’s time for you to come in.” She led her little platoon to stand next to Father Joseph’s chair, and put her hand on it protectively. She smiled at us, her professional smile, but she avoided meeting my eyes. “Father Joseph needs to rest now. Thank you so much for coming to see him.” The sisters helped the priest up and ushered him back to the house. He stopped them, and turned back to Richard.

“Leave such matters alone. For your soul’s sake!” Then he glared at me. “And you. Pray!”

Then Sister Catherine interposed herself between us and told us that the gardener would show us the way out.

I gritted my teeth as we crossed the ward on our way out of town.

“Are you hurt?” Richard asked me quietly.

“What?”

“Your head,” he reminded me.

“Oh. No. My head is pretty hard.” My wolf head is hard. And I’d been moving when she struck. The spot was tender, but not what I’d call hurt. “Do you want to go back and pin the priest to the wall, and ask him again?”

“If you wish,” he said.

I thought about it. The only way we’d get information from the priest was if we got him alone, away from the church and all his minders. “We’d have to get him alone,” I said aloud.

Richard was shaking his head. “He is too well warded.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll leave him.” For now, I thought.

Since I got to L.A., on the weekends I get out my maps and look for the open spaces in the city, and go and explore them. Alone. It wasn’t that late in the afternoon. We were on the 57, going south, but I didn’t take the cutover on the 60 back to Whittier. The freeway was moving well, and I just kept going.

I saw Richard notice that I missed the exit. After a moment he said, “Can I ask where we are going?”

“Someplace where I can think.”

I like to move while I think. I like long, open spaces, preferably along the ocean. I’ve found a couple places I like, and I headed for the nearest one now, jogging down the 405 to Long Beach.

What was I doing? I’d come to Los Angeles to keep my head down, to make no noise, to stay out of sight, until I gained enough strength to fight the battle I knew would one day come. But now I was involved in something much more imminent, that might be just as dire. And I was teamed with this creature, who looked like a man, a very beautiful man, and smelled just as good, who followed wherever I went, and what was I doing with him?

And I had to admit, he was a delight to the eye. Probably John Dee had specifically designed him that way, from his blond hair, his high cheekbones, his sweet body, slight and smooth, his eyes that were bleak with ancient longing and remembered pain, and warm and questioning when he looked at me.

I made the choice to leave home, leave family, to be alone. But I confess, having even a bit of a pack again comforted a part of me I hadn’t realized was aching. And that was what I needed to think about.

It wasn’t hard to find parking since it was March, and not a lot of people came to the beach this time of year. The surfers and dog walkers were out, some couples, and a few families with kids digging in the sand. There’s a long, black beach at home, cold and mist-shrouded and empty most of the time. I like to run there. Here, there are no rocks, and the sand is blindingly white, but there is plenty of space, and no end in sight. That’s why I like the place.

I walked out to where the sand was packed hard, close by the water line, and started southeastward at a good pace. Richard kept up easily. After awhile I said reflectively, “So John Dee got a dud. Demons are generally powerful and dangerous, but—” I said his real name, just to see him start at it, “is not?”

He didn’t answer for so long I thought I hadn’t worded it sufficiently strongly as a question. At last he said quietly, “I beg you not to say that name aloud.”

I stopped and faced him. I was about to tell him that I could say what I want, that I’d understood him the first time, and anyway there was no one near enough to hear, but when I turned I saw there was a couple behind him running toward us after their dogs. I’d been paying attention to the dogs and missed the humans, which I didn’t care to admit. So I only said, “All right. Point taken. Now answer the question.”

The fairness of his skin was even more obvious in the merciless late afternoon sunlight on the beach. His arms were folded loosely as though guarding a wound, but I knew he was just keeping a wary hand over the important jacket pocket. He met my eyes to answer my question.

“I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what I am. John Dee scored over my understanding with so many commands and admonitions, decrees and geases that I barely remember that anything came before the moment I appeared in the midst of his pentagram. I was hoping…” His eyes drifted out to sea for a moment. “…that the priest could tell me. Or the sorceress.”

“I thought we went to Tamara to tell her—and ask her—about the Eater of Souls.”

His eyes fell. “Yes, of course. That, too.” He shrugged. “I didn’t try and ask more. It was obvious that she thinks me hateful.”

“True.” I cocked my head at him. “The priest didn’t think you were hateful. He was pretty sure I was, though.”

Richard smiled. It was a really sweet smile. I looked away. “When I have my soul, I avoid no end of troubles,” he said. When I looked back, he was waiting to meet my eyes. “Thank you.” He looked out over the sea. There were clouds over the water on the horizon, so you couldn’t see clearly the line between the sea and the air. He said, “It is my hope that if I help them—you and them—with the coming cataclysm, some one among the sorcerers will, in return, tell me…” He glanced at me sideways. “With your permission, of course.”

“Tell you what?”

He shrugged, lowered his eyes again. “Who I am, what I am…”

“How to get home,” I said.

He nodded, looking down at the water rushing almost to our toes.

“All the things that John Dee thought it would be better if you didn’t remember.”

“He was an ignoramus.”

“In these matters, don’t forget, so am I.”

His eyes were troubled. The wind had come up, ruffling his hair. Beneath one of his eyes was a tiny scar. I wondered when and where in his travels he’d gotten that one. I wondered about the ones I couldn’t see, and the ones I’d never see, because his body had been new made, what, more than six times? The noise of the waves beside us, the distant roar of traffic, the smell of salt and the sea, and the scent of him, and all these questions, raised a tide in me that a stiff walk was not going to satisfy.

“Wait here,” I said. “I’m going to run.” I took two steps away and stopped in my tracks. When I turned back he was standing there, and I knew he would stand there until I came back and told him to move. And the tide would finish coming in, and…hm. No commands without an ending. I came back to him, looking around. There was a barbecue area up the beach, deserted now, but with places to sit. I pointed. “Wait over there.”

He gave a brief nod and started off. I watched him go, moving easily despite the weight of the sand on his boots. Not a dud, really. I turned suddenly and ran.

One thing I’ve found about the beach is there are dogs that run there, as well as people, and down near the waves people can never be absolutely sure what they see. I changed as I reached a group of people walking along the surf, and leaped on four legs into the ocean. I ran along its edge, leaping the fingers of foam, then widened my stride. Down along the beach a couple of people were walking with their dogs, who leaped in and out of the surf wearing big dumb grins. I charged through the dogs and watched them scramble away, howling and yelping, and then at my clamorous challenge they ran to join me again for the joy of the chase, any chase, their owners calling uselessly behind them. I let them keep up for a while, and then left them in the sand.