The Summoning (18 page)

“Did it ever occur to you,” Darius interrupted, “that the demon was sent to distract you from your true mission?”

“Huh? I mean, come on.”

“Our fight is with the World Snake, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “I only heard about that last week. I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.”

“The demon told you of it,” he said, as though he knew already. “Did he tell you how to fight it?”

“He told me,” I said, remembering, “He said that before the World Snake, the Eater of Souls will come. And he says that may be the greater danger of the two.”

“Right,” Darius said, disgusted. “And why is that?”

I thought back. I was starting to not like this guy. “I don’t know.”

“You do know,” he insisted.

I shrugged. “Richard’s scared of it.”

“Is he?” His voice was growing milder with every question. It made him sound sarcastic. “And does he have a soul to be eaten?”

I felt the color rise in my face as I realized several facts weren’t adding up, which made me feel stupid, which made me feel embarrassed, which made me feel angry, but I said, without missing a beat, “Yes, he does.”

“Does he?” Darius said, in honest wonder. “Well, that changes everything.” He thought a moment, and then nodded to himself. “I’ll have to find out more about demons. The only ones I’ve known so far are treacherous, lying bastards.”

“Have you had one?” I asked, curious. “One that was yours?”

He shook his head. “No. Thank the Spirits that be, I have not.”

“Then you don’t know much about it, do you?” I said.

He laughed at that. “All right. You’ll have to find your Richard on your own. I don’t think that’s my province. I seem to be the clearinghouse for information on our prime enemy. I put groups in touch with one another, I take questions, and if I can’t find the answers myself, I find those who can. I marshal our resources. I know already that you’re going to be one of our most important ones.” He added in a murmur, “Maybe the most important one.”

“Yeah?” I was still thinking about how to find Richard. “What can I do against the World Snake that all you power-raisers can’t do?”

He looked surprised. “Well, for one thing, you’ll be able to sense where it is. Won’t you?”

I thought about that. He was right. If it was nearby, if it was that big and that powerful, I’d know. So I nodded.

He nodded back. “That’s useful to all of us. You’ll begin at once, of course.”

Huh? “Begin what?” I asked.

“Seeking the Snake. We don’t know where it is. We need that information. We need you to do this for us.”

“Do what?”

“Quarter the city. I’ll give you some numbers you can call in to, to tell where you are and what ground you’ve covered, and some other numbers in case you sense the enemy. You can’t begin too soon.”

“Now just a minute,” I protested. “I never said—”

“You are with us?” he asked, sounding as reasonable as any adult sane person can who has just said something totally unbelievable.

“Look, I may be with you but—”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll get you those numbers.”

I followed him across the room. “Now hold on just a minute!” He turned back to me with mild, enquiring eyes. I stood my ground, not letting his quietude disarm me. “I am in this fight. But I am in on my own terms, and I will do it my own way.”

“But you just said—”

“I’m not finished! This is my city. But I am not your hunting dog. I am not running around this whole stupid basin sniffing for your stupid Snake. At least not until I find Richard. Now tell me what Marlin is doing with him.”

Darius smiled. “Well, we know it’s not a virgin sacrifice, don’t we?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
left a little later with a brand new Thomas Guide turned to the right page, an address clearly marked, and my ears still ringing from the sound of the chiming golden bowls. It had taken precious minutes of waiting while Darius carefully and deliberately set each brass bowl spinning on its slender wand, one after another until he had all nine going again, with me sitting stock-still in the chair, admonished not to move or even think too loud while he did his casting.

Once the first bowl was spinning I heard, so faintly it was almost like a miniscule buzzing in my ears, the slight ringing sound they had been making when I came in, and I smelled water. When all nine were going again, Darius took a stand in the middle of the room with his arms out and his eyes closed. The ringing grew louder as the bowls seemed to spin faster and faster. I wondered if I was being hypnotized, enjoying a hallucination or a carnival trick. The bowls spun on and on. They changed tone. One turned onto its side. No way should it have been able to do that. Darius’s head was thrown back. The expression on his face was distant and intense. Sweat had gathered on his brow.

All at once two of the bowls exploded from their perches and shot across the room with a whiz and a splash. For an instant I felt water on my face, but when I touched my cheek, it was gone. Darius wavered a little and opened his eyes. He studied me gravely.

“I asked if it is imperative that you go to work for us now.” He frowned as he thought about what he was saying. “They said you are already working for us.” He shrugged. “So be it. You should ask me, not where your Richard is, but where you can find Marlin.”

With the address and the Thomas Guide, in about fifteen minutes I pulled up at a three-story building in Beverly Hills. The front door to the glass office building was open and I caught one of the elevators to the third floor. I stepped out and was brought up short: it was faint, and it was hours old, but I smelled Richard. Richard had been there.

Only one of the four offices was currently lit and occupied. Fortunately, it was the one Richard’s trail led to, or I would have had to do some breaking of glass doors. I was tempted to anyway. I hit the door to the Lemmon and Frazier Dance Studio hard, but it was heavy and did not give me the satisfaction of crashing open in front of me. Darn. I resisted the temptation to go out and slam it open again as a bunch of guys were already looking at me.

They had been doing a working. I could feel it in the air, the power swirling like a strong current, only beginning to dissipate at the edges. But it was over, and groups of men were standing around on the brightly lit hardwood floor, reflected on three sides by mirrors set over exercise bars, and on the fourth by a wall of windows looking out onto a view of the city. Some were still dressed in their workout clothes, tank tops dark with sweat stains, and tight spandex pants. Some had showered and changed into clean, dry shirts and sweats, or back into the suits or slacks that were their day wear. They stared at me as I walked a third of the way into the room, my head lifted and casting around for scent. Great gods, what had gone on in there was complicated! There were ancient layers of heavy sweat as a backdrop to the day’s events, both men’s and women’s; this place had been in business for years. I caught Richard’s familiar, sweet tang, overlaid by the scents of more recent exertions. Clearly and sharply, I smelled sex. My hackles rose. For a moment I felt I was wearing two skins at once, wolf and woman, and I took a moment to think that this was how Jacob the bear had done his dual-aspect trick. But I was mad, and I wasn’t giving anything away.

The guys had stopped what they were saying or doing to watch me. I walked on into the room until I stood over the place where Richard had been about three hours earlier. The buzz of magic raised, a wild magic, powerful and rough and a little crazy, was strongest here, at its vortex. I looked around at the dancers, beautiful and fit, their faces open and their movements graceful with strength, satiety, and release. I knew what they’d done with Richard.

One of them, a lithe, olive-skinned man with close-cropped black hair and a small mustache asked, “Can we help you, honey? I’m afraid this is men’s night. The girls—”

I turned on him with a snarl, and I got large. There was an instant response from the group, a connection, an alertness, but I was too angry to pay attention. “Where’s Richard?” I asked. I headed toward the showers calling, “Richard?”

Another of them, smooth and heavy-set, answered me, as four or five converged to bar my way to the door of the men’s showers. “We don’t have anyone here called Richard. I’m sorry.” He smiled apologetically, but he wasn’t afraid.

I stopped. Richard’s scent petered out near the men’s room door. He hadn’t been in there. I explained, “You had a guy here. Young looking. Blond. Maybe you called him Stan?”

There was a tightening of tension in the room. Some of the men looked at one another, and others made some effort to
not
look at each other. The first one who’d spoken to me said, “He’s not here now—”

“I know that,” I said, and I could feel the anger coursing through my body like blood, adding to my power. I felt myself growing larger; I felt their collective energy falter as they took in the change. I almost felt like laughing as I looked around over the tops of their heads. My anger was feeding on the magic buzz in the room. Soon there would be action. Soon, there would be blood. “He came here with Marlin. Where’s Marlin?”

The energy in the room diminished, like air leaking out of a balloon. Now they looked around at each other, trying to get a consensus, trying to get an answer. Another guy spoke for them, this one tall and lanky, with a neat beard. “Sure. You can talk to Marlin. He’s right over there.”

The man sitting on the bench in front of the piano was older than most of the other dancers. He was hard to notice, because in this room full of men buzzing with vitality, he seemed empty. He was dressed in brown corduroys and a loud, red, button-down shirt. I could smell Richard on him faintly, and the fact that he’d showered recently, but overlaying those traces was a bubble of raw fear that I didn’t understand. It had nothing to do with me; it was older, and he wasn’t looking at me. Five or six of the men surrounded him, offering drinks, massaging his shoulders, chafing his hands, but he sat there as detached as a homeless guy in a crowded train station. When I came over to him, he looked up and smiled. He had a thinning head of dark hair and a fine mustache.

“Hi, guys,” said Marlin. He looked down again immediately, and the smile vanished.

“He isn’t like this,” the guy rubbing his hand protested. He had a neat, square beard and was dressed in purple spandex shorts but had put a dry blue sweatshirt on. “He’s—” He looked around at the others for concurrence. “He’s
Marlin
,” he said, as though that would say it all.

“Where is Stan?” I asked the group at large, and Marlin in particular.

The men around him looked at each other. “We don’t know,” purple spandex shorts replied. “Marlin had to drop him off somewhere. He left early. He was supposed to come back here—”

A guy in a suit, who was on one knee offering Marlin spring water from a fresh bottle said, “I came late. I saw Marlin walking down Sunset Avenue on my way here. I knew he was supposed to be here, so I stopped.” He looked up at the others, as though they alone could understand his pain. “He didn’t recognize me.”

Another of the men bent over Marlin gently, his hand on his shoulders. “Marlin? Marlin?”

Marlin looked up again, smiled cheerfully, and said, “Hi, guys.” Then once again all expression drained out of his face.

“Where did he take Richard?” I asked.

They looked at one another again in silent conference. “We don’t know,” a slender young man beside me answered. He stretched his arms behind him unconsciously till his shoulders cracked.

“Look,” I said, putting it simply for them. “Richard is mine. Marlin’s friend Tommy took him, gave him to Marlin—” I snarled at the hint of laughter in the air.

The little one said apologetically, as the laughter abruptly ceased, “We didn’t know he was—anyone else’s. He had a little chain around his wrist. Marlin said, while that was there, Stan would do anything we said.” He shook his head, wonderingly. “And he did. He never said a word. Marlin said we could use him, and then—”

That was all I could take. I changed and lunged for Marlin’s throat in the same instant. His head came up and that same smile had started on his face as my paws passed his ears and my jaws closed round his throat and the first sweet taste of salt and flesh and blood melded with the feeling of cartilage ready to snap between my teeth.

Gods, those guys were fast. I didn’t see it start, I didn’t see what happened, but the next moment I was ass over backwards and a mirror smashed against my back. I slid down the wall and twisted to my feet. They stood across from me, holding one another, every hand grasping arm, wrist, or shoulder, feet set wide and strong. Connected like that, they radiated a wall of power that they had raised and focused and used to knock me away. Two of them had Marlin by the shoulder. They hadn’t, in that moment, even started to staunch the punctures I’d made in his throat. I could tell by the small amount of blood that either I hadn’t managed to do much damage, or they’d stopped that too, when they threw me across the room. I lowered my head as though I were sorry. I wagged my tail like a dog—a gesture I was sure they’d recognize. Then I trotted forward slowly, like a sorry puppy finally answering to her name. They let me come; they didn’t do anything. Two steps away I gathered my strength and my fury and leaped again at Marlin, and once again I felt the air tighten around me like a fist. I twisted and smashed, sideways this time, into the mirror adjacent to the one I’d hit the last time. I heard an angry protest, and at least I had the satisfaction of having broken another of their mirrors as I hit the ground again. I got up. Looked at them, still interlocked, still sustaining their power. Hey, wolves never hunt the whole herd. Wolves cut out the losers. Wolves wait until they know they will win. I sat down, licked blood off my paw. My blood, damn it. Wolves are patient. Wolves are patient hunters. Right. That’s what my dad always said. All right. Since I didn’t have a choice, I’d be patient.

I changed. They didn’t move. They stood, holding one another, focused and braced against me.

I could smell the blood running down my back as much as feel it. There were places on my shoulders and side that stung, but this wasn’t the time to think about them. The olive-skinned man relaxed his hold on the two men beside him and stepped forward. “Listen, honey, we don’t want to hurt you—”