The Summoning (20 page)

It took me over two hours to get to Darius’ bookstore as I hit rush-hour traffic almost as soon as I got on the freeway, half the time gazing into the blazing sunset. But what got me actually cussing was trying to find a place to park. I finally took a spot around the corner this time in a bank parking lot—Bank Parking Only, We Will Tow, but it was after business hours, so who would know? Bunches of other people seemed to have the same idea, anyway.

I wanted to side-track Marlin’s group of guys. I wanted to know who Marlin’s contacts were, where he might deliver Richard, since he knew he was a demon. And Darius said he knew everyone. And he might. I went blazing into the store looking for him. The little bell hanging from the door handle tinkled as I went into the shop. A dozen people were rooting around through the books, one of them up on a ladder. One was hunkered down in a corner, surrounded by half a dozen open books like he was in for the duration. Darius sat behind the counter. He didn’t have any books open in front of him this time, his radio was off, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He smiled at me as I came up to him. “Hi,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

He didn’t look right. He didn’t feel right. He smelled the same, but… no, he didn’t smell the same. The Darius I had scented yesterday lay on him like a coat. What was emanating from him now was pitiful, like last year’s scent. Like an empty bottle that once held something pungent.

“Darius?” I said. His gaze had wandered into the middle distance while I studied him, but now it came back to me. He smiled.

“Hi,” he said brightly. “What can I do for you?”

“Darius?” I leaned over the counter. “Do you remember me?”

The smile faded from his face and he looked up at me blankly. I wondered for a moment if it would remind him if I changed suddenly, right now, with my front feet—my hands—on the counter. Just as I thought I’d try that, a guy sidled up with a stack of books in his arms. Darius turned to him with his smile renewed. “Hi,” he said again. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to get these,” the man said, and got out his wallet. I backed away while Darius slowly, methodically, re-piled the books, then slowly, methodically, looked up each price, and slowly, methodically, wrote down each book and its price on a receipt. The customer waited patiently.

This was not the Darius I had met the previous night. I turned and made my way as unobtrusively as I knew how to the back of the shop, trailing my fingers along the spines of the rows of books, pretending to browse as I went. I stood by the ladder in front of the wall of books right next to his back door. I waited until the woman pulling out cookbooks from the shelf on the other side of the door made a considered selection and turned away. A quick look around. When I was sure no one was paying any attention to me, I tried the door. It opened under my hand. With another quick glance, I slipped into the back room.

The wards on the curtain that separated his room from the shop were in shreds. I went inside, my senses taut at the smell of some searing conflagration that had not been there when I was last in that room the night before. I eased the door closed behind me and found myself standing in darkness. I reached for the light switch and turned it on.

The walls and ceiling, and the backs of the books, were blackened as though by a swift, hot fire or explosion. The futon had been thrown against the wall, the bedding scattered, and it too bore marks of scorching. The bronze bowls were strewn everywhere, and several had melted. The silver bowl of water had turned over. There was blood on the carpet in the middle of the room. I changed in order to be sure, but I knew already that it was Darius’s blood—not much, but his. The conflagration seemed to have obliterated all other scents in the room. Something violent had happened, had happened fast, and what remained of Darius was sitting outside, smiling a happy smile, slowly and methodically keeping his accounts. Who didn’t remember me at all, one he had called a player in the game.

Like Marlin, there didn’t seem to be much left to him. And it seemed to me, the Eater of Souls had come to town.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
don’t remember getting back in my car. I don’t remember starting up and heading off. I came to myself when some idiot tried to pass me on the right on a single-lane two-way street and almost hit me. I realized I was heading back to Marlin’s dance studio. I realized also that I was so furious and so upset that I was on the verge of changing involuntarily, something I grew out of a long time ago. The first time you change, you have no idea what’s happening. Your brain changes too, you see, so you generally go right on with your life looking at things from several feet lower to the ground, and with a whole new set of strengths and senses and emotions, and you don’t even realize that you’re different until you try to talk or use a hand. As you get older, you learn to control your changes. I sat crouched over the wheel, holding on to my human nature for all I was worth while my thoughts roiled over the mess I was in, and my body wanted Richard, and my blood wanted to kill something
now
. I passed the turn to Marlin’s studio with both hands clutching the wheel, turned up Beverly, and headed for the hills.

It’s better to run these moods out than try and live your wolf nature in your human form. The two sometimes are not compatible, and you’re liable to do something that for a human isn’t forgivable, though it’s passable in a wolf. So what I say is, better to be a wolf when you do it.

I stopped the car on the roadside, fell out already changed, and headed up the verge.

I ran straight uphill so the running would take all my strength and I’d spend this excess passion all the sooner so I could think. I needed to think. Up on the top of the slope I could see the lights of the city spread out all around me, like jewels in the darkness. There’s no illusion of being in the country when you’re up in the Hollywood Hills. The roar of traffic is loud and ceaseless. You can even hear voices from the streets below. I paced the ridge like a rooftop, still feeling confined. I startled a pair of picnickers sitting on their blanket, holding glasses of wine. They sat frozen while I passed them by and then started arguing as soon as my back was turned, as if I couldn’t hear them.

“That’s a wolf!”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It is! Look at it!”

“Darling, it can’t be a wolf, we don’t have wolves in Hollywood.…”

Ha. I ran down the slope and up the next, around the side of the hill out of sight of any people. I sat down there, looking down at the red lights and the white lights of the freeway below. The cold, strong fury I first felt in Marlin’s dance studio swelled up in me again, comforting me with its power. While that passion was in me, I wouldn’t stop, I wouldn’t change course, and I wouldn’t lose my way. I felt its dimensions, glorying in the strength of it. This was going to be fun.

What was I doing?

Three different magic users said I had a part to play in the coming battle to preserve the city from the World Snake. Fair enough. I was here, I’m important; of course they would want me to be involved. And on their side. The thing was, I would take part the way I chose, or not at all. It would be entirely up to me. If that was good enough, then fine. If not, the city could go under, for all I cared. I looked around, taking in the extent of the lights, all the way to the horizon and beyond. I knew: to the north up to Calabasas, to the south as far as Orange County and down into Irvine, to the east along the basin, to the little ridges of hills—that was going to be the new coastline. I thought of the ocean lapping its way up Baseline Avenue, and grinned.

How did someone like me take part against the World Snake?

By being able to tell where she was, Darius said. I sniffed. No World Snake here.

But that wasn’t why I was up here, was it? That wasn’t why I had run all this way, why I had fled in my car, holding onto my nature like a pup unable to control herself.

The Eater of Souls was here, and I was the only one that believed in it. Besides Richard, who had been left somewhere by Marlin, who had then, or so it seemed, lost his own soul. And Darius, another powerful user of magic in the neighborhood, had gone the same way, or so it seemed.

I would rather not become a vacuous idiot, thank you very much. That isn’t really in my life plan. So leaving town right now really did seem like the best option. Except there was Richard. Who had gotten himself into my service in order to have some protection from the Eater of Souls that he feared. Who appeared as an old woman, according to Tamara, but Richard had mistaken for a man.

Could Richard be made into a vacuous idiot, if he didn’t have a soul inside him to be eaten? What could the Eater of Souls do to him? I didn’t want to know. I whined a little, softly, remembering the scent of him. Remembering how it felt to be stretched out along his length. Remembering some of the things he had done. I lay down on the grass, still green up here from last month’s rains, damp from the night’s dew, and rolled, enjoying the raw scent of grass and dirt and dust—and other critters that had passed that way tonight, today, this week, since the last full moon—that launched into the air around me as I rolled. I lay still then, looking up at the sky. The moon had risen bright and full in the east. Only a few stars made it through the haze to stand out against its brightness. The traffic roared below me. A plane tore the air overhead. I sat up. It was a crowded city, and a busy one, but it was mine.

To hell with the World Snake, anyway. Who knew if she was going to come here at all? But the Eater of Souls was here already. I had evidence of that. And more than that, I wanted my demon back. That was it. I wanted my demon back. Whatever fight anyone else was in—the power raisers, the magic users, the sorcerers, the wise ones, the dual-natured like me—I was going after Richard, and to hell with anyone who got in my way.

I took my car back down to the town in my human nature, but the cold still fury that had taken hold of me was so strong that I went without thought, without distraction, as though I was still in my wolf nature. It felt good. I knew where I was going. I was going hunting.

The building that held Marlin’s dance studio was open and the lights upstairs were on, but the scents leading to the elevator were children, pubescent and prepubescent, mostly girls, spiking with excitement and joy, and their tired, overworked parent, escorting them to dance class. I looked at the schedule on the poster. Thunder Mountain Boys Dance Rehearsals on Tuesday, ballet class tonight, women’s jazz tomorrow. No boys around tonight, but no matter. Of all the boys that had been there last night, one at least must live in walking distance.

I changed and crossed the lobby, nose to the ground. I found a faint trace of Richard’s scent from the day before, coming or going, I couldn’t tell, but I followed it out to the sidewalk and down the street to where Marlin must have parked his car. It ended there. I shivered in the dark and made myself small. There were voices coming from across the street. If they glanced my way I wanted them to take me for a stray dog, not a wild animal.

I went back to the lobby and cast around again for the scent trail of another of the Thunder Mountain Boys, coming or going from their weekly meeting. It took me dozens of casts, but I had time, and I was patient. I found one at last that led down the street, turned the corner, up the hill, and turned another corner into a street of apartment buildings. Two of them walking together. I could even put a face to one of them; it was the olive-skinned man, Honey. The two of them had gone in to a three-story building together, one that Honey had gone in and out of dozens and dozens of times as far back as I could tell. The companion had left this morning. Honey had left later… and unless there was another entrance, he hadn’t yet come back. A narrow driveway led to a tiny set of carports in the back. The building’s fire escape was near a back entrance that smelled of laundry, but Honey hadn’t been through there in days. Good. All I had to do was wait.

I checked the front door again. This was fun; there were wards there telling dogs to go away. Honey and his friend had spent some time last night putting them in place. The woman on the second floor who owned the sheltie must have had one hell of a time getting her little friend back into the building after his walk that day. Even if the ward worked on my wolf nature, which I doubted strongly, it wasn’t going to matter. I wasn’t planning on going into the building. I was going to meet Honey somewhere in the surrounding streets, and we were going to have a little talk.

I followed the scent that was most current; he’d gone out in the afternoon. There was nothing more recent than that, which is how I knew he wasn’t home. I tracked it onto a major street and then wended my way along, holding my tail high and pretending to be afraid of people till I got to the bus stop where Honey had spent half an hour or so. Then I lay down there for a few minutes right near where Honey had stood. I let myself be petted by a tough old woman in a uniform that smelled astringently of detergent; off to work, I suppose. Honey was letting off a little trace of fear. I put my nose right near that where I lay on the ground and took it in. He was nervous too, and, after a few minutes, he’d lit up a cigarette, bad boy. Too late to enjoy it completely; his bus must have come in the middle of it. He’d thrown it in the gutter, and there it lay. I trotted back up the street to Honey’s apartment, keeping myself small, dodging the legs of people who took any notice of me and wagging my tail like a good dog.

I didn’t have long to wait after all. As I was trotting back to Honey’s door a car double parked in the street and Honey got out. He looked around. The driver got out of the car. He was the young guy from the night before. He looked around carefully, too. They were using magic-enhanced senses, but whatever they were looking for must not have looked like me, where I sat between two parked cars waiting quietly to see whether I’d be taking both of them out, or just the one. But after looking around carefully, the two of them exchanged a few words, and the young guy got back in the car and pulled away just in time to avoid the wrath of the guy in the truck coming up behind him. Honey headed for the front door of his apartment building, his key ready in his hand.