The Summoning (22 page)

“Won’t it hurt?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

So I took out the comb that Richard had been using, that I’d picked up from my place, and gave him a few of Richard’s bright hairs.

The Rag Man tried several times, but all he saw was darkness. His hands did not explode into flames this time, which was just as well. I didn’t have any more bandages. When he dropped his telltales to the ground for the last time, he sat quite still, but his eyes didn’t change. After a few minutes he looked at me sharply. “Something’s coming. Be ready.”

He had one more thing for me. As I backed out of his shelter, he added, “Watch out. Stan’s going to hurt you.”

I paused in his doorway. “I know,” I said.

The sun had set by the time I got to my car. I drove back to Whittier. I had one more place to try that night.

Hellman Park closes at dark. I wonder what the cops thought of all the cars parked along the street outside the gates. Or maybe there were wards there, too, that I didn’t pay any attention to. I could already hear the drums.

I made my way up the hill at a run, not because I was in a hurry, but because it felt good to run. I wasn’t planning to interrupt whatever ceremony they had going that night. I just wanted to talk to the sorceress. I was about out of sources of information, and she was the only power-raiser I could think of who might know where or how I could look for Richard.

I slowed when I reached the hilltop overlooking the clearing where they had set up their circle and altar the last time. The drums were pounding louder and stronger than ever before. Breathless, open-voiced chanting carried on the wind accompanying the drums. When I looked down on their circle there seemed to be dozens of them, dancing around a bonfire, robes swirling, hands raised. After a while I saw there were only twenty or so women altogether, four or five drumming, and the rest dancing. It’s hard to see a working clearly.

They’d built the altar to the east again, and the sorceress stood there in profile to me, quite still, holding her sword. All of them, drummers, dancers, and celebrant together were bound up in the trance of the energy they were raising. The sorceress swayed in the wind the dancers made, but there was no wind that I could feel up where I was. It wasn’t protection and deflection they were working this time, but sustaining and maintaining the power they’d already raised and set in place. They were still working up to their full power. I lay down in the grass among the mustard flowers, put my head on one paw, and waited for them to finish.

I must have fallen asleep. I was woken by the sound of silence as the drums cut out altogether, the dancers froze on a shout, and the sorceress brought down her sword. There were words said, and the drums came in on a heartbeat as the women slowly walked the lines of power they’d raised around the circle, and wound the working up.

One of the drummers wasn’t wearing a robe, a black woman watching the other drummers with calm, alert certainty, her djembe sounding bright and clear among the rest. I knew that woman, but out of context it took me a few moments to realize who she was, and be astonished. It was Yvette. From work. Drumming with the magic-raisers. What on Earth—? And what was I going to do if she recognized me?

What the hell. They were all still in trance. Maybe she wouldn’t remember this or anything else the next day. Hey, I like fairy tales, and anyway, it could happen!

They women sang in closing. They thanked the powers and let them go. They quenched the fire, they hugged, they doffed their robes, and some of them started on the long walk down the hill. Cell phones opened, conversations to distant parts mingled with those with their neighbors. “I’m coming down, I’m on my way, I’ll see you Tuesday…” When the sorceress had hugged her last cohort, holding her sword, now sheathed, in her hand, she turned up the hill and faced me. “Sister?” she said. “Did you want to speak to me?”

Damn. Yvette was still standing there, smiling at the other drummers who were talking with her, hugging her, exchanging phone numbers or something. What the hell. I trotted down the hill to meet the sorceress.

The women weren’t so amazed to see me this time. Yvette glanced up in surprise to see a wolf come down the hill, but she was being cool because everyone else was. When I reached the sorceress, she nodded to me regally. “What did you want to ask me, Sister?” she asked.

I sighed. Too bad she wasn’t a mind reader. Oh well. I changed. I nodded to the sorceress and moved so that my face would remain in darkness, and when the sorceress moved with me, I put my back firmly to Yvette before I started talking. But the sorceress said first, “Where is it? Did you kill it?”

“Kill—?” She meant Richard. “No. I didn’t kill
him
. Listen, I need help. Someone’s taken him from me, and I want him back.”

“Taken him?” She sounded skeptical.

I shook my head. “There isn’t time to tell you the whole story.”

She smiled, looked around, picked a nice patch of earth, and sat down on it with her sword in her lap, folding herself up cross-legged with remarkable flexibility for someone her age. She gestured, and I sat down beside her. “I have time,” she said. “Go ahead.”

So I told her. Most of it, anyway. At the end she sat back on her hands, raising her face to the sky. There were the usual few scattered stars, but what lit her face was the reflected glow from the city below. We could hear the unending thunder of traffic from the two freeways in the distance. She looked tired. I wondered what she did for her day job.

“So,” she said, “the demon seduced you, made you fall in love with it, and now it’s been captured and you want to go after it. Where have I heard this story before?”

“It isn’t like that,” I said.

“No?” She sat up again and took hold of the sheathed sword in her lap. “I’m just sorry I didn’t kill it when I had the chance.”

“I stopped you for a reason. And I’d do it again.”

She cocked her head at me. Her eyes were very blue. She seemed wise, but you’re only as wise as your experience can teach you to be, and she didn’t know Richard the way I did. “Are you aware that those things survive in this world by making themselves attractive, and making themselves useful here? But what they are, what they want here, no one knows. At least, no one that I trust for a truthful account has made a study of it. I gave it to you because I thought you’d be able to kill it, whereas….”

“You couldn’t do it.”

She shook her head. “I’d seen it, seen what it was, but I couldn’t slay it when it looked so much like a man.”

I didn’t answer, but really, I’d felt the same.

“What do you know about the Eater of Souls?” I asked her.

She nodded thoughtfully. “Ah, yes. That’s just the kind of cataclysm that would arrive in a place where the World Snake is expected. Just as your demon has.”

“The Eater of Souls is here,” I said, “or at least something like it.” I told her about Darius, and about Marlin.

She looked skeptical. “Maybe Marlin and his Thunder Mountain Boys just blew a head gasket. You sure he didn’t brain himself with his own working? I never thought those people knew just what they were doing. Too busy doing it—and enjoying it.”

“They said Marlin went to drop Richard off somewhere. They said he was fine when he left. He didn’t come back on his own. One of them found him walking the street. When I met him—he was gone.” I tapped my head.

“It could be a number of things.”

“What about Darius? Did you know him?”

“Of course I do. If anything’s happened to Darius…” Her hands came up in a gesture of aversion. “That would be a great blow to our cause. We’re a proud lot, we power-raisers, and prickly. That comes with the power. Darius is one of the few that can talk to all of us, keep us all on the same page. As much as we ever are on the same page. The Thunder Mountain Boys should have been doing their working tonight, not Tuesday, for one thing—”

“They can’t,” I told her.

“Why not?” she asked. “Tonight the moon is full. They shouldn’t even have to look at a chart to know—”

“They couldn’t do it tonight because their studio’s not available. It’s women’s jazz dance night tonight. It’s Thursday.”

The sorceress threw back her head and laughed.

When she’d had her fun I asked her, “If there is an Eater of Souls, where would I find it? Do you know anyone who’s dealt with it before, and can tell me how to…”

“How to what?” she asked me sharply.

Was I a hero or not? Was I going to take the job? It’s not like I had anything else to do. All right then. “How to defeat it,” I told her.

I didn’t like the way she looked at me when I’d said it. The way you look at a kid who’s just said she can fly. The trouble was, I knew I didn’t know what I was getting into. I knew I didn’t know what I was taking on.

Be patient and wait, be patient and wait. Look, I can be patient when I want, but I had things to do! The sorceress told me she’d do a working for me, and find out more about the Eater of Souls, if it was here, where it was, and how to defeat it. She’d send for me when she had the information I wanted. And what was I supposed to do in the meantime? Sit on my hands? Suck my thumb? Play with the mammals? Maybe I’d hunt me up another Thunder Mountain Boy just to see if this one said different things from the other one. I wondered if Honey had found a way off the roof yet. I’d have to ask him someday. If he made it.

I watched the sorceress walk down the hill into the dark after she’d told me to be patient, she’d get me that information, and I was pissed off. I thought for a second of finding out how big I’d be if I changed right then. I was angry, and if I was really big when I changed I could be on her in a single bound, give her back a little pat, and watch her roll the rest of the way down the hill.…

“Hey, Amber!”

The last thing I was thinking about was meeting a coworker at that moment. I turned around, trying to find my coworker smile somewhere in my choice of expressions. I realized then I didn’t have a coworker smile.

Yvette had on jeans and a long African shirt, and her hair was tied in some kind of kerchief. Not like at work. She was holding a drum decorated all around with beads and feathers and little bells. She held it like it was an extension of herself. She was radiant. Not like I’d ever seen her at work.

“Hey, Yvette.”

She came over to me. “Is this cool or what? I heard the drumming, I came up the hill, these women treat me like I’m their long-lost kinfolk. They said—” She was rapt. I knew I was going to hear every word of her experience before I got away. “They said there’s power in my drumming, and that I tune well with their power, and they—did you hear it? When we were drumming, there were voices in the drums. Like—spirits—answering us. It was fantastic.”

“Yvette,” I said, “where do you live?”

She looked down the hill and pointed. “There.”

I started walking in that direction, and she followed after me, still going on about the drumming. I walked her almost to her door. When we turned down her street, about a mile from the park, she fell silent. When we neared her apartment, a rundown three-story old house that had been subdivided fifty years back, she stopped and turned to me, cocking her head under the streetlight. “Hey, Amber.”

“Yeah?”

“Did I see what I thought I seen? When you came down that hill?”

I could have frozen her dead. It’s what I’d have done with anyone else. Hey, I do it on principle. It’s the way I am. But this was Yvette, and she’d covered for me at work that day, without my asking her to. I said cautiously, “What did you think you saw?”

“A dog. A big, black and gray—”

“It was not a dog!” I told her, outraged. “It was a wolf! Don’t you know a wolf when you see one? A timber wolf, a Gray Sister, a Daughter of the—”

“All right, all right, shhh…” She had her hands up, shushing me before we woke the neighborhood. “A wolf, then.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“So,” she stepped forward, “can you show me how to do that?”

I went to work the next day because I hadn’t come up with another plan to find Richard, and I didn’t want to spend a lot more useless hours driving around the city, especially not on the off-chance I’d happen to run in to him. I had no plans to be that stupid again.

I got a break from oiling the wall paneling because Pete, our boss, wanted the stage cleared of junk prior to the new boards being put down. I threw myself into hauling all the crap to the back and tossing it into the dumpster, working furiously to make up for what I ought to be doing right then and wasn’t because I didn’t know where and I didn’t know how, which was finding Richard and getting him out of whatever it was he had gotten himself into. I kept trying to suppress what he’d said about how the Eater of Souls had treated him last time. It’s hard not to think about what you don’t want to think about. Funny how it’s always, always there.

At lunchtime Yvette came and got me with the assumption that the two of us would go out together, and I went, thinking with amazement that I had a friend. An ordinary friend. And also, how easy it was. You just go along, and you don’t kill them or anything. We went to the enchilada place again, which was great because those things are really good. She asked me some questions about being wolf-natured. She said “werewolf,” but I told her we don’t call it that. She thought I could bite her and make her one too, but I explained you had to be born to it. Then she gave up on that and we—she—talked about drumming.

She’s recently gotten out of juvenile hall, where she’s been held for almost four years for beating up her mother. Except she wasn’t the one who had beaten up her mother, who was left in a coma for months and was brain damaged afterwards. It had been her stepfather, and she’d been delighted to go to juvey because it got her away from him. When he accused her (and she’d been big when she was sixteen, just as she was now), she’d confessed and never said a word more. She liked juvenile hall, she said, because it was orderly, all the meals were on time, and school was easy. She’d gotten her GED the last year. Also, until the funding was cancelled, there’d been an African music group, and that’s where she started drumming.