The Summoning (25 page)

I turned into the middle of the room so as not to be herded. “But if I just wanted to know, like you said, to have more knowledge…” This was like that game I’d seen girls play in middle school, trying to look stupid so the guys would feel smart. It’s amazing how often the guys fall for it. It’s amazing how stupid they’ll believe a girl can be. Ibrahim al Hassan fell for it too, or else maybe he just enjoyed being the smartest one around, and telling you about it.

“Ah, of course, of course. A child after my own heart, I knew it.” He returned to his chair, gesturing for me to follow him so that his robe flowed around him in a gentle swell. “Sit down, yes indeed, sit down and we will discuss the matter.” When he had seated himself he absently reached for his teacup. He frowned at the half inch of brown liquid left in the cup. It must have been cold.

“What must you know about the Eater of Souls? Well, you must beware of her, of course. She makes no distinctions in the quality of the souls she devours.” He finished off the last little sandwich, and then stabbed with one damp finger for the crumbs on the plate and waved the finger at me as he made his point. I should have been pretty hungry by then, as I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, but somehow I’d lost my appetite. “You, or even I, are the same to her as—as one of those people in the street out there. No distinction.”

I frowned at his words. So far, the Eater of Souls had favored power-raisers pretty forcefully. “We don’t taste any different? Any better?”

“No.”

“And how do you stop her? If you meet her in the street, I mean. What do you do?”

He’d given up on the remains of the tea. He leaned back in his chair, smoothing his robe about him. “I, of course, would not meet her in the street. But what should a young adept do, who wished to keep her soul after all? A young adept, such as yourself?” He smiled that benign smile again. It really made me feel as though I were going to be the one for dinner. Not a feeling I like. “First of all, you must not meet her gaze,” he said, leaning forward and fixing me with his own. “Her gaze is like that of the snake, that penetrates the mind. She can see your soul, you know. That’s how she knows what it is she is after.”

His gaze held mine and I couldn’t tear it away. I felt a growing numbness in my gut, and I realized that it was fear. Inside my chest the cold ball of anger that I’d nurtured for days swelled up suddenly in answer. I blinked back at him, glanced away as though unconcerned, then met his gaze again politely. I felt like I was growing larger. He didn’t seem to notice. He looked perturbed for a moment, and leaned back again in his chair.

The door opened and his daughter came in. I wonder if I imagined the angry stare she gave me before she bent to her father’s ear and whispered. His face lost its benign expression and settled into one of tight, hard anger. He rose up from his chair, and all of a sudden he looked bigger too, and stronger, and older, and nowhere near so cute anymore. His daughter backed away from him, pulling her scarf over her head, bending to make herself smaller. It was easy to see what this family was like. I was out of my chair too, but he held up a calming hand.

“Forgive me, my dear guest. Something has occurred that requires my attention. My immediate attention.” His daughter was about to follow him out but he waved his hand at her. “My daughter will entertain you. More tea, perhaps?”

He was already most of the way to the door, moving darn fast in that robe. Two of his sons met him in the doorway and an intense, low-voiced conference began before they’d even shut the door behind him.

No doubt about it, the daughter was eyeing me with hostility. I wondered if the kids listened in on their dad. With the future he had in store for all but one of them, I wouldn’t blame them one bit. He must be pretty powerful, I realized, if he could keep this bunch from taking him out in his sleep.

I smiled at the daughter, and took a stab at random. “Lisa, is it?” Almost every woman I know is called Lisa. Or Laura. Or Sue.

“No,” she said.

“Sorry. Laura, then?”

“My name is Maryam,” she told me. Then she looked sideways at me and smiled. “What’s yours? My father didn’t tell me.”

“Do you live here all the time?” I started to walk around the room again, and she followed me.

“Of course not. We have houses—many houses. In Cairo. In Paris. In South Carolina.”

“South Carolina?” I asked, surprised. “What’s there?”

She looked down, looked away, shrugged one shoulder eloquently. “We go wherever my father’s experiments take him. It has to do with the latitude—and other celestial considerations,” she added airily, and she waved her hand just like her father did.

“Aren’t you going to show me the balcony?” I asked, continuing toward the door.

“No,” she answered, but she followed me.

“That’s funny. Didn’t he tell you? I was telling your dad that the balcony with all the trees and shrubs looked so beautiful from the outside, and he said you’d show it to me. For just five minutes, that’s what he said.”

She looked sulky; she looked like it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she led me out of the room where four of her brothers or half brothers were congregating in the hall. She waved them away with a few words in a language I didn’t know, and they retreated to their four respective doorways. I figured their presence meant that I probably couldn’t just walk out of here. But I was going to see what I could do about that.

We went up the stairs and I admired everything out loud, the tapestries on the wall, the handsome dark paneling that continued up the stairs, the marble stair rails, for the gods’ sake. She swelled and thawed a bit in the sight of all the things she had that I didn’t have. She’d seen my apartment. When I said I’d never seen anything like the huge painting at the head of the stairs, where a bunch of people in robes looked on in open-mouthed horror as the guy on the throne’s servants offered them a severed head, she knew it was probably true.

There were a number of doors off the upstairs hallway. She led me through the center doorway into a sunroom with wicker chairs and potted palms placed on a tile floor at strategic locations, and a wall of windows with a set of French doors in the center. She opened these and let me out onto the first floor balcony. I could feel the cool breeze that came up the side of the house, but there were no scents in it. Large square planters held ferns and shrubs and even a couple of palm trees leaning out from the balcony for more light. Along one side was a box of roses, and boxes of late tulips and irises stood at intervals along the balcony railing. Two of her brothers were stationed along the railing. They moved closer to me when I went to admire the view out over the front lawn. I smiled at them like a pup, ducking my head and making myself small. My action didn’t seem to have any effect on them. I thought, now or never.

I unleashed all the fear I’d been feeling, I opened up to the cold anger that I harbored in the bubble by my heart, I threw myself into the air as angry and huge as I could make myself, and I changed.

My front feet hit the rail as the two men leaped for me, but I was past them, and then my back feet pushed off the rail and I launched into the air, and I was huge, I was enormous, I was not going to fall forty feet to the pavement below and break my legs and be trapped here, I would fall not even half my body’s length, and I realized this with joy as, like a blow, my senses returned to me and I could smell everything, the house, its filthy repression still clinging to me like a layer of soot, I could smell the garden, the breeze, the tales told by little tangs in the air and I leaped into it with all my heart out of joy at seeing I was only two strides from the wall, I was going to make it, I was going to be free, when, on my second stride, I almost turned in the air with a yelp, because I smelled Richard.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
stood for a second, still inside the wall. I was casting about, trying to gauge where Richard’s scent was coming from. Up on the balcony where I had leaped, Laura or Suzie was screaming and waving her arms, and bunches of her brothers and some sisters had joined her. It was quite a family. Down in the garden more brothers were converging on me from both sides of the house, and some of them looked to be pretty darn old, hobbling toward me in the same long dark jackets, pants, turban, sandals, holding gardening rakes or shovels. I put my head down and growled at them, and what was funny was none of them hesitated for an instant, like they didn’t know enough to be afraid of me. When the brother appeared on the balcony with a rifle, that made my mind up, and I hopped onto the wall. I walked along it to where I was sheltered by a tree and I changed. If there are guns involved, you don’t want to look like a wild animal; people won’t help you then. They’ll help to shoot you down.

I scanned for Richard. I didn’t believe he’d be out in the yard, but that’s where I’d scented him. On the other hand, he could have rolled naked and sweating all over the floors of that house and I didn’t know that I could have smelled him at all. More people were converging in the yard—how many kids did this guy have? Twenty? A hundred? He must have been a busy, busy guy for a long time. I could still smell Richard’s scent, the tiniest touch of it—and then I realized where it was coming from. It was on me. In tiny amounts: on my ear, in my hair, and on my hand. When had I touched—of course. It was the fly.

I hopped off the wall and onto the sidewalk, and quickly crossed the street. The gates were closed. Funny, I couldn’t hear any of the hullabaloo out here, not even Suzie screaming from the balcony like she had been just a moment ago. I was trying to think what to do. Obviously, there were powerful magics in that house. Obviously, Richard must be somewhere that that fly could wallow all over him before it had a go at me. Obviously they didn’t want me to leave. I had the choice. I could leap back over that wall and try to take out the whole family, which chances I didn’t think very much of because the guys on the ground hadn’t been afraid. There were enough of them that I wouldn’t have time to bite them all before I’d be at the bottom of a dog pile. And of course there was that gun, which wasn’t good.

But Richard was in there. And didn’t that make this house—I stepped backwards as I realized it—the house of the Eater of Souls? Did the old wizard have the Eater of Souls inside? Or was he the Eater of Souls himself, that kindly old guy with the big library and the bigger family? Did he have as many kids as he had books? Did he have more at his other houses? And where were his wives? It boggled the mind. My best chance was to get the hell out of there before I was turned into a driveling idiot myself, and the next step was to tell the Thunder Mountain Boys, and Tamara, and the sorceress, that I’d found the Eater of Souls and—where the hell was my car?

I’d parked it right across the street from the gates. I knew exactly where I’d parked, and my car was gone! The bastards! So, when Suzie said it would be safer inside, she’d meant it. It wasn’t good enough for this neighborhood, so it had been hauled away? The local private police could see it didn’t belong and had taken care of it? Or al Hassan’s boys had picked it up bodily and carried it away inside. Well, then, at least my parking outside had given them that inconvenience. Good.

The street was still quiet. No one ever goes outside on streets like that. Nobody takes neighborhood walks. They live in their walled mansions like cocoons. The gates of al Hassan’s place were closed, and I didn’t even see any of the children looking out through the bars. Dark had fallen. Over there, on the eastern horizon, the moon was rising, extra large in the haze, and full. Still, they knew I was close by, and if I was going it was best I went soon. Now, in fact. But it was a long, long, long way back to Whittier from here. Damned if I was going to walk it as a human. Humans are slow walkers. I moved along the street into the shadow of a hedge and changed, going as small and humble as I knew how. I turned and started back along the street—and there was my car! Right where I’d left it! Damn, how’d they do that?

I changed back without even looking around—and damn if the car wasn’t gone again. But I knew right where it was then, and I walked forward until I touched it. Just as I ran into the bumper it exploded back into my sight as though it had manifested before me at that moment. I didn’t worry about why. I worried about how soon those gates across the way were going to open. I unlocked the door, sweet-talking the car as I slid in because the gods forbid anything should go wrong now. But the engine came to life as soon as I turned the key—I love that car. I turned the headlights on bright to offset the possibility that I was driving a car that only I could see, and I drove on out of there.

What should I do? Richard was back there. I turned right at the next major street. No one seemed to be after me. I should go back, scout the house, find a way in there—and lose my senses again and not be able to find him. I turned right again at the next light. I knew where he was. He was somewhere in that house. All I had to do was go back there—and get mobbed by that multitude of children. He had some awfully old children, too. How old was this guy? Was he the Eater of Souls, or had he been about to conduct me to whatever that was when his son called him away? I turned right again. And where was Richard? Had the fly been on him, or had Richard turned into a fly? After all, I’d seen him turn into a wolf once. Did this guy know how to get Richard to change? But if Richard was a fly, he was dead now. I’d seen them do it. Or—I turned right at the next light—was he back in his original body, all scars erased?

I’d circled the neighborhood one and a half times by now and had come no closer to a plan. I couldn’t go back in there, much as my wolf blood wanted to start biting something. I needed help. I needed to know more. I needed—a pack. Damn. I was a different kind of wolf, that’s what I’d always believed about myself. I didn’t need family, like the others did. I was a lone wolf, and I went my own way. All right, well, this time I needed help. And I knew the first place to look for it.

Heading down the 5 to Costa Mesa on a Friday night, I hit traffic. I was two and a half hours in second and sometimes, blessedly, in third gear before I got onto the 22 and mercifully was able to make fourth at last.