The Summoning (26 page)

Tamara’s shop would be closed at this time of night. How was I supposed to find her, even if she was in town? Then I remembered what Richard said about the wards around that place. All I had to do was go and break them, and someone would come to see what was up. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The moon was full, and Tamara’s Ethnic and Tribal Music Store was hosting a party. I noticed the parking problem before I heard the music, but as I cruised by the shop I saw the drum circle and the dancers in the little courtyard, tiki torches lit all over the place, colored lights strung in the trees, and the people milling around, eating, drinking and talking. I finally found a parking place about three blocks away, and even from there I heard the drumming loud and clear. Also, I smelled meat. I trotted back to the store.

The moon had risen high above the crowded buildings, the power and phone lines, and the streetlamps, but the moonlight was drowned out by all the ambient city lights and the torches that surrounded the music store. Smells of barbecue wafted from the back of the store. Someone was grilling chicken and beef. My mouth opened as though I were in my other nature. I was hungry.

There must have been twenty drummers in the little courtyard, drowning out a couple of fiddle players and a bass player, but blending well with the dozen or so people wielding shakers and rattles, banging on bottles and sticks, and the two guys standing side by side, wearing hats like little red pots and blowing down didgeridoos. The dancers, both inside and outside the circle, made the drummers and other musicians almost invisible.

I smelled meat, I smelled spilled beer, I smelled sweat and excitement, and something akin to joy. Amid all that gathering, I caught the scent of someone I knew just before I glimpsed her among the drummers. Yvette, my friend from work, had found her own way to the music store. Not too surprising, if someone had told her she could go there and drum. She’d changed her hair. She was wearing it combed back now, and had braided it with tiny beads and little glinting gemstones, red, white, black, gold, and blue. She was watching the other drummers with quiet intensity, and pounding away on her drum, stamping a little in time.

The dancers and drummers weren’t doing a specific working—no one had organized them—but the buzz of magic that was always present in the music store, a remnant of workings in the past, was fully alive in this joyful, pulsing noise. It may not have been a working, but magic was there.

I didn’t see Tamara outside. I made a circuit near the barbecue, but they weren’t giving out food there. A couple of guys were grilling up a huge stack of skewers full of meat, laughing and talking. One of them was the biggest bear. I had an urge to warn the two straight humans that a lot of their food might be missing before long, but who was I to interfere in the doings of the bear kind?

Near the front door I found the food tables, where I reached past slower, less hungry people and grabbed a handful of skewers, plain and marinated, chicken and beef, as my stomach was telling me quite clearly by that time how long it had been since I’d eaten. I scarfed down four of them standing there. Then I headed for the door. Another one of the bears confronted me as I stepped through the door—the smallest one, whose name I hadn’t heard. I expected to be told to eat that stuff outside, or at least to be asked what I was doing, but instead he nodded me toward the door to the back room.

“They’re waiting for you,” he told me, and moved away.

I walked slowly toward the back door, chewing as I went, wondering why they would be waiting for me. Jacob stood by the closed backroom door.

“What’s going on in there?” I asked him, tearing the meat from the last of my skewers.

“Meeting,” he told me. “They’re expecting you.”

“Nobody told me,” I said defensively.

“They knew you’d be here,” he answered.

“Yeah?” I asked. I didn’t think it had been that easy to get out of that house. I wish I had known I was going to make it. And I sure could have used some help with the traffic!

“They have their ways.”

He opened the door to the office and pointed to the trash can where I could drop my skewers and my napkin before heading into the back room where the meeting was being held. The noise level in the back room was loud and shrill. “What’s everyone so upset about?” I asked Jacob.

He looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you feel the earthquake? This afternoon? About a five point five.”

I must have been on the freeway. The voices beyond the door rose again. Some man on the other side of the door was shouting, and then other voices rose over and drowned him out.

Jacob sighed as only a bear can. “They all think they know just what it means, and what we all need to do about it.” He opened the door for me.

I had no idea why they wanted me there. But I sure knew what I wanted from them. I walked through the door and lifted my head and took a breath to take in the gathering. Every chair was filled and people were sitting on or leaning against the counter that surrounded the backroom. Tamara, in a new red and purple turban, sat at the head of the table with a bent old woman wrapped in a patterned green shawl beside her to her right. On her left was a skinny guy with a self-satisfied smile, who kept reaching to touch her hand or brush her shoulder, though she was leaning a little away from him. He had long graying hair tied back in a ponytail, and a deep tan. A white scarf was draped over his shoulders. Behind him, two women, one older and one young, stood in attendance on him, also wearing white scarves. There was a group of priestesses across from them, obviously priestesses because they wore shiny clothes and diaphanous draperies and many rings. They were telling everyone what was what, at the same time. Through a break in the noise I heard one saying, “The answer is not to be belligerent. Violence will only enrage it. We must speak to it—”

“Commune with it!”

“We must stop it with any means, and at all costs!” A black-robed man with an impressive beard shouted her down, and the clamor of voices rose again.

I smelled three of the Thunder Mountain boys before I spotted them near the foot of the table, well-groomed and elegant in expensive casual clothes. I almost smiled because one of them was Honey. I guess he’d found his way off the roof after all. He didn’t meet my eyes. I expect the women from the Wiccan group may have greeted me, but they were involved in an intense argument with a group of Goth kids squeezed against the counters, holding, of all things, wands.

On a stool at one end of the table a girl sat bent over a chess board, playing against herself. A trio of bearded guys stood against the wall, the shortest one bellowing down the table while the other two tried to contain him. In front of them a heavy-set guy with short, stringy hair and glasses, sat back in his chair with folded arms. He had a sword on the table in front of him. An older guy, with long white hair and merry blue eyes was whispering in his ear, and the sword guy was trying not to laugh. Magic users. People of power. Working together. I could have had a good laugh myself.

There was a lot of shouting. All of this noise together with the drumming outside created a din that made the hair on my nape rise. No one looked at me. Well, this wouldn’t do. I jumped onto the table and made sure I landed hard. That silenced them. They turned to look at me as I walked down the table, and Tamara rose at my approach.

I didn’t wait for courtesies. “I’ve found the Eater of Souls, and he has my demon. Does anyone here know how to kill him?”

I don’t suppose I should have expected an answer, or at any rate, one that I could hear or make any sense out of. It seemed like every one of them answered at once, and now most of them were on their feet, and everyone was shouting at the same time. I jumped down next to Tamara. The touchy man in the white scarf had risen, too. He reached out his hand to me, his eyes wide. I showed him my teeth and he backed off into the comforting arms of his supporters. I turned my head, feeling someone’s eyes on me. The old woman in the green shawl still sat beside Tamara. She looked me up and down with deep, hard eyes. I almost shivered.

The angry robed man down the table raised his voice over the noise to tell me, “This meeting is not about the Eater of Souls!”

“It’s about the earthquake!” one of the priestesses shouted. “I foretold there would be a second quake, and it means—”

“It’s about the Worm We Do Not Name!” The robed man’s voice rose and drowned her out. “That is our enemy. We were just getting on track when you got here.”

Tamara only said, “Welcome, Sister,” and smiled a long-suffering smile. I nodded to her, almost smiling back. I didn’t mind being called Sister by her.

Then the little dark woman on Tamara’s other side lifted one hand and, after a moment, the noise ceased. When there was silence, she pointed to me. “Who is this?” she asked.

Tamara pitched her voice loudly, as one does for the partly deaf. “Mama, this is the daughter of the wolf kind that I told you about.”

“The wolf girl?” she repeated in the silence.

“That’s right, Mama.”

“What does she want?” the old woman asked in a querulous voice. It did not go with her steadfast eyes.

Tamara looked at me briefly, and then answered for me. “She wants help in defeating the Eater of Souls. She says she’s found
him
, and that he has her demon.” She gave me a sharp look, to remind me of her message that the Eater of Souls was not actually a man. I knew what she meant. I hadn’t seen al Hassan actually do the trick where someone’s mind was taken away, but then, since I was the only one in the room with him aside from his children, I thought it was a good thing I’d missed it.

Uproar followed Tamara’s answer. There were fierce arguments going on about what to do next, when to do it, and what good it would do. The Thunder Mountain Boys seemed to be making a case to throw me out. The sword man was looking around and laughing. The chess player defended her pieces from the women next to her leaning over the table. The touchy guy reached out to me again. I looked at him at let my eyes turn gold, and he backed up fast.

Then the old woman grabbed hold of the edge of the table and drew herself slowly to her feet. Tamara extended a hand to support her if she fell, but she was careful to do it out of her mother’s sight. The old woman held herself upright with both hands on the table, and then she turned to me. “What do you want?”

By the time she finished speaking, the noise had died again. Everyone in the room waited for me to answer the old woman. I spoke strongly and clearly.

“Inside his house, I can’t smell anything. I need to know how to beat that. He’s got hundreds of servants, his children, and they’re not afraid of me. I can’t kill them all. I don’t know where Richard—my demon—is. If I can smell him, I can find him. I want to find Richard. And I’d rather not have my mind wiped by the Eater of Souls while I’m at it.”

“How do we know—” a piercing voice began from down the table where a soulful young woman with long blond hair in a long gray gown was speaking. “How do we know that the Eater of Souls isn’t you?”

I looked at her, and she stepped back. That’s not the sort of question I answer. I looked back at the old woman.

“We’ve all seen Darius. We all know what happened to him,” the young woman continued, her voice pitched so that the old woman could hear. “
She
was the last to see him.” She pointed a limp finger at me. “She said so. How do we know—”

Uproar again. Voices came out of the din, and none of them said anything that was of any use to me.

“We cannot divert our resources—”

“This is not what I came here to talk about—”

The old woman reached out and took my hands, transferring her weight to them from the table. She was pretty small—I topped her by more than a head—but her hands were very large. She opened my hands with her own and peered down at them, raising them close to her eyes and then holding them far away, adjusting her focus. She breathed a whistling breath as she stared down at them. She had a spicy smell to her, a clean scent, with just a touch of musk, and the tang of the soap she used on her hair. Her dark skin was deeply lined. Her eyes, slightly filmed with age, were calm and certain. I waited, my hands in her grasp and, as I stood there touching her, some of the fury and fear that I’d been carrying since I’d decided to leave that awful house dissipated. I felt my feet on the ground, her warm touch on my hands, heard her breathing, and slowly my certainty returned to me. What a strange old woman! I liked her. After a few moments of peering she put both my hands together and patted them, and looked up into my face. She cupped my cheek with her hand, and I let her, and didn’t snarl or bite. She grinned then and reached for Tamara.

“I’m going to lie down,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this.” She toddled toward the back door of the shop. The third bear stood there. He held out his hand for her, and she took his arm. Before she got to the door, she turned and said over her shoulder to Tamara, “Give the wolf girl whatever she needs. Don’t forget. It’s important.”

The argument in the room had already returned to its roaring pitch. Some people hung tiredly in their chairs, while others were on their feet yelling at people to hear them. The sword man and his friend were pushing their way to the shop door. I figured I’d done what I came to do. I went out the back door after the old woman. I watched the bear conduct her slowly across the courtyard while people fell out of his way as soon as he neared them. He opened the door of the next house for her. I guessed that’s where Tamara lived, and maybe her mother, too.

I stood on the back steps, plotting a trail through the crowd, which was thick at this end of the courtyard. And I wasn’t sure what to do next, except I knew it would involve more food, and plenty of it. I turned as someone came out the door behind me. It was Jacob.

He nodded to me by way of greeting. “Tamara said to tell you to come here tomorrow. She’ll get you what you want.” He cocked his head and advised me, “Don’t come early. She’ll be up all night with that lot in there.”

“What’s the meeting about?” I asked.