The Summoning (27 page)

He looked disgusted. “They want to coordinate their plans for the next new moon. They’re better off working by themselves and hoping all the pieces fit together.” He looked up at the moon, now topping the sky. “They’ve wasted tonight. They could have been out there doing something.”

I nodded to the fire circle. “Isn’t that something?”

He shook his head. “Not enough. Not what it could have been.” He turned to go back inside. “See you tomorrow.”

I went back to the food table and grazed on meat skewers that just kept coming from the barbecue, and piles of pretzels and chips and guacamole, and even some vegetables, mostly for the tasty white dip that went with them. There were bowls of some African thing that you wrapped up in flat bread and ate like a burrito. I used the bread to wrap up a handful of chicken, instead of tearing it off the skewers, just for variety. At a table on the other side of the door, a pair of young women were selling soft drinks and bottled water. The beer was coming from someone’s cooler deep in the crowd. I got myself some water. I don’t drink things that spit at me.

“Amber? Amber! What’s up with you? What are you doing here?” Yvette came toward me, an elongated can of beer in her hand. If I’d depended on just my eyes, I wouldn’t have recognized her; she looked happy.

“Hey, Yvette,” I greeted her in return. “You come for the drumming?”

“Yeah, some of the women from—you know, last night—they told me. The ones I’m drumming with. They’re over there.” She pointed. I took her word for it. “What are you doing here?”

I spoke the truth without thinking about it. “I came to get some help.”

“Yeah?” she said. “What’s going on?”

I studied her. For all the insult of the bear the other day, wolves aren’t really known for discussing their business. And I had kept my own counsel from the time I realized I was on my own, and that was back when my dad disappeared, and my mom stopped answering my questions. So my instinct was to brush Yvette off when she asked me my business, maybe with a smile that showed my teeth and taught her the lesson not to ask me again. But we’d begun to be friends. And she hadn’t freaked out when she saw me in my true nature on the hill. She wasn’t freaked out now, though she knew what I was.

I said, “You know what’s going on? I mean, with the Wicca group last night, and all these guys?” I made a motion including all the various dancers and drummers, shakers and players around us.

She nodded. “I hear the city’s going down, and people who can raise power, through drums or by dancing, or whatever, are doing what they can to stop it.”

That was a drummer’s answer, all right. She probably thought the Wicca ceremony the previous night had been all about the drummers, with the celebrant and the dancers just hanging around to help out.

“That’s right,” I said. “So nobody has time for the other enemy that I’ve uncovered, but he’s got something of mine that I want back, and I want it before—as you say—the city goes under.”

“I’ll help,” Yvette said, taking a swig of her beer.

I was going to ask her what she thought she could do to help me, but then she looked away from me, and headed off back to the drum circle. Then I realized something about the drumming had changed.

Tamara had joined the circle of dancers. She’d shucked off her outer clothes and was wearing a robe of dark blue that looked like it was covered with stars. Suddenly the drummers were making a pattern that was like a maze for Tamara to dance through. There was a shift among the bodies of the musicians. Drummers who had been taking a break went back to their drums. I saw Yvette sit down on a camp stool and right the drum she had leaned against it. She listened for a few moments, joining in on the heartbeat, and then she found her place in the pattern, and laid in a rhythm loud and clear on her own. The drumming was hard, sharp, intoxicating. I couldn’t help moving to it where I stood, and neither could anyone else. If it hadn’t been a working before, in that circle, it sure was now.

Tamara turned and twisted, reached up and reached down, and it seemed she was climbing the sounds of the drums the way she might have climbed a ladder. Suddenly the fire flared as high as she was, though no one had put on any more fuel. Other dancers joined her, so the pattern repeated in the air, even as it changed constantly, over and over like dozens of mirrors repeating an image to infinity. The drumming began to echo in my head. I heard voices, as though a group of people had started chanting, but I never saw who was making the sound.

In the crowd of fire dancers I saw the three Thunder Mountain Boys, perfectly in step, perfectly in synch, even when their movements opposed one another, harmonizing somehow with the other dancers even as they kept to their own space, close by the fire. Honey briefly met my eyes from across the circle, then spun away.

I saw others that had been in the meeting taking their places around the circle. They held up their hands, speaking words that couldn’t be heard over the drumming, whether of blessing, invocation or admonishment, no one could tell. People who weren’t dancing picked up sticks and tapped on bottles or cans, snapped fingers, or clapped hands. The force of the circle shifted, became stronger. I made a circuit of the circle from behind. When I walked along the sidewalk I saw a cop car cruise by. Both of the cops stared straight ahead as though they couldn’t see or hear the party in full roar beside them.

I stood behind the drummers for a few moments, watching Yvette and the others. I swayed as I stood there, in time to the drums. I recognized two women from the Wicca group on the hill. I was going to move on, do another circuit, but the pounding of the drums was reverberating within my heart and in my blood. My feet started to move before I did. I made my way between the drummers and was dancing even before my feet entered the circle. I danced without thought and without plan, but before I’d gone twice around the fire I found I was certainly dancing with intention. The cold anger that sat upon my heart like a hitchhiker opened and enlarged. I danced the fight I would fight with the Eater of Souls. I danced how I would stalk him through his great house, using every wile I knew from my own experience and from that of my people of old. I danced how I would knock down and take out every one of his children who got in my way. Even if there were legions of them, still they would be defeated. I danced how I would chase down the Eater of Souls, how I would take his head in my mouth up to the shoulders, and he could do what he would in the darkness inside my gullet, before my teeth came together and snapped him in half. I danced how his blood would taste when I drank it. I danced sweet white human meat, with lots of fat, like bacon. Yum.

Then I danced how happy I would be to find Richard, imprisoned, not dead, in one piece, and my own again. I didn’t dance anymore than that, though the thoughts were there. After all, I was dancing in public. I leaped from one side of the fire to the other in a single bound. I found myself looking down on the head of Tamara, though she too towered beside the fire. I saw that I was dancing now on paws and now on feet, as though I had eight limbs instead of four, and I realized I had taken in the lesson Jacob had shown me: for the first time, I was wearing both of my aspects at the same time. So then I danced the joy of both my natures, the power and passion of two-in-one.

I danced as though the whole circle was mine, and the drumming built the halls I hunted in. The three priestesses spun past, whirling like children. The Thunder Mountain Boys stamped and turned to their own choreography. The chess player jumped up and down. The Goths spun through the circle like wraiths. The priests stalked the edges. Shakers and drummers stamped in and around. People leaped close to the fire and then away, but even though the crowd dancing around the fire grew and spilled out to the sidewalk, no one collided, and no one got in my way.

Tamara seemed to take up the whole world herself, with her sky-robe swirling around her, her hands and hair wild, her face entranced. Then all at once the other dancers seemed to twirl away. The circle near the fire was clear, and there I saw a small dark shape, wild and intense, powerful and profound, and then the drums found her heartbeat, and she began to dance as though the moon, the stars, the air, the city, the distant traffic, the drumming, and every one of us were the pattern that she danced against. It was Tamara’s frail mother, who, when she took my hands, had not been able to stand unaided. Now, in the relentless rhythm of the drums, she danced down the moon.

Later on I thought that I dreamed it. The next thing that I remember at all clearly was waking up in the back seat of my car, still parked on the street near the music store, really thirsty. I fumbled with the door handle for several moments before the thought occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to open the damn door if I had fingers on my paws. I was so tired it took me a few seconds to change.

The sun was rising through an early morning haze. The streets were still. My ears were still ringing from the sound of the drums. And I ached with exhaustion. It was chilly, and my sweatshirt was damp with sweat. My hair needed brushing, my teeth needed cleaning, and my mouth was dry.

The music shop was dark, but half a dozen people wandered around outside like zombies, cleaning up the mess from the all-night party. In the courtyard three of the four bears sat nursing large mugs of coffee in their big hands. They nodded to me. Jacob read my unspoken need, took me in the back door, and poured me a styrofoam cup of coffee from an industrial-sized pot. It tasted awful. Just what I needed.

“Tamara’s not back yet,” he told me when my immediate needs were seen to.

“I know,” I said. “You told me not to come till later because Tamara wouldn’t be up yet. I’ll wait. It’s not worth driving home and back now.” I sipped the hot, bitter liquid.

Jacob was looking at me in surprise. “Didn’t you know? The old lady had a seizure early this morning. The ambulance came and took her away not an hour ago. Tamara went with her to the hospital.”

I stared at him. “Her mother?”

He nodded. He looked fierce, and the scar on his brow knotted under his frown. “No one expected her to dance. She hasn’t danced since—not since I can remember, anyway. Tamara about had a fit when she came into the circle.”

“I remember her dancing,” I said. I shook my head, trying to clear it. I remembered the dancing as though it had gone on forever. And I couldn’t remember a thing after that, until I woke up in my car.

Jacob was smiling now. “Yeah, you were dancing pretty wild yourself. I didn’t know the wolf kind could dance like that.”

Actually, I hadn’t either. But we are known for keeping our secrets, so I just smiled and said, “You’d be surprised what the wolf kind can do.”

But he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

I was pretty sure that what the bears had been doing during the dancing was cleaning up the food, but I didn’t mention it. One should be kind to bears.

We went back out into the courtyard where the other bears feigned being deeply involved in sitting and coffee-drinking, so deeply involved that they couldn’t possibly help the others clean up the mess. I joined them. It pays to learn the ways of your cousins, especially when you feel like a truck ran over you.

The biggest bear was Aaron. Close up it looked like all of the features of his face were oversized, but this just added to the impression of his great size. “So what’s this Soul Eater?” he asked me.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I’ve seen two men that met him. They’re both supposed to be pretty powerful magic workers—”

“Marlin and Darius,” Jacob said, nodding. “They are both very respectable sorcerers.”

“In different ways,” said Sol, the smallest bear.

“In very different ways,” Jacob agreed, and there was a general bear laugh, louder than necessary, and going on for longer.

“So what does he do, the Soul Eater?” Jonathan, the third-biggest bear, and the quietest, asked.

I shrugged. “All I know is that when I saw them after they’d met him, the only thing they could say was, hi, how are you, and can I help you. That kind of thing.”

The bears exchanged glances that were fierce and hard.

“I know Darius,” Jonathan said. He shook his head.

“We all do,” said Aaron. “He wasn’t like that.”

They nursed their coffee thoughtfully for a moment.

“So, what are you going to do?” Jacob asked me.

They all looked at me. What could I say? I shrugged. “I’m going to go back in there, and I’m going to hunt him through the halls of his mansion, and when I have him backed against a wall, I’m going to tear his head off.”

There was another bear laugh, and I joined it with a wolf grin, which is a lot like a snarl.

The sun had long broken through the haze when Tamara pulled up in front of the store. She got out in a hurry, slamming the door of her car hard. She was wearing the same clothes as she had the night before, and wrapped her night blue shawl close around her in what was almost a protective gesture as she walked toward the store. The bears stood up when they saw her. She glanced at them, and then caught my eye. She motioned me to follow her as she climbed the stairs rapidly, seeming almost to fly up them with her usual grace. When I entered after her, she turned on me. She looked exhausted. Her eyes were sunken with sleeplessness and grief. Her attitude, however, was sharp as ever.

“Here.” She held out something in her hand. “This is what you came for. I hope it’s worth it to you. It may cost my mother her life.”

I took it. It looked like a small round circle of flesh, about as big as my thumb. It was dark brown, almost black, and not very old. There was a hold punched in the top and it hung from a length of black cord. I smelled it, and looked up, startled. There was a white bandage around Tamara’s upper arm. Under my glance she cupped it in her other hand protectively.

“My mother said it was important.” She shrugged. “I would think that saving the city would mean more at this time. But she has always been—” She seemed to smile then, but as her mouth widened I realized she was trying to keep from crying. “Stubborn,” she said finally, closing her mouth hard on the word.