The Summoning (28 page)

“What does it do?”

She waved a hand. “It’s a focus point. When the magic of that house surrounds you, this will provide a focus for you to find and keep your senses.”

“I don’t feel anything,” I said doubtfully, looking down at the little scrap of skin. If it were magic I ought to feel a tingle or something.

“If I tried something on you right now, you’d feel the difference. But to tell you the truth, I’m too damn tired.” She dragged out a chair and sat down in it, almost awkwardly. “Get me some of that coffee, would you?”

I got her a cup, brought her the sugar she asked for, and found the milk in a small fridge under the counter.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said in return. “For this.”

She raised her hand tiredly, waving me away. “Go on, then. Go find your demon. And kill that thing, whatever it is, if that’s what’s deprived us of Marlin and Darius now of all possible times…” She trailed off, staring into her coffee. I was about to go when she raised her head again and looked at me. Her eyes were bright with tears, but this time when she looked at me, she saw me. “If you find that demon of yours…” She shook her head. “Be careful.”

“You told me that before,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I mean it.” She got up then, took the talisman from my hand and slipped the cord over my head. “Here. Go with my blessing.”

She laid one hand, cool and light, on my forehead. After a moment, she laid the other hand beside it.

For a moment her scent, so close to me, gave me the impression I was walking through a dark forest and was about to step into a brilliantly lit glade just ahead. I looked up, startled, to meet her eyes, but hers were closed, and then the impression was gone. I went out the front door, where the store had just opened up, and I was still trying to grasp the impression of that vision as I got into my car. I’d reached the freeway before I realized, suddenly, I wasn’t tired anymore.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
o now I was supposed to drive to L.A., hop the wall, and attack the Eater of Souls in his lair, relying on the little brown talisman around my neck to fend off evil and save me from a life of vacuous inanity? In broad daylight? Right.

If I was going to enter the grounds of that house again, it was going to be dark, and no one was going to know. I was going to smell my way to wherever Richard was and find him, and chew him out of whatever it was they were using to hold him down, and get him the hell out of there and go home. That’s it. So what was I supposed to do? Go and hang around that mega-upscale neighborhood in my little Honda Civic? I was nowhere near well-groomed enough to fit into that neighborhood.

I went home. I fried myself up a pan of steaks. And then another pan, because dinner was a long time and a lot of dancing ago. I took a shower, because pouring hot water down the back of your neck is a cure for almost everything. And then I lay down until the sun set. I may even have slept.

I parked a long ways from the house. The moon was already riding high in the east, in its last night of full, just one corner looking a little shaved. I’d hunted by its light thousands of times. Tonight would be no different. No, I told myself. It would be better.

I assumed he must have wards out; any two-bit sorcerer would have wards out. He hadn’t sensed my nature when I was in his house, I was pretty sure of that. That he knew it now, I had no doubt, but I still thought it would probably be harder for him to read my presence in my wolf nature than as a human, since he might not know exactly what to look for. So I changed beneath the hedge of a mansion two streets away, and trotted along to the house as the smallest, most harmless canine I could make of myself. I stopped to sniff a few times—studly poodle, been eating pork, also milkbones, and also (did his mumsy know?) dead possum—and even to pee. Not till I crossed the street and stood under the wall of the house did I seek for that cold hard knot of anger sitting over my heart, and allow it to grow. As it grew, I grew also. I hopped lightly onto the top of the wall.

Nothing stirred. The grounds were empty. Most of the lights in the house were out. Over to the right, a window stood half open. Good. And if that didn’t work—I glanced up—there was always the first-floor balcony. I’d stepped off it getting out of that place. I could step up there again. It seemed awfully high from where I stood, in the shade of a tree on the top of the wall. I nursed the cold anger that had taught me to grow and felt confident. I could do it if I had to. I leaped lightly off the wall and into the grounds.

At least, that was the plan. As I jumped, something hit me from several directions at once, knocked me off balance and onto my side, and entangled me as I fell to the ground. I landed with a thump, kicking and snapping for all I was worth. A net. Not of rope but of wire, and as the moonlight glinted on the strands, I knew, the wire was silver. Idiots.

People appeared. I struggled, whining and shrieking what I hoped sounded like painful shrieks, and then I changed and lay still.

Ibrahim al Hassan swept his long white robes and his crowding children out of his way with the same gesture and squatted beside me. “Just as I thought,” he said, looking me in the eyes. The moonlight caught his liquid eyes, large and kindly as ever as he studied me. He stood up abruptly. “Bring her.”

They must have had everything already planned, because he didn’t give any more orders. They handcuffed me where I lay before they untangled me from the silver net, with silver handcuffs, no less. They put silver manacles on my ankles as well, as I moaned and protested. I don’t suppose I needed to bother. The kids didn’t take any notice of anything I said or did. When my ankles were connected by a reasonably long chain, and my hands were cuffed tightly behind me, they removed the net and hauled me to my feet. A whole crowd of them escorted me inside the house, but most of them found other business once we entered the hall. I took a deep breath as I stepped through the door. My token was still around my neck and, sure enough, I could smell. I almost forgot to moan and cry and carry on for a minute.

The daughter, Suzie I think her name was, stood by the library door, waiting to conduct me inside. Two of the boys escorted me in. Al Hassan waited inside, standing by the fireplace.

He clapped his hands as they brought me towards him.

“Good!” he said, “Very good! I am pleased with you, my children. You may tell the others. Come,” he said to me, “let me look at you.” He hauled me forward by my shoulders, turned me around, checked that the handcuffs and ankle cuffs were good and tight by yanking on them hard, then turned me around to face him again. I cringed and twitched.

“You caught me,” I told him, “fair and square. Now take these things off me! They hurt!” I added a whine. What did he know about kids? His were zombies. “Please?”

“Oh no,” he said, a pleased smile on his face. “No, no, no, no. I know too well your powers, you see. I have done my research.” He waved a hand at a pile of books on his desk on the other side of the room. “Tonight, the moon is still full. When it has set, then I will consider removing those silver restraints. But not before that, no. Do I want a werewolf loose in my house? Heaven forefend. But you, you—my twice-welcome guest. How happy I am that you have returned, almost as though you knew it was your fate to do so.”

I just stared at him, eyes wide. What the hell was he talking about?

“Twice-welcome,” he continued, “I say because, in the first case it has come to my knowledge—and do not ask me how but let it be sufficient to know that one such as myself has ways of discovering these things—that you, of all people in this late and decadent age, have succeeded in doing what my kind have spent their lives striving to do—and for that alone, I of course desired to bring you as an honored guest beneath my roof.”

I didn’t understand what my two natures had to do with people striving to do things. You have to be born what I am. It doesn’t come any other way. That nonsense about getting a bite from a werewolf making another werewolf—if that were true, the world would be peopled with our kind. It’s not like we hold back, after all. I didn’t say anything. My idea was, the less he knew about me, the better for me, and the more he kept thinking for himself, the more he got it wrong, and that was good for me too.

He went on. He really seemed happy to see me, and he was the kind of guy to share his happiness by talking. “That is why I invited you here first of all. You have succeeded in summoning a demon. How wonderful! How praiseworthy! You must show me your methods. We have so much to learn from one another. You must be as delighted as I that we have found one another.”

I opened my eyes wide at him. “I summoned a demon?”

“Oh, my child.” He moved to put an arm around me, but I stepped back just far enough so that he missed. He continued, unperturbed. “You mustn’t try to deceive me. Remember, I have my little ways of learning these things.”

“Oh yeah?” I challenged him. “Like how?”

His hand swung in the air again. “Your demon told me, of course.”

“My demon…?” I started, unbelieving.

He greeted this with a laugh. “I am not saying that he meant to do so. I am not saying that. But again you must remember that I have made this area my study for many, many years—more years than you can imagine,” he added, leering into my face for a moment. “And there are many techniques for inviting cooperation from those who would withhold their knowledge unreasonably. What do you call him? Stan? Amyas?” Again, the leer in my face, as though he were crowing over knowledge that I would be surprised that he knew. “Amyas has told me many things about you. How to find you, for example. He told me that.”

I remembered his daughter standing outside my house with that pendulum thing swinging, and how it went wild inside my apartment, where Richard had spent time. It occurred to me that this guy might be lying through his beard. Richard hadn’t, after all, told the guy what I called him.

His hand was waving in the air again. “But then I learned another of your secrets, and I see that I must treat you with more respect this time. I wonder if you chose to be a werewolf, or if you were attacked, and the powers of the wolf have simply been added to your other, considerable abilities. We must discuss this at some time, but first…” He looked me up and down, and then walked around me, grabbing my handcuffs hard and yanking on them when he was behind me. I cried out. I hoped it sounded girlish.

“You will have learned already, through your many disciplines,” he told me, “that pain is one of our best teachers. It is my hope that your current… discomfort… is teaching you that your only course is to obey me in all things as long as you remain under my roof.” He reached down and grabbed the chain on my ankles. He jerked hard, to one side, and I couldn’t help falling, and falling hard with my hands behind my back, onto my hip and shoulder. I got to my knees and then to my feet while he watched me. I didn’t mind the bruise or two. When he came close to me I smelled what he was trying so hard to hide, with all his servants, and his great house, and his great power, and his great wealth so abundantly on display. I smelled fear. Long-held, ancient, tamped-down, but nonetheless omnipresent, his fear. I was almost smiling as he led me to the next room. I just had to find out what the hell he was afraid of.

“Your last visit was interrupted,” he said, as he conducted me across the room, “just when I was about to show you my work room. And too, just when I was about to explain so many things to you. I wanted your cooperation, your collaboration, even. I mentioned—but of course it was only to deceive you, you understand that—that it was one such as you that I would, in time, make my sole heir. But my children would never stand for such a thing. Never.”

He walked to one of the bookshelves. It opened smoothly like a door as he approached it, and he waved me into the next room, dimly lit as though by lamplight, but no. By something else.

The walls of the next room were lined from floor to ceiling with a jigsaw puzzle of shelving, the dividers creating innumerable niches of various sizes, jammed with small glass bottles. Each bottle emitted a tiny luminescence, each with a slightly different shade of color from a dark deep purple to a white so pure and clear, it was entrancing. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The glass vessels came in all colors and shapes, some as tiny as one of my fingers, some so large that I would have had to hold it in both arms. The shelves were stuffed with them, shining like little suns, here a green like the forest leaves in sunlight, here a yellow so pale it was almost white. A huge bottle whose glass was blackened nonetheless emanated a glow of cobalt blue, in a nimbus around the dark glass. A tiny, plump bottle glowed red like a bright ripe apple. A tall, thin one with a long neck shone black as a moonless night. On one shelf half a dozen different bottles glowed in variations of white, from the fist-sized clear one that glowed with a warm, inner fire, to an opaque crystal that looked like a luminous stone, and could only be identified as a bottle because it had the same wax and glass stopper as all the rest. There were hundreds of them. There may have been a thousand.

High on a shelf to the right, perched precariously in a crowded niche, stood the little blue bottle that Richard had kept in his pocket and I had once touched. There was no mistaking it.

Al Hassan had followed me into the room. “How many…?” I asked him.

He opened his arms. The light from the bottles lit his face like a figure in a church. He looked rapturous, even holy. “Ah, my collection. What do you think of it, eh?”

“You’re the Eater of Souls,” I said. “How many—?”

I broke off as he started laughing. He laughed and laughed. “The Eater…? Oh no, oh no. You must not think that. The Eater of Souls is nothing like this—wasteful, an appetite, that is all. I—” and he leaned close to me again, to impress on me what he was saying. “I am a collector. A connoisseur, you might say. And this is my pride, and the fruit of my not inconsiderable labors.”

“They are souls,” I said, staring at the bottles uncertainly.

“But of course they are. I would expect an adept such as yourself to recognize them at once for what they are.”