The Summoning (33 page)

Jacob looked at me with his head to one side. He kept glancing from my face to the top of my head and back. He was smiling a little, but he also looked impressed. “You should perhaps put your head on straight, first?”

I looked down, and up, and started laughing. “It’s your fault,” I said to Jacob. “You showed me that trick. I didn’t know I’d learned it so well already.” I was wearing both my aspects, my wolf and my human one, simultaneously, one above the other. No wonder those little girls had screamed. And I thought it was my natural authority.

I pulled myself together, looked at Jacob. “All right?” He nodded. “Very good.”

Al Hassan’s children, those still on their feet, were assaulting the shelves that held the luminous bottles. I was about to join in the grabbing and smashing when the drums from the corridor reached a crescendo, and a familiar face appeared in the doorway. I found myself smiling. I realized I did have a co-worker smile. Or maybe, this was my friendly smile.

Yvette was wearing a stylish African cap over her many beaded braids. The closed, hard look was gone from her face. She looked happy and powerful. She wore her drum on a sling at her front, and as she pounded it, she danced. She came into the workroom, glanced at the bears, glanced at the piles of bodies, at the blood and the gold and the broken glass, and she finished her drumming with a articulation that sounded like a comment on the whole event. Then she beat out a final phrase and stopped, and silence fell.

Silence, except for the groaning, the shouting, the moaning, and the smashing of glass. Over all this she saw me and beamed. “Amber!”

I thought she was going to hug me when she reached me, but her drum was in the way. She grasped both my hands. “Why didn’t you wait for us? I told you I would help you.”

“The bears brought you,” I said foolishly, smiling. Through the corridor I could see a third bear, lumbering after his fleeing prey, and two more drummers, Yvette’s friends from the Wicca circle.

Jacob came to stand beside her, put an arm around her shoulders in a way I could see wasn’t new to her. Yvette looked awfully smug. “She brought us,” Jacob amended.

“I thought you’d be needing help. We would have got here sooner, but you left too fast. So, it took us awhile to find out where you’d gone. Didn’t I tell you I was going to help you?”

Maybe she had. I didn’t remember. Wolves don’t hunt with other kinds. It hadn’t occurred to me that her offer was serious. But I was in a new place, and I was learning new ways. Perhaps these were the ways of the humankind. “Thanks,” I said. “You were in the nick of time.”

Yvette grinned and beat out her pleasure on her djembe.

We smashed the rest of the bottles. The luminosity in each of them held in the scattered shards on the floor for a long moment, and then went out like a falling star.

“I hope,” I said, almost to myself, “they find their way home.”

The third bear joined us when there was only one bottle left. He metamorphosed into Aaron before my eyes as he kicked aside the broken door with a bear’s foot, and shoved a crawling young man of his way with the foot of a man. “Are we finished here?”

“One more thing,” I said. I took off at a run, reaching out onto four legs instead of two, since that would be faster. I had to know.

The spells that kept me from smelling inside that house were wafting away in the fresh air from every broken window and smashed door. I tracked my way down the passageways, through the kitchen, to the wine cellar, to the basement stairs. I charged down headlong, caught myself up at the bottom, stood up onto two legs, and went to the box where Maryam had indicated that Richard was kept. The circle, the pentagram, the signs of ward and restraint, the sword and the wand, seemed suddenly justified to contain that being of writhing darkness that had worn Richard’s form, the last moment I saw him. I hesitated. Richard had come to me when I called for him. The talisman that had preserved my senses against all the spells that al Hassan had laid on his house, had released the dark energy that might well be his true form. I’d come down here to make sure Richard was all right. If he was in that box, he was not all right. But what if it was not Richard in that box?

I kicked aside the circle, smudged open the pentagram, and tossed the blade and wand aside. I fumbled a few moments with the complicated latches, and then opened the box. He had been there. I smelled his scent, and I smelled his desperate fear. But the box was empty. I tried to believe that was good.

Just to be sure, I made my way through the house all the way to the rooms at the top, but the children had already been there. I found the room where al Hassan had done his experiments, because Richard’s sweat and his blood were still evident. The sumptuous rooms were wrecked. I didn’t find any tools. I went back downstairs.

I joined up with my rescuers after that. Yvette and her drummer friends from the Wicca group were standing in a circle in the hall while the three bears loped around, chasing the few remaining children of al Hassan who had not hidden or fled. Then we walked out of the house and into the morning light, and the free air, and all the scents that tell the tales of the world. The drummers were laughing, giddy and proud of our success. The bears, Jacob, Jonathan, and Aaron, and Sol, whom we met up with in front of the house, seemed pleased and satisfied with their morning’s activity.

I made sure, before we left, that al Hassan was dead. Richard had believed him dead too, at one time, and it had proved untrue. I supposed a sorcerer such as al Hassan would have defenses and illusions to help him in a pinch. I guessed his children knew that too. When I went to look, there wasn’t enough of him left to make a meal for a puppy. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. I wished I had done the job, for Richard’s sake, but I knew justice when I saw it. Al Hassan had raised up his own executioners.

The gates stood wide open, never to be closed again without a whole lot of repair work. They had come in two cars, and they piled back into them, while I trotted down the street to find my car where I’d parked it a few blocks away. From a trot I slowed to a walk. From a walk, to an amble. I was really, really hungry. I was more relieved than I cared to admit that al Hassan wasn’t going to do experiments on my soul or on my body to extract my demon’s name. I was tired. And it wasn’t over yet. In my pocket I held, hidden in the palm of my hand, the last remaining bottle, a small one, sky blue.

I followed the others back to Tamara’s shop, where we celebrated with pizza and soda and coffee and beer. The coffee was awful. And there was drummer boasting, and bear boasting, and bear boasting will beat any other boasting in the world. To hear the bears tell about it, each one of them had separately taken Ibrahim al Hassan’s house apart, beaten off the hordes of his children, and torn out the sorceror’s throat. The drummers told their side, in higher voices against the background of the bears’ unceasing gloating, how their drumming had opened a hole in the defenses of the house that had enabled the bears to break down the gates and the doors and scatter the children. I didn’t know what the defenses were, except the one that kept me from using my chief senses. I nodded and smiled and thanked them and agreed again and again that they had come just in time. They’d earned their celebration. It was the least I could do. You wouldn’t believe how much pizza a bear can eat.

When the twelfth large pizza box was opened in front of me, Yvette came and sat down beside me, the better to reach for her share, I thought, before the bears got in and there was none left.

“Great hat,” I told her.

She glowed. “Tamara gave it to me. She says…” She leaned forward to tell me, out of hearing of the others. “She says I have power in my drumming, that the ancestors speak through my hands. She says it’s a gift I have, and I’m always welcome here.” She took a huge slice of pizza, with four kinds of meat on it, in both hands. “This is the best time I ever had in my life.” She bit off the pointed end. “You ever need help again, you tell me.”

“I will,” I said. “And, thanks.”

She flapped her full hands at me. “Anytime. Next time, though, you tell us where you’re going, and we won’t have to haul a diviner out of his bed to find you.”

“Tamara knew.”

“Yeah, but she was sleeping.”

Tamara’s sleep was more important than the diviner’s, it seemed.

Tamara was back at the hospital with her mother that morning. The store was open, with friends running the shop. We sat in the back room until the pizza was gone, and then I thanked them all again, and made my excuses, and drove home.

Richard’s scent, though faint now, was still discernable in my apartment. The smells he’d made in the kitchen were still there, as were those that remained from the things we’d done on the bed. I took a long shower, set the alarm clock, and lay down. After a while, I came conscious long enough to climb out of the blankets and change my form, turn around until I found the right configuration, and lie down again. I didn’t want human thoughts, or human dreams, right now.

I slept wolf-style, in short naps. When the moon rose, I changed again and reached out to turn off the alarm clock before it buzzed. I got dressed, put on my jacket against the cold, and slipped the shining blue bottle into my pocket. I drove up to Hellman Park as the gibbous moon was lifting off the horizon. The park closes at dusk, so I left my car a ways down the street and, holding the little bottle safe in my hand, inside the pocket, I climbed the steep hill and walked back along the ridge and down into the bowl where the Wiccans met.

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
here were clouds in the sky blowing in from the sea. There were not a lot of stars because the night was hazy and the moon was close to full. The Wiccans weren’t there tonight. I knew they wouldn’t be. Yvette and her friends would have told me if there was a working on for that night. I wanted to do what I planned in the open, under the sky. And this place had the resonance of all the previous magic that had been raised there. I might need all the help I could get.

I took a stick and drew a circle in the dirt, more than big enough to stand in, and a pentagram inside it. If I’d known any symbols of guard or protection, aversion of evil, I’d have written them between the points of the star. If I’d known the proper prayers or invocations, I’d have offered them up, sealed with lit candles at the points of the pentagram. Richard hadn’t been Richard anymore, the last time I’d seen him. He was a demon, an actual demon. I needed to talk to him, but I did not want to be eaten. So I did what I could. I drew the basic sign of containment, and the open gate, which was as much as I knew. And then I spoke Richard’s name, his true name, and called him to me.

He was there in the center of the pentagram on the last sound of the last syllable, clothed in darkness upon darkness that moved, and only a shadow of him was the Richard I knew. I stepped back and, once again, all the hair rose on my neck and back. A half-familiar form was traced over the figure, like the reflection of a friend seen in water, among other forms. I hadn’t been mistaken. It really was a demon. This was the form that had been spilling out of Richard the last time I’d seen him.

He saw me and turned, and knelt down inside the center of the pentagram. “Mistress.” He bowed his head without taking his eyes off me.

That wasn’t Richard. Richard had never called me that. I could feel this creature’s will, huge and deep and dangerous. “That’s not what I wanted,” I said. “I want Richard.”

“It is what you called.” It spoke with many voices, like whispers in the darkness. One of them was Richard, but hardly distinguishable from the rest.

I shook my head, trying to separate the voice I wanted from the others. “It’s not what I asked for.” And I commanded, “Richard!”

And he was there, shaking with cold, bent and bowed before me.

And that pissed me off. “
With
clothes,” I demanded. I wasn’t going to have this conversation while I watched his body turn blue. And I was pretty sure he knew this, and was trying to distract me, one way or another.

He was clothed almost instantly in jeans and the blue silk shirt all clean and new, and the used leather jacket, and the worn boots that I was used to seeing him wear. He looked up at me with wild, unregenerate, rebellious, and completely foreign eyes.

“No,” I said. “
Richard
. That’s all I want to see.”

And there he was, his dark blue eyes troubled as though by a storm. But it was him, all of him, and only him. He lifted his hands to me and said in his own voice, “Do you know what you are asking?”

I thought about that for a second. I was beginning to think I did. “First,” I said, “give me back the token I gave you in the basement last night.” I held out my hand for it.

He moved then as though he was struggling in someone’s grasp, as though he were trying to find his way around my direct instruction. Finally he said, “What are you going to do with me?” And in his voice I heard Phaedrus, and Amyas, Jack, Philip and Stan, and other names that I probably hadn’t been told, since he hadn’t told me everything. He’d certainly forgotten to mention earlier a hundred and twenty-four years of imprisonment by Ibrahim al Hassan. But I understood that he didn’t have to answer anything that wasn’t a direct and specific question. And I understood, too, that he could be tricky. So I didn’t answer him, and I didn’t negotiate. I just held out my hand.

And the token was in it. I smelled it. There were scents upon it that I couldn’t identify or describe, but beneath those, which it carried lightly, it was the same. I slipped it over my head. It didn’t seem to make any difference here to my senses, but then, I wasn’t inside a mad sorcerer’s bespelled fortress.

“What did it do, when you put it on?” I asked. “You changed. I saw you. What happened?”

I sat down on the ground in front of him, so I wouldn’t loom over him anymore. He sat back on his knees. His face was smooth. He looked new again. He looked the same, and yet not the same, from when I had first seen him. He was frightened as he’d been then, but that had been an old fear that he trailed behind him like an exhaust fume. This was new, and it was large, and it nearly pulsed the air like the darkness that was his true form.