The Summoning (6 page)

“Dangerous for who?” I said, smiling. But I let it go. “Give me another choice. Katherine Dee called you Phaedrus too? Who was next?”

“She sold me to a drayer to pay a debt. He called me Jack. His son’s cousin had an inn. I was ‘tapster’ there, or ‘you, boy,’ for a generation.” He began to eat.

“You’re not telling me any good names.”

“I was Philip after that. An officer’s servant in the wars.” His eyes darkened.

“But you don’t like Philip.”

He shook his head. “I was an earl’s leman, from his boyhood in the wars to his death, after that.” He glanced at me briefly from under his lashes. “He won me at cards.”

“Still called Philip?”

“No. Amyas.”

I took a sip of the wine. It was sweet and fruity. Not to my taste. My plate was empty then, and he got up to cut me some more bread, and added some of all the other treats as well. He opened the chocolate. What a heavenly smell!

“Didn’t you have any good times?” I asked him.

“Some. For a short while. In places.” But he had nothing more to say to that. He sat down again and gave more of his attention to his supper.

“How about Luke? You ever been called Luke?” He shook his head, but I had changed my mind already. That name had a certain flavor for me, a certain associated scent, and a horde of memories. I didn’t want to cloud them. I bit in to one of the chocolates, a hard milk chocolate outside with a soft hazelnut center. Divine. I lapped it up and took another. “Richard,” I said. “How about Richard? You ever been Richard?”

He shook his head again, smiling a little. “It’s not a servant’s name.”

“Well, let’s use that.” I got up. “I’m going to bed, which I haven’t seen nearly enough of for the last couple nights.”

He was on his feet again instantly, and it suddenly dawned on me what he was thinking. I almost laughed aloud. I put my hands on my hips and canted them like a call girl. “So. You gonna go in there with me and make sweet love to me all night long? You up for that?”

He ran a hand through his hair, smoothed the other against his pants, unconsciously. “If you wish,” he said, soft and sweet. He made his eyes change, so that they looked all at once like all he thought about was sex. But I’d seen how they looked before.

I shook my head. “I don’t make love under duress. Either way, now or ever.” I looked around the living room. “There’s a spare blanket in the top of that closet. The bathroom’s through there. You can sleep in here, if you prefer it to the streets. Otherwise…” I shrugged. “Do what you want.”

He hadn’t moved. He was still taken aback. I’d reached my bedroom door before he said anything. I looked back at him. He’d stiffened, like I’d insulted him or something. “You would enjoy it,” he said, as I closed the door on him. Sometimes you could tell he was a demon, from his eyes.

I was really beat. Good thing it was Friday night. No work tomorrow, so I didn’t set the alarm. I stripped and fell into bed with relief. I lay still, listening to him move around out there, clearing the table, running water to clean the dishes. I remembered how he’d looked when he came out of Thomas Fallahan’s bedroom, all pink and sweet and finely made. John Dee must have given him exact specifications for the body he wanted him in. I wondered what Dee had wanted him for, and fell into wandering dreams on the thought.

In the morning, I pulled up from sleep as I heard the front door open and the guy go out. Oh well, I thought. That’s it, then. He just wanted me to help him get his soul back. About an hour later, I came awake again when the door opened, and he returned. Hm. What next? I lay listening to the sounds of him quietly moving around out there. Somehow, I didn’t resent him in my space, my den. The sounds were companionable. As though I had a pack again. Huh. That was making too much of it. Who knew how long he was going to stick around? He had a use for me; I understood that. All of his tricks and turns and strong assertions were designed to put me in a position where I stood between him and harm, whatever harm he thought was coming. If the World Snake was real, if it was really coming, maybe what he wanted was a ride to Colorado. But for the time being, he wasn’t too objectionable. I smiled, as the vision of him emerging, sweet smelling, his body slightly flushed from the shower, from recent sex, from hope and desire and fear, rose in my mind. And he was doing everything in his power to make me think of him that way. I knew that too. I turned over, gave up thinking, and sank back into sleep.

I heard the shower run. Later, I heard the kettle boil. And some time after that, I smelled onions cooking. When I opened my eyes the sun was shining on my curtains. It was late. No wonder the smell of food got me up. I pulled on my robe and went into the bathroom and showered. I found a clean pair of jeans and a shirt, gave my hair a few licks and went out to see what the demon was up to. The living room smelled heavenly. The table was set. The kitchen smelled… different.

Barefoot, dressed in his jeans and his big new blue silk shirt, open at the throat and the baggy sleeves rolled up, and wearing an apron I’d never seen before covering him from chest to knees, he stood in my kitchen hovering over three pans on the stove. It seemed, too, that we now had a toaster. He’d washed his hair, and trimmed it as well. It looked neat and soft, curling a little just at the ends. He smelled really good.

Coffee was brewing in a brand new coffee brewing gizmo. His air of happy industry evaporated as I walked passed him without a word, opened cupboards, pulled open the fridge, looked in a larder I’d never used for the source of the new smells. He flattened himself against the cabinets, smiling a stupid, scared, fake smile. There was food everywhere. The fridge was full. There were green things in the bins.

“What have you done?” I asked him.

He straightened up a little. “I went grocery shopping. It’s just down the street.”

“I know where it is,” I said. “With what money?”

“It’s there on the table,” he said, pointing with a brand shiny new cooking implement whose name I did not know. He followed me to the table. There was a pile of bills laid out, mostly hundreds, some twenties, a ten, some ones, and a little change. On top of them were some receipts. “I spent a hundred and seventy dollars and sixty-three cents,” he said. “That’s the rest of it.”

“The rest of what?” I asked him.

“The money from Tommy’s wallet,” he reminded me. “Last night? There was eight hundred dollars in it.”

“Eight hundred…?”

“It’s all accounted for.” He backed away to the stove, made things sizzle, made more heavenly smells.

He was distracting me. I said, “Is that breakfast?”

“If you wish.”

I wandered back out to the table. “That money isn’t mine,” I told him. “You stole it fair and square.”

He turned back to me. “It is yours. Everything I have is yours. I’m not allowed to have anything of my own.”

“Is that another one of your rules?”

He gave another of his shrugs and turned away, got out plates, started dishing things onto them. I went and sat down, shoving the money and receipts into a pile at the end of the table. “I didn’t make the rules,” he said, with an edge. He put a brimming plate in front of me. “But I certainly know them.” He set a mug of hot coffee by my hand. The food smelled really good.

I was torn between defending my Spartan and ascetic space, and the glorious smells that wafted from the plate in front of me. “You’re just taking over here, aren’t you?” I might have sounded more sincere if my mouth wasn’t already full.

He smiled. “You’ll get used to it.”

It would certainly be easy to get used to him. The coffee was almost not bad. And gods, he could cook. “Where’s yours?” I asked him.

He brought his plate then, stripped off the apron and sat down across from me in the place he had taken the previous night.

I sipped my coffee and dug in to the egg-and-shrimp thing with yellow sauce dripped over it, leaking mushrooms and tomatoes and peppers. There was crunchy buttered toast, and fried potatoes with onions and something else in there that he’d put on my plate, and slices of banana in a dish with a sugary brown sauce. I eyed him as he joined me. “What, you were going to eat in the kitchen?”

“It’s usual,” he told me, a little prickly, picking up his fork.

“On the floor? In the corner? With the rats?”

He put his fork down again. “If you wish.”

“Don’t be an idiot.” I took another bite. “Oh gods, this is good.”

He ducked his head and had some himself. “I wondered,” he said with diffidence, “if you only ate meat… but last night… and the donuts…”

“Meat,” I told him, “is what I know how to cook. And it doesn’t take much, the way I do it.”

“True,” he agreed.

I shot him a look, but he was bent over his plate, wielding fork and knife like an epicure.

He must have eaten something earlier, because this time he didn’t go at the food like he was starving. He finished before I did and sat and watched me while I ate. At one point he got up and refilled my coffee cup. “I was wondering…”

“Hm?” I finished sopping the toast in the last drops of the yellow sauce and putting it in my mouth.

“What am I to call you?” He lifted his hands briefly. “What would you wish me to call you?”

Master of all masters? Your exalted greatness? I almost laughed aloud. “And you’ll call me anything I want, right? It’s another rule?”

“Yes.”

“I’m called Amber, here,” I told him.

He said, “But that isn’t your name?” in a friendly, suggestive way.

I smiled, not my nice smile. “But you aren’t going to know my name,” I told him. “My kind know very well the power of such knowledge. Besides, you couldn’t pronounce it.”

“I could,” he replied.

“But you won’t,” I said, still smiling. “You’ll call me Amber. All right?”

“Yes, Amber,” he said.

He might be in my service, I realized, but he certainly wasn’t tame.

“All right,” I said, when he had cleared my plate. “Let’s see it.”

He was so taken aback that for a moment he lacked the ingenuity even to pretend he didn’t know what I meant. He stammered when he said, “Pardon me?”

I looked up at him, just looked, and waited to see what it would take to make him give in. I didn’t have to do anything. In a short while his face crumpled. It was enough to make me start to think these rules he talked about really did bind him, as he said.

“It’s mine,” he said finally. He put a hand up to his chest, telling me where it was.

“Yeah? And what happened to ‘everything I have is yours’ from just a few moments ago?”

He looked utterly forlorn. “Please…,” he said. “I have to have it… I need it.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said. “I just want to look at it. I’ve never seen one before, at least not outside a person. Give it here.”

He was wearing it inside his shirt. He’d bought a pair of shoelaces at the store and used one to knot a kind of basket tightly around the vial and the other as a cord to hang around his neck. He laid it in front of me like it was holy. Well, probably it was.

I couldn’t see the vessel for all the string, so I pulled it away. He hovered in mute protest, but I gave him a look and he backed off to the end of the table.

It was in a small, thick glass vessel that fit in the palm of my hand. In it glowed something warm and luminous, with a pale white center, blue at the edges like an iris, entrancing to look at. The glass was rounded in the belly, tapered at the top, with a stopper of glass and wire that was welded to the opening and neck of the bottle.

“Where did you get this?” I glanced up at him, to watch him compose his answer. He might not be able to lie to me, but I was pretty sure he could equivocate till Hell froze. He answered readily, though, this time.

“I stole it.”

“Who’s missing this, then?” I held it up. It was difficult to put down, once I had it in my hand. He didn’t take his eyes off it.

“No one. I mean, no one who is alive. I once met a sorcerer. He could extract that from a newborn child, as he killed it.”

“Yuck!” I offered it back to him. He bent and gathered it gently in his hand.

“He collected these,” Richard continued, his words still carefully light. “I was kept in his house a while. When I departed, I took this one with me. He was in no condition to miss it. No one else had a use for it. But I have.”

“He was in no condition…?” I queried.

Richard met my eyes. “His house burned down. I was told he was dead.”

“That’s good,” I said. I still had a feeling I was missing a trick somewhere. “He’s long dead?”

“It was a long time ago,” he conceded.

“Good,” I repeated. I picked up the remnants of the shoelaces and tossed them towards him. “You don’t want string for that.”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you get wire?”

He sighed. “Because there are rules. I can buy boots for myself, and so I can buy bootlaces.”

“You can buy thingies that I never heard of, but you can’t buy yourself a piece of wire?”

“I can supply your kitchen, and your larder. I can clothe your servant.”

“Fine. Buy some wire.” I thought a moment. “Here.” I pushed the cash on the table in front of him. “Take this. Buy whatever you need to make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you.” He looked down at the thing in his hands. The white and blue light illumined his face. He looked like an angel in a candle flame.

I asked him, “If you have a soul, at least technically, why are you still a demon? I mean, shouldn’t that make you—well, if not human, something like it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know how to bind it to me. And I don’t know if it can be mine, even if I did. Those who have knowledge of the craft will not even speak to such as I am, without this. And without this, I cannot pass their wards. They usually know what I am on sight. My hope is, with this, I can learn what I need to know.”

“To become human?”

“Good Lord, no,” he said, the first honest exclamation I thought I’d heard from him. “To avert the Eater of Souls. Our common purpose,” he reminded me. “The reason I entered your service.”

“Yeah, right, I forgot.” I tried another point I wasn’t sure about. “I assumed, now you have a soul, you don’t have to be in anyone’s service anymore. You’re free to go.” He was shaking his head before I finished. I continued, “All right, what if I discharge you? What if I tell you you’re not in my service anymore? You’re fired?”