Black Wolf

by Steph Shangraw

  Kevin’s was silver and bronze in a very different form: a dagger with a six inch blade, and interestingly, the minimal adornment on the graceful hilt and sheath was all lunar.

  *It took me hours to fix the spells on my knife, y’know.* Jesse started, found Kevin watching him, grinning. The words formed clearly in his mind, unmistakably Kevin’s voice. If you ever, ever touch any of my tools again… There was laughter behind the threat.

  “Why are you blushing?” Deanna demanded. “Kev, what did you just say to him to make him blush that red?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Kevin said innocently. Since you were so interested in mine, I thought I’d get you one.

  The dagger felt good in his hand; he drew it, half expecting another painful shock, but nothing happened. Only metal. It felt… almost familiar. Comfortable. He slid it back into the sheath, and laid it beside him on the floor to see what was next. Doing his best to get his blushing under control. He should’ve expected Kevin to know, after everything he’d seen the mage do!

  Deanna’s was a length of wood, bent so the ends were crossed and lashed together, with what looked like a silvery spider’s web woven in the middle, small beads shimmering like dewdrops in it, and feathers dangling.

  “It’s a dream-catcher,” she explained. “You hang it by your bed, and the good dreams are funnelled through the hole in the middle to you, and the bad dreams are caught until sunrise when they die. I made it.”

  “Hey, that’s cool. Who invented them?”

  “They’re a Native tradition.”

  Cynthia gave him a new Walkman, which delighted him—his old one had gotten beyond all repair a month ago, and he hadn’t had a chance to steal a new one yet. This one was better than any he’d ever had, she’d even included an upgraded set of earphones, and he decided instantly to keep it out of sight when he went back to the city.

  He opened the box that held Bane’s, discovered a new pair of black jeans, and a black leather vest. The jeans were the right size; he stripped off the sweatshirt he was wearing so he could try the vest. Why wasn’t he surprised it fit?

  “You look good,” Deanna told him.

  Gisela lingered on the fringes until he was done the rest, then handed him a small box. Inside was yet more silver—a ring, shaped like a snake holding its tail in its mouth.

  “That’s a promise-ring,” Deanna said, plainly surprised. “What promise, kitten?”

  Gisela looked down, and blushed. “Just… friendship. And truth for truth, always.”

  “That’s about standard,” Kevin said, flashing Gisela a quick smile. She returned it, tentatively.

  Jesse tried it on. It fit perfectly on the ring-finger of his right hand. How did they manage things like that? It was one thing for clothes, easy enough to check anything he wasn’t wearing, but ring size? Truth for truth… that was something to think about.

  “Now I’m all set,” he laughed. “C’mere, you.”

  Uncertainly, she came. Squealed when he hugged her, but she hugged him back before escaping.

  Eventually, they did get to bed.

  Jesse left the silver-and-bronze dagger in reach, on the table by the bed, and hung the dream-catcher above him, in the window.

  No nightmares troubled him, but his dreams were a confusion of trying to choose the path through a forest that would take him where he so desperately wanted to go, when the map he held showed him only a path that led the wrong way into a desert.

  *

  All the world seemed dark and quiet, sleeping peacefully; Sam sat by the living room window, gazing out over the vacant street below her. Alfari lay on her lap, relaxed and alert at once the way cats had mastered beyond any other creature, purring while Sam stroked her. The sky was bright with stars, but this was the night the moon hid her face from the world.

  Things were not as serene as they seemed on the surface. Out there, somewhere, just on the fringes of her awareness, something searched that meant only evil to the one it sought. How it had come here from the demon plane to this, whether called for some purpose or lucky enough to slip through a crack between planes, mattered not at all; it was here.

  Its presence stirred old memories in her mind: the wolves descended from Alessandria’s seventh child Cassandra and her Native shaman mate; the community that had formed a century and a half before, at first to support Cassandra’s line when they felt rejected and misunderstood by Haven, then they’d found that it brought good to them all; Unity that had been built on hope and love to be their own home, bringing them all together physically.

  A terrifying night of unearthly music from the lake, a storm like nothing she’d imagined could be real, and by morning she was alone and feared only she had survived.

  Unity, she had realized much later, had died at the hands—or whatever—of the bad sort of demons and of something unknown that lived in the deep lake Unity had been built at the edge of. Demons like the one that now hunted in Haven for Jesse.

  Surely here, amidst so many other wolves and other races and seeking a target who didn’t even know himself, it would be unable to find one wolf that still carried demon blood and thus was still a threat to any hostile demon who manifested on the material plane.

  “Sam?” Bryan said softly. She didn’t bother to glance back as he padded barefoot across the carpeted floor to lay his hands on her shoulders. “What is it?”

  She started a bit, then realized he wasn’t asking about the presence outside, only about what kept her up at this hour.

  “There’s something out there that shouldn’t be.”

  “Dangerous?”

  Only to Jess, only if it finds him. I don’t matter, no matter what I know, I’m only human. “Not as things stand right now. I don’t think it’ll find what it wants. Then it’ll go away.” For a while, at least. They must suspect something, to look here.

  Absently, he began to rub the muscles of her shoulders and upper back; she hadn’t known until then how tense she was. “I have a hunch I shouldn’t ask.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “All right. Are you going to sit here all night?”

  “Until it leaves, I think.”

  “You’ll be too sleepy to open the shop tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be okay. You can go back to bed.”

  “Call me if you want me.”

  “I will.”

  Bryan gave Alfari a good-night rub under her chin, and went back to his room; Sam listened, noticed in affectionate amusement but no surprise that he didn’t close his door. She’d been lucky a thousand times over when he found her, she could ask for no truer friend.

  Alfari resettled herself more comfortably, quite content to hold vigil with her. It couldn’t stay past dawn. Only a few more hours at most, before she could relax and know that once again Jesse had escaped.

  18

  Here in the city, with countless lights, there was no way to simply look up and know that tonight was the night of the dark moon.

  Patrick knew it anyway. Keeping track of details like that ensured that he was never caught by surprise by his demon servants. They’d turn on him in a heartbeat, given the opportunity, and the night of no moon was a time of demon power. Much better to have it used for his benefit, rather than against him.

  He walked the streets of downtown, studying those around him measuringly. What kind of prey should he choose tonight? Power or pain? Maybe he’d just leave it up to chance, and see which he spotted first.

  “Spare some change?”

  Patrick glanced at the girl huddled in a doorway. Occasionally, he chose a homeless teenager deeply mired in despair and self-contempt and shame; it left them vulnerable to a kind word and an offered meal, even at a cost. Each had willingly suffered to feed Patrick’s demons, pathetically grateful for praise and approval. It was much easier than needing to hunt once a month, and he’d found uses for them the rest of the time.

  Of course, they never survived past the death-offering the demons demanded once a year, at the w
inter solstice, but then, it wasn’t as though their lives were worth anything anyway. It was probably a mercy, really.

  This one, though, she still had a core of strength hidden beneath the raggedly-cropped hair and the tattered layered denim and the faded army blanket. She was no use to him. He shrugged, tossed her a couple of quarters, and kept walking.

  He walked past a bar he knew was friendly to the leather and bondage crowd. The concept of domination and submission and all its layers had seemed like a godsend when he’d first encountered it, but he’d discovered quickly that, for the most part, it was the worst possible place to look for someone with the mindset of a victim. The so-called submissives in those circles tended to have too clear an idea of who they were and what they wanted, which made it much more difficult to tie them into emotional knots. Why go to all the extra effort, when he could find prey that was so much easier to break? At least he’d picked up some useful ideas, though he saw no reason for the great care for safety that obsessed that whole group.

  Power tickled the fringes of his awareness; he scanned the area, tracking it. It was quiet, muted, he would never have noticed it at all had he not been searching for exactly that sort of clue. That was a dryad aura… there, coming from a young man with café-au-lait skin, mahogany hair drawn back in a tail. In Patrick’s experience, dryads came in two basic types: small and slender, or tall and solid. This one was the latter, but life in the city, where contact with the earth and the trees was scarce, had turned what would otherwise have been the sturdiness of an old oak into an illusion—this one was hollow inside. Probably his mother had a brief relationship with a male dryad, and this one had grown up never knowing why he was chronically ill and depressed.

  Patrick followed him, twining light mental fingers into the dryad’s mind. Yes, the emptiness he’d expected was there, a sense of something missing, a weariness from yet another battle with poor health. He’d won, had recovered, but was beginning to wonder whether it were worth it—hm, that he was doing as well as he was implied that he might be healer-gifted, which would make it all the better. Somewhere, he’d come across the idea that he must have done something in another life that he was paying for in this one, and while he only halfway believed it consciously, some deep part of his mind had latched onto it—any explanation was better than none at all. Even now, he was wondering again what he could have done that was so very terrible.

  This would be almost too easy.

  He followed the dryad, reaching deeper into his mind, encouraging the fantasies of atrocities he might have committed in another life. While he was in there, he picked up his name, as well: Troy.

  The dryad left the busier streets, making his way through a quieter area. Around them were offices, for the most part, all closed for the day; there was no one in sight.

  Patrick wrapped an illusion of absence around himself, and nudged Troy’s mind with apprehension, enough to make him stop and look around, checking behind him. That gave Patrick a chance to get in front of him. As soon as the dryad faced him, the mage traded that illusion for one that wrapped him in white and gold light, turning his everyday clothes to blinding white, with a suggestion of bright wings.

  Troy cried out, shielded his eyes with an arm.

  “Peace, Troy,” Patrick said, pitching his voice to gentleness. “There’s nothing to fear.”

  Cautiously, Troy lowered his arm, eyes watering from the brilliance. “What… who are you?”

  “I’ve come to help you. Nothing ever goes right for you, does it? Somehow, no matter what, you always get sick again, or you stop feeling that anything matters, and your life falls into pieces again.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You did something you shouldn’t have, in your last life, and you never paid for it. The universe demands balance, so you’ve been atoning for it in this life, right from your birth. But you know that already, don’t you? Something inside told you that was what was happening, that was why the world and even your own body seem to turn against you every time it looks like something might work out.”

  Troy lowered his gaze. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “I’ve come to give you a chance to free yourself from that. A chance to do your full penance all at once, so you can be free of it for the rest of your life, and continue on from here with no old business outstanding. What happens then is entirely what you can make of it. But it’s your choice to make. It’s no easy thing to do a lifetime of penance in a few hours. And once you choose, there’s no turning back.”

  “All at once?” Troy looked up, hope dawning in his eyes. “Then everything will stop going wrong all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything! I don’t care how hard it is, I’ll do it. Please, tell me what I have to do…”

  Almost too easy. But that was just as well. He had no stomach for dragging people off by force if he could possibly avoid it.

  “Go home,” Patrick said. “I’ll come to you there.” He switched illusions again, from brightness to invisibility, and waited while Troy’s eyes adjusted to the twilight again.

  The dryad lived in an apartment building; small wonder he was sick so often, half a dozen stories up from the earth. Patrick stayed near him, unseen; it took only slightly more illusion to slip in the door past him.

  “Now what?” Troy asked the empty apartment.

  Patrick let himself appear—still haloed with light, enough to blur his features, but not enough to completely blind the dryad. “You’re certain?”

  Troy nodded mutely.

  Patrick smiled. “Strip.”

  He bound the naked, shivering dryad with chains made of fiery light, and turned his imagination loose, describing for Troy in ruthless detail the supposed crimes for which he was being punished. His primary demon, Sikial, came at his call, in the form of a slight, white-clad, blonde youth of about twelve, and watched avidly, drinking in the dryad’s guilt and shame and fear.

  When Patrick decided Troy was ready, he turned to more physical forms of penance. There was a certain satisfaction in this, in the control it gave him over another person’s body and mind and emotions; this aspect of his bargain with Sikial’s kind he’d taken to eagerly.

  Hours later, near sunrise, Patrick looked down at the sobbing, exhausted dryad. He’d done nothing that wouldn’t heal—physically, at least. It would be months before he recovered from Sikial and the others feeding on his healing gifts, but even that would pass. The odds that Troy would ever tell anyone about this were low at worst, and even if he did, who would believe him?

  Patrick sighed, and strengthened the illusion of light, backing it with sunlight warmth.

  “Troy,” he murmured. “You’ve done well, and you’ve atoned for what you did, the balance has been restored. Leave the city, move to a place where you can get back in touch with the earth and the cycles of nature, and go on with your life. You have no further debts to pay. Your life and your future are in your own hands now. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Troy whispered. “Thank you.”

  Patrick laid a hand on his forehead, and sent him into a deep sleep. By the time he woke, the edge of the pain would be gone.

  “Sikial, go. Wait back at the motel.”

  Sikial nodded, and vanished.

  Patrick let himself out, laid a hand over the lock and gave it a telekinetic nudge so it snapped shut, and began the walk back to his motel room.

  19

  A dream shifted, led Jesse back to the waking world; he opened his eyes on moonlight.

  The dream had been very vivid, his dreams often were in Haven, but the nature of it now escaped him, leaving only the memory of intense joy.

  He uncoiled himself, regarded his own hand against the white sheet in the bright pale light. He’d never, he felt sure, truly looked at himself before. His body… what was it? Bone and skin, blood and muscle, but what made it his, made it obey his thoughts, made it exist in this form? Slowly, he closed his hand, relaxed it, entranced by the
subtle shifting under the skin. He kicked off the blankets, sprawled on his back, stretched languorously; without conscious thought, his hands caressed his body, and somehow his own touch brought him pleasure that made him sigh to himself, eyes closing again. Yet it was easy to imagine he could feel the moonlight, cool fingers playing over his skin, calling to him.

  Outside, there’d be no glass between him and the moon.

  He got up, wrapped a black magesilk blanket around himself like a cloak, and opened his door quietly. As soundlessly as he could, he made his way downstairs. It was late April, the air was cool, but he didn’t care; he spread the blanket near the fountain, and sat down on it. Curiously, he began to explore himself, as one might a new lover, every touch and every sight new and fascinating. The wind brought him tantalizing new scents he’d never imagined, couldn’t identify, yet some stirred deep instincts. Earth and wind and moon were one, and he was one with them, everything around him and inside him had always been there yet he’d been blind to it.

  He laid back, hands never still; the moon was his lover, the ultimate partner, this wasn’t the quick sexual release he knew, this was loving the moon and in the doing loving himself, which was another matter entirely…

  The sharper pleasure of climax, he heard himself cry out. Delicious peace wrapped around him, and he relaxed utterly into it, nothing in him prepared to resist.

  The only disruption was the wind and his shivering because of it. The thought of going inside and getting dressed made him wrinkle his nose in distaste; he curled up, bare back to the wind, mind busy with the problem.

  A simple thought made muscles tighten or loosen, changing shape. Surely, in the magic of the moon, thought could create greater changes? His instincts told him yes, that was the way, the best solution. All he had to do was close his eyes and reach deep down inside to the place where his instincts dwelled, and wish with all his being and feeling and needing.

  Pain shuddered through him, but pleasure as well, he accepted both joyfully as his body warped itself into a different form, a form it had never taken yet which it knew right down to every cell, it was agony and it was bliss and it was for this he’d searched, for the incredible feeling of being finally truly whole…