A Wolf at the Door

by Stewart, K. A.

  Since sunrise had passed about an hour ago, rest seemed like the best course of action for all of us. But the thing had known we were at that party. We couldn’t go back where we were expected. “Where would be the last place someone would expect to see you? Someplace you never go.”

  “Um…the beach?”

  “Tai, take us to the beach. Doesn’t matter which one.”

  As we drove, I briefed them on what I’d deduced about our shape-shifting friend. Neither of them had any ideas on the matter, but I felt better keeping them informed.

  It was early morning in late December, so I wasn’t sure how many people would be at the beach. Luckily, aside from a few joggers and dog walkers, we seemed to have the place largely to ourselves. Gretchen kicked off her shoes and walked down toward the water’s edge, Tai sticking close to her side.

  I just watched up and down the sands, gray in the early morning light, listening to the faint pulse of the ocean somewhere in the back of my ears. I pulled the hair tie from my ponytail, letting the light breeze ruffle my long hair. The seabirds called, already swooping low to see if we had any treats to offer, but it was still a sound that belonged. Something right and natural. It was like meditating, and I continued to breathe in time with the tide until my phone rang.

  “Dawson.” At the sound of Ivan’s deep, gravelly voice, relief coursed through me so hard I almost sat down in the sand. “I am here.”

  The old man was here, and suddenly, it didn’t matter if I was pissed off at him or not. He was here, and he’d fix this shit. I told him where to find us, and waited.

  By the time Ivan got there, Gretchen was sacked out in the backseat of the Town Car, sleeping as best she could. Tai had the radio on softly, his eyes closed as he rested in the front seat, but I didn’t think he was sleeping. In fact, his head came up when he heard me stand, his eyes watching my every move until he was sure things were okay.

  “Ivan!”

  The enormous white-haired man strode across the sands, his black trench coat flapping around him like wings. I had to wonder if he knew he still looked like death walking. Probably the kind of death that would grind your bones to jelly and eat it on toast. Ivan’s a big boy. “Dawson! There you are!”

  “Man, it is so good to see you.” We did the one-armed manly hug thing, Ivan pounding me on the shoulders like he was trying to mash my back through my front. “You have any trouble getting here?”

  “Ni. I have visited Los Angeles before.” Ivan then leaned back to look me up and down. “You are not to be looking well. What has happened?”

  “Christ, where do I even start?”

  We found seats on the beach, far enough away that we wouldn’t disturb Tai and Gretchen. First, I turned over the half-burned demon sigil. “Destroy this somehow. Don’t burn it.” The old man took it grimly, tucking it away in a coat pocket with no further questions. Next, I poured out the little envelope of gray dust into my palm. “What do you think this is?”

  The old man wet his finger then dipped it in the powder, first sniffing then tasting it. (See? It’s not just me!) “Hmph. It is to be tasting like clay.”

  “What, like…Play-Doh?” Anna had Play-Doh, it came in bright colors, had a distinctive smell, and was salty tasting. (Oh, don’t even act like that. You ate it when you were a kid too.) This powdery stuff wasn’t Play-Doh.

  Ivan was apparently familiar with the concept, and gave me a scathing look. “Ni, clay. Like…dirt. Soil. From the earth.”

  “I smelled damp soil, at the movie lot.” Freshly turned earth, in fact. Like a new grave. How’s that for a somber thought? “Why would he be coated in clay?”

  “Perhaps you should be starting this story from the beginning. Explain to me what is to be happening.” Yeah, seemed logical, so I did. I think I included all the pertinent details in a way that made sense. Helped to have them scribbled down on my yellow legal pad. Except for that part where I was out here doing a favor for a demon. I kinda threw that in at the end, hoping he might miss it. That didn’t go over so well.

  In fact, I don’t think I ever saw the old man speechless until that moment. His craggy face turned red all the way up into his snowy hair, his jaw clenched until I could hear his teeth grinding, and even the birds overhead suddenly found a different place to be.

  “You are to be realizing that this is foolish, tak?” Funny how he could make “foolish” sound exactly like “suicidally insane.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know. But it had to be done.”

  Ivan let out a long breath through his nose, clearly still pissed but trying to be calm. “Often, we do things that must be done, regardless of whether they should be done.” He shook his head, then ran a finger through the gray dust in my hand again. “I am having a thought about this.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mm. When I was to being a small boy, many years ago, I lived in a little town, very far from any city. In those days, the old ways were to be existing beside the new. Magic and science all at once. Superstition alongside diagnosis.

  “As always in those times, there was to being a powerful man who wanted more.”

  “More what?” I was fascinated. Ivan had never spoken of his past before. At least not to me.

  “Everything. Power, supplies, land. Fear. And he would send the soldiers. We had little. Barely enough to live, not enough to spare. The elders of the town, they were to be knowing when the soldiers would come again. They went to the priest, and asked him to pray for protection.”

  With one thick, gnarled finger, Ivan drew a symbol in the sand between us. It wasn’t one I recognized.

  “He found this in an old book. No one knew where the book was to be coming from, it was just always to being there in the church. Following it, they shaped a man from the very dirt of the fields. A great man, taller than I am to being now, twice as wide. The legs were like tree trunks. And with this sigil, they said to him ‘live.’ And he did.”

  “Wait, I know this legend. You’re talking like a golem, right? Isn’t that a Jewish myth?” Right there, I’d exhausted my golem knowledge. I had a vague memory of one being connected to Prague, somehow, but that was it.

  Ivan smiled faintly. “Many peoples of the world have shared stories. And magics.”

  “So did it work? This golem, did it protect your town?”

  “Mm. To start. The powerful man eventually lost power, and another took his place. And another, and another. Always they came, the soldiers, just wearing different colors. Always, the clay man would kill them. But something dark was to be happening. With every death, the clay man gained more will of his own, as if the blood fed him life.

  “There was to being a day when he would no longer obey, when he turned on his creator. It was decided then to be destroying him, and to never build such a man again.”

  “So did they? Destroy it, I mean?” And please oh please tell me it was easy to do.

  “Tak. They erased the sigil, and he fell to dust.”

  Erase the sigil. Oh sure, lemme just strip the thing naked while it was pounding on me and look to see where someone had carved on it.

  “This thing, could it change shapes? Look like real people?”

  Ivan shrugged. “I am not to be knowing. It did not, in my memory.”

  “Could it speak?”

  The old man frowned a bit in thought. “It did not, at first. When they came to destroy it, it did then.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said only ‘Please, do not.’”

  Specific details notwithstanding, Ivan’s golem legend sounded like my best bet. A biddable minion, strong, almost indestructible. That’s the kind of errand boy I’d send, if I were a demon. A moldable clay man, capable of impersonating anyone.

  “If it could look like someone else, how would I tell? Is there some kind of test?” Not-Alec had been human enough to fool my eyes, and my danger sense.

  “A real man will bleed, Dawson. A clay man will not.” Ivan looked disappointed that I hadn�
��t figured that out myself. “And he will bear something belonging to the one who created him. A token, binding his will to his master.”

  Well, hell, that could be anything. I rubbed my forehead, trying to ease the slight ache there. “So even if I kill this thing, I gotta worry about who’s pulling the strings behind it.”

  “It would to be seeming so.” Ivan erased the sigil from the sand with a swipe of his hand. “You should have been informing me of this before. This is not to being a defensible position.” He gestured around the nearly empty beach.

  “Do we really want to get into who did and didn’t tell each other what? “I raised a brow, challenging, but it was aimed at the frothy waves a few yards away. Still couldn’t quite bring myself to stare the old man down.

  He sighed. “Perhaps it is something to be ‘getting into.’ It is impossible to be knowing when we may have another chance, ni?”

  “Okay. You go first.” I brushed the golem dust off my hands and leaned back on my arms, prepared to listen at least. I mean, how long could I really hold a grudge anyway? “You lied to me about how many champions there are. Why?”

  “Because information that you do not have cannot be taken from you. I have long feared that the forces we fight would rise up against us, organized. If each of you believed that there were but few, perhaps our enemies would believe it also.” He shook his head a bit. “It is only now, when we are to being under attack, that I worry I have made the wrong decision. When they come for me—and I am to be believing that they will—much knowledge will be lost. Things I cannot enter into Grapevine, memories and skills that cannot be put into words.”

  A samurai welcomes his death, if it is a good and honorable one. Still, Ivan’s fatalistic tone made me squirm uncomfortably. I didn’t like to think about it. “You’re talking like you’d lose.”

  He smirked a little. “I am to being old, Dawson. Sometimes I wonder if I have not outlived my purpose.”

  “So how many of us are there, really?”

  “At last count, one hundred and twenty-three. Not to be counting our comrades within the Catholic church. I have been attempting to recruit more, in recent years, but so few believe in such things, in these modern days.”

  Damn. A hundred and twenty-three champions. Way more than I’d ever dreamed. “Who else knows? You, Viljo…who else?”

  “You.” He traced idle designs in the sand, just to give his hands something to do. I understood, I often did the same thing myself in uncomfortable situations. “No one else is to be knowing the whole of it. I am to be giving instructions to Viljo. Grapevine is to be wide open to you. Learn them all. It may to being important at some future day.”

  I frowned. “Sounds like you’re planning a sudden retirement, Ivan.” And like he was picking me to be his replacement. Um, no? I was gonna retire after this myself, remember?

  “I fought my first demon when I was to being younger than your Estéban. I have seen the best and the worst that our kind offers to others. I loved a beautiful woman, and lost her. I fathered a daughter and have seen her grow into a fine woman. I have brought men together who work to make this world a safer place. I think I am entitled to my rest, when it is to be coming. But I will not rush headlong toward it, either.” His grin was a little lopsided, and he poked me in the shoulder almost hard enough to shove me over. Either that, or I was way more tired than I realized. “You worry much, Jesse Dawson.”

  With that, he heaved himself up off the sand, straightening his long coat. “Am I correct in believing that you are not to be having a safe place to retreat to?”

  I stood and brushed myself off too. “Not sure. This thing, someone’s telling it our moves, someone who knows where Gretchen will be. It could be waiting for us back at the hotel.”

  Ivan looked me over again, reaching out to pluck at the sleeve of my blue silk shirt. Only then did I realize that it was charred in places, revealing where the spells on my leather bracers had scorched through the cloth. “You are to be needing sleep. And weapons. I will return to this hotel with you, and we will see what may to be waiting for you.”

  That actually made me feel a little better.

  Luckily for us, there was nothing waiting for us at the Masurao Grand. Ivan inspected Tai’s newly set wards, declaring them remarkable. He checked over The Way and my armor, declaring them passable. In that suite, we were as safe as we could possibly be. At least until we could arrange something else, something no one could trace.

  “Walk with me, Dawson.” I escorted him down the elevator to the lobby, where he stopped to hand me a folded piece of paper. “This is to being the address of a local woman. She may be able to help you translate the contract.”

  I looked it over. The name said Cindy Lee. “Do you trust her?”

  “Ni. And she will require payment for any work she is to be doing. But she is to being the best I could find.” He busied himself buttoning up his coat, though there was no way he needed it as nice as the day was turning out to be. “I will to be remaining in town for a few days. If you are to be needing magical assistance, call me. I understand it is to being unsafe for your Mira to be working her magics.” Christ, I was gonna kill Estéban for his big mouth.

  “Yeah, I’ll give you a holler.” We clasped forearms, and I held his in my grip when he would have pulled away. “When I’m done here, Ivan, we need to talk more. I think…I think I’m done.” There, I’d said it. Saying it out loud makes it true, right? I was committed now. Whatever plans Ivan had for me, if I walked away, that was the end of it. He owed me that much.

  After a moment, he nodded. “We will to be seeing.”

  To my sleep-deprived eyes, the sunlight outside was garishly bright, reflecting harshly off the windows of the cars parked out front. I stood with Ivan while we waited for the valet to bring his around. Neither of us could seem to think of anything else to say.

  “And he will be a king among kings…” The moment the doorman was distracted, Felix appeared, shuffling along in his brightly colored rags. His whiskey-colored eyes were fixed on Ivan, and he smiled broadly, the wrinkles in his face deep and jolly. Even his dreadlocks seemed bushier today, a reflection of his apparently jubilant mood. “He will walk with his head above other men. His arm will protect the weak, his hammer the innocent. And he will be rewarded for his duties on the happiest of days.”

  Ivan looked down at the old homeless man, and I was struck by the odd juxtaposition. Towering Ivan, frost-haired and severe in his black coat, standing over stooped, wizened Felix, who seemed to walk along in his own personal rainbow. I couldn’t help but watch curiously as Felix reached out a hand to rest on the bigger man’s chest, his fingers too gnarled to lie straight. The black man’s smile faded a little, becoming a bit sad around his already worn edges. “I am sorry.”

  Ivan nodded. “I am not.”

  Felix patted him a few times, fidgeting with Ivan’s shirt buttons like he would tidy them right up, then shuffled away as the doorman came to hustle him off.

  I raised a brow at my mentor. “What was that about?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder how Felix had known that in his youth, Ivan fought demons with a hammer. A maul, to be precise. And by the time I did think to wonder, I already had my answer.

  16

  Upstairs, I found Tai crashed out on one couch, his arm draped over his eyes, and Gretchen on the other, her head pillowed in Dante’s lap. No idea just when he’d shown up, but his presence seemed to be doing her good. He smoothed her hair gently, giving me the “don’t you dare wake her up” glare. I just held my hands up. I fully intended to find myself a horizontal position pretty damn quick too.

  But first…my conversation with Ivan on the beach kept trickling through my head. A clay man will not bleed, Dawson. For my own peace of mind, I had some testing to do.

  Tai wasn’t the golem. That I knew. I mean, magic just oozed out his pores, and the golem had none as far as I could tel
l. Not to mention that he’d been there tonight when the thing attacked, so that let him out.

  Gretchen wasn’t, obviously. Even fully clothed, the tattoos on her back were there, and my skin itched just thinking about it. Almost like I could see them swirling through her T-shirt. Almost like I could hear them crying out.

  Dante…well, I suppose I should test him just to be sure, but surely someone would have noticed if he’d been replaced. His expressive face held none of the smooth waxiness I’d come to associate with our centurion friend, and Gretchen was his best friend. If he wasn’t himself, she’d be the one to know. Still, if I tested one, I’d have to test them all. It was only fair.

  “Dante, does she have some pins or something around? Sewing kit, maybe?”

  He gave me a puzzled look, but nodded toward Gretchen’s room. “On her dresser, should be some. Don’t touch anything.”

  I rolled my eyes at him as I went to find something sharp and pointy. Like I was gonna do a panty raid or something, geez.

  Gretchen’s room was not nearly as decadent as I’d been imagining. Her bed was covered in stuffed animals and pillows, done in shades of tan and pale blue. Her clothes were strung all over the floor wherever she’d dropped them, and her closet doors stood wide open, revealing heaps of shoes beneath a kaleidoscope of gowns and other garments. Other than the sheer volume of it, it could have been any girl’s room, anywhere.

  A huge mirror surrounded by lights crowned a low table on one side, and curiosity made me go check out the pictures tucked around the frame. Gretchen and friends, mostly, Dante appearing in more than half of them, the only sign of the passage of time being the changes in his hairstyle and color. Tai and Bobby were there too, though usually standing sternly in the background, only caught on film by accident. Other people, some famous, some not, all with plastic smiles for their best friend of the moment.