by Carol Wolf
“Where did you get this?” I asked her.
“I don’t have to tell you.”
“No?” I lifted a lip at her. “Well, it won’t work on me.” I tossed it and her braid back to her.
“I saw you! I saw—”
“What did you see?”
She swallowed. “You changed into a wolf. You couldn’t do that if you weren’t a demon.”
I smiled, and it was not my nice smile. She leaned back as it turned into something wider, with too many teeth, and she stopped talking. I made that twist in my mind that allowed my other aspect, my wolf self, to rise up and superimpose itself above me, until I wore both my natures at once. A little trick I’d learned from a friend of mine of the bear kind. “Only all my life,” I said. I leaned in to her, and she shrank. She must have been a head taller than me, but now she was the one who made herself small. I asked her, “Have you never met one of the wolf kind before?”
She licked her lips. I wondered if she meant it the same way Baz did. “The wolf kind?”
“One of the two-natured folk, who wear one aspect while the other waits.” She looked over my human head, where my wolf head loomed over her, eyes gleaming, mouth opening. “Well, most of the time.”
Her mouth opened, too. She stared, first at one of my heads, then the other. I could only see her out of my human eyes, since the wolf head wasn’t really there. But it's still a cool trick. She swallowed a couple of times. She started to lift a hand, but then thought the better of it, which is a good thing because whichever head I’m wearing, it bites.
“That's just…”
What? Amazing? Cool? Beautiful? Terrifying. Yeah. I grinned.
“They said—they told me there's a demon in Los Angeles, who has the power to stop the World Snake, but she won’t.” She stared at me over her glasses. “You’ve heard of the World Snake.”
“Oh, yes.” I had heard too damn much about the stupid World Snake.
“And that it's coming here. And that it's going to swallow this whole section of California. That's what you heard, right?”
“Yes, but it's over. It's taken care of. She's not going to come.”
“Oh? That's not what I’ve heard. There's a demon, or a girl who's possessed by a demon—”
“Look,” I told her, “there is no demon. It's gone.”
“Then there was a demon!”
“I told you—”
She leaned forward. “How do you know it's really gone?”
I sighed. Oh, Richard. “Believe me. He's gone.”
She looked over her glasses at me. “I have a very good friend, who can tame this demon, and use its powers for good.”
I leaned my head back against the seat. Telling her things just didn’t seem to be working.
She went on. “Cecil, that's my friend, said he could do so much more with this demon if he had it. So, Holly and I—Holly's my sister—decided we would get it for him, for his birthday.”
“And that is why you shot me?”
“I didn’t…”
“You want to see the hole?” It still really hurt.
“I thought I was shooting a demon,” she said quietly. “Holly asked me to get it for Cecil.”
“For his birthday. And who's this Cecil who wants a live birthday present that bleeds?”
“No—not you, just the demon, I told you.”
“And shooting me was just a means to an end.”
“We were trying to save you!”
“Couldn’t you have asked me first if I needed saving?”
She took that in for a moment. “All right,” she said at last. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shot you.”
There! Was that so hard? Except, now that she’d finally said it, it didn’t seem like anywhere near enough. All of a sudden, I really wanted to bite her. I wanted to taste her blood, and then spit it on the ground.
“So,” I said, in a voice that really meant, I want to kill you right now, “tell me about Cecil.”
“It was his birthday on Saturday.”
“Who is he?”
She turned wide eyes on me. “Cecil. You never heard of him? No? He's the leader of the Order of the Higher Nature of Tantric Karma.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“He has a group of followers in Malibu, and he teaches them meditation techniques for advancing upon the Way. Cecil is the Noble Master, the Teacher, the Great-Souled One. He is the incarnation in this century of the Universal One.”
She said all those words, but her voice had spit in it too.
“You don’t believe that,” I pointed out.
“I used to.”
“Then why do you want to give this guy a birthday present?”
“I don’t. Holly does. My sister. And—I told her I would help.”
“Because you had the gun.”
She looked at me. “Because I have experience with large animals. I’m a large animal vet.”
Oh. “So that's why you smell like a camel?”
I swear she flushed. “Yes. There's a camel who's going to drop her calf anytime now. I had to… I gave her a check-up today.”
I looked down at her arm and sniffed. So she had. “And what does Cecil want with a demon?” I asked her.
“Holly said Cecil could use the demon to stop the World Snake.”
“That's done. We did it already.”
“Yeah. Anyway. Cecil says the demon could teach him things about the world that would save him a whole lot of incarnations.”
“But you don’t believe him.”
“I think Cecil's full of shit,” she said.
“And you still shot me?!”
“I said I was sorry! And anyway, I shot a wolf. I really big wolf!” She looked at me sideways. “You didn’t look like you do now.”
It's true, in my wolf form, I have almost my full growth. And in my wolf form, I am pretty big. I almost smiled at her for noticing.
She went on, “Anyway, I’m sorry that you were stuck in the cage for so long. Cecil was supposed to be back on Saturday, and Holly planned a big party, but he was out of town.”
“So you were planning to keep me drugged and chained up for how long?”
“Until Cecil got back and could safely remove the demon.” Her glasses glinted again.
“There is no—” I started, and she held up her hands.
“I know, I know!”
I didn’t think I had convinced her. I didn’t know what more I could do about it except start chewing on her, and somehow I didn’t think that would convince her either that I was not possessed, or that the demon had gone. I should have tried harder, but I hurt, and pain makes you stupid. I let it go. And boy would I be sorry later.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me about these.” I reached back into the footwell, grabbed the bandana and opened it up. The leather bracelets, the tangled wires, the delicate little silver hooks, were still smeared with my gore.
She wasn’t surprised to see them. She knew exactly what they were. All she said was, “How did you get them out?”
“How do you think?” I snarled. I wasn’t going to tell her all my ways.
“You’re the first who's ever done it.”
And suddenly I was very large indeed. She shrank back, gasping again. “Do you mean to tell me,” I said, low in my throat, “that you do this to folks all the time?”
“No—no, that's not what I meant. I meant—”
“Oh,” I was tired, which made me slow. I realized, “Baz couldn’t get his out. He's not two-natured. He's just changed. Who changed him?”
“Sarah. My aunt, Sarah. She's always been able to do that.”
“That woman can change people into animals?”
“And animals into other animals.” Elaine got a little reminiscent smile on her face. “It's fun.”
“Fun?”
Her smiled faded. “It can be fun.”
“Who else has she done it to?”
“Did you see her horse?”
&nb
sp; “The old bay in the barn?”
For a moment she had a trace of a grin. “Aunt Sarah tells everyone her ex just walked out on her. And he did. In a way.”
“And you help her with this?”
“No, no, I just treat them.”
“Who put these in me?” My wrist and my ankle still hurt, badly. You don’t want to be lame, if you’re a wolf. You really, really don’t. As my anger rose, I began to grow.
It took her a moment, her fear peaking again strong enough for me to smell it in my human form. She curled back against the door and almost wailed, “I did. I wanted to help get the demon— for Cecil.” She added, “I’m sorry.” But that wasn’t enough. “Oh, God. It's all fucked up now.”
It isn’t usual to change form without deciding to, but I found myself staring at her through my yellow wolf eyes, my butt crunched up against the door as I took up more than half of the cab. Elaine crouched down against the door with a cry, turning away from me, warding me with her hand. I contemplated the sheen of sweat on her neck. I though how easily I could pierce the the cartilege of her throat with my teeth, how the blood would stream, and that it would taste good. If I killed her, I would be certain that she never hurt me again. Or I could at least bite her a little. I could hurt her the way she hurt me.
I changed back. It took her a few moments to stop crying in fear, and sit up again to look at me. I held out the bandana. “Did you make these things?”
“No, God, no. I don’t have any magic. I’m just a vet.”
“An evil vet. Just what I need. So, who does make these things?” I lifted up one of the little hooks. I could still feel the tingle. Whatever it was, it was still working.
“I don’t know if I should tell you.”
“Listen, evil vet, I just spent five days locked in a cage. If you don’t want to be the one to pay for that, tell me who is.”
She lifted her hands. “All right. I can’t tell you his name.”
“You can’t?
“He's a metallurgist. He teaches metalwork at Pasadena City College. Holly—my sister Holly knows him.”
Something was cockeyed about what she was telling me, but in the shape I was in, I wasn’t sharp enough to figure it out. I wrapped up the silver hooks, the wire and bracelets in the bandana, and put them in my pocket. Pasadena was not that big. I was going to find that guy.
Elaine said, “There really was a demon, though. Wasn’t there?”
I looked out into the darkness. Shapes of bushes and a few trees were silhouetted against the sky. In the back of my throat I still remembered the scent of Richard in his wolf form. I remembered him running in my tracks, fighting by my side. The demon had played me in every possible way, and wooing me in wolf form was just one of his wiles. But it was still real. He had been there. “He's gone,” I told her.
“Can you get him back?”
“He's not coming back. Look, if you don’t believe in your Cecil guy, why do you want the demon anyway?”
“Holly says that with the demon, Cecil thinks he can bring us peace on earth in our time.” She looked at me, and her glasses glinted again. “I think that's worth a try, don’t you? Even if Cecil is a king-sized, asswinding jerk.”
I tried to imagine Richard instructing a great-souled leader of Tantric meditation in the nature of the universe. Not Richard as I’d known him, the beautiful youth, trapped and powerless, but the writhing conscious mass of weighted and spiraling darkness he became, when he recovered his powers. The hair on my neck rose, remembering his demon form. Maybe he’d laugh. Or, maybe he’d just make lamp oil out of this Cecil, to make a pinprick of light in whatever universe of blackness he dwelled in now. Or he might bring us eternal peace. Very still, very quiet, and very dark. That would be bad. I said, “I don’t think you want to study the One True Way from a demon. No.”
She rubbed her hands. It was late. The cab was cold. In the east, the gibbous moon was rising, eight days past full. My wounds ached.
“Where are my clothes?” I asked. “And where is my car?”
She said Holly had thrown my clothes in a dumpster, because there was blood on them. The bitch. My car was still parked in the dirt lot where I’d left it at the beginning of this adventure. Elaine drove me to the lot above the private beach where I’d been lured to the party, that was not a party after all, but just a trap. I added a couple more people to the list I had to talk to. Honey, from the Thunder Mountain Boys. And Yvette, who I’d thought was my friend.
My keys and my wallet were gone, but one of the things my kind always does is stash spare car and house keys. We can usually hold on to the stuff in our pockets when we change, but every now and then something doesn’t come back with us when we change to human form. I found the magnetized box in the wheel well, and the keys were there, and the car started just fine. I made Elaine get out of the truck and give me all the money she had, for taking my wallet. And that wasn’t a bad haul, since her camel patient had paid her in cash. I also made her give me her tennis shoes. They didn’t fit, but I scrunched her socks up in the toes, and that worked all right.
Before I left her, I pulled out her vet case, and scrounged out some things I would need. Then I took the keys from her once more, lined up the truck, put it in gear, got out and released the handbrake. I had planned to aim it over the cliff and into the sea. But since I’d been talking to her for nearly an hour, and we’d gotten all chummy and looked into each other's souls—even though she still didn’t understand what she’d seen in mine—I just sent the truck down the steep dirt path and sank it nose first in the sand on the beach. I’d angled it just right, so it made the first hairpin turn before it fell off the path. It was going to take a tow truck hours to haul it out. They might have to use two winches. I hoped it would cost her five days of anguish, but I don’t think it gave her that much. The gun, though, I did throw into the sea, though she squawked that it was county property. And it served her right.
I left her running awkwardly down the dirt road after her truck, barefoot, shouting at it, and yelling curses back at me, angry and cold, frustrated and afraid. But unharmed. I still had three holes in me, and I was pretty sure one of them was bleeding again. She hadn’t even offered to bandage my wounds. She was an evil vet. The bitch.
CHAPTER FIVE
The only up side to driving away from Malibu toward home was that at that hour, there was no traffic to speak of. My black Honda Civic is a manual drive. Shifting, with my right hand, flexing all the muscles of my aching wrist, and pressing my wounded left foot down on the clutch, hurt. Every time. I used my right foot for the gas and brake, so once I got onto the highway I was able to stretch out my left ankle and let it rest.
Far across Los Angeles, my apartment in Whittier drew me on, offering bed, food, water, especially bed. I headed down the 10 freeway at exactly three miles over the speed limit.
It wasn’t long before I realized that if people were still after me, Holly, the metallurgist, Cecil, or any other of his ambitious idiotic acolytes, that was where they would look. If they shot me through the window, I could wake up in a better-guarded cage, and never see them coming.
My foot lifted on the gas. I put it down again. They were all across the valley behind me in Malibu. I just wanted to be home. But one of the people who had set me up worked in Pasadena, just up the 605 and a ways along the 210 from Whittier. My friend Yvette had decoyed me to the party. She lived in Whittier.
I skipped the turn-off to the 60, and stayed on the 10. I needed sleep. I needed safety. I needed to tend to my wounds so they would heal quickly, and not get infected. I skipped the turn-off to the 605. I was not going to Whittier tonight. Soon after, I followed a bright attractive sign and pulled off the freeway into the parking lot for a motel. The parking lot was crowded even though it was the middle of the week. The long, two-story building looked well cared-for. I would use my well-gotten gains from the evil vet to buy a room for the rest of the night, and the next night too, maybe, and wash and sleep, and s
leep…
I hadn’t even gotten out of the car before I realized that without my precious fake ID, no one was going to rent me a room. At least, not at a place where I could be sure of getting through the night without an unpleasant interruption. Wearing sweats that didn’t fit, bruised and wounded as I was—I hadn’t had a chance to check but it was likely that just then I looked like a pretty suspicious person.
I started the car again. I winced as I put it in gear. Every time. I trolled down the main drag until I saw a 7-11. I wasn’t going to stand out there. I wandered in and bought stale sandwiches, packages of jerky, chips, more jerky, a Danish, a couple of bottles of water, and some more jerky. You just can’t have too much jerky. The zombie store clerk didn’t raise his eyes to me.
I drove back toward the motel, into the parking lot of the even bigger one next door, and chose a remote parking spot, not right at the back, but an inconvenient walk from or to anywhere. I ate and drank. While Richard was with me, he’d done the cooking. He had strong views on processed food, on the necessity of fresh meat and condiments. I liked the sound of his voice, and the way he looked when he talked.
I kept reminding myself that he hadn’t been real. He’d been Dr. John Dee's fantasy, overlaid with every other of his masters’ fantasies, for he altered himself, as a good servant does, to suit. The last had been me. Well. Not everyone gets a fantasy for their first love. If they had any idea what it was like, the people who were after me for my demon would want him so much more. I know I did.
So I ate my stale food and thought of what Richard would say about it. Then I changed, hopped into the back seat, and licked my wounds. And slept at last.
At first light I worried open the crusted scabs on my wounds and licked them until they didn’t smell bad anymore. It's difficult to make detailed plans while wearing a wolf's brain. I changed and lay curled in the back seat, trying to think of what to do. I could leave Los Angeles. That might be safest. But I’d have to go the Whittier to recover some of my cached money, and that was out. I needed somewhere not too far away to lay low until I healed, and could defend myself again.
