by Carol Wolf
CHAPTER SIX
I got to the parking lot without seeing Gray Fox again, but that didn’t mean he didn’t follow me every step of the way. I was very glad to sit down in my car and get my weight off my ankle, but the wound in my hip had begun to hurt. I’d probably torn all the newly-healed tissue in the three miles of hiking that rocky trail. Clenching my hand on the stick shift made my wrist ache again. I was one sorry pup as I headed off that mountain, with no place to lay my head.
I drove out to Redlands, about an hour to the east on the 210. I didn’t know if Gray Fox was shadowing me, or if one of his many tribe was tracking me, or if he could scry me, but I did not want him following me home to my place in Whittier. Since he was so sure my den was in Redlands, that's where I went, and hopped off a couple of the exits, circled the neighborhoods, and hopped back on again, then got on the 10 and drove back toward L.A. Then I caught the 215 and headed south.
It's difficult to scry someone on the freeway, because freeways all look alike. I hoped to obscure the trail enough so that when I eventually went to ground, I would be pretty hard to find. I had one last place where I thought I could ask for help. If she was in town, if she was at her shop, Madam Tamara might help me.
I pulled around back into the parking lot for the World Music: Ethnic and Tribal Instruments store in Costa Mesa. Parking lots look pretty much the same to scryers as well. I sat in the car for a few minutes, resting my wrist, getting up the strength to stand on my bad foot again.
I could hear the drumming from inside the car. Some folks were jamming on the little patio beside the store. Toots and bells, honks and whistles played among the drums, and I thought I heard a fiddle as well. The music had a joyful buzz to it. The residue from the many magical workings that had taken place at Tamara's store over the years gyred in the air, and music or dancing, or sometimes just conversation fed into it, caught the buzz and expanded in its resonance. I was the farthest that I’d ever been from wanting to dance, but as I passed the music makers, heading into the store I felt my heart and my breathing respond. I saw a few faces I recognized, but no one I really knew. A couple of them nodded at me, friendly.
A bear was sitting on the wall to the patio, drinking coffee. He was in his human form, a big black man with a heavy face and eyes that seemed sleepy, but noticed everything. I nodded to him. It pays to be respectful to the bear kind. They will make you pay if you are not.
“Aaron,” I said, greeting him.
He nodded back.
“Is Tamara here?”
He pointed to the store with his chin and I headed for the door.
“You look a mess,” he said, as I passed him.
“It's a gift.”
Coming out of the bright late April sunlight, I paused inside the door of the shop. A group of women clustered among the bright silks, the African pattern cloth, the Indian muslins set with tiny mirrors. Wafting traces of ginger and sesame oil, they draped one another with colorful textiles from the various racks, posing, exclaiming, twirling in front of the mirrors. Along the next aisle a couple of giggling children made rude noises with some wooden whistles. An elderly man methodically sorted through a box of old sheet music, frowning over his glasses.
Tamara stood behind the counter, watchful over everyone in the store, while she wrapped up and boxed a painted mask for a burbling customer. Madam Tamara wore a sky blue turban, vivid against her dark skin, and a flowing yellow, blue, and black dress that set off her angular frame.
She saw me as I came in, looked me over and motioned me to the back of the store, without breaking off her side of the conversation. I went through the curtained doorway, the wards parting for me as I reached it, passed through the office and collapsed in the first chair I came to in the back room. I shoved a stack of catalogs on the long table out of my way and put my head down on my arms.
The next thing I knew, Tamara had my right wrist in her hand, and was washing the wound with a cloth over a bowl of scented water.
“There you are,” she said, when she saw I was awake.
She looked tired. I remembered suddenly that I’d been off the map for five days. “How's your mom?” I asked. Tamara's mother had been in a coma since she danced up a spell for me. Tamara's dark eyes hardened and grew distant, and I knew I had not been forgiven.
“The same,” she said. “Now what have you been up to, girl?”
“I was taken prisoner.”
She thought I was joking. “By who?”
“Well, supposedly, by the disciple of some nut up in Malibu who thinks he should have my demon.”
“Ah,” Tamara bent her head. “Has this happened before?”
My gaze on her sharpened. What had she heard? “Has what happened?”
She met my eyes. “Has someone tried to take your demon from you?”
“Twice.” I winced as she touched my wound with her cloth, and tried not to show it. She felt it though. Her touch became more gentle. I told her, “Couple of weeks ago, this guy called Joachim offered me money for my demon.” Richard had already been gone by then. I’d almost taken the money.
Her brows rose in amusement. “How much?”
“Not enough,” I snarled. “He's one of the Holy Workers out near Chino.” She nodded to show she knew the group. “Another guy tracked me down in Whittier and tried to mug me for him.”
She stopped and looked at me. “What did you do to him?”
I shrugged. “I dissuaded him. But that was nothing compared to this latest bunch.”
“How so?”
“They shot me!”
Her head came up again. Her eyes were amused this time. “Oh?”
“Knockout dart. Veterinary gun.”
“You were in your wolf form?”
“She still shot me.” What did it take to get some sympathy?
“And then they took you prisoner?”
“They were planning to give me to their guy Cecil for his birthday.”
“Cecil?” Her voice rose in what sounded like amusement.
“You know him?” I don’t think she liked the way my eyes narrowed, or my jaw tightened, or my mouth was suddenly all too full of teeth. It's an impression I give when I’m thinking about killing something.
“Oh, yes, I know him.” She lifted a finger at me. “I didn’t say I liked him.”
I backed down. “Cecil told his disciples that he should have my demon, so they set it up so they could deliver me to him.” I hissed out my breath as Tamara smeared some ointment into my wound.
“I told you having that creature was dangerous,” she said, her concentration on what she was doing. It was more than just cleaning and bandaging. I could feel the warm energy from her hands dull the pain in my wrist.
“If I still had my demon,” I pointed out, “they couldn’t have held me prisoner.”
Her eyes met mine, arrested for a moment, then disbelieving again. “It is only you who say he had any more powers than he needed to read tarot for us.”
“Okay, fine. But he did have enough power, as you say, to walk in, hit people on the head and let me out of that cage. But he's gone. So I had to do it myself.” I reached into the pocket of my stolen sweats, and took out the bandana and laid it in front of her. “While I was unconscious, I was forced into both my forms at once, and then held there. Look.” I opened it, and showed her the leather bracelet, and the silver hooks. “Have you ever seen these before?”
Her head went back as she felt the magical charge they still held. Then Tamara leaned over, examining them. She looked again at the wound on my wrist, her face grave. She held out two fingers and, not quite touching, passed them over the bracelets and the hooks. She touched her finger to her tongue, and passed them over the hooks again. “I’ve never seen such things. What did they do?”
I told her how I’d woken up in the cage, pinned and chained. “I think they are bespelled to hold you in one form.”
That got her full attention. She turned over the bracelets and the hooks,
using the bandana so she wouldn’t have to touch them, concentrating, sussing out the flow of energy in the device. She held her fingers over my wrist again, to see if any of the spell lingered in my body. Then she wrapped the hooks up again, and passed them back to me. “Monstrous.”
I told her about the dog, and watched her face swell up as she tried to hold on to her indignation. She finally burst out laughing. I grinned back at her. “Her ex-husband's in the barn. She turned him into a horse.”
Tamara chortled and tried to look stern at the same time. There are rules about using magic, and Sarah was breaking them. Still, from a certain point of view, it was funny.
Tamara interrupted my story only refill her bowl with warm water from the sink in the bathroom. She added some powder to it from a white ceramic bottle above the sink, and brought it back steaming, to go to work cleaning the wound on my ankle while she listened to my adventures. Some of my adventures. I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her what I’d done to the vet's truck. It's harder to sound like you need help if you’ve already committed a major act of vandalism. Even if the evil vet had deserved it. I thought I’d see if I could get the help first.
“Sarah is the changer. But she had help. She didn’t make these things. The vet said there's a guy who works metal, up in Pasadena, and he might have done these. Do you know him?”
Tamara did not look at me while she thought. I wondered what she was deciding not to tell me. As she spread salve on the wound in my ankle, and a pleasant warmth dulled the pain I’d felt for days, I thought even if she lied to me, just for the present I’d have to let it go. At last she said, “I know someone who can do this. I don’t know if he is the one.”
Well, that was all right. “I’d like to talk to him.” I added, my voice growing grim, “In fact, there are a number of people I’m planning to talk to.”
“Oh? And what do you plan to do to them?”
“Just talk,” I said, with all the innocence I could muster.
She gave me a look. It's not her wide jaw, her high cheekbones, or her deep-set eyes that make her face so expressive. The powerful spirit, the wellspring of her magic, blazes out her messages through her dark eyes and makes them impossible to miss. In her expression I read, “Who do you think you are? You’re in no condition to talk to anyone right now.” And, underlying everything, “You’ve been nothing but trouble since the day you first walked in here, bringing a demon with you into my presence.”
Under the weight of her gaze, I added, “I don’t plan to kill anyone.”
“I’m so happy to hear it.”
But that was the question. What was I supposed to do to these people? I couldn’t just let them get away with setting me up and attacking me. If I did that, it meant what they did was all right with me. So I had to do something. And the longer it took me to recover my strength, the more dire that something should be.
I didn’t want to discuss all this with Tamara just at present, so in order to skip the whole tedious conversation, I asked, “Who is this guy? Where can I find him?”
She shook her head, exasperated. “This is not important now. It can wait for a more opportune time. Why don’t you concentrate on the crisis at hand?”
“I have told you and told you—”
“Yes. I know. You keep saying that the fight is over, that the Worm We Do Not Name has been defeated.”
“Not defeated,” I tried to explain one more time. “She's been turned. Richard turned her. She's not coming.”
“But Richard is gone.”
“Yes. He's gone. I freed him.” I had to look away. I don’t cry. I don’t. But I was tired and wounded and in pain, and I missed him.
Tamara lifted her hands. She moved like a dancer, with a dancer's grace. “And yet no one has been able to verify what you claim. People are growing desperate.”
“Look, if the World Snake was coming, would I still be here?” She made a sign of aversion at the name. “Child, that only means you believe what you say. It doesn’t mean it's true. Your demon is a being of trickery and deceit. Eight million souls depend on your word, and no one knows if your word is good.”
That made me burn. My eyes flared but Tamara didn’t react. Here, in her own holding, within her own defenses, she wasn’t afraid of anything I could do. I was supposed to be a big player in this crisis. And I had been! I’d won the war. Being a big player with a small voice is frustrating. But it was true, about Richard. He’d been a master of manipulation and deceit even when he was powerless, because these are the stock in trade of a slave. Once his powers returned, and he was free, he became something unfathomable.
I watched Tamara's hands spread ointment on my ankle, that hardly hurt anymore. And I wondered, just for a moment, if Richard had lied to me. I shook my head so hard Tamara looked up at me. According to the rules of his presence here, Richard was not allowed to lie to me, or disobey a direct command, while I was his master. So I could trust that he had done what I asked. Getting other people to understand all this, now that was the problem.
“What can I do?” I asked Tamara. “I thought if I waited, and the World Snake didn’t come, then people would finally believe me. Instead, I woke up as someone's multi-mammalian experiment. I was a couple days away from being tied up in a bow and offered as a birthday present when I got out of there.”
She finished tying off the bandage on my ankle. “Where were you shot with the dart?”
I peeled back the sweat pants from my hip, revealing the huge purpling bruise emanating out from the crusted angry puncture wound. No wonder my walk was stiff. It was the biggest bruise I’d ever had.
“Oh, my!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That hurt.”
She cleaned and anointed it like the others, and left something warm and tingling working in the wound when she bandaged it. Then she laid a hand on my head. When she took it away a moment later, the pain of my wounds had receded, and my tangled situation felt less daunting. “Thank you,” I said.
“Go home,” Tamara said, gathering up the detritus of her doctoring. “Rest. I’ve thought of someone who may be able to help. I’ll see if she will come and help us. I’ll send for you when I’m ready.”
“I can’t go home,” I told her. “People know where I live. There's nothing to keep them from taking me again, if they shoot me while I’m not looking.”
“No one will do that again. I’ll talk to them.”
I wasn’t sure I could trust her word to that extent either. But that wasn’t the only problem. I’d kept my personal affairs private thus far. But I needed Tamara's help if I was going to stay out of further trouble. It was time to share. I said, “My family has found me. I think they’re tracking me. I can’t let them know where I live.”
“Your family?” Tamara took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. “Just how old are you, my girl?”
I shook my head. “I can’t go back home. Not until I’m older. And stronger.”
She held my gaze a moment longer, and then said, “What is it you want?”
“If you could tell me how to keep them from scrying me, now that they know where to look—”
“They can’t scry you here,” she assured me. “There isn’t anyone I know who can get through the wards around this place.” She thought a moment, and then seemed to give way to a remedy that did not entirely please her. She sighed. “Stay here. Rest. Get well. Then, we’ll see. Come. I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
Tamara and her mother lived in the house that stood across an empty lot from the music shop. The dark little clapboard bungalow, with peeling green paint on the porch, had two downstairs bedrooms. Tamara's mother had long ago built a studio on the upstairs floor where she did her workings. I could feel the charged air coming from up there as we passed the stairwell. Tamara's mother was a sorceress of considerable power, as I had reason to know. But she wasn’t home now. She lay in a hospital, undertaking who knew what journey, into another kind of night than the one now f
alling outside. She’d saved my life. She’d given me what I needed to save the city, and I’d only spoken to her once.
Tamara showed me to a tiny spare workroom at the back of the house, where a narrow bed stood against the wall, made up with a pillow and an old handmade quilt. The pine tree pattern was threadbare in places, and the colors had faded, but it held a sense of comfort and peace, worn into the cloth by three generations of women. Tamara and her mother had both curled up in it many times, and another girl as well. Before that there had been another woman, who had slept in it, wept and bled into it, a long time ago.
Tamara rummaged in a narrow closet and brought out a couple of pairs of jeans, more stylish than any I owned. One of them fit me, if I rolled up the legs. Everyone is taller than me. She found a t-shirt for me as well, and some underwear. The girl who had owned these clothes was the other girl who’d slept wrapped in the quilt, but I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my business, and besides, I was too tired. I peeled off the sweats that smelled of the shepherd, back in the days when she’d been a smoker, and kicked off the stupid shoes. I wrapped myself in the quilt that smelled so good, dropped on the bed and fell into blessed sleep.
I woke once from troubled dreams where I was pinned to the dirt by a giant silver hook while Gray Fox stood over me, looking at me like I was his dinner. I blinked away the vision as Tamara entered the room with a jar of ointment and fresh bandages. The windows were dark, and Tamara's shadow was cast by light from the kitchen beyond. She did not speak to me, but sat on the bed and checked my dressings, humming under her breath. I fell asleep again before she left, but the warm imprint of her hand on my forehead stayed in my consciousness even as I subsided again into dreams. This time I walked through a forest of pine trees, drawn by some necessity toward a lighted glade, and a small intense figure dancing there. She turned as I broke into the light, her dark eyes bright, smiling fiercely, and said something, and I woke up with her voice in my ears.
