by Carol Wolf
It was not yet dawn. I lay listening, thinking that Tamara had brought her mother home, and it was her voice I had heard. But the house was silent. The voice, like the figure, had been part of the dream. I went in and used the little bathroom, and drank from the tap until my stomach was full. I went back to bed, but before I fell asleep again I got up on top of the covers and changed, pawed and turned around until the conformation of the bedding suited me, and then dropped down again and fell asleep in my wolf form. My wolf brain was not troubled by disturbing dreams. I woke later in the day because there was a bear in the room.
“You want me to feed you in here, or you want to come eat in the kitchen?”
Aaron loomed in the doorway, his deep voice resounding between the walls, though he did not speak loudly. “Come on, get up. Tamara's brought someone for you to talk to.”
I changed on the bed to my human form so I wouldn’t have to drop onto my right forepaw with all my weight. Oh, how I ached. All my bruises had seized up, and my wrist and ankle felt like the hook was back in them, big as a pipe, throbbing, and with spikes. I put on my new borrowed clothes and hobbled barefoot toward the kitchen. Then I pulled myself together, slowed and shortened my steps so I was only limping a little when I entered the room. Two other bears, Sol and Jonathan, small compared to Aaron, but big compared to anyone else, seemed to take up all the room around Tamara's kitchen table. Sol was already tearing into the second of the six huge all-meat pizzas, and Jonathan was chewing efficiently, and already reaching for his next slices.
I helped myself to three pieces, knowing that if I took them one by one, the bears would have finished the food before I got my second piece. Do not wait on bears when it comes to food, or you will go hungry.
I didn’t see the fourth bear. “Where's Jason?” I asked with my mouth full. If you stop eating, they think you don’t want that other piece you have, and you can’t argue about that when they’ve already starting chewing on it.
“Where is Yvette?” Jonathan asked in return, cocking a heavy brow at me.
“Ah.” My friend Yvette the drummer had taken up with Jason a few weeks ago. She knew he was one of the bear kind. It hadn’t been a problem yet, but then, he hadn’t taken her home to meet the family, either. “If you see her,” I told the bears, “I need to talk to her.” There was the little matter of her inviting me to the party at which she did not appear, but I got shot.
“So we heard,” Aaron said.
Tamara opened the door to the kitchen and came in trailed by two others, just as the bears were tearing into the last box. The bears stopped, big hands still outstretched over their claimed portions as she came and stood over the table. “Any left for us?” she asked pointedly.
Sol, the littlest bear, still over six feet, his big frame just a little more wiry than the others, was the last to withdraw his hand.
“Sure,” Aaron said, getting up. “Come and sit here. There's plenty left,” and he stepped back as though he didn’t have two pieces cupped in his huge palm.
Sol and Jonathan perched on the counters, Aaron slipped into the doorway and finished eating. Tamara brought out paper towels and she and the man and woman who had come in with her took the bears’ places and started on the food. Since I was still at the table, and I was still hungry, I got myself another piece. I could feel the bears eyeing me. I ate slowly and with obvious enjoyment. After all, it was delicious.
“This is my sister,” Tamara told me, nodding to the woman beside her who had a huge slice of pizza draped over her small hands. The woman grinned at me. She had short red hair salted with gray, a round face and a nose with an incongruous crook in it. Her skin was pale and scattered with freckles. She wore a smartly cut business suit, and a merry smile.
I looked back at Tamara, whose scarlet and night-blue dress set off her dark skin. I was not going to say it. Obviously she was trying to get a rise out of me.
Tamara smiled in response. “She is the sister of my soul.” She nibbled the point off her second slice of pizza. “She is a skilled diviner, so she may be able to resolve the problem of whether you are speaking the truth or not.”
I put down my food. I felt my eyes changing color. I’d sat down to eat with friends. I hadn’t realized they all thought I was a liar. Not only a liar, but a braggart besides, since I was claiming to have defeated the enemy they all feared.
Jonathan's huge hand came down on my shoulder, and he leaned to speak in my ear. “Look at it this way,” he counseled, in a baritone that could be heard over at the shop, despite his speaking low. “In order for us to continue to defend you, we have to have evidence for why we believe in you, besides your beguiling ways and sweet smile.”
I relaxed a little. Then I looked down and saw my food was gone. I turned around to him with a smile that showed all my teeth, but he was back up on the counter, the pizza was gone, and he was smiling too. He looked not only like he had more teeth than he should, but that they were bigger than could easily fit in his mouth. I decided not to look more closely.
“I’m Kat McBride,” Tamara's sister told me. “The three of us,” she included the man across from her, “met at a conference on neurology and music, many years ago. That's Sunny.”
“Curt Sondstrom,” he corrected her, turning my way.
“He makes instruments,” Kat told me.
Curt suppressed a spike of fear as he offered his hand, which got my attention. He had a friendly smile plastered on his face, but he didn’t meet my eyes. His little scraggly beard trembled a little, and his dark hair was beginning to escape from his ponytail. He hunched in his chair like a spider, with long arms and legs, but he wasn’t tall. After a moment or two, he took his hand away.
When Tamara and her friends finished eating, the bears cleared away the refuse in a generous action that disguised the careful checking of the boxes for extra little scraps that quickly disappeared. Tamara wiped down the table and then covered it with a tablecloth of pieced-together African cloth. I was distracted for a moment by the engaging scent of the man who’d woven the cloth, sweating, impatient, cheerful, a long-held chancre of worry eating at him somewhere. The women who had sewn the pieces together were mother and daughter, and both of them had been pregnant, far away, but not too long ago.
Then Kat McBride picked up a cloth bag that she’d set down by her chair, brought out a hammered bronze bowl and a wooden rod, and set them on the table. Tamara brought her a pitcher of water.
I didn’t know that I wanted to be divined. There were a lot of things about me that I didn’t want generally known. The fact that I was an underage runaway, for one. The fact that I was in hiding from my family. And the wolf kind have always been careful with the secret of our nature. “What if I don’t want to do this?” I asked.
Kat took off the jacket of her business suit. She removed the gold pin from her lapel, and took two rings from her fingers and gave them to Tamara to hold. “You don’t have to answer any questions. There's nothing we can do to make you.”
That was for sure.
“But not answering a question is an answer in itself, as you know.” She smiled at me, like she’d just scored a point.
Huh. Tamara's soul's sister or not, I didn’t think I liked this woman.
Kat raised a hand over the water in the pitcher and murmured a blessing. The air in the room changed slightly in response to her invocation. The attention of the folks in the room heightened, and that increased the energy that Kat had engaged. She poured the water into the bowl, and everyone was so still we could hear it ring on the metal, we could hear it slosh.
Kat lifted the stirring rod, murmuring again too softly to hear. The narrow end, carved with a fretwork leaf pattern, pleasing to the eye, fit neatly in her hand. The wide end was polished smooth with use. She touched this to the edge of the bowl and a bright tone rang out, hung in the air, and faded away. Kit closed her eyes, and whispered a few words.
The air changed again, tightening, beginning slowly to turn one way a
bove us. Soon after, near our feet the air began slowly to gyre the opposite way.
Kat touched the rod to the outside of the bowl, below the edge, and slowly moved it around, rubbing the side of the bowl. At first the only sound was the wood rubbing on the metal, but then a low throbbing hum began. I heard it first with my body, before my ears registered it as sound rather than simply vibration. The sound increased, thickened, picked up overtones, until it rang through the room, pleasing to the ear, waxing and waning, the highest resonance only just within hearing.
Kat moved the rod to the top edge of the bowl, and produced a treble harmony to the deep low vibration that continued, even as the new note rang out. She spoke another incantation, and we saw the water begin to ruffle. Soon it hissed and danced. Kat left off rubbing the bowl, but held the rod close to the edge of it, as though as a reminder. The vibrations, high and low, continued to sound unabated, and the water continued to move.
“What is your name?” Kat asked me.
“Amber,” I answered without thinking.
The ringing sound flattened into discord, rose into harmony, flattened into discord again. Kat broke into laughter. “Well, that was unusual.” She looked hard at me. “That seems to be both a lie and the truth at the same time.”
I nodded. “That's about right.”
“Huh,” she said, stirring the water again. “I can see this is going to be an interesting session.”
“Ask her,” Tamara said, “about the World Snake.” She made her usual sign of aversion as she spoke the dreaded name. “Ask her what she knows.”
Kat rubbed the bowl again, raising the dual notes, pure and sweet, and then asked me the question.
“So far as I know,” I told them, as precisely as I knew how, “the demon in my service turned the World Snake at my command. I told him to see to it that she never swallows a city again, and he said he had done this.”
I felt another spike of emotion from Curt Sondstrom, sitting to my right, almost out of my sight line. It wasn’t fear this time, but excitement. I wondered briefly why he was being so thoroughly unobtrusive. He’d slipped just then, so I’d noticed him again.
The bowl continued to ring true and clear, the sound of my words picking up its resonance, and blending in a faint harmony.
“Well,” Kat said thoughtfully, “that's true.”
“I told you so,” I said to Tamara. I tried not to gloat as it would only provoke the bears. The bear kind are very vain, and it is best not to try to outshine them.
Tamara nodded to Kat, and she sounded the bowl again.
“Where is the demon now?” Tamara asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you call him?”
“I dismissed him from my service.”
The sound from the bowl smudged into a slight dissonance. I frowned at it, and said again, “I dismissed him. I set him free. He's gone.”
Another spike of interest from Sondstrom. I was careful not to look at him.
“That wasn’t the question,” Kat pointed out, as the bowl continued to sound a faint discord. “Tamara asked you if you can call him.”
“Of course I can call him,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean he will come.”
To my relief, the tone from the bowl became true and pleasing again.
“But you can call him,” Tamara insisted.
I shrugged. “Anyone can call a demon.”
“Perhaps we should have her call the demon,” Tamara said to Kat, “and you can put the same questions to him.”
That time, it was my emotions that spiked. “No,” I said. “Really. You don’t want to do that.”
“Why don’t you want to call the demon?” Curt spoke for the first time, but no one was listening but me.
“Because he might come,” I shot at him. In all his writhing darkness, with who knew what animosity about the hundreds of years he was trapped here, and all his unknowable powers, he might come.
“She told the truth,” Kat reminded Tamara.
“That only means that she believes what the demon told her he had done. It doesn’t mean he did it. It doesn’t mean the Great Snake isn’t coming.”
“Why not go and ask the World Snake?” I said.
Behind me I felt a new vibration, almost too low to hear, hard and dangerous, that raised the hair on my nape. I spun on my chair, opening my mouth in a snarl.
The sound from the bowl rose and rang loudly, as Tamara raised her voice to still us both. “Jonathan!”
The growl stopped. “Yes?” Jonathan answered politely, but his eyes were on me.
Well, that was some trick. He was still in human form, and I didn’t know how he could do that. And to growl so low as to almost not be heard, and have such a visceral effect, that was just neat. I’d just learned myself how to be partly in both my forms. I started to growl myself, just to see if I could. Jonathan showed his teeth and I stopped.
Tamara glared at him, and nodded to Kat again. “Amber,” Tamara said to me, when the bowl's song rang out again, “tell us again how you commanded your demon to turn the World Snake.”
So I told it again, how I’d called my demon for the last time, how he had obeyed my commands, and received the dismissal he so desired. There were other things that happened between Richard and me, but they were private. The bowl didn’t seem to notice my omissions, so that was all right.
When I had answered every question three times over, Tamara and the others didn’t seem any closer to believing me. At last Tamara said, “Amber, would you be willing to call your demon, so that we may question it?”
“No,” I said. “Let's not do that.”
Tamara and Kat exchanged glances. “Why?” Tamara asked.
“It would be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Sol asked. “This is the guy we met, right? Short, blond, blue eyes? The little guy?”
“He changed,” I said. The bowl rang out in response to my answer. I almost grinned at it as it sounded “that's true!” to the company. Ha. Someone believed me, even if it was just the magic of the bowl.
“In what way did he change?” Kat asked.
“He got his powers back, and with them, his demon form. He looked like,” I tried to explain, “darkness. If darkness had weight, and shape, and depth and will.” I repressed a shudder. “The blond guy you saw was the form imposed on him by the magician who raised him. That's not what he was, not at the end. He was different. He's powerful. And he's not my demon anymore.”
Kat let the vibration from the bowl fade, as they considered that. “Has anyone else seen a demon? Other than her demon, in the form it took while it was here?”
There was silence.
“So,” she continued, “we have no way of knowing if what she described is true.” She looked over at Tamara. “It could be just what the demon chose to show her.”
Tamara shook her head. “Demons are dangerous. They are unknowable.”
“Right!” I agreed. I loved Richard. Richard was gone. What he’d become was not something I wanted to see again. Really.
“I still don’t see why we can’t ask the demon some questions,”
Sol said. “Call him here, sort everything out.”
“He didn’t like being here,” I told them. “He waited more than four hundred years for his freedom. He would not like being called back.”
“What can he do?” Curt Sanderson entered the conversation once again. I glanced at him, but he still wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was beginning to interest me.
“He could set the world on fire,” I told them. The bears laughed. The humans smiled. They all thought it was a joke. I reached out and took the rod from Kat and swept it around the bowl so that it rang out anew. “He could set the world on fire,” I stated. The laughter died away as the bowl sang true and clear in harmony with my voice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tamara took the others back to the shop, probably to decide who else they had to consult with, before disbelieving me some more. I w
as left to rest, which was fine with me because my wounds were throbbing again, and despite all the sleep I’d gotten, the idea of going back and curling up in that quilt for another couple hours was extremely attractive. But Curt Sondstrom didn’t get up when the others did. His fear was spiking again.
Tamara took me aside before she went out the door and lifted an admonishing finger. “You will remember that he is a friend, and you are under my roof.” With no further explanation, she went out to catch up with the bears and her soul sister on the way to the shop. When the kitchen door closed behind her, Curt met my eyes for the first time.
“You wanted to talk to me.”
“I did?”
“Tamara told me what happened to you. Look, I didn’t do anything to you, but something of mine may have helped.”
He was tamping down his fear as much as possible. I could smell the sweat on his upper lip. “What are you talking about?”
“Tamara said you have some things that I made.”
It took me a moment, but then my teeth bared. “Oh. You make instruments.”
He put up his hands. He might be just a straight human, but he could feel what was flaring off of me just then. “Look, keep in mind, I didn’t do anything to you, and I didn’t know what was happening.”
“No?” I smiled. It was not my nice smile. It was the smile that has more teeth in it than a human ought to have. I was gratified to see the metal worker guy lean back hard in his chair and make a smile of his own. His was the kind where you expect to see the tongue come out any minute to lick his lips. His little beard was trembling.
I went to the back room and got the bandana I’d left by the bed. I put it down on the table, opened it up, and pushed it over to Curt.
“You made these?” My blood and my gore were still on them, and the teeth marks on the leather, and the torn wire where I’d finally gotten myself free.
