by Carol Wolf
I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud, until I heard the sound of my voice: “I will find them out. And I will teach them not to mess with me.”
I looked over at the bear, but he hadn’t heard me over the pounding of the drums. Or he didn’t listen. But still, my words sounded against the drums’ resonance, and the harmonies rang out, doubling and redoubling in the open air.
CHAPTER EIGHT
So, the first thing I did to get ready for my hunt was rest and heal up. That was only smart, after all. Tamara made it clear that if she was going to house me and feed me for a few days, then I was going to have to make myself useful, which is why I spent Saturday perched on a stool in the back room of her shop, unpacking boxes and checking their contents against the manifests. It was relaxing, and since I wasn’t moving much, I was hardly in pain at all. I had time to think, about Sarah and her ranch, and seeing Richard again, and other things.
Tamara, with long-suffering patience, took me into town at lunch time to a place where I could buy some new tennis shoes. I got a couple of pairs of socks and some underwear as well, since I didn’t know how many changes I’d need. At least, when she asked me if I needed money, I was able to tell her I could handle it. I spent the evil vet's camel money. I felt I’d earned it.
Aaron came to the house that night with a huge order of Chinese food. Sol joined us, and he and Aaron told of their adventures in the mountains, and in coming to and from the mountains, and Tamara told of some of her travels. I tried six different dishes, and felt left out. The places I had traveled, I couldn’t talk about.
After another round of cleaning and ointment, and whatever extra healing was added by Tamara's concentrated touch, the following day I was back on my feet without too much pain. In the early morning I changed and in my wolf form trotted around the lot between the house and the shop, making myself small to avoid excited calls from the neighbors about seeing a wolf wandering loose.
I still felt a twinge when I put weight on my fore and hind feet and flexed them, but it didn’t seem that I was going to be crippled, and that was a relief. If they had crippled me, I probably would have had to kill someone, though, if I were crippled, I didn’t know if I could. What was I going to do to these people, in return for what they’d done to me? There's lots of biting you can do which creates lots of mayhem, blood and pain, without causing death. I thought about all the possibilities as I nosed around the lot, grinning to myself. Probably, when I met up with them, I’d just wing it. And that would be fun.
Tamara owned the lot behind the vacant one as well, that faced onto the next street over. On it stood a big old house surrounded by an eight-foot fence, that Tamara rented out. These days her tenants were the bears. A gate with a latch high near the top of the fence allowed them to cut through the yard between the house and the shop. Jonathan wandered through while I was trotting along the fence, and eyed me blearily. Bears tolerate wolves, but they are never happy about sharing their territory. I could see that I wouldn’t be staying much longer.
Tamara went off after breakfast to the hospital to sit with her mother, as she did nearly every day. She had two or three employees who minded the shop at various times. There were also a dozen or so people who hung around and occasionally lent a hand because they were there, just as I was, while I convalesced. Today more and more people kept arriving, organizing, bringing in supplies, running errands, consulting about arrangements, hurrying around, putting up decorations of wreaths and flowers, setting up candle lanterns on the patio, stringing Chinese lanterns across the lot. A pickup truck carrying a load of wood backed over the curb and onto the vacant lot, and people gathered to unload and build the bonfire. Today was Beltane, one of the eight great holidays, so tonight there would be a gathering. There would be fire and food, dancing and drink. Power wielders planned to use the energy raised by the dancing and the drumming to help to strengthen the wards they’d been building all over the city against the World Snake. Well. It wouldn’t do any harm.
I held things and carried things. I climbed up on the roof at one point to help string colored lights. I don’t know why this annoyed the bears, but it did. I went inside and looked busy by grabbing a duster, a feather duster, made from the feathers of distant and probably long-dead ostriches. I dusted the shelf of foreign gods, the shelf of books about, guess what, music, and the thumb harps, the xylophones, and the many drums. I ignored the growing number of people arriving, gathering, greeting one another, carrying instruments, carrying plates or trays or covered dishes of food. I felt the rising excitement resonate with the magical buzz in the air. I kept near the walls and thought about Richard, who hadn’t been Richard, and Yvette, who hadn’t been Yvette.
By noon, my ankle was aching again, and despite there being so many people around I kept bumping into bears, whatever I was doing. So I went back to the house to lie down in the back room and take a nap on the quilt that smelled so comforting. I could hear some of the growing hubbub outside, as I rose from sleep to awareness, and relapsed into sleep again. I curled into a ball and wrapped the quilt around me. It wasn’t that I was chilled, or lonely, or in pain. It's just that I still missed Richard.
Lying half asleep I remembered the smell of him in his wolf form; the scent of grass on his fur. The thoughtful, attentive look on his face that contorted into protesting laughter when I pretended to bite him. The evil, self-satisfied smile he had when he worked his long-honed wiles on me until I moaned. The smell of him, in his wolf form, the scent of grass on his hair…
Tamara came into the house, bringing with her four or five chattering friends. They laid out a buffet of ham, cheese, bread from the bakery, potato salad with dill, sodas and a bottle of wine, and talked and laughed while they ate. I went back to sleep. After a while I woke to the change of sounds, and heard them go. Tamara called and talked to some of them from the porch, and then she came back inside. I opened my eyes as she stopped in the doorway of my room.
“Come into the kitchen. I’ve saved some food for you.”
Before I sat to eat down she took my wrist in her hand, felt the air over it with the other hand, and nodded. It had been giving me twinges, but now it subsided. When we sat down she held out a hand for my ankle, and with relief I lifted it, and felt the pain leak away. Wonderful. They’d left lots of ham. The bread was crunchy, and the potato salad was delicious.
Tamara offered me a cup of coffee. It was not as awful as the coffee they brewed in the shop and kept going all day, but it was pretty bad. Quantities of milk and sugar made it just about drinkable. Tamara sipped hers with apparent enjoyment, and picked at the last of the potato salad. She watched me take slugs of my coffee with laughter at the back of her eyes. I didn’t seem to be fooling her one bit.
“I have taken counsel with many of the people who are concerned about what our next move should be. No one has yet been able to divine whether the Great Worm has changed its course. After tonight, I planned to meet with some friends in the desert. When we scry the stars together, we often receive a stronger, more powerful reading.” She looked away into the distance, as though seeing the desert under the night sky. “But that isn’t possible while so many are clamoring for action now.” She met my eyes. “You are going to have to call that demon of yours. You’re going to have to make him answer questions, to either set everyone's minds at rest, or figure out how to carry the battle further.”
I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”
“Can’t?”
“I set him free. I gave him his freedom. I can’t call on him anymore.”
She looked into my eyes searchingly. “You told Kat you can call him.”
I shrugged. This wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. “I can call him, but he isn’t my servant anymore. It's different.” I added, “It's dangerous.”
She smiled wearily. “So, you understand at last what you are dealing with.”
“I didn’t say I understood him. But I do understand that, now that he's no longer bound by me, h
e can eat me for breakfast.”
“Yes. Well, the hope is that there will be sufficient people of power present when you call him, to contain any damage he might wish to do.”
“Have any of them had any experience controlling a demon? Ha. Or even seen one?”
“Nonetheless,” she said, “this is what you must do. If you want people to believe you, if the danger is really past, we are going to have to hear the demon say so, and make our own judgment.”
“Tonight? You want me to call him tonight?”
“On Beltane? Of course not. This is a celebration.”
“But you want me to call him in front of other people?”
“That's the idea. You want to convince us that he defeated— turned—the Worm, yes? How else can you do it?”
“I thought I’d do it by having the Snake not come.”
“People are too worried to wait for that.”
“Yeah. I get that. But here's the thing. If I call him in front of other people, they’ll know how it's done. They’ll hear me call his name.”
“So I suppose.”
“But that's the problem. If they hear his name, if they can call him themselves, some of them may try to enslave him again, and I promised him that wouldn’t happen.”
Tamara thought a moment. I hoped she was thinking about all the power wielders she knew in this city, and what some of them might do with a powerful demon in their service. She said at last, “Then what do you suggest?”
I looked straight at her, with as much sincerity as I could muster. “Everyone there has to promise, has to swear, that they will never use what they see or hear to increase their own power. They have to give me their oath, on whatever they hold most sacred, that they will never call Richard themselves.”
Tamara raised her brows. She suspected something. Her believing me depended on how stupid she thought I was. I opened my eyes a little and held her gaze, and finally she nodded. “It will be as you say.”
Yeah, I thought to myself. And now we’ll find the liars out.
So, the plan was that she would find an auspicious day, and all the interested power wielders would get together, and after everyone swore they wouldn’t use this knowledge against him, they would watch me call my demon. Richard would come, he would tell them the crisis was over, and everybody would go away and be happy. Great plan.
Tamara said she would start sounding people out about the auspicious day, since many of the people she had to consult were here already for Beltane, or would be here in a little while. Finding the right day didn’t mean throwing the bones, consulting the I Ching or meditating among three bowls of water, it meant finding a day and a time that interested power wielders could agree to meet. So, that was the first problem, and it was going to take a while.
Tamara finished her coffee and headed back to the preparations. I volunteered to clean up the kitchen, and she agreed, after I promised not to stay on my feet too long. I packaged up the food, washed the dishes and wiped the surfaces, standing on my good leg for the most part. I’d done this kind of thing with Richard, not too long ago.
Another problem was, Richard is not my demon's name. Richard is what I called him, because using a demon's real name for ordinary usage is asking for trouble. Richard entered my service for protection when he was powerless, and he gave me his true name. With that, I had complete mastery over him. Now that he was free, his true name was all that would summon him. Giving an all-powerful demon's true name to a bunch of power wielders was a really, really bad idea. Richard and I had talked about this, before he went. I’d given him a date for his freedom, but as long as I knew his true name, I could enslave him again simply by uttering that word.
If I called Richard, at the gathering that Tamara planned, I would be making a present to anyone who wished it, of the word that would call an all-powerful demon. If Tamara managed to invite all the people who were after me for my demon, she’d be doing my hunting for me, and all I had to do was watch who rose to the bait. This just might be fun.
When the kitchen was clean I wandered back over to the store to watch the preparations. I was crossing the vacant lot when Curt Sondstrom drove by. He saw me and came to a stop, double-parking across the street. He got out of the car and beckoned to me.
I took a moment to decide whether I’d seen him or not. I’m not a puppy. I don’t come when I’m called. He looked over at the crowd of people, then came around the back of his hatchback and crossed the street toward me. I decided then that I had seen him, and I met him part way on the sidewalk. He glanced over at the gathering, where the preparations seemed to have melded with the party to come. The drinking, the laughing, the eating, and some preparatory drumming had already begun. Only the dancing would wait for nightfall, and the fire.
Curt turned so his back was to the crowd as he faced me. He had that plastered smile on again, and his tension was so strong I could practically taste it. He wasn’t spiking fear this time, though, and that annoyed me. He should be afraid of me. I’d have to see what I could do about that.
“You wanted to talk to Sarah?” he said. “She's waiting to talk to you.”
“Why would I want to talk to Sarah?” I said. I had spent some thought about what I should do about Sarah. I wasn’t ready to talk to her because I hadn’t decided which of the lovely scenarios were most fitting. Some of them, of course, were going to make some folks pretty angry if they found out about them, but there was no one here I answered to, after all.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t put it right,” Sondstrom said. I was interested in the fact that not all of his attention was on me while he was speaking. He kept a sharp eye on people coming up the sidewalk in our direction, or crossing the road towards us. He was not on the look-out for friends, unless he was looking for them in order to avoid them, I decided. “Sarah is waiting to speak to you.” He dropped his voice, to sound sincere and contrite. “She has something she wants to say to you.” He looked at me then from under his brows, giving the impression that he shared in this supposed apology. Of course, he hadn’t said she was going to apologize, or maybe do anything but cuss me out one way and back for messing with her dog breeding program. But he was implying that she would.
“Oh?” I said. “Is she coming here?”
“No, no. She wouldn’t. She's—some people don’t understand the things she does, or why she does them. I’ll tell you her whole story some day. She's at my shop in Arcadia. I’ll take you there.” He touched my arm to guide me to his car.
“But—it's Beltane!” I protested, child-like. “There's going to be a bonfire.”
He smiled. “I’ll get you back before the party gets going. I promise. It's not that far.” He started walking, his arm not quite touching my back to herd me along. “You’ll like my shop. Maybe you’ll see something that appeals to you. I hope you will.” His smile was tense, and fake. He was lying.
“I don’t know,” I hesitated. “I should be helping with the party. Tamara had some important things she wanted me to take care of.” I tried to think what they were, in case he asked.
Instead, he said, “Oh, Tamara knows all about it. In fact, she suggested that the best thing you could do was meet with Sarah and make it up. Today, while there's time.” There was that smile again. “And I’m to have you back in time for the barbecue.”
Oh what a liar! I had to admire him, as I crossed the street with him to his car. “Should I tell Tamara I’m going now?” I asked, just to keep him jumping.
“I just talked to her on my cell. It's fine, she knows.”
“Okay,” I said, and stepped into the passenger seat of his car.
The car filled up with his tension as he drove off down the street, turned the corner, and then caught the main drag that would eventually take us to the freeway. I was wondering how long I should let this go on when he pulled in to a gas station and drove up to a pump. That's when Elaine, the evil vet, came out from behind the farthest set of pumps and got into the seat behind me.
> “Go,” she said. “I’m in,” and Curt pulled onto the main drag again.
It is not good to let an enemy sit behind you, within the reach of her arms. I turned around in my seat to face her. “Hi!” I said, with fake enthusiasm. I could see both her and Curt at the same time from this position. “How are you? The hole you put in my hip is healing nicely, in case you want to know.”
Elaine radiated tension in a different way than Curt. Hers had an intensity, like a low note on the scale, unlike the ascending chords that Curt was emitting. “I’m fine,” she said evenly. “My truck is still nose down on the beach. They haven’t managed to bring it up yet, because they haven’t got a tow truck small enough to get around that bend, and big enough to tow it off the sand.” Her mouth widened into an angry sneer, “And it's going to cost a fortune!”
I couldn’t help my big fat grin. Honestly. I couldn’t. “Oh, I’m really sorry,” I said. I noticed that she was keeping her hands out of my sight. Unless I climbed up to look down in her lap, I wasn’t going to be able to see what she was holding there. “So, do you want to talk to Sarah, too?’
She registered surprise and shot a look at Curt, who must have caught her eye in the mirror. He answered, “We thought it would be better if we were all there together when you and Sarah talk.”
“That's right,” Elaine concurred, following Curt's lead. “We’re all trying to help you.”
“Is that what this is?”
“We’re perfectly serious. You don’t know what trouble you’re in.”
