by Carol Wolf
Richard bought the fixings for the chicken mushroom dinner again, but this time he stood over me and made me make it, so I’d know how. I didn’t know cooking could be that easy, though fiddly, since all I’d ever done was fry meat. We lingered over dinner, and we still hit traffic on the 605. We crept along to the 10 and then headed west, toward the city, and beyond, up to West Hollywood. On the way, I asked Richard, “Where is Keith?”
“Who?”
“The kid in the parking lot, who called your name—your fake name.”
“Oh, that fellow with the wand. Why did he have a wand?”
“Current fashion.”
“I see.”
“What did you do with him?”
“I ate him. Why? What did you want me to do with him?”
“You ate him?”
“I can, you know. I have a big enough mouth, in that form.”
“Where is he now?”
He turned his head to me. “Wherever I like. I told you, time is different across that boundary.”
“Can you drop him back here, alive?”
“I can drop him anywhere. Down a chasm where he’ll fall forever. Into my own world, where he can be a piece of dust. Alive, dead, mummified, eighty years old, or an egg.”
I laughed. “Can you turn him into a dog?”
His smile was wicked. “If it’s your pleasure. He did break his oath to you.”
So he did. But if I thought someone needed to die, I should do it myself, and I didn’t know this guy. I thought about it. Something that wouldn’t hurt too much, but would leave him really wigged out. For the rest of his life. “Can you drop him in a hospital in some foreign country, with a broken arm, a strange bite out of his leg somewhere, and no memory of Monday night at all?”
Richard laughed. Now that was a sound worth hearing. “Lovely. What country?”
“Um. What’s a country pretty far away that we’re not enemies with right now?”
“Poland?” he suggested. “I liked Poland.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Poland. That’ll teach ‘em.”
“Not really. The Thunder Mountain Boys are going to draw up the strongest wards they know, and call Bellsandahisnlianamene.”
“Oh. Is that why you have to go?”
“No. I have to go because I’m not from here, and I don’t belong here anymore.”
“I know.” After a moment I asked, “What are you going to do to the Thunder Mountain Boys?”
“Have you ever heard the story of the red shoes?” His voice was light, but I heard the anger underneath. He’d had a bad night with them.
“No.”
“Look it up sometime. I thought I’d eat them afterwards.”
“What are they calling you for? I’d have thought they’d know enough to be afraid of you.”
“They want me to put Marlin back together again.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Can you?”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh.” I fell silent with disappointment. I took my foot off the gas, and started looking for an off-ramp to turn around. Then I thought, what the hell, and put my foot on the gas again. I might as well check it out myself.
“Amber?” Richard had taken all this in. “Where are we going?”
“Someone I want you to meet.”
“All right.” After a silence he said, “You would prefer I did not eat the Thunder Mountain Boys.”
I shrugged. “Whatever you like.” He had an edge in his voice. Richard had never had an edge in his voice. Every now and then, for a moment, despite his scent, I remembered that this was not really Richard anymore.
“It shall be as you please,” he said. “I will have my… fun, but they will survive the night.”
I said, “Thanks,” because I supposed he was sparing them on my account. And it was true, I didn’t want Oliver to die. Somehow I thought I owed him that.
“It will be a very long night, though.” After a silence he added, “But the next one who calls me, I will eat.”
I looked over and saw his eyes flash. Not blue for that instant, but some color of darkness, very deep and very black. I let out a breath. “Fair enough.”
“So, if I’m not to eat the Thunder Mountain Boys when I’m finished with them, what shall I do with them?”
“Where are they going to do the raising?”
“Their studio.”
“Just blow a big hole in their floor. That’ll fix ‘em.”
“So it will,” Richard said on a laugh.
I smiled at the thought. After all, they were trying to take possession of my demon The last time they’d had him, when they’d finished with him they’d betrayed him to his death without a second thought. Richard owed them a bit of payback. So did I, come to think of it. “Feel free to take out some of their mirrors, too,” I suggested.
He met my eyes with a smile. They were blue. “I will consider it a command.”
I found a parking place down the street from our destination. We walked up the sidewalk as the sun set, and I took Richard’s hand, because he was there and because I could. When we reached the bookshop, Richard stopped.
“I know this place.”
“Have you been here? Do you know Darius?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t get near it. His wards were too good.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t thought of that. “How about now?”
He smiled. He really wasn’t quite the same as when I’d known him before. He’d never had a smile that mocked others. “There are very few wards that can touch me now,” he said. “In any case, these are in tatters.” He held up his hands, as though feeling the shreds of spider webs in the air.
“I want you to meet Darius,” I said.
“If you wish,” he shrugged.
We set off the little bell walking into Darius’s bookshop. Two heavyset bikers looked up from opposite corners to check us out as we came in. Darius sat behind his desk, looking down at his hands. He was not reading. The desk before him was clear. The woman seated beside him checked us out too. None of them seemed friendly.
The rows of shelves from the front windows to the back wall were no longer orderly and well-stocked. Shelves had long bare patches. Books were piled sideways, and some were stacked on the floor. A pair of young women were going through the books and setting them up on shelves in some kind of order. They glanced at us too.
“Can I help you?” The woman sitting beside Darius pitched her voice as a challenge. I walked toward the desk, and Richard followed. “If you’ve come to browse the books, that’s fine,” she continued. Her red hair was cropped like a helmet on her skull. She had large eyes, enhanced by make-up, and a square jaw. Her suit coat and soft blouse said clearly that she didn’t normally work in the bookshop.
“You’ve had trouble,” Richard stated.
“Darius has been ill,” she said, setting a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice. “Some people took advantage.”
“Robbed him blind,” one of the bikers muttered. “Bastards.”
“We’re looking after him now,” the woman said. “Can I help you?”
I ignored her. “Darius?” I crouched a little so I could look into his face. “Darius?”
He raised his head, his deep eyes haunted. He smiled, but it was just a muscle memory. “Hi,” he said, hardly raising his voice. “Can I help you?”
I reached out and took his hands. “Darius?”
“You a friend?” Helmet woman asked.
I nodded. I didn’t have to tell anyone that I’d only known him for a few hours as his real self, a geomancer of considerable power. He was known as the one person who could keep all the power wielders in the greater Los Angeles area talking to one another, and even in some sense working, if not together, then at least in the same direction. Shortly after I met him, Darius had been attacked by the Eater of Souls, and this was what remained.
He caught my eye again. The smile creaked into
place once more. “Hi. Can I help you?” He stared at me and the smile faded.
“We think he had a stroke,” helmet-woman said. “He just sat here, day after day, and somebody took the cash box, and then other people started just walking out with all the books they could carry.”
“We put a stop to that,” one of the bikers came up to eavesdrop.
“We took him to the clinic, but they couldn’t find anything that might have caused this.”
Yeah, they probably never even heard of the Eater of Souls. Though in the last few months, there’d probably been a rash of people like Darius around here. Marlin, for example, lived right across the street.
I looked over at Richard, but he wasn’t giving anything away. He looked Darius over, and then wandered off to look at the backs of the books, favoring big fat old dusty ones, that he pulled out and examined. I trailed after him. I can be patient.
“What’s in it?” I asked, after he’d leafed slowly through a heavy book with thick black writing.
“It’s a history of one of the princedoms of Germany, from the eighteen hundreds.”
“Huh,” I said. I knew where Germany was. I knew there had once been two of them. I didn’t know one was a princedom.
“I spent some time there,” he said lightly, and put the book back. “It’s like getting to read the end of the story.”
“Can you help him?” I nodded toward Darius.
“No.”
I had not expected him to say that. “But—you fixed the Rag Man. He told me.”
Richard has a really sweet smile at times. “Yes. But that was different. That was a, a cog out of place, is all. His gift was not meant to hurt him, and all I did was an adjustment. The Rag Man didn’t have anything wrong with his soul.”
“Can’t you just magic Darius back, make him the way he was?”
Richard laid a hand on his chest. “I am here in my accustomed, severely limited form. As you see.”
“Yes.”
“In order to bring enough of my power into this world to aid Darius, without killing him at the same time, it would take a gateway more complicated than you know how to create, or we have time for.”
“I thought you had mastery over space and time.”
What looked at me suddenly through those eyes was not Richard. A jolt went through me and all at once I was braced to kill, while part of my brain screamed Run Run Run! It was gone in a moment, and his blue eyes were just Richard’s again. “Yes,” he answered quietly, well aware of the tension in me. “But you truly do not want any more of me in this world.”
I let my breath out on a little laugh. “You’re right.”
“Well then. There is nothing I can do for Darius. But you can.”
And that is why I spent the last night I had with my lover breaking in to the back room of a bookstore in order to bite the head of a geomancer.
Richard explained while we sat in the car eating fast food and waiting for a better hour to commit breaking and entering, and assault and battery.
“He had his soul cut out of him, as you saw. But he fought hard. He may even have fought them off at the end. You say there was a fire in his room?”
“Scorch marks. Still smelling of fire.” I chowed down on my burger. Richard picked out the best fries and laved them with salt and ketchup.
“Mm. He has some soul stuff left. He can attract more, and make use of it. His spirit is strong. But you’ll need to bite his head open.”
“I’ll need to—? I did mention I kind of like this guy?”
Richard looked at me shrewdly. “You respect him.”
“Yes.”
“You feel guilty about him.”
And he was right. I did. I had an idea that I had somehow led the Eater of Souls to Darius, and but for me, the guy would have been fine. “Yeah. So?”
“And that’s why you want to fix him. And to do that, someone needs to cut a hole in his head. You’re not going to get anyone else to do it. Medicine has gone on another path here. But if you puncture his skull, just here,” Richard touched the middle of the crown of my head with his finger. His greasy finger. “He’ll be able to attract the kind of human energy that he can use as soul stuff. To make a gross, inaccurate modern analogy, it’s like giving him a way to access stuff he can reprogram for his own use.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“I’ve been here a long time. And I was raised by one of the greatest scholars of his age, after all. And unlike you, I like to read.” Richard took my hamburger from me, turned it, and took the best bite. I did not snarl. I did not savage him. I waited for him to give it back to me. Truly, I was in love.
So, at about one o’clock in the morning we parked around the corner, sauntered along the street past the darkened front of the bookstore, and then cut down the passageway between Darius’s building and the one next door. We could try and break in through the shop, but we risked being seen from the street, and all the unpleasant complications that might bring about. Darius had one narrow window in the back room where he slept, but it looked over a neighbor’s yard, and that was my second to last choice. The back door that led to his room was at the end of this passageway. He still used this door. In fact, he’d used it recently.
When we got there, I tried knocking, just in case Darius would simplify matters by simply opening the door and letting us in. No answer. The door was steel, close-fitting into the frame. I leaned down to examine the lock, thinking over everything I knew about burglary, which wasn’t much, and Richard reached past my head and tried the knob. The door opened.
Well, that made things a lot simpler. I stepped into the dark back room. No one was there. I changed to make sure, and so that I could see in the dark. The bed was empty. Darius hadn’t slept there tonight. Someone had tidied up the room since I’d last seen it. The smell of scorching was still discernable, but the marks were gone. The bloody rug had been removed, and the books had been stacked neatly against the wall. Darius hadn’t touched them since that was done. One of the stackers was helmet-woman, and one was the talkative biker.
Darius had eaten a plate of beans at the table, earlier tonight. So, when he’d used the door recently, it hadn’t been to come in. I went out to follow his trail and track him down. I trotted into the passageway just as the end of it was blocked by a car pulling up. Doors opened, doors slammed. I smelled gun oil, a trace of vomit, fear and fury. A cop car. I backed quickly into Darius’s doorway, as people came down the passageway, two flashlight beams stabbing the darkness ahead of them.
“Okay,” said a heavy, tired-sounding voice. “Here you are, home safe.”
“Oh, shit,” a younger voice, a woman’s voice said. “He left the door open.”
“All right, check it out. I’ll wait here with him.”
Darius’s voice, strained, confused. “I have to find… I have to go…”
“Don’t worry. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”
A flashlight beam hit the back wall and played around the room. I dropped on to Darius’s bed and made myself as small and harmless looking as I possibly could. When the flashlight caught me, I heard the woman cop’s indrawn breath, and felt her jolt of fear.
“There’s a dog in here!”
I lay quite still. I wagged my tail just a tiny bit. And gods help me, I let out a little, pathetic whine. I had no idea where Richard had got to. I had a moment of panic that my last hours with Richard had been used up, that he’d gone forever and I’d wasted our final night. But at the moment, I kept my eyes on the woman with the gun, who was looking back at what she might in her crazed imagination consider to be a threat to her safety. And it was true. I was. And if she went for her gun, she was going to find out just how fast one of the wolf kind can be. But I did my damnedest to look just as harmless as I knew how.
The other cop came to look, holding Darius by the arm. I wagged my tail at him, too. “Huh. Is that your dog, Mr. Kolpak?”
Darius shuffled into the doorway. The cop fo
und the light switch and turned it on.
Darius looked around stupidly, as though he didn’t know where he was. His feet were bare, and he wore only a pair of pajama bottoms. His long body was thin from recent malnutrition. He took a few steps into the room, and then he noticed me. “Hi, there,” he said, sounding pleased, and reached out a hand to me.
I got up slowly on my four feet and walked over to him, head low. I wagged my tail and nosed his hand. He crouched down and hugged me hard. He turned his face into my head. His voice, though quiet, was raw. “Please, please, help me,” he said.
“All right, then,” said the cop. “We’re going to go now. You go to bed, okay? It’s bedtime. Don’t go outside again until it’s light, understand? But if you do, take the dog with you, why don’t you? Then the creeps out there won’t bother you.”
“You lock this, now. Hear me?” The cops closed the door firmly behind themselves. But Darius didn’t move. He buried his fists in my fur and began to sob.
As they walked back to the car the woman cop asked, “What happened to him?” and I heard the older guy reply something about Darius having been robbed and attacked, and hit on the head, and his store broken in to. And that was part of the story. The real robbery that the Eater of Souls had carried out was invisible to him.
When the car had driven off, Richard was in the room again. I looked up at him curiously. He no longer smelled of burgers and grease. He nodded to me, looking down at Darius’s bent head, and he was right. Darius was still holding me hard, crying into my shoulder. He took no notice of Richard. There would be no better moment.
When I grow large, it’s usually because I am angry. But this could not be a moment of raging passion. If I missed the exact place Richard had pointed out, which is where the three seams on the skull come together, I risked projecting a bit of bone into Darius’s brain, and that wouldn’t help him a bit. And I needed my head large, but the rest of me could stay as it was, since Darius was holding on to me, and that would serve to keep him in place. So I drew on my passion for the first time in a measured way, and nothing happened.
