Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (31 page)

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 found 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.

Well, that pissed me off, and since I’d already set myself to grow, the next moment my head was brushing the roof, so that was all right. I worked on toning the size-thing down a bit, while I focused on the top of Darius’s head, and then planted my pointy upper-left canine just—there. I steadied myself for a moment, leaned in to Darius to hold him steady, and then dropped my tooth hard onto the top of Darius’s head and heard the bone crunch.

I tasted blood, and Darius let out a choked scream, shoved me away hard and grabbed his head. Richard was there with a towel and pressed it down hard to stop the bleeding.

I backed off, and when I was far enough out of reach I changed. I crouched on the floor where I was to try and keep from panicking him any further. “Darius? Darius! Listen, I’m sorry I hurt you. But I think it’s going to help, it’s going to make you better. Darius? It will be all right.” At least, I hoped it would be.

Darius grabbed hold of the towel and pressed it to his wound as though doing so would stop it from hurting so much. He was still crying, which disconcerted me. Honestly, I hadn’t wanted to hurt him.

Richard brought another towel, took the first one away from Darius, and bent to examine the wound. Then he covered it with the second towel, and guided Darius’s hand back up to hold it in place. The first towel was fairly soaked, but the wound didn’t seem to be bleeding so much anymore.

“How is it?” I asked. “Did I do it right?”

“It looks right,” Richard said uncertainly.

“You weren’t sure!” I heard it in his tone. “You don’t know!”

He shrugged. “How much can anyone know, caught in a form like this one? It should work.”

“How long before we know?”

“I have no idea. But this is a good place to try what you did. He has done many workings here over the years. A lot of energy has been raised, and he put a lot of himself into his work. If this works, he should be able to call that energy to himself.”

“If it works.”

Darius’s panic decreased as he seemed to realize that no one was going to attack him anymore. I sat there talking to him, saying anything I could think of, so he would calm down. I was well aware that the night was leaching away, my last night with Richard, my last hours with my love. And I couldn’t tell if all this had even done any good.

Richard brought a third towel, and Darius focused on him as he took the other one away and guided Darius’s hand to hold the new towel in place. When Darius turned back to me, his eyes had changed. They weren’t empty anymore. There was, in their depths, a gleam of awareness.

“Darius?” I said.

A moment later I thought I’d imagined it. He went to his futon and lay down, still holding the towel to his wounded head.

The freeways were as clear of traffic as they ever are as we sped home. The streets of Whittier were empty and dark. I let us into my apartment, and we went straight to bed. And perhaps he was a master of time and space, because despite the lateness of the hour, we seemed to have all the time in the world to say good-bye once more. I did everything I could to impress his form, his scent, and his laughter into my memory. This extra visitation was a gift, and I made the most of it.

When I woke, Richard was gone, as he told me he would be. Not wholly gone. He’d left his jacket, neatly folded on the chair. It smelled like him, and when I put it on, it just about fit me.

S
o, the demon was gone, everyone finally got it about the World Snake not coming, my lover had come back of his own accord to be with me and ravish my senses to unparalleled bliss, I’d defeated Finley and sent him into a miserable exile. I had a job, I had a friend or two, and I’d grown almost an inch, and might grow some more, so now I could settle down and live happily ever after, sad about Richard going away, but joyful that he’d come back at all.

Not unexpectedly, it did not turn out that way.

I flitted around the music store all day in a state of hyperactive bliss. I dusted every shelf and every object, reorganized the sheet music, cataloged and shelved the new CDs for sale, and even greeted and helped customers using a friendly voice and a nice smile. Ariadne looked at me askance. I think she was considering a drug test. When Yvette came in at lunch time, she told Ariadne not to worry, it would wear off and I’d be back to normal again.

I’d been ignoring Minto, Adriade’s cat, and she didn’t care for that. After lunch I went into the back room where Minto was sleeping, and a moment later the cat ran out into the shop hissing and yowling. When I came out, she hissed at me and struck out with her tiny paw, and then ran and hid under the counter where she made yowling sounds. Ariadne looked over from where she was showing a customer how to assemble their new music stand. I could see her wondering just what I’d done to that cat.

I got down on my hands and knees and stuck my head under the counter. Minto backed away and growled, but I saw her smirking at me. I propped my chin on my hands and smiled. She flinched back. “I’ve only ever once eaten cat,” I told her. “It was pretty stringy. But if I lose this job, I’m going to be hungry, and I’ll bet you’re not stringy at all.” I smiled wider. Minto slowly crouched down. Her tail stilled, and she stopped making those noises. I got up. Ariadne was watching me. “She’s fine,” I told her.

After that, Minto made a point of greeting me when I entered the shop, and otherwise left me alone. I could feel her watching me sometimes from her various hiding places, but that was fine. Now that she knew her place on the food chain, she was just as respectful as she needed to be.

I walked home after work, enjoying my melancholy at Richard’s departure, which was overshadowed by my glee that he’d come back, he’d come back to see me, he didn’t have to, he just wanted to, and the joy we’d made together, and the fun we’d had. His smell was still on me, in places. And I was thinking about that chicken thing with mushroom sauce, that we’d made so much of the previous night that I was going to eat it for dinner again. Up the street a guy got out of his truck and came toward me, flipping the keys and pocketing them. I noticed him first because he looked a bit like my defeated stepbrother Finley. It wasn’t Finley, of course, but that’s the moment I realized I’d forgotten all about Finley’s truck.

Finley’s truck was better than a scent marker. It was a beacon that would summon someone from the family. And for anyone from my family, Finley’s trail would lead directly to Elaine, Elaine’s house, and the fight I’d had with Finley in the orchard. Anyone who came looking for that truck would be able to tell that I’d been there, that his blood and mine had been shed on that ground. Since Finley was gone, they’d know where to start looking for me: they’d start with Elaine, and she knew where to find me. Was the truck still there? Had it been towed away? Or had he been in a rental car, which was now overdue and being tracked down? Had Finley told anyone where he was going that last day?

I called Tamara’s shop as soon as I got home, to ask her to contact Elaine. Tamara wasn’t there. The shop worker didn’t know Elaine. She’d heard of Curt, but didn’t have his number. She said she’d have Tamara call back, except Tamara wasn’t expected back in the shop that night. Since there wasn’t any point in trying to cross the greater Los Angeles valley right smack in the middle of rush hour, I had my dinner, and enjoyed the last of the chicken with mushroom sauce, breathing in the scent that Richard had left in the room, on the things that he’d touched, remembering his smile, the look in his eyes, before I caught the freeway and headed back out to Calabasas.

And I hit traffic. It was dark by the time I got to the exit from the 101 that would lead me to the little hamlet where Elaine lived in her parents’ house. It was true that my family could use that truck to hunt me down. On the long drive out, I realized that it didn’t necessarily have to work that way. I could instead use the truck as bait, to gather information on who was hunting me, how much they wanted me, and what they knew. I thought of Gray Fox, and how this would put me one up on him. So now this was not their trap to catch me, but mine to catch them. And that was a lot more fun.

I parked in the parking lot of a trendy restaurant some miles from Elaine’s place. The dirt lot backed up against a scrubby hill, with a bigger and steeper hill beyond it. I changed in the twilight and leaped the fence, and loped up and along the hillside. I made a loop around the steeper hill, then came down the rocky, scrub-covered slope to the dirt road that ran behind Elaine’s orchard. No one of the wolf kind or the fox kind had been on this hillside. I moved closer down the slope. Finley’s truck was there, parked a hundred yards down the road and around a slight bend from the back fence of the orchard. Finley had made sure that if I circled Elaine’s house before going in, I wouldn’t see his truck, and I wouldn’t catch his scent. As it turned out, I hadn’t bothered to check, since I hadn’t expected Elaine’s call to be Finley’s trap. I told myself to be more careful next time. And of course, this was next time.

So I moved parallel to the road for a couple of hundred yards, to catch any scent of anyone looking for me. I came down to the main road and walked along it on two feet for a half mile, passing the start of the dirt road, some ways from where the truck was parked. I completed the circle without scenting anyone recent, anyone hanging around, anyone who wasn’t a human who passed here often, or a critter who lived in the neighborhood. No one had found the truck yet. So this would be my trap.

I walked on two feet down the road in front of Elaine’s house, and then changed and trotted along her fence line, and turned up the far end of the dirt road behind the orchard. Somewhere back there I remembered seeing a sagging section of the fence. What I wanted to do was change the story that our scent traces told about what had happened in the orchard. Right now, you could scent that Finley had walked from his truck to Elaine’s house, gone over the fence into the yard, and gone into the orchard, where he’d met me. We’d had a big fight on two feet, then he’d changed, and there was blood from the wounds I’d given him on his shoulder, and of course his nose, and a tiny bit from the dart wound. All of this would tell the hunters to go knock on Elaine’s door on two feet, and ask questions. I didn’t want Elaine brought into this, since she knew how to find me. So I had to prevent anyone from finding her, by making the scents tell a different story.