Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (32 page)

The fence to the old orchard had been repaired a number of times, but for the last few years no one had bothered. I found the sagging boards, got up on two feet and manipulated them until I’d made a gap. I changed and went through on four feet.

It was easy to find the place where Finley had fallen. He’d lain there bleeding for quite a while, spreading his scent with his blood, sweat, saliva, and fur. In my wolf form, I rolled in this, until I carried his scent on my back and sides.

Then I went back and forth through the gap in the fence, until you’d swear that both of us had come in this way. If someone found the place along the way where Finley had touched the top of the wall jumping over into Elaine’s yard, they wouldn’t know what to make of it, because it didn’t fit the story. I went out onto the dirt road and wrote a new story. I trotted over to Finley’s truck, and then on the way back I rolled every few yards, rubbing my back on the dirt road. In a day or two, when the wind and weather, fog and traffic had erased the marks, a scent tracker would be led to believe that I’d met Finley at his car, that we’d both come back this way on two feet, and then we’d gone into the orchard through this fence, and fought all over the place, on two feet and on four.

On four feet, I rolled over the ground where I’d dragged Finley to the garage. I left a few more odd traces of Finley in the yard, and then came back into the orchard and messed up the story some more. There’d been a big fight, obviously. And then I’d run away straight up the hill across the dirt road from the orchard. I laid that trail, and then I laboriously laid the scents that would tell them that Finley had followed me in his wolf form, up to the summit of the hill. I took both his scent and mine up and back down the trail I was laying. When I got back to the dirt road I walked back the way I’d come on two feet, until I crossed a stream. I changed onto four feet and followed the stream for miles, in and out of the water, and then made a huge circuit around the whole base of that mountain, and then ran up to the top of it and caught up my trail and Finley’s again, and took it in another direction.

My kind are air as well as ground scent trackers, so water by itself won’t cause us to lose a trail. What confuses a tracker the most is circles. One trail crossing another, concentric circles with tracks crossing through them, makes the path hopelessly confused. I made four concentric circles, the first two a hundred yards or so apart, and each succeeding one farther apart until the last two were miles from each other. Then I crossed through all of them again and again, laying spokes across these great wheels, with both my scent and Finley’s, in different directions. It would take a month for someone tracking this to figure out who was going where, and in that month the traces would degrade and make it even harder to understand. Some trails I went over again and again, some only once, touching the ground, or the foliage, as little as possible.

You can fool a tracker into thinking a trail is fresher because it is stronger. I confused the story for ten square miles moving out from Elaine’s orchard. Ha. Let them try to figure that out. This is what I’d done when I’d run away from home. I’d laid tracks of concentric circles for weeks beforehand, and then joined them up just before I left, so they’d be tracking me in circles for a month, while I got away by car. I couldn’t say I wasn’t having fun. I giggled to myself every time I crossed the track again, with yet another misleading trail.

I got home a couple of hours before dawn, even before the morning rush hour began. I took a hot shower and fell into bed for a few hours’ sleep before I had to go to work. I drifted into dreams, my feet twitching as I ran my trails over again while I slept.

At work the next day I was as slow and dragging as I’d been hyper the day before. Ariadne was amused. Yvette gave her an “I told you so” look. I planned a quick dinner after work, and then three or four hours sleep before I headed back to Calabasas to see if anyone had walked into my trap.

Instead, Jason arrived about fifteen minutes before I was due to clock out, looming through the shop doorway and staring askance at the cat on the counter. Ariadne didn’t have any students on Fridays, so she was showing Yvette how to draw the bow across a violin, and we were all, even Minto, being polite about the sounds she made. Jason greeted Ariadne respectfully. Yvette turned at the sound of his voice and lit up at the sight of him, though being on duty she did not throw herself into his arms, as she usually did.

“Hey! I didn’t know you were going to be up this way tonight.”

“Madam Tamara sent me.” He turned to me. “Madam Tamara would like to see you.”

“Oh? When?” A drive down to Costa Mesa that evening was really not in my plans. I’d had a long night, and I was in for another one later.

“Now, of course,” the bear replied.

“Now?” I said, and I put every bit of resistance I could into the syllable.

“Yes,” he said, meeting my gaze. “Now.”

A wolf can take a bear. Bears know that, too. The trouble is, what’s left of the wolf afterwards is usually not worth much.

As it turned out, Tamara was in Whittier, at the home of Lady Fireheart. I drove there with Jason hunched in the passenger seat giving directions and making unspoken but unmistakable complaints about the head and leg room. I felt the wards guarding Lady Fireheart’s house from two streets away. I went past the house and parked in front of the next one. Wards incline you that way, and hers were strong. The name on the mailbox was Ortiz. Jason opened the front door without knocking and led the way through another powerful set of wards that parted for us, through the living room redolent with ancient incense, with floor to ceiling bookshelves on every inch of wall space, all stuffed with books. On a few empty surfaces heavy glazed pots were displayed. We passed a couple of young kids in front of the TV who didn’t look up from the computer game they were playing together.

In the kitchen, Madam Tamara sat at the table cutting vegetables with a long knife, while Lady Fireheart fried meat on the stove. Jason made a slow circuit of the room, sampling whatever food he could reach. I stood in the doorway with my arms folded, making my own unspoken statement.

Madam Tamara looked up at me. Her hair was twisted up in a simple blue cotton kerchief, and she wore a long white cotton shirt over a pair of light blue trousers. She took in my expression and asked, “What did the bear tell you?” She shot a look at Jason, who looked unconcerned.

“That you wanted to see me. Now. Tonight.”

Lady Fireheart gave the bear a look. “Trust Jason to put it like that.”

“We do have a few questions to put to you,” Madam Tamara said. Her voice was remote, not friendly.

“Yes,” Lady Fireheart turned to me, the hand without the wooden spoon in it open. “But I sent Jason to ask if you would join us for dinner. If you please. People of power are so prickly!” She slapped Jason’s hand away from one of the pots she was stirring. I thought she was brave, to come between a bear and food, even in her own kitchen. Also, whatever she was cooking smelled really good. And anyway, it wouldn’t do me any good to leave this early for Calabasas and my stake-out of Finley’s truck. If I left in an hour and a half, I’d get there at the same time as if I left right now, since rush hour was just gearing up.

“Thanks,” I said. I stepped into the kitchen. Lady Fireheart turned back to the stove. She was barefoot, and wore jeans cut off below her knees, and an old t-shirt. She told me to call her Susan.

“Perhaps you would like to tell us,” Madam Tamara began, but the sorceress interrupted, admonishing her with the spoon.

“Wait until after dinner. Everyone will be in a better mood.”

“I won’t,” I said. I went to stand across from Tamara at the table. “What do you want to ask me?”

Susan turned and pointed the ladle at me. “After dinner.” She licked it before it dripped red sauce on the floor, but I got the message. Susan might be making dinner for family and friends, but Lady Fireheart was still in the room.

Susan made vast amounts of taco salad, so there were leftovers despite the two starving children called in (over and over) from their game in the living room, the silent gangly boy who was my age who emerged from one of the bedrooms, and the bear at the table. I had several helpings myself. After dinner she put a plate of homemade butterscotch brownies on the table while the kids cleared the plates to the sink. They grabbed their share and went back to their game. Jason grabbed more than his share and cadged a ride from the boy back to Whittier, to hang around Amadeus Music until Yvette got off work. Susan made a pot of sharp, smoky tea and served it to me and Madam Tamara.

“We have to ask you,” she said to me, as she sat back down at the table, “if you know anything about what happened to Keith.”

“Keith?” I asked.

“The boy who called your demon’s name in the parking lot.”

“Oh.”

“No one has seen him since that night,” Susan said. “His mother is a friend of mine. I don’t know what to tell her.”

What was I supposed to tell them? That he was either drifting somewhere in the universe where Richard was the wind, the stones, and the spaces between, or still falling down a bottomless pit to the center of this or another world? Or maybe in a hospital in Poland, with a broken arm, a bite mark, and a case of amnesia?

“Two other people who were there that night are missing, too,” Tamara added.

Whoops, I thought. So he had gotten to eat a few. “Any Thunder Mountain Boys?” I asked.

“Funny you should mention them,” Susan said. “There’s been some kind of explosion at their studio. They said it was a terrorist attack.”

I started to laugh. “And it blew a big hole in the studio floor, right?”

“How did you know?”

“Are any of them dead?” I asked.

Tamara and Susan shook their heads.

“Then let them be grateful. Richard owed them.”

“You admit your demon is at work in this?” Tamara asked.

“No,” I said. “You took their oaths, didn’t you? Anyone who’s missing, that’s what’s at work. They saw what they were dealing with. They had fair warning.”

“That’s true,” Susan said.

I grabbed another one of the brownies. “So, what’s the new plan for dealing with the World Snake? Any meetings ahead? New workings? Coordinated power raisings?” Tamara and Susan looked at each other. I sat back. “So. You believe me. You finally believe me. The World Snake isn’t coming.”

“It was a very convincing demonstration,” Susan allowed.

“And various diviners have concurred.” Tamara added.

“She’s turned,” I finished. “She’s not coming. Ha.” I grabbed the biggest brownie left on the plate. After all, I deserved it.

“Then, is your demon still with you?”

I shook my head, my mouth full. “He’s gone. He’s not coming back.” I swallowed. “Unless someone calls him. I know I’m not going to.” I met Tamara’s eyes. “Ever again. He said he’d eat anyone who did.” She nodded. That was good enough.

“We heard a rumor that you attacked Darius,” Susan said. She poured us all more tea. “Is it true?”

“I attacked him?”

“You bit him in the skull,” Tamara stated.

“Says who?” I wondered who had seen us.

“I say so,” a voice spoke from the doorway.

I looked up, and there was Darius. Kat McBride followed him into the kitchen, and set a chair for him. Susan went to hug him. He and Tamara nodded to one another. I sat there grinning like a fool.

“He has a lot of questions,” Kat told us, “so I thought I’d bring him along. The people who have been helping him found him in his shop yesterday morning, taking inventory.”

“They told me I’d been attacked and robbed,” Darius said. His voice was thinner than I remembered, from when I’d first met him. He seemed frail and wan, and the bandage on the top of his head looked like an absurd little hat. But it was Darius, not some empty shell. He fixed his gaze on me. “You attacked me the other night. You bit me in the head. What did you do to my store?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t do anything to your store.”

Helmet-woman from the bookstore followed him in and was introduced as Patricia. The talkative biker we’d met at the bookstore loomed in after her, carrying a case of beer. He said he was called Terry. More chairs were brought, the circle expanded. Susan produced a second pan of brownies, which quickly disappeared.

“You were angry with me, for what I asked of you,” Darius said to me. “But I didn’t think you were going to come back and attack me.”

“She attacked you?” The biker stared down at me. “Which time?”

“It wasn’t an attack,” I tried to tell him. “I did put a hole in your skull. And it worked! You’re better now.”

Some of the women from Susan’s Wicca group came in. They made greetings and then went on through the kitchen and set up tables on the patio outside. Helmet-woman sat down close to Darius, and explained to him that he had had some kind of stroke, and had been nearly unresponsive for weeks.

“What are you talking about?” He stabbed a finger at me. “She came to my shop a couple of days ago. She was looking for Marlin, and I explained to her that the World Snake is our first priority. And it has to be.”

“Ask him what day it is,” I suggested.

Darius heard me. “What day—? It’s March 18th.”

In the silence that followed, we could hear the women talking out on the patio, and voices in the living room that signaled more people arriving.

“Darius, it’s May 6,” Susan told him. “The World Snake has been turned, you’re back, and everything’s all right.”

“It’s… ? No,” he said, shaking his head.

“You trepanned him,” Susan said to me. “What made you think to do that?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to bring Richard into this discussion, because that would confuse the question of whether or not he was truly gone. “I just thought it might help.”

More people came into the kitchen and I got up to make room for them. I let the crowd push me out onto the patio, where a string of bright lights criss-crossing the yard had just been lit against the twilight, and tables were being loaded with snacks and drinks. At the end of the patio a building with a roof and three walls stood next to a huge brick oven. I wandered over to the shed where shelves of ceramic pots stood, identical plates of fresh brown clay, rows of cups, pots, bowls in pale brown, without decoration, and bright glazed finished teapots, vases, platters, more mugs and bowls, with slashes of fierce color, or intricate decoration, all drying row upon row in the open air. Lady Fire-heart was a potter.