Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (6 page)

“Yes. That is what I want to talk about.” Just ahead a narrow road met our thruway on the right, leading up a barren hillside where development had not yet been committed. “Turn right there,” I told her. “Not too hard, because you don’t want to jerk my hand or anything.” She made the turn as gently as that big truck could.

“Where are we going?” Her voice was not quite steady. In a rising tone, she asked, “What do you want? What are you going to do?”

I couldn’t help it. I grinned. “I’m so hungry. I’m going to eat you for dinner, my little pumpkin!”

Okay, the screams were fun, but the truck weaving out of control, not so much. I was careful not to poke her with the dart, because I really did want to have a conversation, not watch her bleed all over the place. And again, it was lucky for us there was no traffic on that lane going either way because we would have nailed them all. I slipped into the front passenger seat and put a hand on the wheel to steady the truck. Her screams rose into hysteria. Then she got a good look at me, and they began to taper off.

I made myself look small. There are times when wearing the aspect of your second nature like a spirit superimposed over your head, or changing to a wolf so large she hardly fits in the room, and her head looks big enough to swallow someone whole, can go a long way to focusing a conversation. But just now, I didn’t need Elaine any more crazy, and I knew that making myself small didn’t mean I was any less dangerous. It just allowed her to believe it. For the moment. She stopped screaming and stared at me.

“But—you’re just a kid!”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the kid that you
shot
the other night. Pull over here.”

She pulled into a wide place in the road and stopped. I reached for the keys, turned off the engine, and pocketed them.

“Now,” I said, and I let myself grow larger. “You get to explain why you shot me.”

She leaned away from me until her back was to the door. I thought she was going to grab the door handle and make a run for it into the night—and I have to say that the thought of running her down in my wolf nature made me forget, just for a moment, the towering pain in my wrist and ankle, which meant all I could have done was hobble after her anyway. But she didn’t run. Her right hand groped for the end of her braid. I wondered if she had some kind of weapon stashed there. All I could see was a small dark metal clasp. She grabbed it, held it up to me, and made a warding sign with her other hand. “Avaunt ye, demon! Begone!”

I heard a sound like a marshmallow popping, and felt a tiny rush of air. She shook the clasp at me. “Thing of darkness! I command you to depart!”

“Um. No.”

“You—demon—begone!”

“I’m not a demon.”

“You’re…” Behind her specs I saw her blink. “You are a demon. I saw you.” She shook the little charm at me. “This should be working.”

I plucked the clasp from her fingers and leaned forward to examine it. She didn’t try to stop me. She just leaned away as far as her braid would let her. The clasp was a Celtic knot, cast in bronze. I could feel the twinge of a ward there, but it wasn’t very strong. This was supposed to dismiss a demon? Richard wouldn’t have bothered to swat it aside, even before he got his powers back.

“Where did you get this?” I asked her.

“I don’t have to tell you.”

“No?” I lifted a lip at her. “Well, it won’t work on me.” I tossed it and her braid back to her.

“I saw you! I saw—”

“What did you see?”

She swallowed. “You changed into a wolf. You couldn’t do that if you weren’t a demon.”

I smiled, and it was not my nice smile. She leaned back as it turned into something wider, with too many teeth, and she stopped talking. I made that twist in my mind that allowed my other aspect, my wolf self, to rise up and superimpose itself above me, until I wore both my natures at once. A little trick I’d learned from a friend of mine of the bear kind. “Only all my life,” I said. I leaned in to her, and she shrank. She must have been a head taller than me, but now she was the one who made herself small. I asked her, “Have you never met one of the wolf kind before?”

She licked her lips. I wondered if she meant it the same way Baz did. “The wolf kind?”

“One of the two-natured folk, who wear one aspect while the other waits.” She looked over my human head, where my wolf head loomed over her, eyes gleaming, mouth opening. “Well, most of the time.”

Her mouth opened, too. She stared, first at one of my heads, then the other. I could only see her out of my human eyes, since the wolf head wasn’t really there. But it's still a cool trick. She swallowed a couple of times. She started to lift a hand, but then thought the better of it, which is a good thing because whichever head I’m wearing, it bites.

“That's just…”

What? Amazing? Cool? Beautiful? Terrifying. Yeah. I grinned.

“They said—they told me there's a demon in Los Angeles, who has the power to stop the World Snake, but she won’t.” She stared at me over her glasses. “You’ve heard of the World Snake.”

“Oh, yes.” I had heard too damn much about the stupid World Snake.

“And that it's coming here. And that it's going to swallow this whole section of California. That's what you heard, right?”

“Yes, but it's over. It's taken care of. She's not going to come.”

“Oh? That's not what I’ve heard. There's a demon, or a girl who's possessed by a demon—”

“Look,” I told her, “there is no demon. It's gone.”

“Then there was a demon!”

“I told you—”

She leaned forward. “How do you know it's really gone?”

I sighed. Oh, Richard. “Believe me. He's gone.”

She looked over her glasses at me. “I have a very good friend, who can tame this demon, and use its powers for good.”

I leaned my head back against the seat. Telling her things just didn’t seem to be working.

She went on. “Cecil, that's my friend, said he could do so much more with this demon if he had it. So, Holly and I—Holly's my sister—decided we would get it for him, for his birthday.”

“And that is why you shot me?”

“I didn’t…”

“You want to see the hole?” It still really hurt.

“I thought I was shooting a demon,” she said quietly. “Holly asked me to get it for Cecil.”

“For his birthday. And who's this Cecil who wants a live birthday present that bleeds?”

“No—not you, just the demon, I told you.”

“And shooting me was just a means to an end.”

“We were trying to save you!”

“Couldn’t you have asked me first if I needed saving?”

She took that in for a moment. “All right,” she said at last. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shot you.”

There! Was that so hard? Except, now that she’d finally said it, it didn’t seem like anywhere near enough. All of a sudden, I really wanted to bite her. I wanted to taste her blood, and then spit it on the ground.

“So,” I said, in a voice that really meant,
I want to kill you right now
, “tell me about Cecil.”

“It was his birthday on Saturday.”

“Who is he?”

She turned wide eyes on me. “Cecil. You never heard of him? No? He's the leader of the Order of the Higher Nature of Tantric Karma.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“He has a group of followers in Malibu, and he teaches them meditation techniques for advancing upon the Way. Cecil is the Noble Master, the Teacher, the Great-Souled One. He is the incarnation in this century of the Universal One.”

She said all those words, but her voice had spit in it too.

“You don’t believe that,” I pointed out.

“I used to.”

“Then why do you want to give this guy a birthday present?”

“I don’t. Holly does. My sister. And—I told her I would help.”

“Because you had the gun.”

She looked at me. “Because I have experience with large animals. I’m a large animal vet.”

Oh. “So that's why you smell like a camel?”

I swear she flushed. “Yes. There's a camel who's going to drop her calf anytime now. I had to… I gave her a check-up today.”

I looked down at her arm and sniffed. So she had. “And what does Cecil want with a demon?” I asked her.

“Holly said Cecil could use the demon to stop the World Snake.”

“That's done. We did it already.”

“Yeah. Anyway. Cecil says the demon could teach him things about the world that would save him a whole lot of incarnations.”

“But you don’t believe him.”

“I think Cecil's full of shit,” she said.

“And you still shot me?!”

“I said I was sorry! And anyway, I shot a wolf. I really big wolf!” She looked at me sideways. “You didn’t look like you do now.”

It's true, in my wolf form, I have almost my full growth. And in my wolf form, I am pretty big. I almost smiled at her for noticing.

She went on, “Anyway, I’m sorry that you were stuck in the cage for so long. Cecil was supposed to be back on Saturday, and Holly planned a big party, but he was out of town.”

“So you were planning to keep me drugged and chained up for how long?”

“Until Cecil got back and could safely remove the demon.” Her glasses glinted again.

“There is no—” I started, and she held up her hands.

“I know, I know!”

I didn’t think I had convinced her. I didn’t know what more I could do about it except start chewing on her, and somehow I didn’t think that would convince her either that I was not possessed, or that the demon had gone. I should have tried harder, but I hurt, and pain makes you stupid. I let it go. And boy would I be sorry later.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me about these.” I reached back into the footwell, grabbed the bandana and opened it up. The leather bracelets, the tangled wires, the delicate little silver hooks, were still smeared with my gore.

She wasn’t surprised to see them. She knew exactly what they were. All she said was, “How did you get them out?”

“How do you think?” I snarled. I wasn’t going to tell her all my ways.

“You’re the first who's ever done it.”

And suddenly I was very large indeed. She shrank back, gasping again. “Do you mean to tell me,” I said, low in my throat, “that you do this to folks all the time?”

“No—no, that's not what I meant. I meant—”

“Oh,” I was tired, which made me slow. I realized, “Baz couldn’t get his out. He's not two-natured. He's just changed. Who changed him?”

“Sarah. My aunt, Sarah. She's always been able to do that.”

“That woman can change people into animals?”

“And animals into other animals.” Elaine got a little reminiscent smile on her face. “It's fun.”

“Fun?”

Her smiled faded. “It can be fun.”

“Who else has she done it to?”

“Did you see her horse?”

“The old bay in the barn?”

For a moment she had a trace of a grin. “Aunt Sarah tells everyone her ex just walked out on her. And he did. In a way.”

“And you help her with this?”

“No, no, I just treat them.”

“Who put these in me?” My wrist and my ankle still hurt, badly. You don’t want to be lame, if you’re a wolf. You really, really don’t. As my anger rose, I began to grow.

It took her a moment, her fear peaking again strong enough for me to smell it in my human form. She curled back against the door and almost wailed, “I did. I wanted to help get the demon— for Cecil.” She added, “I’m sorry.” But that wasn’t enough. “Oh, God. It's all fucked up now.”

It isn’t usual to change form without deciding to, but I found myself staring at her through my yellow wolf eyes, my butt crunched up against the door as I took up more than half of the cab. Elaine crouched down against the door with a cry, turning away from me, warding me with her hand. I contemplated the sheen of sweat on her neck. I though how easily I could pierce the the cartilege of her throat with my teeth, how the blood would stream, and that it would taste good. If I killed her, I would be certain that she never hurt me again. Or I could at least bite her a little. I could hurt her the way she hurt me.

I changed back. It took her a few moments to stop crying in fear, and sit up again to look at me. I held out the bandana. “Did you make these things?”

“No, God, no. I don’t have any magic. I’m just a vet.”

“An evil vet. Just what I need. So, who does make these things?” I lifted up one of the little hooks. I could still feel the tingle. Whatever it was, it was still working.

“I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“Listen, evil vet, I just spent five days locked in a cage. If you don’t want to be the one to pay for that, tell me who is.”

She lifted her hands. “All right. I can’t tell you his name.”

“You can’t?

“He's a metallurgist. He teaches metalwork at Pasadena City College. Holly—my sister Holly knows him.”

Something was cockeyed about what she was telling me, but in the shape I was in, I wasn’t sharp enough to figure it out. I wrapped up the silver hooks, the wire and bracelets in the bandana, and put them in my pocket. Pasadena was not that big. I was going to find that guy.

Elaine said, “There really was a demon, though. Wasn’t there?”

I looked out into the darkness. Shapes of bushes and a few trees were silhouetted against the sky. In the back of my throat I still remembered the scent of Richard in his wolf form. I remembered him running in my tracks, fighting by my side. The demon had played me in every possible way, and wooing me in wolf form was just one of his wiles. But it was still real. He had been there. “He's gone,” I told her.

“Can you get him back?”

“He's not coming back. Look, if you don’t believe in your Cecil guy, why do you want the demon anyway?”

“Holly says that with the demon, Cecil thinks he can bring us peace on earth in our time.” She looked at me, and her glasses glinted again. “I think that's worth a try, don’t you? Even if Cecil is a king-sized, asswinding jerk.”

I tried to imagine Richard instructing a great-souled leader of Tantric meditation in the nature of the universe. Not Richard as I’d known him, the beautiful youth, trapped and powerless, but the writhing conscious mass of weighted and spiraling darkness he became, when he recovered his powers. The hair on my neck rose, remembering his demon form. Maybe he’d laugh. Or, maybe he’d just make lamp oil out of this Cecil, to make a pinprick of light in whatever universe of blackness he dwelled in now. Or he might bring us eternal peace. Very still, very quiet, and very dark. That would be bad. I said, “I don’t think you want to study the One True Way from a demon. No.”