“You see how easy it is for me? You see what fate awaits you?” He waved a hand at his older daughter. “You may release her, my sons. I am finished with her.”
Maryam’s arms and legs were freed from the restraints and she was lifted off the table. She went and stood beside her brothers with her head bowed. The light was out of her eyes. I guessed she’d be a really good girl now.
“And now,” al Hassan waved the air again. “It is the turn of our honored guest.”
The boys started pulling me toward the table. I pulled back and for a moment, stayed where I was. “I thought you wanted the name of the demon?” I asked. I was pleased to hear my voice sound hard and cold. It’s not, the gods know, what I was feeling at that precise second. But he didn’t need to know that.
“Ah.” Al Hassan lifted his hands, one still holding the small rose bottle, in one of his theatrical gestures that made me want to cut his goddamn hands off. “My memory,” he cried. “What was I thinking? The excitement of possessing the soul of a werewolf—”
“Not yet you don’t.” The sons had begun to pull again, and I was losing ground.
“That I shall soon possess the soul of a werewolf,” al Hassan amended, “has made me forget my purpose.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “You held that demon a hundred and twenty-four years and all of a sudden you forgot that you’re trying to possess it.” I leaned to one side and grabbed the closest guy’s shoulder in my teeth and bit down hard. I felt flesh tear, I tasted blood, but the guy didn’t even slow down. It was depressing.
Al Hassan said, “You may as well release him. They hardly feel pain in that state.”
I had reached the table. I wrapped my leg around one of the corners, trying to hook my chain on something so I couldn’t go any further.
“Tell me.” He waved a hand, and the guys stopped pushing. “How is it that you gained possession of that which I have so long desired? What book, what incantation, whose grymoire did you use to learn the creature’s name and bind it to you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I asked.
He stepped another pace toward me, he met my eyes full on, and this time all the kindliness was gone. The illusion of a middle-aged man slipped for just a second, and I saw him, old, hard as nails, crusted with cruelty and malice, greed and power. He let me see him like that, and he smiled. His hands lifted, and the illusion of the middle-aged, kindly scholar was back in place.
“You do not yet take me seriously,” he said. “But I assure you, you should. Perhaps, if you see a little more of my power, you will be convinced.” He peeled the stopper out of the bottle that he held in his hand. Maryam cried out as he raised it to one eye and pressed it there. His eye lit up with a rosy glow, as though a light had come on inside it. Behind me, Maryam whimpered one more time, as her father stoppered the mouth of the bottle with his thumb, and then moved it to his other eye and held it there, until the light in the bottle was entirely gone.
He turned back to me then, his face illuminated unnaturally from within. He looked younger, vibrant, powerful. Even his beard was black again. He lifted his hands and his sons stepped back. He spoke some words and pointed at me hard—and I felt a concussion as though I’d been hit all over at once with a big stick. I slammed back into the wall. The luminosity died from his face. Maryam, too, was leaning against the wall, crying as though she had just witnessed her own death.
He glared at her for a moment. “I don’t usually let them see that. It’s better to allow them to hope.”
I was still trying to breathe, waiting for the pain to subside. He kept talking. There was a drumming in my ears, far away.
“They understand just enough to know that they could be worse off than they are now. They do have something more to lose. Maryam, unfortunately…” He shook his head sadly. “Now, I’ll have no further use for her. A pity. She was a good girl. One of my favorites. And her mother…” He smiled in reminiscence.
I thought it was time to move on. I took a breath. “So what you’re saying is, you’ll trade me my soul for the name of my demon.”
He looked surprised. “Is that not what I have been saying all along? But now you know you must obey me, that you have, in fact, no choice at all.”
My heart was pounding hard in my ears as the realization reached from my gut to my brain that this guy was going to cut me apart. It sounded like drumbeats. I could call Richard to me now, just by that name, but what would come? The new-made boy who had died in this house at least once already? Or the creature of darkness he’d been the moment before he disappeared? The vision of Richard as I’d last seen him, pulsing with darkness, his eyes as wild and knowing as death, grew in my mind, and with the picture I understood: I’d really had no idea what I was dealing with. But this kindly old fraud in front of me probably would. And this critter was the last thing on Earth that I’d want something like that working for. He already had way too much power. Any more, and he’d probably do for us all.
Between the rock and the hard place, the frying pan and the fire, there is still the choice. There’s the choice of what kind of end you want to make. Do you want to sizzle, or do you want to dance? Do you want to give in, or take your chance?
“Lay her on the table, my children,” al Hassan said gently. He lifted the chain from around his neck and took up the little scissors once again. “I will make the first cut, and we will see if you still remember. I will make the second cut, and I will ask you again. I will make the third cut, and you will call upon your demon to save you.” I was fighting with the guys as hard as I could. They were falling over themselves, but I had the table between me and some of them, and my foot was still holding onto to the table leg for dear life. But at this I met his eyes. He thought he had me. I saw it in his face. He knew that before I let him cut out my soul, I would call my demon to come and save me. And when I’d pronounced his name, al Hassan would have it, and then he would kill me. I smiled. I guess he didn’t know everything after all. He didn’t know me. I changed.
I had to pay attention, as I never had before, to where my feet were as they changed shape, and as my joints changed their orientation. I didn’t want to get caught up or twisted or broken as my alteration became inevitable. But it still had to be fast, and it was. I unhooked my foot from around the table, stepped out of my manacles, took a huge chomp out of the arm of the guy who was holding me the hardest while shrinking away from the other, and slipped my handcuffs at the same time. And then I leaped at the nearest child of al Hassan, expecting at any moment to find myself at the bottom of a pile of his sons and daughters, attacking me from every direction and holding me down by their sheer weight. I made my way through the press of people, snapping here, tearing there, clawing four ways at once, trying to reach al Hassan, which was the only way, I thought, to prevent my death in that little room. The pile-up I expected didn’t come. A lot of al Hassan’s servants and protectors did not seem to be facing me when I attacked them. There was a banging and a crashing in my ears, and all the shouting and screaming I anticipated—and more—and then through a clear space in the crowd, I saw a bear.
It is said of the bear kind that they are brave and strong, as cunning in battle as they are tenacious, and that it is best, on the whole, not to incur their wrath. All this I know to be true. When I had a moment to notice such things, I saw that the door to the workroom that led to the hallway was torn from its hinges—bears are strong—and that there were two piles of al Hassan’s children, one lying at the feet of the bear to his left, and one to his right, and none of these people were moving. The bear was on his hind legs, batting one way and then another, which accounted for the distribution of his fallen opponents. The door that led to the library was rocking, there was more noise, and another bear fell into the room onto all fours, carrying with him a pile of men who seemed to have been trying to bar his entrance. He rose to his hind legs as well, and began to dispose of all who came in his way.
I decided then that I like bears very much.
Crowds of people poured into the room from both doorways. I continued to tear up anyone who came near me, but more and more I had leisure to look around because no one was coming near me. The people, I realized, were not trying to attack the bears. They were trying to get past the bears, and once past, they did one of two things. They attacked the shelves that held all those luminous bottles, dragged them down and smashed each shining vessel so that the crashing of glass was a constant percussion beneath the screaming, the shouting, the roaring of the bears, and the beat of the drums.
Drums? I could hear them now, pounding away in a fervent heartbeat and riding the upbeat against the cacophony of the riot. More troops were beyond in the hallway then, I realized. That left me with one more task to do. I looked for al Hassan. When I fixed on him as my prey, something broke open inside me with a roar, and I was riding a riot of my own as I tore around the room hunting for a sign of where he had gone. I didn’t have to go far. I found his hand on the floor. There was another pile of the bodies of his children, but this one was writhing and intent and alive, and beneath it lay their father, Ibrahim al Hassan, who had enslaved and devoured them. They had turned on him at last. I saw his hand clawing for purchase. I saw it convulse. I saw it relax, and flap easily one way and another as his burden of children pounded at him with their fists, and tore at him with their fingers and their little teeth.
His two small daughters, their veils askew, were the first to burrow out of the melee. His other children, soulless, were slower to realize that they had accomplished their task. The first little daughter waited for the second, and when that one emerged, stood looking at her speculatively. Tangled in her fingers was a slender golden chain from which still dangled the tiny pair of golden scissors.
That was it. I changed. I walked over to that cute little girl while she was still sizing up her sister, and pulled the scissors and the chain out of her hands. She cried out and turned to me, to find herself facing someone—something—a lot bigger than her, and pretty darn mad. She threw herself backwards in terror against her sister, and then both of them, screaming high and hard, scurried away.
When I turned back, Jacob the bear was standing next to me in the form of a man. He nodded in greeting. “Was that necessary?” he glanced again at the two girls screaming their way out of the crowded room and back at me.
“Yes, it was,” I told him. “It absolutely was.” I twisted the golden scissors in my hand, trying to ensure that they’d never cut anything again. It wasn’t enough. I went to the counter and lit the gas burner to heat up the little ceramic bowl. I held it close to the flame to get it hot as soon as possible. “Don’t let any of them come near me,” I told the bear, “or we may have to do this all over again some day.”
I didn’t notice how many of al Hassan’s more ambitious children had to be batted away. I was intent on my task. I melted down the scissors and the chain until you couldn’t tell one from the other. Then I spilled the gold in droplets over the counter, onto the floor, onto the clothes of those who had finished fighting and were just lying around, until gold mingled with the blood in the room, so you’d think maybe a griffon had been fighting.
“We should make sure all those bottles are smashed,” I told Jacob, while I was making sure the evil little tool could never be made whole again.
Jacob looked at me with his head to one side. He kept glancing from my face to the top of my head and back. He was smiling a little, but he also looked impressed. “You should perhaps put your head on straight, first?”
I looked down, and up, and started laughing. “It’s your fault,” I said to Jacob. “You showed me that trick. I didn’t know I’d learned it so well already.” I was wearing both my aspects, my wolf and my human one, simultaneously, one above the other. No wonder those little girls had screamed. And I thought it was my natural authority.
I pulled myself together, looked at Jacob. “All right?” He nodded. “Very good.”
Al Hassan’s children, those still on their feet, were assaulting the shelves that held the luminous bottles. I was about to join in the grabbing and smashing when the drums from the corridor reached a crescendo, and a familiar face appeared in the doorway. I found myself smiling. I realized I did have a co-worker smile. Or maybe, this was my friendly smile.
Yvette was wearing a stylish African cap over her many beaded braids. The closed, hard look was gone from her face. She looked happy and powerful. She wore her drum on a sling at her front, and as she pounded it, she danced. She came into the workroom, glanced at the bears, glanced at the piles of bodies, at the blood and the gold and the broken glass, and she finished her drumming with a articulation that sounded like a comment on the whole event. Then she beat out a final phrase and stopped, and silence fell.
Silence, except for the groaning, the shouting, the moaning, and the smashing of glass. Over all this she saw me and beamed. “Amber!”
I thought she was going to hug me when she reached me, but her drum was in the way. She grasped both my hands. “Why didn’t you wait for us? I told you I would help you.”
“The bears brought you,” I said foolishly, smiling. Through the corridor I could see a third bear, lumbering after his fleeing prey, and two more drummers, Yvette’s friends from the Wicca circle.
Jacob came to stand beside her, put an arm around her shoulders in a way I could see wasn’t new to her. Yvette looked awfully smug. “She brought us,” Jacob amended.
“I thought you’d be needing help. We would have got here sooner, but you left too fast. So, it took us awhile to find out where you’d gone. Didn’t I tell you I was going to help you?”
Maybe she had. I didn’t remember. Wolves don’t hunt with other kinds. It hadn’t occurred to me that her offer was serious. But I was in a new place, and I was learning new ways. Perhaps these were the ways of the humankind. “Thanks,” I said. “You were in the nick of time.”
Yvette grinned and beat out her pleasure on her djembe.
We smashed the rest of the bottles. The luminosity in each of them held in the scattered shards on the floor for a long moment, and then went out like a falling star.
“I hope,” I said, almost to myself, “they find their way home.”
The third bear joined us when there was only one bottle left. He metamorphosed into Aaron before my eyes as he kicked aside the broken door with a bear’s foot, and shoved a crawling young man of his way with the foot of a man. “Are we finished here?”
“One more thing,” I said. I took off at a run, reaching out onto four legs instead of two, since that would be faster. I had to know.
The spells that kept me from smelling inside that house were wafting away in the fresh air from every broken window and smashed door. I tracked my way down the passageways, through the kitchen, to the wine cellar, to the basement stairs. I charged down headlong, caught myself up at the bottom, stood up onto two legs, and went to the box where Maryam had indicated that Richard was kept. The circle, the pentagram, the signs of ward and restraint, the sword and the wand, seemed suddenly justified to contain that being of writhing darkness that had worn Richard’s form, the last moment I saw him. I hesitated. Richard had come to me when I called for him. The talisman that had preserved my senses against all the spells that al Hassan had laid on his house, had released the dark energy that might well be his true form. I’d come down here to make sure Richard was all right. If he was in that box, he was not all right. But what if it was not Richard in that box?
I kicked aside the circle, smudged open the pentagram, and tossed the blade and wand aside. I fumbled a few moments with the complicated latches, and then opened the box. He had been there. I smelled his scent, and I smelled his desperate fear. But the box was empty. I tried to believe that was good.
Just to be sure, I made my way through the house all the way to the rooms at the top, but the children had already been there. I found the room where al Hassan had done his experiments, because Richard’s sweat and his blood were still evident. The sumptuous rooms were wrecked. I didn’t find any tools. I went back downstairs.
I joined up with my rescuers after that. Yvette and her drummer friends from the Wicca group were standing in a circle in the hall while the three bears loped around, chasing the few remaining children of al Hassan who had not hidden or fled. Then we walked out of the house and into the morning light, and the free air, and all the scents that tell the tales of the world. The drummers were laughing, giddy and proud of our success. The bears, Jacob, Jonathan, and Aaron, and Sol, whom we met up with in front of the house, seemed pleased and satisfied with their morning’s activity.
I made sure, before we left, that al Hassan was dead. Richard had believed him dead too, at one time, and it had proved untrue. I supposed a sorcerer such as al Hassan would have defenses and illusions to help him in a pinch. I guessed his children knew that too. When I went to look, there wasn’t enough of him left to make a meal for a puppy. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. I wished I had done the job, for Richard’s sake, but I knew justice when I saw it. Al Hassan had raised up his own executioners.
The gates stood wide open, never to be closed again without a whole lot of repair work. They had come in two cars, and they piled back into them, while I trotted down the street to find my car where I’d parked it a few blocks away. From a trot I slowed to a walk. From a walk, to an amble. I was really, really hungry. I was more relieved than I cared to admit that al Hassan wasn’t going to do experiments on my soul or on my body to extract my demon’s name. I was tired. And it wasn’t over yet. In my pocket I held, hidden in the palm of my hand, the last remaining bottle, a small one, sky blue.
I followed the others back to Tamara’s shop, where we celebrated with pizza and soda and coffee and beer. The coffee was awful. And there was drummer boasting, and bear boasting, and bear boasting will beat any other boasting in the world. To hear the bears tell about it, each one of them had separately taken Ibrahim al Hassan’s house apart, beaten off the hordes of his children, and torn out the sorceror’s throat. The drummers told their side, in higher voices against the background of the bears’ unceasing gloating, how their drumming had opened a hole in the defenses of the house that had enabled the bears to break down the gates and the doors and scatter the children. I didn’t know what the defenses were, except the one that kept me from using my chief senses. I nodded and smiled and thanked them and agreed again and again that they had come just in time. They’d earned their celebration. It was the least I could do. You wouldn’t believe how much pizza a bear can eat.
When the twelfth large pizza box was opened in front of me, Yvette came and sat down beside me, the better to reach for her share, I thought, before the bears got in and there was none left.
“Great hat,” I told her.
She glowed. “Tamara gave it to me. She says…” She leaned forward to tell me, out of hearing of the others. “She says I have power in my drumming, that the ancestors speak through my hands. She says it’s a gift I have, and I’m always welcome here.” She took a huge slice of pizza, with four kinds of meat on it, in both hands. “This is the best time I ever had in my life.” She bit off the pointed end. “You ever need help again, you tell me.”
“I will,” I said. “And, thanks.”
She flapped her full hands at me. “Anytime. Next time, though, you tell us where you’re going, and we won’t have to haul a diviner out of his bed to find you.”
“Tamara knew.”
“Yeah, but she was sleeping.”
Tamara’s sleep was more important than the diviner’s, it seemed.
Tamara was back at the hospital with her mother that morning. The store was open, with friends running the shop. We sat in the back room until the pizza was gone, and then I thanked them all again, and made my excuses, and drove home.
Richard’s scent, though faint now, was still discernable in my apartment. The smells he’d made in the kitchen were still there, as were those that remained from the things we’d done on the bed. I took a long shower, set the alarm clock, and lay down. After a while, I came conscious long enough to climb out of the blankets and change my form, turn around until I found the right configuration, and lie down again. I didn’t want human thoughts, or human dreams, right now.
I slept wolf-style, in short naps. When the moon rose, I changed again and reached out to turn off the alarm clock before it buzzed. I got dressed, put on my jacket against the cold, and slipped the shining blue bottle into my pocket. I drove up to Hellman Park as the gibbous moon was lifting off the horizon. The park closes at dusk, so I left my car a ways down the street and, holding the little bottle safe in my hand, inside the pocket, I climbed the steep hill and walked back along the ridge and down into the bowl where the Wiccans met.