Dragon Call (9 page)

Alissa went to close the windows. “You need
to establish some boundaries,” she announced. “Put them on a pair
of leashes.”

“Great, but how do I do that?”

Diane, meanwhile, had retrieved the t-shirt
Cora slept in. She dangled it from her index finger. Cora narrowed
her eyes. “What?”

Diane grinned. “What’d you do, plop your
naked ass down in my circle?”

“Yes, Diane, that’s
exactly
what I
did. I also scooted around marking it with my scent. You do know
you’re going to hell for enjoying this so much, right?”

Alissa laughed, but pressed the issue of the
dragons back to the forefront. “Bickering later, binding now. We
need to pry them away from you to buy some time for us to figure
out a more permanent solution.”

“Alright, alright. Did Ma say anything
useful?” Diane asked. She remained out of arm’s reach, Cora
noticed.

“I couldn’t make much sense of it all. She
wasn’t very worried and seemed to think it’s perfectly natural for
me—and you, too, by the way, so laugh all you want now, ‘cause
payback’s a bitch.”

Alissa glanced at Diane and pressed her lips
together. “We’ll see about that,” she announced. “For now, however,
we need items suitable for leashes. Cora, give me the belt on that
robe. Diane, find something to serve as a second leash. We have to
keep them separated?” she asked, looking to Cora for
clarification.

The dragons had not backed off from their
amorous attentions. One of them nosed against the underside of her
breast and another was busy trying to tease her thighs apart. Cora
clutched the knot at her belt. “Find something else. I’m not giving
them an easy way in. Is this going to take long?”

“Not too,” Alissa said.

“Alissa’s quite good at binding,” Diane
called from her bedroom. “Most amateur witches can sufficiently
bind spirit to spirit, but she can bind spirit to material. It’s
fascinating.”

Cora, to her dismay, was slowly becoming more
aware of the dragons on a mental and emotional level. She could
feel faint traces of rivalry and realized they were competing with
one another for her affection. Competition between the two did not
reassure her.

“Di, come on!” Alissa called.

A moment later, Diane re-emerged from the
bedroom. She had a pair of long silk scarves, one red and one
white. She handed them to Alissa. “Use these instead of that belt.
The colors might make them stronger.”

“I called Ma back,” she said to Cora once
Alissa had gone to work on her spellcrafting. “We have a problem.
Two problems.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Two
more
problems.”

“What’s going on?” Alissa interrupted before
Cora could ask.

“The dragons have owners—”

“Yeah, so Ma said.”

“And they’re on their way to pick up their
runaway pets right now.”

Chapter Nine

“This is not happening,” Cora muttered
fifteen minutes later. Alissa knotted the red scarf around her
right wrist and the white one around her left wrist.

“The knots at your wrists will keep them from
actually getting to you,” Alissa said, “just like the knots at the
ends will keep them from getting away. You know how a short leash
marks the limits of a dog’s run space? That’s how the scarves are
working.”

“It’ll keep them long enough for me to give
them back?” Cora asked.

“It’ll keep them as long as the knots are
intact.”

“You can’t just give them back,” Miranda
interrupted. Her voice crackled over the living room speaker phone.
“They belong to you right now. And don’t you let those men try to
take them, either. Make them honor their end of the ritual.”

Cora threw a pained look in Diane’s
direction. Diane, from her post at the window, watching the street
below for signs that the dragons’ owners—Dragonlords, her mother
kept calling them—were on the way, rolled her eyes in
commiseration.

“I saw that.” Miranda sniffed. “You should be
happy that you’re experiencing this part of the tradition
together.”

“I have an idea,” Cora said. “Why don’t you
explain exactly what this ritual and tradition thing is all about,
since all we’re doing right now is waiting for other people to show
up and participate?”

“Explain what? You know this already. The
Dragonlords were tricked into an eternal binding by their mates—the
Dragonkeepers. Us. Since a great deal of our abilities come from
our descent from the Dragonlord bloodlines, we have to maintain
contact with them, if for nothing more than reproduction, or risk
our own extinction.”

“I don’t think that was ever mentioned in our
history lessons,” Cora said. She looked to Diane for clarification.
Diane shrugged helplessly.

“Not in so many words. You two were just
little girls. I always intended to tell you about it when you got
older, but you went off to college and Diane has her own
thing.”

“What thing?” Diane asked, exasperated.

“You know, your…thing,” Miranda said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking
about.”

The dragons were not pleased with their
present situation. Cora heard them snapping at one another in her
mind, and they strained at the ends of their leashes. The scarves
whipped about with wild abandon. Cora caught Alissa watching the
red and white ties warily.

“Everybody should relax,” she said. Her
fingers tingled where the scarves occasionally cut off circulation
to her hands. She rubbed the needles from her fingers. “Take deep
breaths. We’ll sit down and discuss this with the, uh, Dragonlords,
like rational adults, and then we’ll laugh about it over
dinner.”

Tradition be damned. Cora yearned for the
not-so-long-ago days when the only magic she could create revolved
around a knack for number crunching. City budgets were much safer
than women’s moon craft.

“Shit!” Diane said from the window. She
jerked back away from it and dived to grab the drapes, yanking them
across the glass. “Nobody answer the door.”

Alissa, Cora noted, looked at Diane as if
she’d grown two heads.

“What happened?” Miranda asked.

“You won’t believe who just got out of a cab
downstairs,” Diane hissed. She ran across the apartment to throw
the deadbolt on the door. “Everybody be quiet.”

Cora went to the window, trailing scarves and
dragons. While Diane and Alissa carried on a conversation in
whispers, she nudged the drapes aside and pressed her nose against
the glass so she could see as much as the sidewalk and pavement
below the window as possible. The day was approaching noon, and the
pedestrian flow was thick with lunchtime urgency. People
disappeared beneath the first-floor awnings and reappeared again a
few paces later.

Behind her, she could feel the dragons
crowding against her legs. Alissa’s binding served to keep them
from actually touching her, but the longer she held onto the
creatures, the more aware she became. They didn’t have to touch her
for her to feel the heat of their presences, warming her even this
close to the drafty window.

When the dragons focused their attention on
her, their presence was almost soothing. Cora chewed her bottom
lip, considering that development. Now that she had space to think,
she realized their nearness wasn’t unpleasant at all. She felt warm
and, strangely, protected instead of threatened. She definitely
didn’t feel the alarm that Diane was projecting from across the
room.

Cora tried to banish her woolgathering and
ignore the dragons, squinting down at the ground. She finally
focused on a single figure standing still in front of a quartet of
newspaper vending machines. The man’s face was upturned, and she
recognized him. Salim stared back at her.

She pressed her hand against the glass to
stabilize suddenly weak knees. The red scarf fluttered against the
windowsill. That bright flash of color drew Salim’s gaze up to her.
She jerked away from the glass, allowing the drapes to fall.

“You have to tell me about him now,” Cora
announced, interrupting a nonsense argument between Diane, Alissa
and Miranda. “The Collector. Diane?”

Diane grimaced. “He collects spirits.”

“A necromancer?”

“No, a shaman. He collects familiars. Animal
spirits,” Alissa supplied. “I didn’t realize dragons were in his
menagerie.”

“Dragon, because the other belongs to someone
else,” Miranda corrected. “And one does not collect dragons. One
either is or is not a Dragonlord. What a Dragonlord does for
recreation, however, is another matter.”

“Well, that’s the rumor.” Diane shrugged.
“He’s a thief, if you can believe the rumors. He doesn’t just
collect his own spirits, he collects spirits that already belong to
other practitioners.”

“It’s frowned upon, dear,” Miranda said by
explanation. “Once a spirit becomes a familiar, it becomes part of
the witch’s soul. If he takes a familiar, he takes part of the
familiar’s host as well.”

Cora presumed the explanation was directed at
her. She didn’t know what to say. “Oh” seemed small.

“Any news on the other one?” Diane asked in
the direction of the phone.

“Nothing terribly detailed. He was parked in
a garage down the street.” Miranda sounded cheerful. “And he’s at
the door now.”

Miranda hadn’t finished her announcement
before Dragonlord number one knocked. A knock was the last thing
Cora expected. It was anticlimactic. She’d expected a belch of fire
to burn the door down, or maybe a half-solid figure to ooze through
the panel seeking to reclaim his other parts so he could be
corporeal again. The knock, though—it wasn’t even angry. It was a
polite knock, a knuckle rap.

Predictably, nobody moved to answer the door.
Cora counted to thirty before the Dragonlord knocked again. “Is
anybody home?” he called through the panel. His voice was slightly
muffled, but the words were clear.

Diane and Alissa looked at one another.
Miranda was humming a tuneless song on the phone. Cora imagined her
mother waiting patiently, knitting or something while she watched
her bowl, the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder.

She sighed and crossed the room, muttering to
Diane, “Rational adults like coffee.”

Diane took the hint and headed for the
kitchen while Cora threw the deadbolt on the door and flipped the
flimsy lock on the knob. She drew a deep breath, made sure her robe
belt was pulled tight, and opened the door.

The greeting died on her lips. Greg stood
with pen and pocket-sized notebook in his hand, poised to write a
note. When they saw each other, Greg frowned and tucked the pen
back into his shirt pocket.

“Cora? I didn’t realize you lived here,” he
said. He dropped the notebook into his jacket pocket, looking over
her body in a cursory obtaining-information way. “And I got you out
of bed. Forgive me.”

She stood dumbly with the door open, staring
at him. He had changed his look since the night—two nights? Cora
was losing track of her days—before. His hair was short, stylish
and tipped with new toasty blonde lights that reminded her of the
beach. Neat, creased blue trousers and a butter-yellow silk shirt
continued the beach boy motif. He was everything she’d encountered
the first time they met and none of the rage that propelled him the
last time they met. Nothing in the world, she decided, could appear
more harmless than he did without even trying.

And she was staring. She cleared her throat,
tried to regain her train of thought, and said, “I’m a guest.”

“I see.” He nodded.

“Are you going to invite him in?” Cora heard
from the living room. She flushed, aware that if she had heard,
Greg had as well.

Cora fingered her scarf-bracelets
self-consciously. Greg glanced over her shoulder again.

“Is this a bad time?” he asked.

“No, not at all,” Cora lied, wondering
whether her mother had made a mistake about the Dragonlord knocking
on the door. Greg seemed about as likely to swoop in and stuff a
dragon spirit into his soul as she to sprout wings and fly.

Bewildered, she stepped back and waved him
into the room. The white scarf fluttered like a welcoming banner.
“Please. Come in.”

Greg hesitated. “Are you certain I’m not
interrupting?”

Cora bunched her scarves up in her fists,
nervous fingers crumpling silk. The dragons had stilled. They
remained a steady pressure inside her skull, but they weren’t
attempting to draw attention to themselves. She wanted to stop and
think about this curious development—to stop and think about
anything
at all so long as she could think instead of
act—but Greg was waiting for an answer.

Despite a very dear desire to shut the door
in his beautiful face and beg a twenty-minute time out, she
swallowed a sigh and nodded. “I’m sure. We’ll have coffee. Do you
drink coffee?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Trusting Diane and Alissa to watch her back
in the event Greg decided to jump her from behind when she wasn’t
looking, Cora stole a moment to linger in the doorway and scan the
corridor. The elevator down the hall flashed to indicate its
ascent. When it reached her floor, the doors opened, and Salim
stepped out. He met her eyes, his dark and unreadable, but he
didn’t approach. She didn’t invite him in.

Somebody—either Diane or Alissa—cleared her
throat and Cora frowned at Salim. She counted another five seconds.
He didn’t move or otherwise indicate any intent to approach, so she
closed the door. Foremost in her mind, now, was the curious turn of
events that continued to bring her, Greg and Salim together. Her
fingers shook under the stress of the day as she reset all the
locks.

She shoved Salim to the back of her mind out
of necessity. A spot check of visible corners inside the apartment
showed that Diane and Alissa had crowded into the galley kitchen.
The line-in-use light on the telephone glowed green; her mother,
while silent, was still listening. Somebody had swept away the
black soil around the ritual circle, but a broom and dustpan hadn’t
erased it entirely.