The Summoning (14 page)

“What?” I couldn’t hear him. I pulled on my sweats and opened the door. “What.”

In the light, he looked pretty trashed himself. They must have kicked him a few times before I’d shown up. A rage rose in me, and once again I felt regret for things I hadn’t done. His face was clouded with bruises. His hair was matted with salt. His new shirt was torn and stained. Tomorrow he’d have to get some new clothes.

Richard said, “I bought some bandages and salve, and some disinfectant. Want me to look at your…” He nodded to where I was holding the towel against my side.

I said, “Why don’t you get cleaned up first?” I went to my room, leaving him the bathroom.

I lay down on my bed and fell asleep without even thinking about getting under the covers. I woke up a long time after the water stopped, when Richard came into the room. He paused by the bed for a moment, and then sat down beside me.

“Turn over,” he said softly. I did so. He lifted my sweatshirt and I felt him gently pry off the towel I still held wadded to my side. That pricked me awake, but I didn’t move or open my eyes. He cleaned off the blood, and then he said, “This is going to hurt,” and it did, as he patted on some ferocious disinfectant. My eyes were open then. He made a neat bandage and taped it to my side.

“You’ve done this before,” I commented.

“Many times.”

My eyes had closed again. I heard him open a small jar and a pungent scent arose. I felt his fingers lightly exploring one of my bruises, rubbing in the salve. After a moment, a pleasant, warm tingling began.

“What’s that?” I asked, without opening my eyes.

“Comfrey. Helps you heal faster.”

“Mm.”

He slipped off my sweatshirt without my having to move, and his fingers sought out other bruises. It wasn’t long before I realized there was nothing businesslike about what he was doing. Still, it was pleasant, and I let him go on for a while before I asked, “You trying to seduce me?”

One warm hand continued to move slowly down my flank. “Of course.”

I opened my eyes and regarded him, bent intently on what he was doing. “Think you can?”

He only smiled.

I sat up. He wore only a towel wrapped around his waist. His body was smooth and very white, almost without hair. As I looked him over, a pale pink flush rose from his belly all the way to his neck and into his cheeks. I smiled. There were bruises on his arms, a couple on his face, and some really spectacular ones, in layers, over his ribs. “Boy, they really got you. Lie down. Your turn.” I took the jar of comfrey cream.

He lay down warily on the edge of the bed, and closed his eyes as I traced the bruises on his face. I brushed his hair back, dripped some of the antiseptic into the scrape above his temple, and then onto the one beside his lip. He was tense, and that bothered me. He rolled over onto his stomach when I told him. I took my time then, rubbing the scented paste into the darkest bruises on his ribs before I started on the paler, deeper ones. I moved on to the bruises on his arms, and the shallow ones on his back and shoulder. His skin was soft and pleasant to the touch, and as my fingers traced the marks along his ribs, his scent changed. It was clean and sweet from the bath, but some new tang was rising. Beneath that, deep in my throat, I still held another scent, a wolf scent I could not forget. And anyway, I love a challenge. His tension changed, and I smiled. I could feel his his awareness of my every move. I wormed the tag end of the towel out from where it fastened at his waist, and I told him to turn over.

I couldn’t say, after the fact, who had seduced whom. He fell asleep before I did, but I lay there beside him, elated, every nerve wrung, with a whole new outlook on the activity. I had never done this with someone whose object was to ravish me unmercifully into a state of blissful exaltation. The way my stepbrothers and their buddies played, if you found yourself pinned to the floor, you lost. Nothing memorable in that, except repulsion, and the impulse to bite.

Richard was different; that was clear. I lay on my side and with my fingers gently traced the line of light that fell across his body from the streetlamp outside the window. He sighed in his sleep. Maybe he had won. In the morning I woke him up early to try for best two out of three.

I gave him full points for getting up after that to make breakfast. He did something with eggs, and bacon, and cheese, and bits of bread, that had me practically licking the plate. He brought me strawberries with little hats of whipped cream.

“What shall we do today?” I asked him, as I licked the last of the cream from my fingers.

“Whatever you wish,” he replied. His stare was sultry, and he was thinking that what I was thinking was that we should go back to bed and stay there all day. And that we should bring the whipped cream, and the rest of the strawberries, and improvise until we laughed so much that it ached. Which wouldn’t take long, after all. We were both stiff and sore from our various hurts.

But we had a city to save, and I wanted to see his eyes change. So I said, “We should go talk to the Buddhists up on Mount Baldy, don’t you think? If they’re up to something particular, maybe they have some answers for us.”

And his eyes lightened with relief, and hope, and that’s when I learned about kissing.

The first time we took the wrong exit, off the 210 to Mt. Baldy Road, I thought we’d misread the map. The second time, we took a wrong turn and ended up back down on Baseline. The third time, I was certain we were on the right road, but then I had a sudden conviction that my gas gauge was wrong, and that we’d better go back and fill up while we could. This resulted in our winding around the streets all lined with river rock and the remnants of orchards, heading away from the mountains again.

When I found a gas station and put six gallons in my car, I decided I was ravenous. We went back to the grocery and deli that we’d seen on Foothill and got sandwiches. As we sat on the porch outside eating them, I listened to myself saying that going up the mountain was probably not a good idea after all, and then I grew angry.

“What is going on? We are going up that mountain! What is getting in the way?”

“It may be,” Richard suggested, “that someone has laid down a spell of misdirection.”

“A spell? Are you kidding me?”

He shook his head at my anger. “It works the same as a ward, except it’s a deflection rather than a barrier.”

“Well, we are not going to be deflected. And whoever is trying to deflect me is going to enjoy an interesting afternoon.” We got back into the car. I turned onto Foothill, turned left at the first significant road I came to, and pointed my car at the mountain. “That’s where we’re going. Pay no attention to anything else.”

Just past the dam I was momentarily distracted and almost turned off again, but I recognized the turnoff I’d taken before, and this time we held the course.

I was a little annoyed that after the intense intimacy of last night—and this morning, I remembered with a smile—to have in the car the dutiful, attentive servant again. I glanced at him with a trace of that smile still lingering. He caught my glance and his eyes ignited, and it was a second before I could look back at the road again, my breath high in my throat. It was all right.

We continued up the mountain, crossing into the Angeles National Forest which, in this area, had a surprising number of trees. The peaks on either side of us were topped with snow, and there were grimy patches wearing away in the shadows. The rocks grew larger, and a crashing stream ran parallel down below the road. I felt a sudden urge to stop, to go fishing in the stream—in March, come on!—and then that urge passed.

“Did you feel that?” I asked him. “Another ward—or misdirection?” He nodded. After I thought about that for a moment, I asked him, “Can you feel the wards before I do?”

He turned to me with a surprised look.

Well, that was interesting. “John Dee really did get a dud,” I observed, watching him. His eyes flared. That was interesting too.

He replied tightly, “John Dee took two years to think of every possible consequence of having a demon on the loose, and lay every possible binding upon me to prevent them.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I am.” I heard the bleakness in his voice. But honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out exactly what the rest of him might be, after what I’d seen on the first night, when that sword touched his head.

We reached Mount Baldy Village and crept through. The traffic going up the mountain to the ski resort, and from the Snow Lodge in town, allowed us to watch carefully for the turnoff to the Buddhist priory that was on this road. The Rag Man had told us it was just outside of town. We kept going up the road, back and forth on the hairpin turns, until we dead-ended at the ski resort parking lot. I uttered a curse and threaded our way through the lot until I was able to turn around. We drove back down, against the traffic this time, until we were in the village again. There we considered every building as we passed it, and every access road, until we were through the town as far as the turnoff to Cedar Creek Canyon.

I pulled off on a side road and found a place to turn around. “You know, these people are really starting to bug me. Why don’t they want people coming to this place? What are they hiding?” I thought about the problem for a moment and asked, “Richard, do you have your cards?” He produced them from a pocket in his jacket “All right. Can your cards be misdirected?”

“No,” he said and smiled at me, his blue eyes bright. “They cannot.”

“Good!” I decided not to be distracted in yet another way, so I did not lean forward and kiss him. “We are going to find the priory. First question: right or left?”

He cut the cards. “Left,” he replied, and we drove back up the road into the village.

We played “hotter or colder” with the cards, and after one more pass found the access road—and also why we had missed it so many times. There appeared to be a fence across the road until we were right beside it.

“I don’t believe it,” I said, eyeing the fence. “Ask the cards again: right or left?”

The cards said to go right. I turned the car into a collision course for the fence, and just before we might have struck, it turned out that the fence was just suggested to our eyes by the way the tree shadows fell. There was no fence there at all. Huh. Good one. Ahead of us was a rocky, deeply pitted dirt road partly covered with snow. I pulled over and parked, and we walked along the road to the house, trying to keep from slogging through the deeper puddles. A chill breeze blew lightly down from the mountain. I lifted my head and scented the air.

“There have been a lot of workings around here,” I noted.

Richard, walking half a step behind, at my shoulder, added, “For a long time.”

“But not right here,” I said, as the road stopped at the only house. It was boarded up, decrepit, and abandoned. A living dwelling has laid upon it a tangled web of comings and goings, laced with intention, with excitement, frustration, happiness, or pain. You can sense the ambience that this energy creates. A long time ago, an old man lived in this house. He had walked up and down one side of the steps, beside the rail, with an old, sick dog. But they were both gone.

“No,” Richard agreed. “Not here.”

“Your cards said this is the priory.”

Richard held out the deck and turned up one card, and then another. “This was the priory, the place originally used as the priory. A long time ago.”

I don’t like being fooled. I liked these Buddhists less and less. “What is going on here?” I looked around. Behind the house, a dip led down to the distant roaring creek. Beyond the creek the slope rose steeply, the scree partly covered with snow and occasional stands of weathered trees. “Let’s go hunting,” I said to Richard. “Let’s hike around until we find all the workings these folks have been doing and see what they’re up to.”

Richard looked at me as though he wanted to suggest that in leather boots, with me in tennis shoes and a sweatshirt, we were about as prepared to go hiking in the rocks, and the water and the snow as we were to fly.

I grinned at him. “Not on two feet. On four.” Already, in the back of my throat, the memory of a marvelous scent was rising. Richard smiled back at me, and I had to turn away before he saw the heat in my eyes. But he probably knew.

We consulted the cards once more, drove out of the village, and parked at a popular trailhead. The lot only held a few cars. The canyon had patches of snow on the steep slopes on both sides. It was too cold and wet for casual hikers at this season. The well-worn trail along the swollen creek was empty, though there were myriad traces of the people—and dogs, and other critters—who had traversed it over the years A few people had gone up along it in the last couple of days. There were cabins up the canyon. A trace of wood smoke along the creek gave away which ones were presently inhabited.

We hiked up the trail, and the noise of the creek, the brushing of the wind in the trees, our muffled footsteps, were a counterpoint to the mountain’s soundlessness. There was no one in sight. There was no one around. I said to Richard, “This way, follow me!” and I changed and leaped up the trail.

The gray wolf bounded after me. I turned and touched his snout and he slathered my jaw and I slathered his head, and my head was full of his scent again and I charged up the trail with him after me.

I felt the abrasion on my side and slowed down until I found a pace where I could run without noticing it. The trail was snow-covered this far up the canyon. The gray wolf ran in my tracks. I could taste the scent of deer, of raccoon, of human, of coyote who’d used this trail recently. The intoxicating presence behind me galvanized thoughts of the hunt we could make, the two of us, against anything on this mountain, the stalk, the two-sided attack, neck and heel, the gorgeous kill, the taste of blood, the bloody excess of meat, the joy that would come after, the two of us—oh shit shit shit shit shit—

I changed so suddenly I stumbled and fell down. I pulled myself up from the rocks, my knees banged, my pants wet, my tennis shoes beginning to be soaked by freezing snow, and I stood there, dancing from one foot to the other, staring at the big old cedar tree ahead, its bows protecting its trunk from the snow. Oh shit shit shit shit shit!