The Summoning by Carol Wolf Page B

good,” I said. I still had a feeling I was missing a trick somewhere. “He’s long dead?”
    “It was a long time ago,” he conceded.
    “Good,” I repeated. I picked up the remnants of the shoelaces and tossed them towards him. “You don’t want string for that.”
    “No.”
    “Why didn’t you get wire?”
    He sighed. “Because there are rules. I can buy boots for myself, and so I can buy bootlaces.”
    “You can buy thingies that I never heard of, but you can’t buy yourself a piece of wire?”
    “I can supply your kitchen, and your larder. I can clothe your servant.”
    “Fine. Buy some wire.” I thought a moment. “Here.” I pushed the cash on the table in front of him. “Take this. Buy whatever you need to make yourself comfortable.”
    “Thank you.” He looked down at the thing in his hands. The white and blue light illumined his face. He looked like an angel in a candle flame.
    I asked him, “If you have a soul, at least technically, why are you still a demon? I mean, shouldn’t that make you—well, if not human, something like it?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know how to bind it to me. And I don’t know if it can be mine, even if I did. Those who have knowledge of the craft will not even speak to such as I am, without this. And without this, I cannot pass their wards. They usually know what I am on sight. My hope is, with this, I can learn what I need to know.”
    “To become human?”
    “Good Lord, no,” he said, the first honest exclamation I thought I’d heard from him. “To avert the Eater of Souls. Our common purpose,” he reminded me. “The reason I entered your service.”
    “Yeah, right, I forgot.” I tried another point I wasn’t sure about. “I assumed, now you have a soul, you don’t have to be in anyone’s service anymore. You’re free to go.” He was shaking his head before I finished. I continued, “All right, what if I discharge you? What if I tell you you’re not in my service anymore? You’re fired?”
    “After I cooked you that nice breakfast?” he said lightly, but his fear spiked again.
    This did not add up. “Level with me, then,” I said. “What do you want?”
    “I want to defeat the Eater of Souls, as I told you. It’s true, once I had this,” he raised his soul gently in his hands, “I could duck service sometimes, if I wasn’t properly bound in time. But the Eater of Souls is coming here. I need the most powerful master I can find, for all our sakes.”
    “And you chose me,” I said. “Great.”
    He shook his head again. “I didn’t choose you. In truth, I sought the sorceress. But I was truly bound to you by the events of that night, by the working, by her and by you. It’s true by every sign I’ve learned to look for. I only hope it is enough.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    R ichard started on the dishes, and I let him. He was probably quicker at it anyway. And there were things to wash I’d never owned before, a colander, for instance. And if I had made breakfast, there wouldn’t have been nearly so many dishes to wash, anyway, so I left him to it.
    When he was finished he hung up his apron on a new hook he’d installed inside the larder door. He was just making himself right at home. He put his leather jacket back on, not because he was cold but because he’d put the soul in its inside zip pocket. He sat down across from me and took out the deck of tarot cards he’d shown me the first time he’d come to my house. He set them in front of me.
    “Will you cut them?”
    “What for?”
    “I promised you the answers that you seek. Ask whatever you like, and I will ask the cards.”
    I had a lot of questions about my life. I had burning questions that I’d longed to know the answers to for years. Was my dad still alive? Was my older brother? But every hunter knows you follow one trail at a time. And everything I asked the demon would be one more thing he knew about me. I trusted him to the extent I did, in my house, and in—he