Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga by Carol Wolf

fact that I was an underage runaway, for one. The fact that I was in hiding from my family. And the wolf kind have always been careful with the secret of our nature. “What if I don’t want to do this?” I asked.
    Kat took off the jacket of her business suit. She removed the gold pin from her lapel, and took two rings from her fingers and gave them to Tamara to hold. “You don’t have to answer any questions. There's nothing we can do to make you.”
    That was for sure.
    “But not answering a question is an answer in itself, as you know.” She smiled at me, like she’d just scored a point.
    Huh. Tamara's soul's sister or not, I didn’t think I liked this woman.
    Kat raised a hand over the water in the pitcher and murmured a blessing. The air in the room changed slightly in response to her invocation. The attention of the folks in the room heightened, and that increased the energy that Kat had engaged. She poured the water into the bowl, and everyone was so still we could hear it ring on the metal, we could hear it slosh.
    Kat lifted the stirring rod, murmuring again too softly to hear. The narrow end, carved with a fretwork leaf pattern, pleasing to the eye, fit neatly in her hand. The wide end was polished smooth with use. She touched this to the edge of the bowl and a bright tone rang out, hung in the air, and faded away. Kit closed her eyes, and whispered a few words.
    The air changed again, tightening, beginning slowly to turn one way above us. Soon after, near our feet the air began slowly to gyre the opposite way.
    Kat touched the rod to the outside of the bowl, below the edge, and slowly moved it around, rubbing the side of the bowl. At first the only sound was the wood rubbing on the metal, but then a low throbbing hum began. I heard it first with my body, before my ears registered it as sound rather than simply vibration. The sound increased, thickened, picked up overtones, until it rang through the room, pleasing to the ear, waxing and waning, the highest resonance only just within hearing.
    Kat moved the rod to the top edge of the bowl, and produced a treble harmony to the deep low vibration that continued, even as the new note rang out. She spoke another incantation, and we saw the water begin to ruffle. Soon it hissed and danced. Kat left off rubbing the bowl, but held the rod close to the edge of it, as though as a reminder. The vibrations, high and low, continued to sound unabated, and the water continued to move.
    “What is your name?” Kat asked me.
    “Amber,” I answered without thinking.
    The ringing sound flattened into discord, rose into harmony, flattened into discord again. Kat broke into laughter. “Well, that was unusual.” She looked hard at me. “That seems to be both a lie and the truth at the same time.”
    I nodded. “That's about right.”
    “Huh,” she said, stirring the water again. “I can see this is going to be an interesting session.”
    “Ask her,” Tamara said, “about the World Snake.” She made her usual sign of aversion as she spoke the dreaded name. “Ask her what she knows.”
    Kat rubbed the bowl again, raising the dual notes, pure and sweet, and then asked me the question.
    “So far as I know,” I told them, as precisely as I knew how, “the demon in my service turned the World Snake at my command. I told him to see to it that she never swallows a city again, and he said he had done this.”
    I felt another spike of emotion from Curt Sondstrom, sitting to my right, almost out of my sight line. It wasn’t fear this time, but excitement. I wondered briefly why he was being so thoroughly unobtrusive. He’d slipped just then, so I’d noticed him again.
    The bowl continued to ring true and clear, the sound of my words picking up its resonance, and blending in a faint harmony.
    “Well,” Kat said thoughtfully, “that's true.”
    “I told you so,” I said to Tamara. I tried not to gloat as it would only provoke the bears. The bear kind are very vain,