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

and it is best not to try to outshine them.
    Tamara nodded to Kat, and she sounded the bowl again.
    “Where is the demon now?” Tamara asked me.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Can you call him?”
    “I dismissed him from my service.”
    The sound from the bowl smudged into a slight dissonance. I frowned at it, and said again, “I dismissed him. I set him free. He's gone.”
    Another spike of interest from Sondstrom. I was careful not to look at him.
    “That wasn’t the question,” Kat pointed out, as the bowl continued to sound a faint discord. “Tamara asked you if you can call him.”
    “Of course I can call him,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean he will come.”
    To my relief, the tone from the bowl became true and pleasing again.
    “But you can call him,” Tamara insisted.
    I shrugged. “Anyone can call a demon.”
    “Perhaps we should have her call the demon,” Tamara said to Kat, “and you can put the same questions to him.”
    That time, it was my emotions that spiked. “No,” I said. “Really. You don’t want to do that.”
    “Why don’t you want to call the demon?” Curt spoke for the first time, but no one was listening but me.
    “Because he might come,” I shot at him. In all his writhing darkness, with who knew what animosity about the hundreds of years he was trapped here, and all his unknowable powers, he might come.
    “She told the truth,” Kat reminded Tamara.
    “That only means that she believes what the demon told her he had done. It doesn’t mean he did it. It doesn’t mean the Great Snake isn’t coming.”
    “Why not go and ask the World Snake?” I said.
    Behind me I felt a new vibration, almost too low to hear, hard and dangerous, that raised the hair on my nape. I spun on my chair, opening my mouth in a snarl.
    The sound from the bowl rose and rang loudly, as Tamara raised her voice to still us both. “Jonathan!”
    The growl stopped. “Yes?” Jonathan answered politely, but his eyes were on me.
    Well, that was some trick. He was still in human form, and I didn’t know how he could do that. And to growl so low as to almost not be heard, and have such a visceral effect, that was just neat. I’d just learned myself how to be partly in both my forms. I started to growl myself, just to see if I could. Jonathan showed his teeth and I stopped.
    Tamara glared at him, and nodded to Kat again. “Amber,” Tamara said to me, when the bowl's song rang out again, “tell us again how you commanded your demon to turn the World Snake.”
    So I told it again, how I’d called my demon for the last time, how he had obeyed my commands, and received the dismissal he so desired. There were other things that happened between Richard and me, but they were private. The bowl didn’t seem to notice my omissions, so that was all right.
    When I had answered every question three times over, Tamara and the others didn’t seem any closer to believing me. At last Tamara said, “Amber, would you be willing to call your demon, so that we may question it?”
    “No,” I said. “Let's not do that.”
    Tamara and Kat exchanged glances. “Why?” Tamara asked.
    “It would be dangerous.”
    “Dangerous?” Sol asked. “This is the guy we met, right? Short, blond, blue eyes? The little guy?”
    “He changed,” I said. The bowl rang out in response to my answer. I almost grinned at it as it sounded “that's true!” to the company. Ha. Someone believed me, even if it was just the magic of the bowl.
    “In what way did he change?” Kat asked.
    “He got his powers back, and with them, his demon form. He looked like,” I tried to explain, “darkness. If darkness had weight, and shape, and depth and will.” I repressed a shudder. “The blond guy you saw was the form imposed on him by the magician who raised him. That's not what he was, not at the end. He was different. He's powerful. And he's not my demon anymore.”
    Kat let the vibration from the bowl fade, as they considered that. “Has