Kerri’s fingers reached to latch on. They held hands for a few seconds, like they would often do, and said nothing.
Then Andy dissolved the handshake, took a sip of Coke, and added: “I’m waiting until you beg.”
And the imaginary scoreboard went up another point, while Kerri stared in awe and orange curls went simply mad.
“You…you bitch and your one-liners. Where did you…?” she argued, while the camera drifted away from them. “Don’t give me smiles; how am I supposed to leave you alone in San Francisco eight hours a day?”
“V.”
“No, stop it with the word games. V, what? It’s probably…‘vagina,’ I bet!”
“What?! No, it was ‘voluptuous’!”
“Fuck off!”
“Honestly, Kay, you’re obsessed!”
“Shut up, Andy Rodriguez.”
Their voices faded away as Nate closed the window to the backyard and returned to the half-drawn diagram on the boys’ room floor.
He took one of the eggs he’d just bought, cracked it, poured it in a bowl, and placed it in the center of the circle, left of the Sign of Clairvoyance. Then he went on to his signature: with the kitchen knife, he drilled a wound on his fingertip and smudged his own blood on the south edge.
The Seal of Zur was ready, if he had correctly interpreted the notes in the grimoire and Old Acker’s advice. All that was left to do was light the candle (one was enough for a small seal) and burn the parsley leaves.
“Okay. Tim. Come here, boy.”
Tim, cuddling with his penguin in a corner of the room, looked up, scarcely interested, but decided to see what the fuss was about. He sat down where Nate indicated, in the middle of the drawing, and awaited the next command.
Nate, on his knees, drew back from the circle, dragged the Necronomicon closer, and read aloud:
“?‘Per Anemai, per Ngovalis, Ab Vrna Driadha quaeso spiritua dh’flui Zur vsathla uthurragathik.’?”
He paused for a reaction from the earth’s tectonic plates. They refused to comment.
He set aside the grimoire and faced the Weimaraner, his own eyes slightly above the dog’s ghostly blue ones.
“I am very sure that the ritual to summon or expel Thtaggoa required five human souls,” he told the dog. “Not animals. Otherwise, Dunia could have just tossed a hedgehog, a dung beetle, a toad, and a smuggled sheep inside the pentacle and gotten it over with. So, if the ritual worked with you…if there is an avatar inside this vessel, then show yourself,” Nate concluded.
A thin slice of summer afternoon flew by. Tim’s attention drifted over the ceiling, then over Nate’s jeans, then at some scar on his hip that still itched from time to time.
Nate insisted: “Just tell me who you are.”
Tim looked at him, eye to eye, his Byronian visage peacefully sliding into a solemn acknowledgment.
Nate clenched a fist when he saw the Weimaraner’s loose lips stiffening up, then deliberately moving.
“I am Ashen Fox,” the dog said. And like in the aftermath of a nightmare, in a split second Nate captured the unfakability of the event, all the meticulous details that made it real: the slim tongue cooperating with the tiny front teeth, the droopy lips helping, the voice not essentially different in pitch from Tim’s barks, the pale blue eyes unequivocally addressing Nate as an equal. “Third Moon Shaman of the Walla Walla, from the Sky City in the Warm Snows.”
Nate tried to swallow that revelation, forced it down his throat, then spoke again.
“You helped us with the ritual. You told Andy about the aklo. No way she could remember that on her own.”
“I simply helped her recall the words she had heard. You are a powerful sorcerer, Nate Rogers.”
Nate made sure to record that compliment.
“How long have you been here?”
Tim answered, words blown gently out of his mouth like the whisper sound of a summer breeze on firs. “You did raise an avatar from a jar of salts that night when you were a child. They were my salts, prepared by Debo?n from the remains he stole from my burial site. They were still on his workbench when you wandered in, read the spell, and brought me back.”
Tim licked his leg. The itch must have been too much.
“Your dog was kind enough to serve as my vessel,” Ashen Fox added. “Please do not feel deceived: he has been your dog all this time. I just ride along.”
“But that was Sean,” Nate argued, fearing the next answer. “Sean was the dog we took to the house thirteen years ago; not Tim. Tim is his great-grandson.”
“Well, as Debo?n told you, aging forth and back is not difficult. Switching ourselves with one of the younger cubs is. It became easier once Kerri left for college and went months without seeing us.” Tim shrugged, a bittersweet smile in his mouth. “You know. It’s all been done before.”