So that was it. I could picture it without effort, Damhnait’s devastated husband and son fleeing the site of her death—and Christopher’s flight continuing after his father had driven him away, leaving him with only the treasured instrument his mother had made him. Never staying long anywhere lest he find the power in his own blood catching up with him… and unless I missed my guess, kicking himself for a coward the whole time. He hadn’t said it in so many words, but he’d semaphored me that bit of subtext with big bright neon flags by looking so utterly thunderstruck when I’d praised his bravery.
“And now you’re in Seattle,” I concluded, squeezing his shoulder. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Christopher. But if it makes you feel any better, I’m glad you’re here.”
Slowly, as if through a series of time-lapse photographs, Christopher’s entire face eased. One corner of his mouth quirked up, then the other followed suit. His brow smoothed out, and with a quiet contentment that shone like a light his eyes grew clearer and brighter. Whether it came from his embracing his Warder station or just from talking with me I didn’t know, but it heartened me to see that peace.
“Smile at a man like that,” he rumbled, “and you’ll make him forget he’s tryin’ to brood.”
“That’s the plan,” I cheerfully replied. “Brooding is unhealthy, and as long as we’re stuck here for a while anyway, you don’t get to sit there with an instrument I’ve never laid eyes on before and not teach me how to play it.”
“I’ll teach you gladly—but I seem to recollect, lass, you promised me some fiddle.”
I had, and with that reminder, my spirits skyrocketed. All at once the idea of waiting for word from Jude and Millicent didn’t seem so onerous, not with an easy way to fill the hours before us, and one which would give Christopher some rest and relaxation. After everything he’d been through in the last few days—getting his head bashed in by a troll, challenging pissed-off Daoine Sidhe, and facing down the past that had haunted him for sixteen years—I wanted to give him that. He’d have plenty of time soon enough to be a Warder of Seattle; right then I wanted to give him some time just to be Christopher.
And perhaps, I thought, I could do that with music.
Now you may expect me to say that due to shared magic and mutual attraction
, Christopher and I achieved seamless, perfect unity on our instruments. Didn’t happen. Fact of the matter is, even the best musicians in the world (in which august category neither of us qualified) must learn each other’s pacing and style before they sound like they know what they’re doing when they play together. And for us, anyway, camaraderie rather than perfection was the point. We played to work off the stress of the last many hours, to kill time while we waited for news from Jude and Millicent, and for the sake of simply making music. For every note I struck badly Christopher came in late on a chord or overshot the frets on the bouzouki, and we didn’t care. Our initial nervous winces at mistakes turned into snickers, which in turn became challenges to throw one another off the beat by making outrageous faces at flubbed notes.
And lest you get the wrong idea, we weren’t a complete mess either. We both knew our instruments, and we found a great deal of fun in the diverse music we had to share with one another. Christopher offered up Newfoundland folk songs all about bold sailors plowing the raging sea, and I matched him with classical pieces by the composers I most loved. My instrument was better suited to his than the other way around—after all, the violin is a folk staple. I pointed this out as he scanned the pages of my copy of Irene Britton Smith’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano”.
“There isn’t any ‘Bouzouki’ in the title of that, you know.”
Christopher looked me square in the eye. “Pretend I’m playin’ an eight-stringed piano,” he advised, launching into the opening measures. I blinked, laughed out loud, and whipped up my bow to join him.
Eventually the music came together. Time whirled by in long stretches of melody, rhythm, and harmony, and the bright metallic twang of Christopher’s instrument melded with the more organic sound of mine to make something fuller and richer than either one could make alone. And yeah, sharing the Warding had been wondrous, but this was strangely better in a way. This was something purely mortal, something that didn’t rely on supernatural senses or magic to do. All it needed was two musical instruments, and two people who took great delight in playing them.
Christopher’s delight was so tangible that I reveled in watching him. He’d glowed with an almost childlike wonder calling upon his Warder power for the first time, but with his bouzouki in his hands, he took on a new, relaxed confidence that electrified every move he made and every chord he struck. Each time I met his eyes, the gold-drenched green of maple leaves bathed in sunshine branded itself into my memory as the color of his joy.
Oh, I knew the real world—or, rather, the surreal world—would intrude again soon. The weather was intrusion enough upon our playing, what with the rain hammering on the roof and gusts of wind jarring the windows in a ceaseless percussion. Once or twice, tympani rolls of thunder laid down rumbling accompaniment. A single crack of lightning very close to the house not only cut us off as we worked through an air’s opening measures, it sent the cat scurrying for cover as well.
But with my companion’s high spirits and bright smile to egg me on, I willingly drove all else out of my mind. Even the weather, lively though it was, made things all the more companionable.
For a few hours, there was only Christopher, me, and the music.
The intrusion I expected turned out to be Jude, calling from her cell phone to report that she’d retrieved Millicent from Renton. As much as I hated to interrupt the fun Christopher and I were having, my friend’s news was far from unwelcome.
“Can’t talk long, babe, I’m on the road and visibility absolutely blows,” she told me. “But I’ve got Millie. She says she got jumped yesterday, and whoever it was dumped her in Renton. Wiped her out.”
I conveyed this to Christopher, whose face flooded with relief that the old Warder woman had been found and grave concern over whoever might have ambushed her. “It hurts a Warder to take her out of her city,” he said grimly. “And any who’d think to do it can mean no good.”
“Could it have killed her?” I asked, and a chill slid down my back at his nod and his reply.
“If she’d gone too long without help, yeah.”
That sounded more than a little disturbing, and exactly like something that the Sidhe might have pulled in an attempt to render Seattle defenseless. And by extension, me. I didn’t want to keep Jude on the phone while she was driving through heavy rain, so I urged her to be careful and to call us back as soon as she could. Jude promised another call as soon as she had Millicent in a safe place, and then hung up.
So much for distracting myself with music. I stood there for a bit with my phone in my hand, feeling a cold weight of fright in my chest and wondering exactly what I was that I could move three members of the Seelie Court to break their Pact with the Warders. Weren’t they supposed to be the good guys of Faerie?
Did my mother—’the most powerful Seelie mage born in a recent age’, if Elessir was to be believed—have anything to do with it?
Or that nightmare I’d had of something huge and dark chasing me, a nightmare about which the Unseelie had also hinted?
And what was it that Malandor had said while he’d held my chin in his hand in the parking lot at the Penguin? I could remember his touch and the pull of his voice, but not the things he’d said or the questions he’d asked me. Something about my blood, I thought. That was important. But try as I might, I couldn’t bring it back to mind. Wrapping one arm around myself, I rubbed at my eyes with my other hand and struggled not to shake.
“Millicent will be all right.” Christopher took me by the shoulders and turned me to him as I hung up the phone, giving me a steady, earnest look that was more bracing than a smile. “I can feel her, through the city. She’s back on our ground now.” I liked that
our
. It gave me reassurance. “Seattle will return her strength.”
Which made sense; if it hurt a Warder to remove her from her city, I could buy that it helped her to put her back. “It’s all about the life energy, huh?” I guessed.
“A city sustains its Warders,” he agreed.
Speaking of which… “Your head!” I blurted abruptly. “Have you seen it? It looks a lot better!”
Christopher’s hair was not as long as mine, but it was every bit as prone to escape confinement. Several strands had come free of his ponytail while we’d played, testimony to the vigor with which he’d banged away on his bouzouki. One long dark tendril now fell across his forehead, and without thinking, I reached up to brush it aside for a better look at the place where the troll had clocked him. It had changed since the last time I’d looked. The swelling was gone, and the angry reddish-purple bruises along his hairline had faded to a much more subdued yellow-brown, well on their way to regaining the healthy hue of the rest of his skin.
Startled, Christopher lifted his own hand to his head. His fingers brushed mine, which made us both jump, and I hastily withdrew mine so he could carefully probe the injured spot. “Doesn’t hurt all that much at all, now,” he murmured wonderingly. “I’d forgotten.”
“We should get your stitches out,” I said. It sounded like a good health plan, I had to admit, and having Christopher hale and sound before me buoyed up my hope that Millicent would indeed be all right. “Maybe when Carson and Jake get back. Jake used to be an EMT. I could get him to do it for you.”
“I’d appreciate that,” answered Christopher, slowly lowering his hand.
Is anybody surprised that with him standing only inches away, I blanked out on what I was doing? Uh-huh. I didn’t think so. “No problem,” I said, and promptly forgot the words the moment they left my mouth. Neither of us moved; for several long moments, we just gazed at one another. In the back of my mind I felt that current of ours, still active, like a sweet sustained harmony on the very edge of my hearing. It was stronger today, perhaps bolstered by Christopher coming into his power, but it took a back seat to my growing awareness of his simple proximity. He looked healthy, all right. He looked
good
.
“Kendis,” he said then, his stare turning restless and ever so slightly uncertain, “would you think me wretchedly forward if I told you I want to hold you in my arms?”
Warmth that had nothing to do with magic swept through me, and I stepped closer so that I could snuggle against him.
“No,” I replied, smiling up into his eyes, “I can’t say that I would.”
Just for the record, we didn’t do
that
.
Not that I didn’t think about it, and I needed neither magic nor my keener senses to tell me Christopher was thinking about it too. His embrace sent my imagination wandering off in very interesting directions, and while I was happy to let it wander, I held back from following where it led. So did Christopher, for which I found myself grateful. A lot had happened to both of us in the last couple of days. He was becoming a Warder; I was becoming… well, whatever I was becoming. By unspoken mutual assent, whether born out of the rapport of mingled magic, shared music, or simply reading the language of each other’s bodies, we did nothing more adventurous than holding each other close. It seemed wisest, at least until we knew exactly how weird life was going to get.
The weirdness wasn’t over yet, I was sure.
As the day progressed the weather steadily worsened. Rain fell in relentless sheets, turning the view out my windows into a blurred wash of silvery-gray even to my newly sharpened sight; the wind howled, and the lightning and thunder hurled back violent, rattling replies. Around one the power began to flicker, enough of a warning that I scurried through my half of the house and through the connecting mini-hallway Carson, Jake, and I had opened into their half, shutting down all the electronic devices we owned. Around two, the power cut out completely—not only in my neighborhood, we learned over my portable radio, but across most of northern Seattle as well. It was easily the worst storm to hit the city in the last ten years, and on any weekend before this one, I might have thought nothing of it. But this was the first weekend since my enrolling in Intro to the Supernatural 101, so anything out of the ordinary was enough to make me paranoid.
Jude called us back as promised, reporting in that she’d gotten Millicent safely to her house and tucked away in bed, dosed up on Vicodin. “I don’t like it, Ken,” she confided to me unhappily. “She didn’t want me to say before, but whoever shanghaied her down to Renton roughed her up as they did it. Her ankle’s broken. I know she’s supposed to be magical and all, but hell, I feel like somebody beat up my grandmother!”
That didn’t help my paranoia any, and I admitted as much to Jude. “I don’t like it either. But stay with her. Call us if anything changes or if you need anything, okay?”
“Babe, I’m the one with the transportation, remember? I’m the one who ought to be making that offer to you.”
There were indeed disadvantages to not owning my own car. But what could I say? The trouble we were all in was because of me to begin with; I felt responsible. “Yeah, well. Just be careful,” I said. I’d said it the last time she called, but it bore repeating.
“You too, babe. Talk to you later.”
Just as uneasy as Jude that someone had physically as well as magically assaulted Millicent, I updated Christopher, called Aggie again to make sure she knew what was going on and just to hear the sound of her voice, and then tried to figure out what to do next. Our options were few. With the power out I couldn’t get on the Internet to try to contact Millie’s Warder friends and ask for information on Malandor, and I didn’t want to call Jude back to make her ask Millie for the numbers, not if the Warder needed her rest. The weather was ferocious enough to keep us inside—not that I wanted to cross the Wards we’d laid anyway.
So I got out matches to light a couple of the decorative candles on the shelf above my fireplace, which filled the living room with warm, flickering light and the scents of orange and cinnamon. I tried to call Carson and Jake, anxious to make certain they were all right, though I managed only to reach the front desk of their hostel once again since Carson wasn’t answering his cell. Christopher and I played the cat’s favorite game with him, Stalk the Hand under the Rug, much to Fortissimo’s delight. We played Scrabble, too, before raiding the kitchen to see what we could make for dinner without electricity.