War For The Oaks Part 19

"And you might not. I've told you a great deal more than I should have in the past weeks. I've flown in the face of tradition, inclination, and direct orders. You'll cozen nothing more out of me."

"I'll... what?"

"Cozen," the phouka said bitterly. "Trick. Beguile."

"I've never tried to trick you!"

"Hah."

She looked at him through narrowed eyes. "What if I won't go through with it?"

"With what?"

"This... binding. If it was no big deal, you'd have told me about it."

The phouka gave an exasperated hiss. "By earth and air, I've tried to keep you in the dark at every step of the way! Why balk at it now?"

She'd never made him so angry-she wouldn't have believed she could. What had happened to the perfect b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd taken control of her life on the Nicollet Mall? That phouka would have laughed at her, ordered her around. He wouldn't have thought it worth the trouble to fight with her.

She said, "If I got on the bike right now, and tried to ride away-would you stop me?"

He seemed angrier still, and about to speak. Then he turned away, looking back toward downtown and, she suspected, not seeing it. A knot of muscle had leaped into sudden relief in his jaw. He lifted one hand to the side of his face, as if to nurse his headache, and Eddi lost sight of his expression.

At last he said fiercely, "No."

A damp breeze, smelling of mud and car exhaust, fluttered his hair and hers. "You'd get in trouble for that, wouldn't you?" Eddi said.

"Trouble." He spat out some crisp word that Eddi didn't catch, and might not have recognized anyway.

"Yes, I suppose 'trouble' would cover it, if spread thin." He swept his hair back from his face with both hands, a movement that seemed equivalent to rolling up his sleeves. It made his eyes slant even more than usual.

"Eddi," he said earnestly, "I haven't much taste for begging, and less skill. But I will happily beg you for this, with all the meager talent at my command. I would even bribe you, had I anything to offer. Will you please, please, go through with the business tonight?"

"You make it sound as if I have a choice."

He closed his eyes, shut out her angry stare. "You do."

Then he'd meant what he'd said; if she left now, he wouldn't stop her. It made her hands shake. She stuffed them in her jacket pockets.

"You told me once that I couldn't get away, that the Unseelie Court would come after me."

"And they would. But they may be less vigilant now, thinking that if you meant to flee, you'd have done it weeks ago. You know more of your enemy now as well-though that may be scant help." He paused, and when he spoke again, it might have been to himself. "And there is more of you to reckon with than I suspected then."

Playacting! Eddi thought. Isn't it? "What's involved in this bind-ing?"

The phouka sighed. "If I could tell you and not make it sound worse than it is, I would."

Eddi started across the parking lot to the stairs.

"But I can do this much," he said at last, as if the words were dragged up his throat with a string. "I can enable you to see it all truly, so that what you do, you do by your will and not at the prompting of any glamour."

Eddi looked at him over her shoulder. How well he was coming to know what mattered to her....

"But in return, you must promise to do what is set before you to do-and you must tell no one that I've tampered with the process. Or I will indeed," he grinned ruefully, "be in trouble."

"Sounds like it amounts to the same thing."

"Perhaps to you. Not to me."

"Why, after all this, would you offer to let me go now?" she blurted out. "Is this some last disgusting trick?"

The expression that swept the phouka's face was a little frightening, though Eddi couldn't say what it meant. He turned sharply away.

From behind and above them came the sound of a heavy door opening, and they looked up. Carla was standing in the doorway at the top of the iron stairs.

"Come on, guys!" she yelled. "You're late!"

The phouka let his breath out audibly. "Well! Had I a pot of gold to bestow...," he said. "After you, my sweet."

Eddi shook her head and rattled up the stairs.

Someone had managed to open a couple of the dusty painted-shut window sections in the rehearsal s.p.a.ce. The hanging sheets moved in the breeze, and the room smelled of electrical power and spring.

"'Bout time," Carla said when Eddi came in the door. She nodded toward the middle of the room and added, "Much longer, and they would have wandered off into the Twilight Zone and never been seen again."

Dan, w.i.l.l.y, and Hedge were engaged in playing something that might once have been Dire Straits'"Tunnel of Love." It was not loud, but it was... well, weird. Dan was adding and subtracting synthesizer voices and dabbing in sampled sounds wherever a blank spot seemed imminent. Hedge was running the ba.s.s through a phase shifter. The bone-resonant notes wove in and out, forward and back, like the breathing of a monstrous asthmatic cat. w.i.l.l.y's guitar was so unmodified as to sound naked; it would follow the other two docilely through the chords for a few measures, then, in something like musical senility, it would wander off into the lead riff for another song entirely. They were all three absorbed in each other, glancing back and forth for cues. w.i.l.l.y's hair had already fallen into his eyes.

Eddi found herself grinning at them in proprietary pride. "So what are you doing standing here?" she said to Carla.

Carla blinked.

"Let's jam, kid."

And for a while, they did. Carla added a ba.s.s drum beat to anchor it all, then found a pattern on the toms that interlocked with Hedge's phasing. Eddi played spa.r.s.e guitar, high and stringy.

A chord progression opened like a door before her. It led toward a song she and Dan and Carla had worked on a week ago. She leaned on the rhythm, bending it to the shape she wanted. Carla noticed and followed her; Dan picked it up, then started his left-hand riff. Hedge and w.i.l.l.y heard the new drive and unity behind the sound, and added themselves to it.

Eddi went to the mike and heard Dan back off his improvising, just a little; w.i.l.l.y came back to the chords and stayed there.

Neon on the frontage road The red light shines on me I only want you to be happy I only want me to be free

Midnight on the interstate I'm on the run from you I've got a dollar says you're lying I've got a feeling says it's true.

She gave w.i.l.l.y the nod for a lead break, and he snagged the melody and carried it away, ran with it as if it were a kite in the wind. Then she pointed to Hedge, w.i.l.l.y, and Dan, and drew a finger across her throat. Everything stopped but drums.

You look so sweet when you're asleep, When your mouth is closed; The angry things all shut inside, The kind of things you used to hide from me.

And far away from you, I keep Pictures of you, posed, All your good side, all well-groomed, Chronicles of true love doomed By what I didn't see.

Synthesizer, guitar, and ba.s.s swelled slowly through the second half of the bridge in answer to her prompting. She heard Carla and w.i.l.l.y add wordless harmonies, too, and that filled her with reckless delight. The last verse was a ragged but enthusiastic climax.

Water on the motorway The wipers beat like hearts Why do you love me best whenever We're a hundred slippery miles apart?

After that, there was the rattle of critical comment that she'd already come to expect. "I think you want ba.s.s on that bridge." Carla said.

Dan said, frowning absently, "Can we try that again? I wanna bend that last note out of shape, like a car goin' by-is that too hokey?"

"We'd better do it again," w.i.l.l.y laughed. "We don't know how to start it yet."

Hedge puckered up his face, studied his axe for a moment, and played a couple measures that made a very good intro.

By the time Eddi called a rest, they'd improved the chord progressions and added drum punches to the lead break. Dan had put a rush of white noise into the second verse that suggested tires on wet pavement.

w.i.l.l.y and Carla were singing the words on the bridge. They sounded remarkably like a band.

Eddi flopped down on the wooden floor. "We need a couch. And a PA. And a coffeemaker!"

"I'll go for coffee," Carla offered. "I need cigs anyway."

Eddi snapped upright and leveled an admonishing finger. "You slack off on the smoking, girl. Bad for your voice."

Carla stuck out her tongue and turned to Dan. "Danny? Wanna come with?"

"Yeah, sure." Dan swept a look over his equipment, like a parent wondering if the kids really were safe by themselves. Carla grabbed her jacket, and they trotted out the door.

"She thinks I'm kidding," Eddi said to the ceiling. "Boy, is she gonna be surprised."

It seemed awfully quiet. She didn't want quiet; it was suitable for thinking in, and right now Eddi had no use for thinking. The music had worked like a drug, wiping away her quarrel with the phouka, her fear of what the evening would bring. Now the drug was wearing off. Conversation was not the all-absorbing distraction that music was, but she would settle for it.

She propped herself up on one elbow and looked around for w.i.l.l.y. She found him leaning against the wall at the far end of the room talking to the phouka. Oh, G.o.d, she thought, what mischief is that little jerk up to now? But there was no spark of wickedness about the phouka. He was sitting on the floor with his chin on his knees, looking as close to gloomy as she could imagine him.

w.i.l.l.y, in contrast, seemed to glow. He was discussing something with great seriousness, and he leaned forward as he spoke, punctuating everything he said with crisp motions of his pale hands. He was full of contained energy, and Eddi found herself envying him for it, and disliking the phouka for not reacting to it, and despising herself for both feelings. She dropped back to the floor, tucked her hands under her head, and closed her eyes.

Her unwelcome solitude lasted perhaps a minute. Then she heard someone approach, and opened her eyes.

It was Hedge. He sat down on the floor next to her, crossing his legs as if it required great deliberation, and stared at her solemnly. He seemed to be waiting for her to open the conversation.

"h.e.l.lo," Eddi said, trying not to sound cautious.

He nodded.

This was encouraging but not inspirational. "I liked what you were doing on the ba.s.s," she ventured.

Hedge smiled his sweet smile, the one that turned his usually closed, ferrety face into something that could light a street. He nodded again.

"Is... there something you want to talk about?"

His brown eyes widened a little, as if the possibility hadn't occurred to him. Why does he play ba.s.s as if he were nitro-fueled? Eddi wondered. He does everything else on three cylinders.

Hedge looked as if, at worse times in his life, he'd slept in alleys. His brown hair was clean, but not well acquainted with a comb, and might have been cut with a kitchen knife. His thin face had a sallow cast that, with his underfed build, made Eddi wonder if he was recovering from a long illness. He could have been anywhere from fifteen to thirty years old. He wore a plaid flannel shirt so well-washed it was almost white, and blue jeans with holes in the knees.

"No," he mumbled finally, and Eddi realized he was answering her question.

Of course he doesn't want to talk, she grumbled inwardly. I wonder if the boy says a dozen intelligible words all week. Maybe he's afraid his tongue will dry up if he opens his mouth.

"Do you sing?" she asked him.

To her surprise, he gave a half-hearted nod.

"Why don't you ever sing with the band?"

He blinked at her.

"What does that mean?"

Hedge looked down at his tight-clasped hands, and his jaw worked, as if trying to form words and test them before letting them past his lips.

"Are you embarra.s.sed about it?" Eddi asked him gently.

Hedge frowned quickly up at her, looked down, then nodded, a motion so offhand it might have been a shrug.

Eddi studied the mop of messy brown hair that hid his face. His fingers tugged at each other in his lap.

It was an angry, helpless gesture, from the hands that played ba.s.s lines so thick with emotion they were almost verbal.

She looked across the room and saw w.i.l.l.y and the phouka still talking softly. "If there was only me to listen," she said to Hedge, "would you sing?"

Hedge peered out from under his hair and said, as usual, nothing. But Eddi felt encouraged.

"Yo!" she called to the phouka and w.i.l.l.y. "How would you guys like to take a walk?"

"No," said the phouka promptly, smiling. "Thank you."

w.i.l.l.y c.o.c.ked his head at her.