Power Trio

Evan slides a werewolf roar down his A string, slamming to a halt on a juddering note. He lets it drone under Sion’s harsh, buzzing riff and drifts his attention over to Kell, who takes a moment, as she lulls the rhythm into a hi-hat breakdown, to wink at him and blow him a kiss. Then she bobs her head in a one two, and Evan’s head syncs with hers on the three, four, and they pierce the stillness with a joint offensive of crashing sound. Thekla opens up over them with a hair-raising shriek and the Captain Pete’s crowd loses their minds.

They’ve started closing their shows with Fossil Fuel. It’s their biggest song now thanks to a carpet-bomb offensive by Warcry. The first time Evan heard it on a sound system, at Labyrinth’s monthly barbecue, he thought they were playing it as a shout-out to the shop band. “No, man,” Hockham had said. “We’re listening to the radio right now.”

He’s heard it four times since, and Commodity Credit twice. Thekla gave their label one rule and one rule alone for promotion: no car commercials ever.

The show they’re playing tonight is the single release party for Vampire Facial, which is out tonight with Tremendousness as its b-side. Evan takes the low-effort bridge as a moment to catch his breath and look out with renewed awe at the house in front of them. Captain Pete’s Suds n Sounds Shack is a perennial favorite of the New Laytham underground scene, in part because of its bonkers name, but mostly thanks to its capacious basement. You could pack a couple hundred people in here. And they have.

It’s an indulgence to keep playing the DIY spots. Anise keeps telling them it’s fine for shotgun shows, but if they want to schedule something out, let her know so she can book a proper venue. “You’re becoming a fire hazard in these bars.”

Evan has Mel’s bass back. After too many performances without it, he newly appreciates his prelate’s heft and solidity. Compared with his Reeve, the neck is baseball-bat thick, and the body is weighty and substantial, vibrating against his stomach with every pluck.

Evan isn’t sure he’ll ever forgive that luthier for blowing up his spot, but he can’t deny their craftsmanship. The sealed crack snakes its way across the shoulder like a lightning bolt striking the bridge. What could have been the end of this weathered instrument is instead a badass battle scar.

“New Laytham!” Thekla howls, as the band brings the song to its demolition finish around her. “You’ve been fucking amazing!”

Kell ends the song with one final acrobatic fill. Thekla cries out over the claps and stomps and cheers. “Vampire Facial is out there wherever you get your music. And if you’re hitting Vail, you’d better fucking come to the Warcry showcase on Thursday night, so I can undress you with my eyes all over again. I’m talking to you, Maria. We love you, bitch.” She addresses their screaming, pigtailed superfan, who comes to every show she can. During the day, she’s told them, she’s an accountant. The first time they invited her to an afterparty, she looked at them like they’d given her the secret of eternal life.

Kell catches Evan as he’s coming backstage; she’s already got Thekla in her clutches. Submitting to her sloppy post-show kiss is a tradition.

“Remember to breathe, children.” Sion straps his hard case to his back. “I’ll be in at the bar.”

“No afterparty for us tonight, brother,” Kell says. “We got plans. Handle the schmoozing, okay? Give ‘em our love.”

“I will.” Sion bows his way to the green room. “You seem to have enough to spare.”

Kell sticks out her tongue at him.

* * *

“You say if you need a break, okay?” Thekla says over the buzz.

“It’s fine.” Evan’s jaw is set. “Kinda smarts right now, but it’ll feel fine once I’m used to it.”

“Bro, it feels good to me honestly,” Kell says. “Like right away. Is that messed up?”

“I don’t think so.” Thekla wipes the ink and plasma off Evan’s shoulder. “It’s pain, but it’s satisfying.”

“You would say that, Miss Choke-Me-Please.”

“Dude.” Thekla glances around, but it’s after hours at Labyrinth, and the only other tattoo artist here is Hockham, who’s doing paperwork with his earbuds in. “I’m gonna slap your bandage.”

“My tattoo artist will get mad at you.” Kell puts a protective hand over the fresh saniderm on her forearm. “She says to be very gentle during the healing process.”

“Okay,” Thekla says. “Big line coming up. I’ll be fast.”

Evan gives her thigh a reassuring squeeze with his other arm. “You don’t have to warn me, hon. You’re not hurting me.”

“I know, I know. But this one’s gonna get close to the bitch pit.”

“Bitch pit?”

“That’s the other side of the elbow,” Kell says. “So-called cause it hurts like a bitch.”

Thekla kisses the side of Evan’s forehead. “I’ll be gentle, big boy.”

“Oh, this is nothing,” Evan says. “Now the ribs were—okay, ah. That smarts, actually.”

“You’re being very brave about it.” Thekla raises her tattoo gun. “And there we go. Linework’s done. I’m swapping tips out and we’ll blast in some shading.”

Kell wanders over and whistles approvingly at the new tattoo gracing Evan’s forearm. They got it as close to where hers is as they could, although Kell has a lot more tattoos already on there, and a lot more forearm.

The image is the same, though. An iron-ringed door, padlock broken, in the midst of opening, with a set of clawed fingers cresting the edge. Below it, in boxy black-letter: LEGENDARY.

They’ve got a few logos they swap between on their merch. Evan’s personal fave is the face-melting fairfolk, the same sticker Thekla has on her guitar. He didn’t even realize it was her art until they printed it onto a t-shirt. But they all soul-searched and agreed that a human with a tattoo of a fairfolk skull on his forearm was a little suspect. “Unless you marry us,” Thekla said. “Nobody can call hate symbol on a guy with two fairfolk wives.” Then she blushed and clarified that it was a joke and she was just kidding and not to bring her joke back up and that they were going to do the door.

After Thekla’s finished with Evan, she’s going to tattoo herself, which sounds nerve-racking, but apparently she’s done it before.

“Very clean, my love,” Kell says.

“Thank you, my love,” Thekla says. As she swivels round in her seat to get back to work on Evan, her phone buzzes. “Can you get that for me? It’s been doing that for a bit.”

“Bet.” Kell unlocks Thekla’s phone (her PIN is 80081). “Con’s blowing you up. Uh, calling us whores for not being at the afterparty, sending a photo of her kissing Sion’s cheek, asking you when my birthday is, oh. Here’s something.” She turns the phone around. Thekla and Evan squint at it.

next time your in the shed girl im crashing it

we WILL collab on a song at the showcase or im telling everyone evan’s ACTUAL actual last name

its stalin btw. hes evan stalin. thats what im going to say

“What do you guys think?” Kell asks. “Chill with Conna on Friday? Figure something out? It would be a pretty dope curtain call at the showcase.”

“It would,” Evan says. “I’m down. Thek?”

Thekla purses her lips. “We can’t start up a whole new thing and have it up to scratch for Vail, but maybe we can tag her in on one of our pre-existing. Oooh, actually.” She blasts in the door's keystone. “What about Field Fire? She could really tear up a ballad. And I’m too intimidated to share vocals with her, she’ll show me up.”

“She’ll show me up harder,” Evan says.

“It’s different for boys. It’s like a duet.” Thekla nudges his arm a little away from her to reach the inner edge.

“Just don’t fall in love with her too, Ev,” Kell says. “Bed’s big, but it’s not fairfolk harem big.”

Evan chuckles. “I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

Evan isn’t in danger of falling in love with Conna, because she’s kind of crazy and she’s half bird (not to yuck anyone’s yum). But he has to admit, he respects the hell out of her artistry.

She perches on a side table made from a repurposed amp, the Shed mannequin’s feather boa pilfered and hanging around her neck, watching their performance of Field Fire. Her high-beam attention zeroes in on him as he demonstrates the vocals. Already she’s humming harmonies along with him, pitch as perfect as a synthesizer.

They draw to a close and she hops to her feet. “Okay! Let me get my shit set up and then I’ll join you on the next one.” Her zipped-up crescent bag is on the floor. She flicks it open with a deft movement of a talon. Evan is unnerved at how regularly Conna uses her feet for things. She plucks a silver-and-red microphone out of the bag and hackey-sacks it upward, catching it in her hand. “Y’all got an extra XLR?”

“Sure.” Kell feeds one end of the line into the boxy, blinking monitor on the Shed’s west wall. She brings Conna the other. “You didn’t have to bring your own mic, y’know. We got a lot.”

“Sure, but this one is beakproof.” Conna taps the ball enclosure at the end. “Used to be I always had to worry about getting too into it and pecking the capsule out. So Evanski.” She plugs the mic in, does a couple clicks and a huff of breath into it. “What’s our mood here?”

Her voice amplifies. Somehow through the PA it’s even more golden. There’s just a wisp of singer-songwriter fry in her lower range, enough to make her sound trained without being hokey. “Thek, can you grab me a pinch of reverb, please?” Thekla tweaks the effect knob on the monitor as Evan grapples with the question.

“Sad?” he tries. Conna grins and cocks her head. Evan tries to get his answer somewhere in the neighborhood of adequate. “Sad in an elegaic way. But there’s a hope that grows throughout it, like a gradient.”

“Mkay. I like that. I hear that. Think I come in halfway then and take verse two? The one about smoke? And then punch in some harmonies.”

“That works.” Evan chews on this, nodding as he goes. “You sure you don’t want to start it off? You’re the big feature.”

“Nah. I didn’t live it, see.” Conna slots her mic into a stand and adjusts it to her height. “I’m just an upper-middle type chick with a performance degree her parents paid for. This is your song, so it’s your story. Out of you, it’s real.”

“That’s Ev, bro. Real as hell.” Kell warms her wrist back up with a flourish of her drumstick. “Whenever you’re ready, lover boy.”

Evan squares his shoulders, shakes out the slight ache from getting used to his heavier home instrument again. Field Fire begins up the neck, in the places bassists rarely ever touch, his mother’s prelate straining as high as it can to form a plaintive metallic sigh of a line. Evan’s voice joins it, as unsure and out-of-place as its high octave. He works his way down as Kell’s beat embraces him like a hug from behind, puts some steel back in his spine.

By the time they’ve reached the chorus, Sion’s taken up the riff from the beginning, those unfamiliar notes sounding sweet and full on his thinner strings. Thekla’s fingers dance across her magician line, throwing in spellbreaking flourishes and chords to make sure they don’t spill the eldritch beans in front of their avian guest singer.

Conna shuts her eyes and sways to the song. As they exit the chorus into a swirl of fingerpicked arpeggio, she steps up to her microphone and opens her beak.

* * *

Conna’s voice flowers across the lawn in an enrapturing current, binding the showcase crowd into a collective, sighing daydream. Kell wipes her sweat with her forearm, her bangled bracelets chiming. Evan backs away from his own microphone, ceding the bright lip of the band shell stage to the harpy.

Sion is in his usual virtuoso trance, head at a slight angle, shaded eyes dilated, the collar of his tuxedo shirt three buttons deep. Thekla told him, on the drive up, that one of the truest reasons he’s in Legendary is because of the ash elf advocating for him in a way he’d never advocated for another bassist. The ash elf glances back at him and Evan’s gratitude glows. This weird, spooky son of a bitch has never gotten easy to predict or interpret. But he is a friend, tried and true. Evan owes him the world, and he never acts as though he intends to collect.

Thekla has her pursed-lip concentration on. This lead line is easily twice as complicated as anything else she’s played in front of him. Every time she flows through it, she dazzles him. It was her idea to dress as fancy as possible for the showcase. For her, that’s a little black dress, open-backed to show off her ornamental back piece, and a pair of floral-pattern netted tights. Her earrings, her eyes, and her hotrod guitar all gleam in the setting Niagara sun. She’s been on fire all night, dancing and crying and crooning and shredding, and the sudor sheen across her chest attests to it.

Kell’s got a bodycon red dress on, with an open midriff to let her chiseled abs peek out. She’s gone hard on the eyeliner, streaking a fan of lines across her right cheek. It’s an orcish war paint design, she told him. The audience can’t see it behind those double kicks, but the unladylike way in which she’s sitting to reach all her pedals, and the rhythmic flexing of her quads through her customary blastbeat interludes, has been threatening Evan’s focus all night.

And here’s Conna in front, the guest of honor, scarlet feathers haloed in the stage light gold as she spreads her wings and sings her heart out. Shrike performed in standard punk uniform, so she’s massively underdressed in a jean miniskirt, but it hardly matters when her plumage is more majestic than anything a tailor could conjure. When she stepped onto the stage to join them, the crowd just about broke the sound barrier.

Anise wasn’t lying. Brooklyn’s audience seemed so huge. Niagara’s given them twice that. Five thousand people, easily, arrayed across a gently sloping hill and framed by the forest. It’s a comfort, seeing the sunset light on such a rainbow of faces after their biggest crowds were predominantly human.

Conna’s voice brings a dramatic power to the song it’s never had before. Elegant swoops, rock-steady sustain. She mirrors Evan’s rawness, but with intention. She teeters just on the tasteful, cool side of the coin without tipping over into musical theater. She’s riveting, but Evan sees how she’s serving the song just as he does. He comes back to his own mic and does his best to keep up. He likes to think he’s giving her vocal acrobatics a solid platform. Or at least making her sound good in comparison.

The powerhouse outro starts and Evan steels himself for his most difficult line, breathes deep into his diaphragm and lets out a gritty, anguished cry. Conna’s lilt joins and flourishes around him, raises the entire band with her, and Kell smashes a più lento slowdown, and Sion punctuates every single note in the riff with a warbling bend, and the crowd is already cheering before the final tone rings out. Waves of sound and energy wash over them.

“Vail,” Thekla cries. “We are fucking Legendary.”

Earth-shaking applause.

“Conna, c’mere.” Thekla embraces the harpy. “Love you. Shrike is next, everyone. So keep that noise up. Good night, Niagara!”

They rush offstage in a giddy pile. “Who needs the mainstage, bro.” Kell pops Thekla into the air. “Who needs it? That was so sick.”

Evan gets a glance at Sion in the middle of the furious makeout that follows. Contrary to his usual behavior, the ash elf is standing politely to the side, waiting for them to finish. Evan taps Kell’s shoulder and gets the trio’s attention on Sion.

“I don’t mean to cut anything short,” Sion says. “But I wonder if you could do me a quick favor.”