Power Trio

“We were never meant to do this,” says Kell. “You don’t like magic, but you’re cool with doing this. I don’t get it. I do not get it.”

“I do so like magic,” Thekla says. “I didn’t used to, but now I do.”

Evan wiggles his hand out of Kell’s vise grip. “Gimme this for a second. I need my bubbly.”

Nathan Puck comes up the aisle and pauses near their seats. “Getting some shut-eye. Smart.” He nods toward Kell, her sleep mask secure over her face. “Think I’ll follow suit. Good for the jetlag, you know?”

“Kell’s not asleep,” Evan says. He takes a draw from his champagne. “She just hates flying.”

“Never met an orc who enjoyed it.” Puck tsks. “You’ll acclimate.”

“I’ll get used to it when I get a private jet,” Kell insists, rigid in her seat. “Until then, this is ass.”

“Hey, this is first class,” Puck says. “Enjoy it, yeah? Take in an in-flight movie. You don’t want a PJ. The social media kids track PJs these days. You don’t need them on your case.” He winks and moves on. “See you when we land, right?”

“You got it, Nate,” Thekla pipes sweetly.

Evan drains his champagne and returns his hand to Kell, who clutches it tight. “Think about Samhain, okay?” he says. “Less than seventy-two hours till Samhain.”

Thekla giggles. “Only our wife would comfort herself on a first-class plane ride with the thought of performing for a hundred thousand people.”

“I’m not your wife yet,” Kell says. “We’re gonna fall outta the sky and into the Atlantic and we’ll never have been married and my ghost will kick everyone’s ass.”

Fortunately, Kell’s record of prognostication receives another black mark a few hours later as their airbus coasts into Heathrow. She hisses air through her tusks as they hit tarmac and scrambles off the plane as quickly as she can, but once they’re on solid ground her cheer returns quickly.

It increases with every British accent she hears, and maxes out when they reach the luxe hotel. “This is bloody brill, innit?” she says, rolling their luggage into their palatial suite.

Thekla removes her sunglasses grimly. “Evan, if she keeps talking like this, let’s get a divorce.”

“Tough but fair, hon.”

They surrender a day to jetlag, order room service and watch weird TV. They take the next to explore London. There are as many fairfolk in the UK as there are in America, concentrated into a much smaller footprint. Thekla takes them with delight to a goblin market, laughing at the ceilings they scrape their heads on and negotiating in rapid-fire susurrus for a flamberge dagger for Evan and a genuine spider silk scarf for Kell.

“Is this thing legal in New Layth?” he asks, examining the elegant blade.

“You’re a Kamiyon now,” Thekla says, as if that’s all the answer required.

They go to a Nixie seafood place called Greentooth, right on the Thames, and feast on kelp shopska salad and some of the best fish Evan’s ever had, flaky and filling and perfectly greasy.

That night he dreams of Fall Creek again, just as he did the night he first slept with Kell and Thekla. But this time it’s night, and his father’s voice is silent. He’s fleeing through the darkened woods from something immense and hungry. He dream-runs, too slow and fatigued, stumbling and grasping at trees for balance, and feels breath on his neck. It catches him, and with many limbs it embraces him, and he realizes as he is borne to the ground that he should have been the one pursuing the entire time.

Evan awakens tangled in the arms of his girlfriends. Kell’s elbow lays across his chest. Her fresh Legendary tattoo is right over his heart, on the Thunderhead logo he engraved there five years ago.

Today is the day.

* * *

They take a charter bus out of London, headed for Laytham Field. Anise is harried halfway out of her mind, glued to two separate phones and a carafe of coffee.

They ride with Argyle and the Breakers. Like it’s no big deal. Mandrake Altimor, Kell’s drum idol, shooting the shit with her and laughing about tambourines. Nina Argyle, in an ethereal state of meditation, guitar in her lap. These are musicians Evan grew up listening to, whose fingerprints are impressed upon his heart. Goshen Leonard asks Evan to see Mel Houper’s bass.

How the hell do you say no to Goshen Leonard?

He cradles it like the artifact it is. “This is new.” He runs a thumb down its sealed crack.

“Had a run-in with a headbanger,” Evan replies.

The bus pauses at a motel outside of London, and with a flurry of feathers, Conna is here with them. “Surpriiiise, bitches!”

“Girl!” Kell is up like a bullet, tugging the harpy into a mighty hug. “How did you get here?”

“I begged. I pled. I promised Puck my firstborn.” Conna finds Evan over Kell’s shoulders. “I need to sing Field Fire with you, Evan Kamiyon. Need it. Will you let me?”

“Hey, girlie!” Mandrake slaps Conna on the back. “Howzit?”

“You two know each other?” Thekla asks.

“You do a cuppa coffee with Warcry, Conna’s a fangirl of you at some point,” he tells her. “Just how it is.”

It’s the fourth day of the festival; the fans and the infrastructure already spread like a spiderweb across the countryside. Tent cities and camper vans. Human and fairfolk, punks and squares and crusty old-timers who’ve been coming to this since the days of Thunderhead. A teeming ocean of people, descended upon the English idyll in a distant mirror of the Crossover, centuries before. Drawn now, like then, by the power of music.

The bus rolls through the motley and deposits Legendary a hundred feet behind the mammoth stage that will host their first Samhain set tonight. From the other side, they hear the booming frequencies of one of the daytime performers.

Puck is back here, and Anise goes to him, babbling something about a union guy. He receives her with his customary unflappable manner.

Between sets, they’re let up onto the stage for a line check. The platform upon which they’re performing is the size, by itself, of all of Glorie’s back hall. Ultra-professional roadies ask clipped, courteous questions and mark spots and equipment with colorful gaff tape.

Then they return to the bus and wait. The crowd is like the distant roar of the surf outside the metal walls.

Sion performs his spidery warm-up. Thekla massages Kell’s back. Evan sits with his bass and turns it this way and that, catching his warped reflection in the metal of its bridge. If he holds it like this, so he can only see one blue eye and a crescent of his big nose, it’s like his mother is looking back out at him.

“You know what?” Kell says, into the still air.

“Mmm?” Evan looks up from his instrument.

“Maybe we should call ourselves Dog Collar Match.” She squeezes Thekla’s hand. “You guys think there’s time to ask them to change it?”

* * *

Thekla closes her fist around her microphone. A half a dozen house-sized plasma screens catch the motion and splay it out to hundreds of thousands of people across the teeming night.

“Samhain.” Her smoky voice rolls out to the distant foothills and back.

She looks over her shoulder at every member of the band. Kell’s vibrating, her leg jiggling so hard she’s keeping her foot off her pedal for fear of an early kick. Evan’s finger presses to the notch above his pickup, the skin on his thumb white. Sion looks how Sion always looks.

Evan was born and raised in Chattanooga. He loved that city, treasures the memories still. The crowd before him is roughly the size of its entire population.

Thekla turns back to the assembled faithful on Laytham Field. “We’re Legendary,” she says, and the keening shriek of Sion’s guitar is lightning tearing through the night.

 

Fossil Fuel.

Evan remembers the third time he played this song, after the rocky first go-around and the groove he caught on the second. There was a moment after, when Kell was in Herbalism’s darkened storefront, where the john was located a flashlight’s beam away, and Sion was outside for a reason he can’t recall.

That was the first time he was alone with Thekla, and she busied herself with a pentatonic practice run up the neck of her Alfons, avoiding his eye.

“Thekla,” he said.

“Mmhmm?” Still not looking at him.

“That’s a very cool guitar,” he said.

“Thank you.” She gave him a tight smile. “I got it because if you put the right amount of fuzz on it, it sounds fucking hideous.”

The fuzz is here now, a mudslide of it, blowing hair back and enveloping Fossil Fuel in grimy amplitude. Thekla is small and Thekla is cute. But her teeth are razor sharp, and she can bare noise and discord as easily as she bares her shark fangs, going from angelic ringing to hellacious dissonance as the song directs.

Her ginger hair whirls through the Samhain glow, mouth open wide, eyes screwed shut, as she screams HOLY! RULE! to an army that screams it back.

 

Escalate.

Evan remembers Kell running him through a tricky, technique-heavy polyrhythmic breakdown on this song. Something just wasn’t clicking. By his third attempt, he was feeling the chilly fingers of an anxiety attack closing his throat.

He’d had his very first of these a couple of years ago, and another two weeks later, and that began a regular, approximately biweekly cadence that could only ever calm itself with his hands full of the alder of his matrilineal bass.

He’s not sure if she noticed his distress. But she stood up, and cracked her broad back, and said to him, “It’s all just a bunch of big boomy noises. And then our weird monkey brains decide if they’re good or bad.” She sat back down. “Kinda ridiculous of us, to be honest.”

After the first night he slept in Kell’s room, when she told him what she thought of him, he’s never had an anxiety attack again.

Kell’s double kicks are a cavalry charge tonight, with Evan’s mid-heavy octaves as their blaring war horn. They crash into that technical breakdown, and Evan has never executed it with such perfection. Kell mouths YES at him from across the stage.

“On the drums!” Thekla raises her fist, her scarlet pick pointed at her lover. “My fiancée, Kellax fucking Falrak!”

 

Vampire Facial.

Evan remembers standing outside a club after a performance of this song with Thekla, a few nights after their date and the charged encounter on her couch. She lit up a cigarette and sucked its smoke down, and its snaking blue billow back out of her was one of the most erotic things he’d ever seen.

She saw his gaze, licked her upper lip.

“You’re looking at me like you want to fuck me, Evan H,” she said.

Their mutual attraction made him bold. “I imagine a woman like you is used to that.”

“It’s different with your eyes.” She passed him the cigarette. “Anyone ever tell you that you look like a husky?”

“I don’t smoke,” he said, to her offered dart.

“Don’t inhale. Just put it in your mouth. And hold it there.”

He looked at the filter, at the little mark of merlot-colored lipstick on it, and did what she asked. It was still warm and damp from her tongue. She stared at him, unblinking.

She stares at him again now, head rolling over to him from her splayed-out place on the floor of the stage. Her eyes are full of lust and promise. She bends the leg facing the audience, to block their view with her knee, and tilts her hips to give him a private look at the black-and-red stripes of her panties.

They know every little thing about each other now, every smutty dream the other has dreamt, every trick that makes the other crazy. Kell is a wonderful lover and a selfless domme, but sex with Kell is always sex with Kell (just as a wagyu steak is always a wagyu steak). When Evan and Thekla are one-on-one, the goblin delights in teasing back the edges of dirty fantasies that he never thought he’d speak out loud, let alone find an eager ear for. She’s tied herself down and dressed herself up. She’s played teacher for him, and nurse, and steamy secretary. She is every shameful porny imagining he ever had, turned shameless, loving and unafraid.

They hit the chorus, and he lets loose with his stormy groove. She arches her back as her voice goes high and breathy on the hook.

A veritable explosion of applause after this song. She stands up and makes a show of innocently smoothing her mini dress out. “Evan H on the bass!” She indicates him with a sweep of her arm, then holds her hand up. The ring he gave her glints in the stage light. “I’m marrying this dude too. True story.”

 

Thunder Thighs.

Evan remembers a late night when they decided they’d finally buckle down and figure out the name for this one. “It cannot keep being fucking Thunder Thighs,” Thekla said. “That’s not even a lyric in the song.”

“Maybe it oughta be,” Kell said. “Come check out my. BA-DUM. Thunder Thighs! They get all the. BA-DUM. Handsome guys!”

“You could name it Lithaeam Teiabraum,” Sion said.

Kell’s nose wrinkled. “That’s elf, right?”

“Indeed.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Thunder Thighs,” Sion said.

 

Tremendousness.

Evan remembers a day when Sion came to the Shed and, with no preamble or discussion, totally changed his part on Tremendousness. It wasn’t any sort of stab at a spell, Evan knows that now; but at the time Thekla was paranoid that Sion was about to make them cast Fireball or something. Evan and Kell sheepishly confronted the ash elf after rehearsal about the change.

“We just want to make sure you’ve got yourself under control,” Evan said.

“I’ve become a mad wizard, you think?” Sion is running through his new line acoustically. “Off to build a tower in the wilderness and hire 1d6 apprentice magic-users?”

“Dude.” This was the testiest Evan had ever seen Kell. “Just answer the question. Are you trying to do magic with Tremendousness or not?”

“The only magic I’m attempting to work is transmogrifying my dreadful dad rock draft into something worthy of the instrument it’s played on,” Sion said. “Music can be for music’s sake. There’s few sakes sacred-er.”

“Okay.” Evan’s trust in the ash elf was shaky at best. But what choice did he have besides taking Sion at his word? “It does sound better, true.”

“Everything is iteration, Evan H,” Sion said. “Iteration and effort. You’ve heard that line about music living in every person’s soul, yes?”

“Sure.”

“It stands to reason, then, that 99% of the music created is boring shit.”

And here’s Sion’s Tremendousness line, as ersatz and eldritch as the elf who wrote it, lacing across an otherwise straightforward tune and subverting as it elevates. He swerves into a minor key, swells into a booming chord passage, drops out in the middle of an eighth note shuffle and returns with a tearing wound of feedback.

The guy might not be a mad magician, but nobody would try the things that Sion does. He is the most adventurous guitarist Evan’s ever played with, and with the time and practice they’ve put into these songs, he’s alchemized his experiments into glittering gold.

“Sion Benefice on guitar!” Thekla cries during a blitzkrieg passage, and the horde lances a storm of appreciation through the night air.

 

Commodity Credit.

Evan remembers his mother.

Her bass in his hands, running up the major scale in arpeggios and plunking his way through old Thunderhead recordings. Mom could go entire songs in the shadows of her bandmates, playing only root notes and simple patterns; and then for one bridge, one bar even, she would burst out these breathtaking virtuoso lines.

“They’re always talking about Uncle Lysander,” Evan said. “All his solos. But you’re better. Why’d you play like this?”

“I don’t know about better.” She chuckled. “That’s what the song needed, Evvy. Simple as that.”

“You coulda played those solos easy.”

“I coulda.”

“And nobody talks about the bassist.”

“They sure talked about me. Your mom used to be a looker, you know that?”

Ray was in the kitchen, cutting up a watermelon. He let out an affirmative wolf-whistle.

“Ew. Mom.” Evan made a scandalized face. “But your music. Nobody ever says oh, that bassist was so good. It’s always the guitar guys.”

She laughed. “We can get you a six string, y’know.”

“No. I like this.” He clutched the bass closer to himself. “I just wonder why not.”

“When Uncle Lysander played good, the audience came out saying that guitarist was amazing,” Mel said. “And when Terry was on, they’d come out saying that singer made me cry. That drummer was going crazy all night. Know what they’d say, after shows when I was on fire?”

She smiled mischievously.

“Nothing?” Evan guessed.

“They’d say: that band is my new favorite band.”

Evan feels the potent control his mother taught him, vibrating his whole body with every dancing note. His band, his audience, his own heart. All of them held in thrall to his bass, all of them bewitched, a single united artery through which his rhythm pulses.

 

Trapped Like Rats.

Evan remembers the struggle with this song, the endless sweat to get it right.

After one fruitless evening of work, Kell brought him back to her apartment in a pensive state. They arrived at her duplex, and unlike last time, the living room was tidy. More than enough space for Evan to spread her expensive sleeping bag out. Evan thought of pointing that out, but she was already opening her room door to him, looking back over a finely carved shoulder expectantly. He joined her at the foot of her cali king once more, and she told him a story.

“Before I met Sion, you know,” she said, over the hissing of the distant traffic, “this whole thing was just a hobby. A way to vent. It was me and him and my ex, and I didn’t have any plan for what to do with my life. I was really only in it to whack stuff really hard. And said ex would say these dumbfuck things that would make me feel like a tourist. I was ready to quit more than a few times.”

“Did Sion keep you going?”

“That’s right.” She smiled at the memory. “I told him once you’re gonna have to find another drummer. And he told me, I still remember.” She put on a snooty impression of the elf. “You are an artist, Ms. Falrak, in a world where we are an endangered species. You can ignore that and let it eat you alive, or you can ignore our rhythm guitarist and let it eat him.”

It’s easy to forget that Kell and Sion have been playing together the longest until Trapped like Rats begins and Sion leads them all into his labyrinthine house of mirrors. Kell is so surefooted and steady, pulling a danceable groove from the elf’s thicket of sound, always there to keep the song on the rails when Sion departs the realm of sanity, or back up his high strangeness when the song metamorphoses and twists between its sections.

“We got one last song for you, Samhain,” Thekla says, “and we have a surprise.”

Evan will remember this later: Conna comes jogging from the back, to another crashing round of cheers. As she waves to the crowd and exchanges a hug with Thekla, Sion steps close to him and says, sotto voce, “Evan, do you trust me?”

“I trust you.”

“You are my brother, Evan. I would not want to be here with any bassist but you. My love is not like Kell’s or Thekla’s. But you have it just the same.”

An anxious twinge in Evan’s gut. “I love you too, man.”

“Then do something for me,” Sion says. “Don’t stop playing.”

Before he can think about this, Thekla is back on the microphone. “This one is Evan’s. I’mma swap out and let him preach at you.”

“Hi.” He steps up to the microphone. The world knows who he is. It stills to listen. “This is a song I wrote because I wanted a different life. It’s called

 

Field Fire.

Evan’s bass swells a high, moaning lament across the festival.

He closes his eyes. On the inverse of his lids, he’s back in the Smoke Shed and its carnival lights and musty scents. His wives watch him with expectant eyes. He sings.

Kell is the foundation, rising monumentally from the lapping ocean of wind and crowd noise. Sion’s guitar is a glittering bridge across which Thekla’s line flows. Evan sings and plays and dares to look, and the crowd has grown as other sets finished. There are more people in front of Evan than he has ever seen in one place. More people than he will meet and know in his lifetime. A patchwork coalition here to witness the climax of the Legend. To see how it ends and how another begins.

As if conjured, Conna’s angelic tone descends, and Evan swears to God the air thins from the mass intake of breath. She alights upon their sound, takes the second verse and dominates it. She climbs up the register into a crystalline falsetto. Evan feels the band slowing slightly, as one, to give her voice more room. She’s changing it, mutating Field Fire again.

And Evan realizes it, as the second verse ends. The world dims. His focus narrows.

Conna is casting a spell.

His voice falters for a moment. His head jerks to Sion, whose face has changed while playing, for the first time. He returns Evan’s look with desperate, pleading intensity. Don’t stop playing.

Evan’s mind is frantic. What is happening? Does Conna even understand what she’s doing? But it makes no difference. He can’t stop.

“Evan!” Kell shouts over the noise, on the edge of hearing here, so close to her. Every muscle in her body is tense. The stud in her tusk gleams from her gritted teeth. “What’s happening? What are we doing?”

Evan can’t respond. The next verse is here and Conna’s magic is so strong that his voice is shackled to it, his throat open wide, singing with a raw power that is not and could never be his. The force moving through him is Richter scale. A massive, eclipsing shadow.

Thekla’s gone silent, but it doesn’t matter. Conna has taken her place. Her guitar hangs slack. She staggers back, face stricken. Evan wants to go to her. Don’t stop playing. The thought is a geas, a thing not his own, rooting him to the spot.

Conna reaches a vibrating, diamond-cutter note, sustains it with her arms outstretched, her pupils dilated, her face possessed.

The strobes and spots die with a thunderous noise like God snapping His hi-hat shut. The stage goes dark. Laytham field plunges into a starscape of phones and safety lights.

Haloed by the waning moon, Conna’s arms raise to the sky. Her wings fan out in a scarlet circle above her head. Her eyes glow. She speaks.

“Open the door.”

A line of light ascends from the earth, past the end of the crowd, whose mass confusion is only now beginning to manifest. Up through the air. Two dozen stories high.

And then.

Like an unfolding book, a glaring blue sky unfurls, squared off at the corners. An invisible door, the size of a skyscraper, opening with a rushing howl of wind. A rolling forest, primeval and massive, the early rust of autumn threading through it. Waterfalling islands of floating stone and alien flora float like impossible satellites before a jagged tusk-shaped mountain peak, splitting up from the earth.

Not the earth. Not Earth at all. The old world, stretching before them.

And Conna backs away, to stand before a Kell agog at the light of an unthinkable day’s intrusion upon the Laytham night. The harpy makes eye contact with Evan. She grins and winks.

With an ungainly flapping hop, she begins a sprint, from where she stands to the stage’s edge, and she leaps and

her wings extend, her hands sharpening and detaching from the expanding membrane and

her feathers shine and harden and lay flat, tail solidifying, and

her beak grows, bristles with teeth, takes on the same scarlet shade as her feathers (not her feathers; her scales) and

she grows as she ascends. And keeps ascending and growing and

and Conna is not a harpy. Conna is a fifty-foot long, ruby-red dragon.

Screams and wonder. Awe and pandemonium. Thekla drops to her knees. Kell is already vaulting the drums, bowling a cymbal aside. Conna does one long corkscrew circle around the stage as she climbs, and Kell has grabbed Evan and Thekla and anchored herself between them and the titanic dragon.

Evan stares, hypnotized. Conna’s cream colored belly is strobe-lit with thousands of flashing cameras. Her massive head turns and one magma eye fixes on the musicians, huddled in the center of the stage. The wily light of the harpy they called their friend still sparkles within it, as if to say: check this shit out.

Her football field wings raise with familiar diva showmanship and then beat downward, a typhoon force rocketing her into the azure sky beyond the portal.

It does not close behind her. Its light blazes into the altered world of mankind.

Sion gazes, the recovered sun of the old world shining an ethereal glow on his skin. He unslings his guitar and takes a step forward.

“That,” he says, “was a great song.”