Power Trio

Anise hustles across the camp to the practice tent at its edge. An absurd part of her is eager enough to skip, or jog at least, as she goes. She will not do that, because:

One. She is old enough to be their mother. She keeps reminding herself.

Two. Her contractors are all watching her and she has to project sober authority.

Three. She heard the noise they made last time, and she heard its sudden cessation. One reason she’s coming to practice is because of what she suspects they’re getting up to under her nose. If Dee’s letting an unlicensed bard with a proven track record of magical catastrophe incant on her tour, she’s misjudged the packmistress.

They’ve already gotten started. She hears Dee’s booming bass as she approaches the tent. She pokes her head into the flap and is greeted by a cheerful wave from Dee, a respectful nod from Nick, and a fully assembled drum kit.

“You guys just assumed I’d say yes?” She slides behind the snare and takes a seat on the throne.

“Course we did, boss.” Dee’s tongue pokes out as she performs an amateur tune-up. “Every time we get you to drum you look like… Nicky, can I get an English phrase that means real happy?”

“Happy as a clam,” he supplies.

“As a clam?” Her brow furrows. “That’s a wkre’pek, right? Like—” She mimics a shell opening and shutting.

“Yep. On Earth they are happy, apparently.”

“Man, if you say so.”

Anise is glad they are having this conversation and not paying attention to her, because she’s pretty sure she’s blushing. She kicks up a practice rhythm, a 4/4 motorik with a cheeky splash at the beginning of every bar.

Dee enthusiastically launches into a low G bassline. “Feel the groove.” Nick steps over to them, forms a loose circle of musicians. “Don’t rush. You wanna lock in. Try looking at her leg on the bass pedal.”

She zeroes in on Anise’s leg, biting her tongue as she focuses on matching up. Anise, who changed into shorts as soon as the balmy change of scenery gave her the excuse, tries not to be mortified. Her thigh is jiggling with every kick.

Dee’s finding the pocket. Her wide hips tilt in time to the rhythm they’re making. She looks up from Anise’s foot and meets the elf’s glance. Her face is glowing.

“Get a few more roots in there. Construct the line. I’ll jump in.” Nick thumbs his selector switch onto his bridge pickup and bobs his head to their beat. “Remember where your fourth and your fifth are. Good. Very good.”

His guitar wails to life and twinkles a beautiful lead line atop them. The stars on his arm twitch as his bicep flexes from his strumming. Dee’s got him putting on muscle fast. Those villain eyes close, and his head tilts back, and his lips part, a silvery strand stretching in one corner, and stop looking so close at his tongue, Anise, you fucking alley cat. Even if he wasn’t an employee, he’s barely older than your daughter.

God, he’s skilled. What’s he doing slumming it with two amateurs in his rhythm section?

“Play around with it,” he calls over the noise. “Anise is gonna hold you up. Try some syncopation.”

Dee switches up her flow, drills out rapid sixteenths and drops muted notes between Anise’s bass-snare boogie. “End of this bar, you take a fill, Ani.” Nick nods at her. “Drop out with me, Dee. Okay, two, three, four…”

Her bandmates choke their sound off. Anise pounds out a barrage of toms and a slivery splash of cymbal, and Dee whoops with glee as she and Nick open back up over her. And Anise is having such a fucking blast it only occurs to her after they’ve wrapped this song up that Nick just called her Ani for the first time.

That feels a little too familiar. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him to stop calling her boss. But here’s his pink hand with its long, tapered fingers angling for a high five and she slaps one on him. “That was sweet,” Dee says.

“That was so sweet,” Nick says. “Did you have an instructor or anything, Anise? You are tight.”

“Nothing like that.” Anise feels her face heat up. “It’s all just YouTube and fucking around, to be honest.”

“An autodidact, huh?” Nick whistles. “Very, very impressive. Those fills were acrobatic as fuck.”

“You are hot, boss,” Dee says.

Anise giggles. “Thanks, Dee.”

“I’m serious.” Dee fixes her with her wide stare. “You’re good at drumming and you’re cute as hell. You are a catch.”

Anise goes as red as a strawberry. “Uh. Thank you.”

“I just wanted to say something cause you were blushing when I was looking at your legs. And I think you should be proud of your legs. They’re really nice legs. I get it ain’t something you bring up in polite company on Earth, but I figure we’re in the O-Dub right now. You can write me up for inappropriate office conduct once you’re back Earthside.” She winks.

Anise isn’t sure whether she wants to crawl into a hole or break into dance.

Dee turns her attention to Nick. “Could that be our first song?”

“It could. Just needs a chorus and some lyrics. Uh, but Dee.” Nick nudges her. “You haven’t asked Ani yet.”

“Oh, shit, that’s true.” Dee leans across Anise’s snare, unintentionally giving her employer a remarkable view down her v-neck. “Boss, you wanna be in a band with us? We’re Quillbear. And we need a drummer.”

No way. She has absolutely no time to join a band. She’s already so busy. This isn’t spring break. She’s old enough to be their—

Well. They weren’t in here throwing around magic spells after all, were they? Dee has her trust still. And she’s already found the time to practice with them. Why not do an original or two?

Especially if it means Dee is going to keep looking at her legs. And Nick is going to keep calling her Ani.

You shouldn’t call him that and he shouldn’t call you that, her inner principal chides. But she’s going to burn out if she loses this outlet.

“Is the name set in stone?” she asks.

“Yes,” Dee says.

“Not if we outvote her,” Nick says.

“Packmistress vote counts double.”

“That would make it a dead heat.”

“If I say yes.” Anise holds up a finger. “It’s a soft yes. I might change my mind as the situation calls for it. This is Legendary’s tour, not Quillbear’s.”

“Deal.” Dee extends a hand across the drum kit and they shake on it.

Nick scratches his ear. “And we’re definitely Quillbear?”

After a few more runs and the first stabs at a chorus, Quillbear break for the night.

Nick catches her on the walk out. “Can I talk to you about something?” His face is grave.

Anise hesitates. It’s been a bear of a day and Nick looks serious. “Will it keep until morning?”

“Yo Nicky,” Dee calls. “You coming?”

“Sure.” Nick gives her the thumbs up and follows his packmistress.

Anise retires to bed. Nick and Dee retire to theirs.

She refuses to be jealous. There is no reason to be jealous.

She’s got her yurt set up next to Dee’s on most of their campsites. It wasn’t a conscious decision on her part, but she can’t camp next to the trailer anymore and listen to Thekla getting sexually destroyed every night. Mostly Nick and Dee just talk. Sometimes one or the other plays that acoustic of his. She hears it muffled through the felt. She’d know if they were getting up to anything carnal, she’s pretty sure. Not that she tries to listen.

No thinking about Dee this time. She lays her hand on her stomach and dresses herself down. You promised yourself you’d stop.

You shouldn’t think about Nick either.

But she never made that promise. Not yet, anyway. And she’s remembering the way he looked when the music overtook him. His open mouth. His screwed-shut eyes.

Is that what he’d look like with his hand in her hair and his cock in her throat?

“Alley cat,” she mumbles to herself, in the velvet dark. Her fingers slip downward. They’re so much smaller and slighter than his.

* * *

It’s a glorious morning, crisp and blue, as they pull stakes and pack the rhinos, and Anise is inside the trailer watching through the window with an enormous book of crossword puzzles in her lap.

Thekla sits on the pullout bed in the crook of Evan’s knee, a guitar in her lap. “I’m learning your final lesson,” she purrs in her smoky alto, picking out a skeletonized B flat. “You taught me… mmm.” She nudges her husband’s calf. “What rhymes with lesson?”

“Lessen, maybe?”

“Babe, that’s the same word.”

“No, like, lessen.” Evan turns the page of his novel. “Like decrease.”

She clicks her tongue. “That doesn’t count. That’s poetically lame.”

“I’m shooting my Smith and Wesson,” Kell sings, as she gallops into the trailer and flops onto the bed. “Hello, Ani. Hello, wives.”

“Why would I be doing that?” Thekla’s nose wrinkles.

“Cause guns are sick.” Kell mimics shooting Evan, who dutifully flops over dead. “Ani, could you tell Dee that she has to let me shoot her revolver or she’s fired?”

Anise takes a long pull from her coffee thermos. “You can tell her that, and if she says no, you can fire her.”

“I can’t do that. I’m a pussy.” Kell lifts Evan back up to a seated position and takes a long inhale of his hair that ends in a muffled little whimper. Her long, tattooed arms tighten around his chest.

Anise dog-ears her puzzle to mark her place. She has danced this dance before. The band is very accommodating, but when Kell’s switch is flipped like this, she’s handsy and restless until she gets some alone time with her mates.

“I’m gonna go be useful.” She stands up and does a quick toe-touch to loosen her morning tightness. “You guys need anything?”

“Sorry, Ani.” Kell’s gray eyes look sheepishly up from atop Evan’s shaggy mane. “We’re all good in here.”

“It is seriously nothing to worry about. This is me getting my percentage.” Anise plucks her coffee off the counter and bows herself out.

She wanders through the deconstructing camp. She waves at Dalma, who’s sitting on a packed supply crate and gazing intently at an unnerved Parag. She gives a thumbs-up to Nick as he and Graila haul a case of metal scaffold onto a wagon. “You wanted to talk to me about something, Nick?”

Nick glances at his packmate loading the steel onto the wagon. “I’m good. It wasn’t anything important.”

Anise shrugs that off as she continues on her way. She ends up at the foot of Dee’s massive rhino. Dee and the pack seneschal, a hulking phantom called Rarek, are sitting atop their mounts, listening intently to a compact radio in the outrider’s hand as it unfurls a string of orcish syllables. The packmistress has a weather-worn and jampacked binder in her hands, and Anise watches as she scribbles in it, tearing out pieces of paper and consulting in orcish (packtongue, Anise reminds herself) with her packmate.

“What’s up?” Anise asks.

Dee passes the binder to Rarek, who takes over her scribbling. “Updating the radio almanac for Vatramor,” she says. “Not a lotta packs out here, but there’s still a channel for us.”

“I’ve seen you do this.” Anise glances at the seneschal as he takes notes. The pen is comically small in his hand. “So you give each other the lay of the land?”

“That’s right. Weather and travel alerts, local politics, shit like that. Been a long time since we were in Vatramor, so a lot’s changed. But there’s a packmaster up by Lareth being real patient with us.”

“Is it a voluntary thing? I thought you compete with each other.”

“Sure, sometimes.” Dee adjusts her gun belt. “But the radio almanac is different. Sacred, kinda. Used to be it was boards at crossroads. You can still see them sometimes. Technology marches on, right?”

Anise has tried to explain smartphones to Dee a few times; the packmistress finds it patently unbelievable. And these satellites are in space? Like stars in the sky space?

“Can I ask you a favor?” She gives Hammer the rhino a rub on his snout. “Can I ride with you today?”

“Not trying to trailer it?”

“It’s just such a nice day out,” Anise says. “And also, every time I ride in there, I feel like I’m a chaperone to a bunch of horny prom dates.”

“Get on up here then, boss.” Dee clasps Anise’s forearm and pulls her into the saddle.