Power Trio

They take the subway two stops further out from the midtown core, to a sleepy residential neighborhood called Darrowbrook. Kell sits next to him and tells him more about Field Fire. Her sotto voce laugh, about her aunt’s bullheaded insistence on running the front of house by herself, mingles with the rumble of the train through the dark. He tells her about Nashville, the parts he likes to remember, the Grand Ole Opry and the sprawl of the pikes, and driving around to nowhere listening to shitty pop punk.

She takes him to a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint, with a glowing ATM and a sleepy Iranian guy behind the counter who Kell fistbumps and introduces as Peyman the Pizza Prince. They eat at a chipped linoleum table by the window, looking out into the glowing orange night. This place has big, pillowy crust and thickly pulling cheese, the kind of pizza that fills you up in a single slice.

“There’s just something about humans and cheese,” Kell says. “Not that I dislike it. But I knew you’d be all over this stuff.”

“Mmm?” Evan tries to chew faster so he can respond. He’s never been adept at talking and eating simultaneously, even before he knew how important food could be.

“Y’know, I grew up mostly around round-ears, and the first time I explained to one of my herd what cheese is they thought I’d lost my mind.” She imitates Auntie Logga in a husky brogue. “You are letting milk of different animal mother go bad? And you are eat? Then they moved to the city and now we all eat it all the time.”

Evan chuckles, tosses his crust onto the plate. “There’s plenty of humans who don’t touch it. You go to China, you won’t find much.”

“Maybe someday,” Kell says. She leans in. “But I’ve made a pledge. Have I told you?”

“What’s that?”

“I am not leaving New Laytham on anything but a tour bus. My own tour bus. It’s kind of dumb, but it’s what it is.” She picks up his crust. “You mind?”

“Go ahead.” Evan watches her scarf it down. She’s the first woman he’s ever met who eats faster than he does. “What about a plane?”

“Not in love with the idea of flying. I would allow a private jet.”

“A van?”

She holds up a finger. “Maybe I’d do a van. But you’d have to drive us. And none of that pop punk cruising music.”

“This is why you don’t have an appreciation for it, I’m telling you,” Evan says. “You gotta listen to it behind the wheel, 2 AM in a totally dark suburb, with your high school friends who are never, ever moving away.”

“You glad you got out?”

“I didn’t. Not really. I turned up in New Laytham and fell right on my face. I don’t know if that counts as getting out.”

“Well.” Kell wads their plates and napkins up with the tray’s wax paper. “It does now.” She tosses a free throw past his ear and misses the trash can by a good four inches. “Motherfuck.”

Her apartment is on the other end of the block from the pizza place. It’s a duplex, bigger and more run down than Thekla’s, and she fishes the front door key out of the beak of a canvas-and-wicker owl statue. “Our security, as you can see, is airtight.”

“Very advanced.”

“Our actual security, of course,” Kell explains, leading him up a flight of creaking wooden stairs, “is that everyone knows four orcs live here.”

Evan hesitates on the stairs. “This place suddenly seems smaller than I thought.”

She laughs. “Don’t worry, my little pink ward. You ain’t gonna meet them tonight. And they’re all OK with you staying.”

“Where are they?”

“We work nights,” she says. “Orcs tend to. I take Wednesdays off on my schedule for the band. My old boss was not having it, said that wasn’t an excuse for never having the hours open. He wasn’t exactly rock-and-roll. It was the job or the music.”

“What a chode.”

“Yeah, well. What he found out is that when you’re a bartender with a lot of tattoos and a nice pair of tits, and you can knock people’s heads together like a bouncer, you’re not exactly hurting for nightlife employment. So fuck that guy, right?”

“Fuck that guy indeed,” Evan says, filing her vocation away in his ever-growing Kell scrapbook. Kellax Falrak. Drummer and bartender. Is aware that her tits are nice. Has winked at you; has not, in the time you’ve had eyes on her, winked at anyone else.

Kell’s duplex, to put it bluntly, is chaos. The ground is covered in shoes, blankets, and, in the kitchen area by the door, a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes awaiting recycling. A mess of wire snakes throughout, plugged into various electronic personal devices that have been tossed haphazardly onto a mismatched assortment of furniture. A wavy-bladed two-handed sword, a Zweihänder if his video game lore is right, is lying across the couch. Kell tuts and leans it, point down, against the wall.

“I cleaned up this morning for company, honest,” she says. “Buncha fuckin’ kral’gvak.” She removes a frilly brassiere from a kitchen chair and hangs it on what must be its owner’s doorknob. “Well, you can just come crash in my room.”

Evan doubts if anyone in human or fairfolk history has ever tried as hard to appear normal and casual.

“Oh, okay,” he says. “I won’t get in the way?”

“Nah, I got a sleeping bag for you. We host bands here all the time. It’s an open floor plan when it comes to company. If there’s an open floor, you can plan that company is gonna be sleeping on it. C’mon!”

She leads him to a door off the kitchen, with a floor-to-ceiling tapestry on it depicting the cover to Shepherd’s first album Automartyr, Joan of Arc beatific in the flames of her execution as a cyclopean eye regards her. “Here’s me,” she says. “Gosh, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if it was all dirty in here too ka-bow.” She kicks the door open to reveal a bedroom in a lived-in but perfectly acceptable state, in opposition to the chaos outside. “That’s right, boys. Orc girls can clean up nice.”

Kell’s room is about halfway taken up by a California King bed pushed into a recessed nook in the far wall. The halogen light from a streetlamp filters through a stained-glass panel in her window, casting a jagged rainbow across it.

Kell lifts the big mattress one-handed, like it weighed nothing at all, and pulls a sleeping bag and pillow from its crawlspace. “Think fast.” She tosses both to Evan. “I get that this place isn’t exactly at Thekla’s level, but on the flipside, Dalma won’t be snooping around collecting your hair and fingernails.”

“Dalma is, uh…” That morning, Evan had awakened to the goblin artist hovering over him, measuring his pupillary distance with a small hand ruler. I measure our guests in case I ever need to make a maquette of them, she’d told him. Do you know you sleep like a broken doll?

“Dalma’s cool,” he finishes. “But this is perfect. I love a sleeping bag.” He spreads it out on the floor at the foot of her vast bed. “Is this a Rook 20?”

“I have no clue,” Kell says. “It’s from a glampy cousin. Hey, Ev?”

“I think this is a Rook 20. These things are pricy.” Evan is testing the springiness.

“Hey, Ev.” Kell is rocking back and forth on her heels, grinning. “I’m about to get into my jimjams. You’ll wanna be on the other side of that door if you don’t want to see a naked orc.”

Evan bustles out of the room before his conscious mind can conclude the degree to which it wants to see a naked orc. When she opens her door and lets him back in, she’s in a long band tee, its sleeves customarily torn off, with the lacy hem of a pair of sleep shorts peeking out from where it terminates at her thighs. Her powerful legs are as coated in tats as her arms, including a freshly poked one, still in its peely ugly-duckling stage, of a chariot getting pulled by a pair of rhinos.

“You like the ink?” Kell does a half-turn to display it. “It’s about two-thirds done. That line work’s gonna get blasted in.”

Evan snaps his attention back to her face, mortified by how close she’d been observing the direction of his gaze.

“It’s already looking great,” he says. “The rhinos are sick.”

She beams and flops onto her bed. “Thanks. I’m a real slut for major arcana and orcish imagery, so this one’s kind of the dream tat. Can you grab that moisturizer off the shelf for me?”

A line of bookshelves runs across the wall opposite the foot of Kell’s bed. Between a statuette of the late guitar god Taavi Anttonen and a stack of books with their titles in orcish, Evan finds a tub of tattoo goop and tosses it to Kell. He keeps examining her knickknacks, determined not to turn around until she’s finished rubbing her thighs down.

“It’s cool how much stuff you have in orcish over here,” he says. “Do you mind if I have a look?”

“Go for it,” Kell says. “It’s sorta overcompensating, to be honest. First half of my life, I was the only orc I knew outside my herd.”

Evan opens a book called FIRE RITUAL: AN ORAL HISTORY. Each page is doubled, first in English and then in spiky orc script.

“They sent me to that farm school out by Pharaoh Lake,” Kell continues. “I guess they figured it would give me a better shot at life outside New Laytham. They had this idea I’d be part of the fairfolk diaspora and bring orcish blood out to the Midwest or where-the-fuck-ever. And then I went straight to New Laytham. Broke my gamgaw’s heart.”

“You decide you were a city mouse?”

“Basically. You know what they say. ‘It’s New Laytham, then it’s New York, then it’s Old News.’ I guess…” Kell falls silent. Evan risks a look, and sees her sitting on the bed, hand still resting on her lotion-shined calf, a distance in her eye.

“Y’know, all of this—” she waves her arm to encompass the books. “All of it’s just guesses. When the crossover happened, it was only people. No stuff, no written record, not even clothes. Just a bunch of stunned fairfolk with their nuts out in a Podunk English field. And then this mad dash by the historians and the artists to get everything down, what was in the living memory, because that was all we brought over. So who knows.” She gestures to her leg. “The rhinos and the ritual knights might be bullshit. Or a fairy tale, or a mistranslation.”

Evan sits on the edge of her bed. “It’s still looking great on you, though,” he says. “And even if it’s just a story, what’s the difference? Not like the past is something you can reach out and touch, either.”

“Maybe not.” Her grey eyes shine. “Well, a dope tat is a dope tat. And it’ll play well for the dorks in charge of the Vail.”

“I’ve heard you guys talking about that,” Evan says. “That’s the fairfolk music fest, right? Kinda like the American version of Samhain?”

“Yup. Upstate New York, beginning of autumn. And you and me are gonna be there.” Kell nods to herself, scoots her butt back, and slides under the covers. “Maybe I can’t go form New Orctown in the sticks, but I can be on national TV tearing shit up, showing the blood out. Probably not enough for gamgaw regardless, but you gotta put in the effort.”

“Thank you for telling me that.” Evan gets into his own bedding, appreciates the luxe sleeping bag. This thing is worth, like, 25 chickens. “I was already going to join the cult of Kell, but now I’m a true believer.”

She giggles. “I’ll sacrifice you last.”

She flips the light switch at her bedside and the room goes into shadow, colored only by the deep jewel tones of the stained glass.

“We’re getting you to Vail, Kell,” he says.

“I know you are,” she says. “Night, Evan.”

“Night.”

He listens to the whoosh of the cars passing through the night, like brushing swells on a cymbal.

“Are you awake?” Kell whispers. Her head appears above the lip of the bed, face highlighted in a pool of scarlet. “Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah,” he whispers back.

“You’ve been exactly what I hoped you’d be so far, Evan H.” She lays back down.

After another minute, he hears the slow, even tempo of her sleeping breath.