Dark Arts (7 page)

“I was, but your dad was never as hard on
me,” Bernie replied.

“I had traditional teachings, practical
things, and some history. Most of it was about Europe since the
fall of Rome, and how our people survived as pagans,” Miranda said.
“I’ve never heard of a Sun Prince. I’ll take the car this time,”
Miranda said as Max got onto his motorcycle. “If my aunt sees
anyone else driving it, I’ll get the evil eye from her for the rest
of the weekend.”

“Everyone’s gone lakeside,” Bernie said.

“Good enough, just run interference between
me and everyone who wants me to be a believer.” He strapped his
guitar onto his back. “I need to look some things up, see if I was
dreaming.”

“Keep me in on it, none of this is safe if
you’re doing it alone. You know the rules: There is always a
conjurer, a weaver and a watcher.”

“Yeah, I never thought I would have to pay
any attention to them myself,” Max replied. He looked to the
roadside then, where Miranda was getting into her Aunt’s Skylark.
It was a beast of a green car with a great, frowning grill. “Could
have warned me that she was coming.”

“You two were separated when her mother died
for a reason, Max,” Bernie said. “Your father had a vision before
he died, and my dad carried his wishes out.”

“Fucking geezer,” Max said. “That goes for
both of ‘em.”

“You guys were always hanging out when you
were kids, and she was my other best friend. I wanted to tell you
she was still writing every few months, but my Dad made sure I
didn’t say a thing. I don’t have all the details, but my Dad used
to tell me that you two would be too much of a distraction to each
other growing up.”

Max turned the situation over in his head.
His father was always manipulating people, and it didn’t stop
there. He grew up overhearing conversations about portents and
visions, listening to his elders talk about how to prevent this, or
to ensure that. It all added up to self-serving nonsense to him. If
a vision predicted that something was going to happen, why would it
take so much work to make sure it did? That was only one of the
many questions that no one ever answered, and it fortified his
disbelief. “I missed her.” Max looked at his old friend, who looked
worried. “I still remember strummin’ to her singin’, and I never
forgot her laugh. Now she’s something else, we missed all that time
between.”

“It was hard, man, keeping everything I knew
about her away from you, especially at first, but I guess I just
started having faith in the plan after a while. By the way, what’s
in the case?”

“Half your first year college tuition,” Max
replied. “What’s the plan?”

“I don’t know, they just had to keep you two
apart, that’s why I fell back on faith. She wasn’t happy to move
either, she tried to get her Aunt to take her back for years, if
that helps. New York was close though, she almost stayed, but
things are going disco there too, not much of a future for a singer
like her.”

“So, she’s going to stick around?” Max
asked. “Don’t think I can stay away now, don’t think her aunts want
that for us either. They were grinning like they had clothes
hangers in their mouths when we rolled in on my bike. Not the
reaction I’m used to when someone’s daughter is on the back of my
bike.”

“Be careful, Max. I know she’s grown up
foxy, but she’s your match, man,” Bernie said. “Like your equal,
just as cool, seen more of the world, and done just as much as us
in it. She was on her own in New York for a year.”

“Miranda,” Max said her name as though
slowly rolling it over in his mind and his mouth and watched as she
started the car twenty feet away. “All this spiritual shit’s
getting me sideways, but that ride has been in my head since this
morning. Be careful,” Max shook his head once and sucked air in
between his teeth. “Too fucking late, mate.” He jumped down on his
kick-starter, and the engine failed to turn over.

“Careful, she’s cooling off. On the way to
the graveyard she was saying you didn’t seem to enjoy that ride you
can’t forget,” Bernie said. “Let her know, man, let her know.”

“Stop talking about me and get in the car!”
Miranda said, leaning out of the window and honking the horn.

“Think she heard us?” Bernie asked.

“Not bloody likely,” Max replied, trying to
kick start his bike again and failing.

“Oh, yeah,” Bernie said, starting to walk
away. “You’ve got a mess to clean up, Zack’s tripping hard on some
LSD he picked up. The guys have him cornered on the bus, but who
knows how long that’ll last.”

“I’m kicking him out of the band,” Maxwell
said. “I know we’re retiring anyway, but firing him is the best way
to make sure he doesn’t disco all over our songs.”

“Saw it coming,” Bernie replied, jogging to
the car at the sound of Miranda blasting the horn again.

“C’mon, old girl,” Max said under his breath
as he kicked his starter again. The engine turned over and he
increased throttle. “There it is.” He reached into his pocket for
his pack of cigarettes and tried to pop one out only to find that
the last one had been crushed to paper and crumbs. “Days like
these,” he said as he crumpled it up and tossed it into the
wreckage of the church in front of him.

He spun his tire, spraying the yard with
dirt and gravel until his bike was turned around one hundred eighty
degrees. He couldn’t leave the graveyard fast enough.

“I hate when one of my aunts are right, now
that both are right, there will be no living with them,” Miranda
said. She drove a car like Maxwell did, her foot down, and her
front right tire right along the outer edge of the road. On the
highway it was quick and a little alarming, but on dirt roads it
was terrifying. It made him wonder if she was a better rider than a
driver like Maxwell too.

Bernie gripped the dash with his left hand
and the edge where the door met the window with the other as they
made a tight corner. Max passed them as soon as they were past it,
roaring by. He tried to ignore the shared insanity between Miranda
and Max. “What do you mean?”

“They’ve been telling me for the last year
that Max was my destiny, trying to get me all worked up about
visions of him and me getting together now that we’re both ready.”
She huffed, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “They actually
cursed me with a memory spell for two weeks. I kept having dreams
that were just memories of Max and me. You know, him playing that
old acoustic and me singing along beside the barn. A few where
we’re just running around like the kids we were, having fun. There
was one, it must have been when Max was eight, I was seven, we were
all snuggled up in the yard in one of those night time family
circle ceremonies and my mother wraps a blanket around us. When I
woke up I could remember how sweet and comfortable and safe that
moment was. Riding his bike with him was just as good. No, better,
because there was more, like our auras were merging, it was just
amazing and right. Then it’s over and he says ‘take it easy,’ like
I was just another saddlebag, and my aunts are standing there
grinning, because they know I won’t be able to stop thinking about
him, and I can’t, even though I should be just as happy to see both
of you, we grew up together, until I got kidnapped off to Italy,
and Spain, and New York. Maybe I should just stay away from him to
make a point,” she actually made a growling sound as her lips
pressed together with such tension that they were drawn across her
face in a straight line. Meanwhile, her foot was getting heavier on
the accelerator.

Bernie was rattled in his seat as the car
went over a section of road that was recently flooded, small
potholes and loose stones. “Easy, these roads aren’t nice to
speeders.”

She slowed down to a slightly more
reasonable speed and turned the radio on, Wish You Were Here was
playing, one of only a few songs that Bernie sang on stage every
once in a while, usually to buy Zack time to get on stage or decide
that he was finished pitching a fit over the latest slight.

“You heard me, right?” Miranda said.

“Oh, yeah, destiny, you didn’t want to like
him,” Bernie said, realizing that Miranda was paying more attention
to him than she was the winding road. “Road, road,” he said,
pointing over the dash.

“I’m a great driver, never had an accident.
Then again, I didn’t drive in New York, and I don’t have my license
here, but this isn’t much different from Italy or Spain, lots of
dirt roads there. Anyway, you had to know why they separated Max
and me back then.”

“No, I just heard your mother died and you
were going to live with your aunt,” Bernie replied. “I was sad
about it for a few months, well, maybe a few weeks, but Max was
pissed. First, at loud, slamming doors and skipping school to play
guitar, then he didn’t talk about it, he was just low, you know? I
knew why, but no one at school did, so we started high school and
he was just this quiet, dark, kind of unpleasant English guy to
them.”

“Wait, when I left he was what, fourteen,
fifteen?”

“He was about to turn fifteen,” Bernie
said.

“So, how long did his pouting last?”

“It wasn’t pouting,” Bernie said,
emphatically shaking his head. “At first, when he was loud about
it, yeah, but then he got quiet and didn’t come back up unless you
counted the noise he made with his guitar. He wrote some amazing
stuff back then, we played constantly after his father died. Music
was how he connected to people, and I think he jammed with everyone
who could play three chords or more. He just never really got happy
again, like when we were kids.”

“So why would my Aunts and his dad agree
that I had to go half way across the world and pretend he didn’t
exist? I mean, I guess I wasn’t distracted either, they taught me
everything they knew, and other than not having too many friends I
had a great time growing up, well, until New York, things were
okay.”

“Let me guess,” Bernie was momentarily
interrupted as they struck a pothole dead on and he was bounced in
his seat, his head brushing the ceiling. “You started rebelling,
getting into trouble.”

“I took off with a band for a while, Aunt
Susan nearly cracked me over the head and chained me to the
radiator when she caught up with me four months later, but I was
out of high school, I didn’t see the problem,” Miranda said.

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen, I just graduated,” Miranda
replied.

Bernie could see that she honestly didn’t
see the issue with a seventeen-year-old girl running around the New
York area with a band without telling her guardians where she was.
The parallels – Max spending his college fund on their old school
bus, road money and a demo around the same time, acts which
infuriated Bernie’s dad, but there was little he could do. The only
real differences were that Max was eighteen when he ran off, and
that Bernie went with him.

“What?” Miranda asked after a stretch of
silence.

“You’re perfect for each other,” Bernie
said.

“I didn’t want a boyfriend, I’m here to
figure out the next act,” Miranda said. “Can’t think about that
though, not since that ride. The Gathering was all I came for, I
love nature, and connecting with the universe the way we do, so I
couldn’t skip this. I was looking forward to reuniting with you and
Scott too, and it’s good to see you both after so long. Max has
stolen the scene though.”

“Stolen the scene?” Bernie asked.

“I was in a few plays in New York, mostly
background stuff, it means…”

“I get it,” Bernie said.

“But if he’s going to be all broody and
quiet the whole time, I don’t know,” Miranda said. “I’ll hang out
until he cracks, if he cracks.”

“He will,” Bernie said. “I think if anyone
can connect with him, you know, aside from me and Scott, you
can.”

“Cool, but what’s with his British accent?
It’s even thicker than before.”

“He spent four months in England with his
Great Uncle before he died,” Bernie replied. “Must have been three
years ago now. He brought back a small library and that
accent.”

“Oh,” Miranda said. “At least I can
understand him, most of the time.”

“So, instead of proving your aunts wrong,
you made sure you were one of the first things he saw when he came
into town?” Bernie said.

“No,” Miranda said, shaking her head. “They
both had a vision, and they told me, where he’d be and when,”
Miranda confirmed.

“Then you go there,”

“To prove them wrong,” Miranda said. “I
wanted to get right up to him and take a good look, so I could go
back to my Aunts and say; ‘nope, I checked him out and didn’t even
get a buzz.’”

“Then-“ Bernie started to reply.

“Then I’m asking him for a ride out of no
where, I didn’t plan it, I didn’t even think about how it would
look to my Aunts, who are gloating,”

“I heard that the first time,” Bernie said,
patiently. He was glad there would be dozens of people to talk to
once they got back to the farm. People other than the love-stunned
Max and Miranda.

“Yeah, so I just forget everything and ride
with him, like we’re tucked into that blanket together all over
again, and time passes so fast, and we’re at the farm and I
remember – shit! I was supposed to turn my nose up at this
British-Canadian hick, not throw myself at him! Then he says; ‘take
it easy!’”

“Do you want advice? Or are you just talking
to blow off steam?”

“Oh, suck an egg!” Miranda shot at him.

“That’s what I thought,” Bernie said. They
were finally getting close to the farm, and he wondered what
trouble awaited him there. He was the peace keeper between Maxwell
and Zackary, the lead guitarist and lead singer, but sometimes,
especially when Zack had gotten into a terrible substance and was
on a bad trip, Max was the only one who could calm him down. He had
a way with the inebriated and insane.