The Wild Ways (23 page)

Read The Wild Ways Online

Authors: Tanya Huff

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Epic

BOOK: The Wild Ways
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“Ha. Knew it!”
“You’ve totally switched to the Allie side of the force.”
“Totally.”
Charlie closed her phone without responding and handed it to Eineen. “Drop it mid Atlantic. I don’t actually need it until Wednesday.”
The fiddler in her head broke into a perky version of “Over the Waves.”
“Charlotte?”
“Sorry.” Concentrating brought the volume down, but it seemed as though the intermittent soundtrack her life had acquired was there to stay.
“The mid Atlantic? Are you sure?”
“Get it back to me Wednesday and I don’t care what you do with it.”
For the first time since they’d met, Eineen seemed honestly amused. “Go. The music calls.”
“Yeah, Chuck, the music calls.” Mark held the door open. “Let’s answer it, shall we. We’ve got less than an hour before we have to head back to the festival, so chop chop. You remember the festival, right?” He stood aside as Tanis left the cottage, her eyes dry but her nose red. “We’ve put together a band for it and everything.”
Muttering apologies to Mark, Charlie waved good-bye and went in to take her place in the circle.
“Play it acoustic today, but we’ll plug in when we play the park.”
Mark had written the lyrics to “Wild Road Beyond” a couple of years ago and had been messing with the melody ever since. The heartbeat of the bodhran stayed consistent, but every other part had been discarded and rewritten at least twice. Other songs had come and gone—they had three of his originals on the set list—but this one had never been played in front of an audience.
“It’s still missing something,”
was Mark’s only explanation.
Because it meant so much to Mark, she blocked out everything else she had going on—Selkies and Auntie Catherine and Tuesday’s ritual and her sisters and Jack and Allie—and when they finally put all the parts together . . .
“All right, people, let’s put our grown-up pants on and get through this once without stopping as the actress said to the bishop.”
. . . Charlie threw herself into the song. Her left hand flew up and down the fretboard, her right moved between dancing the pick over the strings and slamming out the chords. She slid effortlessly up into her falsetto for the descant harmony, winding her voice around Mark’s lead. Shelly’s rhythm throbbed in her blood and Tim’s keyboard stitched them all together as Bo’s fiddle called them to the wild side and took them home.
They were dripping wet and breathing hard as they finished.
Bo’s last note wailed off into perfect silence . . .
. . . shattered into pieces by a crack of thunder.
“Holy shit!” Shelly jerked, flailed, and just managed to catch her bass before it hit the floor. “That sounded close.”
They made the porch more or less together, Bo out in front still holding his instrument, Tim bringing up the rear, having gotten tangled in the accordion strap.
The sky to the northeast looked like a bruise, purple and green and likely to be painful if anyone could come into contact with it. A canvas beach chair tumbled past the cottage, rolled along the gravel by the wind. Thunder cracked again.
“It’s moving fast.”
“Too fast. What?” Bo demanded when Mark poked him with a stick. “It’s what you say when someone says that.”
“And besides,” Shelly added, “that fucker is moving too damned fast. Storms don’t come in like that, not from the northeast. Northwest maybe.”
“We need to get to the festival. The festival,” Charlie repeated when no one moved, “where they’ve got a crowd of people to get to safety, and a shitload of stuff to batten down.”
“Most of those people are from the island,” Bo said, eyes locked on a line of distant lightning. “You really think they’ll need our help?”
The thunder cracked before the lightning dimmed.
“Yes.”
 
By the time they piled out of the van at the festival gate, the first drops of rain had started to fall. Although people were jostling for position, arms loaded down with blankets and coolers, trying to move en masse to their cars and avoid a soaking, no one had panicked yet.
But it wouldn’t be long.
The potential for panic was there in every wide-eyed glance up at the sky. In the face of every parent who held their child closer than the current situation required. In the expressions of the locals who knew storms didn’t come in like that.
The parking lot—field—required the patience of a saint to get out of at the best of times. Charlie shot a glance back over her shoulder at the roiling clouds. Which this wasn’t.
“Tim! Mark!” She had to shout to be heard and even then the wind tried to snatch the words away. “One fender bender in that lot . . .”
“On it!”
Shelly grabbed her arm and together they ducked a plastic water bottle. “I’ll head for the booths! They’ll need extra hands!”
“Not you!” Charlie snagged a handful of Bo’s shirt as he tried to follow Shelly. “You head for the stage.” She dragged him around, shifted her grip to his left wrist, wet her fingertip and draw a charm on the polished wood of his violin.
He stared at it like he’d forgotten he was holding it. “What are you . . . ?”
“Doesn’t matter. Get to the stage and play!”
“Play what?”
At least he hadn’t asked why, knowing as well as she did that if anything would keep this particular crowd from panic, it’d be music. “Something familiar, something that’ll stand against the storm.”
He stood for a moment, frozen in place, then he nodded once and ran, fighting his way in against the exodus.
Charlie followed, hauled a small child up off the ground by one skinny arm and thrust her at her father, swore as an abandoned lawn chair slammed into her shins, saw a man with a fiddle case . . .
She reached him just as he settled a four-year-old boy on his hip. Recognized the two kids hanging onto Neela’s hands. The family was a very small island of calm in the growing chaos.
“Gavin!” Had to be Gavin. “You’re needed on stage!”
“What?”
She turned him until he could see Bo, bending to plug in. “If enough people pause to listen . . .”
“They’ll get hit by lightning?” But he was already handing the boy to his mother and opening his case. He whipped his head around to glare at her when Charlie reached past him and drew the charm. His instrument was visibly older than Bo’s; had been played harder.
“What do you think . . . ?”
“Gavin!” Neela’s eyes flashed black, rim to rim. “Let it go. Just play.”
He scowled, looked from his wife to Charlie and back again. “Is this . . . ?”
“Yes. Hurry!”
“You three stay with your mother. Help her!” Violin and bow in the same hand, he ruffled his other hand through his eldest’s hair, kissed Neela quickly, and ran for the stage.
The rain seemed to be rolling off Neela’s hair without being absorbed. Which was hardly surprising, all things considered. “Do you need . . . ?” Charlie began.
“You have other things to do, Charlotte Gale.”
Someone screamed. And that was all it took for people to start charging toward the exit like the storm wouldn’t hit them if they were off the festival grounds.
“It’s not
that
the wind blows,” she muttered, as a baseball cap smacked against the side of her head, “it’s
what
the wind blows.” It was the punchline of a joke about being out in hurricanes although, at the moment, Charlie didn’t find it that funny.
Ducking debris, she cut another two fiddlers out of the crowd. No more time to draw charms, she realized, shoving her reinforcements toward the stage. Gavin and Bo would have to suffice if the power went out.
The rain had started to pound down. Each individual drop hitting hard, then they were hitting so close together it was like being pounded by a wet fist.
Up on the stage, pressed in against the back where the rain couldn’t reach them. Five, no six, fiddlers played “Bandlings,” one of the classic Cape Breton reels. Gavin must’ve grabbed a couple more musicians on his way up. The sound system, put together by people who understood maritime weather, continued to hold.
As the speakers crackled to life and the reel danced out on the wind, heads jerked toward the stage. And okay, maybe more people were thinking
are they fucking insane
than
let’s stand together against the storm,
but hey, whatever worked.
Lightning / thunder.
Ears ringing, blinking away the afterimages, Charlie wondered why popular opinion was thunder/lightning when the lightning always came first.
Lightning / thunder.
Or came too close to call it.
Praying that last impact hadn’t been with anything living, she found herself in front of one of the luthier’s booths—still mostly standing. With the storm and the music sizzling together under her skin, she reached without thinking for the last of the unpacked guitars, pulling a pick from her pocket with the other hand.
Without a strap, she folded her legs and dropped cross-legged to the ground, water seeping immediately through her shorts. Chin tucked in to keep from drowning like a turkey, she played the two sounds together.
Music. Storm.
The song changed. “The Battle of Killicrankie.”
The fiddler in her head took up the harmony line.
Should’ve grabbed a piper,
she thought and swore under her breath as she lost her grip on the wet pick.
No time to find another. No choice but to dig her thumb against the strings.
The wind shifted and slapped a wall of water against her. If she’d been standing, it would have knocked her over. Her palm protecting the sound hole as much as possible, she kept playing, forcing the storm to the music’s parameters. The four un-charmed instruments fought her almost as hard as the storm, but she pulled them in, pulled it all together, played it . . .
Played it.
Played it.
Stopped it.
Later, they said the storm blew back out to sea as quickly as it blew in.
No one mentioned that storms didn’t do that.
Or that as the soggy people started putting things back together, the sky was a brilliant blue as far as anyone could see, and the sea was so calm the seals looked like stepping stones bobbing in the water, all of them staring toward shore.
SIX
 
A
S THOUGH TO MAKE UP for Saturday, Sunday’s weather was beautiful. Sunny and warm, the sky looked as though it had been scrubbed. With none of the Selkies about—Tanis had wiped her eyes and told Bo she had family obligations and Neela had gone off with her kids—Charlie concentrated on the festival, making notes on the competition, jamming with the competition, and explaining an infinite number of times why she had a Band-aid on her right thumb. She hadn’t even realized she’d strummed it bloody playing the storm.
She bought the guitar.
Her bank account held twenty-two dollars more than the reduced asking price and, given what it had been through, the odds were high no one else would be able to play it anyway. Back on her hillock, listening to Five by Five rock out to “Ghosts of Calico” by Enter the Haggis, Charlie changed the heavies that had been on it for mediums—the luthier had set it up for bluegrass and, evidently, storm calling. Although she’d changed strings thousands of times on dozens of instruments, she drew blood with every string. Was it because the old strings had been blooded and that was what the guitar now required or was she just short on sleep, a little bit stoned, and three beers into the afternoon.
When she wandered away from the party at the campground that night to stand on the beach, she could see the darker lines of seals hanging vertically in the water, watching the shore. No, watching her. She walked to the right, their heads swiveled to follow. They didn’t follow the couple holding hands, trying to convince each other that what they felt was real and not a result of the music. They didn’t follow the four kids up way past their bedtime too buzzed on sugar to sleep anyway. They followed her. Only her.

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