Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (44 page)

I am your own soul's mate."

And he was, of course, just Willie.

"Then I'll appear in your arms

Like to the deer so wild"

And he was wild, out drinking and partying
and driving fast and being a dear, if not a deer, to everybody in
the world but her, and she home and pregnant and having given up
her career. Again Brose and Anna Mae and Gussie had to hold her
arms around him even after the verse continued:

"You'll hold me fast, not let me go

And I'll father your child."

And Juli stared at her swollen belly,
thinking, "as if he hasn't already done enough of
that
."

"And I'll appear in your arms

Like to a silken string."

And he did, except it was silken threads and
him so elegant and dandified while she was barefoot and pregnant at
home. With every little favor she wanted, there was a string
attached of one more pleasure or privilege she had to give up for
him to help her.

"You hold me fast, don't let me go

Till you see the fair morning."

Time didn't pass quickly for anyone. Juli
suffered through every transformation, and the people on the ground
had cramps and mouths full of dust. Gussie's arms had gone to sleep
and so had Anna Mae's when Brose said, with relief, "Sky's lighter.
That's close enough for me."

And Willie suddenly was just Willie, attired
appropriately for skinny-dipping and the chorus in the cacti
sang,

"And I'll appear in your arms

Like to a naked man

Dip me into a water strand

And take me out again."

And they did, and according to another
version of the song and for decency's sake, Juli and the others
wrapped him up in a blanket. He seemed to see them for the first
time and said, "Water's fine. Aren't any of y'all gonna join
me?"

But Torchy was having a redheaded fit.
She threw down her riding crop and snarled, "Curse you, Willie
MacKai. You're no better than that other sorry scamp, and after you
volunteered and
promised
to
help me! Those devils will take me for sure now, and I'll be lost
for good."

Willie shook his head and looked down the
road where the devils were catcalling to Torchy, making her horse
leap forward while she hung on for dear life.

Willie grabbed for the reins and missed, and
Dally Morales shoved something into his hand.

Dropping the blanket and all sense of
decorum—which he was never big on anyway—Willie whirled a loop of
Daily's data up in the air and over Torchy's shoulders and lassoed
her off her horse just as it cantered down the left fork, pursued
by eighteen animal-rights activists who weren't about to let the
devils hurt that pretty Appaloosa horse.

Willie reeled Torchy in and hollered, "Keep
singin'," and Brose and the others helped him hold fast to the
Debauchery Devil as she changed from a quite literal wolf to a fire
to a snake the size of an anaconda, to a deer and a silken string,
and finally was ready for a dunking, which Anna Mae, Gussie, and
Julianne were quite ready to help with.

But they pulled as big a surprise out of the
pond as any that had preceded her final transformation. She still
had red hair, but it was not the hard-looking fire-engine red it
had been, more a shade somewhere between a sunrise and a fox coat.
Her teeth were white, her eyes were hazel green with flecks as gold
as autumn leaves, and her young white body was covered all over
with rusty-looking freckles.

Gussie put it best. "Who the devil are you?"
she asked.

CHAPTER 28

They never exactly found out who she was.
She wasn't a devil anymore. All the devils at the left-hand fork
disappeared sometime during the dunking, leaving behind the only
mortal among them, Hughie Graham, the Man from SWALLOW, busily
recording every illegal word of that unlicensed song in his little
notebook.

Nobody remembered seeing Torchy leave,
though everybody sort of remembered her, and some saw her in their
dreams for a long time after.

Willie MacKai, for one. He saw her every
once in a while but most often when he felt blue and lonesome. Then
he would see that freckled face in his mind for an instant and feel
loving arms all around him. He'd smile and learn a new song or tell
another story or, sometimes, try to write a song that would bring a
smile to that easy-smiling pretty face.

Barbara Harrington-Smith thought she saw
something of that face again when she met a younger man, a marine
biologist with a sense of humor who told her jokes he claimed
dolphins had told him.

And Mary Armstrong had never noticed the
girl at all, but she still saw an elvish grin on the face of Ute
Guttenberg. Some of the other cowboy poets saw that flash of
mystical beauty and quicksilver fun in Mary's face, sometimes, as
she wrote humorous cowgirl-poet lyrics there at the ranch and
worked on a western novel.

The Amerasian kids left the ranch knowing
that the fox woman in the States was a kinder, gentler fox woman
than the one in Chinese myth. Her memory helped them excel not only
academically, but as singers and storytellers of new and remembered
stories and songs from both cultures.

The animal-rights activists who were there
that day began winning people over with songs and published stories
true and fictional about animals who were friends and individuals
and the stories won many more people to their cause.

The Native American people who had come to
help Anna Mae remembered the spirits they had seen and particularly
the last one, though they remembered her as black-haired and
golden-skinned, with snapping black eyes. All of them carried the
memory of her laughter back with them and sang to pass it on to the
others they knew. This spirit told them and kept telling them
inside their heads that they were as good and strong a people as
their ancestors even though they lived differently, and they were
winning honor in the battle to survive despite great odds. Anna Mae
saw in the elfin figure the spirits of her sisters, martyrs, happy
and free and no longer bound down by pain, showing her that if she
did not let pain make her a slave, she was better equipped to lead
others to freedom.

Brose saw those gold-flecked eyes look out
of the eyes of the countless kittens and puppies, horses, wolves,
deer, and other animals he helped the animal-rights activists save
and shelter. He no longer needed one home himself. He was too busy
singing animal songs and dance songs and telling stories to
children's groups and donors all over the country.

The insurance agent who had been about to
stiff the Curtises and the Randolphs only saw what lovely people
they were. He not only covered their losses, but paid them several
thousand dollars to appear on a television commercial (much to the
dismay of the devils, who no longer had such a tight grip on the
media with all the new whimsy and the popular demand for the
lovely, mystical meaning people were beginning to glimpse flitting
from literal truth to literal truth).

And the refugees from the Tulsa camp, they
saw the spirit in their mirrors as they remembered pioneer
ancestors who had come across the prairie and fought illness and
exhaustion and hostility. They recollected how some of those people
were descended from the people in the old songs they had heard, who
had another kind of strength, and how all that strength had been
passed onto them with all those songs and how they could most
certainly begin again.

And the Curtises and the Randolphs began to
find more people who were like them or wanted to be, and all of
their writer friends suddenly had hundreds of good ideas for books
and some left over for songs.

Gussie saw a reflection of that spirit—which
for all she knew was mostly just part of her very longest story—in
the eyes of Lettie and Mic, who were canvassing publishers and
recording companies to reproduce lost books and records, leaving
traditional material free to public domain.

Julianne, for all her psychic powers, never
saw that redhead straight-on again except in dreams she couldn't
quite remember. Although the fairy dust had turned to dime-store
glitter, pretty and fun but absolutely without power to do anything
except reflect light, Juli still felt that new spirit possessing
her hands as she played and her voice as she sang. On her pillow in
the morning, she found little gifts of observations the spirit had
gathered while Juli slept, so that Juli could make songs of
them.

The only kind of people the spirit didn't
touch and leave a little better were those like the SWALLOW agent,
Graham. People say that elfin figure drove him nuts. He would spot
a glimpse of her hair or catch the lilt of her voice from some
office-building window and chase after her as she tossed the
inspirations for one uncontrolled unlicensed song after another
like confetti to hungry pickers everywhere. He tried to catch her
for her beauty, her voice, her songs that acted on him like a drug.
After all, he had once been a lover of music. He followed her all
over, tracked down every mention of her, ran after her so fast he
finally ended up throwing away his tape recorder and his notebook
to lighten his load. One day some kind person told him that she was
easy to find if he just went away by himself and sat still for a
spell. Last anybody heard, he's still sittin'.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the author
of 22 solo fantasy and science fiction novels, including the 1989
Nebula award winning
The Healer’s
War
, loosely based on her service as an Army Nurse in
Vietnam during the Vietnam War. She has collaborated thus far on 16
novels with Anne McCaffrey, six in the best selling Petaybee series
and eight in the YA bestselling Acorna series, and most recently,
the Tales of the Barque Cat series, Catalyst and coming in December
2010, Catacombs (from Del Rey). Her last published solo novel was
CLEOPATRA 7.2, soon to be re-released for e-book download and print
on demand by an imprint of Gypsy Shadow Publishing.

Scarborough admits to having been a folk
music fan back when she was a child, long before it was
fashionable, throughout the Great Folk Music Scare of the 50’s and
60’s, and long after it was fashionable, up until today. She
visited the Library of Congress Folk Music Archives for the first
time while researching these books and met then-librarian Joe
Hickerson, a fine musician and songwriter, and asked him if he’d
mind dying heroically in the telling of this story while she blew
up the Folk Music Archives. Hickerson and other museum staff seemed
delighted to be so gloriously martyred and had the entire
Songkiller Saga trilogy specially bound so it could have a place in
the (thankfully not-blown-up) Folk Music Archives. Since writing
these books, Scarborough has received fan mail about them from
musicians she’s admired all of her life and has made several new
friends in the field.