War for the Oaks (10 page)

Eddi sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, and felt her anger and fear plunge to her stomach and coil there.

"But we need you," he said at last, softly. "There is power in a mortal soul that all of Faerie cannot muster, power that comes from mortality itself. We can use that against the Unseelie Court."

"Why should I side with you? Why should I care if you win?"

The phouka raked his fingers through his hair. "You have seen one of them, one of their forms. That is what seeks dominion over every natural thing in this place. We of the Seelie Court are capricious, and not always well disposed toward humankind. But would you hand this city over to the likes of what you saw tonight? That is the Unseelie Court. If we fall, every park, every boulevard tree, every grassy lawn would be their dwelling place."

Eddi sighed. "It's not just for you, it's for the entire seven-county metro area. Couldn't we just let them have St. Paul?"

The phouka made a disgusted noise.

"All right. What if they did take over? Would we all be eaten in our beds?"

He shook his head. "There are places," he began slowly, "that belong to them. Have you ever passed through some small town, surrounded by fertile country and fed by commerce, that seemed to be rotting away even as you watched? Where the houses and the people were faded, and all the storefronts stood empty?" Eddi remembered a few. "Or a city whose new buildings looked tawdry, whose old ones were ramshackle, where the streets were grimy and the wind was never fresh, where money passed from hand to hand to hand yet benefited no one?"

His words were quicker now. "This city is alive with the best magic of mortal folk. The very light off the skyscrapers and the lakes vibrates with it. If the Unseelie Court takes up residence here, this will be a place where people fear their neighbors, where life drains the living until art and wit are luxuries, where any pleasant thing must be imported and soon loses its savor." He felt silent, as if embarrassed by his own eloquence.

Eddi rubbed her hands over her face, trying to rub away her confusion, her anger, her fear. Finally she asked the only question she had left. "Can't you get somebody
else?"

The phouka began to laugh weakly. "Oh, go to bed, Eddi McCandry. You could befuddle a stone. Go to bed, and sleep soundly, and tempt me not into some foolish and fatal flap of the tongue."

She stood up and stalked off to the bedroom, wondering if she'd been insulted. She turned on the light, and looked back over her shoulder.

The phouka smiled crookedly, and winked. "Good night," he said.

But she did not sleep soundly. Half an hour later, she left off peering through the dark at her bedroom ceiling, and read the clock instead. Midnight.
Too much coffee
, she told herself.
Or the thunder
. But it wasn't the thunder she lay awake listening for, or the rush of the rain on her window. She strained to hear any small noises from outside, and wasn't reassured by their absence. She kept imagining faces in the irregular plaster of the walls. All the faces had an uncountable number of teeth.

At last she flung the covers back, pulled on her robe, and opened the bedroom door a crack. The living room was dark. Something moved near the windows, and she felt her muscles lock up with fear.

Then she recognized the motion—the phouka's silhouette, a black shape against the slatted gray square of the window. He was watching the back of the building through the blinds. The bedroom windowsill would be visible from where he stood.

She didn't want to go out and keep him company; he'd only say something annoying. She wanted to go back to bed and try to sleep. Yet she stood peeking through the barely open door like a spy in her own house, fascinated by the sight of him in an unguarded moment. True, she couldn't see much of him; there wasn't enough light coming through the blinds to fill in color or even details. But Eddi suspected
that, if he knew he was being watched, he would turn away from even so inadequate an inspection.

His forehead, under the thick spill of curls, was high and straight, his nose unexpectedly long and aquiline. His lips were full, his chin jutted decidedly, and when he turned his head a little those ridiculous eyelashes made a sharp punctuation to the vertical lines of his face. He seemed at once real and unreal, as out of place as a celebrity seen in person. She frowned and thought again longingly of sleep.

Then he raised one slender hand and rubbed his eyes. It was an ordinary gesture. But it was eloquent of weariness and sorrow in a way Eddi had never seen, and she was filled with the shapeless melancholy that music sometimes evoked in her.

He lowered his hand and lifted his chin, and became a sentinel again. Eddi's fingers ached from clutching the doorframe. She pried them loose and went back to bed, and couldn't remember when she fell asleep.

Dan Rochelle was an attenuated black man with an incongruously round face and a grin like a Buddha on speed. His hair was cut in an oversize flattop, and he wore glasses because he needed them. The frames looked like Lalique crystal, clear plastic brushed to a translucent matte finish. When he took them off, his face looked half-built. He liked to wear Hawaiian shirts.

He'd been working in professional bands since he was sixteen, too young to drink in the clubs he played. And he could play the keys. He had a pile of equipment that Eddi only half understood, including three synthesizers, a digital sampler, a sequencer, and a few pieces of equipment that might have been stolen from NASA. Or maybe he'd built them himself, to frighten away guitar players. Under his hands it all came alive with some grand electronic passion. Dan's mild face would be transformed then; he might have been hearing choirs of angels, or the singing of galaxies. Dan was tasteful, tuneful, and wildly imaginative—a better keyboard player than Eddi had ever hoped to work with.

Dan accepted everything with cheerful good will, even the phouka. "You from England?" he asked. "Plenty of brothers over there doing good music. You play?"

"No," the phouka said, with a show of charming regret. "I'm afraid I'm only the roadie." The relish with which he used the word seemed
obvious to Eddi, but Dan didn't seem to notice. The phouka put out a hand. "I'm pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Yeah." Dan shook the offered hand vigorously. "Uh . . . you got a name?"

The phouka smiled, an expression of unholy satisfaction that Eddi had learned to dread. "Robin Goode," he said.

Eddi, waiting for some awful utterance, let out her breath.

Dan had a solution to the problem of practice space: the third floor of a building on the down-at-the-heels manufacturing end of Washington Avenue. Dan's former band had broken up before the rental on the space expired, and Dan had the key.

Eddi and Carla agonized over the ad for the classifieds in the
Reader
and
City Pages
. They settled on:

Lead guitarist and bass player
wanted. Strong backing vocals a
must. Experienced pros only. New
music, many originals. No metalheads,
cowboys, or wimps.

"I don't know," said Eddi. "Wimps?"

Carla looked stern. "Well, you
don't
want any wimps, do you?"

Eddi had to admit that was true. Carla delivered the ad to the papers, and for good measure, posted the same information on bulletin boards in places where musicians shopped—vintage clothing boutiques, music stores, and record shops. Then they loaded Carla's drum kit and Eddi's guitar and amp into the station wagon, and went to look at the practice space.

The phouka leaped out of the car when they arrived, and shook himself fiercely. "Oh, there must be a better way to get from place to place than shutting oneself in a metal box."

"What do you want to do? Fly?" said Carla. "So buy a motorcycle or something."

He cocked his head. "An interesting thought."

Eddi led the way up the iron stairs that climbed the back of the building. Dan had arrived before them, and the door at the top was unlocked.

The first floor was devoted to a foundering drapery manufacturer, and the second to its warehouse. In the company's better days, it had
probably had a use for the third floor as well, but hard times had turned it into an empty, open space under the rafters big enough to rehearse a dance company. The right- and left-hand walls were studded with windows, some of which weren't stuck closed. On the street side of the room, double metal-clad doors would have led to the second floor, if they hadn't been barred and padlocked. Bedsheets, put up by the last band to soften the room's acoustics, hung from the beams and vent pipes like the ghosts of walls. Industrial carpeting lay loose on a large section of floor; under it were oak planks nearly a foot wide, sturdy enough for a machine shop.

Eddi smiled down at the floor. "Do you get the feeling that nobody downstairs could hear us unless we played
real
loud?"

Dan was moving around in his equipment, turning things on. "The Dead Kennedys could practice up here. It's like havin' the planet to yourself."

Carla rubbed her hands together. "I'm gonna bring up the rest of my stuff."

They didn't have a proper PA, but they ran a couple of microphones through a little mixer of Carla's, and used her drum machine speaker for output. In half an hour, they had a rehearsal setup. Eddi pushed a hand through her bangs and looked at Carla sitting behind her cymbals, checking the reach to all of her drum heads; at Dan, wearing headphones, playing chords and checking heaven knew what; and at the phouka, who sat cross-legged on the floor watching her expectantly.

"Oo-kay," Eddi said, and slung on her guitar.

They started out, a little tentatively, on Prince's "When You Were Mine." Dan unrolled the melody in front of them. Eddi kept the guitar pared down, letting Dan take over most of the effects. She sang the first four lines very simply, almost without style, feeling for the approach that would grow out of this instrumentation, this chemistry of musicians.

The simplicity became a style in itself. The pure notes she sang enhanced the stark, bitter lyrics and made them bite even deeper. After the first chorus she let roughness creep into her voice, to bring in anger and outrage and trust betrayed. They went into the lead break with exhilarating power. Eddi let some fuzz sneak into her guitar mix, and Dan twisted the melody back on itself, adding buzzing overtones to notes that had once been precise and clear.

Coming back into the verse, Eddi opted for another sort of clarity;
she sang the last verse and chorus in a ringing clarion voice. Then she handed the melody off to Dan, and they wended their way out of the song with an instrumental recap and a final fade.

"Awright," said Dan.

"Yeah." Eddi nodded. "Not too shabby."

"Well, I want a bass player," Carla sighed. "I could break a leg trying to keep you guys steady all by myself."

"We'll get you a bass player." Eddi turned to the phouka. "Whataya think?"

"Play another one," he said.

Carla got her wish two days later. He called, saying he had seen the notice at Oarfolk and wanted to audition.

"Or at least, I think that's what he said," Eddi told Carla, while they waited for him in the rehearsal space. "He sort of mumbled, and faded off at the ends of sentences."

Carla shook her head. "This doesn't sound promising."

"Maybe not. But I figured it was worth a try. We don't need him to talk on the phone."

There was a very small knock at the door, and the phouka answered it. The kid on the other side was the most unimpressive human being Eddi had ever seen. He was small and narrow-shouldered, oliveskinned, with haphazardly cut brown hair and heavy straight brows. His eyes were brown, too, half sleepy and half sullen. His cheeks had the sort of hollows that have less to do with bone structure than with lack of food. He was carrying an electric guitar case that looked as if it had just come from the store.

Eddi stood up and stuck out her hand. "Hello, I'm Eddi McCandry. Are you . . ." She realized that he hadn't given her a name over the phone.

He mumbled, and Eddi caught the words "audition" and "bass."

"Right." She turned to Carla, who raised one eyebrow. "This is Carla DiAmato, the drummer. That's Dan Rochelle." Dan was playing something through his headphones; he glanced up, looking vague and friendly.

The phouka stepped forward and put out a hand. "Robin Goode," he said, grinning. "A pleasure."

The kid's face opened suddenly into a huge, sweet smile around a set of substantial teeth, and he shook the phouka's hand.

"I've been meaning to ask," Eddi whispered to the phouka as the kid brought in his case. "What is this with the name?"

"Don't you think it's a nice name?"

"Oh, it's a swell name. Where did it
come from?"

"I confess, I borrowed it. But I can't imagine that its owner would object, under the circumstances."

Eddi rolled her eyes. "Forget it."

"Instantly," he said.

The kid was unpacking a brand new Steinberger bass. Eddi shot a look at Carla, who raised both eyebrows this time. He opened the accessory box in the case and took out a heavy-duty coiled cable, still sealed in its plastic bag. Then he mumbled something and went back out the door.

After a moment of silence, Carla said. "He's going to come back in here with a new Mesa Boogie amp with the warranty tag still tied to the handle. Do I hear any bets?"

Carla was wrong; it was a large Roland amplifier. But it was certainly new. He plugged it in (the shipping kinks were still in the power cord), slung the bass over his shoulder, and plugged in the cable. Had he stolen it all the night before? She was afraid to ask.

She did ask him how long he'd been playing, and who he'd worked with. He mumbled a little.

Eddi reminded herself that this was not the only bass player in Minneapolis. The ads hadn't even appeared yet. "Ahhhh . . . listen," she said at last. "I'm not sure you . . . that this is a good idea."

And he raised his eyes from his bass just enough to look at her. His eyes were more fluent than his mouth; they blazed contempt and hostility, they pleaded for her forbearance, her indulgence.