Music filled the night. Not the voices of the band we’d heard online, but the kind of background music that blared from speakers just before a concert began. “We’d better hurry up.”
We came into the clearing that had two ticket booths and two lines of people streaming from each. It looked like most were just holding out their hands and being waved in. I looked around for Fred and Phro, remembered Fred wasn’t there to help and settled on Frida instead. He didn’t have his arms crossed as usual, but still stood tall and alert, his narrowed gaze darting around the crowd. Phro’s eyes were huge as she looked at all the costumes.
Most people wore one. Long medieval dresses, poet blouses and some even carried swords. None had on warm coats. I walked close to one man in pants so tight I wondered how he breathed. He had a sword gripped in his left hand. Moonlight shined off the smooth blade. It looked real.
A handful of giggling teen girls in jewel-toned dresses jostled into him. He grinned down in recognition, tucking a strand of chin-length blond hair behind one ear. A couple of the girls oohed and awed over his weapon.
“There are more people than I expected.” I pulled Blythe into a line with me.
“It’s a lot,” she agreed. “And hardly anyone is wearing a coat. You know, I was expecting this to be like a concert in the park I went to when I was thirteen. Some folk singers had posted flyers all over town. Cute pink flyers with pictures of cats on them.”
“Let me guess. The name of the group was Cat Nip.”
She giggled and nearly tripped over a rock when she moved with the line. I caught her arm and kept her from getting mud all over her new coat. We stood out, with every single concert attendee decked out in costume.
“Cat Nip would have been a better name. It was Itty Bitty Kitty.”
I let go of her arm. “Only you would go see a band called that.”
Light fell on her face as we finally got close to the ticket booths. The band had also strung hanging lights in the trees on either side of the arena here. Big blue eyes looked at me with speculation. “You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have gone too. Just to see what a band with that name sounded like.”
She had me. I grinned. “Yeah, I would have.”
“The lead singer was Kitty and she wasn’t even five feet tall. And she wailed.”
Phro snorted. “Wailed.”
Most of the people around us in line were young. Like teens and early twenties. Many of them were pale and gaunt. Malnutrition showed in skeletal collarbones and hips, in pale lips and dark circles under eyes. Yet the excitement sending a buzz through the crowd was catchy. I remembered being excited about a concert, recalled the nervous jittery thrill of knowing you were about to see your favorite band in action.
The men working the booths looked healthier than everyone else. The one we approached leaned over so he could see out of the square opening, a set of earplugs swung on a chain around his neck as he looked me up and down. “First time?”
“Jeans give me away?”
“Those and other things. Tickets are fifty bucks each. Cash only.”
I could tell he didn’t expect me to have that much cash on me. I handed him five twenties. I was going to have to take on some paying jobs when we got back at the rate I was going through my savings.
He took the money, then shrugged. “Have a good time.”
Like any other concert, there were concession and swag stands. I was surprised to see T-shirts because I expected medieval wear. But there were also scarves, shot glasses. “You guys have concert schedules?” I asked the woman running one of the booths.
She only laughed and shook her head.
“Let’s see if we can find Sophie.”
Blythe nodded and we weaved between people as they spread out blankets and greeted familiar faces. I recognized a few from the group we’d spied on earlier, noting that one of them looked worse than she had then. The moonlight and strung lanterns threw shadows onto her thin face. She sagged to the ground and nobody moved to help her. Her friends only milled about her as if they were used to it.
“Should we do something?” Blythe grabbed my hand and pulled me to a stop.
“Yeah.” I walked to the girl and squatted down. “You okay?”
She looked at me with glazed eyes. “When does the music start? I need the music.” She smiled and stroked her hand over the grass.
I stood and whispered in Blythe’s ear. “Drugs.”
“Poor thing. I have something in my pocket that might help.”
“Let’s just find Sophie first. We’ll come back and help this girl.” Glancing up, I watched as most of the audience stared at the stage. There was excitement, yes, but something else threaded the wave of emotion, something darker that made my skin crawl. It was like they craved the band…like they were all druggies and the band was the fix.
Blythe and I walked toward the sidelines along the back of the crowd. We reached the edge of the stage and two huge thug-looking guys stepped in front of us. They wore the blue Staglina shirts that stretched taut over bulging muscles. One of them had shoulders so wide his head looked like a bald twig perched on his body. I bit my lip, feeling bad for him because I wasn’t sure I’d seen anything uglier…well, except for that ghoul. This man had small eyes and a tiny mouth to go with that head, but everything below his neck tipped the Hulk scale.
I moved to step around him and he shuffled in front of me again. “No one allowed beyond this point.”
The growling bear voice coming from that tiny mouth had me blinking at him a second before I pointed behind him. “There are a lot of people beyond this point.”
“They are allowed.”
“But you said no one.”
He crowded into me. “You and the little blonde are not allowed beyond this point.”
“Her mentor is actually a member of this band. She’ll be allowed.”
He shook his head and I marveled that it didn’t just teeter off his body. “No one is allowed beyond this point.”
“Are you a robot programmed to say that or what? Why don’t you go find a wi—” I broke off. Tact. I’d been told countless times that tact worked. “Look, find a band member named Sophie and tell her Blythe is here. Please.”
“No.”
So much for tact. His large friend stepped up next to him and crossed his arms. I kind of wanted to fight them. Enjoying their look of surprise when I let my strength loose could be more fun than getting this whole thing with Sophie over with. But just then, lights on the stage flared, the sound of a flute and cello blared and the concert was beginning. For fun, I did call bees as I walked away from the bouncers, smirking at the sound of skin slapping and cursing.
The excitement in the crowd built. It felt like an electrical current in my chest. Bodies jostled mine as the crowd moved like one entity toward the band. Then everything sort of stopped. All noise from the crowd, from the forest. Every face surrounding us was aimed toward the stage as nine witches and wizards quietly walked out single file. They wore long, filmy blue robes and had bare feet. Lights shimmered in a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors on the screens behind them, then flowed into scenes of ocean waves. The singers formed a half circle and lifted their arms to the sky.
Every person around Blythe and me did the same.
Blythe moved closer to me and reached for my hand. I felt her fear in the sweat on her palm so I squeezed her fingers reassuringly.
“Do you see Sophie?” I whispered, amazed that I could whisper at a concert.
She nodded. “She’s the one with curly hair on the right side. The pretty one.”
If I guessed right, Sophie was one of the three black women on the stage and she was stunning, with a head full of gorgeous black curls, thin arching eyebrows, high cheekbones and full lips. I frowned. “She doesn’t look old enough to have raised you.”
“She was only eighteen when she took me on. Normally mentors have to be older but Sophie and my mother were best friends and I’d been around her my whole life. The council accepted her petition.” She paused. “Something is wrong with her. I can see her eyes from here and they aren’t the right color. They’re usually hazel, not blue.”
I looked at each person on that stage and a chill crept up my spine. “They all have the same color.” It was a pale blue, like a robin’s egg blue, the same color as the robes, the T-shirts on the bouncers.
Blythe stepped forward and the people in front of us turned to stare. I narrowed my eyes, silently daring them to make another move. They turned back around, lifting their arms to the sky again.
The music started and the witches and wizards began to sing. Every part of me just froze in place at the absolute beauty of the sound. The video on the Internet hadn’t prepared me…nothing could have. Hearing it in person was like nothing I could explain. It was so loud it drowned out everything else, and so very beautiful tears sprang to my eyes.
It felt as if every note entered my soul.
Blythe let go of my hand and lifted her arms. “It’s like they’re putting heaven into my heart.”
Just behind Blythe, something shimmered and I peeled the dimensional layers, noticing it took more effort than usual. Phro stood there, gesturing frantically toward the stage, her dark eyes half the size of her face, her hands moving in short, jerky movements. She spoke, but I couldn’t hear her. I tilted my head, frowned, seeing swirling, lazy streams of light all around her head. My mouth fell open in awe, wonder spreading this overwhelming joy throughout my body. It was warm, like a hug from Castor.
Phro rolled her eyes and made a throat-cutting motion.
I laughed. The people around me started to laugh like I’d released a highly contagious virus into the weaving, pretty-colored air. I lifted one hand to touch a stream of glittery purple.
Blythe slumped to her knees. Faint alarm filled me, but it was so barely there—it fluttered inside, bouncing off walls, like a soft rubber ball in a pinball machine. The image made me chuckle and touch my chest—I expected to feel the ball moving around. People all around me started to fall and I leaned over to stare at Blythe. Couldn’t remember why I leaned, then I shook my head and picked her up. She wasn’t tall and she had a curvy, full-figured form, but she weighed less than I expected, so I stumbled because I overshot my lift. She snuggled in and her movement made me happy. She was alive.
Of course she was alive. I stopped walking. Frowned. Turned around to see that most of the audience was on the ground. I wanted the music out of me, so I took a deep breath and pushed it out hard. Then I giggled at how silly that was. I laid Blythe on the ground away from the crowd and she stretched out and buried her fingers into crumbled leaves.
Dizzy, I spun, tried to remember what I was doing here. The fear that chased the fog came so fast and hard I hugged myself and once again caught Phro’s frantic gesturing. Giggling, I watched her hopping form.
This was wrong.
I never giggled.
I closed my eyes, held my breath, and worked hard to ground myself in reality. It felt like I’d swallowed a bottle of whiskey, even though I’d never drunk that much alcohol in my life. In fact, I hadn’t had anything at all to drink here. I fought to get free of the brain fog, but it was like pulling limbs from a sticky spiderweb. My body wanted to stay in that trap.
I stared straight ahead, focused on the stage in the distance and saw that the witches and wizards were no longer alone. A woman stood in the middle of the semicircle behind them, her arms also raised to the sky. She had long black hair and some sort of gold crown that looked like frozen snakes from this distance. Her long gown, also medieval in shape and form, glowed gold in the lights from the screens.
The voices swelled, rising in a harmony that again brought tears to my eyes and froze my breath. It took every bit of effort I had left to peel the dimensional layers and what I saw shook me to the core. Trails of sparkling energy were flowing from the trees, the ground, the bushes into every person in that audience, then tendrils of life were being pulled from them toward the stage.
All flowed to the figure behind the witches. She writhed in pleasure.
People in the audience started dropping all the way to the ground. Some were even having sex. Stunned, I stood there gaping, still fighting off the effect of that music.
Phro punched me in the face.
Pain exploded in my nose and up into my eyes and cheeks. “Holy shit, Phro, why’d you do that?”
“Can you hear me now? Can you? I had to pull energy from this already weak fucking crowd, Beri.” Her frantic yells hurt my ears, which already felt sort of weird and hollow. I wiggled my jaw, trying to pop them.
“Were you trying to break my nose?”
“I’m trying to save your stupid life! You have to get that thing off the stage!” She pointed to the woman behind the half circle of witches. “That is something bad—very bad. Something from the past and the underworld.”
I took a deep breath and walked toward the stage, only to find the two hulking brutes before me again. One looked at the other and I saw the earplugs. Something dripped onto my lip and I swiped my hand on it, coming away with blood from Phro’s punch. Great. I swerved and rushed the stage and hit what felt like an invisible wall. Shock reverberated through my whole body as I flew back and crashed into some of the only people still standing. They merely stumbled back, moved forward again and lifted their arms.