“She didn’t…” Anise is scrambling for an excuse. “We’ve had a long trip up. And she’s hangry.”
“It’s okay.” In the dim light formed by the room’s lambent candles, Conna’s eyes are shadowed by her bangs. “We’re done here for now. But if you could tell her to at least consider coming back in for dinner once the food gets here. They do some remarkable things with beetles, our hosts.”
“Maybe it’s just shock?” Anise chews her nail as she looks at the beaded curtain through which Dee departed. “Maybe she just needs time?”
“I haven’t known Dee for very long, but I know when someone’s decided. And she’s not in the wrong for keeping you out of all this.” Conna gives them a sad smile. “I won’t be traveling with you, I’m afraid. Not this time.”
“Conna, we really need to send something back to Earth,” Anise says. “There’s a lot of people who want answers. And if I can’t come to them with the truth…”
“I get it, Ani,” Conna says. “I’ll think about what kind of truth I can give them. Or come up with a really dope lie.”
Dinner is as delicious as advertised, although Dee doesn’t join them. Anise and Nick stick to the chutneys and miszkts, where the insectoid proteins have been ground fine to hide their buggy nature. The Kamiyons, in contrast, tuck into everything. “I was the same way, before I married a goblin,” Evan explains, cracking open a thick roast beetle shell with his thumb. “Once you take the plunge, you adapt quick.”
Thekla is starry-eyed as she eats, exchanging excited Kyssaki with one of the Kamiyon chefs. “They use berries,” she says. “Berries in a miszkt. That’s why the sweet sap’s so pink. That’s fascinating. I gotta tell the matriarch.”
Evan nudges her. “Still think yours is the best.”
“I’m going to go find Dee.” Nick scoots his chair out. “Be back.”
“Take this to her, okay?” Anise passes him her plate and stacks a layer of flaky stuffed pastry onto it. “She’s gotta eat.”
Nick meets her eyes. They’re cloudy and confused. She’s surely wondering about the wellspring of the drama she just witnessed, who this Anders is. But nowadays she’s their lover before she’s their employer. “Okay,” he says, and lays a quick kiss on the crown of her head before he follows his packmistress.
He finds Dee outside, at the lip of the cave, gazing out over the forested tableau below them. The floating mountains are light blue colossi in the distance; one of them passes over the setting sun and a cooling shadow draws across his still mate, casting the cliff face into blue chill.
She doesn’t turn around, but she doesn’t have to; she knows he’s here. The mate bond hovers between them like a magnetic field. “I’m sorry, Nicky.”
“You have no reason to be.” Nick places the plate he brought on the rocky ground. “I brought you bug goop.”
“Not real hungry right now.”
“I know.” Nick steps behind her and rests his arms across her middle. “But Ani asked me to.”
Dee issues a shaking sigh. “Okay. I’ll have one for Ani.”
Nick picks a pastry up and passes it into Dee’s hand. He holds her from behind as she forlornly munches.
“If she’s telling the truth. Conna, I mean. If she’s telling the truth. It would be the right thing to do. The virtuous thing. But I—” Dee runs out of momentum and visibly crumples. She pops the rest of the bug tart into her mouth and takes her time with the swallow. “I’m not a fuckin’ hero,” she says. “I’m a packmistress. I’m supposed to keep you all safe. That’s what the packmistress is for. And if I were to have my Voraags follow a dragon, again, after last time, after all that pain. What would that make me?”
“She can figure this out without us,” Nick says. “She’s resourceful. She has Sion. Maybe it is the right thing to do, but maybe we’re not the right people. Simple as that. Not your fault.”
“I want to keep deserving you.” Dee’s eyes are watery. “You and all the Voraags. That’s all I want. Be the person you need me to be. I’m supposed to be the one you lean on. That’s the deal. Now I’m listing. I’m questioning myself. I’m a mess.”
“Nobody’s the rock all the time.” Nick tightens his grip on her. “Me and Anise have you. We’re called Quillbear, right? Not Dee and the Quillbears. All three of us.”
Dee laughs a wet laugh and wipes the flaky crumbs from her chest. “Dee and the Quillbears woulda been tight, though. For a name.”
“Bit too retro for us.”
“Probably.” She tilts her head back onto his shoulder. “Can I tell you the worst part?”
“You can tell me anything.”
“I really want to kill that motherfucker.” She leans further into him. “Anders. I want to put a bullet in him. That’s why I left the room. Because if I’d stayed longer, she would have had me. Am I a piece of shit for that?”
“You already know I’m gonna tell you no, babe.”
“Yeah.” Dee shivers as a cutting breeze whistles across the summit. “But I like listening to your voice.”
The sun has gone all the way down by the time the last plates are cleared. Thekla insists on lending a hand washing up, and is soon mingling with the Old World Kamiyons, gabbing happily as they rinse the tacky crumbs off stone cookware. Nick’s known the goblin as a polite but deliberate person (when she isn’t having alarmingly loud sex with her husband and wife). It’s interesting seeing her so loose and bubbly. When they offer to host everyone for the night, she’s eager as a puppy with the zoomies.
Dee is itchy to get out of the warren and away from the dragon, but Sion and Kell have gotten tipsy on mushroom vodka. Legendary and Quillbear present a united front to the packmistress that the ash elf isn’t situated to ride a pony down a mountain in the dark.
“Plus Sion says they’ve got some extremely dope studios in here,” Kell says, and that tears it. Nick can tell by the shift in his mate’s shoulders. The one thing that’s guaranteed to put Dee in a better mood is getting loud as living hell with her lovers.
She throws out a final defensive wall. “I didn’t bring my bass.”
“Mine’s in the trailer,” Evan says. “Short walk from here. You can use it.”
Seven pairs of eyes rivet to him. “Your mom’s bass?” Kell asks. “The bass?”
Evan chuckles. “It’s just a bass, babe.”
“You love that bass. You told me you’d rather break a leg than that bass.”
“I do love it. And I did say that. But that was when the bass was just about the only thing in my life. Now my life is pretty full. Besides. It’s the packmistress.” Evan clasps Dee’s shoulder, then heads for the mouth of the cavern. “Be right back.”
“Dude, Dee. Now you fucking have to stay,” Kell says. “Do you know the story of that bass?”
By the time Kell’s regaled them with the tale, digressions and all (“And then he fucking clubbed the dude with it”) Evan’s returned, his beat-up leather hard case strapped to his back. Dee receives it with the gravity of a knight being dubbed.
So armed, the musicians of Quillbear are guided by their goblin hosts to a rehearsal room hewn from the igneous mountain. It’s a curious mixture of ancient vault with modern studio. A Webber drum kit gleams below an antique brass chandelier. Amp/cab combos rest in sconces carved with goblin deities. Foam soundproofing hangs on walls beside tapestries of woven root-twine.
Nick borrowed a guitar from Sion, a trim Prelate Pioneer with two silvery alnico pickups. It’s a significantly nicer instrument than the strat he’s been beating the hell out of on the road with Legendary; Sion made him promise “to refrain from any of those crustpunk theatrics” when using it. Fair enough.
Dee has a clear surfeit of aggression to take out tonight. They’ve been prodding away at a song built off Anise’s slick rhythm, with the working title of Wai’rek, Tower. Dee’s usual bassline is a bouncy eighth note octave. Tonight she’s throwing in vicious power chords and chugging sixteenths. Nick thins his guitar out and gives her bass room to throw a tantrum. It turns the song stormy and brutal. Anise doesn’t give up an inch, but her churning dance beat is what’s keeping Dee tethered from just transforming the whole thing into an avalanche.
Nick considers, as he often does, how fantastically these newbie musicians fit together.
There’s a sheen of sweat on the elf’s face on her machine-gun outro. As the air stills from their assault, she looks up at Nick. “Am I buzzed, or did that kinda kick ass?”
“That kicked serious ass.” Nick pulls an earplug out. “The bass was nasty. Good nasty.”
A pleased beam of light breaks through Dee’s tempest. “It’s this relic thing, man.” She holds up Evan’s vintage prelate. “Like it’s begging to be cut loose.”
“Maybe,” Nick says. “Maybe it’s just you’re in a bad mood and you’ve got some tangr’ak up in there.”
“Maybe.” Dee flexes her fingers on the bass. “You tell me if I seem smashy, okay? This shit’s older than any of us.”
“You can just say older than Anise,” says Anise.
Dee blows her a kiss. “Never.”
“This is the first time I’ve really loved Tower.” Anise tip-taps a flam on her snare. “I vote we always do it like that.”
“Agreed,” Nick says. “We’ll figure out a way to piss off Dee before every performance.”
They finally pull a smile out of their girlfriend. “Impossible. I’m the picture of patience with the pack. It’s only the dickheads who fuck with my people that start the engine.”
“Conna’s not a dickhead,” Anise says. “She’s just… in a hard-up spot.”
“I know, I know. I’mma work on being less of an asshole to dragons, okay? Tomorrow morning I’m all the way nice, I promise.” Dee tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “As long as they stop trying to give my ass quests, man. All I’m asking.”
“Classic refusal of the call.” Anise points her drumstick at Dee. “That’s step two of the monomyth.”
“Nick, do you understand what our elf is saying?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Nick says.
“What?! Nick, come on. Joseph Campbell? The Hero’s Journey?” Anise tsks and shakes her head. “I have to nip back over to Earth when this is done and bring my e-reader back. This is disgraceful. What are they teaching kids these days in English class?”
“I usually skipped English Class,” Nick says. “It’s why I fell into a life of crime.”
“I’m going to rehabilitate this boy,” Anise tells Dee. “I can fix him.”
“Sure you can.”
“Let’s do the new Tower again.” Nick flips the standby off on his amp. “Get it down to the marrow.”
They’re midway through their newer, meaner rendition when the door cracks and Sion Benefice sidles through. Nick’s line halts but Dee plows right on through, and yanks him back into the song in her wake.
As they thunder to the finish, Sion provides a desultory golf clap. “Good song,” he says.
“Thanks.” Nick dampers down his restless pickups. “What do you need, Sion?”
Sion produces his guitar and lays it across his chest. “It occurs to me I’ve never had the opportunity to play with Quillbear,” he says. “I’d like to rectify that, while we still have this ideal setting. No offense to Legendary’s charming practice tent. But the great outdoors are acoustically miserable.”
“You wanna just jam or something, then?” Nick asks.
A shake of Sion’s silvery head. “I want to incant.”
Anise goes rigid. “I’ve never done that before. I dunno, Sion.”
“You’re in the company of two accomplished magicians,” Sion says. “An ideal environment to break the seal.”
Anise looks uncertainly to her orcs. Dee sucks air through her tusks, then says, “All right, man. I’ll go along with it.”
Nick realizes belatedly that Sion just called him an accomplished magician. That puts some steel in his spine.
“You want to do magic?” He raises the volume on his guitar. “Let’s bring the magic.”
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Always with the magic with this boy!
One track mind having ash elf