The spacious back yard was empty of people, although folded tables leaned up against the wall near the back door and folding chairs leaned in long rows against a screen porch. I led Luke through the orange-green evening to the rotunda, a brick-floored circle of columns covered with a white dome.
“I think we must be very early,” Luke remarked. He retrieved a folding chair for me and sat on the edge of the rotunda, watching me set up. After a few minutes of silence, he said, “I know about your brother.”
I looked up from tuning my harp. “My brother?”
He reached into his battered canvas backpack and withdrew his flute case. “From one of your memories. How old were you when your mother lost him?”
I could have feigned ignorance, but the truth was that I remembered the exact month, day, and hour that Mom had lost the baby, down to the weather outside and what I’d eaten for breakfast. I wondered what else Luke had dug up from inside my head. “Ten.”
His deft fingers assembled the flute pieces while his eyes scanned the edges of the yard, ever on guard. “Does it bother you to talk about it?”
I remembered Mom’s huge belly disappearing too soon, and the last time I’d ever seen her cry. But it wasn’t my sorrow; I was a step removed, and to me, the pregnancy had always been a bit surreal anyway. “No. Why do you want to know?”
Luke’s eyes flitted over the trees closest to the rotunda: three petite thorn trees a few yards away. “Before I decide I don’t like someone, I always try and figure out if there’s a reason why they are who they are.”
“Me?”
He gave me a withering look. “Your mom, stupid.”
I chewed my lip, feeling both defensive and relieved that an objective third party thought she was hard to live with. “She’s all right.”
Luke frowned. “I’ve had plenty of time to watch the two of you, thanks to your memories, and I don’t think she’s been all right in a while. And don’t get me started on Delia.” He shook his head, and added after a moment’s pause, “We’re going to have to protect your family. If I won’t touch you, They’re going to try to come at you any way they can.”
I imagined trying to coax Mom into wearing iron jewelry. Or trying to have an intelligent conversation with Dad about faeries. And Delia—well, she could fend for herself. Maybe I could use Delia as a decoy.
Luke laughed when he saw my face. “I think we have to find out what Granna was working on before They got to her.”
I sobered, remembering that Granna was lying in a hospital while we were laughing. “Will the doctors be able to fix her? Do you know how to fix her?”
Luke shrugged and shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that. Some of Them might know, but it’s not as if I can just call Them up. Even if I could, I don’t know if I’d want to. Even the best of Them aren’t exactly safe.”
“They aren’t all like Eleanor and Freckle Freak?”
“Freckle Freak?”
“He was at the reception. And again, at Dave’s Ice.”
Luke frowned, remembering. “Aodhan. That’s his name.” His eyes narrowed further. “He was at Dave’s?”
“James bitch-slapped him with a fireplace shovel.” That reminded me of something else I wanted to say. “I think James is jealous of you.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “You think?” He lifted his flute as if he were going to play it, and then rested it on his knees again. “He’s known you for years, Dee. He had plenty of chances, and he blew it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You aren’t worried about it, then?”
Luke shook his head and blew an “A” before pulling the slide out a bit on his flute. “Nope. I love you more than he does.”
I sighed. I wanted to take this moment, wrap it in paper, and give it to myself as a gift every time I felt crummy.
Luke glanced at the silent house. “We’re definitely early. Do you want to play some tunes to warm up?”
I wanted to hear him say that he loved me again, but playing tunes with him came in as an okay second. I leaned my harp against my shoulder, the smooth wood fitting perfectly into the crook of my shoulder; it felt like it had been too long since I’d played. “Sure.”
Luke seemed to feel the same, because he ran his fingers over his flute and said, “It’s been a while. What do you want to play?”
I rattled off a list of common session tunes I thought he might know, and he nodded recognition at all but one. I ripped into a bouncy reel and Luke tore in after me. It felt like we were two pieces of a puzzle: the high, breathy note of the flute filling in everything that the harp lacked, and the rhythmic arpeggios of my low harp strings pulsing beneath the melody of the flute, driving the reel forward with a force that made me forget everything but the music.
At the end of the set, I dampened the strings with my hand; Luke’s attention immediately returned to the thorn trees.
I cuffed his arm, pulling his eyes back to me, and demanded, “Okay. Enough’s enough. What are you looking at? I don’t see anything. Is someone there that I can’t see?”
Luke shook his head. “I’m pretty sure you can see Them all now, if you try hard enough. But there’s nothing to see there. Yet.”
“Yet?” That was an ominous way of saying “nothing.”
He gestured to the upward curve of the yard. “This massive hill, those thorn trees, the storm—I can’t imagine a time and place any more perfect for the Daoine Sidhe to make an appearance.”
The name seemed to whisper recognition in my soul. “What’s that?”
“The ‘Forever Young.’ The faeries who worship Danu. They’re—” he seemed to struggle to find the right words, “—of music. Music calls them. It’s what They live for.” He shrugged, giving up. “And if any music would call them, it’d be yours.”
My fingers touched the key at my neck. “Should we be worried?”
“I don’t think so. They refuse allegiance to her, and in return, she’s done everything she can to destroy Them. Of all the fey, They’re the weakest in the real world—the human world. They’d need a storm like the one we just had to even think about appearing before the solstice.” But I knew from his persistent observation of the thorns that he still regarded them as a possible threat; I raised an eyebrow. He added, “But I did say there’s no such thing as a safe faerie, didn’t I? There are Sidhe that would kill you just for the prize of your voice.”
I stared at the thorns, a bit taken aback by this new bit of knowledge.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you.” Luke spoke softly.
I almost believed it was true; I could have been convinced of his infallibility if I hadn’t seen him slain on the kitchen floor by an enemy that wasn’t even in the same building. But I lifted my chin and leaned my harp against my shoulder again. “I know. Do you want to play anything else?”
“You make me want to play music until I fall asleep, and then wake up and play some more. Of course I do.”
I leaned my harp back and began to play a moody, minor reel, slow and building. Luke recognized the tune immediately, and lifted his flute again.
Together, we twisted the reel into something at once towering and creeping, inspiring and sobering. The melody dropped low on my harp strings and Luke’s flute ripped upward, dragging an aching counter-melody ever higher in the octave. It was almost too raw; both of us laying everything that made us who we were out in plain musical language for anyone who cared to listen.
In the shadow of the three thorns, the darkness stirred.
The tune throbbed, driven by a faint drum from the depths of the trees like a heartbeat. I could see the music, pulled tight like a cobweb, stretched into the darkness where it coaxed and lured the shadows into life. Every infatuated note, every hopeful measure, every bit of emotion-charged sound took shape; and, in the shelter of the thorns, the tune became real—music became flesh.
The two faeries that stood there in the trees were slight and sinuous, with pale skin tinged green, either through trick of the light or by birth. One held a fiddle in his long green hands, his young face turned toward us, and the other held a skin drum under her lean arm. Unlike Eleanor and Freckle Freak, there was no chance of mistaking them as human, though they were as beautiful as they were strange.
I let the reel fade away, half expecting them to fade as well. But they remained, watching us from their nearby copse.
Luke whispered in my ear and I started; I hadn’t seen him move. “I know them. I call them Brendan and Una.”
“‘Call them’?”
His voice was still low. “The Daoine Sidhe don’t tell anyone Their true names; They think it gives others power over Them. Stand up when you talk to Them—it’s very rude not to.”
He stood, lifting his chin, and addressed the faeries. “Brendan. Una.”
Brendan stepped closer, his face curious if not friendly. “Luke Dillon. I thought I heard your particular brand of suffering.” He started to move out of the trees, but fell back, holding his hand in front of his face. “And still armed to the teeth.”
I thought he might be talking about Luke’s hidden dagger, but his eyes were on the key around my neck. Luke nodded. “More than ever.”
Brendan held up his fiddle, a beautiful instrument covered in some sort of paint or gild, patterned in woven flowers and vines. “I was going to ask to play with you, but you know I cannot abide that rubbish. Can’t you take it off so we can play like old times?”
Luke shook his head and looked at me; his expression was so protective and possessing that warmth stirred inside me. “I’m afraid it’s not coming off this time. I’m sorry.”
Una—slighter than Brendan, with pale hair piled on her head in a half-dozen fat braids—spoke from the trees, her voice either teasing or mocking. “Look how he glows when he looks at her.”
Brendan frowned over his shoulder at her and turned back, assessing me and my harp. “So you’re the other voice I heard. You play nearly as well as one of us.” Luke looked at me sharply, and I knew it was an incredible compliment.
Standing, I tried to remember what the old faerie tales had mentioned of human-faerie etiquette. All I could remember were random passages about being polite, not eating faerie food, and putting out spare clothing to get rid of brownies, and I wasn’t sure any of that applied. I went for complimentary; it always worked with Mom’s catering customers. “I’m not sure that’s possible, but thank you anyway.”
The compliment tugged Brendan’s mouth into half a smile, and something inside me sighed in relief at answering correctly.
“I think you’d find a more agreeable existence playing music with us than in this world,” he replied. “Surely you know that Luke Dillon and his music aren’t like most of your kind.”
Una added, disconcertingly close, “He learned from the best.”
