Oz Bites

by Mary Hughes

  “You already know what to do.” He nuzzled my throat. “Otherwise you’d have dragged me to the Caffeine Café for a full brain refueling. I heard they have chocolate chip muffins.”

  “I know what to do but…chocolate chip? With those curls of chocolate on the top…no, I’ve got my protein bar. It’s better for me.” To prove it, I chomped bar. Mmm-mmm, vitamin infused cardboard. Healthier, yes, but better? Not only did the Café use real chocolate, the owner heated my muffins until they steamed sugary goodness directly into my pores. These days I got no muffins, no whirlpool, no deep pounding sex…

  Wait. Love was making me do this pit thing, yes. But what was making me so whiny? Usually I was a doer, a problem-solver. Confident. Was this pouty girl just because I was hungry?

  Julian distracted me from worrying overmuch by doing some really interesting things to my collar bone with his tongue. “If you know what to do, let’s just do it.”

  “Well, I know what to do, but I don’t like it. I mean, I really don’t like it.”

  He raised his head. “And I don’t like the sound of that.” His tone held a growling note, revving vampire mode. “A fight?”

  “Worse. We’re gonna have to raid the high school band.”

  Three days later I smashed myself flat (or at least as flat as a pregnant chick can get) to black-painted cinderblock, my clarinet cradled against my breasts and my bass clarinet and alto sax crowded behind me. Even so it was barely enough for the brass and woodwind players to clomp past.

  We were in the high school auditorium pit for the first rehearsal with musicians and soloists. The renovated Performing Arts Center wouldn’t be done for a couple more weeks.

  When the coast looked clear I eased into my chair…and sprang up again as three more kids careened down the stairs. But they didn’t pass.

  No, this flute, clarinet and tenor sax squeaked up chairs next to mine. My new Reed II. One part, three musicians, what a bargain. But as I said, doublers were rare, and good doublers were almost like fairy tales. I’d tried for Junior the Big Bad Wolf on anything woodwind, and had gotten the three little pigwinds instead.

  Worse was the amount of room they took up. Pit real estate doesn’t come cheap and the kidlets had brought their cases in. No big for the flute and clarinet but awkward for the tenor sax case, the size of me wadded up. Probably my weight too, pre-kid.

  The flute player started warming up, squawking a couple notes in the key of G-honk. I cringed. They say beggars can’t be choosers, but even high schoolers should be close to in tune. Within city limits, say.

  I know I made a big deal about how good us MCer musicians were. I’m occasionally wrong, okay? But I’ll never admit it publicly.

  On my other side, my beloved husband Julian shot me a long-suffering look. He was really good at speaking without talking (especially the things he could say with his hands in the dark…yeah). But this look wasn’t that pleasant, along the lines of My ears are now bleeding.

  I shrugged, a nonverbal Blame the mayor.

  He screwed down his eyebrows, Don’t try to wiggle out of it.

  I raised my eyebrows and rounded my eyes, Ms. Innocent Who Me?

  He released his eyebrows slightly and let his eyes shimmer, almost an eye-roll but without the condescension. I know better.

  Yeah, that communicating-with-a-look shit they say husbands and wives can do? All true. Unfortunately.

  As I warmed up I tried to block all the honking and squawking. Once the kids were playing it’d be fine. Probably. At least it couldn’t be worse.

  As if the Demon Murphy had taken that as a personal challenge, a tall imposing dude showed up. The obligatory black-on-black togs, white mane, music case and short stick proclaimed he was the pit director imported from Broadway.

  Sure enough, one of the clarinets let out a great honking squeal.

  Mr. Broadway Import screeched to a halt, his foot hovering over the first step. A huge shudder passed through him. “What was that?”

  The clarinet shrugged, adjusted her reed…and did it again. Next to her, the flute player giggled.

  “Quiet!” The director strode into the pit. “You.” He skewered the clarinet with an accusatory baton. “You are an imbecile.”

  A little harsh, but I suppose he thought he had to establish his mastery or musical dominance or something.

  Or maybe he just spoke in imperatives. “Overture!” He waved his stick. “Begin!” The baton swooped up.

  Beside me the clarinet sucked in a breath. Well good. At least she had enough training to breathe before the downbeat. Except...Reed II was supposed to be on sax to start so why did she have the thing in her mouth—?

  The baton came down. With it came a cello (Julian) an alto sax (me), eight kidwinds sucking air—and one clarinet squealing her best imitation of nails on slate.

  Julian and I shuddered. The kidwinds snorted into their instruments. The trap kid did a badum-bump *crash*. The tenor sax high-fived the clarinet.

  “Enough!” The conductor pointed a forbidding finger at the stairs. “Any who do not wish to play properly, leave!”

  The kids sat front with appropriately serious faces. Exactly the kind of mask I’d worn in high school while working my worst mischief. This would not end well.

  I was about to warn the conductor when he whacked the stand with his baton, a bang-bang-bang that set my teeth on edge. It was the musicians’ equivalent of getting our noses pushed into pee. I hated being treated like a naughty puppy so I bit my tongue.

  “Begin!” The conductor gave the downbeat. Kids breathed. Julian and I played. The conductor hit beat two and half the kids decided it was okay to play. Another beat went by and more kids joined in—starting at the beginning. Pretty soon the puppy analogy was truer than I liked. We sounded like a squiggly pile.

  “Imbeciles!” The conductor beat his stand until his stick broke. He grabbed another from his music case. “Again!”

  We started and stopped like a bad flashing-red traffic light joke, vroom-screech vroom-screech. We couldn’t even make it through the overture. Broadway conductors are used to pristine perfect from beat one. High school kids learn their parts through weeks of rehearsal. Both are valid approaches but they mix like oil and flamethrowers.

  With a brimstone hiss, the conductor skipped to Number One, the musical proper. By the first big solo, Dorothy’s “Dreams Beyond the Rainbow”, he was tearing out his hair. Literally. He dug fingers through his collar-length mane and came away with white strands. Then hunks. Then Julian’s nostrils flared like he scented blood and I started to worry for the conductor’s scalp.

  Although I worried more for the actor’s singing. Our lead-in was tentative and thready and up on stage Dorothy had three different starting pitches to choose from. The flute player was flat, the clarinet sharp, and the trombone player had decided the hell with those pesky flats and sharps and was playing in the key of C.

  Despite the lead-in from hell, our Dorothy, the Ancient One’s ward, hit her first note right on pitch and proceeded to sing a solid solo. She was not only firm in rhythm and notes, she had a rich alto that made me shiver.

  There’s a girl to watch, my eyebrows said to Julian.

  The Ancient One would not have any less, his smirk said in return. As I said, no one did smug like my hubby.

  Despite the pit suckage the leads were great and I had some actual hope that we might be okay.

  Right. Things would be okay when those Fulvous Flamingos learned to fly alongside their porcine partners. But they say hope springs eternal and I’m proof positive that stupidity springs eternal too. Munchkins, Glinda and other extras were still being cast from local auditions so we sailed right on to the finding of the companions, solos for Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion.

  We started the Scarecrow intro. It was a jaunty little exposition punctuated by a trio of little clarinet after-beat boops—cute, but they had to be dropped in right on time or be mistaken for machine gun fire.

  Sure enough, n
one of the three of us could agree where the beat was, much less the after-beat. Even machine gun fire would have sounded more precise. Although some of that might have been the conductor, who did one-two like he was hacking jungle with a machete.

  The Scarecrow made faces but managed to pull his solo off. But when we repeated the exercise for Tin Man, he threw a fit. And Lion—after one note—walked offstage and wouldn’t return despite the artistic director’s pleading. The pit conductor was adding his snarl when Kid Clarinet got bored and started noodling.

  She popped a squeak as loud as a fart. The winds giggled. Egged on, the clarinet popped another fartsqueak. Not to be outdone, the trombone belched into his mouthpiece. Amplified by nine feet of tube and a bell, it was a gastric explosion. The rest of the brass got involved and a whole locker room of rude noise erupted.

  “Enough!” The pit director tossed down his baton so hard it bounced off the stand and nearly skewered me, Julian’s lightning-fast vampire reflexes the only thing saving me from a new navel piercing. The director snatched up his music case and stalked from the pit. “That’s it! I’ve had more than enough. I quit!”

  “Me too.” Tin Man marched off the stage. Dorothy and Scarecrow ran after him, arguing, obviously trying to talk him out of it.

  Nobody tried to talk the pit director back. Fine by me. Besides banging stands, the guy had the beat pattern of an Anaconda snake. He couldn’t conduct Darling Clementine in whole notes.

  The artistic director emerged from the wings, shoulders slumped. “We have lost our Tin Man and Lion—unless we get real musicians.”

  He may not have been aware that “we” meant me, but it hit me right where I lived.

  I was back to square one, with even less time than before.

  Chapter Three

  “I have no idea what to do.” Naked, I slumped on our bed and buried my hands in my hair.

  “You could lay back down and let me try to think up a position Six.” Julian had just treated me to some amazing feel-better sex, which had brought me from the screaming pits of despair to merely disgusted and depressed.

  Depressed was normally not me, but I hadn’t been myself since I’d said yes to Mom. “Sex later, worry now. I need to get real musicians, but without real cash to pay them—”

  “You’ll think of something.” Julian sat up to massage my shoulders. “You always do.”

  “I’m not always this desperate.” I rolled off the bed, picked up my Stratocaster guitar Oscar. Laid down a few riffs. Practicing often cleared my head.

  My fingers stumbled over the fret board, the notes dribbling out like sewer sludge. Trying again only made it worse. Horrified, I set the guitar aside.

  Julian watched me from the bed. “Maybe you don’t need all professionals. Maybe a few key players would do.”

  Panic receded. “Good idea.” I trotted back to the bed, scooped my Juke off the nightstand, and connected with Junior Stieg. “I need a doubler. I’m willing to beg.”

  “Hello to you too, Nixie,” she said dryly. “If begging would pay for my rent-a-kid, I’d be in like flynn. What does that mean, anyway?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “It’s for Errol Flynn,” Julian of the super-vamp hearing said. “His panache, swinging in on a rope to beat his cinematic foes.”

  “Errol Flynn?”

  He sighed. “A prehistoric Orlando Bloom.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” I told Junior, then returned to my original begging. “This totally sucks. I need pros but don’t have the money.”

  “Maybe you could find another incentive,” Junior said.

  I perked up my ears. “There are incentives besides cash?”

  Junior was a practical businesswoman, Meiers Corners’ Sausage Queen. If anyone knew about it, she did.

  “Cash is a big incentive, Nixie, but there are lots of reasons people do things. Duty and pride. Guilt and embarrassment.”

  I understood duty, pride and guilt as goads, courtesy of my mother. Hmm. Maybe I could sic Mom on the whole pit orchestra. No, probably too nuclear fly-swatter. “Embarrassment is an incentive?”

  “Sure. Think of that fulvous fundraising phenomenon I’m seeing around town. People are paying just to get rid of the things. Makes me glad we don’t have a front lawn.”

  Lights went on in my brain, and not just fundraising lights. “Good fucking better ideas. You don’t have flamingos. And you didn’t get the Phone Call.”

  Julian’s eyes went laser-sharp.

  “Phone Call?” Junior was as good as me at hearing the nuances of inflection. “When you were here you said something about a mysterious call, but you didn’t give it capital letters.”

  “Rocky got a call blabbing that I didn’t have cash. Lob did too, but you didn’t. Did you get one after that?”

  “I didn’t get any phone calls about the pit, except this one from you.”

  “Well, shit. Shit shit shit.”

  Junior laughed. “Vamp ‘shit’ until thinking complete.” Since she wasn’t clued in on the fangy world, I knew she was using vamp in the musical sense—a repeated section that stretched out as necessary, sort of like pregnancy pants.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Thing is, you didn’t get the flamingo plague and you didn’t get a phone call. Rocky got the Phone Call—and she had fifty-five of the suckers.”

  “Don’t donations max out at fifty?” Junior sounded intrigued. “Why would anyone waste five birds when they could deposit them in someone else’s lawn and get five bucks? That makes no sense, at least from a business perspective.”

  “You said sometimes there are incentives other than cash. Any ideas here?”

  “Just the obvious, that those extra birds must have some other value.”

  Some other value. “Junior, you’re a genius. I’ll get back to you.” I swiveled my phone shut and started to throw on clothes.

  Julian had caught on and was already halfway dressed. “Lob had extra flamingos too. You surmise they’re being used to spy, and conjecture it’s on our musicians?”

  “Surmise and conjecture? That sounds naughty.” I arched a wicked eyebrow. “I don’t know. But if the flamingos are bugged, we’re compromised. Any plan we make to lure real musicians will be torpedoed before we start. So we need to find out if they’re bugged—and by who.”

  “Agreed, and not just for the sake of the musical. If those flamingos were bugged by our favorite gang of rogue vampires, they could be stealing Alliance secrets.”

  Good lucking ford, he was right. Flamingos stealing my secrets was bad. Flamingos stealing Alliance secrets? Zombie apocalypse bad. Scary Ancient did not play well with the villainous Lestats.

  Lestats, yes, like the Anne Rice vampire or the Tom Cruise role. Only in our case they’re a gang, vampire muscle for the bad guys. Lestats recruit from vampires who don’t make the transition well and are more blood instinct than human—or the ones who weren’t quite human to begin with.

  Bottom line? Rogues are wild vampires who prey on humans. Lestats are rogues who run in a pack, and are a thousand times more dangerous. I really don’t like Lestats. “We have to get a sample brown bird, pronto.” I sat to put on my shoes. Stared at Julian. “What are you doing?”

  Buttoning his shirt with one hand, my husband was feeling up the top of the dresser with the other. “Grabbing my public blade. Or I thought I was. I forgot it’s at Bruno’s being retipped.” His blades have a silver inlay to improve vampire cutting.

  “Take the foot-long hot dog.” I slapped Velcro straps shut and stood.

  “I prefer not to carry my stiletto unless I’m on patrol.”

  “Because it’s all kinds of illegal, got it.”

  “It’s not illegal, exactly.” Julian grabbed his tie and jacket. “It’s just harder to conceal and we’ll be dealing with humans. I have a backup blade in storage. Do we have time…?”

  “Scary Ancient, Lestats, and Alliance secrets? How could that possibly be an emergency?” I swung out of our rooms.r />
  “Right.” He followed, was alongside me in two steps. “Anyway, we’re only off to appropriate a flamingo. Back home and safe in no time.”

  “Appropriate? You mean steal, lover?”

  “We’ll return it if it’s not bugged.” Julian grinned. “But how will we determine if it is wired? We’re not electronics experts.”

  “We can get Mr. Blond Techie Fangs’s company to analyze them. That’s what we have them for, isn’t it?”

  “You mean Steel Security? Good idea. So all we have to do is get a flamingo to analyze.”

  “Yep. Lob’s is closest.”

  Julian picked me up and we raced through the early evening to Lob’s home.

  But when we got there, the yard was bare.

  “Where’d they go?” I asked when Lob opened the door, then discreetly slapped my forehead. No hi, nothing…I was turning into my mother.

  “Hey, Nixie.” Lob said. “Where’d what go?”

  “The brown birds. You know. The flamingos.”

  “Oh, those. I paid the money.”

  “Where did you get cash?”

  “I used my rent.” He shrugged. “Hey, this was like taxes—either I paid the money or dealt with the shit.”

  Which, considering the birds’ color, was fairly accurate. It also reinforced Junior’s idea that embarrassment was a real incentive.

  “Where did you have the flamingos sent?” Julian drawled.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Emerson.” Lob waved his hands in front of his body. “The Flaming Plastic Lump Flamingos comment reminded me that I’m a drummer. I’ve made enough enemies already. I didn’t sic them on anyone.”

  “And the world is a better place.” Julian turned to me. “Rocky’s?”

  “Rocky’s.”

  The instant we were out of Lob’s sight, Julian picked me up and kicked into vampire mode. When he wanted to, he could hit forty-two—last month I made him spin past one of those speed detector signs. Of course vampire mist was the fastest form of movement but as mist Julian couldn’t carry me.