Trying to remain calm, I open my back door a crack and leave it ajar. I slip back into my bedroom and strip down. If anyone spies, it will be a final show. I desperately call on the techniques Teddy was trying to explain to me and flow into my full wolf form … and focus even harder. The point where wolf befriends man, I think as my tail curls over my back, feeling the contrabass phase fit my body. A quick glance in the mirror reveals me resemble nothing more than a big cuddly Siberian husky. Fully warded, no one will see anything but a big dog harassing a scared little bird—if we’re seen at all.
I step out into the sticky night air, already too warm for my thick coat. “It’s over, motherfucker,” I intone, doing a darned good job of producing human speech through a canine facial structure. “Everyone knows that doves are daytime birds.”
There is no response. Even the frogs go quiet, as if holding their breath. I speak again, “Give it up, Gabriel! You have a lot of explaining to do, you sick fuck!” Even angels themselves have been known to fall.
My hunch is correct: he is too obsessed with me to be scared off, lured instead by my calling his name. In a whistle of wings he descends before me. I’m sure that he would try to manifest a halo as well if he could. His large, dark eyes are liquid and guileless as he spreads his limbs outward in a saintly gesture, fine-boned feathered arms awaiting crucifixion. I don’t give him a chance to explain, pouncing on him and pinning both wings to the ground with my forepaws.
He pecks madly at my feet. “Birch MacKinlay, I’m the only one you need! Don’t you understand that I’ve been trying to keep you safe?”
“Safe?” I roar. If he ever wanted to get close to me, he’s about to get more than he ever bargained for. I expose my fangs just inches from his head. He struggles and tries to shift back into human, but I pit my stronger energies against his own.
“She told me you were special, the boss did!” he begins chittering. “I was madly in love with you even before she sent me down to get information on you! Our boss is the world’s most powerful shifter, she wants to trap or kill all the other shifters, wants all the power to herself. I kept you safe. I only shared your information with Copperhead and Quinn. Never the boss, never the boss.”
“Well, isn’t that kind of you,” I sneer. “So it’s been another shifter killing and abducting us all along. Aren’t you a hero?”
He panics. “You don’t understand, Birch MacKinlay, Birch, Birch, Birch, Birch MacKinlay! I am the only one who can keep you safe!”
“Safe from what?” I demand. I press down harder with my forepaws, feeling the delicate wing bones snap. Gabriel screeches but persists.
“Safe from them! Those other lycans! You could be with me, and we could be absolved together by the boss, we could be protected, we could be happy together forever while war is waged on the rest of the shifters!”
“And just why,” I continue, wondering why I don’t bite the head off of this idiot right now, “do I need protection from my own pack?”
“Bad people!” he cackles. “Bad people, bad people, bad people, bad people! You deserve better! Maybe you would have liked me better as a macho stag, the way I was at the Shifter’s Ball. You were so amusing, Birch MacKinlay, letting prey chase predator! Hind’s feet in high places, Birch MacKinlay!”
All of my adult life I have been trying to tame my rage. First I stifled the beast within, then I studied meticulously with my pack mates, who had honed their own skills for years. Do I really want to blow it by killing this guy? If I snuff him while he’s in dove form, I can just bury him in the back yard and no one will miss him. But I will be stuck with the knowledge that I’ve killed another person. Even someone twisted enough to betray his own, who thinks that his obsession with me is love. I growl as deeply as my voice will go.
Gabriel suddenly goes still. “I was afraid that you wouldn’t see it my way, Miss MacKinlay,” he peeps. “Now there’s no choice but for us to see the Kingdom of Heaven right away. We will be together for all of eternity!”
“Oh right, you’re going to try for a suicide-homicide now.” I am amazed at how much sarcasm can be conveyed from a dog’s mouth. And then I see the silver band he has attached to his leg. There’s a tiny glass vial on one end and a tiny dart on the other. Oh, no you don’t! No more poison ever!
I snarl as loudly as I can, but he is too insane to show fear. “I could have killed you right away!” he cries. “I would have kept you cold and stiff and beautiful in my car, to hold you and tuck you in every night, to finally show you some kindness! Not what that idiot Yohan was doing to you!”
He spied on that too? I am almost too incredulous to be sickened.
“But you rejected me!” he accuses. “We were destined to play music together, but you had eyes only for that group of barbarians you call your pack! And one of them was always hanging out with that priest, yes that priest, I had to try to kill him, for the Church constructs lies about our God! And then you were in love with that spic, not to mention always playing gigs with that ni—”
His head pops off in my mouth so easily, I can’t believe it’s really over just like that.
“I shouldn’t have killed him,” I moan between retches. “I didn’t want to kill another person, and I could have gotten more information out of him.” One last dry heave wrings out my gut, squeezing tears from my eyes. Because I am a werewolf, the taste of blood in my mouth should be expected from time to time, but having killed another person is more than I can handle right now. One’s own near death experience is one thing, but I am no soldier trained to keep his own team safe in combat. Even with the coolness of the porcelain sink and tile floor, I can’t ground myself. My bathroom begins to feel too small to contain enough oxygen. A final flush, a rinse of my mouth, and I manage to stagger out.
Lydia catches my shoulders before I lose my balance. “You did the right thing, Buzz. Letting him live would have been too risky, even long enough to wait for us to arrive.”
“He is connected to our nemesis,” I tell her. “It’s an individual female with minions rather than an organization. He simply called her ‘the boss.’ I don’t think he meant Springsteen. He said that she was the world’s most powerful shifter. We’re facing a parahuman dictatorship and totalitarian regime.”
She checks my eyes for something. “Buzz, I think you need to relax now. You’re shaking and your t-shirt is on backward. You’re still panicked, and Raúl and Rowan are waiting outside for you. I will take custody of the body. The poison dart will also be analyzed. We have also added the Chimera Enterprises business card to our files. The only fingerprints we found on it were yours, indicating that the man who handed it to you was able to shift his skin somewhat. It’s definitely an inside job.”
“One more thing?” I tell her. “I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before. Gabriel paid all of my hospital bills. Whoever he’s working for has deep pockets. The records can probably be traced back to the head honcho.” She nods. “I’m on it.”
Dazed, I descend my front steps where my two packmates await me. They enfold me into a healing group hug, sharing their good energy with me, counteracting the ambiguity of shock. The fight-or-flight adrenaline leaving my body is suddenly replaced with raw emotion and I burst into tears. They set me down onto the cool grass of the sparse front lawn, literally grounding me. I am shaking and sobbing so hard, I don’t know if I’ll ever get up. I suppose we are warded, for no neighboring tenants come to investigate. The frog songs begin to calm me at last, and Raúl begins to hum a soothing mantra. My body unfolds at last and I sprawl out onto the ground, letting every limb touch the earth, letting the earth absorb all of the excess bad energy. Corpse pose, I think to myself. How appropriate.
“Listen to me, Little One,” says Raúl at last. “You have brought us some very good leads on the enemy. I don’t know everything that was involved, but it was obviously at a terrible cost to you. We are here for you whenever you are ready to talk about it.” I nod knowing that some tales will have to
remain untold, at least for the time being, such as Gabriel spying on my trysts. It would be helpful to mention that he was a racist, but I can never repeat what he said to me verbatim. Raúl has already been through too much.
Lydia appears at the door, and my pack-mates hoist me up and carry me inside. I am wearing nothing but a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, but I still feel like an idiot as they place me into my bed and tuck me in. Raúl and Lydia offer me a soothing goodnight, but Rowan lingers for a minute.
He sits at my bedside and pats my hand. “Hey. You did good, kiddo.” In spite of my shock, a happy glow begins to kindle in my belly, not a burning, but a friendly candle flame. I think it reaches my eyes.
He kisses the top of my head. “Get some rest. I’ll lock up.” For now, it is enough.
I dream no dreams.
It’s impossible not to keep peeking out of the club tonight at that huge pumpkin-colored moon. I try to stay put in the green room, but I am brimming to the max with anxiety and a need to pace.
I had briefly seen Rowan backstage, conferring with a local committee of Alpha shifters and SIN agents. He looked as if he hadn’t slept at all, but his eyes were fever-bright as he approached me for a quick kiss on the cheek. I had a hunch that the mastermind had been discovered at last, and he affirmed my query with a brief nod, his mouth at a grim angle. Patting me on the shoulder, he made his way out into the club toward the sound console, instructing a couple of young technicians. This gathering is going to be broadcast on some encrypted frequency only known to shifter leaders and SIN agents worldwide. Anyone else will only perceive it as an entertaining concert. Who knew? I push the gravity of the situation out of my mind. I have a job to do.
My Fodera bass is tuned—although I keep checking it every fifteen minutes—and I have a fresh battery in my pickups. Lucky leopard thong and matching bra are soft beneath my clothing. I’ve worn my most glamorous stage clothes. My ferocious eye makeup rivals that of Diamanda Galás, but I haven’t bothered to try covering my scar with lipstick. Instead I flaunt it tonight as a warning to others. I’m hydrated, warmed up, and pumped up like a horse in a starting gate. I also feel slightly sick to my stomach. I so seldom get stage fright or feel nervous before a show that when it does happen I almost don’t know how to cope with it. I tell myself that since I could perform the English horn solo in The Pines of the Appian Way at age sixteen, I should have no problem pulling this bass solo off tonight. I try to ignore the little voice in my head that tells me that people’s lives didn’t depend on my ability to play The Pines of the Appian Way back then, and look around for something else to focus on.
Teddy and Raúl are goofing around off to the side of the stage. Teddy has been teaching Raúl a favorite childhood rhyme of his called “Piss-Pot Pete,” and they are gleefully reciting it like a couple of schoolboys. I don’t doubt that this is deliberately intended for me to overhear and to ease the tension that is threatening to crack me in two. Then Sylvia joins in and I fall into hysterics.
And without warning, the canned music fades, the lights dim, and Aydan takes the stage. A few members of Anatolian Fusion Project have already begun playing the freely improvised acis prelude, allowing Aydan to make a sweeping entrance and pick up her bağlama. She introduces her number as an original piece of music set to the poetry of Ahmet Yesevi, a poem about longing for peace. The other players launch into a vamp that walks a fine line between East and West—unapologetic jazz with Byzantine echoes—while she goes into an unmetered improvisation that Teddy tells me is called taksim. She barks a quick cue to her band, and the song changes, picking up in speed and intensity. Aydan whips the audience into a frenzy with her blazing fast riffs over a dance tune—Kolbasti from the Black Sea, I remember from Teddy’s CDs. Her voice sometimes floats above the heavy groove in the spine-tingling Sufi chant, although I’m not versed enough in the music to know what type of Sufi song. But it’s like a call to prayer, a lover’s kiss of raw silk, and a dark, hypnotic siren. They come to a hard stop, a lightning strike of triumph. The thunderous applause makes me feel caught in a sudden heavy downpour.
And now I’m up: a one woman, one six-string fretless bass spectacle. The stage is huge, and I am tiny. The last time I embarked upon an ambitious endeavor like this I failed, but I have to try again. I freeze the echo of rejection and tuck it away in the back of my mind to deal with later. I can smell apprehension, but the room is dark and the spotlight makes it even more impossible to tell who is out there or how they are reacting. But this is not for them anyway. I cannot base this performance on audience reaction—only the here and now.
I am in alto phase. If it makes Rowan or any other males notice my enhanced appearance, so much the better, but now I need to be in this mode to have my sharpest hearing possible. Even my calloused fingertips need extra sensitivity, even thought I know it’s going to hurt like hell.
I take a deep breath and hum a mantra to myself. The vocal mic won’t pick it up, but the hum grounds me and gives me courage. And the others can feel it. One by one each member of the pack—my pack—joins me. I feel them strengthening my note, a perfect unison, unlike the ever-changing toning that we usually do.
The primal urge to yank my hand away from a hot stove seizes me with the first note, and still I play. There is no going back now. No second chances, no overdubs, and no excuses. I reach for microtones without even gut frets to guide me. The notes ease into one another like a human voice … or a subtle howl. My fingers are like figure skaters: they leap and land on a playing field with no markers. Every nerve screams an acid burn, scalding water, fire ants, blistering and boiling, and I exhale hard through my nose and keep on. My jaw is clenched hard enough to shatter my molars. I have to push this pain to the farthest corner of my mind. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, it hurts … I try breathing it out, mentally separating myself from my body. It doesn’t work. A tear wells up in my eye and I think I might be growling. Concentrate!
My heart cracks just then, sending lighting bolts of shocks through my ribcage. It breaks wide open, and the music comes pouring out. My thumbs hit the drones of my lower strings as I work my way up the neck and rake through a hypnotic mantra with subtle melodic variations across my higher strings. Each variation is a wordless chapter of my confessions. I play for the hatred instilled in me by Naj and Sand, the vengeance by Cal, the regret for hurt I have caused others, and the rage over endless bullies I have fought from the playground to the venues. I play for my friends and packmates in danger. I play for love, and this life of mine that I would gladly lay down for them all. I play through every sorrow and relive every tear I have shed for shattered ideals, failed endeavors, and unrequited love for Rowan. I harness every fear of being discovered as a fraud, and of dying alone. I send my vibrational warning to my fellow shape-shifters, my voiceless testimonial of what may become of us all if we do not wake up and fight.
I shape notes into arrows, ready to take down our adversaries. I shape them into blocks of defense, and I shape them into hard diamonds, cutting and rare. I shape notes into round circles, open but unbroken.
I think I may have tears streaming down my face, but I am long past any dignity. The show must go on. Every note sears my skin, every emotion skins me alive, and I strive to make it sacred. For this moment I rip my heart out and channel it through my rig. It’s raw and ugly; it’s delicate and pristine. It’s my story, and it is real. What musician hasn’t felt this? To keep striving for the ultimate beauty, even as every note tears a person in two?
The pain and I dance like old lovers. I am one with the agony; I am the fire, and I am not the fire. I am the spark that ignites it all … And then only the flame remains while the pain recedes. I can almost see its energy radiating off of me, away from me, like ripples in water. Like sound waves. I keep playing. I am the element of fire. I am the vortex through which fire enters this universe …
It’s amazing what sounds a person can coax out of an instrument when suddenly no longer racked by excruciating pain. M
y head clears, my heart soars, and the music becomes the finest thing I have ever created.
I am truly in my own element. Flame is a symbol of what it is to be a lycanthrope. It represents the delicate balance between beast and man. It is the chaotic razor’s edge between creation and destruction. Animals cannot invoke it, and humans cannot wield it responsibly. We are intended to be the peacekeepers, taming the human within. We bring the fire and its light and warmth to all.
And one by one, my pack joins me onstage. Rowan on guitar, channeling a signal through his emotional control. He is water. Teddy on bass, laying down a low, steady groove under my improvisation, a pattern of communication and intellect. He is air. Raúl on drums, creating a strong rhythmic foundation, a physical pulse to be felt in the body. He is earth. Sylvia steps up to the keys, the snarling Hammond B-3 sound an unmistakable sacrament. She is spirit. Even though we all face the audience, we are situated in a circle, forming a wolf-paw pentagon of protection. We form a strong groove, vamping over Rowan’s improvisation.
I am in complete control, and yet I let go. Something inside me opens. If I could put cognition into limiting words, this would be labeled as my heart chakra. It is alchemy. Fears melt, impurities burn, all things radiate from the heart. To be broken is to be whole, and now I understand.
Why did no one tell me that I am the heart of the pack? I feel no ego and no pressure … just an all-loving center that pumps the blood of life to the unit that is collectively known as a pack.
I feel some sort of energetic gate opening, but I cannot break my concentration to take in the details. All I know is that there is some vast interconnectedness within the room and far beyond. There is not only a strong interconnected pull within the group, but also outward to a network. We are all a part of something much bigger. Our pack is one of many constellations, and I channel the energy. We are a giant satellite, broadcasting our message to be passed along to packs all over the world. Word of howl, and we leave no tracks.
The Wild Harmonic Page 23