Robots vs. Fairies(46)

“Because he also knows it isn’t working,” I said. “Maybe at this point he thinks hearing me fail is funny. Although—I think he failed too. He sang some crap about staying together all night as I was leaving.”

“No desire to change your mind?” Sarah asked.

“None at all—if I hadn’t known he was a gancanagh, I would have thought it was a really cheesy attempt at flirting.”

“Maybe you two cancel each other out,” Sarah said. “Love and death could be opposites.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that happening.”

“Neither have I, but I’ve also never heard of something like what’s going on with your voice.” She tucked the cake into a container, tapped the top. I could see the shimmer in the air as the spell that would keep the cake from going stale settled around it. “The whole thing seems weird to me. Bad weird, not entertaining weird.”

“You have a point. But.” I took another bite, considered.

“How can there be a ‘but’?” she asked.

“I can still feel it. The call. The omen. Whatever it is, that wants me to sing. And to sing to him.” Fog, quiet, waiting in the back of my throat. “I don’t think this is finished.”

“I don’t like this,” Sarah said.

I didn’t either.

*

I went out busking the next day, as usual. I half expected Trent to show up again, but things were—with the exception of the guy in the suit who used the cash I had collected to make change for a twenty without asking, and then dropped a quarter back in the lunchbox with an enormous flourish—uneventful. No banshee wails rising in my throat, no half-heard songs following me on my way home, no disappeared Fae.

And then I got home, and Sarah was gone.

Which was weird, but not impossible. What was impossible was that she had left the oven on, the bread that she had been baking now bricked into charcoal, and the smoke alarm was wailing louder even than I could.

There were no good circumstances under which that would have happened. But the burned bread was the only thing out of place. It was as if Sarah had just . . . left. As if something had lured her out, had wooed her from within the safety of our walls.

That was when I knew.

I had met someone, very recently, with a voice that could lure. He wouldn’t have even needed to be in the apartment, wouldn’t have even needed to know it was Sarah he was luring out—a song sung below an open window, and that would be enough.

I ran to Purple Reign.

“Trent’s sound-checking, but he said if someone like you showed up, to let her in,” the woman working security said.

Inside, I was greeted by a sight I never expected to see—Sarah, onstage, playing the drums. Playing the drums well. I was so shocked that it took me at least a verse and a chorus to register what else I was seeing. There was the púca, in his human form, playing bass. A redcap on keyboards. A trio of flower Fae singing backup. All the missing Fae here, in support of the gancanagh.

Once the shock had passed, I looked closer. Sarah’s hands were raw, blistered. So were the púca’s. The redcap’s hat was almost dry, as if he hadn’t refreshed it in weeks. He had been, I remembered now, the first to go missing. The flower Faes’ blossoms were wilted at the edges and their lips dry and chapped.

The gancanagh smiled as he led his kidnapped band into the next verse. There was no recognition on Sarah’s face. None. All of the Fae had the same expression: absolute, focused concentration. If Trent had used his voice to tell them that this was what he loved, what he wanted, they’d play until he told them to stop.

They’d play forever.

“I told you I’d have a full band. They haven’t been together that long, but I think they’ve got real potential. All of them just love what they’re doing,” he said.

“Care to join us? I think you’d be the perfect addition.” He started to sing then, something about desire for the spotlight, the perfect girl, a whole room in love. I felt it then—not a compulsion, not fully. But that edge of wanting, just beneath the skin. The beginning of the thought that here, up onstage, this was where I belonged. Where I had always wanted to be.

“Come on, everybody, give it up for our new guest vocalist!” Trent called out.

A tray of glasses shattered as the bartender dropped them so she could clap. The bouncers started screaming and stomping their feet. The coat-check guy climbed up on the counter and cheered. All the staff who had been going about their business a second ago were going wild to convince me to get onstage.

I looked again at Sarah’s hands, at the other Fae—stolen, hurt, exhausted. At Trent, and his smile—that smarmy, self-satisfied smile, as if all of life were his for the taking. With this band, it was. Somehow, he was stronger with them, using them to boost his own magic. In that moment, I wanted him dead.

“Come on now, sing with us. All we need is you and we’ll sound perfect.”

That itch of wanting to be there, on that stage, was stronger now, more compelling.

“Yeah, okay. Sure.” I stepped up and grabbed the mic.

“Remember, I want a love song.”

“Oh, I’ve got one for you.”

There are all sorts of songs about love. There are the songs that make you feel that champagne fizz of first attraction, songs that ride on the drum and bass beat of lust. Violin strings of longing and the mournful piano of endings and regret.