Fairy Metal Thunder (Songs of Magic, #1) (14 page)

The girls gathered in around him, putting
their arms around them, then took pictures with their phones,
acting excited, as if they’d met an actual rock star.

People started flooding in through the front
door. They swarmed Mitch and Jason, demanding to hear music.

“Wait, wait,” Mitch said. “Everybody, we’re
still getting set up here.”

The crowd grumbled.

“We came to hear the band!” one guy
shouted.

“Just wait!” Mitch said.

“Come on, play!” a girl yelled, and the crowd
voiced their agreement with her.

“Half the band isn’t even here yet!” Mitch
said. He was looking agitated at the swelling crowd that filled his
house.

“Play something!” another guy yelled.

“Jason,” Mitch said, “Can you give them a
guitar solo or something?”

“Do it!” Wendy yelled. She was grasping
Mitch’s hand tight, while Mitch tried to pull away.

“Okay, whatever.” Jason opened his guitar
case, and he jumped when a number of people cheered and clapped. It
seemed ridiculous that they could be reacting so strongly to a band
nobody had heard of even two days earlier. Especially when the band
was just a group of kids from their own town. It was unreal, and a
little scary.

Jason sat down on the couch, and girls pushed
their way in all around him, sitting beside him, behind him on the
couch back, and all around his feet. They stared at him
expectantly.

“So, here’s something I like to warm up
with,” Jason said.

“Yeah, warm up!” one girl shouted.

“Warm up!” another added.

“Hurry!”

“You have to give me a little space,” Jason
said, but nobody backed up. He drew his pick across all six
strings, filling the air with sound, and the whole crowd seemed to
sigh and relax.

He played “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty, one
of the first songs he’d learned on guitar. The people around him
cheered at a volume that made Jason’s ears ring.

“Sing!” a girl yelled from the back of the
crowd.

“I don’t really sing,” Jason said. “Our
singer’s on the way here.”

“Sing anyway!” a guy shouted.

“Um, I’ll try…” Jason sang the first line
haltingly, but then the words starting pouring out of his mouth
with no effort. The guitar vibrations seemed to strengthen his
singing voice, making it sound almost decent. The crowd joined in
and sang along with him, and the girls around him leaned in closer,
as if they went to going to gang up and smother him. Tadd was
circling around, getting footage of Jason and the crowd.

The guitar grew warm in his hands, and the
air grew thick and hot, like there wasn’t enough oxygen for all the
people packed into the room. Still, he kept singing with no
trouble.

Then Erin walked into the room.
Unfortunately, she was with her boyfriend Zach.

Jason stopped playing and stood up,
struggling to find some fresh air to breathe.

“There’s our singer!” Jason said. “So she’ll
be singing from now on. This is the end of the part where I
sing.”

The crowd turned and gasped, then closed in
around Erin. The guys seemed particularly interested in getting
close to her.

“Sing!” somebody yelled.

“Yeah, sing a song for us!”

“You’re so pretty!”

“You really are!”

“I love you!”

Zach gaped at all the dopey-eyed fanboys
congregated around his girlfriend. Jason took more than a little
pleasure in his discomfort.

Erin approached Mitch. Zach followed, trying
to elbow guys out of his way while maintaining his photo-perfect
smile.

“This is a huge crowd!” Erin said to Mitch,
speaking loudly over the chattering, excited mob. “Where did they
all come from?”

Mitch pointed to Jason. “He invited
them.”

“Very impressive, Jason!” Erin called, while
Jason tried to ease his way past adoring fans to reach the other
band members.

“I only called a few people.”

“What about all the people outside?” Erin
asked. “Where are they going to listen?”

“There’s
more
outside?” Mitch looked
horrified.

“Like a hundred people,” Erin said.

“My mom’s going to kill me.” Mitch looked
like he wanted to bang his head against something.

“We should open the windows and turn on the
ceiling fans,” Jason said. “It’s going to get really hot in
here.”

The crowd cheered at his words, which he
hardly expected. Guests hurried to open up the windows, as if Jason
had given an order and they were obedient servants. The breeze from
outside cooled things down a little. People were already crowded
outside the windows, and they applauded when then windows
opened.

“This is crazy,” Erin said.

“Did all these people really come to see
you?” Zach said. “Maybe we should get out of here. This is
weird.”

“Hey, hands off!” Dred shouted. She’d entered
the room, and she used both her drumsticks to beat back the
reaching hands of admiring fans. “Where did all these people come
from, Mitch?”

“
Mick.
This is our fan base! Like
‘em?”

“I don’t know.” Dred whacked a hand from her
sleeve with the end of a drumstick. She pushed forward until she
was standing in front of her drum kit. “Who moved my drums?”

“We were running out of time.”

“And who’s this guy?” She jabbed a drumstick
at Tadd, who was following her with the camera. He barely dodged
it.

“Tadd’s shooting the video,” Jason said.

“I know you said you didn’t want this, but I
brought it out just in case.” Mitch handed the little fairy drum to
Dred, who scowled at it for a second, then put it aside on the
tchotchke shelf, among porcelain cats and glass angels.

“Don’t need it,” Dred said. Then she crossed
her arms and stared at a freshman girl who sat on the stool behind
the drum kit, gazing in admiration at Mitch. “Hey, shove off,
creampuff!”

The girl jumped, looked at Dred and the
sticks in her hands, and scurried off, though she couldn’t go far
in the dense crowd.

“Hey, everybody?” Mitch said, waving his
arms. “If you could just back up a step or two, we can get warmed
up here.”

“Come on, make room for the band!” Tadd said,
waving his camera. “And me! Lots of room for me!”

“Hey, what’s the band called, anyway?” a girl
asked Mitch.

“Yeah, what’s it called? What’s it called?”
more girls asked, grabbing at Mitch’s hand and arm.

“We’re the Assorted Zebras,” Mitch said.

“That’s a great name!”

“Awesome name!”

“The Assorted Zebras! I love it so much!” the
first girl said, leaning close to Mitch and gazing at his chin.

“Well, we call it that because the zebra
can’t be tamed,” Mitch said. “You can’t ride a zebra, or make it
pull a plow, or anything. The zebra is the Mick Jagger of the
equine world. If you look into the history of sub-Saharan Africa,
you’ll find that the wildness of the zebra as compared to the horse
was actually a major economic setback for thousands of years—”

“Just play already!” a guy shouted.

The crowd closed in tighter around the
band.

Mitch played a few notes on the keyboard, and
the crowd quieted a bit. Jason strummed his guitar, and Erin took
out her harmonica and warmed it up. Jason didn’t need to touch his
golden tuning pegs—the instruments tuned to each other
automatically, and an electric resonance crackled through the
room.

“Okay, everybody, thanks for coming out!”
Erin shouted. “We are the Assorted Zebras.”

The crowd applauded.

“I guess we’ll start with ‘Cinderella
Night,’” Erin said. “That’s the one from the video you all
saw.”

The crowd cheered like it was an old
favorite.

Dred tapped out a four-count, and then the
rest of the band jumped in. As before, the sound was powerful with
the three magic instruments working together. Jason felt
alternating chills and blasts of heat rushing up his spine. His
hands became very loose and relaxed, and the guitar strings almost
seemed to bend up to meet his fingertips and his pick, as if the
guitar were eager to make music.

The crowd thrashed to the song, screaming
along with Erin’s lyrics. It sounded like they’d all memorized the
words.

The music worked its magic on Jason, too, so
that soon he thought of nothing, but lost himself in the
playing.

At the end of the song, the crowd applauded
and cheered and stomped. The people gathered at the windows pounded
their hands against the screens and window frames.

“Go easy on my house!” Mitch shouted. Then he
pointed at a group of senior guys across the room, who were opening
brown bottles. “Hey, no beer! I’m serious!”

The guys toasted Mitch as though he’d greeted
them.

“Okay, here’s a song I wrote for my boyfriend
Zach here.” Erin touched Zach’s shoulder, and he gave the crowd an
annoyed half-smile.

Erin sang, and the crowd went wild. They were
dancing everywhere: on the coffee table, the stairs, up against the
walls, knocking down the framed pictures. Mitch shook his head, but
he kept playing. He slowly closed his eyes, and it looked like he
was getting lost in the music like Jason.

Jason smiled and closed his eyes, too,
letting the song direct his hands and fingers. Playing the guitar
was effortless. He somehow never missed a beat, never got a chord
wrong, but it felt like all he was doing was listening and letting
the music flow through him.

Erin moved on to “Remember,” which had
everybody crying and holding each other by the final verse.

“Okay, sorry, let’s pick things up a little,”
Erin said, wiping tears from her face. She played the opening for
“Roller Coaster” on her harmonica. It was a much faster song and at
least sounded upbeat, unless you listened too closely to the lyrics
about being thrown around by your emotions.

Jason and Mitch played along, but there was
no drumbeat. Jason looked back at Dred, and she was swaying as if
hypnotized by the music, her eyes closing.

“Dred!” he said in a loud stage whisper.
“Dred, wake up!”

“Huh?” Dred’s eyes fluttered open, but they
had a blank, empty look. She gazed around the room, then saw the
drumsticks in her hand. “Oh! Sorry.” She started tapping the
rhythm.

A pair of uniformed police officers elbowed
their way into the crowd. One of them pointed to the kids drinking
beer, and both the cops started in that direction. Jason looked at
Mitch, then Erin, but they were both deep into the music, their
eyes closed.

The drumbeat stopped—then resumed, but
stronger and deeper than before. Jason looked back.

Dred had placed the little fairy drum in her
lap and started hitting it with her fingertips. It grew larger as
she played, and the sound became more thunderous.

It swelled into a full-size snare drum,
inscribed everywhere with fairy runes, with some kind of animal
hide stretched taut across the top.

Jason looked back at the two cops, but they’d
both joined in the dancing, their eyes closed, drawn into the music
like everyone else. Jason smiled.

Dred stopped playing long enough to lift the
original snare drum from her kit and toss it aside like a piece of
garbage. She replaced it with the fairy drum. She resumed playing,
and the drum kit slowly changed. As with Mitch’s keyboard set-up,
the fairy instrument seemed to infect the other instruments. The
two toms slowly shifted form until they resembled the fairy drum,
wooden with runes. The cymbal and hi-hat turned to gold. Finally,
the big bass drum shifted its appearance, too.

On the front of the bass drum, a hieroglyphic
image of zebras appeared. The zebras were animated, and they ran
faster as Dred accelerated the tempo. Words appeared above the
moving images like twisting smoke: THE ASSORTED ZEBRAS.

The crowd cheered at the special effects.
Jason felt his guitar grow hot. With all four instruments playing
together, a kind of magical haze seemed to fall over the room,
charging the air with energy. The dancing audience synced up with
each other so that they appeared almost choreographed.

Jason felt the crowd’s growing energy course
through him like fire.

Erin lowered her harmonica and sang new
lyrics he’d never heard before. His fingers played a tune that
matched it perfectly.

Let tonight last forever

Capture my sound and song

Share it with your world

Pass the song along…

As if Erin’s words were a spell, everybody
took out their phones and began recording the show.

There is no pain

We’ll always stay young

Forget your past

And the days to come…

Erin’s new song was like a lullaby for the
mind. The words and music filled Jason with a deep, warm bliss,
blanking out his mind.

Erin reached the end of her verses and
starting playing harmonica again. Dred’s drumming grew faster and
faster—bass, toms, cymbals, snare, all somehow ringing out at once.
Her eyes seemed to glow with a kind of mania as her hands and
drumsticks flew everywhere. Sweat soaked the kerchief tied to her
head and drenched all of her clothes.

Jason, Erin, and Mitch gave up trying to
follow her. They surrendered, letting Dred tear off into a wild,
loud, crashing drum solo.

The floor rumbled under their feet. Each time
Dred hit the cymbal, a window shattered, or a porcelain cat
exploded with a sound like a gunshot.

The house shook as Dred’s tempo accelerated
to an inhuman speed. Deep cracks spread up the walls. Puffs of
plaster rained down from the ceiling—but she didn’t stop playing,
nobody stopped dancing, and the rest of the band was just as
enthralled as the audience.

The house shuddered like it was caught in an
earthquake. The stairway railing splintered and broke into pieces.
Light fixtures and lamps blew out, and the ceiling fan swung
wildly. The plaster ceiling cracked and fell in big chunks.