Fairy Metal Thunder (Songs of Magic, #1) (15 page)

As Dred hit her crescendo, the entire house
bucked and heaved, seeming to lift up from the ground—and then with
a final crashing sound, the interior walls came tumbling down,
exposing the wooden frame of the house and all the pipes and
wiring.

Dred threw her sticks at her snare drum,
where they bounced off and whirled away through the air.

There was a long beat of silence.

Then the entire crowd erupted, cheering and
screaming their heads off, clapping and stomping and banging their
fists on everything in sight. It was deafening.

It lasted several minutes. When the crowd
finally died down, Erin said, “Thanks for coming everyone! We’re
the Assorted Zebras. Good night!”

Mitch and Dred stood up and joined Jason and
Erin in a bow, and the applause reignited.

“Did you get all that?” Mitch asked Tadd.

“Oh, yeah,” Tadd said quietly, shaking his
head. “We got it all.”

“Come on, let’s mix the video on my desktop.
I want this uploaded tonight!” Mitch led the way upstairs, past
confused-looking kids who crowded the steps.

Dred sat down, leaned against the wall, and
closed her eyes in exhaustion.

Jason and Erin looked at each while little
bits of the house continued to drop around them.

“Uh…do you think Mitch noticed what
happened to his house?” Erin asked.

“I’m pretty sure he’ll pick up on it
eventually,” Jason said.

“That was completely wild!” Zach grabbed Erin
and gave her a long kiss. “I didn’t know you could really
sing.”

“I told you,” Erin said. “You don’t
listen.”

“Let’s get out of this place before it falls
on our heads,” Zach said. “We should all get going, for
safety.”

Dred groaned.

“Do you need some water, Dred?” Jason
asked.

Dred raised a finger without opening her
eyes. Jason took it as a “yes.”

“It actually might be dangerous here,” Erin
said, looking at the exposed ribs of the house, the deteriorating
ceiling. “Maybe we should go.”

The crowd was dispersing. Clumps of quiet,
exhausted, confused-looking kids wandered outside, not talking very
much. The two cops were among them, their eyes drooping as if they
would keel over asleep any second. Jason remembered the kids who’d
been brought down to Faerie for the night so the fairies could
drain their energy with music.

“Wait a second.” Jason hurried into the
kitchen, which looked like it had been struck by a tornado. The
cabinets sagged forward from the walls with their doors hanging
open. The dishes inside had crashed all over the counter and floor.
Two large cracks, each more than an inch wide, ran all the way
across the floor, breaking it into three uneven levels.

Jason stepped carefully to the counter. He
found a plastic cup, shook fragments of coffee mug out of it, and
filled it with cool water.

By the time he returned to the living room
and handed the water to Dred, Zach and Erin were stepping out the
front door. The rest of the guests were leaving, too, with dazed,
zombie-like looks on their faces.

“Hey, wait, Erin.” Jason ran after her. “Why
don’t you stay? We can look at Tadd’s video.”

“I’m really just worried about this house
collapsing,” Erin pointed to the sagging, broken ceiling overhead.
“We should go

“We have to meet Gustav and Muppet Boy at the
coffee shop, like, thirty minutes ago,” Zach said.

“Just stay here,” Jason said.

“Um…” Erin looked at the broken ceiling and
walls again, then at her boyfriend.

“Let’s go.” Zach jingled his keychain as he
walked out the door.

Erin backed out the door, still looking at
Jason. “You’ll let me know when it’s done, right? Send the link to
my phone?”

“Yep,” Jason said.

“Thanks.” Erin looked past him and waved.
“Bye, Dred!”

Dred, still sitting against the wall, raised
her empty cup and shook it. Jason walked over to get her a refill,
but he kept his eyes on Erin.

“Bye, Jason.” She gave him a tired smile. Her
blonde and green and blue hair was dark with sweat, plastered
against her head. “That was a great show, wasn’t it?”

“A great show,” Jason agreed, and he tried to
smile as he watched her leave.

Jason watched the last stragglers stumble
their way across Mitch’s front lawn and off into the night. The
cars drove past, each one bouncing as it hit a huge chasm that
spread across the front yard and out into the street. It ended in a
spiderweb crack of asphalt in the center of the street. Jason shook
his head at the destruction.

Up and down the streets, neighbors had come
out onto the porches and driveway, gaping at Mitch’s house.

Jason ran inside and went upstairs, careful
to avoid the splintered handrail, and walked into Mitch’s room.

Mitch and Tadd were hunkered over Mitch’s
desktop, whispering excitedly to each other as they cut and
rearranged the video file. Snips and snarls of music thumped over
the speakers as they mixed the sound from the different
microphones.

Two Claudia Lafayette posters hung over the
bed. One showed her with sea-green eyes and a matching dress,
soaking wet on a rock in the ocean, the green dress clinging to her
legs to suggest a mermaid’s tale. In another poster, she had violet
eyes and a leather jacket, and leaned against a black motorcycle
with an ornate violet painted on the engine.

“She must have a closet full of contact
lenses,” Jason joked, pointing at the posters. Neither Mitch nor
Tadd acknowledged he’d spoken.

The doorbell rang.

“What’s that?” Mitch said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jason told him. “All your
neighbors are probably coming over to see what happened.”

Mitch opened the door, walked down the
now-crooked hallway to the top of the steps, and screamed.

Jason and Tadd ran out after him.

“What’s wrong?” Jason asked.

“Look at my house!” Mitch shouted. He pointed
at the uneven steps, the shattered handrail, the broken floor and
furniture and walls. “What happened?”

The doorbell rang again.

“You were here,” Jason said. “It was the
music.”

“Yeah, man,” Tadd said. “We just watched that
happen again on the video.”

“Yeah, but this is real.” Mitch closed his
eyes and rubbed his forehead with his hands. “Wow.”

“You didn’t notice before?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. “It just didn’t
seem like it was actually happening.”

The ceiling fan pulled loose from it housing
and crashed into the coffee table.

“Oh, I wish I’d been shooting that,” Tadd
said.

“My mom is going to kill me,” Mitch said.
“Then she’s going to hire a necromancer to raise me from the dead
so she can kill me again.”

“Just tell her it was a freak earthquake,”
Tadd said.

The doorbell rang several times,
insistently.

“Great. Now I just need a whole construction
crew to rebuild the house in the next couple of hours.” Mitch shook
his head. “You guys better get out of here.”

“I’ll help clean up,” Jason said.

“I don’t think ‘cleaning up’ is really going
to touch the problem here,” Mitch said. “Just go. I don’t want the
neighbors telling my mom I had people over. She’ll go mental.”

“She’s not supposed to be home for a couple
of hours, though, right?” Jason asked.

“Sure. If the neighbors haven’t called her
yet. How did I not realize this was happening?”

“The music,” Jason said. “It plays with your
mind.”

“Seriously, go on,” Mitch said. The doorbell
rang yet again. “Try not to let my neighbors see you leave.”

“You sure?” Jason asked.

“Yes! Go!”

“All right, man, we’s out.” Tadd held up a
hand for a high-five, but Mitch was not in a high-fiving mood.

Jason packed up his guitar and walked out the
back door with Tadd. They circled around to the front of the house.
Jason had to get his bike from the garage, and he saw several of
Mitch’s neighbors on the front porch. An old man in a bathrobe was
punching the doorbell again and again.

“When did Dred leave?” Jason whispered. Her
van was gone.

“Probably when everyone else did.” Tadd
pointed towards his car, a rusty sedan. “Want a ride?”

“Thanks,” Jason said. Tadd opened the trunk,
and Jason loaded the bike inside. They drove past several
outraged-looking neighbors, who approached the car and tried to
wave them down, but Tadd ignored them and drove on.

He could barely keep his eyes open on the
drive home.

It was dark over the town of Glastonbury, the
deep, brooding clouds smothering the light of the moon and stars.
From the top of the lone hill, the dark plains of Somerset
stretched away into the night. The only sound was a drum circle of
hippies near the base of the hill.

A roofless rock tower, three stories high,
sat atop the hill, with two doorless archways facing each other so
wind and people could pass right through. The floor was worn stone,
the tiles cracked and aged with time. One of these tiles had risen
up and tilted back like the lid of a trap door, revealing a
squarish hole in the floor.

The elf named
Hokealussiplatytorpinquarnartnuppy
Melaerasmussanatolinkarrutorpicus
Darnathiopockettlenocbiliotroporiqqua Bellefrost raised his head
out of the floor hole and gazed out at the dark expanse beyond the
archway. He looked up at the dark sky above the tower, then back at
the archway behind him. So far, there was no sign of a guardian,
but appearances could deceive.

He climbed out onto the floor of the roofless
tower. The unicorn’s pink horn and mane rose from the hole behind
him, and she turned her head from one side to the other, taking in
the scene with watchful, chocolate-drop eyes.

“Stay there, Buttercake,” Hoke whispered.
“I’ll check for a guard.”

Hoke walked out through one archway. A single
ribbon of concrete stretched from the ruins of the tower down to
the lowlands beneath it. The rest of the hill was blank, covered in
grass.

Hoke shook his head as he walked a complete
circle around the tower. The place had changed a great deal since
the last time he was here. It looked uninhabited, maybe even
unguarded, but Hoke kept his hand on his belt anyway. Pouches of
combat herbs and a sharp, sheathed flint blade lay within easy
reach.

He stepped back into archway where he’d
begun.

“Come along, Buttercake,” he said. The
unicorn emerged cautiously, swishing her pink tail, and eased
toward him. “Don’t forget to shut the door,” Hoke added.

Buttercake snorted. She walked back and
kicked the stone tile, and it moved back into place.

“Good girl,” Hoke said. He scratched her mane
as she joined him in the doorway. She turned her head to nuzzle his
hand.

They walked out onto the concrete path and
started down the hill at an easy pace.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been to man-world,
have you?” Hoke asked.

Buttercake neighed.

“And you’re too young to remember the wars,”
Hoke said. “You wouldn’t believe me, but this very place where
you’re clomping was once a large city of fairies. Maybe the
largest.”

Buttercake made a blowing sound and shook her
head.

“Oh, yes,” Hoke said. “Down there, those
grassy terraces? Each one was a street more crowded than any
thoroughfare in Sidhe City. All manner of Folk were welcome
here—fairies, elves, ‘chauns and gnomes, all in peace together. It
was called
Ynys yr Afalon.
In time, just ‘Avalon,’ because
everyone likes to shorten things. That was in the time of Mad Mab’s
grandfather, the good fairy king Gwynn ap Nudd. Many thousands of
years gone,” Hoke sighed. Seeing the place so empty made his heart
ache. The world had once been very different, and kinder.

Buttercake stopped and sniffed the grass by
the walkway.

“Smell the residual magic everywhere, don’t
you?” Hoke asked. He looked out over the lowlands again. “The hill
used to be an island in the sea. Then a lake. ‘Course, the fairies
took everything after the Iron Wars, took the other layer of this
hill, the whole city, Avalon—that’s the Old Town Quarter in Sidhe
City, now.”

Buttercake gave him a questioning whinny and
resumed walking. The path ran along a shallow slope of the hill, so
it was a longer route than if they’d walked down one of the steep
sides.

“It’s hard to explain,” Hoke answered.
“Humans and Folk lived in peace for as long as anyone remembers.
Then the humans began attacking us with iron, taking our land, so
we all fled together.”

Buttercake gave a sad, soft blow.

“It is unfortunate,” Hoke agreed. “But humans
are about as trustworthy as fairies. That’s why I like the swamp,
just me and you cornhorses. Nobody bothers us.”

They were halfway down the hill now, slowly
approaching the ring of humans beating their drums.

“We’d better get out of sight,” Hoke said. He
hopped on the unicorn’s back, stroking her neck. Thousands of
little sparkles gleamed in her pink horn, and then the elf and the
unicorn turned invisible together. Buttercake stepped off the path
to walk quietly in the grass, so her cloven hooves didn’t ring on
the concrete.

The humans in the drum circle were a mingling
of males and females, a range of ages. They all had quite long
hair, many of them twisted into thick braids or dreadlocks. Some of
them were singing.

They reminded him, strangely, of the
primitive, friendly humans from the Age of Flint, before the
horrible Age of Iron. Of course, you couldn’t believe anything you
saw among the humans. Their world was full of illusions.

One of the drummers stood up and stretched.
He had thick gray dreadlocks, a grizzled beard, tired-looking eyes.
His airbrushed t-shirt read “
Ask me about
Glastonbury
Tours
!”