Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (23 page)

He ignored her question, taking her hands in
his own and sitting down with her on a futon couch covered with a
homemade crazy quilt. His eyes searched hers with that same old
compelling intensity that made her want to give up her will
entirely and put her soul into his hands—almost.

"Dear Julianna," he said, enlisting
the broad
a's
that would have
made a person think he'd never been
near
Arkansas. Where was that accent from
anyway? It wasn't exactly Germanic, or French, or Spanish—nor was
it Gypsy, though perhaps it was supposed to sound that way. She'd
never really asked him about his own life and past. How thoughtless
of her. Who was he, she wondered, and remembered suddenly that her
late husband George, who in death had used Lucien as a medium,
hadn't cared for him at all while he was alive: "I heard about your
loss," Lucien said, sounding somber, sympathetic—and
seductive.

"Which loss?" she asked. There'd been so
many of them. George, her career, her deafness, and then for a time
her body, as her spirit went to inhabit ballad heroes. She'd been
burning through some major karmic debts in recent years.

He looked puzzled and sat back, cocking his
head first to one side then the other, studying the sides of her
face. "You seem to hear well enough now. I had heard that you
were—that you had lost your hearing."

"Oh, yeah. I did. It was the most awful
thing too, Lucien. But I just like kept my chakras clear and
listened with my inner ears, and overall I think I've come out of
it very well, really grew from it all, y'know? And I'm dying to
tell you all about it, but I'm a little tired right now. Can I stay
here?"

"In the shop? Dear girl, I wouldn't hear of
it," he said. "You must come home with me. My house is much more
comfortable."

"I always thought this was your house."

"Before you left it was. But the universe
has been kind to me."

That was an understatement. He lived in a
custom-built log mansion with enough stained glass in the windows,
walls, and doors to provide windows for all the stone cottages and
hotels in two whole villages in Scotland and a castle to boot. The
downstairs was full of beautiful things—aura paintings, more
crystals, chimes that sang in the breeze created by ceiling fans,
Indian rugs and blankets on the floors, walls, and seating, African
masks and ugly little dolls, brilliantly colored, patterned, and
sequined flags he said were from Haiti for the celebration of
Houdon ceremonies. One antique oak occasional table was filled with
rare and beautiful tarot decks mingled with feathers and more
crystals.

"Wow," she said. "The universe
has
been kind to you."

"Ah, yes," he said. "My teachings have been
of some use, and I've been made comfortable by the gratitude of
those I've helped."

As he led her to the guest room, she
couldn't help thinking of the heroes she had inhabited, of how they
expressed their humility in less . . . smug terms. Of course, that
wasn't fair. Many of her heroes were already kings or princes or
knights or something when their heroics took place and ... It
occurred to her again that she knew very little about Lucien. She
found him as exciting and commanding as ever, but still, she didn't
find herself nearly as anxious to tell him about what had happened
to her and the others as she had imagined she would. ‘It's just
because I'm so used to being with my friends, with other
musicians,’ she told herself. ‘It stands to reason that after being
with one group of people for the last seven years, being alone with
anyone else is bound to seem . . . strange. I probably just need to
get to know Lucien again. This time I'll ask questions and really
pay attention—not take him for granted so much—instead of just
babbling my problems all the time.’ But she was a little
disappointed anyway. After all she had been through, she had been
able to reach into the hearts of so many people around her, both
dead and alive, and Lucien and she had been so close. She was
surprised she felt closed off from him now.

"Your room, of course, is haunted, but
they won't intrude on you," Lucien was explaining with a smile.
"This house is built on the traditional burial grounds of the
Osage, but I received special clearance and had a cleansing
ceremony and
feng shui
done
when I started building, so all the spirits of the departed think
of this as their home too."

She nodded. "You always know the right
thing to do, and you have such a
feeling
for spirits from the other side.
Speaking of which, have you heard anything from George since I
left?"

"Only when he told me that you had been
deafened and then that you were in some sort of—vehicular trouble.
He was quite upset about it, and I was frantic. I feared it was a
collision and you had been killed." He turned and put both hands on
her shoulders and squeezed, smiling down at her. "You can't imagine
how relieved I am to see you again after all these years. I
couldn't find you, and George vanished shortly after that last
contact. You must tell me all about your journeys, both spiritual
and material, when you've rested. I have an encounter therapy group
coming to my home in the morning, but we'll be out by the pool so
you just sleep as long as you like."

"Fine," she said, and yawned, setting her
bag down beside the waterbed and stepping out of her sandals. "
'Night, Lucien."

"Good night, dear girl. Your bath contains a
whirlpool—it's the little switch to the left of the faucet.
Enjoy."

"Goody," she said. He hadn't mentioned that
the bath was under a skylight, where she could look out and see the
gibbous moon.

A shadow fell across her, between her and
the moon. She felt goose bumps rise on her skin and turned on the
hot tap again before settling back to watch the cloud glide across
the moon. But when she looked up in the skylight, she saw no cloud
and no moon, just a pale, bluish face surrounded by draggled,
weed-tangled hair. The face stared down at her through empty eye
sockets.

The tortured strands of green-slimed
yellow hair dripped dirty droplets onto Julianne's naked shoulders
and chest as she stared up into those endless eye sockets. Her
mouth opened and closed, and finally her voice emerged, small and
uncertain. "Y-you sure don't
look
Indian."

* * *

Lazarus, the magic banjo, would have cried
out, of course. Would have started loudly wailing away at some tune
that let Willie know it was in trouble and he had to wake up and
save it. But the guitar Willie had with him was just a plain old
unmagical Martin guitar, great tone, nice action, plenty of bass,
but dumb as a post.

So when, about halfway between Oklahoma City
and Wichita Falls, the bus driver decided Willie was sleeping so
sound he wouldn't notice, she reached back and hooked the cloth
guitar case by the strap, opened the bus door, and heaved the
guitar as hard as she could, one-handed like, what with having to
hold onto the wheel and all.

The guitar strings jangled and whined
as it flew—and landed in the outstretched arms of Willie MacKai,
who had reared up from a sound sleep and intercepted it. Now the
wonder of this wasn't so much that Willie knew in his sleep that a
perfectly nonmagical guitar was in danger. He'd actually gotten
kind of sensitive to anything concerning music during the last
seven years. The
wonder
was
that he functioned so well and was actually able to catch the
guitar and not fall out the open door of the moving bus when he'd
just woke up. Willie always claimed he didn't see color in the
morning without four cups of strong coffee in him.

By that time the driver's hands were
on the wheel, and she was staring forward as if the guitar had just
slid out of the seat, opened the door on its own, and tried to
fling
itself
out.

Willie MacKai was not fooled. He pointedly
reached over and closed the door, then sat down with the guitar
case on his lap, opened it, and extracted the instrument, which
seemed oblivious to the near miss it had just had. He started
tuning. The driver didn't say anything this time. He then played
all the verses and choruses of "Mama Don't Allow No Guitar Pickin'
'Round Here," all the time staring hard in the driver's rearview
mirror just so she didn't miss the point. He woke up the entire
bus, everyone proceeding, after a little initial grumbling, to sing
along. They were responding to the novelty of the music during a
long, boring trip, to an easy chorus, and to the fairy dust still
lending Willie that air of being somebody special.

The bus driver fought it, but before long
she found her lips moving against their will and the tune running
over and over through her head and forcing its way out her
mouth.

When the song was over, Willie grinned
cockily into the mirror and said, "Well, now. That was pretty good.
Any requests?"

* * *

The rain came down harder after Tom George
left the tribal center and Anna Mae cursed herself for failing to
ask George for a lift somewhere where she could get a room. The
highway was miles away. She looked around her and wondered how
tight the boards on the casino were, but when she inspected them,
they looked pretty tight. It wasn't as if she were carrying a
crowbar with her. Same way with the fireworks stand. So then she
thought, maybe there were houses somewhere close and she could use
a phone. Again, she should have used the one at the trading post,
but she hadn't gotten around to asking George before he kicked her
out.

No light gleamed as far as she could see,
but there could be something beyond that fence. Tom George had
mentioned a museum, hadn't he? Judging from the state of the fence
and the weeds she could see growing through the holes in it, she
didn't have much hope, but she wanted to look around anyway, as
long as she was there.

The only carpentry in the whole place that
wasn't nailed down tight was that fence. She sloshed through the
puddles in the parking lot to go over for a look-see and bent over
to peer through where the bottom half of a plank was missing.
Through the weeds and gloom she saw a tepee, a hogan, a longhouse,
a hut. She remembered the place then. The museum of Native American
dwellings had been built after she'd grown up and moved away, but
she'd seen it once on a visit here.

The plank was about six inches wide, and the
one next to it was loose too. She pried it a little farther and
squeezed through the fence. To her surprise the buildings were in
fairly good repair, though the tepee had been covered with ripstop
nylon to protect the hide coverings. It was pretty dry inside. She
wouldn't really sleep here, just kind of wait until Tom George
returned in the morning.

She started making noises to scare snakes,
then wondered if that was a good idea, and finally decided to take
refuge in a more traditional attitude. "I've come to join you,
little brothers. I won't take much room." She felt as if she were
being silly and sensible at the same time as she settled down close
to one side of the entrance, where the ground was dry and the wind
didn't blow.

She had nothing dry to put on or wrap
herself in, so she hugged her knees to her chest and sat with her
back against the side of the tepee, shivering. She thought of
building a fire, but she was too tired and discouraged and too
sapped by the cold wet wind to do it. How was she ever going to
find anyone on foot? How would she get them to believe that a bunch
of songs, not even Indian songs, would be of any benefit to them?
For that matter, how would she or her friends get anyone at all to
believe that the songs mattered? Tom George was suspicious of her.
How much less suspicious would anyone else be? But those worries
were only surface ones. Furrowing beneath them was the fear that
she no longer belonged here. What had she done to help her people
in the last fifteen years? Before that she had inadvertently
betrayed fellow activists, tricked by her own naivété. She and her
white man's ballads no more belonged here than that casino over
there, or Fourth of July fireworks.

With all of those worries and the cold
biting her, she fell asleep slumped against the side of the
tepee.

She dreamed of a fire in the firehole in the
middle of the tepee. It warmed her and let her blood run free in
her veins again and pried her eyelids from her cheeks with fingers
of warmth. Coral and blue flames lit the center of the tepee with
light that bounced off the eyes staring at her from across the
fire. She sat up abruptly, jerking herself awake. The fire was
really there. To make sure, she stretched her hand out to it and
let the heat bite it, but not for long—she needed that hand.

The eyes were really there too, and now they
moved nearer as a long muzzle came into view. A coyote. It settled
back down on its haunches, still staring at her, then abruptly
yawned and scratched behind its ear. Behind it, beside it, she
became aware of other pairs of eyes. Beside her was a rabbit, on
the other side a raccoon. As her eyes grew accustomed to the
firelight, she made out a bobcat, a squirrel. But all of the
animals weren't small. Eyes on a level higher than her own caught
her, and she saw the club ears and massive shoulders of a bear, the
shaggy mane and broad face of a buffalo. How had such a huge
creature fit into the tepee? Must be a dream after all, she
thought. Every totem animal in existence. A beaver and a mole away
from her, a porcupine briefly bristled, rearranging itself, but
nobody got stuck. She laughed suddenly, and the coyote looked at
her inquiringly. She said, "It's nothing. You just remind me of an
old Bill Staines song, 'All God's Critters Got a Place in the
Choir.' " The coyote scratched contemplatively and gave her another
questioning look.