Music to My Sorrow

by Mercedes Lackey

  "Yeah, that big explosion tomorrow'll probably clue her in," Magnus said sullenly.

  Ace shot him a burning look. "Why don't I just see if I can get you untied? We've got a good few hours until dawn."

  Struggling awkwardly, she began working her way around to the back of Magnus's chair.

  * * *

  One piece of business done, another yet to do. Sending Devon to his rest—the boy's parents had been so happy to get him such a respectable position as an intern at Fairchild Ministries, and Gabriel found his presence eternally amusing—and releasing Jormin to his pleasures—any untidiness could be concealed in the aftermath of the concert disaster, after all—he went to keep an appointment he had made several days before.

  His destination was a tavern in the poorer part of town. Such places never changed—from a turf-covered hut at the village's edge with a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, to a rough wooden building at the edge of the high road with the drinks served across a bar made up of kegs and planks, they were all the same: places for mortals to seek out oblivion and trouble.

  The mortal was waiting for him in a booth in the back. Gabriel sat down opposite him.

  "I was afraid you weren't coming," he said anxiously.

  "I had a little trouble getting away without anyone seeing me, LeRoy," Gabriel said. "You know how important it is that nobody see us together."

  "Because They're always watching," LeRoy LaPonte said.

  Gabriel had first become aware of LeRoy LaPonte a few months before, while looking through Billy's fanmail. To say that he read it would be entirely incorrect: he sifted through the letters as a mortal might sift through the grains of sand at a beach, looking for something that might catch his attention.

  LeRoy's letter had. Painfully misspelled, nearly incoherent, it had rambled on about the New World Order and how Billy was surrounded by enemies who would try to stop him.

  The letter had made no sense. But it had been filled with power and passion.

  Gabriel had written back. He had shared his growing fears that nameless forces close to Reverend Fairchild were perverting his holy mission and causing him to waver in his commitment to purity. He had told LeRoy about the concert—having learned long since that LeRoy was a great fan of such music—and encouraged him to attend.

  He had always intended that LeRoy should make a disturbance at the concert—it would be good publicity—but when his plans had changed, he had decided that LeRoy should make an even larger disturbance. . . .

  "That's right," Gabriel said. He extended his glamour around LeRoy: no matter what he said now, LeRoy would believe it absolutely. But it was hardly necessary. "I have hard news for you. But I know you're strong, and I know you can take it like a real man."

  LeRoy nodded solemnly.

  "Reverend Fairchild has fallen to the Dark Forces. He's decided to sell out the music. At the concert tomorrow he's going to announce that he's shutting down Pure Blood and the other bands and is renouncing his Purity Crusade. The New World Order has gotten to him, LeRoy. You have to stop him. You're our only hope. You know what you have to do, don't you?"

  "I have to stop him," LeRoy said. "I am the Sword of the Lord, His Avenging Angel of Light."

  Not for the first time, Gabriel wondered what went on in mortals' minds. LeRoy's thoughts were so tangled and fragmented that they were nearly impossible to read.

  "That's right," he said solemnly. "You are the Lord's Avenging Angel of Light, and Light shall be your weapon. The only way to save Judah Galilee and all the others is to blow up Billy Fairchild's false cathedral at the very moment he's trying to stop the music. Then he'll see he was wrong."

  "Nobody will get hurt, will they?" LeRoy asked anxiously.

  Gabriel stifled a sigh. Why did they always ask that? Mortals were as bloodthirsty as a pack of rabbits.

  "No, LeRoy," he said. "Nobody will get hurt. An Avenging Angel wouldn't hurt anyone with innocence and repentance in their hearts, after all, would he?"

  "No," said LeRoy, brightening. "I guess I wouldn't. But . . . the concert's tomorrow, and all, and I—"

  "I have all the tools that you need to carry out your holy mission," Gabriel said smoothly. "I will show you what you need to do, and where to place it."

  And when he was done, LeRoy LaPonte would not remember Gabriel's part in this at all. When he was caught and confessed—for Gabriel certainly meant for him to survive—the evidence that would also be found would link him with another Fairchild Ministries insider.

  And then the fun would begin. . . .

  * * *

  Hosea was long past having second thoughts. He was well onto tenth thoughts by this time. And all of them were the same. This was a bad idea.

  He'd been trying to talk himself out of the notion ever since Ace had gotten out of the car and started walking up the road. The trouble was, Hosea didn't have a better idea. She'd been right all the way down the line: she had the best chance of committing what was, when all was said and done, this burglary, and getting away with it safely. She knew how her dad thought; she probably knew not only how to get into any place he owned, but how it was likely to be laid out. And most anyone she met would think she was just back from whatever school Billy claimed she'd gone to.

  But the longer she was gone, the more he remembered that the best chance wasn't a dead solid certainty.

  Finally he knew, with a sinking sense of disaster, that she'd been gone far too long. Something bad had happened. He took a chance and moved the car into the business park.

  Like its brethren along the Boardwalk, the Casino of Prayer was a 24/7 operation, and even at this hour, there were plenty of cars parked right outside. He was unsurprised to see how many of them were clear examples of people who were suckers for a fast talking salesman, and with more money than taste—and not very much money, when it came right down to it. The pink Cadillac fit right in, sad to say. If anything, it seemed tame.

  There were other distractions as well. Horn's concert was tomorrow, and kids were already coming in to wait for it, settling in with blankets and sleeping bags and chairs around the main stage. Security wasn't even trying to keep them out, nor paying any particular attention to them, even though Hosea saw bottles being passed around and caught the sweet scent of pot. At least that meant Security wasn't paying any particular attention to Hosea, either. He parked in front of the casino without incident. Multicolored neon from the building's facade slid over the car's paint-job, turning it orange, purple, lurid magenta. . . .

  He thought about going inside. It would be easy enough to say he'd just come back looking for a little background color for his story if anyone happened to recognize him from earlier in the day.

  But wherever Ace was, she wasn't wandering around the casino floor. And from what she'd told him, he wasn't sure it would be all that easy to get into the office tower. Not without a touch of shine, anyway.

  Just then his cellphone rang.

  He whipped it out, but there was no one on the other end, only static, and the signal wasn't even strong enough for it to show a number.

  He regarded the tower grimly. Only one person was likely to be phoning him at this hour of night—one person who couldn't get through, anyway. And Ace wouldn't be phoning from inside the building unless she was in a power of trouble indeed.

  He got out of the car, and slung Jeanette over his shoulder. As an afterthought, he dug through the bag in the back seat that Gabriel Horn had given him and pulled out the laminated "All Access" pass on its scarlet lanyard and looped it around his neck.

  It took him a while to make his way past the stage and through the small crowd, but, as he'd hoped, the pass gave him the perfect disguise. Though every instinct screamed at him to run, he moved at a purposeful walk, and if he didn't quite blend in to the crowd, at least he looked as if he belonged.

  He was within sight of the doors to the tower lobby when he saw Ace come dashing toward them. But just as she reached them, Judah Galilee appeared beh
ind her.

  Hosea stood very still. One moment the lobby had been empty—he would have been ready to swear to that. The next moment Judah had been there. He watched from several yards away as Judah dragged Ace back toward one of the elevators.

  Lord Jesus, protect that child, Hosea thought simply. He'd follow as quickly as he could, but he did not think his power was any match for Judah's, and he dared not risk being caught himself.

  The Good Lord helps those who help themselves, Hosea thought, heading for the doors once he was sure the lobby was empty.

  It did not occur to him to wonder why he did not stop to call Ria Llewellyn.

  * * *

  The outer doors were locked, but that was not enough to stop even an apprentice Bard. Mage-sight told him which buttons to press on the keypad, and in what order. The lock light went from red to green, and he was in.

  He considered the elevator, and hesitated. It was too easy to get trapped in an elevator. From the direction he'd seen Ace come, she'd taken the stairs coming down, so that was the way he'd go up.

  There was another lock there. It hadn't been used as recently, so the traces were harder to read. Hosea settled for just asking it to open. It took a little more work, but he managed it.

  At each door on the way up he stopped, testing it, but Ace hadn't passed through any of them, and there was no one on any of the floors that he passed. From his tour, he remembered Billy saying that the whole building wasn't occupied yet. He and Gabriel Horn had offices on the penthouse floor. The record company's offices were on the floor below. The broadcasting studios and the Ministry offices occupied the three floors directly above the casino, and Billy's extensive publishing and mail-order empire occupied the three floors above that. But the only thing between floors six and fourteen was something called Christian Family Intervention on the tenth floor, as far as Hosea knew.

  Of course, that might just mean that the other seven floors were occupied with offices and conference rooms.

  Or there might be something on ten that needed a lot of elbow room. . . .

  When he got to the fire door on ten, he took a good close look at it, and read emotional traces all over it, traces he recognized. Ace hadn't opened it, but she'd stopped here, and seen something that had frightened her badly.

  Had she seen Judah? Had she been running from him, and been brought back here? Hosea simply didn't have enough information to be sure. What he did know was that he was only a few minutes behind Judah, and he'd do well to hurry.

  For the first time, he felt a stab of regret that he'd never accepted the sword that Toni Hernandez had done her best to urge upon him ever since he'd become a Guardian. A sword—not an enchanted banjo—so she said, was the proper sort of weapon for a Guardian to carry into battle. And right now Hosea had to admit that it might be a little more practical if he had to face down Judah Galilee and whoever he had with him.

  But when all was said and done, a sword just wasn't his style. And he was as much a Bard as a Guardian. The music magic had been his long before Jimmie Youngblood had bequeathed him her legacy. Whoever, whatever it was that was in charge of Guardians was just going to have to adapt to Hosea's style and choice of weapons.

  It would have to be enough.

  He eased open the door into the hallway and stepped out.

  Without the distractions of earlier in the day, the crowd of other people getting in the way, he could sense the strange wrongness in the air that told him Judah and Gabriel were probably somewhere near. It still didn't "read" to his perceptions as Unseleighe magick—it felt, for example, nothing like what he'd experienced when they'd fought Aerune—so either Aerune hadn't been a typical Unseleighe, or these two weren't, or they were doing something to conceal their magickal signature.

  To search the whole floor would take more time than he suspected he had, but Jeannette could search it faster than he could. He needed to get somewhere out of sight to call up her help—you could say a lot of things for Bardic magick, but it wasn't generally a quiet thing.

  He glanced up and down the corridor using his mage-sight. Some of the doors glowed a dark baleful red, as if they'd been heated red-hot. Some were only faintly red. Some had no scarlet glow at all. Hosea picked one of those and told it to unlock itself—and just in time, too, for he'd barely eased the door most of the way shut when he heard footsteps in the hall.

  He shut the door and dropped to the floor. They'd see a door that was open even a crack, but there was space beneath the doors. From his unorthodox vantage point, Hosea watched three pairs of feet walk by—a pair of gleaming black loafers, a pair of more ordinary lace-up shoes—and Judah Galilee's distinctive silver-heeled boots.

  They passed out of sight and stopped. A few moments later Hosea heard the elevator rumble to a halt on the floor and stop, and the sound of footsteps entering it. The elevator went away. All was silence again.

  None of the three had said anything, and that was frustrating, but only in bad novels did the villains stand around discussing their plans among themselves just so the hero could be enlightened. The villains already knew what their plans were—why should they bother to tell them to each other?

  He'd just have to find out, which meant finding Ace first.

  And pray he wasn't searching for her body.

  He came out into the corridor again, and headed for the door that glowed most deeply scarlet—the offices of Christian Family Intervention. No surprises there, but a lot of worry; it was supposed to be a family counseling organization specializing in troubled teens. If this was the heart of the Unseleighe infestation . . .

  The doors on this level didn't have keypad locks, but they were locked just the same. He looked at the knob and whistled a few bars of a melody. There was a distinct click, and Hosea turned the handle.

  The outer office was an ordinary receptionist's office. In the glow from the hallway, he could see that it did not have an outside window, so he risked turning on the lights. He searched it quickly, just in case, but there was no one here. The door to the office beyond was locked as well—the sign on the door said "Director Cowan"—but Hosea opened it easily.

  Here, too, there were no windows—but they would have spoiled the whole English Headmaster look that someone had been striving for, rather as if C. S. Lewis had shopped at Wal-Mart.

  And there were people here.

  Hosea checked, but they were no threat. A man and a woman, sitting on a leather couch that was against the far wall of the office. They were slumped against each other, eyes closed, deep in spell-bound Sleep.

  He could try to wake them later. Right now finding Ace was more important, and there was another door to try. He stopped long enough to take Jeanette from her case and sling her strap around his neck. The way the door looked to his mage-sight, he would need all the help he could muster against what might lie beyond it.

  Disturbingly, this door was not locked. One hand firmly wrapped around the neck of the banjo, he eased the door open. . . .

  * * *

  It always seemed simple in the movies—but in the movies, the ropes didn't slither under your hands like live things, doing their level best to re-tie themselves as fast as you tried to untie them. And she was working by touch, with her own hands tied behind her back. It really didn't help that Magnus was growling—there really wasn't any other word for it—and kept forgetting to keep his wrists together to give her as much slack as he could.

  At least neither of them could see that she was crying.

  No matter what had happened in her life before this, she had never actually felt as if there was no hope. There had always been hope; hope that Daddy would see reason, that Gabriel Horn would go away, that she could run away from home, that she and Jaycie and Magnus could manage to keep body and soul together, that one day they would have a real place to stay—

  There had always been a hope.

  There wasn't. Not anymore. She knew that; knew it blood and bone deep, with a despair that had no bottom. They weren't
going to get out of here. They were going to end up like that dark-haired boy that Gabriel Horn'd had with him, the one that Eric had said had gotten all the Talent sucked out of him. But it would hardly matter, because then he was going to kill her, and her Daddy, and hundreds of other innocent people. And then he was going to go home to her Mama, and smile, and smile, and smile. . . .

  Ace choked back a sob. She almost had one of the knots undone, but just as she pulled it free, she felt the rope pulling back the other way, trying to pull itself back into the knot again.

  She looked up at the sound of the door opening.

  "Hosea!" she gasped, in an urgent whisper. "Oh, quick—what time is it?"

  * * *

  It wasn't the oddest question he'd been asked by someone he was rescuing, but people the Guardians rescued tended to want to know things like the year, the country, and—on one memorable occasion—what planet they were on when help finally arrived. Hosea glanced at his watch. "A little after four."

  Ace gave a choked laugh of relief that sounded just on the edge of hysteria; she looked as if she might burst into tears at any moment. "I told you he'd rescue us," she said to no one in particular.

  "Sunrise is around seven," Eric said urgently, looking up at Hosea, and straining at his bonds. "We've got to be out of here before then."

  "Happy to oblige," Hosea replied. He slung Jeanette over his back and pulled out his Leatherman multi-tool.

  He'd expected to have to cut through the ropes, but they simply shriveled away at the touch of the iron blade. More of that Unseleighe muck, he reckoned. What he'd do if they ever managed to make themselves immune to iron and steel, he didn't know. Ace and Magnus stood up and hugged each other hard, as he knelt down and got to work on Eric's bindings.

  "We have to get out of here 'cause there's a bomb," Ace said quickly, over Magnus's shoulder. "Gabriel Horn is setting a bomb to blow up tomorrow at the concert and kill everybody."