A Host of Furious Fancies

by Mercedes Lackey

He watched Hosea carefully turning the offer over in his mind, considering it from all angles. Finally he smiled. “That’d be a kindness, Miss Llewellyn. I’ve been taking up Eric’s couch for too long already. I expect he’d like his living room back.”

  “It’s no problem,” Eric protested. A guilty twinge reminded him he still hadn’t suggested to Hosea that he take him on as a pupil, and part of him realized that Hosea having his own place would make that easier. Emotions between teacher and student could sometimes run high, and it was better not to add that dynamic to the fact of living under the same roof.

  “Why don’t you come down to the office on Monday?” Ria said, fishing a business card out of her jacket. “I’ll make sure Anita has the keys; she can run you over there and get you settled in. There should be enough cast-off furniture there to take care of you, otherwise we can just rent some for a few months. You don’t want to be sleeping on the floor. I’ve been there—some of the roaches are big enough to saddle and ride.”

  Hosea grinned, tucking the card into his shirt pocket. Unwanted insect life was no problem for a Bard—a few tunes, and the critters tended to go elsewhere. But he only thanked her again for her kindness.

  The party broke up around two. Ria had left earlier, pleading a heavy workday on the morrow. Eric and Hosea stayed to help with clean-up—despite her promise to attend, Eric hadn’t seen Jimmie Youngblood anywhere tonight—and then headed upstairs.

  “Y’know,” Eric said tentatively, once they’d gotten into the apartment, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up with you, but I didn’t know just what to say.”

  Hosea stopped and regarded him placidly. “Ayah, you’ve been looking as broody as a hen with one chick for nigh on a week. Guess it’ll be easier now that I’m moving on.”

  “It’s not that,” Eric said quickly. “It’s . . . when I went to that party the other week, I got a chance to talk to my old teacher. I knew you were looking for somebody to train you as a Bard, and I thought he might be able to recommend somebody.”

  Hosea waited, listening intently.

  “He did. Me.”

  He saw Hosea wait for the punch line, realize there wasn’t one, and consider the matter. “Would you be willing to do that?” he asked in his slow mountain drawl. “ ’Cause I don’t think you could pass me the shining without you was willing, and I can’t think of any way I could pay you back, leastways not for a long while.”

  “Don’t even think about paying me,” Eric said firmly. “You don’t pay this back. You pay it forward. The question is, do you want me to teach you, if I can? I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  The anxiety with which he waited for Hosea to answer surprised Eric. Somewhere between here and Maeve’s Naming Day, it had come to matter to him very much that Hosea think Eric worthy of being his teacher. He valued his new friend’s opinion that much.

  Hosea grinned. “Then I guess we’ve got a lot to learn together, Mister Bard.” He stuck out his hand. “Let’s shake on it.”

  Eric took his new student’s hand. “Done deal. I’ll teach you everything I know, however much that turns out to be. And I guess I’ll be learning a lot of things, too.”

  Patience is the first lesson a teacher learns. A memory of Dharniel’s voice echoed in his mind. “We can start as soon as you’re settled into your new digs.”

  On Monday mornings Eric didn’t have any classes until after noon, and he usually took advantage of that fact by sleeping late. “Morning person” was not in his job description, and even busking with Hosea, they generally skipped the morning rush-hour crowds.

  This morning was different.

  Screams woke him—no, not screams. Scream. The House itself was screaming, a soundless air-raid-siren wail of protest. And beyond that, audible to his ears and not his mind, the sound of a door slamming, over and over.

  :Scramble! All units scramble!: he heard Greystone shout in his mind. He lunged out of bed and flung himself into the living room, clawing his hair out of his eyes.

  Hosea wasn’t there. The front door was slamming itself rhythmically and springing open again.

  :Greystone!: Eric mind-shouted. There was no answer.

  He couldn’t stop the House’s alarms, but he could shut them out with a spell of his own. He did so automatically, and as it faded to a thin wail of protest, he apported the first clothes that came to mind—the jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing last night—and ran for the door. It banged open and stayed that way as he passed through it.

  Several of his fellow tenants were standing in the hall in various states of dress from business suits to nudity, all talking agitatedly at once. Most of them seemed to feel there’d been either an explosion or an earthquake, unlikely though the latter was for New York. Someone—he didn’t stop to see who—was holding a broadsword, its blade glowing a deep black-light purple.

  Eric lunged down the stairs, barefoot, taking them three at a time. He was heading for the lobby. Whatever the source of the disturbance was, it was there. He could feel it.

  But when he reached the ground floor, all he saw was Hosea, standing there in bewilderment. He had his duffle bag and his banjo with him.

  Of course. He was going to pick up the keys from Ria today.

  The wailing was louder here, loud enough to pierce his hush-spell. As Eric reached the lobby, Toni came charging out of her apartment. She was wearing an apron and carrying a baseball bat.

  “Get back in there!” she shouted behind her at her two boys. The door slammed shut the way Eric’s had.

  “What?” she demanded, staring around wildly, looking for the threat.

  “All I did—” Hosea began.

  Footsteps on the stairs behind Eric told him that the other Guardians were coming. Paul had obviously been in the shower when the alarm came—his hair was still full of shampoo and he wore nothing other than a terry-cloth bathrobe. José had been asleep—he was wearing a pair of striped pajamas and looked as confused as Eric felt. As for Jimmie, she arrived with gun drawn, looking as if she hadn’t slept yet.

  “All I did—” Hosea began again. He took another step back from the door.

  “Enough. Quiet,” Toni said, though not to them. Eric breathed a sigh of relief as the wailing ceased.

  :I dunno, Boss. It’s quiet as church on Sunday out here. Gotta be something inside: Greystone said, cutting Eric in on his side of the conversation.

  “What’s going on?” Jimmie demanded. The four Guardians seemed to commune silently for a moment.

  José ran a hand through his disordered hair. “I’ve never heard anything like that in my life. It even woke the little ones,” he said, speaking of his beloved parrots.

  “As well as everyone else in the building, Sensitive or no,” Paul said tensely. “You might have a little explaining to do, Toni.”

  “What was—or is—it?” Toni demanded, more sharply this time.

  Jimmie slowly lowered her gun. Eric heard the click, loud in the stillness, as she put the safety on.

  By now several of the tenants had reached the first floor. Without seeming even to notice the gathering in the lobby, they hurried past them and out the front door, to cluster in a tight knot on the sidewalk staring anxiously back at the building.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all,” Hosea said, gazing at the door with surprise. “It was locked when I tried it just a moment ago.”

  “Locked?” Jimmie said. “It’s never locked from the inside.”

  The exodus of tenants had ceased and the door had swung closed again. Jimmie walked over to the door and grasped the handle. It opened easily. She stared at the others in confusion.

  “Try it again,” she said to Hosea, stepping back from the door.

  He glanced back at Eric, who nodded.

  As Hosea approached the door, they all felt the House tense, as if preparing to give voice again.

  “Wait,” Toni said. Hosea stopped, his hand inches from the door. “You try it,” she said to Eric
.

  Shrugging, Eric walked over to the door. He hesitated for a moment, steeling himself for the psychic equivalent of an electric shock, but there was nothing. The door opened silently and easily. He opened and closed it several times. Nothing.

  “No one else had any problem; neither Bard, Guardian, nor civilian. Only this young man,” Paul said.

  “I think we’d better find out why,” Toni answered grimly. She glanced out at the cluster of people on the sidewalk.

  “You figure out what to tell them, and with Eric’s permission, we’ll convene a council of war at his place—in, say, about fifteen minutes?” Paul said.

  “Sure. No problem. I’ll put up some coffee.” And maybe get my heart started again. “C’mon, Hosea. No point trying to leave now.”

  The hallway outside the apartment was empty when Eric and Hosea reached it. Eric’s door swung open peremptorily as soon as they reached the top of the stairs, but, to his relief, stayed still and allowed him to close it himself. He didn’t bother to lock it. He’d just had a taste of how very efficient the House’s security systems were.

  “Just the way I’d want to start a Monday morning,” he said, sighing. He looked at Hosea with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I know you’re going to have to go over it again when the others get here, but . . . what did you do?”

  Hosea looked troubled, and when he spoke his Appalachian drawl was thicker than Eric had ever heard it. “Nothing I ain’t done most every other morning. I figured I’d just take my traps with me when I went down to Miss Llewellyn’s office, and that way I wouldn’t have to double back to get them. So I locked up, same as I always do, an when I got to the front door, it was locked. And all of a sudden, something started hollering in my head.” He shook his head ruefully. “I hope Miss Hernandez ain’t too put out with me. That woman’s got a temper on her when she’s bothered, and that’s the certain truth.”

  Eric regarded Hosea, puzzled. He knew the other man was telling the truth—and the whole truth, as he knew it, at that. Unfortunately, it didn’t answer any of Eric’s questions.

  “Why should everyone else be able to leave and not you? Why this time and none of the others?”

  * * *

  It was a question still unanswered half an hour later, as Eric, Hosea, and the four Guardians—with Greystone listening in from his perch outside the window—gathered in Eric’s living room. Toni had given the other tenants the cover story that there’d been an explosion in the boiler that provided the building’s steam heat, but that it was all taken care of now and the building was perfectly safe. The explanation would do as long as nobody thought too closely about it, though of course, those who had sensed the House’s alarm for more or less what it was would have to be told something more. And the six of them were no closer to the truth than they had been downstairs.

  “So what was different about this time?” Jimmie asked Hosea.

  The country Bard shook his head in bafflement. “Nothing I know of. I was going to go and get settled in to my new place, and then come back here to pick up Eric—you know, so we could go busking in the subway?”

  “Wait a minute,” Jimmie said slowly. “What ‘new place’?”

  “I’m moving out. Miss Ria, Eric’s ladyfriend, she offered me a place to hang my hat for a few months, an—”

  “That’s it,” Paul said, interrupting him. “It’s got to be. It’s the only thing that’s changed. This time you weren’t just going out for a few hours. You were leaving.”

  The six of them looked at each other.

  “Well, now we know that much,” Toni said sourly. “Not that we know anything at all.”

  “We know that the House doesn’t want Hosea to leave,” Jimmie said slowly. The four Guardians looked at each other. “And we know what that means.”

  “No we don’t,” Eric said. “At least, the two of us don’t.”

  Jimmie and Toni looked at each other, and again Eric had that sense of unspoken communication. After a long moment, Jimmie answered him.

  “You know that the House picks its tenants for its own inscrutable reasons. If it wants you, you can stay. When it doesn’t want you, you go—you have to. But sometimes, it really wants somebody. And when it does, it encourages them—strongly!—to stay. My guess is that your friend here wasn’t taking the hint. So it stopped hinting—and yelled.”

  “But there are four of us,” José said, as if continuing a different conversation. “There’ve never been more than four. Why him? Why now?”

  The House wants Hosea? As a Guardian? Eric thought blankly. José couldn’t mean anything else.

  “It’s not as if there’s a hard-and-fast set of rules about this sort of thing,” Paul offered, looking thoughtful. “There are four of us, and as we know, that’s a lot of Guardians to gather in one place. Why not five?”

  “No vacancies?” Toni suggested. “The place is full, Paul. Every apartment’s rented, and they’re all good people. Who am I supposed to evict?”

  “There’s that studio in the basement,” Eric said. “You could clean that out. We’d help.”

  “Just a doggone minute, here,” Hosea said. “What’s this all about?”

  “I think,” Eric said slowly, “that it’s about you joining the Occult Police. Becoming a Guardian.”

  “I can’t do that!” Hosea protested. “I ain’t a—a—” He groped for the word. “A root doctor like you folks. I got me a little shine, sure, but I’m a Bard—leastways, I’m gonna be one as soon as Eric here gets to training me. Right now I don’t know much of anything.”

  The four Guardians looked at each other again.

  “Well,” Paul said, “it does look like you’re going to have the time to learn whatever it is you’re here to learn, my young friend. Because no matter for what purpose the House wants you, I truly don’t believe you’ll be allowed to leave until you agree to stay.”

  “As much sense as that makes,” Jimmie offered.

  “The basement apartment’s not much, but I can get it cleaned out and painted by the end of the week,” Toni said. “Then it’s yours.”

  “I don’t want no charity,” Hosea said, looking stubborn. “I’ve got a place to go to, all ready and waiting for me. I don’t have to stay here.”

  Oh, brother! Eric thought. No wonder the House’d had to shout, if that was how Hosea had been responding to its gentler suggestions.

  “You may be stubborn as a pig in mud, but I guarantee, this place is stubborner,” Jimmie said. “Don’t pick a fight you can’t win, Hosea.”

  “Por favor,” José begged. “For the sake of my little ones. And to spare me another awakening like this one.”

  Toni was looking at Hosea critically. “Well, maybe you’re wrong, Jimmie. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t been Called.” The others nodded agreement, seeing something Eric couldn’t. “But the House wants him to stay. Mr. Songmaker, would you consider doing us all a very great favor and staying on until we can get this sorted out? The rent won’t be much for that small a studio, and I’ve got a certain amount of latitude in what I charge, anyway. Eric tells me you’ll be getting your busking license soon, and I can wait for the rent until then. Besides, if you do stay, I won’t have to wake José up any time I need some heavy lifting done,” she added with a grin.

  Hosea still hesitated.

  “Do it,” Eric said firmly. “I don’t want another wake-up call like that one, either. We need the time to figure this out.”

  “I hate to disappoint Miss Ria that way,” Hosea said tentatively.

  “She’ll survive,” Eric said. “You aren’t irreplaceable there. But it looks like you are here.”

  “Well . . . okay,” Hosea said. “I accept your kind offer, Miss Hernandez. And I’d just like to say that I’m sorry for putting you good folks to all this trouble on my account.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Jimmie said, smiling crookedly. “Battle, murder, and sudden death our specialty. And I’m just as glad to know that we aren�
��t going to have to find out what kind of crisis requires five Guardians on tap.”

  “It’s settled, then,” Toni said briskly. “C’mon, Hosea. You can help me empty that place out and figure out where to stow all that junk.” She got to her feet.

  “I guess I’ll go knock on a few doors and reassure our Sensitives that the Last Trump hasn’t blown,” Paul said, also getting to his feet.

  Toni and Hosea left, and in a few moments the others followed.

  “Hey, Jimmie? A word?” Eric said, as she prepared to follow them out.

  Jemima Youngblood stopped and turned back to Eric, closing the door.

  “What’s really going on here?” he asked. “Is Hosea a Guardian now, or what?”

  “I wish I knew,” Jimmie said, sounding as puzzled as Eric felt. “I’ve never heard the House alarms go off like that for anything else—not even the time it suckered that child molester into the basement so we could deal with him quietly, or the time one of our other tenant’s guests found his ritual tools and decided it’d be fun to conjure up a demon. But . . . you recognized Hosea as—what? a fellow Bard?—the first time you laid eyes on him. Well, it’s the same for us. One Guardian always knows another. And as far as that recognition factor goes, Hosea isn’t a Guardian. I just wish I knew what the House knows that we don’t.”

  Yeah. Me, too, Eric thought. “Oh, well. At least he’ll be close by for his Bardic training.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Jimmie agreed. She glanced at her watch. “Nine-thirty. And I’m working four to midnight this month. If I don’t get my head down soon I’m not going to be worth much at all.”

  “You’d better go on and get some sleep, then,” Eric said. He opened the door for her. “Sleep well.”

  “Thanks,” Jimmie said. “And thanks for convincing your stubborn friend to take the path of least resistance. I’m not surprised the House had to yell to get his attention.”

  “We’ll try to avoid that in the future,” Eric agreed.

  But how? he wondered, long after Jimmie had left.

  NINE:

  PUT YOUR HAND INSIDE