Soul Song

by Marjorie M. Liu

  The witch planted her feet on either side of his chest. Her skirt was very short, revealing long legs, no underwear. M’cal wanted to vomit.

  “You have something for me,” she murmured, and sank slowly to her knees. Her thighs squeezed his ribs, the touch of her skin taking away the pain left by the drying seawater. M’cal wished it would not. He preferred discomfort to the alternative. He tried to move, to kick her off. His body refused him. As usual.

  The witch smiled, long fingers dancing against his chest and throat. She bent to kiss the corner of his mouth, and he felt the draw of her power tug on Elsie’s soul.

  “My prince,” whispered the witch. “Give me your voice.”

  M’cal did not speak. The witch reached between their bodies and touched his stomach, lower still, caressing him with deft, long strokes. M’cal willed himself not to respond, but there was magic in her fingers—literally—and his control meant nothing. He grew hard in moments, his human body a betrayal, and the witch slid herself onto his shaft with a sigh.

  “Your voice,” she said, swaying upon him. “Your voice, and I will stop.” A sly smile touched her mouth. “Unless you want me to finish you. Unless you want me.”

  M’cal tried to look away, but the witch held his gaze and rocked harder, forcing terrible pleasure through his body. The sensation tore at him. Disgusting, thrilling; his defiance was the same as defeat, which was the custom of their dance. Killing him softly, breaking him one impossible choice at a time when all she had to do was command by force what she wanted.

  But the witch surprised him. She stopped her movements, gave up her pleasure, his humiliation, for a long, quiet stare that was far more thoughtful than anything she had thus far allowed him to see. It made him uneasy—a feat, given his already desperate circumstances.

  M’cal returned her gaze, studying her flawless face, the crystalline perfection of her eyes, cold as some blue belly of arctic ice. He tried to remember why he had loved her, so long ago, and thought it must have been for beauty alone. He could not remember for certain. He did not want to.

  From behind the witch a shadow lumbered close—a slow, gray hulk with a fat, pasty face and red spots the size of nickels on his cheeks; silver eyes like shark teeth and a mouth just as sharp. The hulk watched M’cal just as carefully as the witch. Licked his lips, once.

  The witch leaned forward, silver hair spilling over M’cal’s face. He tried to move his head. No luck. All he could do was watch. He did not close his eyes.

  The witch kissed him. Inside his head, Elsie screamed. M’cal almost cried out with her, but he swallowed his voice and held on to the woman’s stolen soul with all his strength, fighting and fighting. His fault, his fault—but this time would be different; he would make it different—

  The witch inhaled, and it was like being kissed by a hurricane. For one brief moment, everything inside M’cal felt loosened from its anchor: heart, bones, lungs. Essentials, floating in blood. Drifting. Elsie, drifting, torn away from his grasp. Until she was gone, stolen. Again. Just like all the others. So easy. The witch always made it look easy. And him, useless, unable to redeem himself. Nothing but a tool.

  The witch leaned back, breathing hard. Shuddering. Her eyes were closed and she touched her mouth, dragging her fingertips over her lips.

  “Ivan,” she murmured, and the hulking man behind her shuffled close. He held out a soft silver robe, which he helped drape over her narrow shoulders. His hand, a palm the size of a football, came down to rest heavy against the curve of her long, pale neck. M’cal glimpsed a silver band glinting against that thick wrist; smooth and seamless, it was not quite a twin to his own, but close enough.

  The witch rose slowly off M’cal’s body. Power leaked through her skin; he felt scratchy with it, as though barnacles or steel wool rubbed against him. The sensation did not fade when she stopped touching him. Distance was the only cure, as with most things in his life.

  The witch stared down her nose at M’cal. “Up, prince. Up, now.”

  No compulsion. Not yet. And with Elsie gone—gone, gone—there was no more need to stay silent. Not that the witch needed his voice to take what she wanted from him.

  “No,” M’cal said. His throat hurt.

  ” ‘No,’” mocked the witch. “No, evermore, with you. No and no. I grow tired of that word.”

  “I do not care,” M’cal replied. “You know that.”

  “And I know that you are mine.” The witch snapped her fingers. The bracelet burned. M’cal fought the compulsion, but his muscles twisted; he pushed himself off the deck and stood. Exposed. Helpless. Raging. The hulk, Ivan, studied him with a narrow gaze; the line of his mouth tilted just slightly.

  “I have another task for you,” said the witch, softly. “A specific target this time. You will take this woman’s spirit and bring it to me. You will do this now, tonight. I must have her tonight.”

  M’cal listened to her voice. “Something has frightened you.”

  The witch tilted her head and Ivan moved—fast for a man of his size, almost too fast to see. His fist rocked M’cal off his feet, sending him sliding across the deck. M’cal tasted blood; a tooth jiggled.

  “Get dressed,” snapped the witch, turning quickly with a flourish of silk and silver hair. “Ivan? Give him the name.” She walked away.

  Ivan knelt and smiled. His teeth were sharp as knives. He tried to touch M’cal’s bloody lip, but the compulsion was gone and M’cal grabbed the big man’s meaty index finger. M’cal yanked backward until bone cracked, then twisted so hard it lay perpendicular to the rest of Ivan’s fingers. His strength was terrible; he began to crush the bone.

  Ivan never flinched. Shrugging, he tossed a slip of paper on the deck beside M’cal, then stood slowly, jamming his heel against M’cal’s shoulder, forcing the merman to release him with nothing more than a push and tug. M’cal gritted his teeth, wary, but Ivan did not retaliate. His expression never changed, not even when he grabbed his broken finger and reset it with a sickening crunch.

  Ivan turned and lumbered off, following the witch. M’cal watched him go, licking his lip, again tasting blood. A weak breeze brushed his throbbing face; beside him, the paper rustled. He thought about not picking it up, but refusal would only delay the inevitable. The witch would force him, just as she had for years. M’cal preferred to move on his own, even if it was just an illusion.

  There was a hotel address on the paper, as well as the whereabouts of the victim, at least for the next several hours. There was also a name. M’cal spoke it out loud, enjoying the rolling delicacy of its sound. It was a short-lived pleasure; he found himself racked by guilt, hatred, a rage so terrible he shuddered with it, his fingers digging into his thigh against the hard deck. The silver cuff glinted against his wrist, the skin just above the metal covered in thin white scars. Again he thought about a knife, a gun—something, anything—to stop himself. Or to stop the witch.

  But there was nothing. Nothing he could do. Nothing he had not already tried.

  “Kitala Bell,” he murmured, gazing once again at the paper in his hands. “Forgive me.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The woman sitting in the front row of Kit Bell’s concert had a knife sticking out of her eye.

  It was a big knife. Blood covered her youthful face, running rivers down her low-cut white dress, staining the ends of her long blond hair. She dripped on the carpeted floor, on the old man beside her. No one noticed. Even the woman herself remained oblivious to the fatal wound in her head. She smiled beneath the blood, nodding and clapping her hands to the fast music. Enjoying herself, because it was a perfect night. Simply wonderful.

  Kit, who was not prepared, who had gone almost a year without signs of death, almost threw down her fiddle. She caught herself in time, though—made the pause in her music nothing but an extra beat, some artful hitch—and hid her nausea with a grimace that she hoped would pass for a smile. She had no choice. The fifteen hundred individuals seated in the posh Queen El
izabeth Theater had shelled out fifty dollars a ticket to see the final leg of her North American tour. Screaming Jesus Christ! and hauling ass off the stage to puke simply would not do. Kit was a professional that way.

  So she gritted her teeth, buckled down. She looked away from the dying woman—anywhere but at that one seat directly in front of her—and rimmed the air with a fine high beat, dancing down the devil inside her mind as she plucked and skimmed, bending her soul around the music running fast from her fiddle—faster, faster—until her skin felt like the strings and the world a bow of light, until the music was so much a part of her that each breath became a note, each heartbeat a melody.

  She was alone on the stage. No accompaniment necessary. Few musicians in the world could claim the same, and it was part of her draw. Because when Kit played, there was not a soul on earth who could keep up with her. She played to the death, death down to ashes, and nothing less satisfied. She might burst her heart one day for real on her fiddle, but that would be the perfect way to go: giving it all, dying like one long note on a string, cutting air and ears and souls. No regrets. Just music. Always, music.

  Now was no different. Kit forgot bones and blood and knives; her thoughts faded into a baser instinct. No one could play with heart and think; no one could hold such music without a little insanity.

  The set ended. The audience began roaring before the last trembling note, but she paid no mind to the applause. The knife was still there.

  Kit bowed and left the stage at a run. She wanted to vomit, to take an aspirin, to get back to her hotel for a hot shower and some kind of goofy cartoon to take the edge off the ghoulishness in her head; but as she stood in the shadows offstage, heart pounding, head bent, she could feel the thunder of the audience rumbling in her veins, and she could not run. Not yet.

  Kit took a deep breath and raced back on stage. She started playing as soon as she left the wings—Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D, but at a breakneck tempo, her bow rocking over the strings until she hit the center of the stage and stopped on her toes, transforming the rondo into something far more earthy, cutting the notes with Irish roots, burning them into a jig. The audience shouted, men and women stamping their feet, clapping hard with the beat.

  All except two. The young woman was gone. The old man beside her was missing as well. Their absence caused no relief. It meant only that the woman had gone to die. Die soon or die later, in a year or a lifetime, with terrible violence as the cause. A knife in her eye.

  And there isn’t a single thing you can do about it, Kit thought bitterly.

  She finished with a flourish. The audience begged for more. Kit did not listen. She smiled and waved, kissed the air with her thanks, and then with a sweeping twirl of her patchwork emerald silk skirt, ran lightly off the stage.

  Her fiddle case lay on a chair just beyond the wings. Her coat was there, too, as well as her purse. Ready for a quick getaway. Kit had no dressing room; she had come to the theater straight from the hotel, and while the stage manager had tried to press upon her one of the Queen Elizabeth’s numerous suites, she had shrugged him off. All Kit needed was her fiddle; bottled water and flower arrangements were unnecessary for her mental health. She was not picky about how or where. All that mattered was that she got to play.

  The Queen Elizabeth’s stage manager was an older gentleman named Alec Montreuil, a Quebecois born and raised. He and Kit had known each other for some years, enough that words were almost unnecessary as she hugged him good-bye. His brow crinkled when he looked into her eyes. She shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you some other time,” she said.

  “Soon,” he replied, his accent heavy. “Your father would be worried, I think, by the expression on your face. False smiles do not work on me, Kitala.”

  “And here I thought I was a fine actress.” Kit shook her head. “I’ll look you up before I leave town, Alec.”

  “Yes,” he replied solemnly. “You will. Bonne nuit, ma belle fille.”

  “Good night,” Kit replied, and walked away. She could feel Alec watching her, but did not look back. She tried not to feel like a dog for doing so—it was bad manners at its worst—but she had no choice. She had to run. She had to get out. The knife was still in that woman’s eye—in Kit’s own eye—dangling like a fishhook. Blood was everywhere.

  She barely pushed through the stage door in time and hit the poorly lit back alley, gagging. Had to lean against the slick, wet brick wall as her body heaved. Nothing came up—she ate no dinner before performances, ever—but it still hurt, still made her eyes well with tears. She wiped them away with the back of her hand—did the same to her mouth—and took a deep breath. The air was good and sweet. Tasted like medicine in her lungs. She heard low voices and glanced to her left, meeting the startled gazes of some theater employees who stood on the loading dock, smoking. They waved at her, frowning.

  Kit waved back but did not wait for a response. She turned and walked away, fast, trying to ignore the faint sound of her name as the men bandied it about behind her. God only knew what they were saying, what they thought. Not that it mattered. There was only so much she could do to protect her image.

  Kit’s nausea faded by the time she hit the sidewalk. She took a right on Cambie, avoiding the main press of theatergoers streaming across the street. No one noticed her—or if they did, were polite enough to leave her alone. Away from the stage and spotlight, Kit knew she was just another woman with brown skin and brown eyes; ordinary, normal. The magic lived only in the fiddle, in the theater.

  Hotel Georgia was a couple of blocks up the road, a straight line from the theater, but Kit took an alternate route, away from the crowds. It was early enough in the night that she felt safe walking the streets. Not bravado; she had spent the morning scouting out the area, familiarizing herself with the best routes, the most dangerous spots. She knew her way; a cab would not be much faster, and she needed the air. Her stomach was better, but the memory was still poison; she wanted that woman out of her system.

  Impossible, maybe. Learning how to forget was one lesson Kit had never mastered. Too stubborn, too much heart to forget those singular prophecies of violent death that sprang upon her like random illnesses. Knowing how people were going to die was a terrible burden.

  Let it go, she told herself, clutching her fiddle case. Let it go. Everyone dies. Everyone goes on. You can’t change a thing. You can’t.

  “Right,” Kit muttered, still miserable.

  It was not quite eleven-thirty. Vancouver at night felt both lovely and dangerous, with an urban shine that was modern, sleek, all fine hard edges with towers and skyscrapers full of electronic stars, glittering bright. A deceptive beauty; the city’s underbelly, as Kit knew all too well, was raw with drugs and cold cash and prostitution. No amount of refinement could hide that, though the natural scenery helped. Everything looked better—cleaner—against a backdrop of mountains and ocean.

  Just don’t look too close, Kit thought, reaching up to touch her eye. She caught herself, but not in time; her fingertips traced a circle around her lashes. She shuddered. Don’t look too close, don’t look too close. Or else risk seeing things that could never be taken back. Suffering. Death. Lingering like a sore.

  Just like the woman in white—the woman dying, the woman already murdered with a knife in her eye. That vision, another cut inside Kit’s heart, another wound, one of many. Whispering, like all the others, maybe and could have, and that deadly what if.

  Kit turned right on Georgia Street, passing coffee shops and wide, clean storefront windows pimping trendy clothes and purses, bright like the eyes of peacock feathers, for show. Yuppie, not much personality. She heard a shout ahead of her, looked sharply and saw two men jump a vehicle parked at a red light. One held a bucket, the other a rag. Guerrilla car washing, for spare change. The men splashed on some water, slopped the rag around the windshield then screamed at the driver until he inched down the window and tossed them several crumpled bills. The light turned g
reen; the car sped away.

  Kit crossed the street before the intersection. The men watched her bypass them and she met their gazes, hard and strong. They did not follow. They had more cars coming; bigger fish.

  Close to the hotel, only a block away from tourist-friendly Robson Street, Kit encountered more pedestrians. She tried to keep her eyes on the sidewalk, but could not help herself—she watched the faces, searching. All she saw was normal, easy and happy; no murder, no mayhem, no weapons. Just men and women out for a good night, with the promise of more and better.

  Nice. She needed that.

  Until, ruin. The end. Just ahead, the door to a Starbucks swung open and a blond woman in a white coat stepped out. The old man was with her, swinging a cane.

  Kit stopped walking. Stared. No blood or knife, not anymore, but that did not mean the woman’s fate had changed. Message delivered, message received; that was all that mattered.

  The young woman and her companion stood on the street corner, waiting for the light to change. Kit started walking toward them. Slow at first, then fast. The woman and the old man began walking, too. They crossed the street. Kit followed. She did not know what to do—she had no plan, no words. What could she say? Hello, excuse me, you’re going to be murdered?

  Right. She had tried that once before and gotten nothing for her trouble but ridicule; worse, even. Which by itself was not such a terrible thing, but now she had a career to consider, a profession that put her in the public eye. Silence, no matter how much it hurt, had been her policy for years.

  And all those what-ifs? What are those worth? Are you going to sell yourself out, let a woman who needs your help pass on by? Even crazy people can play the fiddle. There’s no one who can take your music away.

  Kit took a deep breath. Fine, then. She would do it, this one time. It would probably just freak the woman out, offer no protection whatsoever, but at least she could sleep easy knowing she had tried to give a warning, to divert fate.