“How’s that?” she said to the back of my neck.
“It’s nice.”
“Nice?” she repeated, sounding amused and offended.
“It’s not getting the concert done, though,” I reminded her. She pulled away from me, looking concerned again. “Why?” I said. “Did you try to put a whammy on me just now?”
“Kinda. I guess.” She looked embarrassed. “I thought I could—I dunno.”
“Fix the big bad fucked-up rock god with a hug?” I snorted and shook my head. “Girl, it’s gonna take more than that.”
Outrage, embarrassment, guilt, and don’t-mess-with-me crossed her face. “You holding out for more?”
“Fellatio,” I pronounced with relish. “At the very least. Oh, and there’s a couple of sex demon tricks I haven’t showed you.”
She scrambled to her feet. “Take a shower at least, jeez.”
I got up and flushed the toilet. “Gimme fifteen. I’ll be out there for the reprise.”
At the door she turned back. “Baz—”
Now she was gonna try to let me off the hook in case I wasn’t man enough.
“Don’t say it. I’m doing this.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was going to say, brush your teeth. I won’t kiss you unless you do. And we need a finale-smasher.”
“Weellll, I’m pretty good, but—”
A towel hit me in the face, and then she was gone.
YONI
I strode out toward the stage.
He’d teased me, but I actually was kind of miffed that my goddess mana didn’t do anything for him. Then I wondered if he’d been kidding me along to get rid of me, get me back out on stage where I belonged, get the show done. What would he do, alone on his own in there? My guys didn’t have any drugs in their dressing rooms, but he could get anything he wanted by stepping into the audience.
The audience! Only Baz could have taken my mind off them. I ran to a monitor stage left.
But I could tell how they felt even without the monitor. A sea of smiling faces turned toward the stage. The air was full of the scent of those roses—holy cow, they’d pumped out a lot of rose petals. There were piles, drifts, dunes of petals accumulating under the big urns, stirring in the breezes that blow backstage. I looked straight up at the lights in the fly loft.
That gave me an idea. “Londa,” I said to my dresser as she fussed over my costume in the wings, “can you send somebody back to cue Baz in eight minutes?” I crossed fingers on both hands and knocking on mental wood. “He’s in the dressing room. In fact, you might find him something else to wear. Those baggy shorts are horrible.”
“I’ll say.” She fiddled with my hair and looked into my eyes. “Everthing’s gonna be jes’ fine.”
I swallowed. “You know I can’t do this without you, Londa.”
She brushed tears off my eyelids with her thumbs. “Go be awesome.”
We did another twelve minutes of the regular playlist. The audience warmed right back up. I felt like I’d abused them so badly tonight, they had a right to walk out and leave me singing to empty seats. But soon the mana flowed, and the good feeling I get from a job well done returned, and I wondered how I could have been so discouraged, telling Baz all that down junk.
I felt for my edges the way he’d taught me. They reached all the way to the back of the house. That wasn’t far enough! I extended my edges a bit farther. At least as far as those poor ushers out in the lobby, who had to stand around waiting to get trampled.
The next number started and I focused on work again. I filled up like a weather balloon with high, happy energy. I shared it out to the audience—the ushers—people driving cars on the expressway nearby—joggers on the lake path outside the theater. I was still full.
Last night at the Cubby Bear, I’d forgotten all about my edges. Big mess.
I pulled it in a little. I felt like I’d eaten two birthday cakes and was digging into a third. Don’t let me hurl onstage.
We got closer and closer to the “Baby, Come Home” reprise. No Baz. The only reason I didn’t reach out into thin air and summon him to me was because I didn’t know if he’d arrive naked.
But right at two minutes, I became aware of a stir, stage left. As I danced with my troupe, I stole a look.
There he was in the wings, his arms folded, grinning.
I finished the dance—kick, bump, snarly face, hold it—for the crashing end of the number.
I walked downstage as the dancers melted away. “Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who didn’t have a chance to see him last night, I’m thrilled to introduce a guest now to finish our show with a song from our new CD. Here he is! After long silence—Ashurbanipal of The Mesopotamians!” I pointed stage left.
Baz ambled out, waved at just the right moment, reached to shake my hand, picked up Jimmy’s bass, and assumed the position.
I signaled to the guys, one thumb down, then one finger up. Once through slow, then pick up the tempo.
The wind machines started up behind the band.
The song went great. Would they remember how depressed they were when this song started before? I cranked out my edges a notch, feeling the love and sending it back a million times louder.
We walked that song and then we jogged it, and then we kicked it up, and then we rocked it.
As we swung into a danceable tempo, Baz flung his head in that old Mesopotamian style and his dreads yanked free of their tie and flew wildly around his laughing skull face, spattering everyone in the band with droplets of water, because you can’t shower and expect dreads to dry in ten minutes.
I was so happy to see him happy, the mana in the room jumped higher. I wanted to give it all away. Everybody should feel this good.
The wind machines blew millions of rose petals past us into the audience.
I remembered my hot new idea about the rose petals.
What if the rose petals flew up? Out over the audience to land on people here and there—I blessed the petals as they blew by, throwing all the good wishes and love into them I could—and then they would fly up into the coves, into the air handlers, and out of the building.
“Baby, I’m home,” Baz sang to me, filling me up with peace and certainty.
The rose petals flew past. I coated every one with a bit of the music. I wanted everybody in Chicago to fall in love.
The audience got to their feet and stomped.
Even Aunt Maybellyne and Uncle Chester were snogging in the wings, stage right.
The rose petals swooped out over the audience, showered upward like little crimson angels, and got sucked away into ceiling vents and the vast fly loft above the stage.
We ran repeats until I was limp.
Finally Baz gave me a pointed look, and I realized I was about to fall over. I signaled for once more through the chorus and done.
All is forgiven, baby, come home!
His kiss was minty-fresh.
VEEK
Now it was time to drive home my plan. As usual, Sophie spoke before I could. “Papa, it’s over.”
I said, “No. It isn’t enough for him to acknowledge me. The courts will want more.”
Her papa looked sly. “Damned right,” he muttered. But he put his camera in his coat pocket and turned to listen.
This would be tricky.
“You must yield, Papa.” Sophie turned to me and took my hands. “You’ve won, my Veek. Surely you see this.”
I shook my head. “Ma chère, I don’t look old enough to be the true vicomte. Even if I win the claim, everyone will expect me to die, and . . . I suspect I won’t die for a very long time.” I didn’t say, or ever.
Would she want me that long? Would she survive even a century? Over the bruise on my heart left by Jake’s death, I felt her love, and the love of Montmorency like the promise of new grass in spring. Maybe Baz was right, and I had infected her with my magical oddity.
I looked at her and I saw forever in her eye. My heart bloomed like a hot coal. �
�Also, it would only put off challenges from other heirs—your father’s cousins, for example.”
“Those playboys?” Henri snorted. “They haven’t the initiative.”
I ignored that. “In five years I’ll be over a hundred. I could go to court for a while, disguised as an old man, but I don’t want to appear in public forever only as un vieux. No, the challenge is to slip past France’s hatred of all things new. To get them to accept me . . . a black, immortal vicomte.”
Sophie’s face fell ludicrously. She wailed. “But you can live at Montmorency. Isn’t that enough?”
“No. I can’t be sure I won’t fall out with future vicomtes. Montmorency, the place, that is forever. So, I fear, am I, as the spirit of the place. How can I do my job when a future vicomte might decide to drain the marais for some commercial purpose? Or he might try to exorcise me. I refuse to be an unwelcome ghost on my own land.”
As I said this, I became much, much stronger. Standing in my own consecrated circle agreed with me. I remembered all those dreams of guarding the fence. I had made this circle by running it. I controlled its power.
And more. Samedi had extended my power immeasurably by forcing me to keep moving all those years. Now I was not just a little pocket jam bois, but a force whose bois crossed the ocean, to hundreds of small places in the western hemisphere.
I thought of those places I had claimed, all those years. The insides of rusting boxcars, the flop houses, the kitchens and storerooms of greasy spoons, lean-to huts made of old boards behind ruined buildings, and hollows in the earth under ragged, low-hanging trees. Places where someone might hide from hunters or find shelter.
I looked at Henri and Sophie and saw them with double vision: my kinsman and my lover, persons I would defend fiercely.
At the same time, they stank of wealth and confidence. What if they could have seen me and Jake cowering under a bush in the rain, making a cold supper out of tin cans in the shade of an empty barn with our fellow bums? What if they had passed by while we were being herded into a police van for vagrancy, or washing dishes in the kitchen of a restaurant to pay for a cheap meal? My kinsman and my lover wouldn’t even have noticed us.
Jake and Samedi had indebted me to those other people, the invisible ones. I inhabited their places now…those refuges of the poor and transient. It would feel good to stand there again. My power was rooted there, too.
I’d given Henri enough time to savor his half-victory over me. I spoke to Sophie, but I had him in the corner of my eye.
“My love, you are aware what magical changes have been occurring in the old world—and here, although less so. The Americans haven’t had to deal much yet with the consequences. They’re not like the French. They still try to deny magic, or quarantine it without examination or cure. But over there, the courts have started to acknowledge cases where magic intrudes on law.”
At that last word, Henri stiffened.
“These are times of rapid change. Yet case law builds slowly. I have only followed French and English law so far. For all I know, elsewhere in the European Union, there are precedents that grant property rights to an immortal man. I have studied long on this. As magic creeps across the continent, more cases crop up.”
Henri said suddenly, “Neuschwander v. von Krakaroff.”
“And Cromwell v. Lincolnshire Mine and Coal.” I nodded, affecting to be indifferent to the interruption, although I was observing him narrowly. “In another five or maybe twenty years, enough precedent might be established to give me a chance. The man who could win such a case would be remembered in European case law forever. Alas, especially now that this case is in motion—” I finally looked at Henri. “It would be impossible for me to win it within the next two weeks. Even a lawyer couldn’t achieve it, and I’m no lawyer. I doubt if anyone could.”
“Impossible?” Sophie said mournfully.
Henri snorted.
I suppressed a smile.
Something soft fell on my bare head—a feather?
I said, “Even if Blint Paradlak v. Kramarchykowicz were to be decided in the next two weeks—”
“But it is decided,” Henri said. “Forty-eight hours ago. I’ve been monitoring the chat rooms for those who attended the trial.”
“Really?” I exhibited a flare of hope—but then I feigned dejection. “No. It’s not enough. It’s impossible. It can’t be done.”
“But it’s enough to get an adjournment,” Henri said. He rose stiffly and began to pace. “First, of critical importance, an adjournment. Second, you must present the DNA evidence. I will accept the evidence, and pouf! no case. Third, you will establish your own claim. I will write the pleadings. The Justice de Bureau will be startled to see me walk in and sit on the other side of the room! Ha! Ha! Cromwell—” He waved away Cromwell with the hand holding his video camera. “After that, we invoke Blint and then Neuschwander.” He held up a warning finger. “But in that order! The first establishes that your identity can be validated. We have DNA evidence, no trouble there. The second asserts your rights over your property. One cannot put the cart before the horse!”
“But Papa—” Sophie began. I pinched her. She fell silent again.
The air seemed alive with little falling things. Ashes?
“After all,” Henri said, as if to himself, “As Vicomte Montmorency I would excite no remark. I would be merely another wealthy pencil pusher, managing money and going to charity balls and public dinners into my dotage.”
He rubbed his hands together. “But! As the attorney who wins de Turbin v. de Turbin? Who makes a vodou god the head of a noble French family? The law will speak of me from that day forward, centuries after I am dead.” His eyes were alight. He flourished the video camera. “That’s immortality!” He cackled in his old manner.
I said hesitantly, as if speaking to—yes, to my lawyer, “I have accumulated considerable documentation that may apply. It’s in my briefcase over there.” I pointed.
Henri nodded. “Ah. No doubt I know all of it already, but you may as well show me.”
I fetched my briefcase and handed it to him. “It’s very dim here. Perhaps we should go into the theater building.”
“Yes, yes,” Henri said impatiently. “We have no time to lose.”
“But won’t my cousins be angry?” Sophie objected. “Can they stop you from helping us? It was you who brought the suit.”
Henri shrugged. “It’s a matter of conscience. An attorney who discovers in himself a motivation to stand on the other side of his own client’s case must resign from representing that client. If the judge won’t let me be your attorney, I will represent myself as a citizen and align my interests with yours.”
Slowly, while Henri planned how he would win my case against himself, we gathered all Henri’s bags of equipment and brought them through the dim trees and a thickening shower of falling leaves—or ashes?—to the back of the theater. As we drew near, we heard the music, and then the sound of cheering.
“Ah, the music!” Sophie exclaimed, “It’s Yoni! She feels better! I’m so glad!”
Henri opened the door. A whirlwind of refrigerated, fragrant air rushed out at us, spattering us with thousands of tiny objects. My face stung as if in a snowstorm. Sophie squealed. Henri struggled, but he couldn’t force the door shut.
Something struck my eye and I picked it off me. The air was full of them. I turned my back to shield my eyes and held one up in the light over the theater’s back door.
It was a rose petal.
SOPHIE
My papa monopolized Veek’s attention for the next two hours. They sat in the bar at the Hyatt attached to McCormick Place and went over all the papers in Veek’s briefcase. Then we went back to the Four Seasons in a taxi, and still they ignored me, talking legal matters the whole way. I could have helped, but they didn’t want me. By the time they stopped and my papa’s sandwiches came from room service, and Veek spared me a moment of his attention, my eyes wouldn’t stay open.
“P
oor Sophie,” Veek said, sitting beside me on the couch and touching my cheek. “Sleep. We’ll be busy with this for the next week and more.”
“If I have to wait a week for sex, there will be trouble,” I said as dangerously as I could while yawning.
He hesitated. A chill passed over me.
I sat up. “What?
“I have to prove my case. Without it, I can’t be accepted as the vicomte. Your family will reject me, and I fear also they would reject you. I won’t do that to you.”
“Wait, what?” I struggled sleepily off the couch. “Are you saying you won’t marry me if you lose your claim?”
He stood and backed away, holding up his palms. “We will arrange something. You must not be tied to the wrong man.”
“You are the right man, the only man, and I will have you, and you will not make some foolish gesture like a fool in a bad play!” Now I was fully awake. I could feel the hairs rising all over me, like a cat readying for a fight.
But Veek shook his head. “I can’t.” He backed away further.
“Don’t you dare!” I stalked after him.
“For the love of God, take her with you!” my papa exclaimed.
“You have my number,” Veek said to Papa—to Papa, not to me!—folding sandwiches into a hotel napkin. His eyes were on me. “You’ll email the lab work?” He stuffed the sandwiches in his metal briefcase and snapped it shut. “And bring the samples with you on the tenth?”
“Yes, yes, but take her with you!” my papa pleaded. “She’ll be in a rage the whole time!”
At last Veek looked at me. He stretched his hand out to me. “I beg you, my love. Wait for me?”
I opened my mouth in fury.
He vanished.
YONI
I exited to the wings for the last time and slumped onto Baz. I was a wet noodle. Still, I did my routine, thanking the stagehands and house dressers and house security and shaking hands with everybody. My last concert. For now. I refused to think about a tour for the new CD, not tonight.
Walking on Sunshine Page 31
