Moonlight Binding Magic
Stag Heart Pendulum 1
Charlotte Munich
Copyright © 2021 by Charlotte Munich
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 979-10-96438-81-5
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Also by Charlotte Munich
1
The pale, pale winter light was nothing like I’d ever seen. Such wane cold skies, the blue and pink and violet merged into a washed-out colorless morning that matched the muted green of the grass outside, its long strands now completely covered in frost. The heating must be broken again, because if this was normal, I didn’t think anyone could survive winter in this place. The temperature inside the old country house had to be flirting with a new record low. I thought I could see the clouds of steam escaping my mouth as I exhaled. Even with that piercing cold, the atmosphere still carried a faint odor of weed, a smell I’d grown very uncomfortable with in the last weeks, because it meant Sam, my bandmate, was deep in a slump.
Bringing my thick shawl closer around my naked shoulders, I padded to the living room, feeling the uneven old tiles beneath my feet, so cold that my feet recoiled at the contact. My toes were practically blue under the chipped black nail polish.
I looked around for a pair of pants. The entire place was littered with clothes, sheets of music, plates with remnants of some old meal in it from when we’d had real food, various and sundry objects that I just couldn’t fathom how they’d gotten there. I bumped into a pile of very serious economics books from Thomas’s time at the university. He’d wanted to burn them in the fireplace, but since the conduct hadn’t been cleaned in ages—the lady who let us the place had warned us against using it—I suspected we’d die breathing toxic Adam Smith fumes. Thom thought it was fitting, but I didn’t agree.
“Where is your sense of humor?” he invariably asked.
“Probably in my stomach,” was my frequent reply.
On the table amidst the chaos of old coffee cups was Sam’s sculpted pipe, which he thought looked cool. He loved the demonic face carved in the wood, grimacing and bearded. He fancied himself a shaman, said he was going to travel to another plane of consciousness, find his spirit animal and inspiration, but all he ever found was the stupidest jokes known to mankind.
I thought I spotted my warm socks and nearly stepped into a plate filled with old rice and canned tuna. Linus had thrown it together when they’d tried to lure the neighborhood fox inside with food, despite my protests, but of course, the animal had refused this dubious offer, thank the Goddess.
Ladies and gentlemen, my bandmates, I thought, finally pulling my woolen socks out of some pile. It was a good thing they were all exceptional musicians. I frequently wondered how I could stand them. Sometimes the doubt got so bad that I nearly packed my bag. And then, just as I got ready to quit on them, we’d start to play, and I would remember how good we were together, how wonderful and magical the music could get. It’s very strange how your musical soulmates can be total strangers sometimes. But even so, I could never bring myself to ditch them.
Sighing, I pulled on my socks. Yeah, there was magic in there somewhere. Now, if it could just put some food in my stomach and some heat in that old rented house, that would be great.
The warm socks helped, though, and soon, I found Sam’s sweatpants and commandeered them. In the kitchen, I made hot water and poured some of it over old coffee grounds. It was better than nothing and even smelled a little like coffee. Inhaling the bitter goodness, I retreated to the living room and to my nook. This was where I wrote songs before everyone else woke up. It was my happy place and the best time of the day, bar band practice. Sitting cross-legged on the old crumbling sofa, I opened my notebook and clicked my four-color ballpoint pen. It only carried my least favorite color, green, but there was still some ink in the thing. I whispered a quick prayer to the muses, because a kickass song would be really nice at that point, and started writing about freezing houses, frosty mornings, loneliness and chaos, and the elusive quality of luck.
Linus woke up at nine and found me in the same seat, an hour later. The lovely albeit cruel dawn had disintegrated into a gray and gloomy day.
Linus was my best friend among the three of them. He looked like a Viking and behaved like a teddy bear, most of the time. He was our drummer and the solid, dependable one in the band. You could rely on him and his beats. I’d always felt he was our backbone, as comforting and nurturing as a big brother, while Thomas and Sam were flaky at best.
“Hey, Victoire.” He bent down and kissed my forehead. “What’s shaking?”
I grunted. “Nothing much.” I’d thought I’d found a song, but something was still missing, and I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Wanna take a walk with me outside?”
I made a face. “In that weather? It’s freezing outside.”
Linus smiled. “It’s freezing inside too, Schätzchen,” he pointed out.
He was right, and I needed to get warm, so I went with him, still in my nightie, wool socks, and Sam’s sweatpants, with my thick down coat on top.
The countryside here was beautiful enough. We’d chosen the area because it was cheap, quiet, and no one would complain about our ridiculously loud music but for a couple of Charolais cows. We’d had this fantasy about eating some of the cows at the beginning, but we were really too skint now to buy meat.
“I’m hungry,” I complained.
“Let’s see if Elise can spare some eggs.” Elise was nice. She’d yelled at another neighbor for siccing his dogs on us, and she sometimes claimed she had too many eggs and wanted us to take some home. She had a daughter who was a student in the South of France, and she said she hoped someone was watching out for her Natacha.
“Good idea,” I said. “But we need to brainstorm new ways to make money before it’s too late. Otherwise, things are going to get pretty radical pretty soon.”
Linus was always ready to brainstorm.
The difference in temperature had been shockingly small between the atmosphere in the living room and the wintry cold in the yard. Desolate apple trees seemed to pray to a nonexistent god, wringing tortured limbs towards the gray sky. Maybe I wasn’t in the most optimistic mood today, I thought, shooting into the frozen corpse of a rotten apple.
“Listen,” Linus said. “Before we go back to day jobs for a while, let’s try this: there’s this new bar outside Dompierre, and Bertrand sa
id they were looking for musicians. We should try and audition. It would do us good, and we might earn some bucks doing what we love.”
Bertrand was the guy on the next farm. He wasn’t unfriendly; mostly he considered us musicians as aliens, and we amused him. When he was mildly drunk, he might come and pay us a visit, listen to us play, and offer slightly weird comments.
“A bar?” I sniggered. “In Dompierre?” The town counted two thousand inhabitants, at the most. It was the capital of nowhere.
“What does it matter where it is? It’s a bar, Vic. Playing in a bar would be far better than staying at home gnawing at your own hands or handling the cash register at the supermarket,” Linus retorted.
He had a point, of course. We all worked here and there, using our age-old Volkswagen to deliver stuff, filling the shelves at the supermarket, but jobs were scarce, and we didn’t want anything more permanent. We believed in our music.
“Let’s try it, then,” I agreed. “Shall we go to the bar tonight when it’s open and talk to the owner?”
Having a new plan was uplifting. The weather was still abysmal, but suddenly I was feeling way better. Elise gave us some eggs and even made us an omelet and a cup of coffee. When we got home an hour later, I felt warm again and wrote a song about it, a very stupid happy song. Sam thought it was goofy and Thomas declared he loved it. We spent the afternoon composing and working on older songs. We had some money set aside to pay for a recording studio, not enough yet, but one day we would get there. We’d sworn we would die before we dug into that fund for groceries.
So onwards it was.
Sam was our bassist, and Thom had crowned himself lead guitarist. There was this weird dynamic between Thom and me, where he both praised my work and directed snide comments at me. Sometimes, when you listened to him, I was essentially there to draw in the male gaze and redistribute the attention on the other bandmates who did all the heavy lifting, so to speak. Whenever Thom’s ego got too big for his own skull, I would signal it to him, not mincing my words. We’d fight and shout. It was all very rock ’n’ roll. It cleared the air. Once, I’d gone on a strike, because I was French and fiery and because I could. After a week, Thom had come back groveling. It was all very passionate, and we didn’t even sleep together. Never with a bandmate. That didn’t stop the other two from looking at us sometimes like we were their mom and dad, or reigning king and queen. The possibilities of drama were endless, and they were all fuel for my songwriting.
2
At nine o’clock that night, we all filed into Thom’s old car to go to the new bar in Dompierre, although we still felt skeptical about its very existence. We hadn’t taken our instruments, except for my lucky ukulele, because I never went anywhere crucial without it. It was very plain, I’d bought it second-hand from a guy in high school, because it was cheap, and it had reminded me of Marilyn Monroe’s character in the movie Some Like it Hot. Back then, I’d started fiddling with it, and that’s how I’d gotten started with music, at the advanced age of fifteen. Soon I was singing and looking for ways to make my way onto a stage.
I’d had the ukulele with me when I’d met Sam and Thom two years later. I was carrying it the day I’d found Linus on the subway. And I’d had it with me the day I didn’t die. I sometimes felt as if all my luck came from that plain little instrument.
The night was freezing cold as we piled into the car. Linus and I huddled in the backseat to keep each other warm. Thom cursed when he drove right into the alley pothole and the fragile underside of his precious vehicle scraped the ground, again. I laughed, because this had happened how many times now? Thom cursed extra loudly, and Linus threw me a smile in the rearview mirror.
Dompierre was almost pitch dark. The night seemed to swallow the meagre light provided by public streetlamps, and our car’s front lights didn’t do much either against the obscurity. With shutters drawn on every window, the long, square brownish houses betrayed nothing of what was going on within their walls. I imagined the people inside, sitting in front of their television, watching the same catastrophic news as every night after a hard day of feeding cattle and raising children and trying to make ends meet and never rising above the daily stuff to do anything crazy and meaningful with their lives. After all, this was what had happened to my family. I was determined to fight that inertia. I wanted greatness, whatever the cost, and I was so grateful to live and work with three guys who understood that.
When we got to the place where the bar was supposed to be, it looked even deader than the rest of the town.
“Are you sure it’s here?” I asked Linus.
He nodded. “Bertrand explained it might look like the place is abandoned, because they haven’t opened yet. He said it’s a rehabilitated old barn, and they darkened all the windows and not to worry.”
“Okay, then.”
We stepped out of the car and into the cold, wet night. I shivered, because I was wearing my “good clothes,” with the fancy rock chick skirt and badass ankle boots. Linus hugged me, sharing some of his Viking warmth.
“Let’s get inside.”
Sam groaned something under his breath, and we crossed the street over to the bar. I strained my ears and heard absolutely nothing. Not a freaking sound.
“It feels empty,” I said, hesitantly.
“Let’s try the door anyway,” Linus said. “We’ve come this far. We have nothing to lose.”
I was so glad he was there. Alone with Thom and Sam, I’d never have insisted. We would still be in the car, driving around aimlessly while the guys talked themselves out of trying. But this was an opportunity. This was what struggling artists did: they seized destiny by the horns. They made their own luck.
I grabbed Linus’s hand and squeezed it. “Let’s do it,” I decided, taking the lead of the pack.
Of course, as soon as I did that, Thom tried to wrestle it from me. I just smiled and let him do the peacock.
The barn was a square stone building the color of pale earth, like everything here. Its door was wooden and painted a darker brown. It looked old and heavy. Thom knocked loudly, and we waited. Sam sighed. For all of his mellowness, he was usually the last one to embrace change.
After a minute or so, the door opened, and a head popped through. A very pale head, with dark hair so crazy that it took me some time to notice how handsome the guy’s face really was. A straight nose, strong cheekbones, wide eyes, and perfect lips that belonged on a statue. Dead symmetry. Yup, that head was a looker.
“Yeah?” the head asked in a deep yet silky voice. “Is something wrong? Or did we have an appointment?”
He really had a wonderful voice, rich and full, with something dancing at its core. It was so beautiful it woke up a weird nostalgia in you. It was the kind of voice you were sure you’d heard somewhere before.
I elbowed Thom, and he let me step through.
“No, we didn’t.” I held out my gloved hand for a second, but the head, being just a head, I supposed, didn’t take it. I insisted, though. “Hi, I’m Victoire, and these people here are my band.”
Thom coughed discreetly, and I ignored him completely. The guy at the door looked at me in amusement.
“Okay. But what can I do for you?”
His accent didn’t sound local. It had a flavor, a discreet lilt, that I couldn’t quite place, as if French was his second language maybe, a language he mastered completely but maybe not from birth.
“Are you the owner of this bar?” I asked, wanting to get down to business.
The guy looked at me and then up along the outside wall of the building, as if seeing it for the first time.
“Is this a bar now? How long was I asleep? What day is this?”
I sighed. “It isn’t a bar? Well, I’m really sorry, then, we must have gotten the wrong info.” I threw daggers at Linus, and he widened his innocent blue eyes, showing me his palms in perplexity.
The guy at the door looked at me for the first time then, I mean, he really peered at me, and I near
ly gasped, startled. His eyes were a striking shade of purple, or maybe they were a deep blue but so clear that you could see the blood vessels right underneath. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light. Either way, they were huge, and the pupils looked really dilated.
He’s high as a kite, I thought. Not an uncommon occurrence among musicians and other people who worked at night in bars, but it did make business discussions rather more difficult.
Then his nostrils flared. Was he sniffing us? Granted, we weren’t taking a good long shower every day. The water heater at our place was really temperamental and had all kinds of ups and downs. But I didn’t think we stank.
“No, no,” the guy exclaimed. “If you say it’s a bar, you must know.” Which, in my opinion, was a very strange answer.
I stood my ground, waiting.
And then he broke into a bout of laughter that didn’t sound sick at all, not nearly as weird and demented as the situation warranted. He opened the door, drawing himself to his full height, and boomed, “Well, come on in! Don’t stay outside in the cold. We’ll sort it all out with the manager.”
I exhaled in relief. “Okay.”
The guy still hadn’t told us his name, and he was still blocking the door completely. All I could see behind him were shadows. I could only tell that he was tall and lean and dressed fully in black, in wrinkled dark dress pants and a rumpled dark shirt that seemed to confirm his story of having slept throughout the evening.
Moonlight Binding Magic Page 1
