Faerie Blood (7 page)

I wouldn’t be alone.

“I’ll take door number one, Bob,” I joked, and dug up a crooked grin for added plausibility.

Jude slapped my shoulder in approval. “That’s the spirit! We’ll get blitzed, and you can tell me all about your adventure last night. It’ll be fun!”

My grin slipped a little at the reminder. But I fought off the jangling chord of disquiet in the back of my head, squared my shoulders, and let her lead me off as the team gathered to head out… praying as I went that I wouldn’t see anything else.

Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people.
We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.

The first time they see it, Linux geeks always burst out laughing at the name and the sign over the front door, a penguin in a red hat emblazoned in neon. The less technologically inclined still grin at the conjunction of a penguin and booze, and are more than welcome within as long as they can pay for the drinks, food, and games. It’s not hip enough for Broadway, Capitol Hill’s main thoroughfare; the Penguin’s too many blocks away, the atmosphere too geeky. And since it’s sandwiched on a narrow side street, it’s not easy to find unless you’re looking for it, or unless you’re a regular, like many of us.

We converged on the bar in an erratic wave, the swiftest arrivals scarfing the spots in the lot next to the building. The rest of us circled like vultures through the surrounding streets in search of somewhere closer than Tacoma to leave our cars.

I rode with Jude, which was always an adventure as my friend drives her pickup truck with the aggression of a tank driver navigating a war zone. She honked her horn at three unfortunate drivers who got in her way, slammed on her brakes with enough force to jolt her entire truck and the two of us twice, and kept up a stream of curses that spiked the air with particular color and verve whenever a curbside space proved too small for her vehicle.

“You know,” I deadpanned, keeping my eyes closed to ward off motion sickness, “we could just cough up five bucks and park in a pay lot.”

“Bite your tongue, woman! There’s a principle at stake here!”

“A principle of what? Parking in Spokane?”

“Quiet, you!”

That was Jude at the wheel. Her eyes gleamed with the same energy she exuded every time she argued with one of the team developers, an energy that was far less about anger or spite, and more about the pleasure of a difficult hurdle to conquer. Some people drive with road rage; Jude drives with road joie de vivre.

We eventually found a spot six blocks from the bar, which satisfied Jude’s sense of sport, but not my nerves. I hadn’t avoided the walk home from the bus stop only to have to walk to the noisy, people-filled haven of the Penguin. (Not that I could explain that to Jude.) As we locked up the truck and hurried off, I stuffed my hands into my shorts pockets and strove with all my might to ignore anything that wasn’t passing traffic or the friend at my side.

I was not successful. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted tiny, shimmering shapes like the one in the tree I’d seen that morning—but here there were more of them, flocking like pigeons in the branches of a fir tree. They might almost have been pretty, like Christmas lights, but their will-o-the-wisp glow was far more unearthly than entrancing. And I heard them chiming, faint airy sounds that rose and fell and made me wonder for an instant what they’d sound like if I listened more closely—

Then I caught their voices, thin and piping, like those of the creatures in the hedge—and strangely seductive, high and sweet.

“She listens! She fears!”

“We could sing for her.”

“No more fear. No more thought.”

“Come and listen. Come and listen. Come!”

More of that uncanny prickling swept over me, and with it, for just a second or two, the urge to go closer to the lights in the fir tree and let them spill down in a glittering rain over my head. All that kept me on the sidewalk was the sudden frightened thought that I was seeing something weird again, and this time Jude was with me—

Jude.

She poked my arm, jolting my attention back to her and the corner where we stood waiting for the flow of cars to break long enough for us to cross. “The coast is clear! C’mon, slowpoke!”

She didn’t look once at the firs as we passed them. And I didn’t dare ask if she’d noticed anything odd as I shook myself hard and hastened to keep up with her.

The last two blocks to the bar offered nothing else out of the ordinary—nothing, at any rate, that only I could see or hear. As we approached the bar, music wafted up to meet us: a tin whistle trilling out the measures of a jig in a major key.
Music
, I thought in a rush of surprise and pleasure. Grateful beyond words for the distraction, I scanned the block around us in search of the musician and found her sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk in front of the thrift store next door to the bar.

Small and wiry, even smaller than Jude’s five foot two, and tanned like shoe-leather, the old woman wore a ragtag assortment of clothing that said ‘street person’ from twenty feet away. Her faded camouflage pants had holes in both knees and contrasted jarringly with the heavy leather Native American vest complete with fringes and beads. Both of those clashed in turn with the bright red T-shirt with a picture of Sylvester the Cat and the caption ‘Theattle’. Snow-white hair surrounded her head in a cloud of curls in wild disarray, and resting upside down before her on the blanket was the hat that had probably caused her bad hair day: a battered brown fedora that looked like she’d swiped it off the head of Indiana Jones.

“Hold up, Jude,” I requested, stopping to fish through my backpack for my change purse so I could drop a few more coins in to go with the ones already gleaming in the hat. I would have stopped anyway to give a busker something on general principle, but tonight it seemed especially vital. Someone playing cheerful, everyday music was almost as great a comfort as having my violin in my hands, and it provoked the first real smile I’d managed all day.

Jude obliged, and as I came up with a few quarters, the old lady looked up at me with bright black eyes. Her shriveled lips curled into an answering smile around the whistle’s mouthpiece, though she never once stopped her playing. I waited long enough to let her finish the last few bars of the melody. She seemed to approve, and with a final flourish, she bobbed her head amiably at me.

“Thank you kindly,” she crooned. She had a voice that should have been coming out of a much larger woman, reedy but full and round, mellowed by a trace of a Texan drawl; she sounded like a clarinet playing old, big-band swing. “Like to see a young person smiling for one of the old tunes.”

“I play violin,” I told her, grinning now.

Snowy eyebrows crooked up over those black eyes, whose gaze swept over me even as the old woman chuckled wryly. “A discerning choice of instrument.” Then her eyes met mine dead on. “I can tell you’re a girlie of uncommon perception. I can see it in your eyes.”

I stopped cold. The words alone were innocent enough, but that look was entirely too knowing for my comfort. Especially when the prickling came back, like a fleeting rain of thorns, the instant her gaze locked with mine.

But then Jude poked me again to get me moving. Though she added two quarters of her own to the hat to go along with mine, my officemate and friend was eying the Penguin’s bright lights like a terrier eyes a bone. She flashed a vague polite smile just because I’d stopped, but seemed to notice nothing remarkable about the woman with the whistle.

I let her hurry me onward.

But I looked back over my shoulder as we went—and when I caught the old lady winking secretively at me, I was not reassured.

The Electric Penguin was one-third Internet cafe (free wireless connectivity for patrons, terminals available at reasonable rates), one-third gamer haven (featuring a server room full of consoles for a dozen different online combat games), and one-third more traditional bar with traditional bar entertainments: darts, pool, and booze. Its walls sported a plethora of film, television, and anime posters. Its music—a mix of 80’s and 90’s rock—aimed for merely loud rather than deafening; there was a dance floor, but a little one, out of acknowledgement that most thirtysomething, or even late-twentysomething, computer geeks weren’t likely to actually get up and dance.

Live entertainment wasn’t much of the Penguin’s point. But as Jude and I headed into the bar, Jude in high spirits and ready to eat, drink, and be merry enough for both of us since I hadn’t yet gotten with the program, we discovered it would be the point tonight. Colorful posters all over the walls proclaimed in an enthusiastic cherry-red 1950’s font, “Elvis Presley Karaoke Contest 7:30pm!” To go along with the posters, the bluesy, mournful strains of “Heartbreak Hotel” greeted us over the sound system.

“Oh
man
,” Jude hooted, packing anticipation, amusement, and alarm into one exclamation as she dragged me to an unoccupied booth near where several of our teammates had gathered. “It’s August 16th, isn’t it? Didn’t Elvis die today or something? This ought to be fun.”

“Where ‘fun’ is defined as ‘Oh my God why are they making us watch this?’” Making a face, I slumped into my side of the booth, but waved to the others at the nearby table as I did. Debate over the contest was already in full swing, with Alex the developer and Sanjit and Marshall, the other two testers on our team, playfully arguing who was going to claim what song.

“Thus speaks a woman who is not yet drunk enough to get the point,” Jude loftily intoned before giving me a slap on the shoulder and pivoting to make a beeline for the bar. “Namely, comedy! Hold that thought while I acquire appropriate medication for your humor impairment.” To our teammates, she yelled as she went, “I call dibs on ‘Hound Dog’!”

Moments later the last three members of the team showed up, and with that the ship party got underway.

We ordered food and drinks and started plowing through the bowls of pretzels and chips the staff kept bringing to us. A few of us vanished into the server room, bolstered by beer for an evening of blowing one another to virtual smithereens; the rest opted to stay in the main section of the bar, alternating between appetizers, conversation, darts, and pool until everyone’s food arrived or the contest began, whichever came first.

Content to take it easy at my booth, I nibbled pretzels and sipped at the strawberry daiquiri Jude had brought me. The rum soaked down through my chest and began to untangle the hard ball of tension I’d been carrying around within me all day; at the feel of it I finally began to relax. Friends and coworkers around me celebrating a job we’d done well. Music that wasn’t half-bad, I had to admit to myself. Simple, uncomplicated food and drink. And not a single sign of anything out of the ordinary anywhere in the bar.

Maybe, just maybe, the night was looking up.

Around seven the staff started passing out lists of song titles the Penguin’s karaoke system had on disc and taking the names of those on our team as well as the rest of the patrons bold enough, silly enough, or drunk enough to sign up for the contest. As advertised, around seven-thirty the contest commenced.

A few played it straight, opting merely to sing with a range of skill from painfully inept to decent ability to carry a tune. Everyone else, though, went along with Jude’s interpretation of how to handle the situation: with as much comedy as possible. Jude herself did not actually know the words to “Hound Dog” aside from the first line of the chorus, and did not care. She unrepentantly mangled every other line and made up for it by dramatically waggling her short, thick legs, slicing the air with fake karate chops, and concluding by pinning the audience with a smoldering stare and a curl of her upper lip, along with the obligatory drawled “Thank you very much.”

Two young men in drag queen regalia warbled out “Love Me Tender” in perfect harmony, taking turns pretending to swoon at one another as they sang. When they finished, one grabbed the other in his arms, dipped him over, and ardently smooched him to amused and delighted applause.

A tall, muscular girl whose black leather biker vest, tattooed biceps, and lemon-yellow Mohawk were as far from the Elvis look as you could possibly get popped out of the server room long enough to jump up and take her turn. Her song of choice was “Don’t”, and not only did her smoky contralto come the closest so far that evening to Mr. Presley’s baritone, her delivery nailed him dead on. So did the circuit she made of all the tables closest to the little stage, as she leaned over to serenade everyone within range with a blithe disregard for their age or gender. She even whipped a white scarf from around her neck and ceremoniously handed it to a hysterically giggling Jude, who did her part in return by clutching it to her bosom and squealing in mock ecstasy.

Alex got gales of laughter and a standing ovation from every Star Trek fan in the room when he roared out “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in flawless Klingon, complete with thumping his chest, shaking his fist in the air, and grimacing fiercely out at the bar at large. When he returned to the table everyone showered him in praise and offered to buy him drinks for the rest of the evening, while he grinned boyishly and pronounced in serene satisfaction that he’d been waiting for months for a chance to do that.