Foul is Fair (20 page)

She gave Lani a brief hug, then sat down next to Justin and let Lani get back to work on her Firefly-inspired spaceship mechanic costume. Megan was well aware that the costume pieces Lani hadn't been able to find second-hand had been hand stitched over the course of the week. Her red cape and picnic basket were feeling a little inadequate, but she'd had other channels for her artistic leanings this week. Megan didn't do nearly so much with so little time as Lani did. "How are you adjusting?" she finally asked Justin.

"Well enough. They've been trying to get me ready for school, but I'm uncertain how quickly that will proceed. There's no lack of things to do, though. Especially while we try to save as much of the final crop as possible."

"Final crop? So you've been introduced to the pumpkin mausoleum?"

He grinned at the designation for Mrs. Kahale's garden. "There are some survivors. I think the radishes may be a lost cause, though. Perhaps they would be best left in their graves."

"Not for lack of effort."

"Certainly not. She puts in plenty of time. I'm just not quite certain how to tell her that she's a terrible gardener."

"I think she'd be the first to agree with you," Lani said, taking a break in her preparations, "It doesn't really matter. That's not the point. It relaxes her, gives her something to do when not at work, and, well, we eat the survivors, so there's no witnesses."

Megan laughed. "So what's it going to be this year when it gets too cold to salvage anything else from the killing fields?"

"I don't know yet. She's mentioned poetry. She might try to spend more time battling the spinning wheel. Or maybe the pottery wheel. Or getting the two confused and making a mess."

Justin looked back and forth between them quizzically.

"Have you been down into the basement?"

"With the wheel and full furnace and all?" he asked.

"Ah, good. So you did find the island of misfit vases. Two of those are from when Lani and I were really little. The others... yeah, that's Mrs. K.”

"I'm not sure I understand. She seems so happy with these things, but they all turn out so badly?"

Lani grinned. "She's exceedingly happy to be gardening, or playing with her pottery wheel, or baking... fortunately, the 14th Century seems to have produced iron stomachs.”

“Chocolate... is weird,” Justin said simply.

“By most people's standards, you still haven't eaten chocolate yet. But anyway, enjoying her collection is the whole point. Mom works hard. She's a very good office manager. It's a nice, boring break away from living with a faerie and two half-faeries. When she gets home, she can indulge in something fun, and no one, most especially herself, cares if she's any good at it."

"Collection?” Justin asked. “There's collected sickly plants and collected malformed pottery...”

"And you haven't seen her photography or heard her poetry. You weren't around when she accidentally shaped the rock garden into an obscene gesture. Mom collects hobbies.”

Justin still looked confused, but nodded his agreement. "I will do what I can to help save some of the gardening victims, then."

"We'll all be glad for the help. I couldn't help but notice you seemed to know your way around growing things in general."

"I helped some with that at home, yes. Along with a lot of whatever else was needed. Tending the dogs and horses, cleaning boots and armor, maintaining weapons, and general repairs. Though I will admit, your house is definitely not in need of any general repairs."

"Lack of dogs and horses too. Don't mention those to Mack. Mom only recently convinced him that cowboy-telephone-line-repairman as a costume might be a little too complex for most people to recognize what he was. Thank goodness for LEGOs."

"And you're getting dressed up even though we're going to the Dance instead of out to a party or something?" Megan asked Lani.

"It doesn't matter what costume I wore, I'd still stand out a lot less than most things at the Dance. And I enjoy it. I still think Justin's knight costume ought to win most accurate, though."

"I'm not a knight yet," Justin replied, "and may never be. I'm definitely taking the armor back to Faerie, though."

"I'm guessing the Kahales were able to patch it up and replace the shield?”

Lani looked at Megan like she was crazy. "Patch? We upgraded it. And his new shield is lighter and twice as durable." Justin nodded his agreement.

"Hey, even better. I'm just glad the armor did its job before. Some of those fights could have been a lot worse."

Justin rolled his recently dislocated shoulder, as if to make sure it worked properly after the injuries. Thankfully, between time and the bits of Megan's healing, it seemed to be almost fully recovered. "I think they were bad enough."

"We'll try for less bad this time, yeah. No more golems and no more explosions." Megan wished she could promise more than that, but it was a good place to start.

"The last I can't promise. I put the sword in the stone. I should try to recover it for you."

"That didn't exactly go well last time. So glad you didn't end up with third-degree burns from the fire or something.”

Justin shrugged. “It didn't hurt.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, Faerie's weird sometimes about what doesn't hurt.” Megan remembered the thorn-vine that had scratched and the briarmail that hadn't.

Lani glanced at the sword sheath. "Sometimes. Or there may just be something about the sword and its sheath that protects the bearer. That is pretty intense flame close up."

"Okay, so maybe there's something to that. It's an awfully big risk, though. It's going to be guarded, even if you can stand the fire."

That part, no one had an answer for. The idea was good, but Megan couldn't think of any way to deal with whoever Orlaith had on watch, and despite the week to talk, the others hadn't come up with anything.

"The Count says that haunted-house grapes don't taste anything remotely like eyeballs," Ashling said, instead of hello, as they landed on the windowsill.

Megan didn't bother to ask where any of that line of comparison came from. From the moment she went to the window to greet them, she was far too captivated by the appearance of Halloween. With the light starting to dim, what lights there were became more obvious, the fog machine of the people next door was turned on, and the clashing decorations all over the neighborhood were somehow just perfect. The mix of ghostly noises, canned screams, and maniacal laughter audible now that the window was open didn't hurt either. She was sure it was just going to be even louder and more perfect tomorrow.

Her reverie was only broken when Lani put a hand on her shoulder. "So, you haven't gotten into your bag yet. What are you going as this year?"

“Eh, I brought my Red Riding Hood cape from last year.”

“But you're usually so into dressing up."

"Sure, but there didn't seem to be a lot of point this year. I'm not sure I want any of the candy they'd hand out in Faerie."

"This is the perfect time to dress up," Ashling chimed in.

"I kind of have to agree with her," Lani said. "Weird as that sounds. We could use a little distraction. And this isn't really like you."

Megan blinked, mind going back through some of her old costumes—all homemade, since she was small, and often as much art project as disguise. There was something that felt right about the comment. She just wasn't placing it. "Maybe. I'll have to think about it," She draped the red cape over her shoulders and secured it, pulling the hood up while she pondered. Then, glancing down at the things she'd brought, she dug into the bag again. "But I kind of want to think to music."

Chapter 33: Inspiration

“That's one of your Mom's albums?”

“Yeah... have you heard it before? Cassia apparently has.”

“Cassia was a grown woman obsessed with the local music scene before we were born. No, I've never seen it. Mom apparently spent the '90s into five kinds of folk music. That's when she added the ukulele to the collection.”

“Figures. Well, I'm all for not being the last one to know what my mom used to sound like. Do you mind?” Since no one minded, Megan put the CD in—but skipped the first track. She hadn't heard the rest, but was pretty sure, from the titles, none of the others had much to do with describing pregnancy complications in way too much detail.

The next song started out a lot differently. Instead of the brooding, heavy guitars in minor key behind the off-kilter poetry, this one opened into a walking baseline. It was like something out of the blues, providing a structure everything else built on as the drums kicked in, then the lead guitar. The lyrics started out almost spoken-word, her mother's voice coming across as intense, but steady and controlled. Megan glanced at the back of the CD. The second track was ‘Good Fences (Make Me Crazy).’ As she did, the refrain hit, and the song went into full-voiced rock, except for that baseline. Nice and steady, a good fence for all the rock craziness and suddenly melodic screaming.

When the song finally wound to a close, Lani was just staring at the speakers. "Wow... your mother had some kind of voice. That was amazing. What's next?"

Megan glanced at the case again. "Next one, uhm, 'Monster. Peace. Theater.'" She took the words slow, enunciating each as they were written. Yet again, everything shifted. The instrumentals weaved in and out, as her mother sang about late nineties international events. Megan didn't follow all of the references, and some of the lyrics may have not been intended as entirely literal. Regardless, no one was in any hurry to stop the music, and Megan felt she was meeting whole new sides to her mother with each song.

It got even more personal when she first heard her mother and father interacting. The next song was 'Psych Ward Composition,' with her mother singing the lead. While she sang, the bass was steady, just picking up bit by bit as the song went on. Then, her father took every other verse, providing the rich, dark voices in the head of the fictive 'I' of the song—or perhaps not so fictive. He remained smooth, sounding entirely reasonable despite increasingly erratic suggestions, while the lead's vocals and the accompanying bassline became more and more strained. Only Ashling seemed unperturbed by the song, just swaying and occasionally dancing along to the tune, especially Riocard's parts.

Now, both Megan and Lani were staring at the speakers, a bit wide-eyed. As the song wound down, they exchanged a glance.

"That was intense," Lani offered, pausing the music.

"That might have been the creepiest duet ever," Megan agreed. "They were really, really good. I think this next song might be a little... uhm, lighter, though."

"What's this one?"

Megan showed her the back cover. "’Yet Another Song About Jumping.’"

"That sounds promising. Like something you can dance to, finally," Lani agreed, Ashling notwithstanding. She turned the music back on.

The next song was more or less what it advertised. Amidst making fun of a lot of light, fluffy pop music in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, the song turned out to be not just danceable, but enthusiastically so. Halfway through the song, Megan grabbed for Justin's hand—he had been sitting quietly confused throughout the process of listening to what he had to simply trust was music—and pulled him into the bouncing and jumping around. It took a little bit, but by the time the long song was winding down, he seemed much more relaxed, and even seemed to be enjoying jumping around and dancing with the girls.

If anything, Ashling was even more enthusiastic, hitching a ride from the Count to the top of the speakers so she wouldn't be underfoot while the humans were jumping, then throwing herself into the dance with total abandon—almost falling off several times—while the Count just watched with as bemused an expression as a beak allowed for.

As she danced and let herself relax, more and more of the commentary through the day started to play through Megan's mind. The more she let go of the tension of the week, the more readily ideas came. Nothing was concrete yet, but a plan began to form.

The Jumping song trailed off, then the band opened into “Why Is It Monday?” What struck Megan was how much trouble she had picturing her mother having ever gotten up to the wild weekends that made waking up and going back to normal life so difficult in the song's lament. Listening to what the song expressed as horrors, she was pretty sure her early-twenties mother wouldn't like her current self very much. Of course, thinking of the green pills, Megan admitted it was hard to say whether her mother currently did like herself much.

At the same time, she could hear shades of the same person and personality in the lyrics. She opened up the case, checking through the credits. She somehow wasn't surprised to see her mother's name listed repeatedly. She wrote or helped write almost every song. She played the bass. She sang. She did the cover art photos. She did a lot of the arrangement and sound engineering. Megan considered that, along with the lyrics and what she knew of some of her mother's old contacts. It seemed that even in the days her mother partied hard enough to catch the attention of a faerie king, she was still a hard worker. It was just that, along the way, the partying had disappeared.

When the song ended, she borrowed the remote from Lani, pausing, and then shifting backwards.