The Wild Ways (18 page)

Read The Wild Ways Online

Authors: Tanya Huff

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Epic

BOOK: The Wild Ways
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“As you can see,” Mark announced from the middle of the bench seat as Tim eased the van onto the Mabou causeway behind an enormous trailer with Massachusetts plates, “we’re not talking a major metropolitan area. Not even for the island. Not much more than four hundred people call this little piece of maritime paradise home, but it’s big-time Gaelic around here, Chuck. Big-time Gaelic. Lots of music lovers. Four-day ceilidh back in July where we kicked ass in a major sort of way even though it wasn’t one of the Samhradh Ceol stages so, Christ, I hope we didn’t spend it all there. Thank God we’re not playing until after six—it’s going to be hotter than Tim’s ass today.”
Shoved up against the passenger window, Charlie ducked as he pulled an elastic from his wrist and tied his hair up high off the back of his neck, nearly elbowing her in the ear and exposing the darker circles under the arms of his
world’s greatest grandma
T-shirt.
“And,” he continued, the hand back on Tim’s thigh doing nothing to keep him from pushing her even farther into the door as they turned left onto the harbor road, “there’s ceilidhs every Tuesday at the community center plus a theater slash performing arts center plus a pub owned by the Rankins, so you know what that means.”
“A local crowd who knows what it’s listening to,” Charlie grunted, shoving him back upright. This might be her first run around this particular festival circuit, but some things were a given; an enthusiastic reaction from a crowd of tourists who couldn’t tell the “Gay Gordons” from a “Dashing White Sergeant” could influence where the nine unknown judges placed their points.
Just past Larche Way, Tim turned left again into the gravel road that led down to the
Rest and be Thankful Cottages, Campground, and Trailer Sites.
Charlie reached past Mark and poked Tim in the bare shoulder. “We’re in number ten.”
“Number ten?” Mark repeated, dipping his head and staring at her over the edge of his sunglasses. “Seriously?”
“That’s what she said when I called.” Charlie barely waited until Tim stopped in front of a large clapboard building with a wraparound porch and a view of the water before unbuckling her seat belt and getting out of the van. “You were right,” she called into the car at Bo as Shelly pulled up beside them.
Bo grinned as he got out and stretched. “Come on, it was less than twenty minutes? You got off easy. Last summer, Dundee to Dingwall, he didn’t shut up once.”
“We’re in number ten.” Shelly rubbed a can of soda over her stomach as she came around the front of the car. “That’s . . .”
“I told you I made reservations the moment I heard!” Mark crowed from the porch.
Beer cooler balanced on his shoulder, Tim followed him inside.
Case in hand, Bo had a foot on the stone steps when a burst of fiddle music stopped him cold. When a second fiddle answered the first, he turned and ran for the next cottage.
“Bo?”
He half turned and waved. “They just stuffed ‘Pretty Peggy’ into freakin’ Mendelssohn!”
“That sounds kinky,” Charlie said as he disappeared.
“Fiddlers,” Shelly observed as though that was explanation enough. She popped open the can of soda and took a long drink. “The cottages are assigned to the bands on a first-come, first-served basis. Call early: enjoy two bedrooms, a large kitchen/living room, a view of the water from the wraparound porch, and a shower big enough to share with friends. Call late and cram the band into one rustic room with a shower slightly less wide than my shoulders that’ll try to electrocute you if you touch the showerhead while wet. Aston licked it on a dare last summer, nearly melted his fillings.”
“Aston is an idiot.”
“I’m not arguing, but that’s not my point.” Shelly waved the can at number ten. “The universe doesn’t like anyone this much. What did you do?”
Charlie shrugged, bumped her shoulder into Shelly’s, and quickly traced a small charm on the small of the other woman’s back, her fingertip skating over fine hairs and sweat slick skin. “I just got lucky.”
“Okay, then.”
In the next cottage, the fiddles slid out of Mendelssohn and into something wilder that lifted the hair off the back of Charlie’s neck.
 
 
 
The shower worked off a flash heater, so everyone got hot water. Charlie would’ve charmed it but was just as glad she didn’t have to. Gales had better luck with sand in places sand shouldn’t go than most people but salt water was salt water and she felt significantly better scrubbed and shampooed.
By the time she emerged, wearing clean shorts over her bathing suit, Shelly had flaked out on one of the twin beds in the room they’d claimed up under the eaves and Mark and Tim were arguing over whose turn it was to make lunch. Charlie could no longer hear music coming from the cottage next door—although she
could
hear music coming from all over the property, not only from the cottages but also the crowded campground and the slightly less crowded trailer park. Bagpipes, accordions, guitars, banjos, drums, a lone trumpet, and through and around them all, the fiddlers, pulling the friendlier tunes together and building walls of sound to keep the antagonistic apart. Music was the whole point of the weekend and the ten bands in the Samhradh Ceol Feill only a small part of a much larger whole.
Heading out to catch a breeze on the porch, Charlie paused, one hand flat against the wooden frame of the screen door. Head cocked, she sifted through the sounds of a hundred or so people settling in, touched the bit of melody that had caught her attention, then lost it again as one of the pipers started up a medley of television theme songs.
“Hey! ‘Meet the Flintstones!’” Mark pushed past her, grabbing his bodhran out of the van, closely followed by Tim who scooped up the smallest of his three accordions
“There are times,” Charlie sighed stepping out onto the porch, “when playing cowboy covers in Fort McMurray looks like it might have been the better choice.”
The music she’d almost heard had been passionate and unrestrained. She couldn’t have held it, but she could have laid down a harmony that would have led her along new paths through the wild ways. Paths drenched in salt spray and slippery with . . . well, with that green crap that grew along the rocks down by the shore. She had no idea what it was called.
Mark and Tim had left the van’s side door open, so she wandered down and slid her guitar off the stacked drum kit. With half a mind to join the jam—and given that they’d segued into a rousing rendition of the old
Anima-niacs
theme, half a mind seemed to be what was required for this particular jam—she turned and caught sight of Bo and a young woman by the water’s edge. Her long dark hair had been pulled back into a haphazard ponytail and in spite of the heat she wore a sweater, the sleeves stretched down over her hands. Even at a distance, she was visibly upset and Bo looked lost. Body language had essentially erected a neon sign over his head saying
HELP ME!
“So, do I help?” Charlie wondered.
As she watched, the young woman threw herself into Bo’s arms. When he caught her, the edges of the sound she made lifted the hair off the back of Charlie’s neck.
“I heard them at night.Wailing.”
Hurrying toward the water, Charlie thought she heard the music again. Then realized it was the cry of a gull. The waves on the shore. As she set foot on the beach, she saw three women, long dark hair whipped about by the wind, approaching from the other direction. All three were dressed for the heat; one wore an orange muslin skirt and a bathing-suit top, the other two were in shorts and tanks.
The tallest of the three looked familiar, Charlie had seen her in the audience at Port Hood and then on another bit of beach in the moonlight. As they drew closer, her eyes were black from lid to lid.
Then she blinked and they were merely dark eyes just a little too large for her face surrounded by long, thick lashes under a sable arc of brow and over a generous curve of mouth. She was the most beautiful woman Charlie had ever seen.
Except, of course, that she wasn’t a woman at all. Well, a woman, yes, all three of them were women—all four of them Charlie amended, glancing over at the girl weeping in Bo’s arms—but they weren’t Human women.
It was hard to breathe. The music filled every space in Charlie’s chest, leaving no room for anything as mundane as oxygen, barely leaving her heart room to beat. The tune sounded like “Mary’s Fancy,” a reel in A, played on a single fiddle. “Am I the only one who can hear that?”
The three women looked confused.
It was probably someone playing up in the campsites. “Never mind.”
The other two women held back, their eyes locked on Charlie’s face, but
she
stepped forward, graceful in spite of the way her bare feet sank into the sand.
“I know what you are, Wild One,” she said after a long moment.
Charlie sighed. “You’re completely straight, aren’t you?”
“Tanis, baby . . .” Bo sounded a short hop from hysteria himself. “. . . please stop crying.”
 
“All right, Shelly’s out until I wake her.” The weight of accumulated regard stopped Charlie three steps from the bottom of the stairs. Bo and Tanis staring up at her from the big armchair, Morag and Aisling, Tanis’ sisters, sitting on the sofa on either side of Eineen who looked just as gorgeous inside as she had on the beach. She had broad swimmer’s shoulders and lithe, smoothly muscled arms. Her breasts were small and perfectly formed under the dark purple tank top, without a bra to . . .
“Charlie?”
“Right. What?”
Bo rolled his eyes. “Shelly?”
“Shelly? Oh, right.” She spread her hands. “It’s just a charm. It’s perfectly harmless.”
“A charm?” Tightening his grip on Tanis, Bo frowned up at her. “What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means she believes her decisions take precedent over Shelly’s choices.”
“Yes, I do.” Charlie smiled at Morag, continued descending the stairs, and dropped into the old padded rocker, draping one leg over the arm. “And, in this instance, so do you, so let’s skip the part where you try to set me up as one of the bad guys and move onto the part where we try to get Tanis’ skin back.”
The silence in the room was so complete Charlie could hear the sand falling off her bare foot as it whispered against the pine floor.
Bo inhaled noisily and said, “Okay, I swear I didn’t say anything.”
Eineen raised a slender hand and pushed dark hair back off her face. “It would be easier without him.”
“Probably,” Charlie agreed—as much because she actually did agree as because Eineen had said it. “I can . . .”
“No!” Tanis lifted her face from Bo’s chest and twisted just far enough to glare around the room. “I need him! I want him here. I’ll speak for his discretion.”
“
You
are not thinking clearly and as long as you are not thinking clearly, you cannot guarantee the behavior of your man.” Eineen turned to Charlie. “Can you speak for him?”
“Me?”
“You play with him. A band is a family of a sort.”
“Of a sort,” Charlie agreed, “but we’ve only known each other since Wednesday.”
“It’s not like you need a lot of time,” Aisling pointed out.

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