The Wild Harmonic Read online

  The kick drum pounds through the floor and resonates up my spine in an unmistakable cue. It appears that Raúl is just going to close us out with a drum solo. Not at all the way we rehearsed the set, but it seems like a great spontaneous idea, and the crowd is digging it. So I let my solo fade, and Rowan is suddenly appearing from the backstage shadows—unseen by the throng that is now transfixed by Raúl—and silently leading me by the arm back into the wings. The mere notion that his hands are on me at last makes me giddy beyond description. He wordlessly slips a pair of shades on me. Oh, my, I’m a celebrity now … I lean my bass against one of the equipment cases and follow like an obedient little lamb.

  The urge to reach out and stroke his short-cropped black hair suddenly overtakes me, to trace my fingertip along that fetching widow’s peak of his. I can barely bring myself to look him in the eye for fear that I would drown in the dark intensity of his gaze. What would it be like to bury my nose in the hollow of his throat and breathe in his scent? Would he taste spicy, like his blended heritage—of cayenne and gumbo and chilies and cinnamon? Would he mind how lunar-white my skin might appear against the café au lait hue of his own?

  He leads me down the corridor toward the back exit. The music is still singing in my blood, and I’m savoring the feel of Rowan’s fingers on my arm. The sensation of the tiniest bit of his skin against my own is electrifying, and his body feels turbocharged with energy, which seems to flow into me through his firm grip. My tongue lolls out of the side of my mouth in pleasure. In spite of my dizziness, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol tonight (although I had been planning on a few glasses of celebratory post-gig wine). Another power surge from Rowan’s touch, and I start laughing deliriously again.

  We’re in the employee parking lot. The whole area seems oddly deserted, as if invisible to everyone but us.

  “What the hell was that just now?”

  I’ve never heard him raise his voice before. “Rowan …” I mumble weakly.

  “I don’t have much time. Tell me what’s going on with you. You need to be honest with me if we’re going to keep working together like this!”

  “Rowan … I need … to shpeak wif you ….” I can’t even get the words out. The moon is so bright that even through the shades, the parking lot nearly looks like the weirdly shadowed afternoon of a solar eclipse.

  “I’m not asking you again. Come clean this instant, or I’m leaving right now.”

  Now that the moment I’ve been equally fearing and wanting is staring me in the face, a surreal wave of calm washes over me. Instinct steers me into something that is neither surrender nor risky move. This is the proverbial straw, the tipping point, and it’s now or never.

  “Rowan!” I can feel his body heat, breathe in his richly alluring scent, and all resistance flees into the night. Mustering up all of my courage, I take a huge, deep breath until my lungs creak. The feeling of my chest expanding and my spine stretching means that there is no turning back now. In one frantic moment, I’ve stripped off my clothes and dropped to all fours. My hands are padded before they even hit the ground, with a click of claws on the pavement. My pale coat shines white in the moonlight.

  And there he is beside me … our noses touching, tails wagging. I rear up onto my hind legs in utter joy. He licks my muzzle.

  And then the others appear. Big, gray Teddy with his powerful furry jaw. Raúl with his mottled coat and huge rounded ears, closer in appearance to an African wild dog, his shining white teeth parted in a lupine grin. Soft, slender Sylvia, still wearing that damned wimple held in place by her pointed ears, most likely intended to ease any shock I might feel over this huge revelation. “We thought you’d never come out of the den!” she snorts thickly through her long canine mouth. The words are garbled, but the message is clear. I must be giving her a look, because she continues, “I’m sorry! I was sworn to secrecy, and you know how I can keep a secret! You had to figure it out for yourself.”

  My mind reels with incredulity. How long have they known that I was lycan? Why did it never occur to me that there might be a reason for my connection to Sylvia, Teddy, and Raúl beyond music and friendship? Have I really been that self-absorbed all this time? Or so myopic in my feelings for Rowan that I had a nose for only him? Did I really believe that by burying myself in my music career I could stall my fear and denial about my true nature forever? How did the others find the courage to reveal themselves to each other? Which of them were born into it, and which ones were bitten? I want to understand, almost as badly as I want to be understood at long last. I have so much to learn from this newfound pack of mine.

  The outside humidity makes my nose sweat, and the stench of human agenda surrounding the club is no picnic, but in my joy and relief I couldn’t care less at the moment. Common sense keeps me from howling to the world, I belong somewhere at last! I fix my gaze on Rowan, his dark widow’s peak markings framing his intelligent eyes—now golden, but every bit as smoldering. He smells spicy and clean-of musk, passion, and superhuman self-control. Someday, hopefully, when we’re laughing over a glass of wine in his den, or even—fingers crossed!—lying in bed together, I’ll tell him, “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted you to sniff my butt!” But now is not the time for joking. And I’m not going to try to seduce him tonight. It’s that time of a big, swollen full moon in the sky, and it’s time to gather together in a different kind of intimacy. I look around, but there’s still no one else in sight.

  We all close in together and raise our voices. Packed tightly and banded together, a single unit

  celebrating its uniqueness. Humans would call it noise, or cacophony, or “the crap young people are listening to these days.” But they can’t hear what we can: the subtle beating between notes, the intricate countermelodies, the descant, the way that multiple melodies weave around each other so expressively. It’s a frequency that no one else can hear, save others of our kind.

  There’s no way we could be tracking this in a studio. It would never sound this good on a recording, not even done with state of the art equipment. We are among a very small few who can hear it anyway. All we can do is live in the moment and be grateful that there will be more nights like this. This is our secret, and we will leave no tracks. We are all just a bunch of half-human misfits come together, creating a sound. It’s who we are …

  CHAPTER

  2

  CADENZA

  Journal entry, March 15th: What does it mean to be a werewolf musician? Most days I really strive to be ahead of my game, playing to the best of my ability, always learning, always growing, and feeling the music. Other days I have to suppress the urge to tear people’s throats out. In short, this makes me no different from any other kind of musician.

  I’m not all here. My body is on autopilot, instinctually perusing the upscale boutiques on Magazine Street, but my mind has been elsewhere since that life-changing gig. And Sylvia’s briefing over the phone this morning has given me even more to wrap my head around.

  There is a definite ebb to the erstwhile frenetic energy all over the city now that Lent is finally in full swing. I don’t follow the custom like my clerical pack-sister Sylvia does, but the relief of Mardi Gras stressors being over is enough to make me want to embrace it. Multicolored strands of rogue plastic beads are still caught in the trees lining the streets, generous offerings that never quite made it from the floats to the hands of parade goers. I feel a smile creep over my face as the warming weather caresses my bare arms. As always on days I don’t have to be on stage, a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers are my seasonal coat. My tarnished yellow hair is pulled back in an unceremonious ponytail, although my personal code forbids me to go out in public without my ritual mask of heavy black lines around my eyes. I like to think of it as a tiny trademark disguise that gives me power, like a Superman cape or a Lone Ranger mask.

  “Birch!” a boisterous male voice calls out. “Heyyyyyy, Birch! Where y’at, dawlin’? You were great the other night! How ya been?” In my line of work
it’s not at all sordid to hear a total stranger, like this man in a Hubig’s Pies t-shirt, tell me how great I was last night. Judging by the matching shirt the woman with him is wearing—his mate, I can smell—I can only guess that they are tourists. They are obviously trying to get the hang of some of our local vernacular, and I wonder if they know how to pronounce the name of the city. Nobody around here really says “Noo Or-LEENZ,” but there are endless songs about our town, and nothing good rhymes with the way it’s really pronounced, “Noo OR-lins.”

  The man’s façade of over-familiarity makes me stiffen. I am always introduced onstage by my real name, “Birch MacKinlay,” but my close friends call me by my childhood nickname “Buzz”. An instinctual reflex turns on my automatic smile. These well-meaning people obviously don’t know me, of course, but I always want to be gracious, albeit guarded. I nod and exchange pleasantries with the couple, get a whiff of their enthusiasm, and move on. Finding my cognitive bookmark, my train of thoughts resumes rocking on its tracks in time to my footsteps. As the memories of last night flood back, butterflies dance in my stomach and a ridiculous grin smears itself across my face. I’m not a freak! There are others like me! Not only that, but they are people I care for …

  Too often I have taken this city for granted, but now my reawakened senses allow me to see it through a different lens. In this town, strangers chat like old friends. Brass bands, jazz funerals, and second line parades are part of everyday life. I spend much of my time playing for carnival balls and eccentric pub crawls.

  Icons range from Satchmo and Fats Domino to salt of the earth heroes like Mister Okra—the last of a dying breed of people who drives through the Marigny neighborhoods selling produce from his truck, announcing his wares with a bullhorn in the old tradition of street criers. And of course there’s the late Ruthie the Duck Lady, a famous schizophrenic woman who traversed the French Quarter on roller skates and always had live ducks trailing after her.

  And the Mardi Gras Indians are another element that is difficult to describe to the outside world. They have their longstanding traditions that span many generations of Big Chiefs and Big Queens, elaborate handmade costumes, jagged edge tambourine rhythms, Wild Men, spy-boys, flag boys, signals, and Creole patois. African tribes meet First Nation tribes, blended beings all.

  So why wouldn’t this be a place for lycanthropy as well? Like the Mardi Gras Indians, lycanthropy isn’t a mantle that any person can just take up. It just happens to you, and you can either walk away from it or celebrate it.

  So many labels have been slapped on me over the years: diva, monster, angel, prize, and white trash whore. I have drifted between shores of identity, an uprooted tree trying to blindly navigate its way through the floodwaters. And now I have been swept onto the shore of the Promised Land in a way that no street preacher could have ever foreseen.

  This transformation. I am still incredulous that it happened in front of others, let alone four people I love. I had never let a soul know until now, and shame had burned up most of my energy trying to stifle my dual nature. Even before I had any clue that I would someday become a werewolf, I was simply different. And anyone who has ever been different knows that that is a near death sentence in school.

  I don’t know what I would have done without Sylvia back then. She was a misfit redhead with her nose constantly in a book, and I was a restless tomboy with complete disdain for authority and the inability to blend in. Luckily Sylvia lived two blocks away from me and was quick to soothe me, helping me to transform my frustration into humor as we explored the most ridiculous ‘what if’ scenarios in our heads—usually pitting our nemeses against each other in imaginary cage wars. She was always immersed in her piano lessons, yet always had time for me whenever I showed up at her house, bass in hand—the oboe that my folks thought I should learn just wasn’t satisfying to me. She was ready for us to jam out on “Light My Fire” or any number of songs over which we could bond.

  I wish I’d known that we were both born lycans. We were, after all, the ones who spent our teenage years secretly swapping horror novels, playing “Light as a Feather,” and sitting up all night with Mountain Dew and the Ouija board in her family’s game room. My parents were always so preachy about hellfire and damnation, and I didn’t trust many of the other girls enough to let my animalistic curiosity slip to them.

  I had been devastated when Sylvia had suddenly disappeared with her family, not knowing that her entire household was lycan and about to get its cover blown. And then, with no other friends, the bullying started. It was that time when cruelty at school was an epidemic for which there was no cure. There wasn’t even an official name to call attention to the issue of this merciless persecution, and the teachers neither cared nor intervened. The other kids could not smell it on me, but they knew that I was somehow different, which is a pre-teen death sentence. The bullies and their disciples might have spared a girl with a physical disability, but an able-bodied kid was fair game for getting punched, tripped, taunted, and—worst of all—labeled. I always felt a fire of rage in my belly, but I would always freeze for fear of what I might actually do if I unleashed it.

  I had no outlet. So nearly every day I would run through the woods in which we used to play, screaming out my despair. If I could not preserve my innocence, I was going to slaughter it as brutally as possible—before someone or something else could beat me to it. I wanted to watch it die, wanted it to beg for mercy so that I could show it none, the way none was shown to me. But of course this was impossible, because my innocence was already gone. So I took out my beastly anger on my surroundings. The trees and ferns, the paths and creatures, the things I had loved so were now my targets. Anything in my way was slashed, torn, and mangled on my rampages. And then one day, there no turning back, and I realized exactly how different I was.

  As my body made its transition to adolescence, I seemed to have inherited a curse—or was it a blessing? In recurring dreams I received visitations from shadowy entities, enticing and frightening. Their silky voices were more tangible than audible: “Your time has come. Arise and hunt your destiny.” Wolf-shaped with diamond bright eyes, these were the most perfect creatures I had ever seen, and I wanted more than anything to be accepted by them. After fighting this growing instinct for years, it was a relief to finally accept this lycan life, the only thing that made me feel protected and powerful.

  The option to fight it never entered my mind.

  I received some sort of warning before my first complete metamorphosis, although I hadn’t figured it out until many years later. The last time I had seen my grandmother was during a trip back to Scotland. Before she died, she was trying to tell me something: “You’re alikened to … alikened to …” Alikened to what? I’d wondered for years. It wasn’t until my first transformation that I realized she’d been saying, “You’re a lycan, too.”

  The only thing that prevented my savagery from ruling me was my first bass guitar. My rants in the woods subsided as I immersed myself in its healing low tones. And so began my dedication to this safe haven of music, and my instrument became my first real shield. Learning some bass lines and their foundational structure became the path to tame the destructive flame within, to soothe the beast of me, and to hide it during full moon phases. No matter what anyone said or did at school, it no longer mattered. The monster that was trying to surface within me went back to its lair, and I found some kids my age to play with in a little garage band. At last I was able to connect with other people, and the nightmare was over for a spell.

  My trials had taught me to blend in with my surroundings. They showed me that it was possible for a she-wolf to get through college, play gigs, cultivate friendships, and keep her wildness stifled during the full moon. I had managed to land a lucrative gig, playing bass with the world-famous bluesman Slackjaw Harrison, which suddenly put me in the best of clubs and festivals all over the world. I had even dated.

  I shouldn’t have worried about my wolfishness being expose
d to my suitors, for in dating who wants to see the true person anyway? They only saw a gal with a good gig. Some of the young bucks just wanted to be bought lavish gifts, some betrayed me, and some wanted to be seen with me but lacked interest in getting to know me. So when Calvin O’Quinn came along, with his keen attention to my playing and his acceptance of my wild nature, I ignored the warnings my instinct was screaming.

  I wonder if my lycan life was the only thing that allowed me to survive my former relationship with Cal, or if my preternatural senses caused me to be more deeply entangled with him. He tasted of money and power, both of which had intrigued me, for I had never known these things. He had a penetrating stare that could draw me in and hypnotize prey. At close range he could choke me singlehandedly, and from afar he could suffocate my spirit.

  I paid dearly for the boost he gave my career. His input included coercion into tanning beds and controlled food portions. I began to get weaker, and his power grew. I recall my promo photo from several years ago. I looked as close to beautiful as I would ever be, but in truth I was starving.

  Perhaps werewolves aren’t inherently vicious. Perhaps most of us simply go mad from being given this gift that is taboo to use, like a beautiful and deadly weapon that is illegal to own.

  I finally reached the point where my raw instinct took over, and one day I fought back. He was grabbing me by the face so hard that my back teeth were cutting into the insides of my cheeks. I lashed out and bit him on the hand. A scrap of his skin, dry and oddly patterned, came off in my mouth. We both stared at the scrap before he turned on his heel and disappeared from my apartment so instantaneously, I could have sworn he had vanished into thin air. And just like that, I saw him no more. Should I have fought harder? Should I have tried to run away sooner?