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Fantasy Stories

The Rest of Your Life in a Day

Written by Elizabeth Bear

He was all for cognitive dissonance. Sometimes.

She didn’t turn her back while he undressed, except incidentally as she readied her machine and needles and the dishes of black iron ink. Matt had handled the depilation himself. She did glance across as he slid off his briefs, and said "Your glasses too, please."

He pushed them up his nose with his thumb, reflexively, and caught himself with a short self-conscious laugh. He had come alone; his only family, his brother Kelly, was practicing with his band—which meant smoking some joints and drinking some beers more than actually playing any music, if Kelly's bitching about his bandmates was anything to go on.

That was fine with Matt: he hadn't been there when Kelly got his ink, and he would be damned if Kelly was going to gloat over the pained faces Matt was sure he'd make. And if he told him no, thanks, I'll do it alone, he wouldn’t get his hopes dashed when Kelly said he'd come and didn't show.

Naked, denuded, Matt sat on the edge of the bench, paper crumpling under his ass, stiff plastic denting beneath that. He could barely hear the street noise; easy to forget that New York was going about its business just the other side of the locked, shaded glass doors. Miss Kobayashi pulled on latex gloves—he hadn't known they made them in such small sizes—and wheeled her work surface over. He watched her, deft and precise, a study in gray and black and white, and tried to breathe normally. The ink had an odor to it, chemical, not unpleasant. He wondered how it would smell mixed with blood.

"Lie down," she said, in the same even tone she'd said everything to him since he and his archmage, Jane, came in to make the appointment. He did, staring at the ceiling. It was clean and interesting, hung with colored silks. The light was good, spotless and white.

Miss Kobayashi was a Mage, like Jane, like Kelly. Like Matt was training to become. He felt her iron rings through her glove when she patted his hip. As her hands moved over the tray, he'd seen them, lined with pale gold and set with black and gray coral. "Jane says you're sworn chaste." Her English was as American as her outfit, her voice younger than her age and light in tone. "That's an unusually powerful offering for a young Mage these days."

"I'm not a Mage yet."

She showed him teeth like stained pearls. "You will be when I'm done with you."

The way she said it lifted the hairs on his neck. He bit his lip, shut his eyelids. Anything Kelly could do, Matt could do . . . nearly as well. He needed the power. He had reasons.

"We start at the center," she explained. Another quick pat, which might have been meant to soothe but left him twitching like a nervous bird. "The organs of generation, and then next time, the heart. You are—right handed? Then we finish with that. It will take a year and a day."

He smelled soap, studied the ceiling as she washed him with impersonal competence. And then there was texture—coolness, a sharp pinch, the sensation of weight and stretching as she handled his genitals. He looked down; she'd locked a chromed steel, leather, and rubber cage around the base of his penis and scrotum. "Keeps the blood in," she said. "Otherwise, at the first needle prick—like a turtle!"

Show a little faith, he almost said, but instead laid his head back on the table and tried not to feel the blood rising in his face. Or his penis. "If you need a break," she said, "you tell me."

First, she made him hard. With quick, sharp strokes of her hand, the glove catching on his razor-sensitized skin. He turned aside, embarrassed at how easily he responded to the casual touch of a woman three times his age.

"Do I have your consent, Matthew Patrick Szczegielniak?"

Point of no return. This was strength. This was armor. This was a weapon against the creatures who had left him alone in the world, except for Kelly—at first—and then later, when she had unofficially adopted them, Jane. Not that he remembered his parents. Not well, anyway.

"Yes," Matt said, and made himself open his eyes. At first he thought with relief that only kind of tickles, but then he realized she was drawing careful curlicues over his groin with a magic marker.

The first stab was bad, sharp. The machine buzzed; he tightened his hands on the edge of the table and held on, breathing deep and slow, and the pain tangled and became complex. He'd been told to expect a floating sensation, but it was more than that. Oh, it hurt all right, but not as badly as he'd feared. In fact—

"Give me a second," he said, and the needle came off his skin, blessed relief that nevertheless left him abruptly lonely. He realized how much he'd been feeling the vibration, down both legs and up to his solar plexus. His thighs trembled, his ass and abdominal muscles flexed. He curled up, on his elbows, and let himself gasp like an overheated cat. A thin slick of shining fluid covered his genitals, and he almost thought he saw something shimmer behind it. I can do this. I can do anything, if I want the reward bad enough.

And he wanted it. Jane would make him a warrior monk, she said. Like Galahad. All he had to do was get through this, commit himself to the order, keep putting his heart and body into the training and she'd make him what he wanted to be.

"All right," he said. "I can do this." And made himself lie back down.

After that, it went fine for a while. Once he called a rest and once she did, when he had lost track of what was happening and was just lying on his back, eyes closed, feeling the needles perforate skin. The sensations became warmer, rounder. Until she stretched the skin of his scrotum over a wooden spoon to make a smooth surface for the buzzing needles. That seared like a brand.

By then, it only made him harder.

The cock ring was, quite frankly, humiliating. Still, Miss Kobayashi was clinical, impersonal, and mostly did not try to engage him in conversation. So no, it wasn't nearly as bad as Kelly had insinuated—but then, he thought Kelly had been trying to psych him out.

Big brothers. That bully streak was part of their charm.

He heard himself breathing, deep-chested gasps. Not just the pain of the needles, now; a rooted ache was building behind his testicles. And fire along his nerves, drawn as if with a pen—things flickered and moved in the corners of his vision. He felt himself observed, and cringed from it. There was no one here but the two of them.

He had the sudden crazy urge to thrust, to push himself into her hand, and lifted his feet a fraction of an inch. A spiked band of fear, of what the needles could do to him if he wasn't still, tightened around his heart, and he mastered himself. The chatter of the machine stopped; she stepped back. "Matthew?"

And then the giggles hit, making his diaphragm shake while he stuffed his fist against his mouth and tried to keep still.

When he had himself under control, he peeked to see if Miss Kobayashi was glowering. She huffed approvingly and patted his hip, and he blinked to clear the smear of light haloing her small hands from his vision. A sigh of relief trickled out. "Sorry."

"Perfectly normal reaction," she said, and bent his penis to the left to get a better angle. The lines had to be gone over several times to make them dark. It was delicate work; too shallow and the ink would fade, too deep and it would scar.

Miss Kobayashi played no music while she worked, but bent close enough to his sensitive, fresh-shaven skin that he could sometimes feel her breath. He told himself stories to pass the time, and honestly, to distract himself from that aching edge of orgasm that was becoming an unrelenting pressure, and the way the world swam in front of his vision, the muttering voices he almost thought he heard.

The stories he used were fairy tales, the ones Jane insisted Matt memorize and Kelly scoffed at.

It was okay for Kelly to scoff; he could play an instrument. Matt had to make do with Bluebeard. Iron John. The Firebird.

That one was particularly good, especially the part where Tsarevich Ivan was chopped up by his wicked brothers.

And then Matt thought of the best one, and had a good fifteen minutes with the Beautiful Vassilisa and Baba Yaga, though he never managed to forget the scratch, scratch of the needles, or the way the electricity—the magic, it had to be—scoured him inside and out. Passion was power, and power was passion. If this is like this, I wonder how sex feels.

He remembered another fairy tale with the Baba Yaga in it, and the doll that Vassilisa's dead mother had left her, that guided her through her captivity by her wicked step-family, and by the witch Baba Yaga too. Eat a little, and drink a little, and listen to my grief.

His mother had left him something too. Magic, and the Prometheus Club. And Kelly.

He almost didn't notice when the needle stopped, when cool latex-gloved fingers encircled the base of his penis. He was somewhere else, focused entirely, watching the old witch fly with her iron mortar and pestle for a cart, sweeping away the dust behind. There was a pop, an appalling sudden easing—and Matt startled himself with a breathtaking, uncomfortable ejaculation that left him panting like an animal, hands clenched on the bench. "Shit," he said, when he could speak for breathing.

"It's okay," she said. And she'd been ready for him, too; there was a wad of paper towels in her hand, which she left stowed inside the right glove as she snapped them inside out. God, was he that obvious? "That's not a violation of your oath, I don’t think." She dabbed delicately at the bloody skin with a pad of gauze, patting rather than rubbing. He winced. It hurt now—his testicles ached; his penis felt sandpapered—and there was nothing transcendent about this pain.

But there had been.

Miss Kobayashi clucked her tongue and stepped back, returning a moment later with a sheaf of mimeos and a tube. "Here are the care instructions. Here's the cream—use it before you dress, and then again after you wash—and wash it as soon as you get home. And if it itches, either apply lotion, or slap at it. Don't rub."

"Yes, Miss Kobayashi." Easier said than done, he imagined.

She gave him a sort of a smile. "Don't forget your spectacles. I'll see you next week, Matthew."

****

When Matty staggered out of the tattoo parlor—there was a closed sign hung on the door, but it wasn't like Kelly had forgotten how to find the place in two years—he looked just about as white and exhausted as Kelly had expected. And he walked right past Kelly, inward-turned, focused on his pain, on trying to move normally.

Kelly had been listening to Yngvie Malmsteen on his Walkman, half-tranced by the soar and the grind of the hard-driving sound. That was real magic. Matt's fairy-tale crap, the Prometheus Club's manipulations—those could not compete. Bards had always been the real mages.

Reluctantly, Kelly flipped the music off with his thumb.

"Hey, Matty," he said, and Matt spun around, as light on the balls his feet as he was on the basketball court. Matt had gotten all the athleticism. Well, most of it. Some.

And then he saw Kelly and let the exhaustion show, and also his pleasure. "Oh, you came."

"Sure," Kelly said. "The guys were pissing me off anyway. They don't really give a shit about playing, they just want to coast and pick up chicks. You want to get something to eat?"

"I could kill," Matt said, after a delay as if he checked systems and was surprised to find himself hungry. "You got a place in mind?"

"Jane said we should come over." Kelly indicated his wristwatch.

Matt nodded. "I don’t know that I'm up for a long visit, though."

They walked side by side, Kelly limiting his stride out of consideration. "It went okay?"

He didn’t need to turn to see Matt blush. Scarlet, from the dimple of his collarbones all the way up. "Yeah," he said. "Not too bad."

"Well, all right then," Kelly said. And stepped into the street to hail a cab. "Screw this. It's your birthday. Let's go in style."

Matt paid for the cab, but it didn't actually matter. It was all Jane's money anyway. When he dug in his pockets, he unearthed the clutter that collected there—a matchbook, some steel washers and ball bearings, a packet of sesame seeds. Kelly more or less pretended not to know him until he sorted it out, which was a good trick when Matt kept handing him things.

She had said to come to her private apartment on the Upper East Side rather than the Prometheus Club ritual space on the Upper West. They walked in past the doorman—he gave them a little wink; they were regulars—but Matt hesitated and didn't quite push the elevator button. "What's that?"

Kelly squinted. He didn’t see anything unusual. But there was the usual susurrus of soft voices, the stones of the building awakened by a Mage's residence and presence. They liked having someone to talk to. "You hear that? Already? It's the apartment building. Talking to itself." He cocked an ear. "Somebody on the third floor just brought home a new baby."

"Is this normal?"

Of course Matt knew it was. But it was weird, Kelly remembered, suddenly hearing the city grumbling to itself when it turned over in its sleep.

"It's just a little . . . early," Kelly said, hoping Matt wouldn't notice the hesitation. Damn, he thought. He's going to be better at this than me, too.

Not that it really mattered. All Kelly cared about was the music, and Matt didn't want anything to do with that.

"You know," Matt said, as if he knew what Kelly was thinking, "there's a version of Red Riding Hood where the wolf asks her if she'll be traveling via the road of pins, or the road of needles."

"So what's that got to do with anything?"

"That's us. Pins and needles. Music and stories. Two different ways to get there. Both of them involve things that can stab you through the heart."

Kelly stared at Matt for a minute, and then leaned on the button again. "It ain't magic if you don’t bleed," he said, so softly he didn’t think his brother heard him.

****

Jane Andraste was slender, fiftyish, and lucent. Her iron rings were plated with gold and set with diamonds. She held herself like her spine was a string of pearls dangled in a casual hand. She opened the door for Matt and Kelly, releasing the smell of good cooking into the hall. "Boys!" she said, and tugged them down so she could kiss them both in turn, Kelly and then Matt.

Matt set her at arm's length and grinned at her. "Could have been worse," he said before she could ask, and blew her a kiss.

She blushed and waved him off. "Come in and eat."

Jane was powerful in more ways than one, and as wounded as Kelly and Matt. Matt came into her apartment past framed photos of her husband and daughter, as lost to her as Matt and Kelly's parents were lost to them.

Her husband was just dead—a heart attack, or some other peril of middle age. She didn’t talk about him much. Matt's mom and dad were also dead, beyond recall, beyond reparation, casualties of the endless centuries of conflict between the Prometheus Club and the Fae.

But the Fae craved those with talent, and what they wanted, they took. And Elaine had been taken. Elaine was alive, a changeling in Faerie. And there was always the hope that they could win her back. Her, and all the others.

"Come in," Jane said belatedly. "Sit, be well. How was your day, Kelly?"

He startled. He'd been focused on the middle distance, fingers moving idly on imagined chords. "Fine. We practiced. Wicked good."

Her mouth thinned as she turned away. Matt heard clinking; she fussed in the kitchen and brought them Cokes in crystal tumblers. Matt toyed with his, amused; his-and-Kelly's kitchenware ran more to McDonald's Miss Piggy glasses. "You should come to Tuesday night circle," she said. "We're going to be starting a seminar on bardic traditions. It'll be more use to you than rock songs."

Matt ducked into the living room, looking for a little distance, but Kelly followed, and perched one ass-cheek on the arm of the sofa. Matt, hands folded around the glass to hide how they were shaking, chose a more sedate position.

"Shakespeare was an actor," Kelly said, mouthing the words of the argument more to demonstrate his obduracy than because he had any illusions that he could convert Jane. "The bardic tradition is popular song, Jane. I can be useful to Prometheus on stage."

Jane looked across Kelly, appealing to Matt for help. Matt ducked the gaze. He knew how much Kelly wanted that success, how badly he craved it.

The rotten thing was, Kelly didn’t have the gifts to be more than a mediocre musician.

"I'm starving," Matt said, unsubtle. "What's to eat?"

Jane hadn't ever formally adopted Matt and Kelly, but she'd found out about them somehow. Through the Promethean grapevine, no doubt. Matt's mother had been a Maga. And Jane had made sure they never wanted, and that there was always a foster home in some Promethean's family. It had meant a lot of moving, but Matt didn’t mind—and when Kelly was old enough to live on his own, she'd found the two of them an apartment, which she paid for. Jane had always been there, constant.

Matt couldn't stand to watch them fight.

His question broke them up, thank God. And she'd made roast beef and asparagus. And a birthday cake. And if Matt spent the entire meal shifting uncomfortably in his chair, she could think that it was because he was sore, and not because he couldn't stop thinking, with squirrelly obsession, of the thunder of the needles against taut flesh.

****

A year and a day after Matty's eighteenth birthday, Kelly sprawled on Matt's bed, smoking an unfiltered Camel, watching his little brother dress. They were nearly twins—well, Kelly was taller and better looking, though Matty spent every minute when he wasn't cramming for his classes or in circle at the gym, taking out his sex drive at the weight pile—but the light slid up and down the thumb-thick black bands on Kelly's arm as he smoked, and one of Matt's still showed bare, prickled from the elbow to the wrist only with fine sunlit hairs.

As promised, it was the only unmarked skin remaining between Matt's collarbones and ankles, excluding his hands. Everything else was covered with dully glossy lines of black iron ink that reflected moving highlights as he pulled shirts out of the closet and piled them on the bedroom chair.

"You don’t have to be such a goddamned cram," Kelly said, staring at the ceiling. A spider spun in the corner. He blew a smoke ring at her, but it faded before it went that high. "Semester's over, man. Time to party a little. Even if you don’t screw around, you can still, you know, drink."

"Not when I also have to learn magic," Matt said. He gestured to a pile of books teetering perilously close to the keyboard of the TRS-80 on his desktop. "I just finished my finals, and Jane wants three pages on magia versus goeteia by Sunday. Besides, you're sliding through on technicalities. One of us ought to use school to learn something. Since Jane is being nice enough to pay for it."

"Magic," Kelly said, "is all about the technicalities. Oh, god, Matty, don't wear that. It doesn't go."

"This shirt?"

"It's green," Kelly said. "The pants are olive. Don't do that."

"Fine." Matt threw the shirt on the closet floor. "It's all gray to me." Matty was colorblind.

"That's why you have me," Kelly said, amused, turning his head in the cradle of his arm. He drew a knee up, daring Matt to bitch at him for the Doc Marten on the chenille bedspread. But Matty just gave him that sidelong eyeroll and pulled a purple paisley long-sleeved shirt from the hanger. "How's that?"

"Just wear the jeans, not those fucking painter's pants."

"I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my room," Matt said, unzipping his fly and letting the trousers pool around his ankles. Kelly sat up, and didn’t manage to get his palm under the drooping ash before it pattered to the bedspread.

"Sorry." But apparently it wasn't even worth a dirty look. Matt was jerking his jeans over his tattooed calves with a series of short, concentrated tugs. "I've gotta get dressed, man. I'll see you at the gig?" He held his breath, expecting the kid to blow him off. Although it wasn't like he had, you know, a date.

"Yes," Matt told him. "I'll see you at the gig. Are you coming to my ordination?"

To cover that he'd forgotten, Kelly brushed it aside with the back of his hand. "No shit, I'd skip out on my baby brother becoming a Mage. But you'll be too busy to notice me."

Kelly didn’t let Matt see him smile as he went to spike his hair and change into his gig clothes. And he pretended he didn’t hear Matt muttering one of his ridiculous fairy tale chants under his breath as Kelly was leaving. Bluebeard, this time. Anne, sister Anne, who do you see coming?

****

Matt rested more or less at ease on Yukako's work table, his right arm comfortably supported, as she etched a broad elaborate cuff over her black guidelines. When he shifted uncomfortably it was not from the needles but because he was hard. After the first couple of sessions, he'd figured out that that was just what his body had gotten tricked into thinking it was supposed to do when somebody started sticking needles into it. More embarrassing, he had the same reaction to the smell of Yukako's shampoo and her skin, which haunted him at odd hours. He didn’t care if she knew about the erection. He just hoped she didn’t know that he thought of her meticulous needlework when he jacked off in the shower.

Thick scrolls hurt when the needles passed over his wristbones. He made a little huff of protest; she bumped his knee with her hip. They were old friends, now that her needles had knocked the pride out of him.

It was one way to study humility. It hadn't worked on Kelly, though; if anything, he was more arrogant than ever.

"Matthew?" She was the only one who called him that. He loved it.

"Thinking about my brother." He was well-trained now; he didn’t fidget and he didn’t shrug. "He's got his first gig tonight. I'm going after the ceremony."

"Is he any good?"

"God, no," Matt said, and laughed. "He's terrible." She steadied his arm with her hand and kept working while he leaned down to smell the soap she said was green, to smell her hair, the ink, and the blood. "It'll be weird not seeing you."

"A year and a day. I'll be at the ordination," she said. She set the machine aside, tendons striping her narrow wrist. "Congratulations. You are done."

The words hit him funny; he had to think them over for a minute before he understood what she saying. He felt strangely bereft.

"You'll come back if you need touch-ups?"

"I'll come back even if I don’t," he said, and—greatly daring—touched her hair. He would have kissed her if he'd had the courage.

She chuckled, reaching for gauze and the vitamin cream. He didn’t look up, just took them and began doctoring her work.

"You're a brave young man." And then she ducked down, so her v-neck sweater hung away from her white turtleneck, and pecked his cheek with birdy indifference. "Take an old woman's blessing, Matthew. Happy Birthday."

"Thank you," he said. He draped the gauze loosely over his lotion-slick arm. "I will."

He buttoned his sleeve over the bandage and went directly to the ordination. The city hummed around him, the buzz of human traffic and the quieter conversations of steel and brick and cloth and glass and stones. They were comforting now, the conversation of old friends; he listened while he walked. You could never quite make out the words, but sometimes you could get a sense of personalities, or opinions.

Gargoyles, in particular, had opinions.

Like most of the rituals of the Prometheus Club, the ordination would be short and uncomplicated. Matt took the subway to the Upper West Side, rode a lift to the penthouse of a stately apartment building, and let himself in by tapping the code on the access pad beside the door. He wasn't the first. A couple dozen East Coast Magi stood around the lobby, chatting amongst themselves and snacking on crudités and canapés, because everything tastes better in French.

There were polite and quiet greetings as he made his way around the room. A couple wished him happy birthday; one other poured him a drink. No one tried to take his hand, but Matt mostly kept it tucked in his pocket or wrapped around his wine glass anyway. They must have been warned in advance, because he and Kelly were the only ones with the ink. Which was fine with him. He liked being chosen. Special.

Eventually, Jane's second, Felix Luray, emerged from the ballroom to throw open the doors. The crowd filtered from the antechamber with its stretched stark modern canvasses and ice-pale wood, and were received into a white tall chamber with an inlaid floor. The ballroom ran almost the length of the building, uninterrupted except for a few structural pillars that had been made to look elegant. Matt moved with the Magi, not quite anonymous in their midst. Yukako was already waiting; Felix appeared at Matt's shoulder, his black, wavy hair slicked, his shoulders squared in a pinstriped suit that Matt suspected was navy, though to him it seemed charcoal gray. "It'll be over in two ticks," Felix said cheerfully, in habitually plummy tones.

"Said the bishop to the actress," Matt answered, and smiled a little at Felix's amused snort. "Felix, take my glass?"

Felix lifted it from his fingers and sipped what was left of the wine, while Matt made a face.

"You're on, lad." With a duck of his head, Felix effaced himself. Matt barely noticed him going. Goeteia—illusion—rather than real magic. But kind of charming anyway.

Matt walked forward, sidestepping between waiting Magi, and caught sight of the archmage, Jane Andraste. She wore an off-white tailored dress. She stood alone in the center of the room, her black hair piled up high, her skin powdered until it could not shine.

He wouldn’t glance over his shoulder to see if Kelly had come. He wouldn’t.

Kelly would not let him down this time. Nibble, nibble, like a mouse. "Matt," Jane said. She held up her right hand; a black iron band, slightly concave in the center and flared at the edges, was pinched between her fingers.

Who's that gnawing at my house?

He tried to say her name, and stammered. She grinned. "Matthew Patrick Szczegielniak, do you solemnly swear, avow, aver, and affirm that you will uphold justice in the service of humankind, that the Promethean flame of art and science may be evermore preserved in the furtherance of that service, and the sacrifice of the fire-bringer remembered?"

"I do," Matthew said, and held out his left hand so she could slip the ring on his finger.

****

Kelly edged inside the door just in time to see Jane thread a black iron ring on Matty's left hand, and heaved a sigh of relief. There. As good as his word, wasn't he? He even heard Jane's crisp, carrying voice pronounce his little brother Matthew Magus, and welcome him into the Prometheus Club.

Matt just kind of stood there, shoulders hunched, his head ducked so his bangs fell down over his glasses. Somebody really needed to talk to him about that mullet. And then other Magi surrounded him, patting his shoulders, offering congratulations, and Kelly glanced at his watch. He slipped between the others and waited until Matt looked up.

The smile the kid gave him was—oh, hell. Kelly could have made some flip comparison—saccharine enough to give him bladder cancer—but it was a pure sweet smile, sharp as glass, confident and adult and absolutely piercing. It was their mom's smile. He bet Matt didn’t even remember enough to know that if he saw it in a mirror.

Kelly almost stepped back. Instead he reached out, squeezed Matt's left biceps, and thumped him on the other shoulder so hard his glasses slipped. Matt leaned into it, though, beaming. "Man," Kelly said, and meant it, "man, I'm proud of you."

Matt just grinned wider. "Thank God that's over, huh?"

Kelly winked. "Come on," he said. "Let's ditch this crowd and go buy you your first legal drink."

****

The bouncer examined Matt's license suspiciously—the only reason he had a license, as a New Yorker by birth and inclination, was because Jane had insisted he learn to drive—and ran a thumb across the birthdate before he handed it back. Nothing easier to fake than a New York driver's license. They weren't even laminated.

It was looking touch and go until Matt—suddenly remembering that he was ordained now, and allowed to use his magic once in a while, leaned on the man.

Not enough to be unethical. Just enough to help him make up his mind. He felt the click as the guy decided not to be a pain in the ass and smiled; all it had taken was a little pressure.

"Happy birthday, kid," the bouncer said. "First drink's on the house."

"Thanks," Matt said brightly, and followed Kelly inside.

The place hovered somewhere between hole-in-the-wall and dive, and was leaning crookedly toward the latter. Matt fiddled the buttons on his right cuff to make sure it was closed over the fresh tattoo. An infection at this stage of the game would be just the thing.

"Right," Kelly said. "Can I get you a beer?"

Matt considered. He wasn't about to get lit in this crowd. Not when he had to walk home with Kelly while Kelly was dressed up like a cross between a bargain basement Billy Idol impersonator and a West Village gay cruise. "Yeah," he said. "Anything but Budweiser."

Kelly made a face, but came back with two bottles of Coors and handed Matt one. They clinked; Matt drank from the neck and said, "I'll get the next round."

"We're playing for beer," Kelly said. "Drink up. Oh, there are the guys. I'll see you after the set, all right?"

He was gone before Matt could clear the second swig of beer from his mouth to answer. It's not like he could have said no anyway. He glanced around; the room was small and smoky, with a floor of broad splintery boards, but it was less than half-full and there were stools by the bar with a good view of what passed for a stage—a niche with a couple of klieg lights trained on it.

Kelly's two band mates were shuffling equipment around. Matt thought about going over to help them, but his arm hurt, was sticky with lotion, and there were already three empty beer bottles by Deke's foot. Matt shook his head, claimed that seat by the bar, and set about finishing his beer. He wanted at least part of a second one inside him before Irn Bru started to play.

He was going to need it.

Two girls tried to pick him up while he was sitting with his back to the bar. He waved them off, semi-politely. Legs crossed in a figure four, bottle resting in the crook of his knee, he recited Vassilisa the Beautiful to himself while he waited.

"Well," said the