Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill - Music to My Sorrow.pdf - Mercedes Lackey - margozap

Music to My Sorrow

Table of Contents

Prologue:

Shut Out The Light

Chapter 1:

New York City Serenade

Chapter 2:

Across The Border

Chapter 3:

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Chapter 4:

Pink Cadillac

Chapter 5:

Preacher's Daughter

Chapter 6:

Sell It And They Will Come

Chapter 7:

My Father's House

Chapter 8:

Everybody's Looking

For Somebody

Chapter 9:

Countin' On A Miracle

Chapter 10:

Where The Bands Are

Chapter 11:

After The Thunder

Epilogue:

Don't Look Back

Music to My Sorrow

Mercedes Lackey

and

Rosemary Edghill

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0917-2

ISBN-10: 1-4165-0917-8

Cover art by Jeff Easley

First printing, December 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lackey, Mercedes.

Music to my sorrow / Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original"—T.p. verso.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0917-2

ISBN-10: 1-4165-0917-8

1. Banyon, Eric (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Parent and child—Fiction. 3. New York

(N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Evangelists—Fiction. 5. Musicians—Fiction. 6. Brothers—Fiction. 7.

Wizards—Fiction. I. Edghill, Rosemary. II. Title.

PS3562.A246M87 2006

813'.54—dc22

2005025956

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production & design by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

Printed in the United States of America

To Brenda Schonhaut and "Molly"

In This Series—

Urban Fantasies:

Bedlam's Bard (with Ellen Guon)

with Rosemary Edghill:

Beyond World's End

Spirits White as Lightning

Mad Maudlin

Bedlam's Edge (ed. with Rosemary Edghill)

Music to My Sorrow

BAEN BOOKS by Mercedes Lackey

Bardic Voices:

The Lark and the Wren

The Robin and the Kestrel

The Eagle & the Nightingales

The Free Bards

Four & Twenty Blackbirds

Bardic Choices: A Cast of Corbies (with Josepha Sherman)

The SERRAted Edge:

Chrome Circle (with Larry Dixon)

The Chrome Borne (with Larry Dixon)

The Otherworld (with Larry Dixon & Mark Shepherd)

This Scepter'd Isle (with Roberta Gellis)

Ill Met by Moonlight (with Roberta Gellis)

The Bard's Tale Novels:

Castle of Deception (with Josepha Sherman)

Fortress of Frost & Fire (with Ru Emerson)

Prison of Souls (with Mark Shepherd)

The Fire Rose

Fiddler Fair

Werehunter

Lammas Night (ed. by Josepha Sherman)

Brain Ships (with Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball)

Wing Commander: Freedom Flight (with Ellen Guon)

The Sword of Knowledge (with C.J. Cherryh Leslie Fish, & Nancy Asire)

The Wizard of Karres (with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

The Shadow of the Lion (with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

This Rough Magic (with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

BAEN BOOKS by Rosemary Edghill

Warslayer

Prologue:

Shut Out The Light

The moon's my constant mistress

And the lonely owl my marrow

The flaming drake and the night crow make

Me music to my sorrow

-—Tom O' Bedlam's Song

Another day, another stupid office. Devon Mesier was a veteran of offices, of waiting rooms. They all

had the same happy-happy magazines, the advertisement flyers for this or that pill to cure depression,

anxiety, ADHD, ADD, and every other clinical name that shrinks had thought up to slap onto kids who

didn't come up to their families' standards of appropriate behavior. He almost wished his parents would

try pills on him for a change. If he didn't like what the pills did to him, he could always throw them up;

one of the bulimic chicks at the last concentration camp had taught him how to throw up at will, 'cause a

good way to get a "camp counselor" off you was to projectile vomit on him. And if you started throwing

up, they tended to get nervous and stick you in what passed for an infirmary and leave you alone.

He was fifteen, and long before he'd gotten anywhere near "troubled teenhood" he'd seen more of

shrinks' offices than a clinical psychologist four times his current age. He'd been through every kind of

"give in and submit" camp, therapy, program, and counseling there was, and by now he knew they came

in two kinds: the kind that put the broken kids back together, and the kind that tried to break kids that

weren't broken.

Devon wasn't broken, and he didn't intend to break.

He didn't know why he and his parents had been on a collision course ever since he could remember. It

wasn't that he had a deep-seated hunger to set kittens on fire, or any of the more terrible things he'd

found out that other kids did once they'd started putting him into those programs and groups calculated to

turn him into a Good Little Robot. But . . .

He asked questions. He always had, ever since he'd been a little kid. He'd wanted to know "why," and

how people knew what they knew. Dad said that made him "insubordinate." He'd gone and looked the

word up in the dictionary, and said he wasn't. Dad had refused to discuss it. Mom had (as always!) taken

Dad's side. Devon had yelled. He'd been sent to his room. He'd gone out the window. He'd only been

gone a few hours and a few blocks before a policeman had brought him back, and Dad had been even

more furious.

He guessed he'd been seven, then. Things had never gotten any better. One of the few psychologists

Devon met that he'd actually liked had told him his only problem was that he was twelve—which meant

he was subject to whatever his parents determined was "best" for him, too bright for his own

good—which meant he didn't just accept things passively, and didn't suffer fools gladly—which meant

that when things didn't make sense to him he was always flapping his mouth about it. Unfortunately, in

Devon's opinion, the world was full of fools. That headshrinker hadn't lasted long, not past the first

"parent conference." Evidently the man didn't tell the 'rents what they wanted to hear.

But I can outwait them, Devon told himself grimly. Sometimes he wished he could stop fighting with his

father, but he was damned if he was going to back down first. And he was double-damned if he was

going to turn himself into the mindless drone his father wanted! Particularly this time.

While he'd been getting himself kicked out of the latest Stalag (for cheating—although he hadn't been; if

there had been any copying going on, it was some of the others cribbing from his papers) apparently

Mom had gotten Religion. He hadn't been home from Arizona a week before the behind-his-back phone

calls started again—this time to something called Christian Family Intervention, which sounded pretty

depressing—and then, as usual, Mom cancelled all her house showings for the afternoon and Dad came

home from the office early and the three of them got into the Lexus to drive off somewhere.

Of course they didn't tell him where. It wasn't as if anyone in the Mesier family talked to anyone else.

Certainly not to him. He was just supposed to do as he was told—or better yet, figure out what he was

supposed to do and say by some sort of telepathy.

Screw that.

They didn't want him —they wanted their idea of him, which was something else completely—and they

didn't want to let him go his own road, either. So by now Devon figured he didn't owe them very much at

all.

To his vague surprise, their destination was Atlantic City, only a couple of hours away. Not a place

Devon would have thought of as a hotbed of Christian family values. Casinos and Miss America. Right.

They didn't go anywhere near the Boardwalk, where most of the casinos were, and the rest of the city

was pretty thud. He'd almost decided they weren't stopping in Atlantic City at all when they pulled off

into a business park on the outskirts of the city that said it was the location of—get this—The Heavenly

Grace Cathedral and Casino. There didn't seem to be anything else here.

Cathedral and Casino. The sign made him tilt his head to the side like a dog hearing something weird.

What next? Synagogue and cathouse? What kind of Christian yahoos built themselves casinos? Holy

Dice-Rollers? Maybe his parents had finally gone crazy. Maybe he could become a ward of the state.

They parked around the side of the building—to Devon's great disappointment, since he would have

loved to spend more time inspecting the front of the building, with its three-story-high light-up cross that

looked like it was made of LEDs, which was excellent—and went in through a perfectly normal-looking

door marked "Heavenly Grace Ministries." Devon's spirits sank. He hated preaching, whatever flavor it

came in, and it looked like he was in for some gold-plated holy-rolling here, and no dice involved.

But inside it was a perfectly normal office building—they weren't even playing hymns on the

Muzak—and when they'd taken the elevator to their floor and found the waiting room of Christian Family

Intervention, it looked like every other "family counselor's" waiting room he'd ever been in, aside from the

Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill - Music to My Sorrow.pdf

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