Jill didn’t finish, and she didn’t need to. Dennis hadn’t mentioned the addition of a keyboard to any of them before this very session. She might even have harbored an ounce of jealousy toward it.
Dennis just looked at her the way he always did these days—like she had just walked in naked. “Even if I didn’t need you on the skins, I’d be a sad little sicko without you around to gawk at…”
Holding eye contact, Jill parted her black lips and narrowed her eyes, playful and sultry.
“…and the hypnotic purr of that sexy-ass voice.”
Sitting together nearby on folding chairs, Candace, Stuart and DeShaun gave dramatic reactions—Candace giggling, Stuart covering his eyes and shaking his head, DeShaun launching himself to a stand to simulate a violent vomiting attack.
“I swear you’re making me celibate over here,” griped Pedro. “Your shrink is gonna have to start giving me hazard pay for my chaperone services.”
“Look, I know it’s a learning curve, guys.” Dennis reached for the sleeve of his Mephisto Walz T-shirt and the pack of cigarettes that used to live there. “Damn this oral fixation…” He smoldered at Jill again, and she smoldered back.
“Get ’em, Bravo!” ordered Stuart. “Go for the throat! Kill!”
Bravo hopped up and wagged his tail, but that was all.
“Dude, it’s just not who we are,” Pedro said. “The kids love our songs. And our shtick. No apologies. We’re horror punkers! Not…Goth…death rock…bat cave…cold wave…”
“It’s like I told you, Petey. The studio guy wants it dark and stark. These songs are our biographies, bro. Shit that we went through was not fun, or fun-ny.” He raised the new song sheets, clutched like a stick of dynamite. “This is genuine. And we have it in us. Let’s just roll with it and see what happens.”
Pedro swiped his hand through his unruly, neck-length mop and shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
“Hey, that’s right.” Dennis narrowed his eyes at Jill yet again. “Are you ready to submit to my will, drum slave?”
Candace bumped Stuart and scooted into his chair a little, laughing like Dennis’s allusion was the funniest thing she had ever heard. DeShaun got up in a huff, dramatically stomped to the exit, and slammed the door behind him.
Candace leaned into Stuart, looking at him just a little bit like Jill and Dennis always looked at each other, and they laughed, easy and natural.
“Let’s hit it.” Dennis counted down, and they started again, with a number called “Cinders of Summer.”
The song was a testament to his versatility. Dennis eschewed his usual punkabilly voice projection for a gloomy, dreamy sound somewhere between Rozz Williams and Johan Edlund. He strummed rather than pounded his guitar and kept his eyes closed a lot.
Pedro raised his confused look from the paper on his music stand to Dennis, then to Jill, then back, noticeably straining to stand still and carefully finger his strings without slashing.
Jill choked up on her drumsticks to keep from hitting too hard, but soon found herself staring at her drum set like it was an alien artifact.
She stopped, then Pedro stopped, and finally Dennis. “Okay, guys,” he began. “This transition might take longer than I thought.”
“We wanna play ball, babe,” Jill said. “I mean, Mister Platonic Bandleader, sir.”
“I could get it. No doubt about it.” Pedro looked around the basketball court. “Just not feeling it here.”
Dennis leaned forward over his guitar and peered at him like an interrogating detective. He sat like this for a long time, until Candace cleared her throat, purely to break the stiff silence.
“You’re right, Petey.” Dennis murmured into his microphone.
“Of course I am.” Pedro’s puzzled expression belied his agreement.
The door opened with an echoing clack, DeShaun returning, peering in between fingers. “You guys aren’t doing it, are you?”
“Get in here, deserter.” Dennis had called DeShaun that, plus “traitor” and a variety of other, less palatable names, since the day back in March when the Lotts announced they would be moving away. “We got band business to discuss.”
“Swell.” DeShaun made his way back to his seat. “Then can you guys keep your disgusting mush talk on a strictly telepathic wavelength?”
“I wanna try a different location for rehearsal. Maybe even for recording.” Dennis stood and unshouldered his guitar. “This place’ll be off limits for the Devil’s Night shindig anyway, and we can’t spare the time.”
“Where then?” asked Stuart.
“I want everybody to think about it before you murder me. This could be good.”
“Okay…”
“I mean really good.”
“Dammit, just spill already!” demanded Jill.
Dennis walked out to stand roughly in the center of the group. “The church catacombs.”
* * * *
“Unlike your Jamestowns and your sponsored settlements and whatnot, Ember Hollow was totally independent,” DeShaun would explain to witches Violina and Maisie, just a few hours later, across a table at the Kronus Café.
“Wilcott Bennington knew a trapper guy who had already been over here. That dude dropped some crucial info that nobody else in Europe knew,” Stuart would then say. “The trapper dude found a nice big spread, ya know, a piedmont, with lots of flat fields kind of closed in by the mountains and hills.”
“Benzo knew that, sooner or later, Ol’ Lady England was gonna claim all this dirt,” continued DeShaun. “The Cherokee stayed near water, which our little burg isn’t, so it was basically there for the taking,”
“And these local natives were ‘docile.’” Stuart frowned before his next sentence. “Lots of Europeans thought of Indians as less than human.”
“Our boy hired this guy to get a crew and come back to survey it.” DeShaun drew an imaginary map on the table with his fingers. “Meanwhile, he got up some investors to foot the bill for making the settlement, with him in place as governor, so they could beat the king to laying claim on this bucolic death trap you see all around us.”
“Ol’ Wilcott started recruiting ‘partners’ on the D.L. two years before ever setting sail. Difference between his deal and, say, the French settlements of the time was that
