18

Tonight, we’re going to tune,” said Peter as they entered his room the next Saturday.

Fiona wasn’t so stupid as to think he meant twirling knobs on guitars or drums. His conspiratorial tone suggested something different, something special. “What exactly are we tuning?”

“Ourselves,” he said, like that was a given. His voice remained cool and level; he was obviously trying to hold tight the reins of his emotions after last time. “Basically, I’m going to tap into some planetary vibrations using the book and the master copy. The longer I open myself up to them, the more adept I am at their manipulation.”

“Like getting calluses on your fingers,” she said, displaying her playing hand.

“Exactly,” he said. “Think of it as putting a callus on my soul. The goal is to eventually become so powerful that I don’t need the master copy or the Canoris to wield the universalis. But that will take many, many tunings. If you try to hear too much of it at one time, you can go insane. From what I’ve heard, the last owner of the Canoris did that and ended up killing himself.”

Fiona cocked an eyebrow. It had been cool at first, but she was beginning to wonder how much of Peter’s belief in his musical powers was smoke and mirrors. Sure, she’d seen the worship note in her head and felt the book buzzing in her hands, but she knew that those had explanations, sleight of hand and hypnotic suggestion and all that psychic TV-show garbage. And even this “tuning” was probably just a lot of theater, like the séance she’d made her friends do one Halloween (she’d wanted to talk to Prince, but someone had manipulated the Ouija board to spell out “butt sex”). The more Peter believed in it, the more she was being sucked in, and the stupider she worried she would feel when she found out he was just a charismatic weirdo who’d robbed a library.

It was getting down to the wire with him, she realized. The last day she’d spent with him had had a soaring chorus with a shitty fade-out at the end—now, she wanted something real, something she could believe in. She’d been bold coming here this time, not even coming up with an excuse about band practice—she’d just ghosted and left the community center on her own. The interaction with Tess Baron had only strengthened her resolve. No more sneaking around. She had to be honest about how she felt, just as Lemmy intended.

Now, Peter needed to do his part. If Fiona was going to keep seeing him, she needed to know that Peter was for real.

“Are we doing it here or going somewhere?” she asked. “The roof,” he said. “Weather.com says moonrise is at seven fifty tonight, so we’ll want to bring up all my equipment by seven thirty.”

“How much do we need to haul upstairs?” she asked.

“Quite a bit,” he said. “We’ll start around three, I figure.”

“You really think we’ll need four hours to get everything up there?”

Peter nodded. “It’ll take longer than you think. You’ll thank me later.”

He went about straightening things in his loft, and she stood standing, watching him. There was something else she needed to put to rest before she could continue.

“Hey, so you know Tess Baron, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah. She goes to your school. She threw the party I spun. She keeps trying to help set up other shows, too.”

“You’re not banging her, are you?”

He stopped and looked up at her, face painted with amused shock. “God, no. Why?”

“She stopped me at school to, like, lay claim to you,” she said. “I guess she somehow found out I’ve been…seeing you.”

“How’d you respond?”

“I told her that if she came at me again, I’d destroy her.”

“Nice,” he said, grinning. “As you should have. I figured it’d be something along those lines from you.”

“But you’re not…”

“No,” he said firmly. “I don’t do side projects. I’m all-in on you.”

Fiona smiled back. His confidence in her always raised her spirits. Horace had wanted to be her white knight in shining armor, and Calvin Hokes figured he could be her superhero swooping in to lend her a hand, but Peter respected her enough to know she could handle herself. If anything, he enjoyed it.

…

The staircase to the roof was narrow and steep, and contained forty-seven steps. Fiona knew, because she counted them as she and Peter hauled speakers, PA wedges, and amplifiers up to the roof. She had imagined it would be like the time she and her dad had helped the Fiddlers move, making quips as they worked around corners and over blocky raised thresholds. Instead, the Pit Viper grabbed a bass cab and hauled it himself like it was nothing, and she was left to grunt through every item that her arms could handle.

By five thirty, her body creaked with exhaustion. Sweat poured from her pits and trickled down her spine. When he got stuck behind her on the way up the stairs as she huffed and puffed, she could feel the impatience radiate off him in waves. He obviously didn’t like it when things were in his way, even literally.

An hour later, the vast majority of the Pit Viper’s gear was on the broad warehouse roof. Microphones of different sizes and shapes sat perched in front of the amps and speakers like robot crows. The wires for everything eventually tangled into a lumpy, black braid that trailed down into the building.

The view made Fiona’s heart sing. The city sprawled out before them like a wasteland at sunset. The taller buildings stood silent and still, reflecting the coppery clouds but not yet lit up by a thousand harsh, artificial lights. It felt right, Fiona thought, this momentary quiet as the sun slipped beneath the horizon. But soon it would be gone, and the noise of the city would bring out vampires and ghosts.

“We’re done early,” he said, stretching. Sweat had collected at his collar and under his arms, plastering his shirt to his sinewy body. She concentrated on the skyline and not his slick physique. “I’m impressed. Now we just have to wait for the moon.”

“The moon needs to be up for a tuning?” Fiona asked.

“The moon is the key,” he said. “It’s basically a receiver that channels the frequencies of the other planets to us. All the sounds we’re going to hear tonight are being transmitted to our equipment via Luna. It connects Earth’s sonic frequency to that of space.”

“That’s some real Jerry Garcia shit right there,” she said.

He smirked. “Yeah, guess so. Okay. An hour’s practice, and then we meet back here for tuning.”

“Do you have a spare practice amp I can use?” Fiona asked, hiking a thumb back at the tuning circle. “You made me bring all your other guitar amps up here.”

He shrugged. “Practice on the roof.”

Reluctantly she brought Betty upstairs. As she plugged in and turned on, there was still a thin sliver of the sun left, like a lake of fire on the horizon. She wondered how the guitar would react, playing properly out in the open for the first time.

But Fiona found no hesitation in Betty. The riffs came out of her in a flood, chugging and moaning into the open air as though the guitar had always wanted to be used outside of four simple walls. It was like Fiona and she were playing an epic prayer to the sunset over the city, digesting emotion in huge gulps rather than thin sips. Fiona squinted, feeling the raw energy of the music, the honest offering that came with playing in the open air with no one around to worry about. There was purity to it—no acoustics, no effect created by the size of a room or the material of the walls, just the notes that came to her the way they were, released through her guitar. Leaning back, wailing on Betty, she felt like the mystical being Peter kept promising her she was.

After forty minutes, she stopped playing, feeling strung out and dehydrated. For a moment, her fingers still humming from practice, she held her hand up to the air in the shape of a claw, cupping the last of the day. She could almost feel the weight of her music, the ways she might put it to use…

She dropped her invisible orb by her side. Ridiculous. What was she, ten?

She tried to start back up, but Betty felt spent for the night. The sun was gone, and Fiona watched the daylight die more and more with every second. The moon was on its way. It was Peter’s time now.

…

When Peter finally returned to the roof, night had set in and the city sparkled with dots and waves of electric light, leaving the sky a bruised purple.

He didn’t say a word, just walked to the center of the circle of amps with a laptop, the Canoris, and the master copy. He sat in a lotus position, like a meditating guru. Fiona sat facing him and watched as he plugged a cable into every port of his computer, each cord leading to a nearby central mixing board that in turn trailed dreadlocked wires to all the other devices surrounding them.

Peter carefully placed the record, still in its white sleeve, in front of him. He opened the book to a specific page, and after scanning it used a nearby distortion pedal as a paperweight to keep it open.

“Turn everything on,” he commanded.

She stood, stung by his harsh instructions, and walked the circle, flicking switches and pressing buttons. Once every piece of equipment was awake and humming, she returned to the same position as before. She tried to speak, but he cut her off:

“We are going to try and distill a worship note that comes from the planetary tones of Venus and Saturn, with support from Jupiter,” he said. He put in a pair of soft foam earplugs.

“We have an hour to get it, but we won’t need that long. I’ve tuned to this note before, but each alignment’s different. Tonight’s tonus will be stronger than my previous tunings.”

“Should I be wearing a pair of those?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I want you to listen,” he said. “You should know how this feels.”

“Is it going to make me sick?” she asked.

“If only that,” he said. “It will probably make you feel lots of different things, some of them painful.”

She frowned. “But you want me to experience it,” she said.

“Pain purifies,” he said. “Like fire or boiling water. Cleansing your spirit of normality. You’ll thank me when you’re stronger.”

The way he said it made her shudder. If he was crazy, if this was the thing that would trigger the madness he’d hidden from her thus far, then she knew she’d later recall this moment as the wake-up call she should’ve heeded. If she was going to leave, now was the time—

Before she could respond, he pressed a button on the mixing board, and from a handful of the amps and speakers came a deep note, so low that Fiona could feel it in her guts. It made her grimace. She wasn’t sure soiling herself in front of him was her idea of displaying strength.

“What is that?” she yelled over the sound.

“The moon,” he said. “The bedrock. Try not to talk.” He cracked his knuckles and picked up his laptop. “Now, Saturn.”

He pressed another button and a second note, this one harsh and crackly, like a scream compressed and distorted beyond recognition, spewed out of more speakers. Immediately, Fiona felt it enter her, carried on the back of that deep lunar rumble. With each second, she could sense Saturn’s note burrowing into her body and mind, making her blood bubble like soda water.

He pressed another button, and a third note accompanied the others, and then one more. By now there was no telling whether the notes were high or low, major or minor. The four sounds blurred together to become a steady wall of noise. The hair on her arms and neck stood on end and rippled like ocean waves. This was more than a simple sound, it was a new type of energy, music in its blinding and unadulterated form, shrieking out from somewhere beyond the clumsy use of human hands or constructed implements. It was like a drug, both enrapturing and poisoning her.

She squirmed. The sounds traveled along her nerve endings and made her feel nauseous, anxious, unable to move or look away. Warring sensations attacked her—an acidic burn of sound waves on her skin, a deep-set gastrointestinal rumble of the moon, but also a surging excitement that made her breathe fast and blink hard.

Amid it all, in the blue glow of his computer, sat Peter— no, Peter had vanished, and in his place was the Pit Viper, grinning like a lunatic as the noise engulfed them. He laid down his laptop and began twisting knobs and faders on the soundboard. Her teeth grinding and her mind reeling, Fiona watched as he picked up the master copy between them, discarding the white paper sleeve and cupping the record carefully between his two hands. He raised it aloft over his heads, and she watched as, surrounded by noise, the record vibrated, making it look less like a piece of wax and more like a flying saucer. Soon, it shook so hard that it was just a lightless blur in the air.

Without warning, he lowered the record and pressed a button on the laptop. The sounds all stopped at once.

As he put the master copy back in its sleeve, she thought she could see the etchings on it gleam bright and angry in the light coming off the city.

He looked back at her and asked, “How are you feeling?” She tried to respond but couldn’t. Slowly, carefully, she stood up and steadied her breathing, but even then, she had no words.

It was real, she knew. It was all brutally real, the book and the record and the musical power. Fiona wasn’t sure of a lot of things in life, but she knew beyond any questioning that he had been telling the truth. He was no charlatan or hypnotist; he was a human being in control of powerful forces. Her gut screamed in simultaneous terror and joy.

He rose, and she saw his strength, saw the power running through every taut muscle and fluttering strand of hair. Her knees wobbled. He stepped forward and put his palm against her face. She looked up into his eyes, gleaming and bottomless, and found herself drawn into them. His thumb edged up over her cheek and ran slowly over her lower lip.

Her mind urged her to slow down and think about this. Her heart wept in amazement at him.

Her gut was all in.

She leaped onto him and kissed him fiercely, reveling in the crackle she felt where their skin touched. He pulled her close with grappling hands and solid arms. She dug her nails into his shirt and yanked, ripping it down the back. He bit her lower lip, and she bit back harder, relishing the taste of pennies where she broke skin. There was no moment but this, here, now, realer than anything she’d felt in months.

He hoisted her up, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He carried her downstairs, and the cool shade of his lair closed around them both, enveloping them inside a duet that only they could hear.