Music to My Sorrow

Music to My Sorrow Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill Spirits White as Lightning Mad Maudlin Bedlam's Edge(ed. with Rosemary Edghill) Music to My Sorrow 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 fact that they were the only ones there. They'd barely sat down—Mom looking like she was going for a job interview, Dad looking like he was the one going to be doing the interviewing, when an inner door opened. Devon distrusted the man who stood just on the threshold on sight. There was just something too perfectly appropriate about him: distinguished, graying, kindly, tweedy . he would have been the perfect headmaster for an American version of Hogwarts. In Devon's experience, nobody was that perfect. So he was the worst sort of counselor, shrink, whatever. He was an actor. He didn't care about why the 'rents had brought Devon here, and he especially didn't care about Devon. He cared about money, and the 'rents were the ones holding the checkbook. Something else occurred to Devon then, something one of the other inmates of the last labor-camp had told him. Look out for the religious places. Nobody has to be certified in those, and they can get away with anything they want as long as they don't actually kill you. "Won't you come in?" the man said. "I'm Director Cowan, the head of Christian Family Intervention." * * * "Ours is a special program," Director Cowan was saying a few moments later, when the three of them were seated in his office. Devon was disgusted to see that it, too, was perfect—a little Christian (that was to be expected) but not scarily so; comfy chairs and dignified books. He'd seen offices exactly like it a thousand times before. "Normally— as our name implies—we are an intervention program, for cases in which a child is actively at risk in a hostile and dangerous environment—but Sarah—may I call you Sarah?—has eloquently convinced me that young Devon is indeed actively at risk, as much as any of the poor young souls we pluck from the streets." Devon glowered. His father shifted uncomfortably at the mention of "poor young souls" and Devon smirked inwardly. Good! Let him suffer! It hadn't been Devon's idea to come here and get his soul saved. "All I want is a little peace in the house," Mrs. Mesier said, sounding as if she were going for the Best Actress Award. You've got that every time you and Dad pack me off to another boarding school, Devon thought with deadly accuracy. But that's not really "all" you want. "And you, young Devon, what do you want?" Director Cowan asked, smiling at him. "What do you care?" Devon asked. "Keep a civil tongue in your head!" his father snapped.

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