sunday.

It proved more difficult than one would expect. Chris had always had some sort of sixth sense about when someone wanted to corner him for a Serious Talk, and managed to be elsewhere with preternatural ability. He left to get lunch just when Lance was about to invite himself along. He disappeared the minute that recording was done for the day. He wasn't anywhere near his usual haunts, and none of his other friends had seen him. If it hadn't been for the tracks in the studio, Lance would begin to think that Chris didn't even exist anymore.

Lance finally resorted to borrowing the spare key to Chris's house from Justin and showing up on the Sunday before Halloween, putting on a pot of coffee and waiting for Chris to stumble, bleary-eyed, down to the kitchen.

Chris stopped in the kitchen doorway when he saw Lance reading the New York Times at his table, but after that, he didn't seem all that surprised. "Why the fuck do these conversations always happen at the kitchen table?" he grunted, and that was the last thing he said until he had two cups of coffee under his belt.

Looking at Chris -- really looking at Chris, the way he hadn't in a long time, not since before the hiatus -- Lance was startled to see that somewhere in the last year, Chris had gotten old. It was lurking around his eyes, dark and ponderous. Chris seemed to sense Lance's eyes on his face, and looked up and smiled without humor. "J and Joey sent you, didn't they."

"Yeah," Lance said, and wondered if he should refill his own cup of coffee.

"Giving you some kind of line about how they're worried that I'm gearing up to kill myself, or something."

Hearing Chris say it, it sounded ludicrous, but there was still enough of the oldness lurking around Chris's eyes that Lance wondered if maybe it wasn't what Justin and Joey thought. "Chris," he started, and then frowned. "You're not sick, are you?"

Chris's shoulders began to shake, and he dropped his head down onto folded arms. Lance reached out a hand, ready to let it fall onto Chris's shoulder, ready to say something along the lines of "we'll find you the best doctors around, we'll get through this somehow, it'll all be okay", when he realized that Chris was laughing, dark bitter laughter that rolled from him in waves thick as syrup.

"No," Chris finally said, picking his head up and wiping his eyes dry. "No, I'm not sick. And it's not drugs, and it's not booze, and it's not some sort of suicide wish."

"Then what is it?"

Chris looked away. The tension was back in his shoulders, and Lance ached to be able to reach out and smooth it away. "It's nothing, okay? Just tell everyone that I'm gonna be fine."

Anyone but the guys would have taken that as an answer. Lance knew it for a statement that Chris really did want to talk about it, whatever it was -- he just couldn't bring himself to do so without a little more prodding. "Look," he said. "I don't have anywhere to be today. If I have to sit here all day and keep asking you questions, I will. Don't think I won't."

"Oh, I know you will, you stubborn bitch." Humor flared briefly through Chris's eyes, and then was lost again. "I don't want to talk about it. You can sit here until the cows come home if you'd really like, and I still won't want to talk about it."

"Wanting to talk about it and needing to talk about it are two entirely different things. And you need to talk about it." Lance watched the slump of Chris's shoulders, the stubborn curve of his chin, and tightened his hand around his mug to keep himself from touching. "Can we just pretend that we went through the usual four-hour process of getting you to the point where you're ready to admit what's bugging you?"

Chris sighed. "You're going to think that I'm insane."

"The guys already have me none too convinced of your sanity," Lance pointed out. "Whatever you tell me, Chris, I won't judge. I, of all people, won't judge."

Chris studied Lance's face for a long moment, and then sighed again. "Okay," he said, His voice rang with an unfamiliar defeat. "You really want to know?"

That had been too easy. The only time that it was that easy was when Chris was dealing with something serious. "Chris, if you're in trouble, tell me. We'll figure out some way to fix it, somehow." Somewhere along the line, he realized, he'd become the one to make the plans. The fix-it duty had slid from Chris's shoulders onto his own. He wondered why he suddenly felt cramped and uncomfortable.

"Okay," Chris said, and was silent for a long minute.

"It was back in Germany, right before we really hit it," Chris finally started. He kept his eyes fixed on a point just over Lance's shoulder. It sounded as though he was picking through the words, looking for the right ones to let him keep some sort of control over the story. "Remember how I used to disappear, some nights? When I just couldn't take being around you guys any longer, and I had to get out?"

Of all the ways Chris could have started the story, that wasn't what Lance had expected to hear. He did remember. "Yeah," was all he said.

"Yeah," Chris echoed, and smiled. It was a washed-out and watercolor smile. "So. This one night in Berlin, I found a place that was renting bikes. Motorcycles. I didn't think the guy would rent to some crazy foreigner, but all he said was 'Be careful, it's going to be a stormy night.' I thought he was smoking something, because it was the clearest night you could imagine, all cold and brisk. But I took the bike and went off riding."

Chris rose from the table, to refill his coffee. Lance watched the curve of his shoulders and thought that the coffee was probably an excuse to avoid facing the fact that Chris always found it easier to talk when he couldn't see you. "In retrospect, it was a pretty dumb thing to do, but, you know, we were all pretty dumb back then. It was a good night for riding, and I must have been out there for about an hour, hour and a half, before the storm clouds blew in. I remember thinking that the old guy had been right, even as I got drenched. I was just about to turn around and bring the bike back when this group of riders showed up. Like, out of nowhere. Good riders, too. You could tell that they weren't just weekend warriors, they were the people who knew bikes."

That night came flooding back to Lance; he remembered the click of the hotel door behind him, the sound of Justin snoring, the electric lost look on Chris's face. He chewed on the inside of his lip, waiting for Chris to go on; Chris paused, looked out the window, and finally sighed.

"I should have left. I should have. But I didn't. There was a woman riding at the head of the pack. I couldn't see much -- she was wearing a big jacket and a helmet, and I couldn't see her eyes. But she signaled to me, invited me to ride with them for a bit. And I did. They were good, Lance. Pushed it right to the limit. And I kept up with them." Chris looked back at Lance, over his shoulder. His eyes were one-dimensional. "I did," he insisted, and it seemed to be a point of honor. Lance just nodded.

Chris looked back down at his hands. "We hit this patch of rough road, though. And it was wet and slippery, and they were pushing it hard, and I went down. Managed to keep my legs under me, for the most part, and most of me got clear, but I wrenched my wrist, and got pretty scraped up. The pack stopped, and the woman got off her bike, and took off her helmet, and that's when I saw --"

The narrative cut off, and Lance almost prompted him, until he saw the faint specks of white on the back of Chris's knuckles as he clutched the counter. "She looked human," Chris said. It was almost conversational. "She looked perfectly human. But she wasn't." He took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh, dropping his chin to lean against his shoulder and studying the ground. "There was something in her eyes -- something about the way she moved -- Lance, she wasn't human."

It should have sounded outrageous. He should have thought that Chris was mad. He should have been checking Chris's ashtrays for roaches and recycling bin for empty fifths. Instead, he felt like he'd been punched in the stomach and couldn't draw breath to recover. Chris didn't bother pausing. "Do you remember those stories your momma used to tell you when you were a kid? About the good faeries and the bad faeries, and about how if you weren't good, the bad faeries would come and snatch you away in the middle of the night?"

"Yes," Lance said, and his voice sounded scratchy in his own ears. Chris spoke with the flat despair of someone who knows that he isn't going to be believed. "Yeah, I do."

"Well, I always thought that they were just -- heh. Pardon the expression, fairy tales -- But they were all like that. Tall and shining and beautiful and perfect. They moved like angels, and when they talked, they sounded like you could only dream of, and she -- she was their leader. Their queen." Buried underneath the dispassionate recital was a real and chilling longing, as though Chris had wanted nothing more than to crawl inside those distant and mythical figures and never let go. Lance couldn't see his face, but the sound of his voice sent shivers down Lance's spine.

"She picked me up, and looked at me, and said --" Chris paused, as though he was struggling to remember the exact words. His voice dropped, taking on what Lance imagined was a dim echo of the voice of the woman he'd encountered. "'For one who rides with us, you have done well, little human, but those who ride and fall belong to me.' And she picked me up, and when she touched me -- God, Lance, when she touched me, you can't imagine --"

He broke off again, breathing deeply, and his fingers clenched, then relaxed. When he spoke again, that naked desire was gone, shoved back behind the cool recitation. "She wrapped up my wrist. I didn't ask how she knew that I'd banged it up. She told me a bunch of things -- I don't really remember what she said, not all of it, but the basic essence was that -- she had some sort of claim on me. Some sort of mark. That she'd come back for me, at least once a year, maybe more, and that I'd ride with them for as long as she wanted me. And she drew me close to her and kissed me on the forehead and it burned like acid, and I blinked and when I opened my eyes again, they were gone. And I was wet and cold and my wrist didn't hurt at all, and I went to return the bike and go back to the hotel."

The silence after Chris finished speaking was like a dare. "I remember that night," Lance said. Chris nodded. Lance paused, struggling to count dates in his head and piece together a chronology from days that all blended into each other. Something clicked into place. "We got our first gold record just after that."

"Yeah," Chris said. He twisted his fingers together. "She, uh, said that while I was hers, good things would happen. We would have made it anyway, eventually, but. It. Uh, I think it helped."

"Okay," Lance said. He took a deep breath. The rational, practical, business side of his brain was obviously out to lunch, because he believed Chris. "So. You're basically telling me that the Queen of Faerie exists, and has laid -- what, some sort of claim on you?"

"Yeah," Chris said. "I know. It sounds like I'm ready for the funny farm. Or for rehab. I swear to you, though, I'm clean."

"I know." Lance was more than a little surprised at how well he managed to keep his voice even. "So. This has been going on for -- what?" His eyes flicked upwards as he counted. "Seven years, give or take?"

Chris's voice dropped, and he braced his hands against the counter again as he dropped his head to match it. "Seven years exactly. That's the problem."

"Chris," Lance said, and stopped, not knowing what it was he was going to say.

Chris turned around. Behind the set and distant mask he wore, his eyes burned like two coals. "You remember when we got hit with that damn counter-suit, right? Right around Halloween, back in '99." Lance nodded; those days were written heavily in his book of memories. "And you remember how I kept saying that it was going to be okay, that we'd get out of it fine, that nothing was going to be able to stop us."

Lance had walked around in a daze, reading contracts over and over again; that had been when he'd stopped being interested in business in the theoretical sense, and started being interested in business in the practical sense. Justin had started sucking his thumb again. Joey had disappeared into the clubs, coming back with girl after girl. JC had just seem to disappear inside himself completely, armed only with headphones and a notebook. Chris had fallen apart at first, blaming himself for getting the rest of the guys into it. And then he'd gotten up one day, calm and composed, to face the lawyers with a dignity and maturity that nobody had really expected out of him. Chris, they'd all agreed later, had been the one to keep them all sane through it.

"All Hallows Eve," Chris said, "is the one guaranteed night of the year when she'd come for me. No matter where we were. And when she called --"

"Chris," Lance said again. He wanted to say something brilliant, something that would reach across the space between them and take whatever burden it was off of his friend's shoulders, but it died in his throat at the look that Chris gave him. For a second, it seemed as though all of the weight Chris was carrying had burned away, leaving Chris behind, crucible-forged and shining and real, real, real in a way that nobody had ever been real before.

"Look. I can't tell you what it's like. I don't have the words. Riding with them -- It's like the best orgasm you've ever had in your entire life. Like the first time you stood on stage and had a million teenage girls screaming in your ear. Coming back afterwards, it's like being wrapped in gauze again, deaf and dumb and blind and --" Chris broke off, and swallowed heavily. "And she could fix it. Whatever it was, she could fix it. And I knew that while I was riding with her, while I was one of hers --" The words were spit out, sudden anger flaring and then fading away again. "--that nothing could touch me. Could touch us. We were flying on the top of the world.

"Except nothing lasts forever." Chris pulled up the hem of his T-shirt to rub at his eyes, and when he let it fall again, he was back to being old-looking Chris, that strange glamor gone. He leaned back against the counter. "Because every seven years, like clockwork, the Faerie Court has to sacrifice one of its riders to Hell." His lips twisted, bitterly. "Think of it like royalties."

Lance stirred. For half a second, he was back in that Mississippi Baptist church he'd grown up in, listening to the preacher thump the pulpit and shouting about the wages of sin. He remembered the Sunday-school fire and brimstone, the way he'd shivered himself to sleep at night until his mother had reassured him that God was love, too. He opened his mouth to say something -- anything, anything to let Chris know that he was still there and listening, but Chris wasn't looking at him anymore. He'd opened the floodgates, and Chris was ready to talk.

"It's why she picks up humans and takes them in. We're like -- ants to her, or insects. You have to understand, they live for thousands of years. The Lady's been alive for longer than we've had recorded history. We're dead before she can bat an eyelash. What difference does it make to her if one of us gets twenty years chopped off the end of his lifeline?"

The words were flippant. Too flippant, Lance thought, like Chris was making it all a joke. Or a fairy tale. "Don't make excuses for them, Chris," Lance said, sharply -- perhaps too sharply, because Chris looked back at him, temper flaring quickly. For half a second it was as though the old Chris was standing there in front of him before it was gone.

"I'm not making fucking excuses, okay? I'm not saying that it's right, and I'm not saying that it's good, and I'm not saying that I'm not terrified out of my fucking skull here. I was there for the last guy, dammit. I was there when --"

Chris broke off, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths. A moment later, he continued, in a more even tone, and Lance realized just how close to breaking Chris really was. "I heard the way he was screaming. I can hear it every night before I go to sleep. And all I can think of is, that's gonna be me, in another five days."

The silence nearly crackled. Lance cast about for something to say. "Are you -- Are you sure it's going to be you? Maybe it won't be, maybe it'll be someone else, maybe you'll have another seven years to figure something out --"

Chris sighed, and finally got around to actually refilling the cup of coffee he'd brought over to the counter. He dropped heavily back into the chair across from Lance. "I'm the only human she's got right now. From what I can tell, she keeps it to one or two of us at a time, the same way that you don't really want more than one or two dogs at a time. And she always, always takes the one who's been with them for the longest."

Lance cast about for something to do with his hands and finally picked up his own long-since-cool cup of coffee, staring into its depths as though there were answers there. There had to be something. "Did you ever -- I don't know. Sign anything? Agree to anything? Is there some kind of -- supernatural court that you can go to and ask for some way out of the whole deal?"

Chris shook his head. "You're always the businessman." There was almost admiration in his voice before it deepened. "It doesn't work like that. I know, in the old stories, you always have to agree to it, you always have to bring it upon yourself, but that's not how it really works. I was hers from the minute I fell off that damn bike and she picked me back up and bandaged me up and put her lips on me. She claimed me, and that's not the sort of thing that you can get out of just by saying sorry, nope, don't want to do this anymore. She'll always come for you. She'll always come back for you."

Lance set his coffee mug down with a sharp click. "Look, that can't be all of it. There's no such thing as an unbreakable contract. There's always a loophole. Are you trying to tell me that nobody, in all the history of recorded time or however long this has been going on, has ever managed to wiggle out of this before?"

"Once." Chris winced, a little. "One of the others was the one who told me about the whole thing -- he seemed to like watching me squirm, like the way you might pull wings off a moth or something. Wanted to make sure I knew what I was staring in the face. I asked the same thing, and he said that once, someone managed to duck it."

That brought an absurd rush of relief. "Okay," Lance said. "How? We'll just do that. Whatever it is."

"The only way I know of to get out of it is to have a woman who's pregnant with your child meet the riders at the crossroad and drag you -- me -- the sacrifice off his bike -- well, they used horses back then. But. Drag the sacrifice off his bike, and hold on tight to him while the Lady does everything in her power to try to get her to let go. And if the woman manages to hold on, without letting go once, at the end of it he's free." Chris wrapped his fingers around his mug of coffee and looked off into the distance. "Ever since then, she's, uh. Picked people who tend mostly to play for the other team, if you know what I mean."

They'd never talked about Chris's sexual preferences in the past, not really, but all of them knew about Chris's problems with women. Lance winced. "So that's why you and Dani --"

Chris reached across the table; his hand closed on Lance's wrist, sharp as steel. "I loved Dani," he said, and each word fell between them like spiders. "Don't you dare say anything that insinuates otherwise."

The silence spun out, until Lance freed his hand and rubbed at the side of his nose. "All right," he said, raggedly. "All right. So they're going to come for you --"

"On Halloween." Chris spread his hands out flat on the table, looking at them rather than up at Lance. "And I don't happen to have a pregnant woman at hand to save me."

"Are you sure that's the only way?" Chris's kitchen was the most normal place in the world, all full of dirty dishes and empty bags of potato chips, and the morning sunlight warmed the table. Lance couldn't believe that he was having this conversation in it.

"It's the only way that anyone's ever managed to get out of it before." Chris looked up then, giving Lance a little, sad smile. "Others have apparently tried. None of them managed it."

Lance turned possibilities over in his head. "All right," he said, slowly, feeling useless. He hated feeling useless. "Can you have someone take your place?"

"No." The word slashed the air suddenly, aching and angry. "No, you fucker, I know what you're thinking, and you are not going to give yourself up for me, okay, so you can just stop fucking thinking that right this minute. Jesus, that's why I didn't tell any of you guys. I knew that one of you would come up with some sort of crazy idea to take my place, and you're not going to do it, okay? It was my fuckup, it's my problem, and you're not going to pull some kind of half-assed self-sacrificing shit, okay?"

Lance nearly recoiled at the intensity. "I can guarantee you," he said, "anything I come up with will be fully assed."

That wrung him loose a smile, pale and thin-lipped. "Yeah, well, don't do it. I've been over it, okay? There's nothing that any of you guys can do."

"I'm not going to believe that until the very end of it, okay?" Lance snapped. "Look, you'll have to forgive me, but you're sitting here telling me that one of my four best friends in the world is about to get eaten by -- by something nasty enough to pass for Hell, and I'm supposed to just sit back and pat you on the head and say that's nice, Chris, it's been fun, I'm gonna miss you? What the fuck do you take me for?"

"I take you for someone with more sense than to meddle in shit that you shouldn't touch, dammit!" Chris slammed a hand down on the table. The sudden sound was loud and raw. Lance struggled against the conditioning; when Chris raised his voice like that, the only thing to do was to show him your throat and hope he didn't choose to bite it. "You don't understand. You've never seen her. You've never had her touch you. You don't know what it's like, when she looks you in the eye and tells you to come here and you do, dammit, it's like you're some sort of fucking lapdog, and you can't say no, you can't step back and say no, this isn't happening, not to me, not like this, because you can't get free of her. I'm not fucking putting any one of you in that situation, okay? I love you fucking idiots --" Chris was crying, his eyes bright with the tears that he wouldn't let fall, and Lance ached to reach out and touch, to comfort -- "--but this is mine, my issue, my shit to deal with."

The anger slipped away, and Chris closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I've never kept anything from any of you before, and you know that. But let me keep this. Let me be the only one who gets dragged down this time. I couldn't -- I couldn't bear knowing that I brought one of you with me. Please, Lance. Leave me that much."

Lance did reach over the table then, his hand brushing over Chris's, but Chris yanked his fingers back as though Lance's skin burned him. "Don't touch me," Chris said, his eyes still closed, and his voice rasped. "Please. I can't -- I can't hold onto it if you touch me, I can't --"

"Chris," Lance started again, and maybe the third time was the charm, because this time he knew what he was going to say. "I'm not going to just let it drop. You know that. You know that I can't. If there's a way, and there's got to be a way, I'm going to find it."

"Yeah, fine," Chris said, lifting a hand to scrub over his eyes again, and his voice was like a grey rainy Thursday in May. Lance wondered if that had maybe been the reason Chris had picked him to tell. "You just have to promise me that you're not going to say a word of this to the rest of the guys."

"Okay," Lance said, as Justin poked his head through Chris's back door demanding that the "old man" get his ass in gear so that they could go for the promised game of basketball, and the conversation was over.

-- * --

Promises were promises. But they'd never let a promise stand in the way of the well-being of the group in the past. Lance called the Group Meeting Without Chris So That We Can Talk About Him Behind His Back at Joey's. As the resident No-Longer-Bachelor, Joey's fridge was always stocked.

Chris was right; some conversations could happen anywhere, but for some things, the kitchen table was the only possible choice. Albums had been written at kitchen tables; careers had been plotted. They'd been sitting at JC's kitchen table when they first realized how badly that Lou had been screwing them, and Lance's kitchen table when they'd decided on the hiatus. It was why all of them, no matter if they lived alone, had at least five chairs in the kitchen.

Maybe they'd only need four, soon, Lance thought, and winced. He fought off questions about whether or not Chris was okay until JC (always the last to arrive) had settled in around Joey's table with the rest of them.

"Okay," Justin said, finally, once everyone had beverages and they'd made inroads on the bag of chips. "Give."

"You're not going to believe this," Lance said, and Joey put a hand on his wrist.

"Try us."

"All right, but don't say that I didn't warn you." Lance told them the story that Chris had given him in as few words as possible. He tried, as well as he could, to match Chris's uninflected recital.

"Okay," Justin finally said when he was done, and frowned. "And you believe him? I mean, Lance, that's a bit outrageous --"

"I believe that Chris believes it." Lance knotted his hands together and looked at them. "I don't know how much of it I believe. But --"

"But what if it's true?" JC took up the thread. Of all of them, he seemed the most willing to take Chris's story at face value. Then again, JC also believed in tarot card readings and horoscopes. "If it's true, and we ignore it, we lose Chris. And if it's not true, what's the worst that can happen? We look like idiots for a while."

"Wouldn't be the first time," Justin muttered under his breath.

"Wait a second. This is sounding familiar," Joey said, suddenly, turning his mug of coffee around in his hands. "Really familiar." They swiveled to look at him, and he held up a hand for quiet while he chased it down inside his head. Joey wasn't the best out of all of them at logical deduction, but he could remember things that everyone else had long forgotten. "I think --" He got up from the table suddenly, and disappeared into the living room, where the mingled shelves of his and Kelly's books resided. A moment later, he came back, a thick and musty textbook in his hands. "Mom gave me some of her old books when she realized I wasn't going to college," he said, and let it thunk down on the table.

Lance slid it sideways so that he could see the title: it was an anthology of English literature. "Well," JC said, dubiously, "it's heavy enough that we might be able to hit someone with it..."

Joey shook his head and slid it back over in front of him, flipping pages quickly. "Here," he finally said, and slid the book over to Lance. Lance glanced down at it; Joey had opened to the ballads section, and was pointing out one called "Tam Lin".

"Yes," Lance agreed, after skimming through it. "'Ay the end of seven years, they pay a teind to Hell' -- that's it."

"Let me see that," JC said, and Lance slid the book across the table. JC frowned at the Scots dialect; his lips moved as he read.

"So let me get this straight," Justin said. There was none of the petulance or disbelief in his voice that could have been there; no, Justin honestly wanted to make sure that they had all the facts, not doubt those facts were true. Much. "Seven years ago, in Germany, Chris made some sort of bargain or something with a woman he believes is the Queen of Faerie. During those seven years, he would disappear on Halloween to go riding with these -- I don't know, spectral riders, or something. And now, seven years later, they have to make some kind of ritual sacrifice, and Chris thinks that he's going to be it. And the only way for him to get out of it is to have a woman who's pregnant with his kid yank him off the bike."

Put that way, without Chris standing in his kitchen and looking at Lance with those eyes, it sounded ludicrous. Lance sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. "That's what he said. I know, I know, it sounds insane --"

"We're popstars," Joey said, firmly. "We're the opposite of sanity." He reached out, snagged a potato chip from the bag in front of Justin, and frowned at it, thoughtfully. "Does anyone know the stories? Is there something you can use against Faerie -- weapons, I mean? If we can't weasel Chris out of it, can we just fight him free?"

He was looking at Lance, and Lance held up his hands. "What are you looking at me for? I don't know any more about this than you do, and what I've already told you."

"We need to, I don't know, find books on it or something," Justin said. Bus school, Lance thought from time to time, had affected Justin in many ways, the chiefest of which was that he preferred to rely on self-teaching if he needed to know something. He often demonstrated a childlike faith in the idea that if something was known, there was a book on it somewhere, even if he didn't know where it might be. "Figure out what we can do."

They all looked at Lance as though he could pull the information out of his messenger bag. "Okay," Lance said, finally. "Look. We've got five days. C, you go and look up the song, okay? If it's old, there'll probably be five or six versions of it hanging around, and maybe one of them has more information. Joey, Justin, you guys go to the library and see what else you can find on other stories about this whole Faerie thing. Not the hearts and flowers kinds of faerie, the kind that we're talking about here in the song. The old stories."

JC nodded; Joey asked, "And what're you planning?"

"There has to be someone here in town who knows the folklore. I'll go and see if I can turn them up."

"I just thought of something," Justin said, suddenly. "Does this mean that after all these years of denying it every time the topic comes up, we can actually legitimately say that Chris Kirkpatrick is a fairy?"

Lance pinched the bridge of his nose in the hopes that the headache would go away. "Justin?"

"Yeah?"

"Shut up."

-- * --

Lance made a few calls to people who might know something, and they made a few calls to other people who might know something, and all in all it was a long afternoon and evening spent on the telephone with little to nothing to show for it except a few vague promises to call back if anyone found anything. He hoped that the other guys were finding more luck.

It was nearly ten when his cell rang again, and he half-jumped out of his skin. The caller ID wasn't helpful; it showed a local number that he didn't recognize, and he wondered if his private phone number had been leaked again. He opened the phone and said, cautiously, "Hello?"

"Please accept my apologies for calling so late, but if what I suspect is true, time is of an essence," came the light and reedy tenor from the other end of the line. Even though the crackle of cellular static, Lance could hear the faint lisp behind the Irish lilt that flavored it. Somewhere in the background, there was wild fiddle music playing. "My name is Matthew Kinrowan, and from what I hear, you've been calling all over town today looking for someone who can answer a few questions for you."

Kinrowan's name had come up a few times in Lance's research, mostly in the context of "If anyone will know, Kinrowan will." Lance swallowed heavily. "Mr. Kinrowan. I'm Lance Bass. I've had an interesting folklore problem dropped into my lap today, and I'm looking for someone who can shed some light on some of the more tricky parts of it. Would you be available to answer some questions?"

"Sure, and there's no harm in the asking, now is there?" There was a smile in Kinrowan's voice. "But you'll be calling me Matthew, and I'll be calling you Lance. Do you know Náid's, down on West Washington?"

"I'm sure I can find it."

"All right, then. I know it's coming late, but if you'd like, I'll be here for most of the evening. I'll stand a round, and we can talk. My next set is over at eleven, if you'd care to join me."

Lance found himself agreeing. When he hung up the phone, he followed impulse, and called Joey and asked him to meet there. It took them longer than it should have to find the place, and when they finally did, Lance blinked, because he'd been up and down that street a hundred times without noticing the unobtrusive sign marking the door. The door of the pub was thick and sturdy oak, with a brass knocker meant more for decoration than actual use. It was heavy as Joey pushed it open, and the same bright fiddle music washed over them as they walked in.

The thick and flowing music put a smile on Lance's face. Before he even looked around himself, he knew that this was a place where the drunks never got argumentative, and the waitresses never had to fear unwanted advances, and there was always music playing. It felt, as the door shut behind them, that the bar itself saw them and welcomed them, and that they were safe there.

Lance blinked a few times when he realized what he was thinking. His world had gotten decidedly more strange in the past twenty-four hours, but surely it wasn't enough for him to think that a bar could have a personality.

He was humming absently under his breath, harmonizing to the music, when a waitress saw them standing at the door and bustled over. "Table, gentlemen? You're new here, aren't you?"

"First time," Joey said, with a smile, and she nodded. "We're here to meet someone?"

"Matthew Kinrowan," Lance said, letting his eyes rove over the bar. It was a simple place -- some booths, some tables, and a stage across the back wall that was little more than a double handful of feet across. A man and a woman -- he carrying the fiddle, she a thin round drum that she held in one hand and struck bare-handed with the other -- were apparently in the middle of a set. They had the looks on their faces that Lance recognized from when JC was in the throes of creation. The music was just short of being too loud to talk over, and the pub's patrons, even those who didn't appear to be paying attention, were nodding in time to the music or tapping their fingers on their tables.

The waitress's smile, if anything, got wider. "Ah, so you're the ones Matthew was expecting. He's in the back; if you'll follow me?" She led them through the tangle of tables and booths to what appeared to be a small back office. Lance realized that he was humming again when Joey pitched in the harmony, a fifth up the scale, and stopped himself by force of will.

"Matt," she said, knocking at the door. "Your friends are here."

"Show them in, Sheila," came the response. When they opened the door, the man behind the office's desk was rising and holding out a hand.

From the way that everyone had been talking about this Kinrowan, Lance had been sure that he would be an older man. He had thought wrong. The man facing them looked to be barely thirty; long blond hair dusted his shoulders, and his green eyes were crinkled up in a smile, but that wasn't what stopped Lance in his tracks. No, Kinrowan had that same glow to him that Chris occasionally held, only in him it was radiant and clear. He fairly crackled with it, and Lance fought the urge to squint his eyes before he realized that Kinrowan was talking. "-- must be Lance, and your friend?"

Dumbly, Lance shook Kinrowan's hand, and tried to ignore the sensation of electricity shooting beneath his fingertips and the way that the man seemed to wear a halo of silver. "Uh. This is Joey. Joey Fatone."

Kinrowan smiled. "It's always a pleasure to meet fellow makers of music, though we certainly do move in different circles. What can I do for you gentlemen? Will you be wanting a drink?"

"I think," Lance said, and didn't know what the words were going to be before they left his mouth, "that just sitting in the same room as you is enough to get me feeling drunk."

Joey shot Lance an inquisitive look -- he doesn't feel it, then, Lance thought, how could he not feel it, not when it's just like being in the room with Chris when Chris is shining like the sun -- but Kinrowan just laughed. "I'm sorry, am I being too loud for you? You should have told me that you were sensitive to it."

Everything fell on top of Lance suddenly, all of the chaos and tumult of the past twenty-four hours, and he nearly snarled. "I don't even know what 'it' is."

"All right, then," Kinrowan said, sympathy in his voice. He closed his eyes for half a second, and when he opened them again, the radiance had dimmed to a pale echo of what it had been. "Is that better?"

Lance just nodded. His eyes felt hot and gritty; he fought the urge to lift a hand and rub them. Joey blinked again, and finally ventured, "Um, guys? I don't mean to be rude, but --"

"It's all right, Joseph," Kinrowan said. "I believe that your friend is used to seeing the touch of faerie on a man's face, but never quite so strongly, am I correct?"

Lance felt old. "Look," he said. "I'm in a boyband. I dance. I sing. I occasionally get trotted out in front of the camera for an interview. I don't know a damn thing about faeries or -- or whatever this is. I gave you a call because one of our friends is in trouble --"

Kinrowan was nodding along. "The small one, the one who has the old blood. I saw you on the television earlier this year, and I could see it on his face. I had thought he made the bargain willingly."

"He thinks he's going to die in five days," Joey said, sharply.

"Aye, and he will, unless you're strong enough to stop it." Kinrowan's eyes were suddenly serious behind his kindly smile. "Do you truly not know what your friend's stumbled on?"

"We don't know anything," Joey said, and the note in his voice was frustration. Lance was about to say something, anything, when Kinrowan sighed.

"I can't make believers out of you, not in so short a time," he said, regretfully. "And I can tell that you don't believe. But will you trust me when I say that whatever your friend has told you, he is not lying, and the danger is real and immediate. He will have told you that he has met the Queen of Faerie, and that she has laid her claim on him, and that in five days, she will use him as the tithe she needs to pay. And what he has told you is the truth."

"Is there a way for him to free himself?" Lance asked. For half a second, waiting for Kinrowan's answer, his world seemed to balance on that thread of conversation between them.

"There is," Kinrowan said, after a moment of hesitation. "But it won't be without danger."

Lance met Kinrowan's eyes. "We didn't think that it would be."

The plan that Kinrowan laid out for them was a simple one, but breathtaking in its audacity nonetheless. They went over it twice, breaking off only when Lance couldn't hide his yawns anymore; he hadn't been sleeping very well lately, and Kinrowan finally sat back in his chair and said, "I think that any further conversation would be lost on Lance. You seem as though you're about to fall asleep in your very chair."

"No," Lance said, but his eyelids were dragging anyway. "I mean -- I shouldn't be so rude. You've been so helpful --"

"It's all right," Kinrowan said, and rose from his chair again. "Go home, and sleep it off. It will all look clearer in the morning, and if you've any more questions, you've my number. I'll help you as much as I can."

Joey stood as well. He looked as though he was going to head for the door for a minute, and then turned back. "How do you know all of this?"

Kinrowan's eyes dropped. For half a second, Lance imagined that he saw the regret flaring across the other man's face. "Not all of the Court rides with the Lady," he said, simply, and Lance's breath caught in his throat as he realized what the other man was implying.

"When this is all over," Lance said, his words slurring slightly with the weariness that seemed to be imprinted bone-deep, "I'm coming back, and you're going to teach me what this is that I'm seeing in you. In Chris."

"When this is all over," Kinrowan agreed, and his face was once more only that of a man, "and if it ends well, I will even teach the five of you to harness the music that only you can hear."

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