Music to My Sorrow (1 of 4 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Music to My Sorrow by Mercedes and Edghill Lackey. Copyright 2005 by Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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Music to My Sorrow

To Brenda Schonhaut and "Molly"


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.

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