The Last Request

Corey Webb was forty-two years old and had spent twenty years drifting from one market town to the next, spinning records for crowds that never learned his name. He liked it that way, mostly. Twenty years of one-night sets and two-week lodgings had a rhythm to it, like a song he knew all the verses to.

The Wicket was supposed to be just another stop. A town built into the roots of a petrified forest, where magic got sold by the sack like grain and nobody asked where you came from. He'd owed a bad debt to a bad man, and the house-sitting gig at the Horned Spire had cleared it. Water the plants. Keep the hearth lit. Play whatever you want at night, just don't touch the sealed shelf in the archive.

That last part had been the mage's one rule, passed along through the rental agent with a kind of shrug, like even she didn't believe it mattered.

So naturally it was the only thing Corey thought about.

He had the turntable going at midnight, same as every night. The Spire was a crooked tower that leaned three degrees east of true, and up in the listening room the whole structure hummed when the needle dropped, like the building itself wanted to hear. He cued up a record he'd found in the unsealed crates, some old horns-and-drums thing from a band that had probably broken up before he was born. Good stuff. Music for a town that never fully slept.

He set the needle and sat back in the mage's lopsided chair with his boots up on a crate.

That was when the other record started glowing.

It was across the room on the sealed shelf, third row, and it had been sitting there dark and quiet for three weeks. Now it pulsed a soft amber, like a coal breathing. And it hummed. Not the crackle of a playing record. A hum, low and steady, the way a tuning fork sounds if you press it to your teeth.

"Well, that's new," Corey said to nobody.

He got up slow, the way you'd approach a dog you didn't know. The Spire's plants lined the walls here too, all of them leaning toward the glowing record like they were eavesdropping. The hum got a little louder as he came close. He could feel it in his back teeth.

The rule was don't touch the sealed collection. Nobody had said anything about listening to it from a polite distance.

He crouched down in front of the shelf and the glow washed over his face. Warm. It actually felt warm, like standing near an oven door. And underneath the hum there was something else now, something that took him a second to place.

It was a voice. A woman's voice, singing, so faint it might have been his imagination. Except he didn't have much of an imagination left. Twenty years of taverns and midnights had ground that down to nothing.

The song made him think, weirdly and specifically, of Peggy.

Peggy Tillman, thirty-four, who worked the enchanter's counter at the Horn & Harp and covered the taps with him every Thornday night for the past six months. Peggy who argued with him about whether old recordings beat new ones. Peggy who laughed with her whole head thrown back. Peggy who he had thought about at genuinely inconvenient moments and never once done a single thing about, because doing things was for men who stayed, and Corey Webb did not stay.

The record pulsed again and the hum shaped itself almost into words. Almost.

"Okay," Corey said, standing up and backing away with both hands raised like the thing could see him. "Okay. No. We're not doing that."

The Spire hummed, unbothered. Somewhere below, a plant rustled in a room with no draft.

He went back to the chair and tried to lose himself in the horns-and-drums record, and for a while it half worked. But the amber glow stayed lit across the room, patient as a lamp, and the song kept threading through the music like a second melody that knew his name.

Three knocks came at the tower door.

Corey frowned. Nobody knocked at the Spire. The rental agent sent letters. The debt man was paid off. He took the stairs down two at a time anyway, because a man alone with a haunted record collection would always rather see a person than a shelf.

When he pulled the bolt and opened the door, Peggy Tillman was standing on the top step with a bottle in one hand and the night wind messing up her hair.

"Hey," she said. "You gonna invite me in or leave me out here to freeze?"

"Peggy." His voice came out strange. "What are you doing here? It's past midnight."

"I took a whole Fennday off for this. You left early, which you never do, and I got curious." She held up the bottle. It was a squat green thing, wax sealed at the top. "And I brought fermented night-moss wine, which cost me two days' wages, so you'd better not shut this door."

He stepped aside and she came in, brushing past him, and the Spire's little hearth-flames leaned toward her the same way the plants had leaned toward the record. Corey decided not to think about that.

"How'd you even know where the Spire is?" he asked, following her up the winding stairs. "I never told anybody here."

"Marta at the rental office talks when you buy her a cider. Also everybody in the Wicket knows the drifting DJ took the tower gig, Corey. You're not exactly subtle." She reached the listening room first and stopped dead in the doorway.

The record was still glowing. Of course it was. It had brightened, actually, and the hum was louder now, and it was singing clearly enough that Peggy's face changed.

"What is that?" she said, quiet.

"That's the part I've been trying not to think about for the last twenty minutes." He came up beside her. "It started on its own. Right when I put my own record on. Nothing touched it. The rule was don't touch the sealed shelf, and I haven't, but it doesn't seem to care about rules, it just glows and hums and honestly it's kind of rude."

Peggy walked into the room without asking his opinion, because that was Peggy all over. She crouched by the shelf, close to the glow, and the amber light caught her face and turned her gold.

"It's a memory archive," she said. "Or part of one. I've read about these. The old mages used to press more than sound into wax. They'd press feeling. Wanting, sometimes." She looked up at him. "You hear the song too? The woman?"

"You can hear it?"

"Corey, the whole room can hear it." She stood and turned to face him, and her expression held something he couldn't read, something between suspicion and hope. "Why would a sealed record start singing for you specifically? What's it pulling out of the air?"

"Nothing," he said, too fast.

She waited. Peggy was very good at waiting. Six months of Thornday nights had taught him that she could outlast a stone wall when she wanted to.

"Fine," he said. "Maybe it's pulling something."

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe it's pulling the fact that I think about you sometimes. More than sometimes. There. That's the ugly confession of the evening. The wine's on the crate there, drink as much as you want, and then we can both pretend this conversation never happened and you can go home."

Peggy didn't move. The record hummed. The hearth flames had gone still, like the whole tower was holding its breath.

"You think about me," she said slowly.

"Past tense was implied and was also a lie."

"Why have you never said anything? Six months, Corey. Six months of Thorndays."

"Because I leave." He said it plainly, the way he'd been avoiding saying it to himself for three weeks. "I always leave. Twenty years of towns and never once stayed. Saying something to you felt like starting something I'd have to be a worse man to finish."

Peggy uncorked the wine with her thumb, poured two cupfuls into the chipped mugs he kept by the turntable, and handed him one.

"Well," she said, settling onto the arm of the lopsided chair like she owned it, "here's my challenge, house sitter. I didn't climb a leaning tower at midnight just to hear your sad backstory. I came to hear the Dead Mage's sealed collection. All of it. Every record on that shelf."

Corey took a long pull of the night-moss wine. It tasted like honey and cold air and something faintly electric.

"Peggy, the mage's one rule."

"The mage," Peggy said, "is gone. Has been gone for years, if my reading's right. And that record has been singing at you for twenty minutes because it already knows what you want. I'd rather find out what it wants to show us than sit here being polite about a rule some absent old woman left behind." She raised her mug at the glowing shelf. "So. Play me one. What's the worst that happens?"

The record flared bright amber, and the song came through the room clear as a bell, no hum over it at all now, and Corey could have sworn the voice was laughing.

He looked at the shelf. He looked at Peggy, who was watching him with her eyebrows up and her whole face daring him.

"Yeah," he heard himself say. "Alright. One record."

The amber light spread down the shelf, row by row, like the tower had just been waiting for permission.

Corey picked through the crate next to the turntable while Peggy drank her wine. He was stalling and he knew it. The sealed shelf kept glowing at the edge of his vision like a stove nobody had turned off.

"This one," he said finally, and pulled out a record with a hand-inked label. Listening Dust, it said, in faded brown script. No composer. No date. "That's not a title, that's a warning."

"That's the point of the shelf, isn't it?" Peggy said. "You said it yourself. Feeling pressed into wax." She kicked her boots off and curled her legs under her on the chair, which was such a normal thing to do that his chest hurt. "Play it."

He set the needle down.

For a second there was just surface noise, the soft crackle of old wax, and he almost laughed with relief. Then the room changed. Not the sound. The room. It was subtle at first, like walking into a house where bread had just come out of the oven, except this wasn't bread.

It was her.

The air smelled like Peggy's skin. Not perfume, because she didn't wear perfume, he'd noticed that on the very first Thornday, just soap and warmth and the faint mineral smell of the Horn & Harp's copper taps. It was underneath the record's music, wound through it, and it was coming from everywhere at once. From the walls. From the hearth. From the air between them.

"Corey." Peggy's voice had gone strange. "What is that?"

"You smell it too."

"Yeah. Yeah, I smell it." She was staring at him across the lamplight. "That's not the record."

"I know." He swallowed. The song the woman sang had shifted key, gone lower, warmer, and it sounded now exactly like the way his own thoughts sounded when he let them drift toward the enchanter's counter on Thornday nights. "It's me. The record's playing me. It's pulling wanting out of the air like you said, and the only wanting in this room right now is mine, so it's filling the whole tower with..." He gestured vaguely at the air, at the smell of her, at everything. "With this."

Peggy set her mug down on the floor very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands aren't steady. "The room smells like me."

"Apparently I've been paying attention."

"To what I smell like."

"That's the part you're fixating on?"

"It's a pretty memorable detail, Corey." But she was laughing, almost, and then she wasn't, and she stood up out of the chair and crossed the room in about four steps. She stopped close enough that he could have counted the freckles on her nose, which the lamplight had apparently been hiding from him for six months, along with the fact that her eyes had gold in them near the pupil.

"Say it out loud," she said. "The thing the record's saying for you."

"Peggy."

"You confessed ten minutes ago. Confess again. I want to hear it in words, not wax."

The tower hummed, low, patient, the floorboards of the leaning Spire vibrating faintly under his feet. The amber glow from the shelf had spilled all the way across the listening room now and pooled at their ankles like warm water.

"I want you," he said. It came out rougher than he meant it to. "I've wanted you since roughly the second Thornday. And I was always going to leave before it mattered, and the tower apparently decided it's done waiting for me to be brave, so it's doing this instead. Which, for the record, I did not order."

"Good." She put one hand flat on his chest. "Because I didn't climb this tower for a wax impression. I want the real thing. Yes or no, Corey?"

"Yes," he said, before she'd even finished.

She took the needle off the record with one hand, never looking away from him, and the room went quiet except for the hearth and the tower's hum. Then both her hands got in his shirt and she pushed, and his back hit the wall between the shelves hard enough to knock a grunt out of him, and her mouth found his.

She kissed the way she did everything, Peggy. Direct. No warm-up. Her fingers curled into his