by Milly Taiden
Xan Valentine said, “This is a temporary appointment. We’re offering a probationary contract for three months, and then the band will make a decision whether to extend the contract. Our last back-up singer shat where she ate, if you’ll forgive the vulgarity. To be clear, no fucking the band. Is that acceptable?”
“Yes.” Hell, yes.
He flipped through her calendar some more. “Yet another one of your bands, Lamplight Horrors, is playing at the Whisky-A-Go-Go next month?”
“Yes, we are.” Lamplight was the metal band that she fronted, and scoring that gig was huge. “We’re opening for Bleed Me.”
“You’re not.” Xan Valentine stood and towered over the table and the security men behind him. His hair swung over his shoulders, platinum ends catching on his black suit. “Jonas, get her a contract and tell the rest of them to go home. Yvonne, Boris, with me. My next appointment is?” He strode out, flanked by his two assistants, who began briefing him on his next meeting while they struggled to keep up with his long stride. The black-suited security guys all followed Xan Valentine out of the room, jogging to catch up and encircle him.
Another man whom she hadn’t even noticed came from the back of the room. “Rhiannon? Am I pronouncing that right?”
“Yeah,” she said as the rest of the band awakened, shook themselves, and wandered out the way that Xan Valentine had gone. Tryp grinned at her again, not a leer but with good humor, and waved as he left.
“We’re going to be working closely,” the new guy said. “You’ll be one of the few women on the tour, and sometimes the band and the roadies can get boisterous, and sometimes they can get out of hand, and sometimes they can be real assholes.”
She turned and looked up at the man beside her.
His brown hair curled almost to his chiseled cheekbones. He wore a dark blue suit that fell like he had a gym-built body underneath the soft cloth, and his light tie looked like silk. He hadn’t been on the Rolling Stone cover, which was weird because he was as gorgeous as the rest of the Killer Valentine minor gods.
He smiled with straight, even teeth and a sweetness that reached his pale green eyes. “If you have any problems or feel unsafe, you can come to me. I’m Jonas Rees, the band’s manager, and I’ll whip those assholes into line.”
Yet Another Clusterfuck
Jonas smiled at the little redhead as he shoved the thick contract in her hands, even though he wanted to take Xan aside and pitch a bitch.
Another back-up singer. Another sex scandal or fistfight on the tour bus waiting to happen. Yet another point of contention to rip this band further apart.
Rhiannon took the contract and thanked him like she didn’t even know that she was the hand grenade that had been tossed in the middle of the tour.
The hand grenade deserved to know the truth.
“You’ll join the show in San Diego,” he told her, “so you have two days to ditch your life here. You may want to throw everything in storage rather than keep your apartment, or you may want to sublet. I don’t keep an apartment at all, but I don’t mind being homeless. I have to warn you, I’m not sure if this is going to work out. The other guys all sing back-up, but Xan has a bug up his ass that he doesn’t have to push his voice as hard if there’s a woman’s voice on the stage with him. If this works out, if you take some of the stress off Xan’s voice, then that’s great, but this may not be a long-term gig.”
She nodded, and her red curls swished around her shoulders. As her hair floated, a subtle scent flowed into the air, something sweet, something comforting. She said, “I understand. Thank you for this opportunity.” Her blue eyes got bigger, and she looked so young.
She couldn’t be much younger than most of the band, considering that Tryp had just turned twenty-one. The very last thing they needed was not just any sex scandal but an honest-to-God underage sex scandal. Jonas raked his fingers through his hair, just imagining that panic attack. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
Good.
“Read that contract,” he pointed. “Tomorrow, take it to the lawyers’ office. The address is at the top. Make sure you bring proof of identity, like your passport or your birth certificate and driver’s license.” That would make sure she was telling the truth about her age, because a lot of teenagers haunted the stinking streets of Los Angeles, looking for their big break and willing to do absolutely anything to get it, and lying to a rock band manager didn’t even make the top ten for that list. “And get it all there tomorrow, first thing, when the office opens at nine. They have a notary there, so you can sign the contract in front of him. We have a tight schedule to get you on the payroll and get the hell out of L.A. You’ll meet with the stylists tomorrow and get fit for costumes then, too.”
“Stylists?” Her bright blue eyes widened further, and he was struck by how cute she was, astonished at how the big time worked, but he shook that the hell off.
Jonas said, “Believe it or not, those rockers have all been carefully groomed, even though it all falls apart as soon as we get on the road. I’ll see you in San Diego.”
She thanked him again and walked toward the hotel lobby, clutching the thick contract in her fist.
Her ingénue astonishment meant that she was ripe to get into trouble, and Jonas would have to bail her out, just like he bailed them all out, figuratively and literally, and kept the band together and the tour on track.
Rhiannon’s three-month contract had a much more comprehensive non-disclosure agreement and an airtight morals clause, far tighter than any of the previous ones. If she screwed a band member, she was gone. Jonas didn’t need one of those guys weeping inconsolably when she broke his heart, or two of them fighting over who had fucked her first, or her turning up pregnant and paternity tests and child support in perpetuity, again.
He watched her walk away, her hips swinging gently and her glossy, auburn curls bouncing, so different than the gaggle of vapid singers, all of them getting by with minimal training, flashing their bony legs and silicone boobs, and waiting for their big break with a passive serenity stemming from knowing they could go home and be snapped up as a trophy wife if this didn’t work out. The band had auditioned over a hundred giggly vocalists during the last six hours until Xan had finally been satisfied with this one.
Finally.
And now the hard part began.
The Killer Valentine tour was a goddamned pirate ship, a leaky, rotting boat full of vagabond drunkards that pulled into port to purge fetid bilge water and pillage and fuck, and women are always bad luck on a pirate ship, especially a pretty little thing like Rhiannon.
Killer Valentine
Rhiannon drove over the stacked L.A. freeways—acrid smog streaming through her car vents stung her eyes and coated her tongue with truck exhaust—straight to the lawyers’ office, read the contract by flattening it against the rusted steering wheel of her car, ducked inside to sign it, and cashed her signing bonus check at a drive-through check cashing store because she had never had the deposit necessary to open a bank account. She paid back the eighty-dollar payday loan from when she had needed to see a gynecologist last year that had sucked over a hundred dollars in interest out of her threadbare purse since and high-tailed it back to the flop house she shared with nine other musicians.
For years, all her money went straight from her crapola part-time jobs to her coaches and into costumes and instruments and other stuff that a musician needs. She paid rent, bought gas, and ate on what was left over.
The night before Rhiannon left, she returned to the derelict house with the dead yard that her neighbors kept calling in for being a crack house or a meth lab and bullied her housemates to get them off social media (where they were “building their fanbases,”) to help her drag her filthy mattress, most of her shoddy clothes, and all her crap out into the back yard. They siphoned a half a gallon of gasoline from her car and added some kerosene from the camp stove that they cooked on because the city had turned off the gas months befo
re. She threw her plastic lighter that wouldn’t click off onto the top of the fuming pile.
The fireball could be seen three blocks away.
After they patted out their smoking eyebrows, they celebrated with whiskey shots, and Rhiannon tossed the keys of her beater car to Gaston after he promised to drive her to the airport the next morning.
Other than bandmates, several of whom lived in the house, and a few friends from the cafe where she waited tables a few nights a week, she didn’t call anyone to say goodbye or crow about her good fortune. She had lost touch with most of her foster brothers and sisters when she moved to California and they were shipped to other homes or kicked out of the system to fend for themselves when they turned eighteen. Her few friends had been lost to time and the foster system, mostly before she even left for California.
She had also desperately dieted to lose thirty pounds in forty-eight hours. She had actually lost one-half of a pound, probably from exhaling forcibly while standing on the scale.
After taking the late-morning hop to San Diego, Rhiannon was driven straight to the first venue. Backstage, she and Xan Valentine rehearsed the songs she had prepared while the opening act took the stage.
Despite the fact that she was sitting almost knee-to-knee and singing with Xan Valentine the Rock Star in a green room with a table loaded with meaty sandwiches and fruit that her stomach rumbled for, she nailed every note.
He nodded when she was done, evidently satisfied, and went off to greet the special guests in the green room.
Rhiannon made herself a sandwich.
Of course she sounded decent, not perfect by far, but decent. As soon as the emailed sheet music had shown up in her inbox, she had printed it at the library and taken it to two of her voice coaches, and they had dissected every note for hours, costing her the last of her final paycheck and bar tips. She had downloaded both Killer Valentine albums and all their extraneous singles and listened to them every moment, even while sleeping, just in case that sleep-learning stuff worked.
Between sets at that first performance, when Xan Valentine was stalking around the stage like a caged animal about to be released by music again, he had smiled at Rhiannon and winked.
She didn’t suck so much. Cool.
It took her about a week of concerts in new towns and runners and stale hotel rooms and busses racing to shows and singing her heart out every night without a break or a day off out to figure out the truth behind the slick veneer.
Killer Valentine was falling apart.
Hard.
Somehow, the show went on every night, leaving Rhiannon shocked that she wasn’t on a plane back to L.A. or stranded alone on some empty road beside a burned-out tour bus.
Even days when the drummer Tryp Areleous had been partying too much the night before, which was every night, even when he was incoherent during afternoon radio interviews because he lingered in the twilight between hungover and still piss-drunk, he was lucid by sound check and a madman on the skins by show time.
Rade, the keyboard player, and Grayson, the bass guitarist, were both caught in the riptide of addiction. Rhiannon didn’t know what all they were on, but every night at eight o’clock, they somehow staggered to their instruments and the drugs corrupting their systems burned away under the blazing stage lights, even if they hadn’t showered for days.
Every night, Rhiannon was sure that this was the concert that at least one of them would collapse, but she hadn’t realized that she stood in the presence of musical geniuses. When their instruments touched their calloused fingers, they didn’t drop a note.
Twenty minutes before the show in Tulsa, Rade and Grayson were hallucinating that demon elves were climbing the teaser curtains in the wings of the stage, and Jonas Rees sat beside them, calming them, talking them back to the real world.
“You don’t have to worry about what’s hanging on the curtains,” Jonas told them, his voice gentle like he was soothing skittish toddlers. “That’s my job. As the manager, I’m the chief demon-elf exterminator, too. Let’s stand up, walk out on the stage, and do your sound check.”
Jonas Rees seemed to be in the middle of every Killer Valentine tornado, calming the wild winds that threatened to tear the band apart. Today, he wore a slim black suit that emphasized his broad shoulders, a rock-and-roll twist on respectability. He combed his light brown hair out of his eyes with his fingers, holding it back so that it didn’t fall in soft curls around his ears.
“We’re not hallucinating,” Grayson said. “They’re really there. Aren’t they, Rade?”
“Yeah. They’re right there.”
Jonas stood and held out his hands to help Rade and Grayson to their feet. “Come on, guys. It’s just a few minutes, and then we can all sit down again.”
As they gazed at their instruments, their eyes spun less.
Rhiannon went over to where the musicians crouched at the base of the black velvet curtain. She said, “Hey, Rade. I’m kind of nervous about this sound check. Could you help me out?”
Rade looked at her and blinked, his bright blue eyes slowly focusing. He pushed his blond hair back, swiping at the purple tips to get the shaggy mess off his face. “I can’t.”
Jonas crouched beside him and grinned up at Rhiannon, his eyes twinkling with humor. “Sure you can. You wouldn’t leave a lady alone out there, would you?”
Rade shook his head, eyes jittering. “You go out with her, Jonas.”
“Me? I couldn’t. I’m just a manager. She needs a musician to help her out, right?”
“Oh, yes,” Rhiannon said. She held out her hand. “I need a musician out there with me.”
Rade stared back and forth between Rhiannon and Jonas, up at the curtain, and then back to Rhiannon. He sighed, “Okay.”
Rade grabbed Jonas’s hand and allowed himself to be pulled up, then staggered out on to the stage to his banks of keyboards. The fluorescent tube lights far above shone gray light over the whole stage and the banks of empty seats, and Rade seemed so alone out there as he stuttered into the mic, “Ah-Are you guys ready?”
Rade’s strained voice echoed through the arena, bouncing off the concrete walls and plastic seats. A roadie in the perched sound booth held up a thumb.
Jonas said, “Come on, Grayson. Rade’s out there. Time for your sound check.”
Rhiannon held her breath, hoping that it would work.
Grayson followed, because Grayson always followed Rade. He meandered over to his bass guitar and slung the strap over his shoulder, watching Rade and waiting for his turn with the roadies.
Rhiannon’s hand crept up to her chest to slow her hammering heart. One of these days, Jonas’s cajoling wasn’t going to work, even with her backing him up.
Jonas scrubbed his face with his hands and looked at Rhiannon over his fingertips. His pale green eyes crinkled and the corners turned up as he smiled behind his hands. “Thank you.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“I appreciate it. If Xan catches the Terrible Threesome screwing up the sound check, he might go ballistic.”
Rhiannon had a lot of practice talking to drug-addled people. “Yeah. You’re welcome. Let’s go do this.”
That night, Rade and Grayson played the set list like angels, each note ringing perfect and true.
Afterward, they stumbled off the stage to snort something and shoot up something else in the dressing room, stoned before Xan Valentine finished his solo encore.
It was a double resurrection and duplicate descent to Hell, repeated every night.
Cadell, the lead guitarist, struggled with his sobriety every day, watching the rest of the band get hammered while he retreated farther into an I-don’t-give-a-shit cocoon built out of iPads and iPhones. On the stage, his fingers blurred over the frets and strings of his guitar, playing in perfect sync with the others.
Every night onstage, Rhiannon sang in the background, her bright, forward mezzo complementing Xan Valentine’s clear, ringing tenor. Every person in the cr
owd of thousands upon thousands believed that Xan Valentine had commanded them to their feet and was singing precisely to them as he jumped and threw his voice out there and played his guitar with ferocious energy, and they gave it right back to him. Every show bordered on a mass riot, and more than once, Rhiannon caught Jonas’s eye from where he was watching the audience from the tunnel under the seats, surrounded by hulking security staff, deciding whether to deploy the burly men in black fatigues to secure the band.
Twice, when the crowd spilled over the barricades and boiled up onto the stage, the black-clothed men surrounded Rhiannon and bustled her off to the SUVs.
One time when they were pulling a runner, while Jonas held her hand to steady her and she pried her shoes off her pulverized feet, he looked into her eyes and said, “Xan is right. You have an interesting voice.”
“Thanks.” Her voice coaches had been telling her for years that interesting meant not-commercial.
“I mean it,” Jonas said. He leaned in, and Rhiannon blinked, looking up at him. His green eyes caught the cool blue stage lights and turned teal. “It’s not a typical rock voice. You have some dirt in there, but your higher register is almost head voice.”
“I used to sing a lot at Catholic churches,” she admitted. Catholic Charities had tried to help her mother, and then the social worker had kept track of her, helping Rhiannon when she could.
“Ah,” he said. “That’s what Xan likes. It’s interesting.”
She held her shoes and dropped his warm hand as she reached for her backpack that he held. “I have to run now.”
He handed her the bag with her stuff. “I’ll see you on the bus.”
“Okay.” She backed away. “Okay.”
The contract and Xan Valentine had been as clear and cutting as a diamond: no fucking the band or be summarily fired with prejudice.
