Wild Thing

by Blair Babylon

  Georgie stepped forward, but she stopped herself from running out there.

  Centerstage, under the blazing lights, Xan whipped his head around, looking back to see what was wrong, the blond ends of his long hair flying.

  Grayson was still hypnotized by the light.

  Xan walked over to him, still singing, and rested his hand on his shoulder. The backup singer Rhiannon sang the upper notes, taking the higher line so Xan could gain Grayson’s attention.

  Grayson blinked and tried to focus his eyes on Xan.

  After the refrain, Xan jutted his chin toward Cadell, who picked up that he had been thrown the lead and launched into a guitar solo instead of the backup for the verse. Tryp glanced over his drum set at the chaos and drummed with Cadell.

  Rade played the verse, oblivious. The blare of his keyboards died out of the speakers as the sound technicians faded his part.

  Xan spoke to Grayson until he shook his head, his blue hair fluttering around his face, and wrapped his long fingers around the neck of the bass again.

  Cadell played a few more notes, segueing into the last line of the verse.

  Here came the refrain, Georgie knew. She held onto the curtain more tightly, praying that Grayson could jump back in for the chorus.

  Xan pumped his hand on the last few beats, readying Grayson for the downbeat.

  One, two, three, four. One.

  Georgie saw Grayson’s fingers walk over the strings, and he started playing again.

  After a few more measures, Xan walked back upstage to sing to the crowd, which went nuts that they had his attention again.

  Even from the side of the stage, Georgie could see that several more measures elapsed before Xan shook off the interruption and got his head back into the performance.

  From behind her, Jonas muttered into his headphones, “I can’t believe that it’s going to improve. Be prepared to cut their feeds at any time.”

  Grayson fucked up twice more. The second time, he couldn’t recover before the end of the song, and the rest of them played the last verse and two choruses of “Standing on the Mountaintop” without a bass line.

  Rade was worse.

  No matter how tightly Georgie clutched the curtain, he couldn’t stay on Tryp’s beat. His plinking was all over the place, random notes dropped all over songs like a flock of pigeons crapping a storm of birdshit.

  Jonas finally told the sound booth, “Just cut his feed.”

  Rade pounded on silent keyboards, the notes only fed into his monitors, for the last four songs.

  Georgie stood with her hands over her mouth, her eyes stretched wide on her face, waiting for it to be over.

  Finally, only Xan was out on the dark stage with his acoustic guitar, singing “Alwaysland” and torturing his throat to give the crowd one last song. Rhiannon stood beside him and picked up the notes he couldn’t hit.

  Georgie sagged, hoping the worst was over.

  Xan stalked off the stage afterward, slamming his dressing room door, and didn’t open the door for one silent hour.

  Georgie sat with Adrien and Jonas, fidgeting, while Yvonne paced because every minute dragged them further behind schedule.

  Georgie made a move to go in, but Adrien laid his hand on her arm. “Don’t.”

  “It’s perfectly quiet in there,” she said. “He’s obviously not throwing things and smashing the mirrors.”

  “We don’t know what’s going on in there.” Adrien stretched his long legs and turned his cell phone over in his hands.

  The other security guy, Paul, stood beside the door, his head leaning back against the wall, either dozing or listening intently.

  When Xan did open the door, he called in a wrecked whisper for Jonas.

  Jonas stood and walked in, but Adrien followed him in, took a look around, and closed the door behind them.

  Yvonne sat down next to Georgie and pried her high heels off, letting them clomp to the floor.

  “How’re we doing?” Georgie asked her.

  She shook her head. “If we don’t get him going in fifteen minutes, I’ll have to start cancelling, and he’s going to be pissed about that tomorrow.”

  Jonas came out after a few minutes, pale and shaken. He marched off, talking on his cell phone.

  Adrien didn’t emerge for another half an hour, but he finally blazed out, speaking rapid-fire French on his cell phone. He nodded to Georgie and pointed to the dressing room.

  Georgie steeled herself and cracked open the door, prepared to see wreckage from the violence that Flicka had tried to make her believe he was capable of.

  Xan was sitting in the middle of his pristine dressing room, chilled blue ice packs wrapped around his throat. A half-empty bottle of water reflected in the mirror. Light bulbs blazed all the way around the mirror, shedding heat into the tiny room.

  She asked him, “Are you all right?”

  Xan glanced up at her. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?”

  “What are you going to do with Rade and Grayson?”

  “I told Jonas to start auditioning musicians. I’ll put in a call to friends from Juilliard tomorrow. I won’t allow those two to burn this band down.” His dark eyes took on a steely sheen. “I’m in there every day, fighting and fighting and punching and punching, and those assholes are trying to burn it down.”

  She touched his arm, which was still damp with sweat. His skin blazed as hot as if he had a raging fever. “If that’s what you have to do, then do it.”

  Xan grabbed Georgie around the waist and buried his face in her stomach. His muscled arms cinched around her so tightly that air puffed from her mouth.

  “Xan?” she asked.

  He nodded, his shoulders shaking.

  “Let me breathe,” she squeaked.

  He loosened his arms, backing off. “Tonight was shit,” he said, looking up at her with anguish in his dark eyes. “I left it all on the stage. I did every fucking thing I could. Tryp drummed like a tornado. Cadell played a master class. Those two fucked it up. It was all shit. We can’t get replacement musicians fast enough. We can’t stop the tour to get new people up to speed and teach them the songs. I’m stuck with Rade and Grayson for at least a month, and that includes Madison Square Garden. It’s going to be streamed live on the internet. If they fuck it up, it will break Killer Valentine.”

  “My God, Xan. I’ll help babysit them. They won’t get drugs past me.”

  He shook his head. “Adrien is mustering the militia. I’m pulling a security contingent from home. They’ll have several large men on each of them, twenty-four hours a day.”

  She adjusted her arms around his neck. “Then they’ll be all right.”

  “They have to be,” Xan said, laying his forehead against her breastbone. “They have to be.”

  THE GETAWAY

  Alexandre de Valentinois

  The tour bus howled over the Pennsylvania roads. Outside the long row of windows down both sides of the bus, pastel flowers rippled in the culverts and highway medians in the early-summer sunlight.

  Alex toyed with the notes Georgie had left on their new song. His ever-clever protégé had discovered that she could play the music into her keyboard, and the keyboard would record and transcribe it as sheet music, which she could annotate with electronic sticky notes for him to read on his tablet.

  Within the upper stave, the one with the treble clef, Alex tapped a pink square, and her alternate harmony line played instead of the one he had written.

  It wasn’t nearly as fun as sequestering themselves in a university practice room, her flowery perfume filling the space and lingering when she left him for class, but her slim body leaning against his side while she read a book and he listened to her piano notes through his earbuds was more than pleasant, too.

  Georgie’s phrase had too many green notes and vibrations. This bridge should swirl rosy lavender with bass notes of chocolate brown and navy, maybe a few top chimes of gold or notes related to three’s wafting across the surface.
Alex closed his eyes and tapped the music again, just catching a jarring scarlet flash of a flatted sixth. He tapped the screen to change it.

  His darkness withdrew as Georgie’s warmth seeped into his side. His arm around her with his hand lying on her stomach began to tingle with pins and needles, but they were almost to the hotel. Moving might shake her off, and they didn’t have many of these bus trips left.

  Alex laid his cheek against Georgie’s hair instead of moving his arm and tapped through her notes on the new song, Night Music. A whiff of mint and herbs floated across his vision as cold, shimmering mist. Last night’s hotel must have a different brand of shampoo than some of the others.

  His lawyers had confirmed a court date in Atlanta to finalize changing Georgie’s name, just a few days before the band played the Madison Square Garden concert.

  After that, he assumed that she would be gone.

  There was a strong possibility that Rade and Grayson would acquire more drugs and fuck up the MSG show for all the internet trolls to endlessly gif their reactions to, and then Georgie would step out of his life forever.

  His hands hungered for his violin, even though his core trembled at the thought of holding it under his chin, beside his pulse, and letting go.

  And he couldn’t do it with Georgie around again.

  Alex kept an eye on Rade and Grayson, sitting in the banquette up near the captain’s chairs. They were both absorbed in their phones, texting, from the way they swiped, stopped, and swiped their thumbs some more. Every now and then, they glanced at each other, but they were more into their phones. Both seemed to have trouble texting because their hands were shaking, and sweat beaded on their faces despite the bus’s roaring air conditioning.

  Alex occasionally glanced at the rearview mirrors shining black off the tinted windows of the bus, checking for Adrien and Paul’s black SUV following the tour bus. Their vehicle rode behind the tour’s diesel behemoth, reassuring as always.

  The bus coasted into the parking lot at the next hotel, hissing as the brakes released. Georgie was just sitting up, but as soon as she was dislodged, Alex bounded down the steps and to Paul and Adrien’s SUV.

  Adrien rolled down the blackened window, a condescending smile as usual. “Yes, Your Grace?”

  Adrien had been in Alex’s employ for over a decade and had borne witness to his first year at Juilliard. Adrien surely remembered that year far more clearly than Alex did.

  “Stop,” Alex said, and his gut tightened. “They might hear.”

  Adrien glanced through the front windshield, pointedly drawing Alex’s attention to the fact that no one else had stepped off the rumbling bus.

  Alex asked, “When will they arrive?”

  Adrien checked his phone. “Their ETA is five minutes.”

  “Formidable. Stay on Rade and Grayson until they arrive.”

  Adrien raised one eyebrow. “You are our primary responsibility.”

  Alex ignored that. “Keep them away from dealers or anyone who could be a delivery person. They’ve been texting.”

  “And what shall we do if we find them buying drugs?”

  “Separate them and call the hotel’s security.”

  Alex took two steps back, and Paul wheeled the SUV into a parking spot.

  Just as they were stepping out, Rade and Grayson clambered off the bus, blinking in the sunlight. The Terror Twins looked at each other and something passed between them, some sort of psychic signal of mayhem, and those strung-out junkies split and booked across the asphalt under the warm June sun in separate directions.

  “Fuck,” Alex muttered.

  Adrien and Paul stepped out of the SUV, surveyed the situation, and sprinted after the two rockers.

  The two stoners each reached the edges of the parking lot, where they dove into the back seats of idling cars. The beat-up sedans careened out of the parking lot, spraying gravel on the other cars and belching black smoke.

  Adrien and Paul walked back toward the SUV.

  Alex shoved Adrien’s door closed and trudged back to the bus. When he had climbed the steps to the main level, he called out, “Jonas, we need to track Rade and Grayson.”

  Jonas was sprawled on a couch with Rhiannon, looking at her tablet over her shoulder, probably watching a movie. He sighed, opened his laptop that was lying on the coffee table, and clicked a few icons. “Yeah. They’re moving.”

  “I’ve retained additional security,” Alex said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. Take the new men and haul their stoner arses back to the hotel.”

  Alex glanced back, watching the four dark SUVs that were turning into the parking lot. “They’re here, only three minutes past when they would have been useful. Point them in the direction of those cokeheads. They’ll have them at the venue for sound check.”

  FAKE FIRE AND ARTIFICIAL HEAT

  Georgie

  Georgie followed Xan into the arena. One tier of plastic seats stretched to the low rafters, no balcony. She counted seats and rows and calculated that the hall must hold less than two thousand people.

  She said, “Wow. This is small.”

  Xan stood centerstage, surveying the lighting battens above his head. “The stage is a little cramped, but it will be fine. We booked this show over a year ago, and there’s no larger venue in range. We should at least break even.” He sighed. “We will have to pull a runner, though.”

  Their rig was already up, as the technicians had driven overnight the night before, and had hung the lights and installed their huge television screens, pyrotechnics effects, and lasers above the stage that morning. “Kind of seems like overkill.”

  “No such thing as a small show. Every person in the audience can trash us on the internet if we play a half-assed show. The reviews from Maryland are scathing, citing that we were ‘playing like a high school tribute band’ because we couldn’t find the beat.”

  “Jesus. That’s rough.”

  “The vomiting gifs are the worst. Also, an influential blogger was there. His snark is truly unparalleled, but his venom and rage hit a new level for our show last night. A few more bad shows will destroy us. We may never make it to Madison Square Garden. If they suspect that they won’t sell out, they will cancel us and sue us for damages.”

  His shoulders were shaking. Georgie decided to metaphorically shake a shiny object at him. “I got an email from Rae von Hannover.”

  “Who?” Xan asked, scuffing with his boot at old duct tape gumming up the floor.

  “We met at their wedding a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh, Wulfram. Yes?” He was scrutinizing the small crosses of blue gaffer’s tape stuck to the floor, marks for where he was supposed to stand during pyrotechnic effects so he wouldn’t get blasted by the fire cannons. The blond ends of his long hair dangled over his shoulders.

  “Their other wedding, the church one, is the week after your big concert. It’s at the end of June in Switzerland. I don’t need to head to Atlanta for a week or two after that. I was planning to go. Do you want to?”

  “The big summer festivals will be starting,” Xan said, examining small tubes stuck to the edge of the stage and stepping off the distance back to his marks. “Killer Valentine has to play some sheds this summer to widen the fan base. I don’t know what we have scheduled for that week.”

  “I thought it might be one last chance to pal around,” Georgie said, “and fend off the matchmakers for each other.”

  Xan shook his head. “I can’t imagine the summer tour schedule will allow me to find time for a personal venture.”

  A disembodied male voice floated through the auditorium. “Mr. Valentine, since you’re here, do you want to do your sound check? Your monitors are hanging over your guitar rack.”

  Georgie sat on the raised platform that Tryp’s drum kit perched on and watched Xan fit the monitors into his ears. Knowing that Xan didn’t plan to attend Rae and Wulf’s religious wedding was liberating, she told herself. He wasn’t going to pine after her, and she didn’t n
eed to feel guilty about working her plan and going underground exactly like she had told him she would in the beginning.

  Really, this was the perfect situation. Fuck and be friends. Live a rock star life while hiding in plain sight, then disappear in a puff of pyrotechnics effects to live the rest of her life and pay back her debts.

  Yep, she told herself. It was all perfect.

  She kicked the hollow platform under her with her heels, feeling the deep echo in her thighs.

  All this was just a stage performance to him: the snuggling, the tender looks after he finished fucking her, the deep conversations about music and art, the care to buy her a laptop and a piano with what must be toy money to him.

  She drummed her heels against the hollowness and artifice of the stage. On both sides of her, silver tubes were screwed into the floorboards, the canisters for the jets of cold flames that framed Tryp and Xan during “Standing on the Mountaintop,” the crescendo of the second set.

  Downstage, Xan strummed his guitar and sang, “Because while I live, because while I breathe,” into to the microphone.

  Yes, it was all just fake fire, artificial heat, and love songs that Xan had written for no one.

  A scuffle over in the wings caught her attention. Rade and Grayson had been dragged in by a phalanx of black-suited, burly men.

  Rade and Grayson yanked their arms away from the big guys and scowled. Their pissed-off twin tirades carried, audible even over Xan playing and singing through the speakers in the echoing auditorium.

  At least they were pissed instead of stoned.

  Xan glanced at them and went back to his sound check.

  INCIDENT

  Georgie

  Georgie and Xan sat in his privacy tent, a white cocoon in the wildness of the tour. Noise from the audience expanded from a trickle of boots on the cement stairs to a constant clatter and babbling of voices.