Wild Thing Read online

  “So Killer Valentine is going to put it back together?” she asked, reaching her arms up around his neck. She slid her fingers underneath his hair hanging over the back of his neck and inside the neck of his tee shirt to feel his skin, tracing the tattooed ridges and rough lines on his skin.

  “When I found Cadell, who plays the guitar like a rocker, I practically dropped my violin in the rubbish bin.”

  “You can’t throw a Stradivarius in the trash.” The obscenity of the image offended her, even though she knew he was exaggerating. She hoped he was exaggerating.

  “I couldn’t have, actually. The insurance company would have shat bricks.”

  “Well, yeah.” The loss of such an instrument actually made her nauseated. It was a miracle and irreplaceable.

  “And even if I had, they wouldn’t have let me quit.”

  Georgie went still and cold.

  He said, “Even though I am utterly fascinated by Cadell’s guitar licks, that I will write entire songs just to hear him play, I can’t be allowed to give up that violin. Cadell understands the tyranny of prodigy. The very first time I heard him play, I knew he was different. He was three when he picked up a guitar, when he began to play. He’s a guitar prodigy every bit as much as I was a violin prodigy. Prodigies crack under too much strain. There’s too much riding on every note.”

  Prodigies crack. She didn’t want to know how Alex had cracked. “He’s not like you.”

  “He’s a lot like me. Cadell understood that rock music is a direct descendant of the Delta blues, and the lineage is unbroken. Without Chuck Berry, there would have been no Cream, no Led Zeppelin, none of the rest of them. The guitarists now just play mind-numbingly fast. There’s no tone, no delicacy. Cadell has a blues sensibility, a virtuosity about his playing. We’re in talks with record labels, and all of them are dismissing Cadell’s contribution. They don’t understand what we’re trying to do. If one of them understood Cadell, I would sign with them.”

  Georgie snuggled down in his arms and closed her eyes. His heart tapped beside her ear, and his breath lifted his chest under her cheek. Without thinking about it, she synchronized her breath with his.

  They had only a few hours before Yvonne called for Xan to begin his day, and Georgie needed to decide what to stuff in her single backpack.

  She flattened her hand against his chest, feeling his heart beating deep inside.

  He said, “Rock music should be a primal scream of rage and pain and passion.”

  Georgie smiled and nestled closer to him.

  “You’re smirking.”

  There was no way he could see any smirking in the dark, even if she had been. “I am not.”

  “You’re thinking, ‘What would His Grace the Duke of Fuck-All know about rage and pain?’”

  She did not want to know what kind of rage and pain was pent up inside Alex, rage and pain that Xan controlled. “When you’re on stage, it looks real.”

  “I grew up in one of the world’s most elite boarding schools and never need to work a day in my life. Each of my wine cellars, the one in Valentinois and the one in Monaco, holds hundreds of times the amount of alcohol I would need to drink myself to death. What would someone like me know of rage and pain?”

  It felt like he wanted to tell her.

  Maybe Flicka was right, and it would be better if Georgie knew.

  She followed his arm with her fingers, finding his hard, callused fingertips in the dark. “Just hold me tonight.”

  He adjusted his arms around her and bowed his head to press his lips to her hair.

  She asked, “Alex?”

  “No,” he said, his voice even more strangled than before.

  “Xan.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t want to leave tomorrow.”

  “Then don’t. Don’t leave.”

  “They said that they’ll take me. I don’t want you to be caught in the crossfire.”

  “What use is all this money, all this influence, if I can’t keep you safe? I thought creating a band would mean something, would make me whole, but I just want to keep you safe.”

  “I have to go, but I want you to know that I don’t want to.”

  “Someday, come back to me.”

  “I’ll try. I will.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Hours later, Georgie only stirred a little when she heard Xan whispering, “Cancel them. Cancel everything until the band meeting. Cancel it all.”

  His arms wrapped around her.

  SOUND CHECK

  Georgie

  Because Madison Square Garden had been a two-day load-in and because the internet-streaming video and sound crews needed hours to prepare for the concert that night, the sound check was scheduled early, at one o’clock.

  “Just ride to the sound check with me,” Xan said, standing at the service entrance to the hotel in the underground parking garage. The hotel’s Dumpsters stank of rotting fish, and the cement ceiling thundered as cars drove over their heads.

  Georgie hefted her overstuffed backpack higher on her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “The car will take you right to JFK afterward. Just come stand on the stage with me. It’s one last time.”

  It was one last time, one more moment with Xan on a stage even if it was just a sound check, so Georgie climbed into the waiting limo with him.

  The band rode in two long limousines with a cadre of SUVs flanking them. In New York City, their motorcade didn’t even attract attention, not with the UN in session. Indeed, they passed a longer caravan of black vehicles, plus the New Yorker drivers honked a cacophony at them whenever their SUVs blocked people who wanted to change lanes.

  Georgie and Xan rode with Adrien and Paul, their usual security guys, and Rade and Grayson, The Terror Twins. The Twins high-fived and called to each other the whole trip, gleeful at the city passing by their tinted windows.

  “This is it, huh, Xan?” Rade crowed and clung to Grayson’s arm. “This is it! The motherfuckin’ Garden! The Garden of fucking Eden!” His purple-tipped hair swung as he bounced.

  Grayson swatted him on the arm. “Settle the fuck down, spazz. You’re going to burn off all your good mojo.” But he bounced on the seat, combing his dark blue hair back and out of his eyes. “I was thinking about the bass line for ‘Nine Levels of Tortured Souls.’ I don’t want to change it tonight, but if we do an alt version, I have some ideas.”

  Xan said, “That sounds interesting.” His mild tone sounded like he planned to hear Grayson out at some point in the future.

  Maybe he hadn’t settled on firing them, though Georgie thought that Xan had an appointment with the counselors at Juilliard tomorrow to scout musicians.

  Intra-band dynamics were none of her concern. They hadn’t been before, and they certainly weren’t now. Three hours from now, she would be nothing more than an audience member.

  Actually, she would be a listener. Killer Valentine probably wouldn’t tour Atlanta again for at least a year, maybe two. Georgie might be in law school by then.

  Surviving long enough to go to law school was the plan, anyway.

  Outside the car window, skyscrapers shot toward the sky, but noontime sunshine poured between them, glaring off the cement and other cars. The crowds thickened on the sidewalks as they neared Madison Square Garden, flowing into and gushing out of the doors of Penn Station beneath the arena.

  Madison Square Garden, despite the name, was a round building like a stadium. Dull yellow panels caught the sunlight.

  An enormous banner of Killer Valentine, thirty stories high, hung over the glass front of the building, sunlight glare slashing the shiny material with white as it rippled in the breeze. Xan Valentine stood in front, hair blown back, legs braced, glowering of course, while behind him, Rade, Grayson, Cadell, and Tryp lurked, scowled, glared, and otherwise looked pissed, waiting for the thousands of people who had paid damn good money to see them that night.

  Georgie was
just about to point out the signage, but Alex had already seen it and was pinching the bridge of his nose.

  On the other seat, The Terror Twins slapped more high-fives. Grayson yelled, “Hey, Xan! You’ve got a fifteen story inseam! That means—”

  “Please, gentlemen,” Xan snarled.

  The Terror Twins cracked up.

  A militia of security guards hustled around them, creating a path across the sidewalk from the limo to the back doors. Adrien stuck by her side, spreading his arms to hold back the crowd that just wanted to walk down the sidewalk to get where they were going.

  Rade and Grayson strode ahead of her, rubbernecking at the high walls of the Garden, their bulging backpacks bouncing on their shoulders.

  Adrien had been riding with them for the last few days instead of overseeing Rade and Grayson. Alex must have hired more security for this event, which made sense. Leaving security to chance for a make-or-break concert like this seemed foolhardy.

  On the cavernous main level, the Garden was set up with the stage at one end of the arena floor, a flat stage as usual rather than in the center and theater-in-the-round. Everybody was more comfortable with the usual set-up, even though Xan told her that the internet concert company had wanted them to play in the middle.

  For their first streamed concert, Xan wanted every chance for success. He had wanted a full dress rehearsal, but Jonas put the kibosh on that. Xan needed to save his voice. They couldn’t afford to have him lose his voice that particular night.

  That was another reason for the two-day load-in. The band hadn’t had a concert last night, so Xan had been forced to rest his voice.

  “It has to be perfect,” Xan said, standing in the middle of the stage.

  The Garden held twenty thousand seats for concerts, but the seating levels were flatter and longer than in most large arenas. Thus, the seats stretched farther in every direction. The huge area looked like it held fifty thousand seats, balcony upon balcony, skyboxes and bridges lined with seats, all the way up to the rafters of the wide-sky ceiling far above.

  The suites on the far end—glassed-in private boxes—stared down at the stage. Folding chairs packed the vast floor. Above them, the ceiling bowed down in the middle, starburst stripes radiating from the scoreboard cube in the center.

  Xan’s voice echoed through the space, the air stirred only by roadies scurrying to finish taping electrical wires to the floor and leveling the soundboards. His guitar was slung over his shoulder by the wide strap. Even though the neon house lights cast an even sheet of light over the stage and seats, one follow-spot beamed a cone of light on him, sparkling on the green crystal dangling from his earring.

  The loading dock doors must still be open because New York’s ubiquitous emergency sirens squealed in the distance.

  Georgie squeezed his hand. “It will be perfect.”

  “It’s been years, getting to this,” he said. “It’s asinine that it all comes down to one show. In classical, even one’s debut has less emphasis because your career is based on longevity. There’s more tolerance for one flawed performance.”

  She grinned at him. “You get off on the adrenaline.”

  He tilted his head and smiled. “That, I do.”

  Georgie climbed up on the risers and sat behind Rade’s keyboard set, tapping her fingers on the silent keys, while Xan walked downstage to do his sound check from the frontman’s spot.

  Centerstage, Xan tuned his guitar and played through a few songs, speaking through the mic to Mitch, the sound technician, who boomed his answers over the speakers. Mitch’s voice, usually gravelly with smoke and rough use, was higher than usual. Everyone had a case of nerves. Xan had to backtrack several times, replaying runs and sections, as Mitch and the house tech negotiated how far to push the levels, their squabbling echoing through the speakers over the cement and thousands of empty chairs. Xan finally sang a few bars of “Alwaysland” while the lighting techs ran through an abbreviated tech rehearsal, concentrating the lights to a blaze of streams converging on Xan at centerstage for the final encore.

  Georgie smiled. It was going to be a triumph.

  Maybe her hotel that night in Atlanta would have decent WiFi so she could watch.

  The house lights came up, and Xan walked up the stage toward her.

  Georgie swung down from the keyboardist’s stand and stood with him a minute longer, until the scent of baking bread from a delivery truck somewhere overwhelmed the dry whiff of dust settling from the lighting battens far above.

  She glanced at the time on her phone. “Xan, I really need to go.”

  He stood with his arm around her for a minute, surveying the boundless emptiness. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  AMBULANCES

  Xan Valentine

  Xan and Georgie passed Tryp, who was ascending the hollow-thumping stairs for his sound check.

  Tryp stopped short as he reached the edge of the stage, like he was standing on the edge of a galaxy and gazing into the vast emptiness of the Universe above and around him.

  “Whoa.” Tryp’s baritone voice bounced off the cement and plastic cavern in black jagged lines.

  As they approached the loading dock, the smell of baking bread and truck exhaust filled the cement tunnel.

  The sirens wailed louder, too.

  When Xan had been at Juilliard, he had lived near the campus in the Upper West side of Manhattan. Police cars and firetrucks squealed by at all hours of the day and night, their sirens rising and falling like he was drifting in a green-black ocean. He had learned to ignore them.

  These sirens seemed to be converging on where they stood on the loading dock between the violet fetid cheese stink of the Dumpsters and the flute-like baking bread in the delivery trucks.

  Red flashes ricocheted off the bricks enclosing the dock as two ambulances screamed into view and skidded to a stop. EMTs abandoned the front of the vehicles, running, and burst out of the rear, pushing stretchers.

  No.

  Xan grabbed his phone out of his hip pocket. A text from Adrien read, re: Rade and Grayson. There’s been an incident.

  “No,” Xan said, panic rising in his voice. “No, no, no.” He tapped the phone. “Yvonne! What the hell is—”

  Yvonne said, “They got drugs somewhere. I called the paramedics, but—”

  “But we rode with them,” Xan insisted. “They were fine half an hour ago.”

  Georgie was walking backward toward the car, watching him.

  She couldn’t leave, not now. He called, “Georgie—”

  “I have to go. I have a plane to catch.” She reached for the door handle of the limo behind her.

  He took the phone away from his ear even though Yvonne was still talking about Rade and hurried toward her. “Georgie!”

  Running footsteps and creaking stretchers clattered toward them—crackling and shooting orange flares at the corner of his vision—and a stretcher flanked by EMTs streaked out of the loading doors toward the ambulances.

  Grayson was sitting up on it but his wrists were bound to the sides. He yelled, “I’m fine! I am fucking fine!” He turned toward Xan. “Get them the fuck off of me! I’m fine!”

  Xan ran over though he was watching Georgie. Wind whipped his hair around his face, obscuring her. He pointed at her and yelled across the gurney and between the EMTs, “Don’t leave!”

  Grayson writhed and strained against the leather cuffs, the navy ends of his hair flying in the swirling wind and truck exhaust of the loading dock. “I’m fucking fine. I snorted a dot of zombie dust to take the edge off because I’m fucking freaking out about the concert, and these guys ripped open my dressing room door and tied me up!”

  Xan turned to the EMTs. “He seems lucid.”

  “He just admitted drug use, and he is obviously intoxicated. He is not competent. Plus the blond woman told us to take him for observation,” the black guy said.

  Xan squinted at Grayson’s eyes. His wide pupils barely left a pale rim of hazel around them.
His hands were trembling.

  Grayson’s zombie dust had too much cocaine and not enough Halcion in it.

  Xan frowned. “His pupils seem mostly normal. Doesn’t he have the right to refuse transport?”

  Past the ambulances, Georgie opened the limousine door and slung her backpack inside.

  Xan pointed like he was throwing his voice to her. “Don’t go yet.” He turned back to Grayson. “Are you officially of sound mind and refusing transport?”

  “Fuck, yeah!”

  “When you said zombie dust, you meant a pixie straw of sugary candy, right?”

  Grayson blinked hard, trying to moisten his eyes or focus. “Yeah. I did.”

  “We’re a rock band,” Xan told the EMT. “It can’t be known that we like Halloween candy in our dressing rooms. He does not seem intoxicated to me, and he is refusing transport. Yvonne is not his parent nor guardian.”

  “Untie me from this fucking cart!” Grayson yelled.

  “If you’ll sign the release forms,” the EMT sighed.

  “Give them to me. Where is Yvonne?”

  “She’s with the other one,” the EMT said, holding out a clipboard while the other EMT unbuckled the straps on Grayson’s arms.

  “Rade.” Xan signed the forms where the man pointed with his pen. Grayson was fine. In a few hours, he would be as sober as he ever was for a performance.

  Grayson rubbed his wrists while the EMT unshackled his ankles.

  “Here he comes,” the EMT said.

  Xan frowned and handed the clipboard back to the EMT. “Why aren’t they gallivanting about with him?”

  Grayson slid off the gurney, steadying himself by grabbing the rickety cart.