So yeah, Rome was an awesome show. Thank you, Italy. I played sober, remembered all my lyrics, tried to give everyone my soul, and they in turn seemed more than satisfied. They sang along, they cheered, they danced, they rocked out. And every now and then, I’d look to the shadows of the side stage and see Dawn watching me, always watching me, like the fucking biggest fan, and that’s what I so loved about her. That through and through, she was a fan, a lover, a friend, a girlfriend. She was everything, and at that moment on stage, I had everything. A world at my feet and a woman with my heart.
Things didn’t get weird until we finished the encore. I decided on “Wet Lips” again, just because I was feeling respectful, just because I was
feeling
. Because, God-fucking-dammit, did Hybrid mean the world to me, and though I loved being a solo artist, I loved having the control and going at it on my own, it was lonely. It was lonely in this creative realm. I missed Robbie and Mickey and even Chip, our sound tech. I missed Noelle’s smile when you did something that actually made her smile. I missed the way Robbie argued the lyrics, even when he didn’t write the song. I missed it all. But now I was alone, the one-man show, and I was making a go of it. This was my tribute.
It was after the solo during “Wet Lips,” the one part where I really thought that I gave Mr. James Page a run for his money, where the licks just peeled off of my fingers, that I saw something that reminded me things were not one hundred percent normal and we were not one hundred percent safe.
I looked out into the audience. Half the time you were blinded by stage lights and couldn’t really see any individual faces, which usually made it that much easier to perform for someone like me, who didn’t get off on it (unlike Robbie, who did get off on it). But with the sporadic way the house had the lights for “Lips,” the spotlight was going off on the crowd.
And I saw a familiar face looking back at me.
Long white hair, calculating purple eyes, and a vicious, razor-sharp grin.
The ultimate groupie from Hell: Alva.
The last time I’d seen her was when she dragged me to Lake Shasta in an attempt to kill Dawn and finish me off before my twenty-eighth birthday.
Now she was here in Rome at my solo show.
Now she’d come to collect on Dawn.
I nearly fucked up the last chorus of the song, my eyes trained on the demon in horror. But when the spotlight moved off of her, she was gone, and I managed to soldier through the very end to the applause.
I wasn’t imagining shit, though, not this time. I was shown just enough to put the fear back into my soul.
When the house lights went back on, signaling the end of the show, I headed straight to Dawn at the side stage, my Gibson 335 still around my neck.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, wiping the sweat from my brow.
She was smiling though looking concerned now. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sage…that was amazing.”
I was buzzing too much from Alva now to be buzzing about the show. I reached over and kissed her hard with salty lips, my guitar pressed between us.
When I pulled away, she was breathless, and I noticed Max staring at me intently. I could tell he knew something was up, but I didn’t want to worry Dawn and neither did he.
“Sage,” Jacob boomed, striding over with a glass of red wine in his hand.
I eyed it. “That for me?”
“No,” he said dryly, taking a sip. “A manager has to have his perks, too.” He jerked his head toward the backstage. “Come on, the Italian press wants to get a hold of you, and I believe they’re even, er, grabbier than the French.” He looked to Dawn. “You can come, too, love, now that your relationship is the talk of the town.”
I squeezed her hand and peered down at her, not wanting her out of my sight. “You’re staying by my side whether you want to or not.”
“I think I can handle myself,” she said with a sly grin, and together we walked off into the zoo backstage. And when I say zoo, I mean
zoo
. Jacob was right. The Italian journalists were pushy, loud, and passionate. The translators had to work fast to make sure the correct questions came through, though I had to say they were at least a smiling bunch of hacks, which made the whole thing a lot more bearable.
When that was over and done with, Dawn handling herself quite well as the subject instead of the journalist this time, we headed back to the hotel, with Tricky and Garth dragging us out to a bar around the corner. It seems in the short time we’d been Rome, Tricky had fallen in love with waitress who worked there. He was also giving me a hard time about how serious we’d all gotten over the last couple of days.
“Seriously, dude,” he said to me after we slammed back a shot of Sambuca, “you should be grinning like you’ve eaten shit here.” He looked to Dawn, who was sitting beside me at the bar. Smoke sat in a haze above our heads, ‘50s jazz music played over the speakers, and Garth was in the toilets, apparently sick from drinking too much earlier. “And you, too. What’s with all the glum faces lately?”
I exchanged a look with Dawn. Tricky definitely wouldn’t understand. His idea of the supernatural was taking a lot of mushrooms and talking to God on the roof of the Philadelphia Public Library. I know because I was there.
“We’re just tired,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes drifting over to the waitress behind the bar, “tired from all the sex, I bet.”
I smiled and let him think that, even though he knew for a fact that I could go all night long.
After another a shot, he went off to check on Garth. I put my arm around Dawn, pulling her into me so she was almost falling off her stool. I was pleasantly buzzed, but it wasn’t enough to make me forget. It wasn’t enough to make the chills on my back disappear.
“Listen,” I said to her, hoping she could pick up on the gravity in my voice. “I know we’ve got Prague after this; Jacob told me the visas came in to the hotel today. And then West Germany and who-the-hell-knows-where after. I know this tour isn’t over yet, but…I’m thinking it should be.”
She looked at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I took in a deep breath, somewhat surprised I was about to say this and with no reservations about it. “I mean, I could cancel the tour. I should.”
“Sage, no,” she said, her curls shaking.
“I’m serious, and I think it would be for the best.”
“The best for whom?”
I frowned, my eyes starting to water from the smoke in the bar. “For you, of course. Not for me. It would be a shitty idea for me.”
“I know,” she said, pressing her hand down on my leg, “that’s why I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Sage, whatever is happening, it’s not going to stop because you’ve stopped the tour. It will keep following me until this is all over.”
It broke my heart to hear her being so matter-of-fact about it, like she had already resigned herself to her fate. I wanted her to fight. But I suppose she was in her own way.
“But I can be with you, all the time. I can focus on you, just on you, and not the band, not the shows, not my music.”
She pressed her hand into my leg harder. “But you have to. This is your life, Sage.”
“You’re my life,” I blurted out. I hoped to God she couldn’t see me blushing like a fucking girl because what I’d just said was borderline hokey. But it was the truth. “You are, and I will put the rest of my life on hold if it means keeping you safe.”
She reached up for my face, her soft fingertips tracing along the rough stubble on my jaw. “You are an amazing man. An amazing musician. You are my golden god and every day you surprise me. We, what we have, surprises me. As long as you keep…being there for me, I’ll be as safe as I can be. You’ve done so much for me, more than you’ll ever even know. But canceling your tour isn’t the answer here. I already have guilt. I don’t want any more. If anything, watching you play live, being with you in all these foreign places, no matter what is going on at the time, keeps me sane. It keeps me going. And it tells those fuckers that we aren’t giving up. They can throw whatever they want at me, but I’m not breaking.”
I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it. I wanted to do so much more than that for her. We waited until Tricky and a queasy Garth came back, then I took her back to the hotel. Kicked Max out of the room. And gave her three orgasms hot on the heels of each other. It was the least I could do.
The three of us woke up in the middle of the night to the phone ringing. I heard Max roll over in his bed and pick it up. “Hello?”
There was a pause then he said, voice tired and groggy, “Okay, I’ll be right there.”
He leaned over and flicked on the light, blinding me. Dawn raised her head off my chest and blinked at us wearily. “What’s going on?”
Max got out of bed, pulling on his jeans and a flannel shirt before I had to see anything I didn’t want to. “It was Jacob. Said it was really important.”
I looked at the clock. “It’s three-thirty in the morning.”
Max shrugged and let out a sigh. “Yeah. Well, it sounded…urgent. I’ll be right back. You two stay put.” He quickly grabbed his room key and shut the door behind him.
I looked down at Dawn in my arms—she was already sleeping again. I gently placed her on the bed and got up to use the washroom. I was a little on edge as I did so, flashes of the monster in Dawn’s bathroom flashing in the darkened spaces of my brain.
Once I was done, I went over to the window to open it, since the room was getting stuffy with heat of three people sharing the same air. Our window faced a narrow street on the quieter side of the building. A lone cat was walking along it, rubbing up against the opposite building. And beneath the lone streetlight stood a woman. Tall, thin, slender—a complete silhouette. But she was watching me. I could tell she was watching me.
Angeline. It had to be her.
I looked behind me at Dawn, breathing heavily in her deep sleep. I didn’t want to leave her alone here without Max, but I knew he couldn’t be gone for too long. I looked back out the window again, and Angeline was slowly walking away. I needed answers. More than anything, I needed to know what was going on.
I grabbed my keys from the nightstand, slipped on my pants, and ran out into the hall, gently closing the door behind me and locking it. The hotel was quiet this time of night, guests in their rooms trapped in deep slumber, the front desk empty. I walked out into the street, nearly stepping on a rat that was scuttling past, and hurried up the street, turning the corner and going down the next one.
Angeline was walking away from me, her form disappearing in the empty spaces between the streetlamps. I ran soundlessly in my bare feet, the cobblestones cold under them, and caught up to her as she neared the next lamp.
I grabbed her harshly by her shoulder and spun her around so she was facing me and I could make out her features in the light.
“You,” I hissed.
It was her. But she sure as hell didn’t look very good. Her hair was straggly up close, tangled, and there were gaunt spaces underneath her cheekbones. Thin lines of tears marked her cheeks, and her nose was bleeding.
“Bonne soirée, Sage,” she said, trying to sound sly and sophisticated, but her words came out choked.
I didn’t know what to say now that I had her. This wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Who are you?” I whispered harshly. She didn’t say anything, so I shook her harder, my fingers digging into her arm. A drop of blood splattered onto the ground between us.
She eyed it absently then looked at me with watery eyes. “I’m almost done. And when I am done, I will be free.” She then went off into a tangent in French, just words that she spit out that didn’t seem to go together. The only word I recognize was
mort
. Death.
“Free from what? What do you want with Dawn?”
She gave me a lazy smile and another drop of blood fell from her upper lip. “I don’t care for Dawn. I did care for you, just un peu. But Dawn, she is their business. And I am almost free of their business, too.”
I took in a deep breath, trying to keep myself from flipping out in frustration. “Who are they?”
“You know who they are. Everyone knows who they are.” The blood began to pour more freely from her nose, streaks of red on white, and her eyes went up to the hotel windows. “You can go and ask one of them yourself. It’s with Dawn right now.”
My eyes flew to the windows. I counted up and saw the window to our hotel room. The light was on in the room, and a large form was moving to the curtains. I caught a glint of yellow eyes before it snapped the curtains shut.
I must have screamed or I don’t know what, but I turned and I ran fast as hell away from Angeline, around the corner, almost falling on my face, and back into the hotel. I took the stairs two at a time, praying I wasn’t too late, hoping it was just Max I saw, cursing myself for leaving her alone.
Once at the floor, I sprinted for the room. I didn’t even bother trying the handle to see if it was locked; there was no time. I threw myself against the door shoulder first and used all my strength and fury to bust it down.
I hadn’t been prepared for the next sight.
The lights were on, mood lighting almost. Dawn was on the bed, completely naked, her head back in ecstasy, eyes closed, mouth open, legs spread. There was a man between her legs, fucking her hard, fast, violently.
The man was me.
He turned his head to me and grinned. It was me. Everything about me, everything that made me
me
, he had.
Except his eyes. Those looked like bright yellow pinpricks.
And at the base of his ass was a protrusion flickering like a worm, like a hairless tail.
Oh, fuck it, it was a tail.
A demon disguised as me was essentially raping her.
“Dawn!” I screamed, lunging forward, ready to rip the eyes out of the creature. I’d never been so willing to completely kill something before, just tear it apart with my bare hands. I was lucky the fucker was a demon because if he were a man, I’d be charged for murder.
She opened her eyes, seeing me as I ran for the creature. Then she saw the creature, the creature that was transforming in front of our eyes. The tail grew, bones jutted out of its cheekbones, claws came out of its hands, tentacles burst from its stomach, dripping with blood and matter, like a baby being born.