Wild Thing by Blair Babylon

Author:Blair Babylon [Babylon, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Malachite Publishing
Published: 2015-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE SECOND SET

Georgie

Darkness fogged the stage. Glow-in-the-dark tape frosted the edges of the risers and the marks where the musicians were supposed to stand so that they would be in the spotlights but safely away from the pyrotechnic fire.

Burning spotlights.

Jets of flame.

Smoke like the burning, sulfurous fumes of Hell.

Georgie’s breath caught in her throat.

All the anger and defiance in her whole life couldn’t push air through the fear choking her.

Xan caught her fingers and raised her hand to his lips, kissing the back of her knuckles. “You can do this,” he said. “You were born to do this.”

Air shot down her throat in a stream, and she coughed.

Out in the darkness, Tryp slammed four trash beats on his drums, and the spotlights blasted him with white light like he was engulfed in pale fire.

He played a roll around the drum kit, and Cadell’s guitar sang a keening note above the pounding drums. Spotlights flew over the audience and honed in on Cadell, pinning him to the stage with beams of light.

The crowd screamed for blood or music. Georgie couldn’t tell which.

They wanted her to walk out there, to stand in the lasers frying Tryp and Cadell and in front of the mob screaming a blast wave of sound.

Xan stepped forward, tugging her hand, pulling her even though every nerve in her body was begging her to run the other way.

Yet, she followed him.

Walking onto the stage was like stepping into a roaring tornado built of light. The follow spots blasted her and Xan where they stood. He led her to the keyboards and held her fingers as she stepped up onto the riser, holding her long skirt aside so she wouldn’t step on the diaphanous fabric, tear it off herself, and fall face-first off the stage, probably with her naked legs kicking in the air.

The crowd would laugh at her.

The techs would hate her.

Xan would despise her.

He walked away as she adjusted the office chair to the right height in front of the keyboards.

So many keyboards.

All of them with the wrong numbers of keys. None of these keyboards had the standard eighty-eight keys of a piano. From a quick estimate of the octaves, the biggest one had seventy-six, and the smaller ones above and to both sides held anywhere from twenty-four to fifty-six keys.

Her hands felt cramped as soon as she stretched them onto the ivories.

Or in this case, as she stretched her fingers onto the yellowed plastics. Rade’s instrument needed a good cleaning.

Centerstage, Xan grabbed his microphone off the stand and called out above Tryp’s drumming and Cadell’s guitar. “Folks, we’ve had a problem. Rade and Grayson, who play the keyboards and bass, ate some bad shellfish in Maryland last night.”

Yeah, telling the crowd that The Terror Twins were crapping blood was less embarrassing than telling them that they were too fucked up to play because they couldn’t handle their shit.

Georgie was learning rock and roll lingo already.

The crowd hooted its boos, and somebody yelled, “Fuck Maryland!”

Xan continued, “So rather than cancel the show—”

A collective gasp sucked the oxygen from the arena.

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