Chapter 20 – Ava Jade #2
For the new voice.
For my fucking voice .
My voice that Corvus not only heard in his little makeshift studio but recorded . That he’d edited and added to his song like it was his right to use whatever he fucking pleased. Because he was The Bone Man.
Primal Ethos.
That was Corvus motherfucking James on stage.
My stomach heaved, and I pushed free of the crowd, shouldering past Grey, tearing away from his reaching hands as I shoved through people all around me, itching to use my blade when a few resisted.
Finally, I found cleaner air and fell forward, catching myself on my knees to try to breathe as my head spun.
“AJ!” Grey shouted, and a second later I felt his hands on me, curling around my shoulders, helping me up. “AJ, what’s wrong?”
I tugged away and whirled on him, a little off balance, my stomach still in knots, the threat of vomiting a real and present danger.
“What’s wrong?” I echoed, glaring at him.
His expression darkened, confirming my worst nightmare.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I spat, lifting myself back to my full height to push my hair away from my face and find somewhere to sit down, not bothering to check if Grey was following me.
Corvus…fucking Corvus began another song. Another one of my favorites and my skin bristled, every tiny hair standing on end.
I fell into a seat in a vacant row at the far right of the floor, up one level.
“AJ, listen?—”
“Nope.”
“Just hear me out?—”
“If you say another fucking word, I will cut you.”
Mercifully, Grey fell silent, and I leaned over my knees, head clutched between sweaty palms.
My mind raced in a million different directions, trying to come to terms with this new information.
It was clear that no one else knew. I doubted even their dear ol’ dad did.
I doubted he’d approve of the spotlight, or of his precious second in command doing anything that might take away from gang business.
Those weren’t the important questions, though. The ones I really wondered about, I fought the hardest.
What did this mean?
I’d followed Primal Ethos for years. I’d loved his music for years.
Knowing that there was even a single other soul out there who understood me had gotten me through so much. His music had gotten me through so much.
Corvus’ music.
Fuck.
I wanted to hate him, it was easier to hate him, but…
How could I when…
“I’m going to be sick.”
Grey set a palm on my back, and I flinched, making him remove it immediately. “I’ll go get you some water, okay, just…just don’t move.”
As if I even could right now.
“Becca, there you are. Can you sit with her for a sec,” Grey said, and I wished I could disappear into myself as Becca rushed me, kneeling in front of me, right in the firing line if my stomach won the battle with my mind.
I swallowed my bile back as she set her hands on my knees. “Shit girl, you look like a ghost.”
I almost laughed.
“Was it the Jack? We didn’t really eat anything, maybe that was it. Do you feel sick?”
I shook my head and did my best to sit up, letting the chair back hold me up, but then he was in full view again. Up one level, I could see him clear across the concert venue, above the heads bobbing and swaying in an ocean of bodies on the floor.
I’d wondered before if The Bone Man had ever really experienced the things he sang about, but I didn’t have to wonder anymore.
Not while he sang about digging shallow graves.
About the sound a bullet makes as it left the chamber of a gun.
About how blood goes cold after a while, but still stains you forever, and no matter how many times you try to wash it off, it will linger, like an invisible tattoo only you can see.
Until you’re just red. Nothing but red painted over shades of gray as you dig your graves.
“Incredible, right?” Becca shouted, and my heart squeezed painfully in my chest.
I couldn’t reconcile them together. Corvus and The Bone Man.
I hated him for not telling me. For using my voice. For all the awful things he’d done and said. For every time he’d tried to control me.
But how could I hate him completely when now, through his music, I understood him?
His song, Protector, showed me why he had his need for control. How he couldn’t survive without it.
And the others showed me…more than I wanted to know about him.
I sat there for so long, contemplative and numb that I didn’t notice when Becca waded back into the crowd, leaving me alone, sitting there with Grey at his request so that at least she could enjoy the rest of the show.
I’d told her to go, or at least, I thought I did.
Somehow we’d been there for an hour or more because suddenly The Bone Man was announcing his final song of the night.
His voice, his non-singing voice, expanded into the cavernous underground space, and I’d have known it anywhere, even if he was adding an extra level of gruffness to it to try to mask it.
“I have one last song for you,” he said and accepted a mic stand from a woman in black leather leggings when she walked it onto the stage and retreated with a quick red-lipped kiss blown into the crowd.
Corvus set his mic onto the stand and looked up into the black light. Something in his sharply defined skeleton face softening.
“You won’t know it. It’s something new I’ve been working on. It’s…it’s a little different from my usual, but I think you’ll like it.”
A few rogue shouts of fuck yeah and whoop! Went up.
He exhaled, the sound of it like a whispered prayer electrifying the air.
He settled in as a beat a bit slower than his usual tempo began to filter through the speakers.
All haunting piano keys stuck intermittently with the ominous sounds of breathing and an echoed beat. It made my skin bristle anew.
“This one’s called Sparrow .”
I snapped my attention to Grey, spine going rigid.
He offered me a small impish grin, nodding slightly. Just listen, he mouthed, as if I could do anything else.
“She makes me mad
She makes me mean
She haunts my dreams
I call her Sparrow.”
Something cracked in my chest, and I got up abruptly, letting my feet drag me forward.
“AJ!” Grey called, but I was already gone, vaulting over the railing and into the crowd, dipping and weaving and pushing toward the front.
That motherfucker.
How dare he.
After everything…
The crowd pushed back, not allowing me past as I continued to find a way forward, realizing belatedly that I should have just gone around. There would have only been a couple of security guards to deal with if I had, it would’ve been easier than slogging through this.
“Wicked as they come,
I’m coming undone.
Hate, fear, pain, love
Don’t you know what you’ve done?
Sparrow.”
A guy attempted to grab me when I carved a space out for myself against the front rail in front of the stage, but a single look from me had him moving far away.
What now? An angry voice asked in my head, and the whisper of my darkness coming alive in the pit of my stomach warmed the chilled blood in my veins. I wanted to jump this fucking railing, climb up on stage and get my fist super acquainted with his jaw, but, I also didn’t want him to stop singing.
Caught between warring desires, I stood there, smushed against the rail, sandwiched on both sides by screaming girls whose worst day probably looked something like a busted heel and a declined credit card, unable to do a damn thing as he sang of his Sparrow.
Me.
In that voice.
The one I should have recognized the very first moment he spoke. And maybe I had, but I’d denied just like I was trying to convince myself still that it wasn’t true. Except, there was a part of me, however small, that wanted it to be true now, too.
However impossible it seemed.
It also felt right, in a way that was so so fucking wrong.
Confusing didn’t even begin to cover this.
Maybe it was my lack of enthusiasm. Or my lack of movement that set me apart from the others, but something drew his eye to mine, and I saw the moment he recognized me.
A muscle in my jaw ticked at the shock on his face, and my anger fizzled out when some emotion much stronger flashed in his white eyes.
He sang the last line, his eyes never leaving mine.
“She’s the spark,
I’m drenched in gasoline
…I can’t wait…
….I can’t fucking wait to burn.”
He stepped back from the mic, back from the black light to a raucous jeering of applause, until he vanished into the darkness backstage.
He wouldn’t get away that easily.
Not a fucking chance.
I hopped the rail and kept low, racing across the base of the stage to the narrow corridor leading around to where I assumed the dressing rooms were.
“Hey!” A security guard bellowed somewhere behind me but I didn’t stop, ducking below a velvet rope barrier.
Another guard ahead moved to mid-hallway, blocking my path.
“Now turn around, you don’t want to get yourself arrest?—”
I ran the last three steps, faking to the right so that I could clock him on his left temple, sending him down in a useless heap of overpaid muscle.
Nothing was going to stop me.
Corvus motherfucking James had some explaining to do.