Chapter 30 – Bells
BELLS
The roar swallows me whole.
Three thousand people packed into a dark industrial-themed venue, crammed into velvet seats and standing-room balconies, their screams ricocheting off exposed pipe and ductwork that are vibrating from the bass frequency Phoenix is laying down behind me.
I grab the mic stand and lean into it.
"You beautiful fucking monsters ready to bleed tonight?"
They freak the fuck out.
Phoenix counts us into Crimson Throne.
Rafael's bass slides in, dark and sinuous, and Rex's guitar screams to life beside me with a jagged, furious, beautiful riff.
I open my mouth and sing my fucking guts out.
The crowd surges forward. A wall of hands and phone screens and open mouths, all of them screaming for me.
For us.
For Vespyr.
By the third song, I'm soaked in sweat. The binder digs into my ribs with every breath and the prosthetic has shifted slightly in my jeans, but I don't give a shit. Not when the music has a death grip on me.
Although if the prosthetic shifts any further south I'm going to be performing with a very confused audience and a dick in my boot.
This is unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life.
Vespyr is more than a band.
We're a pack.
A fledgling pack with broken bonds and no marks to join us, but a pack nonetheless, and we play like one.
I tell myself that's what's causing this prickling at the base of my skull, the kind of prickling that makes prey animals freeze mid-step and scan for predators in the tall grass.
I scan the crowd from behind the rabbit mask while belting the bridge of Resurrection.
Thousands of faces.
Phone screens.
Hands raised.
Nothing visible. Nothing wrong.
But something is wrong.
I know it the way I know my own heartbeat. The way I know which key a song is in before the first note plays. Instinct honed by years of watching shadows, years of checking over my shoulder, years of sleeping with my treasured knife under my pillow.
The prickle is coming from the scar on my neck.
My inner omega knows my stalker is here.
She senses that motherfucker somewhere in the crowd.
Fucking fantastic.
We roll into Ashes and I use the choreography to get close to Rafael. The staging has us circling each other like we're both predators, our movements synced. When I lean into his space for the bridge, close enough that the crowd thinks we might kiss, I press my mouth to his ear.
"Something's wrong. I can feel it."
His fingers don't falter on the strings. His body language stays loose and performative for the audience. But his dark eyes sharpen.
"Stay close to me," he murmurs against my jaw, his breath ghosting my throat, and it looks like heat, looks like two rockstars playing up the tension.
It's armor.
I stay close.
We tear through three more songs. Each one I pour everything into, trying to drown the dread rising in my chest with volume and fury and the relentless drive of Phoenix's drums.
My voice holds.
My body moves.
I work the crowd like I was born for this because I was born for this, because music is the one thing that's always been fucking mine even when everything else was stolen.
But the feeling doesn't fade.
It gets worse.
By the time we hit the second-to-last song, my hands are shaking from adrenaline dumping into my bloodstream at a rate that makes my vision sharpen and my pulse kick into combat mode.
I could stop the show. Could walk offstage right now and tell security to sweep the venue. Could trust my gut the way I've been trained to trust it since I was a teenager hiding from a man who wanted to own me.
But Carmine's words echo in my skull.
If the unmasking doesn't happen tonight, I walk. And the tour dies with me.
No unmasking, no comeback.
No comeback, no Vespyr.
No Vespyr, no band, no pack, no Rex finding his way back from the edge of the abyss I pulled him from at Nash's grave.
I can't destroy everything over a feeling.
Can I?
The crowd screams for the finale and the decision makes itself.
The lights drop to a single crimson spot. Phoenix's drums go silent. Rafael's bass hums a low, sustained note that vibrates through the floor like a heartbeat.
Then the pyrotechnics ignite.
Pillars of fire erupt from the stage edges. Six of them, roaring upward in synchronized columns of orange and gold.
The heat hits my face. The crowd screams. The industrial ductwork reflects the flames.
Rex's body is backlit by the fire columns, a black silhouette against churning flame lighting up his black-and-silver mask like the devil himself. He moves toward me, his guitar slung to one side, Raf's bass filling the void.
He wraps himself around me from behind, his chest pressed to my back. One arm crosses my chest. I feel his heartbeat hammering against my spine.
Fast.
Too fast.
He's terrified.
He spins me around to face him, his hands gripping my upper arms as I belt out the notes, his single visible eye burning into mine.
The crowd noise crests.
Every phone in the house is pointed at us.
Every camera.
Every screen.
This is the moment.
My hand comes up.
Temple.
Cheekbone.
Jaw.
I've done this so many times before.
I can do this.
Rex's eye holds mine. That ice blue, steady even though I can feel the tremor running through his entire body where it presses against me.
Then he leans into my hand, his lashes fluttering shut, and he reaches up and wraps his hand around my wrist. He turns his nose into my palm and nuzzles it, his hair falling forward to tickle my skin.
Like he wants to freeze this moment.
Like it's all coming to an end.
Oh gods.
He knows something is wrong too.
I can't do this. I—
"Do it," he whispers, his warm breath ghosting over my wrist. "It's okay."
I don't have a choice.
We don't have a choice.
I pull.
Click click—
The mask doesn’t release clean. Something catches and the resistance is wrong. This is a rip and the mask comes away in my hand.
Two masks.
Both of them.
The performance mask and the skull prosthetic, fused together, torn free in one horrible motion.
Rex’s actual face stares back at me.
For one frozen heartbeat, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. It looks enough like the prosthetic skull that my brain tries to make it fit.
Then it doesn’t.
Because the skull prosthetic was smooth and painted and theatrical.
This is what I saw in the leak, only it’s in real life. Not a picture taken from afar where I can scroll and put it out of my head so I'm not betraying him.
Melted skin pulled tight like candle wax, pink and white where the grafts took. Muscle and bone where they didn’t. The right side of his mouth is completely destroyed. His cheek is torn away, exposing the architecture of his jaw, the sinew, all the teeth on that side.
And his right eye, lids so damaged it can’t blink, glows in the light from the flames shooting up around us, the pupil huge and black and damaged and drowning out almost all the blue.
The other, all I can see of the unmarred side of his face in the shadows of the stage lights, is a terrified pinprick.
The sound changes.
Three thousand voices that were screaming for us thirty seconds ago turn into something else. A roar. Shock and horror and the sick thrill of seeing something they were never supposed to see.
I don’t look at them.
I can’t look at anything but Rex.
Rex doesn’t move.
Doesn’t breathe.
His hands—still gripping my upper arms—go slack. His fingers open one by one, mechanical and slow, like the signal between his brain and his body just severed even though he knew this was going to happen. That something was going to go horribly wrong.
We were fucking sabotaged.
He’s not here anymore. He’s gone somewhere deep inside himself, somewhere beyond the lights and the screaming and the cameras, somewhere the boy who burned alive is still waiting for the fire to stop.
My hands find his face.
Both sides. The unmarred side and the side where there are exposed teeth against my palm where his cheek should be. The edge of his lidless eye socket is smooth and cold against my thumb, a sliver of bone barely covered by skin.
The crowd noise is a wall of sound and none of it is kind.
Fuck them.
Fuck every single one of them.
I pull his face down to mine.
And I kiss him.
I kiss him like the fucking world is ending, because it is, and words are failing me but I make a pleading sound against his mouth.
I'm here. I'm here. Come back to me.
His mouth doesn’t move against mine. He’s stone. He’s gone. Every muscle locked in that frozen dissociative void and then—
Every light dies.
The blackout is total. Instant. And for one disorienting second the only thing that exists is Rex’s mouth frozen against mine and the heat of the pyro columns and the vibration of three thousand people losing their minds.
Then the pyrotechnics go wrong.
A flame column detonates sideways, launching across the stage in a horizontal geyser of fire. The wall of heat hits my left side and lights up the darkness in churning orange.
I smell my own hair burning before I feel it.
Rex's body slams into mine.
He drives me down, covering me with everything he has, his arms wrapping around my head and torso, his back to the fire. He twists somehow and we land on our sides, skidding across the burning stage floor with Rex shielding me with his own fucking body.
More explosions. Columns erupting at random. Loss of sequencing, loss of control, the whole goddamn rig going haywire. Fire catches the backdrop and suddenly orange light paints the darkness in lurching, strobing horror.
He's coming for me.
The alpha who marked me.
I fucking know he is. I know it in my bones.
"Rex!" I yell, struggling against him. "Rex, we have to—"
"Stay down!" he snarls into my hair.
He’s back from wherever he went, and right now that’s the only thing keeping me from completely fucking losing it.
Screaming.
Everywhere, screaming. The crowd surging for exits. Seats slamming. Bodies colliding. The thunderous stampede of thousands of people fleeing in darkness and flames.
Rex starts to get up, then stumbles and falls over me.
He catches himself on his elbows, caging me in with his arms against the burning hot stage.
He's panting, bleeding from where the mask tore his damaged skin, warm droplets falling on my lips, and even in the darkness lit only by flames, his gaze burns with feral blue light.
I've never seen anything so terrifyingly beautiful.
I love him.
I love him, and Raf, and Phoenix, and now we're going to die.
I always did have shit fucking timing.
A crash from stage left. Phoenix’s drum kit going over. Then his voice, loud and commanding even over the chaos.
"BELLS! REX!"
"HERE!" I scream back. "STAGE RIGHT, WE’RE—"
Another column blows.
The heat pushes Rex’s body harder against mine and I hear him hiss through his teeth, a sharp, involuntary sound that turns my blood to ice because I know what fire does to this man. I know what it costs him to put his back to it.
He winds his arms around me and hauls me to my feet, pulling me tight against his chest, and he moves toward Phoenix's voice.
"Raf!" Phoenix roars from somewhere closer now. "RAF, WHERE THE FUCK—"
"I see them!" Rafael’s voice. Stage right. Close.
The pack bond, fragile and new and incomplete, flares white-hot with their terror. Three points of panic that aren’t mine flooding my nervous system and twisting my insides.
The incomplete mark on my neck flares, too.
What the fuck—
A gunshot cracks through the chaos.
Sharp. Unmistakable even over the screaming, even over the fire, even over Phoenix’s bellowing voice.
A sound I know from firing ranges and nightmares and the months I spent learning to shoot because I swore no one would ever make me helpless again.
Rex’s body jerks.
The impact travels through him and into me, a full-body shudder that starts at his back and ends at his chest where it’s pressed against mine. His breath leaves him in a wet, surprised choke that doesn’t sound like a growl or a snarl or anything I’ve ever heard from him.
The last thing he does as the entire world caves in around us is shove me into Raf's arms.
A hand closes over my mouth.
Not Rafael’s.
Wrong calluses. Wrong angle. And the cloth pressed against my nose is damp and chemical sweet.
Chloroform.
My brain identifies it the same way it identified the gunshot.
Too fucking late.
I bite down.
Hard.
Through the cloth, into the flesh beneath. I feel my teeth break skin and I thrash—slamming my elbow backward into something solid, a ribcage, a hip—and the grip tightens.
A second hand closes around my throat.
Over my scar, the thumb slipping past my collar and pressing into the raised tissue like it knows the shape. Like it’s been waiting to touch it again.
And then nothing.