6. Earthquake Weather Is Psychological, Not Meteorological #2
“Concert,” said the bouncer. He winked at me. “Probably not your scene.”
“How do you know my scene?”
“You like to mosh?”
“Mosh what?”
“God, you’re just a baby.” He shook his head at me. “What year were you born?”
“You have my ID right there.”
He handed it back to me. “Doll, for future reference, just answer the question,” he said. “One of the tricks of the trade. People with fake IDs don’t always answer correctly. Especially not when they smell like the back of the bar.”
Right, Atticus had spilled on me, and so had Emmanuelle. “It’s not a fake ID.”
“Of course not,” he offered charitably, and gestured me inside. “Have fun. Stay out of the mosh pit.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Stop breaking my heart.” He winked at me again. But I was accustomed to this behavior, flattering and harmless. Nothing to survive.
The bar was unremarkable and moderately sized—had Julian been inside, I would have spotted him immediately.
It smelled like every nondescript bar I’d ever been in, fairy lights around the ceiling and the edges of the walls, sports memorabilia, a few pool tables scattered around.
Mostly standing tables, beside which were a handful of people milling around. Functionally empty.
Frustrated, I turned to leave, wishing I had my phone.
I wanted to look at a map, to search for places a twenty-something man in work boots might have gone (not that I knew what to look for).
I was preparing myself to encounter the bouncer again, to dismally reveal I’d been a good girl all along, when I heard a thud from upstairs, followed by the din of people cheering.
I could hear some kind of Celtic music, the hard rock kind.
I glanced at the bar, finding the bartender watching me.
I turned as if to mount the stairs and he called dryly after me.
“Looking for the restroom?”
I paused, one foot halfway to the first step. “I’ve got a friend waiting for me upstairs.”
“Do you,” he replied, toneless, and flicked a glance at my empty hand. “Without a drink?”
I sighed, turning to the bar. The bartender had thick black gauges in his ears, an iron rod pierced through his brow.
“What’s the password?” he prompted, slicking his tongue over his front teeth.
I shuffled through my interior wardrobe of personalities for something low effort, high efficacy.
“I think we both know I’m going upstairs without a password,” I said, slithering into character like it was a pair of thigh-high boots.
(Yes, I relied heavily on my looks for conversations like these. It was a convenient shorthand.)
“What’s the password?” he said again, gesturing to the tip jar.
Damn. I grit my teeth. “I don’t have cash.”
He gestured over his shoulder to the ATM.
“Really?” I said. “Come on. Bank fees?”
“Password,” he repeated. There was a loud thud from upstairs and I glanced up.
He didn’t. Fuck. “Fine,” I hissed. “Jack and Diet.” He lifted a brow. “Please.”
“Lovely,” he crooned, and aimed a spray hose of liquor into a glass while I shuffled over to the ATM and took out a twenty. Then I returned and slammed it on the bar.
His lips pursed. The pierced brow arched again.
I exhaled with the swiftness of a gut punch. “Seriously?”
“Inflation,” he said meaninglessly. “Supply and demand.”
“Those are two different things.” I could feel my efforts at likability sloughing away.
So could he. “Price is going up, sweetheart.”
“Come on,” I said, chancing petulance. “I’m young. I’m a starving artist.”
His lips pursed. “Aren’t we all.”
Okay, a different tack.
Everything depended on whether Julian was upstairs. If he was, great. If not, I was wasting my time. Efficiency over pride.
I leaned over the bar, letting my hips jut out behind me. My heart was still jackrabbiting with anxiety and adrenaline, my state of mind turning on something I couldn’t yet know. “I’m good for business,” I assured the bartender.
He gave a low laugh then, sliding my drink toward me with an air of capitulation. “Fine. Tell ’em at the door that Joey says she’s good for business.”
Relief was a heat through my extremities. “Thanks.” I slid my tongue around the straw in a gesture of thanks and turned, picking up speed only once I was already halfway up the stairs.
On the landing was some guy who looked straight out of a Wes Anderson film, with a handlebar mustache and slicked pompadour. I dutifully repeated the phrase I’d been given.
“Arms up.” Wes Anderson’s muse patted me down through my sweat-soaked leather jacket, hands lingering closely on my waist. “Just making sure,” he said, eyes on my bare midriff.
There was another sharp roar from inside, which I took as an opportunity to slide past him, through a black velvet curtain into what looked like the deconstructed warehouse space I’d assumed the building was.
There was one open space up here, half constructed, like a scene from an action movie right before someone inevitably fell off the roof.
It smelled like a mix of booze, cigarettes, and weed, and I fought a cough as I walked into a puff of raspberry smoke from someone’s nauseating vape pen.
It was impossibly loud, the crowd thick and boisterous.
I took an elbow to the ribs, my drink spilling onto the floor well before I was able to figure out the contents of the space—the thing around which everyone had crammed in like sardines to witness.
Context cues gradually added up: Some guy was getting the shit kicked out of him.
I couldn’t see very well—I was trying to work my way over to one of the abandoned chairs and tables, practically parkouring for a bird’s-eye view.
I climbed onto a table in the back corner just as the crowd roared its approval, a stifling wall of incoherent sound.
Then I caught the hard crack of someone getting hit—saw them stumble half dead into the wood of the makeshift ring.
Into the aura of bloodlust, the carnal whims of the madding crowd.
I was absurdly, recklessly positive who it was even before I saw him clearly.
“Julian!” I shouted. His hair was matted with sweat and blood. His shirt was even dingier in the light that swung from half-finished fixtures overhead. “JULIAN!”
He found me blearily, eyes fluttering, almost shut. His opponent, easily fifty pounds heavier, if not more, grabbed him by a fistful of that long, oil-slicked hair.
There he was. With that same look in his eye, the thing that edged so close to despair I almost couldn’t breathe for looking at it. The eyes that were ocean gray, like the crest of a dying wave.
He blinked and I shook my paralysis loose, my mind leapfrogging to pragmatism.
I looked around for a ref, though this obviously wasn’t that kind of place.
Without a phone I couldn’t call the police even if I wanted to—and I did not relish the thought of calling the police under any circumstances—but I couldn’t just let him get himself beaten to death.
My eyes strayed for rescue, and when I came up empty, I looked helplessly back at Julian.
Which was when I saw his eyes start to change.
I couldn’t have explained it. I know, realistically, that there was no clap of thunder, no turntable distortion in the music or anything like that. No sinister laughter. But when I met those eyes a second time, what I saw in them then wasn’t normal.
It wasn’t … human.
His stare went cold, almost dead. His entire face warped; the same features flashed suddenly unrecognizable, like the set behind the curtain had changed.
The other man didn’t see it—didn’t feel what I felt with the certainty of instinct.
He threw another punch like nothing had changed, but Julian’s hand snapped up with a superhuman swiftness.
There was an audible smack as he caught his opponent’s fist in his palm, then a loud, unmissable crunch as he tightened his grip. Like the sound of rolling tires over gravel.
“Julian.” This time it left me as a whisper.
No one heard. The other man had let out too loud and agonized a scream.
Julian smiled up at me from afar, licking blood from his teeth before letting his opponent’s broken hand fall.
I felt myself rocked by something internal, careening toward a fever pitch that seared from the bang of my pulse to the base of my abdomen, like swallowing panic whole.