Chapter 17
He called Kit first.
Not because Kit was the easiest but because Kit had come to him with the folder, in the cold on the steps, and that meant Kit had already been willing to walk toward the hard thing. Jude needed someone who'd already proven they could do that.
Kit picked up on the second ring. "Hey. You okay?"
"Can you come to the safehouse? And bring Sy and Mara if they'll come."
A pause. "Jude. What's going on?"
"I'll explain when you get here. All of it. I promise."
Another pause, shorter. "Give me an hour."
They came in Sylis's car, the three of them, and Marcus let them in without ceremony and put them in the kitchen with coffee and went back upstairs.
Jude sat across the table from Kit and Sy and Mara, their temp drummer that he was pretty sure would be permanent, and looked at the people he'd been making music with for three years and told them everything.
He started with Rand and the money, which they already half-knew.
Then the rest of it: the kids, the venues, the dates, the trafficking to Winsor.
The seven faces on the board upstairs. He told them about the shows, the pattern, what Rand had been doing in the rooms after Jude finished performing.
He told them what Hollow Bright had been used for without knowing it.
He watched their faces while he talked. Kit's went still first, jaw locked, moving slow through something large.
Sy put his coffee down and didn't pick it up again, he excused himself and Jude was pretty sure he was puking.
Mara's jaw tightened, then her eyes went wet, rage in their almond depths behind her bright pink dreads.
When Jude finished nobody said anything for a moment.
"The kids at the Loft show," Mara said. "There was that group. In the front row. Young. Really young." She looked at the table. "Rand bought them drinks after. I watched him do it and I thought-" She stopped. “I was just crew back then. I… I didn’t think…”
"You thought he was being Rand," Kit said. His voice came out flat. There was a fire in him that made his golden skin pink and his freckles stand out. "We all thought that. That's what we thought every time."
"It's not your fault," Jude said.
"I know whose fucking fault it is." Kit looked at him. His amber eyes were red at the rims. "How long have you known?" he ran a thin hand through the long falls of his raven dark hair.
"Rand specifically? A few weeks. That something was wrong-" Jude paused. "I think I knew something was wrong for a long time and I didn't have words for it. That’s not an excuse. Just the truth"
Sy hadn't spoken yet. Big, very dark skinned, and quiet; a man who'd learned young that taking up space was optional. He looked at Jude now. "What do you need?"
"A show," Jude said. "One show. Big, advertised everywhere, Trevor Project fundraiser so it looks like we're coming back for a reason. We need Rand to show up."
"He will," Kit said. There was a world of disgust in his normally gentle voice. "If he thinks there's money and you're there he'll show up."
"That's the point. The crew needs him in one place at one time. And I-" He stopped. Looked at his hands. "I have a song. I wrote it since all of this. I want to play it. I want him to hear it." He looked up. "I want him to know I know, from the stage, in front of everyone, before they take him."
The kitchen was quiet for a moment. The river outside. The low sounds of the house.
"When?" Sy said.
"Two weeks. The Majestic, if we can get it."
Kit was already pulling out her phone. “I know some people who owe me. We’ll make it happen.”
The crew said yes. Marcus sat with the plan for exactly the length of time it took him to find the holes in it and close them, which was about twelve minutes, and then he nodded and said the crew would be positioned.
Ghost mapped the venue exits on his laptop in the time it took Jude to drink a glass of water.
Nate didn't say anything when Jude told him, just looked at him for a long moment with the stillness that meant he was doing the math, and then said: "I'll be in the room. "
"I know," Jude said.
"Front row if I have to."
"Please don't. Your face is too recognizable."
Nate's mouth did the thing. "I'm recognizable."
"You're enormous. It's different."
They rehearsed every day for ten days.
The Meldrum space, same as always, minus the drum kit because it was Rand's and none of them wanted it in the room.
Mara brought her own. She'd always had her own: a Tama Superstar in matte black with a kick drum that rattled the fillings in your back teeth.
She set it up in forty-five minutes flat, pink dreads tied back, shaved sides catching the fluorescent light, moving through the assembly with the focused speed of someone who'd been waiting for this rehearsal her whole career.
She was small enough that the kit dwarfed her.
She sat down behind it and looked like she was about to eat it alive.
He ran the rehearsals. It took two days to stop hesitating before he said let's run that again or back to the top, two days of catching himself waiting for permission that wasn't coming from anywhere.
On the third day he stopped catching himself.
Turned out permission wasn't a thing he'd needed. He'd just been taught to wait for it.
The band found something without Rand in it.
Looser in some places, tighter in others.
Mara hit the pocket differently than Rand ever had.
Cleaner, harder, with a kind of joy in it that Rand's playing had never once had.
Kit filled space in the low end that Jude hadn't known was empty.
Sy's rhythm guitar came up in the mix because nobody was telling him to sit back.
Jude noticed all of it and filed it and let it change things.
Even his own notes on guitar came easier, truer.
Free in a way he hadn't realized he'd lost.
"The Monster Beside Me" was last every rehearsal.
He'd given them the lyrics and chords on day one, walked them through the structure, and then played it for them start to finish without stopping.
When he finished the room had been quiet for long enough that he'd started to wonder, and then Kit said, from somewhere behind him: "Jude. "
"Yeah."
"This is the best thing you've ever written."
He hadn't answered that. He didn't have an answer that was smaller than the truth, which was that it was the first song he'd written in two years that was entirely his.
By day ten they had it. Not just tight. Right.
The build in the second verse, the drop in the bridge where Jude's voice went alone, the outro that climbed until it didn't, Mara and Kit and Sy knowing the push and the silence and how much of each.
They ran it once on day ten and when it ended nobody said anything at all, and that was how Jude knew.
The show sold out in four hours.
Jaz Vail bought two tickets in the first thirty seconds, which Nate relayed to Jude with a look that contained significant amusement and zero surprise.
"Jaz as in-"
"Jaz as in Eros from Club Velvet. He's been a fan since the New Year’s show you guys did there last year. Dray's going to be miserable because it's going to be loud and he's going to stand there anyway."
"DPD homicide coming to a metalcore show?" He had met the man when he stopped by to talk to Zain one day.
"Dray goes wherever Jaz goes. That's just how it is."
Jude looked at him. "Is that going to be a problem? For the operation."
Nate's expression shifted into the one that meant he was doing the professional calculation separate from everything else.
"Dray's DPD, past of his own thing, and currently classified as whatever Jaz needs.
Having him in the room is an asset, not a liability.
He reads threats before Ghost does." He paused.
"And if things go sideways and we need someone to call in the department without it going through Marcus, Dray's got the contacts. And… the rest of Jasper’s boyfriends. "
Jude thought about that. "You want DPD there."
"I want options," Nate said. "Rand in cuffs is better than the alternative. For you. For the trial. For the kids."
"For me," Jude said. Not a question. He knew what Nate was saying. He didn't want Rand dead on his conscience, had known that since he'd stood in front of the board and seen seven faces and understood that what this needed was law, not the other kind of ending.
"For you," Nate said.
"Okay." Jude looked at the show poster on his phone screen. The Majestic. Hollow Bright. Trevor Project Benefit. Friday. "Okay."
The morning of the show he stood in the bathroom of the safehouse and looked at his face in the mirror.
No makeup. He hadn't worn it in weeks. The bruises were gone, the last yellow-green fading weeks ago, and what was left was just his face, the one before Rand, the one after.
He picked up the eyeliner. Stage makeup, not concealer. Black at the waterline, a little smudged at the outer corners, the same as he'd worn it since he was seventeen and his first bar show. This was different from covering. This was putting on the thing that made him feel like himself.
He looked at his reflection.
You've got the brightest smile, baby.
He smiled. Not for Rand. Not for the camera. Just because he wanted to, because it was his and he could.
Then he put on his moto jacket and went downstairs to where the band was waiting.