Chapter One #3
If it isn’t people fearing me for my aggressive patron god, it’s people fearing me for my size. Both valid reasons, unfortunately, but I don’t want this guy to be afraid of me, a want that flurries desperately in my chest.
I’m right up against the stage, arms folded over my chest, and he’s got the higher ground on me from this angle. I let my arms drop to my sides and try a grin. Encouraging, awed.
Alexo lets his eyes dip down my body before they ping back up.
He smiles.
It’s wide and wondrous, digging dimples into his cheeks and illuminating his dark eyes.
Oh, for gods’ sakes. Give a bi guy a chance, would you? Fucking dimples.
Alexo eases the mic back onto the stand, faces the crowd, and sweeps into an elegant bow.
The bar manager comes out from backstage and leans into the mic. “Alexo the Magnificent, everybody!”
The crowd goes crazy again, and it kickstarts what’s left of my brain so I clap along.
“Up next,” the manager announces, “the Big O!”
See? I take my karaoke stage name seriously.
It catches the crowd’s attention, and their cheering turns to equal groans and laughter.
The shift lets Alexo slip off the stage, on the opposite side from me. He’s so damn small that I instantly lose sight of him, and I bound up onto the stage to spot him again, and—there he is. Talking with someone near the hall that leads to the bathrooms and back exit.
“Give it up for the Big O!” the manager tells the crowd. “The Hellhounds’ own newest defensive tank!”
Before I have time to connect that I’m on the stage and I don’t know whether the crowd might hate me, they cheer. A few chant, “O Monroe!” and “Hellhounds!”
A grin blooms across my face and some of the anxiety fighting to burst free settles.
Fans have always loved that I do shit like this, make a fool of myself in public displays of nonsensical joy. That hasn’t gone away. Well, with the Silver Hound’s crowd at least, but I’ll take whatever support I can get.
My song starts.
And I’m suddenly aware that Alexo gave a Grammy-level performance and here I am, planning to butcher Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste.”
With a self-deprecating shrug that makes the crowd laugh anew, I pull the mic stand closer, eyes flicking to the lyric screen—
But I find myself shifting back to stare at Alexo. And that guy he’s talking with.
My mouth opens for the first verse when the guy leans way too close.
I can only see the back of Alexo’s head, so I have no idea how he’s responding to the guy’s advances, if he’s interested, and that’s why I linger. Why the song plays on and I miss the first line.
The guy’s face devolves into fury, eyes narrow, lips peeled back as he talks down at Alexo.
The crowd’s gone silent, staring at me, a few errant chuckles as they assume I’m choking on stage.
But I watch Alexo shake his head at that guy—who then seizes Alexo’s arm.
Alexo tries to yank away.
Nope.
Heat swells up from my stomach, soothing calm focus over me as I leap off the stage. The crowd parts in a confused shuffle when I beeline through them to reach Alexo and the guy, still in an argument. And that guy’s still digging his fingers into Alexo’s arm.
Nope, I think again, and I should probably think more than that, but I’m all narrow-minded goal, the meditative intensity I fall into during a rawball game. Only instead of defend my teammates, that narrow-minded goal is get Alexo away from this guy.
Again, without thinking—really cannot overstress how little I’m thinking—I do what I’ve done to Seb a hundred times when I want to move him somewhere:
I wrap my arm around Alexo’s waist and pick him up.
He smells like fruit. Apples, maybe? Because of course he has to smell edible.
Alexo makes a disconcerted noise halfway between a chirp and a gasp.
The guy releases Alexo’s arm in shock, which lets me deposit Alexo behind me and to the side, so I can use my body as a shield between them.
By the time I’m facing the guy, one arm out to block Alexo, I realize that I made a bad move.
I know better than to just grab people, and shame damn near makes my knees buckle—why the fuck did I do that?
Before I can apologize to Alexo, the attacker guy whips his hands out in a wizard offensive stance, a green spell glowing in arcane ropes between his splayed fingers.
The crowd is watching. Dead silent.
While the instrumentals for “Taste” pulse from the stage.
I foresee an uncomfortable conversation with the team’s publicists in my future about what it means to professionally represent the team. On top of the already uncomfortable conversation I was going to have with the team manager tomorrow. Great.
I lift my hands in an attempt to placate the guy. “Just back up, all right? We don’t need to—”
“You back up,” the guy snarls. He’s upper-middle-aged, not dressed at all for a night out at a bar, in frumpy jeans, a wrinkled T-shirt, and an old beat-up jean jacket. His black hair’s greasy, his teeth are bared, and he looks every bit ready to release this attack spell on me.
I step back and bump into Alexo—and my eyebrows pop in surprise. I figured he’d bolt after I picked him up.
But he’s still here, and when I move into his space, he doesn’t retreat. Just stays there, his warmth bleeding into my lower back and side, and I instinctively lean closer to that heat.
“Alexo,” the guy snaps. “Get over here.”
Alexo doesn’t move.
The guy’s glower goes murderous when it drops from me to Alexo. “We’re leaving. Now.”
“Maybe we should ask Alexo if he wants to leave with you,” I say through my teeth.
Fuck bullies, I swear to the gods.
The guy spreads his hands, that green spell stretching, intensifying. “He’s leaving with me. Now. He’s mine to order around.”
Oh, he did not just call Alexo his. Not in that tone of voice. Disrespectful asshat.
A growl rumbles in the base of my throat, my upper lip flinching in an involuntary snarl.
The crowd shifts and a few people draw closer to me, and I know without having to look that it’s Seb and the rest. Does this bar have security people?
But maybe … maybe Alexo is this guy’s, in some way?
I risk letting the guy out of my sight to look down at Alexo and make sure I’m not reading this situation wrong. That’s the last thing I need, to keep someone from leaving with their friend, however much of a dick he is.
As I turn, all the ways I could be messing up right at this very moment come crashing through me.
Because cameras start going off. It’ll be all over socials in no time, how Orok Monroe, Urzoth Shieldsworn’s tank for the Hellhounds, used his strength and violence to trap a guy at a bar.
I can hear the reporters now: That’s how he chooses to embody his god?
He let these alleged brutalities happen at Camp Merethyl, but he channels Urzoth for a bar fight?
But that all goes translucent with the way Alexo’s gazing up at me.
This close, I can see brown freckles clustered in with the rose-gold glitter across his nose, his lashes made impossibly long by mascara.
He doesn’t look afraid or annoyed that I’m stopping him from leaving. He looks intrigued. Studying me, eyes bouncing over my face.
“Do you want to go with this guy?” I ask him, a little of that growl still in my voice.
His wonder freezes. “I’d have to go with you instead?”
What? I throw my hands up, but to him, it’s supplicant. “Of course not. Just—is this guy bothering you?”
Wow. Next I’ll ask if he comes here often or if it hurt when he fell from the heavens.
Alexo stares at me again, studying, studying, before his lips part in a small huff. And with a triumphant smile—there’re those dimples again, fuuuuuck me—he nods.
“Yeah,” he says, and he drops his gaze to the guy. “Yeah, he’s bothering me.”
The guy makes a garbled noise of protest. “You little piece of—”
But he’s cut off in an aggravated squawk, and when I look, Thio’s counterspelled whatever the green glowing arcane lines were.
“Do we need to call an adventure party?” Seb asks me, but he’s scowling at the guy. “They can take care of him.”
Instead of showing any kind of fear at being potentially arrested, the guy laughs. A boisterous, screeching laugh, and with one last glower at Alexo, he huffs off into the crowd.
I charge after him when a small hand wraps around my forearm. It’s just as debilitating for my sense of awareness as that meditative goal state.
Everything else drops away, crashes and topples to rubble, until there’s just Alexo putting himself in front of me, gazing up with that awestruck wonder marred by confusion, like he’s not used to people defending him. It makes my chest squeeze, that this is surprising for him.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
It’s so quiet in here, the crowd eating this up, and the music’s stopped now, too, but I watch his lips and feel those words dip off his tongue.
I really intend to say you’re welcome. Or something not quite so predatory, after all this shit.
But what comes is a runaway train of “Let me buy you a drink.”
It isn’t even a question.
I clear my throat and try again. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Alexo grins, and I am so, so fucked. He is some kind of siren, isn’t he? Or a pixie, tossing out charms on his every exhale.
But Seb and Thio aren’t affected, sharing a knowing smirk with me, then each other; and Marlow and Darian are behind them, looking concerned until Darian claps his hands loudly.
“All right, show’s over!” he shouts at the crowd. “Or—has it just begun?”
He dives on stage, whips his guitar around, and starts into the first chords of “Somebody to Love.” It earns a stifled applause, and the air of partying burbles back up as people peel away from gawking at me. At us.
Seb, Thio, and Marlow try to create something of a barrier between us and the crowd, a wall on our other side, but I still grimace, wondering how many of the pics people got had Alexo in them.
I know what comes with my lot in life, but he sure as hell didn’t ask to get embroiled in a PR moment with a pro rawball athlete who’s a traitor to his god.