Chapter 1
Chapter One
Jacob
A few weeks later...
LIFE IS SO INSANELY not normal.
Someone grabs my sleeve. I wrench my arm away, diving for the door, where my bandmate Keannen is waiting to snatch my arm and and slam the door shut behind me.
I lean my back against the door and huff out a breath. Pounding fists thump against the metal. Muffled voices squeeze past the barrier, the shouted questions incomprehensible.
“It’s like a scene out of a zombie movie,” I say.
Keannen snorts. Our tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed drummer sneers at the door as though he can see through it to the press waiting beyond. “Vultures,” he mutters.
He stalks off, and I follow, a little shakier than I’d like to admit. My band, Baptism Emperor, finished our first big tour only a few weeks ago. Our management company thought opening for a bigger band during the tour might be a good way to launch our career, but they, and we, had no idea just how right they were.
Everything has changed since that tour, and so quickly that my head is spinning. A few months ago, I worked at a grocery store and played music in my spare time. Now, I can’t get from my fancy new apartment to the practice space where I’m supposed to meet my band without a flock of reporters hounding me. Our manager, Emmett, assures us it’s because we’re new and it’ll die down, and maybe he’s right. We only have one album, after all, and it’s the one we released ourselves before Emmett scooped us up. The tour was great for sales, but we don’t have our own security team or anything like that quite yet. Surely our lives will go back to normal sooner or later.
I follow Keannen down a dimly lit hall. It’s a hell of a lot nicer than the sorts of places where we used to practice, but some things never change. Musicians are almost legally required to make music in a place that could be converted into a garage.
We turn down another hall and then into a room, and I find my whole band waiting for me. Keannen settles behind his drum kit, the place where he always seems most comfortable. One of our guitarists, Shawn, regards me with a worried gaze. Much like Keannen, he’s all dark hair, dark eyes and broody eyeliner. Stubble shadows his cheeks, and if I didn’t know him so well, I’d assume he was some aloof rockstar type.
“You okay, man?” Shawn says.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I say, brushing aside my band’s worrying.
“You had a way tougher time getting here than the rest of us,” Shawn points out.
He’s not wrong, but I wave the comment away. The hazards of being a lead singer, I suppose. People see me as the leader of the band. It doesn’t help that I’m the one who does most of the talking. Shawn and Keannen certainly aren’t going to do it. It’s up to me to slap on my trademark dimpled smile and answer questions when we’re forced in front of a camera.
I run a hand through my wavy brown hair. It’s grown out, almost reaching my shoulders, but Emmett assures me it’s “the right look” for Baptism Emperor’s frontman.
Whatever. I’ll leave my hair a little long if that’s what it takes for me to make music.
“You guys ready to focus on music, or are we going to chit chat all day?” I say, strutting toward the microphone stand in the center of the padded room.
“Yeah, yeah,” Shawn says, hefting his guitar over his head.
Keannen is already at his drums. Levi lounges on a couch with his bass, but gets up when I glare at him. Our backup guitarist, Dan, complies with a shrug.
I guess I kind of am the leader of this group. At my urging we all get to our instruments and start playing one of our newer songs. I wrote it during our journey home after the tour, but it’s rough around the edges. We’re in the very earliest stages of a second album. It’s grueling coming off our first tour and being asked to make more music right away, but Emmett and the management company insist we need to stay relevant if we don’t want our career to be a flash in the pan.
Judging by the press stalking my every step, we’ve got time before people lose interest.
We settle into a familiar rhythm as we work through the music. Even when we stumble, we recover quickly. The five of us have been making music together for years. We know each other. We know each other’s playing. The fancy record deal and big tour aren’t enough to change us. Alone in a practice room with nothing but our instruments, we’re exactly the same guys who used to play dive bars in exchange for a round of drinks.
The world and fame can only change us so much.
I relax, the startling experience with that grabby paparazzo fading to the back of my mind. Words pour out of me and into the mic. I close my eyes, feeling the lyrics, letting them shift and change as I belt them into the mic. I barely need it in a room this small. I’ve always had a voice people describe as “big,” so it’s absolutely flooding the practice room as I barrel through my band’s newest song, “Escape.” We’re aiming to release this as a single to whet people’s appetites for a second album, but part of me cringes at the thought of the media flurry that will surely inspire.
The silence rings in my ears when we hit the end. I open my eyes and find my band smiling and nodding around me. They can feel it too. This new song is a winner, but it’s only the beginning. We need a lot more if we’re going to give the label and our new fans something to sate their hunger.
I sag as the weight of the expectations rushes back in to rest on my shoulders. At least I have these four men around me to help me carry the burden. I’m not sure what I’d do without them. Remove even one of them, and our little rock band would topple like a house of cards in a hurricane.
We get back into the music. Shawn and Dan work on some guitar riffs and solos while I talk about tempo with Luke and Keannen. Eventually, we come back together, running the song again with slight alterations. We try a couple others as well, but none of them are as far along as the first one.
The time slips away, taking my anxieties with it. There are no windows in here, and I don’t go near my phone during practice, so I have no idea if it’s been a few minutes or a few hours by the time we decide to stop. It feels like both at once, the time simultaneously slow and gone in a blink.
When we start packing up, however, Shawn, the broody guitarist, hesitates.
“Hey, maybe we should leave together,” he says.
“Seriously? We’ll be fine,” I say. “Besides, didn’t we all drive separately?”
“Yeah but you barely made it through the door,” Shawn says. “Keannen had to rescue you.”
“He did not rescue me. He opened the door for me. It wasn’t a big deal.”
Despite my words, the ghost of a hand tugs at my arm. What were they hoping to accomplish? Would they really have hauled me into that pack of paparazzi?
I suppress a shiver, smiling instead. “It was just some reporters. They must have gone home by now. Come on, let’s head out. I’m getting hungry.”
The mention of food finally moves my bandmates. We’ve been here all day, and if any of the other guys are like me and rolled out of bed late without eating, they’re probably starving.
“Maybe we can go to that burger place nearby while we’re in the area,” I say as we make our way down the hall. “They had the best fries. You know, the ones with that sauce.”
I get a few nods of agreement. It seems even Shawn isn’t so dire about our parking lot prospects that the idea of a big greasy meal can’t sway him. We can afford fancier dinners now. We can afford fancier everything now. But sometimes a burger that’ll leave your fingers shining with grease is better than all the five-star meals in the world.
I’ve moved on to fantasizing about the milkshakes by the time we reach the door. I throw it open without thinking—
And meet a wall of shouting.
I freeze, blinking at the chaos before me. I can’t even see my car past the cluster of reporters screaming at me. Rather than get bored and wander away, they’ve multiplied into a thicker throng. Several shove small devices at my face. Recorders maybe? They’re all yelling at the same time, and several are taking photos. A few of the devices flash like some old-timey camera.
“When is the new album coming out?”
“What did you work on today?”
“Can you tell us anything about the rumors of a collaboration with The Ten Hours?”
“Keannen, is Tim with you?”
The words wash over me like a tidal wave, drowning me as I stand there gaping. At the mention of Tim, Keannen snarls, “None of your damn business.”
His voice snaps me from my stupor. Keannen has been the focus of a lot of this. The press got wind of his relationship with a rival drummer pretty quickly. It all went down during the tour. While we were busy opening for The Ten Hours, Keannen was evidently busy seducing their drummer, Tim. He hasn’t been shy about the relationship, but that has only made the press more nosy. It’s raised questions in people’s minds about how we got the chance to open for The Ten Hours, who are far more famous than us. Many have implied we secured that opportunity because of Keannen and Tim’s relationship, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They hated each other at the start of the tour. More than once, I feared it would come to blows. Maybe it did and none of us ever knew, but now they’re mostly seen holding hands and going out together. I’m happy for Keannen, I really am, but his situation has only made the frenzy swirling around us worse.
Someone grabs the back of my shirt. I gasp, but realize it isn’t the press when the hand hauls me back into the hall. We throw the door shut, but the shouted questions pelt our exit.
Shawn releases me. “I don’t think we’re getting out that way.”
I put up my hands in defeat. “I can’t believe they’re still here.”
“They’ll sleep in that damn parking lot if they think we’re here,” Keannen says. He digs his phone out of his pocket. “Give me a minute. I’ll call Tim.”
He stalks away, phone already to his ear.
I deflate. I really didn’t want it to come to this. During the tour, The Ten Hours’ security team did double duty in order to protect both bands, but we were nobody back then. Everyone’s been saying we need our own security, yet I’ve resisted, insisting on keeping some shred of normalcy in my life.
“Seth can get here in ten minutes,” Keannen says.
My stomach flips, and not just because of the press. Seth, the head of security. A tree worth climbing if I’ve ever met one and the person who has insisted the most ardently on Baptism Emperor getting its own security team because of situations exactly like this. Now he has to come rescue me like I’m some sort of damsel in distress. What a way to get close to an attractive guy. Not that he’s into me. He looks like a linebacker, and he’s probably straight, but Keannen caught me checking him out one time during the tour and he’s never let me live it down. It’s a lost cause, but hey, a boy can dream.
Right now, I’m mostly dreaming of getting the hell out of here.
If I’m the damsel in distress, then maybe Seth can be my knight in shining armor.