Chapter 4
Chapter Four
SEB
As far as I can tell, Raven’s Wish dropped off the map after Full Throttle rejected them.
Off the fucking planet, it seems. Crew has been trying to run them down all day, and I’ve done my share of Googling too.
No one has updated their website in eighteen months.
No one has posted about them on social media in over a year.
I’ve searched for each of the members separately.
The drummer, Alex, made a go of it for about six months with a band called Marxigram, but even he is a ghost these days.
“Are you sure you even want to find this girl?” Crew asks. “I’m not questioning your judgment—”
“I literally pay you to question my judgment. I just…have a friend who remembers her and was interested in hiring her for a private event.”
“Tell your friend to reconsider. Gregg and I thought she was the most tragic case we’d ever seen in this business, and we’ve seen a lot of addicts.”
“That bad, huh?”
“So bad we had to call an ambulance. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were still in rehab or the psych ward.”
I cringe. Magic shares a razor’s edge with mental illness.
Hell, I’ve been in my alignment less than twenty-four hours and I already question my sanity.
My skin feels too tight, and my body feels pressurized like a champagne bottle ready to pop.
I’m not crazy, though, and I’m willing to bet she isn’t either.
Undeniably, something had its teeth in her back then. It might have been drugs. It might have been booze. Witches are human, after all, a human capable of magic, and unlike dragons, they can become addicted to drugs and alcohol. They can overdose. Their magic only complicates things.
I knew this was a bad idea.
“Thanks, Crew. I’ll consider her a lost cause.”
“Probably for the best.”
He leaves my office, and I stare at the picture of Raven’s Wish on their website.
Even the photo makes her look strung out, like she’s there but not there.
She’s too thin, the type of thin you see when someone is skipping meals to do drugs.
I can make out the outline of her ribs where the neck of her dress falls off her shoulder.
Bleached white hair falls in a harsh, asymmetrical line across her prominent cheekbone.
It’s too hard and cold of a look for a girl who probably still has a prom dress in her closet.
But it’s her eyes that unsettle me the most. Unfocused and glazed, she stands on that stage, but she’s not really there.
“Where are you, Zoe Willow?” I mumble, and then an idea comes to me.
I screenshot her photo and do a reverse image search.
Dozens of photos pop up. I zoom in on each of them until one is too close a resemblance for me to dismiss.
“Well, I’ll be damned. Looks like you didn’t fall off the map after all, Aimee Oliver. ”
I jot down the details of her next show. If all goes well tonight, Zoe Willow is about to have the opportunity of a lifetime.
The Barrel Room is a dive in Hollywood that does not live up to its name.
It looks neither like a storage room for whiskey barrels nor like a place for fermenting wine.
If, instead, you picture a family of rats building a bar inside a barrel, you might get closer.
The place has the vibe of a basement decorated by frat boys on spring break.
The decor has a decidedly yard-sale feel, and what counts as a stage is just an elevated circular platform at the center of a room of velvet sofas and thrift-store chairs.
This is the type of place where you thank fuck for the poor lighting because you don’t want to know about the overall cleanliness.
I find a shadowy spot in the back to stand.
No sense in taking one of the few chairs.
As a dragon, my feet won’t get tired like a human’s, and there are a surprising number of humans here, given the ambiance—or lack of it.
The place is packed. Zoe Willow may have been a washed-up drug addict, but her pseudonym, Aimee Oliver, has amassed a following.
People are buzzing with excitement to take in a show by the undiscovered talent. If they only knew.
A server comes around, and I order a bourbon, neat.
The woman’s eyes rake over me as she takes my order, and my inner dragon sniffs at her appreciatively.
She’s a divine specimen of a human, and given that my mating drive is through the roof, I’m tempted to return her small talk with an invitation.
But I’m not the type to be easily distracted.
I’m a Taurus after all. We’re known for being stable, work-oriented, and attentive.
Tonight, I have a job to do. The Zodiac Brotherhood is counting on me.
I need Ms. Willow’s witchy help, which means I need to know exactly what I’m dealing with when it comes to this witch.
On second thought, I grab the server’s arm as she’s walking away and order a second bourbon. They’re both for me. I’m going to need them to take the edge off.
The sound of applause and appreciative whistles moves my attention from the server’s ass back to the center of the room.
Zoe Willow is taking the stage, and sweet goddess, she is not the same woman I saw in that picture on Raven Wish’s old website.
Gone is the waifish, heroin-chic physique, replaced by a curvy but fit body wearing a short, flowy white dress with puffy sleeves that twinkle under the stage lights.
Her hair is a natural shade of dark blond and falls in soft waves around her shoulders.
When she smiles, bright-red lipstick frames flawless white teeth.
She arrests me. Even from the back of the room, her ocean-blue eyes seem to draw me in. I can’t look away. My dragon comes to attention and presses against my skin, warming my blood. She is enchanting. A siren. A wanderer of dreams. A passing angel.
The server arrives with my two bourbons, and I barely look at her as I hand her a wad of bills and toss both drinks back, grumbling as I wrangle my dragon into submission. Fucking alignment. Major pain in the ass.
Zoe brings her lips to the microphone. “Thanks for coming, everyone. I’m Aimee Oliver, and I’m so happy to be here tonight.”
Her voice is a caress, and I watch as everyone in the room leans forward in their seats as if they want to get just a bit closer to her.
Her gaze travels from one person to the next as her fingers pick out a tune on the acoustic guitar hanging from her shoulder strap.
She boosts herself onto a stool behind the microphone and crosses her legs.
“This first one is about when something gets its claws into you. It could be love or drugs or alcohol or something we don’t think about, like anger or fear.
But those claws sink in, and sometimes we have to cut a chunk off ourselves to get free.
And every time we fall back under the spell of that thing, it takes a bigger chunk, doesn’t it?
Takes a chunk and makes us smaller. That’s what I call this one—Smaller. ”
Creator, her voice is hypnotic, and she hasn’t even begun to sing yet.
“Promises.
You promised me,
you’d set me free.
Make things easy.
But all I’ve seen
is claws in deep,
slicing off a piece,
of my soul asleep.
Am I getting smaller?
Am I losing my way?
Is it any better when
you succeed in stopping the pain?
Or are you just a monster,
saving it up for a rainy day?
Who brings it all down heavy in
the most unbearable way?
Forcing me smaller…
Your promises…promises…
Crushing me smaller.”
I shake my head to clear it. Fuck! No question she’s a witch.
I stand taller when I realize that I’ve leaned toward her like everyone else.
All of us motionless on a giant, collective inhale.
Even the servers have stopped working, paused in their journey toward the kitchen or bar to stare, gap-jawed and glassy-eyed.
The bartender holds a bottle aloft in one hand as if he’s forgotten what he was doing with it, as a single tear frees itself from the corner of his eye.
He notices me watching him and swallows, then continues making his drink.
For the life of me, I can’t tell if this is a spell or just her.
She’s talented. If this had been the audition a year ago, Crew and Gregg would have signed her immediately.
I snort. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m here to get her help as a witch.
Then again, hearing this, makes it far easier to offer her something in exchange.
“Your claws
They scrape and tear
Sink deep
Catch me unaware
I cut you out
All you’re about
Cut out parts
I never knew I needed.
Am I getting smaller?
Am I losing my way?
Is it any better when
you succeed in stopping the pain?
Or are you just a monster,
saving it up for a rainy day?
Who brings it all down heavy in
the most unbearable way?
Cutting me smaller…
I’m cutting…cutting…
cutting me smaller.
Until I fade away.”
I order another drink at the bar. The bartender pours it and pushes the glass across the counter toward me. “She’s really good,” he mumbles.
I’m about to agree when my inner dragon grabs my psychological wheel and gives a possessive growl.
“Huh?” The bartender holds a hand to his ear.
I clear my throat and say, “Thank you.” With a lift of my glass, I slink back to my spot against the wall. What was that all about? Was my dragon really just jealous of Zoe’s distant praise by the bartender? Fucking alignment. I shove him down deep, lean against the wall, and concentrate on Zoe.
For the next hour and a half, I listen to her sing song after song about freedom and sacrifice, about addiction and recovery, about sin and redemption. Her music is moving but also has a hypnotic beat. I catch myself tapping my toe more than once.
She’s just reached the bridge of her latest number when a man near the front storms the stage, reaching for her.
She shakes her head at him and steps away from his grabbing hand, never missing a note.
But another fan, emboldened by the first, rushes the stage.
Zoe backs up again, but the stage is a circle.
A young man behind her steps onto the platform and places a hand on her waist.
She jerks away, but things are getting out of hand. Doesn’t this place have bouncers? Security?
As if they’ve read my mind, the guy checking IDs at the door shoves his way through the crowd and starts pulling people off the stage. But there are just too many. Touching her. Grabbing her. She stops singing.
“Stop!” she yells when a hand grips her thigh. My drink hits the nearest table, and then I’m moving.
Dragons like me have a couple of innate powers.
We can camouflage ourselves until we are practically invisible.
We have incredible strength and speed. We can enter people’s minds under certain conditions.
As I stride toward Zoe, I push fear. I push distance.
I part a path through the crowd as easily as a hot knife slices butter.
And when I reach her, I lift her into my arms, guitar and all, out of range of the crowd’s grasping hands.
Her head whips around, searching for the security guard.
“I won’t hurt you.” I project the thought into her head, and she feels it. She narrows her eyes and scowls. “Where’s the dressing room?”
“Behind the ladies’ room,” she says.
I kick and shove and mentally coax the crowd to part, and I have her out of there before most of the audience knows she’s gone. But when I reach the location she described, it’s actually the door to a broom closet with a vanity set up next to the mop. I scowl as I set her down in the small space.
She’s out of my arms, across the room, and holding the guitar up between us like a weapon before I can even close the door behind us.