He padded after me as I went into my dressing room, the racks having returned back to a reassuring swathe of denim and T-shirts. I pulled open drawers, looking for underwear, surprised when he flicked through hangers to pull out a T-shirt with a familiar logo.
It’d be tight, of course, and short—again, duh—but he held out a Changelings tour T-shirt from back in the early 2010s with a smirk.
“Why does everyone want to dress me? Didn’t any of you get a Barbie doll as kids or something?”
“Let me pretend you’re our groupie for a night,” he said. “Getting damp knickers listening to the band play.”
“That’ll happen anyway,” I muttered.
“Yeah? Well, let me choose the ones that get that honour.”
And so I ended up in a pair of flimsy red lace undies and the matching bra, some well-worn jeans, and his choice in T-shirt.
“So how does this go?” I asked with a smirk, rushing over and wrapping my hands around his arm, looking up at him with a cartoonishly adoring look. “Do I giggle at all your jokes and tell you just how amazingly you play?”
“Just come along and be my girl.”
Chapter 14
Somehow, I was right back at that bloody bus as Luc knocked on the door. It opened not long afterwards, Billy standing in the gap. He looked at the two of us, stunned, then recovered by stepping back. He met my eyes briefly before returning back to the room.
It looked bigger now, or maybe that was just because it was packed with people. The Changelings were there, Billy sitting on the edge of the bed, guitar across his lap. Jake was at his feet, an array of hand drums before him. Johnno was against the wall, a beer by his knee as he picked out an intricate little trail of notes on his guitar, his brother sitting beside him. But between them were other men and women, some I recognised from the tour, some I didn’t.
“Ashanti gave us permission to bring Hartley to Aragide,” Luc said, taking my hand and drawing me over to a gap in the circle. People looked up when we passed, but turned back quickly to their conversations. “I hope that’s OK. Rutherglen was picking them off.”
“Um…yeah. Like, the palace isn’t mine and everyone who needs a place—”
“Getcha a drink, Luc?” a big behemoth of a man with long black hair asked. “My lady?”
“Kira, please,” I said, balking at the forelock pulling. Then I remembered where I’d seen him. Bran and Circe, those feral little feeders who’d had to blow him to get backstage. “And I’m fine, thanks.”
I didn’t get to dwell on that as Luc sat down with his back against the wall, dragging me down onto his lap when I went to sit beside him.
“No, you’re my girl tonight,” he said, rubbing his nose against my neck, pulling away when he saw the mark Jake had left. “And Jakey’s by the look of it.”
“Damn straight,” the man himself said, clambering over the instruments and crawling to me, kissing my lips as I was pressed against his bandmate’s chest. “I found Mark. Duke’s got him helping with moving people into Aragide, but he’ll come back here later. Gonna play something for you.”
He settled back in front of the strange array of drums he’d collected. There were bongos and djembe and others I didn’t recognise. His hand struck one, a little cheer going around the crowd, and then he began.
Initially, it was just a random set of beats, Jake’s brows furrowing as he listened to the sounds each made. He started combining them, playing the different sounds off each other until he nodded, seemingly satisfied. A quiet settled around the room as he began in earnest.
It was a slow, plodding beat initially, the quiet between each hand strike seeming as much a part of the music as the actual sounds, but he embellished on it quickly, the gaps slowly being filled with little patterns. So many patterns, it soon became obvious. I watched his hands, his instruments, the sounds becoming a blur as he repeated circles upon circles of beats, all overlaid on top of each other until your brain couldn’t follow each individual one, only the overall sound.
Luc chuckled when I jerked upright as Jake played the last beat, his hand stroking my hair. Jake shot his other bandmates a sidelong look and said, “Keep up, bitches,” before fixing his eyes on me.
This was it, what he felt, I knew. The beat was a rollicking gallop made up of a million hoofbeats, stampeding on and on, the frenetic pace only rising. Billy jumped in first, watching Jake’s hands move as his did the same. His guitar cut across the complexity at times with big dramatic riffs, then replicated that same battery of notes, his fingers moving so fast, they were a blur. My eyes slid sideways when Johnno came in, playing a counterpoint between the two, picking out one of the cyclical rhythms and drawing our attention to it. Liam leant forward, placing the phone he’d had out on the floor between everyone, recording the whole thing. Then I felt Luc’s fingers dance across my arm.
“You want to play?” I turned around in his lap, so my legs straddled his.
“No, you’re mine tonight.” His hand went to the base of my spine, pulling me closer so he might kiss me.
“I’ll still be yours if you play. It’s OK, Luc.”
“It takes me longer to come up with the basslines. Usually this lot, they get what they want down and then I pull it all apart. Make sure it works as a song, the structural stuff. I was the only one who was formally trained as a musician, so it’s my job to pare all of this back and make something radio friendly.”
I felt twitchy, wanting to move at the sounds they were playing. Right now, it was just some free form curlicue, not a song, but the relentless beat of it made it hard to sit still. I shifted back, pressing my body against Luc’s, his heavy arm anchoring me against him. In lieu of movement, the tension inside me rose.
Jake pulled us all along on this rocketing ride, making our hearts race to match his beat, working harder and faster. I saw the people around the circle lean forward, muscles tensing, watching, waiting to see how this would all play out, but Jake only got faster with the attention. The others struggled. I saw Billy’s grim determination as he bent over his guitar, Johnno’s lips pulled back in a snarl, but Jake just laughed, playing and playing until…
Liam let out a long, fire alarm wail of a note, head tipped back as he gave a wordless cry. Jake’s hands stilled, then played again, slowly now, the notes all dropping away until he was silent.
A chorus of cheers and claps went around the room, filling the gap in sound.
“Fucking shit!” Johnno said, flicking his fingers. “My hands are cramping like a bitch. We need to get back into practising again.”
“Did you get it?” Billy asked Liam.
He picked up his phone and then played back the audio recording, the others nodding in appreciation at the tinny sound.
“We’ve got something there,” Liam said. “I need to sit down and talk about inspiration.” His eyes slid to me. “Then we’ll start on some lyrics. What are you gonna call it, Jake?”
“Kira. They’re all called Kira now.”
Liam snorted at that. “We might have to finesse that a bit. You know how Rutherglen hates…” He froze, and so did the others, only moving when Liam laughed. “Actually, fuck Rutherglen. An album full of Kiras it is.”