The practice room was seething, phantasms filling up the spaces between objects, demons with long tails riding the sound waves in the air.
I was afraid, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t bring my drumming to a halt any more than I could smother the tapping of my foot or the twitches in my face. I was trapped here, caught in the pattern I’d helped shape.
Then reality shifted once more, like the sprockets of a film finally catching, and I saw something I’d almost forgotten… what music looked like.
Moz’s guitar notes were scattered like Christmas lights across the ceiling, shimmering in and out, Pearl’s sinuous melody linking and electrifying them. The dog-boy’s riff spread out underneath, solid and steady, and my drumming was the scaffolding that held it aloft, all of it pulsating at ninety-two beats per minute, alive and connecting us.
I stared at the apparition, awestruck. This was the way I’d been born to see music, before the doctors had taught me to separate my senses, to grab objects and faces and hold them in place. Before they’d cured me of these visions with therapy and pills.
How had this other reality returned? Every sense conjoined, complete and undivided…
But then my eyes dropped to the floor, and I saw Minerva’s song.
It was tangled around our feet, twisting its way through cords and cables, plunging in and out of the floor, like loops of Loch Ness monster in the water. It was a worm, blind and horned, its rippling segments pushing it through the earth, rearing up a hungry maw teethed with a ring of knives.
And suddenly I knew that Minerva’s curse was something a thousand years older than heroin or crack.
I let out a gasp, and she turned her head toward me, saw me seeing it. She dropped the notebook and pulled off her glasses in one brittle motion, her song dissipating into a long, furious hiss. The architecture of the music shattered overhead, my drumsticks spinning from my hands.
The rest of them stumbled to a halt. Pearl was staring at her friend, alarmed. Moz was staring at Minerva too, and for a moment his expression was unmistakable: the boy was dripping with desire.
“Why’d you two stop, man?” the burly dog-boy cried. “That shit was paranormal!”
I blinked, looking down at empty hands. No trembling, just like after any good session. I felt no need to tap my feet or touch my forehead. There was nothing in the air but the hiss of amplifiers, a barely visible ripple in the corners of my eyes.
But I still felt it in the soles of my feet, the beast we’d been playing. Something was rumbling in the earth, deeper than six stories below. Answering Minerva’s song.
“You can smell it too, can’t you?” she whispered to me.
“No… not smell. But sometimes I see things I shouldn’t.” I swallowed, clutching at my pill bottle through my jeans, by reflex spilling out the speech they made us memorize at school, in case the police ever thought we were on drugs: “I have a neurological condition that may cause compulsive behavior, loss of motor control, or hallucinations.”
Minerva raised an eyebrow, then curled back her lips in a sneer that showed too many pointed teeth. “Spasticus… autisticus.”
I nodded. That was more or less me.
But what the hell was she?
12. THE TEMPTATIONS
— MOZ-
Her uncovered face was radiant, shining with a brilliance that liquefied me.
She’d worn her shades until that moment—a total poser, I’d figured. But I could see now that she had to wear them, not for her protection, but for ours, to shield us from her eyes.
What she had wasn’t beauty, it was something a thousand times scarier, something that gnawed at my edges. I’d already heard it in the music, felt it in the way she’d wrenched us all into her wake—the whole band sucked up and totaled by her magnetism, or whatever you’d call it. Something charisma was too small a word for.
Something overriding, bottomless.
Suddenly, this was her band, not mine or Pearl’s. And just as suddenly, I didn’t mind.
Minerva put her sunglasses back on.
I picked up her notebook from where it had fluttered to the floor.
What covered the open pages wasn’t writing, more like the scroll from a lie detector, or one of those machines that inscribes the shapes of earthquakes. Ragged black lines undulated in impenetrable columns, smeared and spattered with drops of water. A few smudges were rusty brown, like old blood.
I offered it to her, but Minerva was still staring at Alana Ray—glaring, her gaze dangerous even through dark glasses. I felt like I should say something to calm her down, since I’d brought Alana Ray here and Minerva was angry at her about… something.
Because Alana Ray had dropped her sticks? But Minerva had freaked out before the Big Riff had broken down. I opened my mouth but found myself silenced by the memory of Minerva’s naked eyes.
“Min?” Pearl said.
I closed my mouth. Let Pearl handle this.
“You okay, Min?”
“Yeah, sure.” Minerva leaned across to take the notebook from my hand, pressed it close against her chest. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to have a hissy fit. I was just kind of… into that song.”
“I’m sorry too,” Alana Ray said quietly. “My condition sometimes leads to performance complications.”
I swallowed, trying to remember what Alana Ray had confessed about herself… something wrong with her brain? All of a sudden, she was talking funny, with microscopic pauses between her words. Little twitches traveled across her body as she stared back at Minerva, as if her nervous system was unraveling inside. I opened my mouth again to say something.
“Hey, no problem,” Zahler said first. “You were fawesome. We were all totally paranormal!” He turned to Pearl. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Pearl said softly. “We were.” She gave me a questioning look.
I held her gaze, something I hadn’t done in two weeks.
It had all clicked—our music, this band. Pearl’s strange, electric friend had pulled us together and forged us into something as brilliant as she was.
“That was great,” I said, nodding at Pearl. “Good going.”
Her face brightened in the dark practice room. “Well, okay, then.” She turned to Alana Ray. “You need to take a break?”
Alana Ray blinked one eye, then the other, then shook her head like she had water in her ear. “No. I’d rather keep playing. I think my… complication is over. But maybe a different song? Sometimes the same stimulus can provoke the same reaction.”
“Uh, sure,” Pearl said, then shrugged. “How about Piece Two?”
Zahler and I just nodded, but Minerva smiled, pulling the microphone closer to her mouth. Low, soft laughter, touched with reverb, scattered about the room.
“No problem, Alana Ray,” she whispered, opening her notebook. “I’ve got about a million stimuli to go.”
Nobody freaked out for the rest of rehearsal.
We played Piece Two, a long jam wrapped around a looped sample from an old vinyl record of Pearl’s, then our third song, which didn’t even have a working title yet. Alana Ray never stumbled again, just accompanied us with psychic comprehension. With every new section she’d follow along for a while, then slowly start to build us up, adding structure and form, staring at invisible sheet music hovering in the air, somehow seeing what we needed her to do.