“Speaking of crazies,” she laughed to herself, approaching the guy in the black shirt and jeans. She walked up behind him and drove her kneecap into the back of his leg, knocking him momentarily off balance. He clenched his fist, cocked it, and turned, ready for a fight.
“I should have known,” Jesse said, relaxing his fingers.
He seemed more relieved than thrilled to see her, she thought.
“Don’t you have reviewers on staff to handle this kind of thing,” Lucy ribbed. “Long time no see.”
“That’s what the Internet and texting are for, isn’t it?”
“Spare me the tech lecture, Jesse. I’m just saying you don’t get out much anymore.”
“Well, you seem to get out enough for the both of us.”
“Still angry, I see,” Lucy shouted, loud enough to hear through the opening song playing. “Why are you being such an asshole?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I have to look over my shoulder wherever I go. You want to know why I don’t get out much? That’s why.”
“Frey is after all of us, Jesse,” Lucy sniffed. “Welcome to the club.”
“That’s just it, Lucy. I didn’t get a membership,” Jesse yelled. “But I’m paying dues.”
It wasn’t like Jesse to whine about being excluded, and Lucy took his complaint with a grain of salt. His tone suggested that he was as worried about her as he was himself. He was being sweet, she thought, in his own difficult, abrasive way.
“There are no secret saint meetings, Jesse. No Martyrs Anonymous,” Lucy barked, showing her frustration. “You know we haven’t even seen each other until tonight. We’re figuring it out. All this crazy shit is happening to us now that you don’t even know about.”
“What? You got special powers or something?”
Lucy was silent. Jesse knew not to press, although by the look on his face, it was killing him not to.
“Yeah, well, eternal glory may be your thing, but it’s not mine. I’m into the here and now.”
He snapped a few photos of the crowd on his phone, captioned them and uploaded them to BYTE, ignoring Lucy.
“I know I haven’t been in touch lately. I’ve been pretty busy.”
“Yeah, I know. Getting ‘The Word’ out. But not even a selfie for me to post.”
Lucy laughed. It had become a stock response to interviewers and everyone else who asked what she was up to these days.
“That was the old me, Jesse.”
“I agreed to do that Fourth Wall show,” Lucy confided. “They’ve been after me for a while now.”
“I begged you to do that show years ago,” Jesse complained. “Why would you do it now?”
“The time is right,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know.”
“Yeah, well, that dude’s a ratings whore and a fraud about to enter contract negotiations with his network. He just wants to embarrass you, Lucy, not help you spread your message, or whatever you’re spreading . . .”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“What I understand is that the more you are out there, the greater the danger.”
Lucy could see Jesse getting red-faced even in the darkness. She could tell he was more than worried; he was scared. She took his hand.
“Listen, I have my doubts about whether I’m doing the right thing. Every day,” Lucy attempted to explain. “But it’s about more than what I think. About what’s rational. It’s not about me anymore. It’s bigger. And that I am sure of.”
“Not about you?” Jesse snarked. “That’s something I never thought I’d live long enough to hear.”
“Or something I thought I’d live long enough to say.” She laughed.
“If you keep making yourself so vulnerable to Frey and those animals he controls, you won’t live much longer, Lucy,” Jesse countered, gesturing at the sold-out crowd.
“It didn’t keep you away,” Lucy said appreciatively, finally understanding that Jesse had risked his own safety to keep an eye on them.
She reached out for a hug.
“You might as well just copy him on your schedule.”
She held him tight as he struggled to break free. “It’s what I have to do. What we each need to do.”
Their discussion was beginning to attract attention. A few stragglers saw them and wandered over, like hungry zombies catching the scent of living flesh.
“You’re one of them,” a girl shrieked, waving her friends over.
“Him, too,” her guy friend noted, pointing at Jesse.
“See what I mean?” he said. “Shrapnel.”
“There’s something really important I need to tell you before the show starts. Let’s go where we can talk.”
“More important than your big TV gig?” Jesse asked.
Lucy took Jesse by the arm and dragged him out of the club through an exit on the first balcony floor and onto a small fire escape. She shoved her foot between the door and the jamb, keeping the portal open.
“About the size of a confessional,” she said.
“Or a witness stand,” he countered.
She looked around and noticed a small group gathered outside the stage door beneath them. Lucy moved even closer and whispered quietly into his ear. Everything she knew, everything she suspected. About Sebastian’s heart.
“No way!” Jesse recoiled and stepped as far away as he could on the tiny landing, gripping the railing tightly. “Somebody is totally screwing with your head.”
Lucy calmly sat down on the cold metal step. “I think it might be true, Jesse.”
“Why? Why would anyone want to do that?” Jesse shot back skeptically. “Kill you, kill all of us, I get. But Sebastian is already dead. What would be the point?”
“Frey is a soul crusher. He wants to hurt us. Demoralize us,” Lucy said. “And everyone who believes in us. He gets off on it. He needs to discredit us before he tries to kill us. Or we become even more powerful.”
Everyone who believes in us. It took Jesse a second to process what she was saying.
“C’mon Lucy,” Jesse said, shaking his head. “This is insane diva stuff, even for you. Total psychodrama.”
“Don’t you see? The threat from Frey is more than just the power he has over some strung-out street punks to attack us,” Lucy explained. “He’ll kill us or die trying.”
Jesse threw his hands up. “If you ask me, it seems like you are doing everything you can to die trying. Don’t drag me into this again, Lucy.”
“You’re already in it,” Lucy replied. “With Sebastian. With us.”
“A bunch of lunatics,” Jesse mumbled bitterly.
“Now you sound just like Frey,” Lucy railed.
Jesse’s face flushed noticeably even in the darkened back alley. She could see he was still smarting from everything that had happened.
“Don’t. You. Dare,” Jesse hissed. “I could have left with him. Avoided all the bullshit.”
“You know what happened,” Lucy insisted, her voice rising. “You were there, Jesse.”
Jesse continued to struggle, mostly with himself. “Don’t tell me what to believe!”
“You don’t need to believe, you saw.”
“Honestly, Lucy,” Jesse sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “I don’t know what I saw anymore.”
The look of rejection in Lucy’s eyes was so powerful that he couldn’t look at her. He dropped his head in shame.
Lucy relented. “Then just do me a favor, okay? Find out what you can. Maybe I am crazy, but I need to know. We need to know. You owe me at least that much.”
“I don’t owe you a thing, LuLu. I made you,” Jesse stressed like a media Dr. Frankenstein, his voice dripping with contempt. “I was arrested, thrown in prison, dragged through the mud by prosecutors and the police, humiliated, discredited, my reputation destroyed . . .”
“What reputation?” Lucy scoffed. “You owe me your life, Jesse. Don’t forget that.”
Jesse looked down, still avoiding her eyes.
He saw the small group that had been standing there disperse and depart with hugs and kisses, except for one, not part of the group, leaning against a Dumpster. The tousled hair and distressed leather jacket seemed familiar, even in the shadowed alleyway. The guy looked up at the fire escape through the darkness, his sharp features silhouetted by the security light above the backstage door, and exhaled what remained of the cigarette smoke in his lungs. Their eyes met for the briefest moment, and he walked away, the sound of boot heels clicking gently along the cobblestones and concrete and into the silent night. Jesse was confused, uncertain of what he’d just seen. But moved, deep inside.
“Did you see that?” he said quietly, rubbing at his eyes.
“See what?” Lucy asked.
“Nothing,” he answered.
“I think it’s more than coincidence that we’re all here tonight, together for the first time in months,” Lucy argued. “I feel like we were led here for a reason, you know?”
Jesse was coming around. “Maybe,” he said.
Lucy’s appeal to him was becoming even more urgent. She threw herself on his mercy. Determined but egoless. “I need your help, Jesse.”
“That’s a first,” he said, his resistance waning. “What do you want me to do?”
“You still in touch with those dirt bags at the medical examiner’s office who slipped you those celebrity morgue photos for BYTE?”
“You mean sources?”
“Whatever makes you feel better,” she conceded. “We need to find out what happened to Sebastian. Who took his heart? And find it!”
“How the hell do you know someone really took his heart?”
“One of the people that follow me around, a priest, told me.”
“You’re going to risk your life on the say-so of one of those psychos?” Jesse questioned. “How do you know he wasn’t just some guy in a priest costume?”
“It’s more than that, Jesse. I see things. In visions. In dreams. The heart is key.”
“If you’re trying to convince me, you’re not doing yourself any favors talking like that.”
Lucy looked him square in the eye. “I know.”
This time it was Jesse who took a seat on the cold metal step, running best- and worst-case scenarios through his head, none of them very appealing.
“Okay, let’s say I believe you. That I’m willing to make a leap of faith,” Jesse posited reluctantly, still unsettled by the figure in the alleyway. “There has got to be more to it, a larger purpose for Frey than just to embarrass you or piss you off or whatever.”
“Like?”
“What am I, a prophet now?” Jesse retorted.
“Hardly,” Lucy said with a smile.
“Why not just let it go?” Jesse asked one last time, exasperated. “Things are going well for you and Agnes and Cecilia. You’re out there talking yourself up. Look at that crowd in there. Can’t you pitch a reality show or design a fragrance or something? Do you need to revisit all that pain and suffering Sebastian brought?”
“You’re missing the whole point, Jesse,” Lucy replied. “We’re doing well because of Sebastian.”
“You’re still alive, so far. Are you sure you want to rattle the doctor’s cage?”
“There is much more to life than living, Jesse,” she said. “Whatever the endgame to all this is, the reason for everything that’s happened, this is the beginning of it.”
“So, that’s the game?” he asked. “Capture the heart?”
“It’s not a game, Jesse,” Lucy said. “It’s a war.”
Cecilia burst onstage like an explosion. She strummed her guitar with an exaggerated windmill motion, the milagros on her boots spitting back beaming rays of light into the crowd.
“She’s starting. I’m outta here,” Jesse said, heading for the exit. “I’ll do what I can.”
Lucy blew him a kiss while mouthing a sickly sweet thank you and returned her attention to the show. She pushed her way back beside Agnes.
“Look at her,” Agnes said, amazed.
“Yeah, but don’t forget to look around you too,” Lucy said, ever cautious.
“Is he in?” Agnes said, looking back at Jesse as he disappeared into the crowd.
“Whether he likes it or not,” Lucy said.
Cecilia finished her guitar intro and took to the mike through walls of noise and feedback. Shining in the spotlight. She started wailing sorrowfully, as if she were mourning.
“Sacrilege” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, one of her anthems, channeled through her fingertips to her guitar, and from her throat into the microphone.
Fallen for a guy,
Fell down from the sky.
A bittersweet song that spoke to her, to her followers, and one that summoned him. She harkened back to the time she played for him at the church, and he was all she saw in the audience. He watched her every move and hung on her every word, just like he did then. She felt it. And she made the crowd feel it too. They were enthralled. Everyone but Lucy. Her eyes were fixed suspiciously on the lighting tech at the side of the stage, loitering behind the curtain. Agnes noticed Lucy getting wobbly, reaching for the edge of the bar to keep herself up.
“You okay?” Agnes asked.
Lucy heard her but couldn’t respond. She was trapped in her own thoughts, which seemed to be occurring five minutes in the future. Lucy could actually see his intentions, visualize his actions in advance. In a blink, she saw the lighting rig collapse, the overhead speakers tumble down, the chaos of the crowd running for the exits. She saw flashes of Cecilia lying motionless on the stage in a pool of her own blood.
The tech caught her looking at him and winked as he climbed the narrow metal ladder bolted to the wall and up to the rig. She felt on the verge of a panic attack, except what she was imagining was real. Or soon would be.
Lucy tried to get a bouncers attention, frantically pointing toward the stage, then the lighting rigs, but it was too loud and the floor too jammed. For Lucy, it was like trying to explain a complicated movie that she’d seen but the other person hadn’t. It was all getting lost in translation and crowd noise.
Neither was she able to get Cecilia’s attention from the back of the room.
Agnes tried to calm her down, taking Lucy’s hands in hers, but Lucy pulled away.
“Where are you going?” Agnes shouted.
“Stay here!”
Lucy took a mad dash for the soundboard at the back of the venue. She could see the lighting rig began to sway, almost in time with the audience and the music. The club staffer was riding it, rocking it gently back and forth like a child on a swing, in an effort to loosen it from the ceiling. It was almost unnoticeable from the floor unless you knew what you were looking for. And Lucy did.
On stage, Cecilia was lost in the moment, in her song, in Sebastian. Her eyes shut tight. Like the rest of the audience, oblivious to the tumult occurring in the back of the room. No way for Lucy to warn her. Agnes looked where Lucy was pointing and saw the guy atop the steel lattice.
Lucy hopped into the sound booth, pushed the engineer over, and began to pull the leads free from the board, cutting the sound and lights in the room completely.
“What the . . . ,” Cecilia shouted, opening her eyes.
Her microphone was dead and so were the monitors behind her. She couldn’t see a thing. The club security assigned to protect Lucy now rushed toward the sound booth to restrain her, angrily clearing a path through the confused fans.
In the brief moment before the boos and complaints from the crowd could fill the room, Agnes cried out her warning. “Cecilia, up there.”
Cecilia recognized the voice as Agnes’s and reached for her crew flashlight, shining it upward. She saw the guy working feverishly at loosening the rig from the ceiling. CeCe bent down and pulled three milagros from her boot and tossed them, one by one, like ninja fighting stars, at him. He was struck on the arm, neck, and back, distracted from his task but not badly hurt.
He pulled the milagros from his
body and flung them back at her, straight for her heart. The gold medals hit her wrought-iron corset and bounced off with harmless pings, but the assailant had not only thrown the milagros with little effect, he’d thrown himself off balance. The engineer got to his feet and began to insert cables back into the inputs, restoring some of the sound and lights in the house, disorienting the phony lighting tech. He teetered and fell as the crowd gasped in horror.
Cecilia stepped back as he crashed down to the stage along with the rig. Just then the sound and lights returned, but the crowd was literally in the dark about the confrontation that had just taken place.
“Is he dead?” a fan in the front row called out to CeCe.
“No,” she replied indifferently.
“Are you okay?” another shouted.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Thank God,” a voice yelled out from the crowd.
“Thank Lucy,” CeCe mumbled.
Cecilia and the crowd looked on as security quickly carried the fake tech off on a gurney and wheeled him backstage to wait for an ambulance. Agnes rushed to Lucy’s side.
“She was just trying to stop that guy from falling into the crowd,” Agnes shouted at the bouncers. “Let her go.”
“Hey!” Cecilia screamed through her mike, finally able to see the commotion at the back. “She saved my life.”
The crowd broke into applause. A rolling wave of approval cascaded through the venue, along with chants of “let her go” that quickly became deafening.
The head of security nodded and his men released Lucy. Agnes took her by the arm.
“Let’s get out of here,” Agnes said.
Lucy smiled at Cecilia, and CeCe blew a kiss back to her.
The lights went down.
The smoke machine powered up, spewing atmosphere all over the stage.
Cecilia reached down for one of the milagros that had failed to kill her and used it as a pick. She looked up and out into the crowd, thinking about what had just happened, about what Lucy had told her, about what was to come.
In the crowd, she saw the anxious faces of her apostles and recognized a silhouette in the smoky haze, a backlit figure glowing subtly in the artificial fog. Her heart and soul were filled with joy. He was there. At her show. Just like she’d dreamed since the moment they met.