Smoke rose where the silver made contact, giving off the sharp stench of burning hair. With a yelp, the wolf sank to all fours, shaking her head violently in an attempt to toss off the burning lariat. Hudson and Yoshida both backed against the walls to get a safe distance from the flailing marauder.
Hudson picked up the flashlight and tore off the wax-paper diffuser, focusing on the monster’s clawed hand. She dropped the trank dart on the floor, looking up at Hudson with glowing eyes that promised annihilation.
Then the eyes softened, and the creature formerly named Aura gave off a keening whine.
“Easy girl,” Hudson said, extending a comforting hand, well clear of her fangs.
* * * *
“Aaaagh!” DeShaun Lott’s cry echoed in the rafters of the Community Center’s basketball court. “I can’t see! I’m…blind!” He fumbled around until his hand fell on his best friend’s face. “Stuart!? Is that you, ol’ buddy?”
“Ha,” answered Stuart Barcroft. “And also…ha.”
DeShaun roughly ran his fingers across Stuart’s mouth. “Yeah, it’s you, all right. Big goofy grin and all. That must be what blinded me.”
Stuart didn’t push his friend’s hand away, just walked away from it to the Community Center’s loading doors, where his brother Dennis’s tricked-out hearse sat with the rear door open. Truth was, Stuart was soaking up every minute he had with his lifelong friend, uncertain how many were left.
He couldn’t resist a barb. “Maybe you can grope your way over to the freeway and stand around over there a bit, if you’re not going to help me with the gear.”
“Nah. You’d miss me, bro.”
Stuart looked back at DeShaun, who smiled as always, but with a hint of sadness. Stuart leaned into the hearse, grabbed the handle of his brother’s coffin-shaped guitar case and pulled it toward him. It was a much easier task now than the last time, some months back, thanks to a growth spurt during the band’s extended hiatus. “Maybe not.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t, what, miss me?”
“Maybe I won’t have to.”
“Don’t talk about it right now, dude.” DeShaun reached in for bassist Pedro’s case. As the teens lugged the instruments toward the center’s stage, the clean purr of an antique Indian motorcycle rose in the parking lot, bringing the goofy grin back to Stuart’s face
DeShaun burst out laughing.
“I can’t help it, man,” Stuart confessed. “Right now, everything is just so…”
“Perfect,” DeShaun finished. “That’s just your meds talking, sonny.”
“Change of plan, losers,” Pedro Fuentes called out as he leaped off the stage, where Dennis—aka Kenny Killmore, vocalist and lead guitarist of Ember Hollow’s resident horror punk band, The Chalk Outlines—and engineer/chemist Bernard Riesling, an odd pairing if ever there was one, intently discussed something undoubtedly so technical in nature that Stuart and DeShaun often commented they should get college credit just for showing up.
“Dennis says we’re setting up dead center of the joint,” Pedro said.
“Dead center, huh?” Stuart repeated. “Bet he really hit the emphasis on ‘dead,’ didn’t he?”
“Says he wants a ‘cavernous’ sound.”
Stuart set his big brother’s guitar case down against the wall, next to a spanking-new portable Yamaha keyboard, and glanced expectantly toward the open door. He should have known better.
“Ooooooh, Caaaaaandaaaace!” squealed DeShaun. “I neeeeed youuuu!”
Stuart punched him in the shoulder. “Shut it, ass brain.”
“Well, it’s not a big secret there, Stewie,” remarked Outlines drummer “Thrill Kill” Jill Hawkins as she sashayed in, her hair dyed for the first time in months, jet-black this time. She carried a helmet airbrushed with the band’s “voluptuous victim” Chalk Outline logo in one hand and a backpack covered in punk band patches in the other. Red drumsticks jutted through the zipper.
Carrying Jill’s spare helmet, fourteen-year-old Candace followed. “You neeeed me, Stewie?” She set down the helmet and clasped her hands, casting a dreamy smile at him. She fluttered her eyes, swooned and “fainted” dead away on the glossy hardwood floor.
Her big mastiff, Bravo, leaped down from the stage to greet her, tail slashing the air behind him as he made his way to lick and sniff his girl back to giggly life.
Stuart loved this, as he did Candace, as he did this moment, this event. His brother’s band back together—at least for rehearsals—after a painful breakup, his best friend, the girl he loved and her big ol’ dog, all in one place and not terrified for their very lives, for a change.
Dennis came to the microphone at stage front, took one look at Jill and made an expression of lust so intense it resembled pain. “Tell me something, lady. How’m I supposed to get any work done with a smokin’ hot number like you slinkin’ around?”
Jill turned her blackened lips into a sultry smile and gave herself a spank.
Dennis shook his head. “I might have to sit down a lot.”
Pedro and the teens rolled their eyes and groaned.
The troubled, yet loving couple, on advice from Dennis’s rehab counselors, had vowed to remain platonic, purely bandmates, for at least six months or until their new demo album was finished. The sexual tension between them was a tightly wound spring; pent-up energy they did their best to channel into their music.
But the flirtation and innuendo flowed nonstop, to the extreme annoyance of anyone in earshot.
“Thanks for helping, everybody,” Dennis said. “It’s been a rough road.”
Applause, a whistle from DeShaun. Bernard intently straightened cords behind the singer.
“I have to say how proud I am of you guys. All of you. We’ve all been through hell.”
Bravo trotted up to the foot of the stage and sat watching Dennis with ears perked, curious about the microphone and what his friend was doing with it.
“I wrote a lot of stuff while I was in rehab.” Dennis drew a folded sheaf of papers from his back pocket. “We’re going for a new sound. You’ll find out in a minute.”
Stuart smiled for his brother.
“This studio in Asheville will invest in us and produce this album—if this demo is any good. Pedro, Jill, we
