Page 23 of Bewitched By the Phantom
“We’re singing that. Good job, you two.” She pats me on the head. “Next time, just tell me you’re crushing on our enemy. Might make this easier.”
“I’m not,” I lie, but her eyes glitter so I know she catches it.
Fuck.
Everyone starts chatting, discussing what other instruments to add into the harmony. But Erik just looks at me, his eyes bright.
“You harmonize like someone I used to love,” he whispers, his shoulder brushing against mine.
“Used to?” I ask, staring at him.
He smiles gently. “Perhaps.”
I don’t sleep again that night for fear I’ll witness another moment not from my lifetime.
Chapter
Fifteen
Apparently, the collaboration challenge isn’t so much a round as much as it’s supposed to just show off what kinds of things we can do to the audience watching around the world. NYX keeps changing the rules as we go and I’m not sure I enjoy their reasoning. When someone had asked about it, they’d merely said that in the music industry, things change on a dime, and while sure, that can be true, a competition is nothing if it doesn’t have rules. Changing them mid-battle doesn’t make sense.
And now, this collaboration round doesn’t even have high stakes attached to it. We won’t be eliminated if we do badly, but maybe we’ll get voted off when the real round two happens. Or maybe they’ll change the rules again and we’ll get whittled down anyways. Despite that threat hanging over us, the constantly changing rules are starting to make me a little less excited about winning. If it’s this stressful now, then how bad will it be if we were signed by this company?
Raoul has been as aloof as Erik has been attentive since we’d sung the duet. My childhood friend, who’d previously sought me out to reminisce about old times, is suddenly avoiding me. Every room I walk into, he leaves. Every time I try to talk to him,he’s curt and ends the conversation. I don’t really understand him being upset with me. We haven’t seen each other in years and he’s never really made a pass at me since we’ve been here. The more he plays this game, the more annoyed I get until I stop trying to talk to him altogether. If he wants to be a jealous asshole despite having no right to be, then fuck him. I don’t have time for that.
Erik, on the other hand, is almost always floating around somewhere. Sometimes, he’s just present in the room, him and his band mates watching us rehearse. Sometimes he’s there beside me when I never heard him approach. The man’s a literal ghost. It feels a little bit like he’s stalking me, but . . . weirdly, I’m getting used to it. Claudia hasn’t shut up about our moment during our practice. I can’t imagine how she’d react if she knew I’d kissed him in his room.
Or if she knew how much I wanted to do it again.
For fuck’s sake, I don’t even know what he really looks like. He never takes that damn mask off.
Today, we’re going to be performing our collaborations. I’m going to be playing my guitar for this one. We’d all taken the strange haunting song that Erik and I had sung and turned it into a rock ballad worthy of winning. I can’t foresee anyone topping what we’re about to pull off, but maybe I’m wrong. I’d heard a snippet of Angels Bleed Mercury’s collab and it hadn’t sounded nearly as polished. Here’s to hoping we stand out in the end.
We’re about an hour out from the performance before things start getting weird. Like, weirder than usual. And it starts with Medusa Rising rushing over to us.
“Have you guys seen Trixie?” she asks.
When I stare at her blankly, she adds, “Tall, blue-haired woman with permanent resting bitch face? Spider tattoo on her neck?”
“Oh! No, we haven’t seen her since yesterday,” I reply, frowning. “Why?”
“She’s missing,” she grunts, running a hand through her hair. “She was with us this morning, said she was gonna go smoke, and never came back.”
“Oh, shit,” Claudia says. “You looked everywhere?”
“Of course, I did,” the woman spits, clearly panicked. “I can’t find her. And no one has seen her.”
“It’s okay. We can help you look,” I offer, gesturing for everyone to get up. “If everyone looks, we’ll find her faster.”
But we don’t find her. Thirty minutes later, after every band had joined in on the search and we’d traversed every part of the power plant from top to bottom, there’s no sign of Trixie anywhere. Whispers start to circulate and a hushed fear spreads over everyone as we all gather back in the main performance area.
“I know everyone is spooked,” Ted begins. “But we’re on air in thirty minutes. We’re gonna have to pause our search efforts. Besides, maybe Trixie just left.”
“She wouldn’t do that!” her band mate hisses. “She cares about this competition more than anybody. Hell, she’s the one that brought our band together.”
“Regardless, people do weird things under stress,” Ted reiterates. “And we can’t do anything it about it right now.”
Which, to me, seems like a terrible position to take. Someone is missing. It’s not even the first time someone had gone missing, but no one seems to remember the band I do that had been here before. And now that there are only eight of us here from the original sixteen, there are even less people to remember. At least this time, everyone seems to know what’s going on. I’d rather us all be panicked than feel insane alone.
