Page 8 of Bewitched By the Phantom
Some songs were written for you long before you knew the words.
It’s cryptic. It’s exactly the kind of poetic vagueness I used to love. Now, it only feels like a veiled warning, and somehow it only serves to piss me off more.
You’re a fucking asshole, too, I reply and slam my laptop closed.
I go to bed angry, my chest tight with the anxiety I feel. If I’m off my game when the competition begins, we’re fucked. This is the big leagues. If I fail, I let down the girls, and I refuse for us to have worked so hard only for me to fuck it up. Still, my tension doesn’t let up, and I fall asleep with my hands clenched tight into fists.
When the dream begins, it’s strange. I’m no stranger to dreaming, to feeling like I’m somewhere else, but tonight, I dream in sound rather than only visions. It starts like a memory. I’m a little girl, holding my hairbrush in a bedroom I barely remember and singing into it with all my heart. But in the mirror, I dance in front of an older version of myself, reflected, full stage makeup on my face, as I sing a duet with a man in gold.
The dream shifts. The bedroom I’d been standing in warps into a ballroom made of amplifiers and . . . are those bones? The golden-masked asshole from the Cadaver Cantata strides from the shadows, his bright blue eyes haunting even in the light of the chandeliers above us. He takes my hand, pulling it up to his mouth to kiss the back of it, his eyes flickering with what I can only describe as hunger.
“Sing with me, angel” he whispers as he looks over the back of my hand up at me, “I’ll never leave you.”
The dream ends with a snap and I shoot out of the small, twin-sized bed with a start. My heart is racing, my head spinning, but the most important part? There’s a melody on my lips, just waiting to be let out.
I scramble out of bed and reach for the notebook on the small bedside table, my fingers frantically shoving the cap of the pen off. I hum the tune, desperate to get it down before it disappears. It’s perfect. It’s mine. And yet I know I’ve never written something like this before.
The door kicks open and Claudia walks in, rubbing her eyes. “Why are you singing right now so loudly?” she growls. “The walls are paper thin and it’s three in the morning.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. “I had to get this down.” And then I hum the tune again.
Claudia blinks. “Whoa. That’s good. Is that our next track?”
I pause, part of me wanting to tell her no and keep this to myself, but we’re a band. Any song I write, it’s all of ours. Still, itfeels almost wrong to smile up at her and nod. Like I’ve told her a secret I didn’t want to tell.
Like I opened the doors to my dreams.
Chapter
Six
The next morning, we’re met with rumors flying and everyone speaking in hushed whispers around us. At first, it feels like they’re whisperingaboutus, and my anxiety gets the better of me. Claudia, though, is never one to pad feelings.
“What’s going on?” she asks the nearest woman, one of the members from The Medusa Complex.
“You didn’t hear?” the woman asks. “One of the bands left last night, and they brought in another to take their place. Some new alt-rock band named Angels Bleed Mercury.”
I frown. “The band just dropped?”
“Well . . . that’s what everyone is assuming,” the woman continues. “Really, it’s more like they disappeared. No one knows what happened to them.”
“You’re kidding me,” Claudia groans. “If it wasn’t so weird, I’d be doing my best to ignore it.”
“Tell me ‘bout it,” the woman laughs. “You four kill it in your rehearsal today.”
“Same to you,” I shoot back before grabbing Claudia and dragging her away. “That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s fucking weird,” Claudia agrees. “But we can’t let it throw us off our game. We need more good rehearsals than we do bad, and after yesterday, we really need a good one. Understand?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, Mother.”
“Don’t call me ‘mother,’” Claudia growls. “Those bitches always leave.”
And then she leaves me there with that tidbit that I somehow never knew about her. Her mother left her? How have we been a band for so long and I still don’t know anything about her. I shake my head and grab an apple from the buffet before heading to the makeshift stage for rehearsal. We’re not up for at least four hours, but I figure I can waste time watching the first few bands during their warm ups.
That’s where I am, thirty minutes later, my feet kicked up on a chair as I listen to one of the bands argue over which note sounds better. It’s as I’m standing to go find more food, that I run into someone I haven’t seen at the competition before.
But that doesn’t mean he’s a stranger.
