After a moment I realized where I'd heard them before: the strange words were shaped from the same nonsense syllables that Minerva always sang. But Abril Johnson had hidden them in her drawl, interweaving them with plain English.
I shook my head. I'd always thought that Minerva's lyrics were random, made-up, just leftover ravings from her crazy days. But if she shared them with someone else... were they another language?
My eyes opened, and I forced myself to look at the floor. Minerva's beast was moving underneath us. Its Loch Ness loops rose and fell among the feet of the unseeing crowd - but much, much bigger than in our little practice room, as thick as the giant cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been made huge by the stacks of amps and the focus of the spellbound throng, and I could see details in the creature now. There were segments along its length, like a sinuous earthworm testing the air.
"How's that for intense?" Pearl murmured, her empty champagne glass clutched tightly in both hands, echoing the singer's grip on the microphone.
"Very." Astor Michaels cocked his head. "But not as intense as you'll be, my dears. Not as authentic."
I shuddered a little, knowing what he meant. Minerva's songs were purer, unadulterated by English. Our spell would be stronger.
The beast coiled faster, and the floor of the nightclub rumbled under my feet, as if some droning bass note had found the resonant frequency of the room. I thought of how wineglasses could shatter from just the right pitch and wondered if a whole building might disintegrate when filled by some low and perfectly chosen note.
Pearl suddenly looked up, her eyes wide. "It's them!"
I followed her gaze and saw a pair of dark figures on the catwalks high above us, climbing gracefully among the rigging of stage lights and exhaust fans.
"Those people." Astor Michaels shook his head. "New fad: physical hacking, climbing around on roofs and air-shafts and down in the subways. Can't keep them out of the clubs anymore. They especially like the New Sound."
"Angels," Pearl said.
"Assholes," Astor Michaels corrected. "Takes away from the music."
The song moved into its B section, and I dropped my gaze back to the floor, catching the last flicker of the worm disappearing. The hallucinations faded as the music grew faster, the air returning to stillness, the lyrics to ordinary English.
"She lost it," I said.
"Yeah." Pearl frowned. "Kind of blew the momentum there."
Astor Michaels nodded. "The Army never gets that transition right, for some reason. It always feels like something is about to break through." He clicked his tongue against his teeth. "But it never does."
"Are you sure you want it to?" I asked. "What if it's...?"
Dangerous? I thought of saying. Monstrous?
"Not commercial?" Astor Michaels laughed. "Don't worry. I've got a feeling that whatever it is, it's going to be the Next Big Thing. That's why I signed you guys."
Pearl looked annoyed. "Because we sound like Morgan's Army?"
He shook his head, pulling her empty champagne glass from her hands. "No, you sound like yourselves. But someone has to take the New Sound to the next level. And I'm pretty sure it will be you."
He turned toward the bar to get her more champagne, and the band slowed into the A section again, as if trying to call back my visions. But they'd lost their grasp on the beast, and Abril Johnson's lyrics were just normal words now. I saw that she wasn't an insect at all; she was just imitating them, mimicking the madness she'd seen on the subway and in the streets.
I realized that Minerva was more real than her.
And I wondered: what if one day the beast under the floor turned real?
20. GRIEVOUS ANGELS
- MOZ-
The noise in my body never stopped. All night I lay awake, tissues struggling against one another, blood simmering. I could feel the beast fighting against everything I'd been, trying to remake me into something else, trying to replace me. Even my sweat raged, squeezing angrily from my pores, like a bar fight spilling out onto the street.
When I looked in the mirror, I didn't see my face. It wasn't just that I was thinner, cheekbones twisting at new angles, eyes widening - it was something deeper, pushing up from beneath my skin, remote and contemptuous of me.
As if someone else's bones were trying to emerge.
The crazy thing was, part of me was dying to know what I was changing into. Sometimes I just wanted to get it over with, to let go and slip across the edge. I'd almost said yes tonight when Pearl had asked me to the Morgan's Army gig, wondering what hundreds of bodies pressed in close would do to my hunger, already halfway to uncontrollable. I imagined their scents filling the air, the crowd noise mingling with the roar inside me...
But not yet - not without Min. In her arms, I still felt like myself. Besides, I had plenty more to learn down here, playing for quarters underground.
A woman was watching me, listening carefully, clutching her purse with both hands. She wasn't sure yet whether to open it and reach in, risking that extra tendril of connection with the strange boy playing guitar in the subway. But she couldn't pull herself away.
Union Square Station was almost empty at this hour, my music echoing around us. The red velvet of my guitar case was spattered with silver, and more coins lay on the concrete floor. All night, people had thrown their quarters from a distance and moved on. Even through dark glasses they could see the intensity leaking out of my eyes. They could smell my hunger.
But this woman stood there, spellbound.
I'd always wondered if charisma was something in your genes, like brown eyes or big feet. Or if you learned it from the sound of applause or cameras snapping. Or if famous people glowed because I'd seen so many airbrushed pictures of them, their beauty slammed into my brain, like advertising jingles with faces.
But it had turned out that charisma was a disease, an infection you got from kissing the right person, a beast that lived in your blood. Connecting with this woman, drawing her closer, I could feel how I'd been magnetized.
She took a step forward, fingers tensing on the purse clasp. It popped open.
I didn't dare stare back into her spellbound eyes. There were no police down here anymore, not late at night. No one to stop me if I lost it.
Her fingers fumbled inside the purse, eyes never leaving me. She stepped closer, and a five-dollar bill fluttered down to lie among the coins. A glance at her pleading expression told me that she was paying for escape.