Page 9 of Follow the Rhythm (Fairview City Omegaverse #2)

“S top,” Ellis yelled, cutting off the chord he was playing abruptly and glaring at Grace. I suppressed a groan. “You’ve added in weird syncopation there.”

Grace took a deep breath. “It’s not weird. It fits perfectly with the bassline. Kieran and I worked it out yesterday, which you would know if you’d been here .”

It was the fifth interruption by Ellis to call out Grace’s playing. Tempers were fraying.

“Are you not capable of playing the songs as they’re written?” Ellis growled from between clenched teeth.

“You mean this?” Grace reached behind her for the worn-out stack of papers I recognized as Michael’s old tabs, and slammed them down on her snare.

I tried not to wince. I knew they were a fucking mess of Michael’s crossed-out ideas and failed experiments.

Grace had done her best. “Why don’t you come over and tell me exactly where I’m fucking up? ”

“Gladly,” Ellis snarled.

“Stop,” I said, stepping between them. “Take a breath, both of you.”

Grace opened her mouth to retort, then caught my eye. “I’m going to get some air.”

I waited until she stormed out of the rehearsal space - a stage in a warehouse near the label office - before turning on him. He was pacing, as always.

“What the fuck is your problem, mate?” I asked.

“Her! She’s a fucking amateur, botching all the songs.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“She’s changing things,” he said petulantly.

“She’s not a robot. You can’t expect her to play the songs just like him.”

Ellis glared at me. “They’re his songs. Our songs.”

“Exactly. Which is why I didn’t even want to do this whole tour. But now that we’re here, you can’t take your shit out on her,” I said.

The tour already felt like purgatory, and it hadn’t even started. When we’d signed the four-album deal with Echelon, it had seemed like a no-brainer. Johnny had certainly made it seem that way.

But no one is ever really prepared for tragedy, and capitalism only waits so long before demanding more.

And now, here we were, touring one last time to “fulfill our contractual obligations” and keep Echelon from releasing the last album. I’d wanted to buy out the option instead, but I couldn’t afford it without Ellis’s help, and he was all too willing to dance to Karen Carlson’s tune.

“It doesn’t bother you? At all?” He stopped pacing for a moment to stare at me with those unsettling eyes. In happier times, I used to take the piss out of him for looking more like a husky than a human.

“It’s better if she plays them different. She’s got her own style. She’s good,” I said.

Ellis sighed and started pacing again. “This is harder than I thought it was going to be.”

I nodded. Being in a rehearsal space without Michael was strange and lonely. I kept expecting him to walk in and apologize for being late. I shoved that feeling down before the grief could surface.

“Give the woman a chance,” I said.

Ellis made a noncommittal noise that I knew meant he’d behave himself at least for a little while. I went to find Grace.

She was on the street outside, smoking a cigarette like it had done her a personal wrong, and texting furiously.

“How the hell do you work with that guy?” she demanded when she saw me.

“He hasn’t always been such a twat.”

Grace scoffed. “I don’t even smoke anymore. It’s been like 5 years. I had to bum one off a tech.” She flicked ash onto the sidewalk.

“Come back inside. He’ll be less of a dickhead now, and we can get some work done.”

Grace grunted, ground the stub of her cigarette out on the bottom of her boot, and followed me back inside.

The rest of the rehearsal wasn’t smooth, but Ellis only yelled once, and Grace just rolled her eyes in response. It reminded me of her friend Jess, the prickly Omega she’d brought backstage.

I clenched my hands around the neck of my bass when I thought of her and quickly settled it in its case.

I’d thought she was beautiful as soon as she stepped into the greenroom.

But when I caught a whiff of her scent, I had to fight the racing pulse of my heart that wanted me to pick her up and carry her off like a caveman.

The car had smelled of her when the driver returned to pick me up from the venue.

And she’d made me laugh, or as close as I got to it these days.

The one complication was that mark on her neck. It had looked a lot like a bite, and if she was spoken for, I didn’t want to get involved.

In the past, I would’ve run as far away as possible from an Omega whose scent was that tempting. A bit of fun was all well and good, but only when the stakes were low. I could already tell that anything with Jess would be intense.

I wondered if maybe I just needed to release some tension. It had been a while. Perhaps any Omega’s scent was enticing after a year of celibacy. But somehow I didn’t think so.

I caught up with Grace as she was leaving the studio. “Nice job today.”

“Thanks,” Grace said, beaming. “And thanks for whatever you said to him; he was almost bearable.”

“Are you heading to the label for this meeting?”

“Yep! I’m excited to be a part of the tour planning. It’s so cool to see how much work goes into it. My band has done some decent-sized tours, but nothing on this level,” Grace said.

Her band, The Valkyries, was an all-female punk group.

When the label had pitched her as a possible touring drummer, I’d flown out to see one of their shows and left very impressed.

If we had to do the tour, we at least needed to do Michael justice on the drums. They had different styles, but Grace had a similar frenetic energy that I appreciated.

The rehearsal space was only about ten blocks from the label office, so we walked.

Ellis didn’t have that luxury and had already disappeared in a black town car, but not after being caught by a few paps waiting outside the back door.

I didn’t know how they always found him; I was just glad they weren’t as interested in me.

I tried to come up with a good segue and failed, so I ended up just saying, “Your friend Jess. Does she have a partner?”

Grace smirked. “I knew you had a thing for her!”

I shrugged. There was no point denying it. “I’d like to get to know her.”

Grace bounced on her toes and said, “I think you’ll be able to do that.” Then refused to say anything else.

The meeting at the label was with Ursula to go over creative concepts. I was interested to see what she’d come up with; I respected the hell out of her work.

Ellis had beaten us to the office and was brooding in the smaller conference room with his girlfriend, Bea. I sighed. Bea was volatile at the best of times, but lately she and Ellis had been more turbulent than usual.

“Do you know how long this is supposed to take? We’re meant to be on a yacht in 45 minutes for a paid appearance,” she asked as Grace and I entered the room. Her accent was so posh it could cut glass. Ellis was looking out the window, disregarding everyone else in the room.

“No idea. But you can leave whenever you like,” I said.

“I have to be here to approve the creative concepts. I’m Ellis’s brand consultant, remember?”

I didn’t bother replying.

“Hi, I’m Grace. We didn’t get a chance to meet before,” Grace said, extending a hand out for Bea to shake.

“A pleasure,” Bea simpered. She didn’t return the handshake.

Grace mouthed, “Okay, then,” and slumped in the seat across from me.

Ursula arrived carrying a laptop. To my surprise, Jess trailed behind her, a stack of papers in her arms. My stomach dropped as if I’d stepped off a cliff, but I thought I held myself together well. It felt like I’d manifested her appearance by brooding about her all morning.

She was wearing descenter again, but I could still detect her tart lime and ginger scent underneath it. She met my eyes, looking defiant, and I nodded in greeting. Jess settled in the seat next to Grace.

“Told you you’d get to know her,” Grace whispered to me, smiling smugly, and tugged affectionately on Jess’s long, dark braid.

Jess glared at her and hissed, “Be professional.” She was wearing a high-neck shirt, so I couldn’t see any bite marks.

“I’m not one for small talk,” Ursula said abruptly. “Here are the concepts I’ve been working on.”

She plugged in her laptop and started flipping through a prepared deck. “I think we keep the overall stage design pretty simple. No moving parts. But we lean into the dark fantasy theme of the last album with lighting, video, and a few larger set pieces.”

Into the Garden was a concept album about a man spiraling deeper and deeper into madness. In hindsight, I should’ve asked more questions about some of Michael’s lyrics.

I looked over at Jess. She was rapt, completely absorbed in Ursula’s explanation of the set pieces she wanted to build, including a massive tree that would be rolled out in the middle of the set for several songs.

Charlie, the tour manager, arrived, a bit out of breath. “Sorry, Urs,” he said, grinning. “Hope I didn’t miss anything too important.”

When he looked towards Jess, his whole body stiffened, and her eyes grew impossibly wider. Charlie opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. Jess was radiating tension. He nodded at her and then sank into the seat next to me.

“Don’t make this a habit,” Ursula snapped at him.

“What? Oh yeah, sorry,” Charlie said, sounding a little dazed.

Grace met my eyes and raised her eyebrows. “What was that?” she mouthed. I furrowed my brow and shook my head slightly.

“As I was saying, Jess here has some great illustrations. I think we could adapt them for video,” Ursula said, pulling up a slide of art prints.

Each was a woman with an animalistic aspect: a woman with antlers rising from beneath her hair, one with ram’s horns curling from her forehead, one with massive wings like an owl, and a woman with the ears and nose of a rabbit.

They were brilliant, but also desperately sad somehow. I flicked my eyes to Jess again.

“Oh my god,” Bea said, wrinkling her nose. “Those are awful. You can't seriously be thinking of using them.”

Ellis shushed her, and she glared at him. But he was staring from Jess to the illustrations on the screen with a look almost as dazed as Charlie’s. Jess had angled herself completely away from him and was refusing to look at anyone except Ursula.

“Jess?” he asked, sounding choked. “Is that you?”