Sugar Skulls Read Free Page A

thumping bass lines. She just might bring Hellcat Maggie’s down around us.
    Now Her eyes won’t leave mine. She’s no longer the eye of the storm; She’s the storm itself, pounding the crowd and sweeping them along with Her.
    V
    I’m pushing it. I can feel the stress building in the new thrum-collectors like a force field against my bare arms, my throat, my lips. It’s too much for this crowd, too, their fresh nanotech already blitzed out and buzzing. I should dial it back. Get backstage. Take a handful of pills. Chill the fuck out.
    It’s been a year since the last blowout, the last blackout. Three hundred and sixty-five days of uninterrupted consciousness, flushed down the toilet for the sake of some asshole staring at me from the bar.
    I twist the microphone out of the stand and launch into something new. To hell with the set list. To hell with Corporate-approved garbage. I find words that have been bouncing around in my head for so long that I can spit them out now, perfect and round. “It’s all just screams and whispers, just prettied-up and dyed. Your fuck-façade all faded, a tarnished future bride . . .”
    Somewhere behind me, Jax loses her shit.
    “What the hell are you doing?” she shouts over the thumping rhythm that’s our artificial heartbeat. “Break time! Sasha’s gonna wet ’em, and I need a hit of silvertip!”
    Despite the protest, she turns up every dial and pushes up every slide, fingers moving over the touchscreens with brutal efficiency. Sasha’s already pulling in chants from sixteenth-century monasteries and screams recorded in hospital waiting rooms. I can feel the fluid in my inner ears pulsing.
    I’m going to get a reaction out of our silent onlooker, even if I fall headfirst into a blackout.
    So I let him have it, all the words and the anger and betrayal and despair I hold in my hummingbird heart. The rest of the crowd moans and sways, crashing into each other, molecules colliding. Hellcat Maggie shouts something at Sasha, then tries the headset, but all I get from my earpiece is crackling feedback that drives me hard into the next verse.
    I lock eyes with the stranger, vomiting up all my dark, dirty guts for him to see. Below me, the flotsam holds itself upright. If these people were pleasantly giddy before, now they’re stumbling drunk. A few fall and are dragged to the side by security. A couple kisses so hard that blood trickles from the corners of their mouths. A threesome in the back crashes into an alcove, tearing the velvet curtains from their brass rod.
    I can’t stop myself now. I close out the set with a crescendo that drives everyone and everything off a cliff and into glorious sonic freefall.

CHAPTER TWO
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    M
    Her spell ends, still echoing in every fiber of my being, and its absence hits the crowd like a shock wave. Spotlights burst, punctuated by pop-pop-pops as hot glass shards cut through lighting gels and shower the band. A heavy crash follows as one of the thrum-collectors blows out and its emitter plate shatters against the floor.
    People in the pit are frothing at the mouth, manic and terrified and roaring like beasts. It’s like two hundred simultaneous nervous breakdowns or the worst trip in pharmaceutical history. This would be brutal enough for recruits with a few months under their belt; for the newbies, it must be damn near agony. I retreat in self-preservation and start working my way toward the double doors. I’ve never seen the hive like this.
    The lights go out, plunging us into darkness. I can hear the chaos all around me.
    Definitely not my scene.
    V
    With howls and screams, they rush the stage, shoving at the barricade and the security detail, tossing the hired muscle aside like paper dolls in their gleeful rage. With my own berserker haze fading, I rock back, shell-shocked. When I wipe the sweat from my eyes, my hand comes away smeared with black.
    “What was that ?” Jax grabs me by the arm and hauls me backstage.
    “Nothing. Just