Blood To Blood (17 page)

“Are you decent?” Sawyer said
from behind the door.

“Angel’s butt naked, so come
on in!” LaLa yelled.

The door opened, and in
walked Sawyer surrounded by his aroma. Overcome with emotion, I struggled to
look preoccupied with getting my wings re-attached and avoided his gaze. He
couldn’t remember what happened at the house, and his reaction before the
glamour was probably only a result of my new singing technique. There was no
way he felt about me the way I felt about him.

He caught my eye briefly in
the mirror and my temperature rose.
Angel, chill out!
I took a deep
breath and visualized polar ice caps.

After some general small talk
about the tracks we were working on, and talk of breaking our collective leg,
he walked over to where I stood. “How do you feel?” he asked. His tone and
demeanor seemed more intimate than before. Yet, if I told him how I really
felt, it would all be over.

“Like everything’s changed.”
Drat, I had to keep it light; there was no need to go all General Hospital on
him. But it was impossible to keep up a carefree pretense when all I wanted to
do was hear him sing again and drown in his arms.

His heartbeat sped up but he
didn’t say anything. He only looked at me hard and long before turning on his
heel and walking out.

LaLa took in my reaction.
“You okay, Angel?”

“Yes, doggone it, I'm okay.
When do we start?” There was dead silence for a few seconds before both LaLa
and Julietta broke out into gales of laughter. I realized how ridiculous my
response had been and laughed, too, in an effort to shake off the Sawyer
effect.

Another knock at the door.

It was the stage manager,
telling us it was time to go to the stage. We clasped hands and bowed our heads
while LaLa quickly mouthed words of inspiration and encouragement. As usual it
lifted my spirits, but this time as she spoke the name of Jesus, I couldn't
help but imagine him as a small, hunted boy attending Mom's Mahá.

As we were led to the stage,
every detail of everything around me came into hyper-focus, down to the rivets
in the concrete walls. I'd never been so alert. So ready to sing. So scared. It
felt as if my feet weren't touching the floor as we walked on.

They're not Angel.
Dad's got glamour action going on so
no one notices. I can’t wait until you get out on the stage! I always wondered
how it felt to be in front of an audience, and now I’ll get to feel it through
you.

Just consider me your
living porthole into Angel-ville.

We finally arrived at the
stage’s wings. There were a number of people there, but Charmain, the main act,
was nowhere to be seen. I imagined her in an elaborately appointed dressing
room, eating Godiva and sipping Cristal champagne with her entourage.

The stage manager pointed
toward the narrow passage leading to the stage. “Wait here until they intro you
and then you'll go though this way. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

“Oh my god,” Julietta said as
she peeked out at the audience. “There's a million people out there.”

“A little more than fourteen
thousand, to be exact” said a friendly-looking girl dressed in super-tight
jeans and combat boots. “It's sold out. I'm Joy. Bass player. Elio.”

Of course. Elio was one of
our favorite bands and we were almost as excited to be sharing a stage with
them as Charmain. They were funky, edgy, and despite being unpredictable in
their musical style, had managed to get a Top 20 hit that rocked the clubs,
too. We met the rest of the band members, and we all tamed our nerves by joking
and discussing everything except the reason why we were there.

Soon, we heard the applause
as our backup band took the stage. We got into position. Over the loudspeaker
we heard: “Ladies and Gentlemen. Introducing Kat Trio.”

With whispered wishes of
“break a leg,” everyone melted away from us as we fell into our choreographed,
slinky entrance onto the stage. After a four-beat pause where we stood frozen
on the stage in various poses, we broke into a sequence of Redd’s sexy, leggy
moves while the band played an extended intro.

With my new immortal eyes, I
easily saw the audience beyond the bright footlights that had always blinded me
in the past. So many people! And they were really clapping for us! On the beat
where we kicked our legs out, the three of us took our concentration away from
the choreography just long enough to flash smiles at one another. Knowing all
these people were even remotely interested in our work sent shivers down my
spine.

I saw Mom, Dad, and Cici to
my left, toward the front. I saw Sawyer sitting in the front row surrounded by
other members of the music industry insiders’ club, including Raj. Nina sat
with them, watching our every move, no doubt taking notes. A whole host of
local artists were in attendance; some, we'd met through the years, some we'd
beaten at competitions. I even saw classmates from school.

Beneath everything was the
steady clatter of mortal movements, breathing, activity, and heartbeats. I took
a deep breath and inhaled the epic aroma of mortality. Ahhhhhh...

And then I saw her.

She was sitting in the fourth
row, sixty-eight people in from the right. It was the lady my reflection had
morphed into. She was smiling at me, and it was the most frightening thing I'd
ever seen. It was less a smile than a baring of teeth. She may have been alone,
or she could have been sitting with a hundred other anomalies. I couldn't tell
because she alone had my complete attention.

She had no heartbeat.

Whoa, Angel. Calm down.
Dad's working harder so whatever just happened, let it go.

Cici could pick up on my
thoughts and feelings, but for some reason she couldn't see I was responding to
the Lady in the audience. The Lady who could somehow shield my perception of
her from Cici and Dad's telepathy. In the minute it took me to register all of
this, the intro choreography wound down and the musical cue came for us to
start singing. Despite my success with Mr. C.’s technique, I quickly offered up
a silent prayer to not kill anyone with my voice before we broke into the opening
line of “Get Out of Here:”

“Motorcycle, boat, jet/

Helicopter, corvette.

I just gotta get out of here.”

Some sections of the crowd
went wild. There were comments ranging from “Who the hell are they?” to “I knew
them back in the day, before they blew up” to “This is my favorite Kat Trio
song!” In my mortal life it took all of my concentration to execute a song just
right, but now I could do it while simultaneously taking in a ton of additional
information. Some of the comments from a lot of guys, and a few girls, were
focused on our costumes: what was underneath them and the body parts exposed or
not exposed. Gross. I made a mental note to block out this type of X-rated
chatter from the audience.

I watched the sound waves
bounce off the back walls of the Garden and ricochet to the front. The colors
glowed in the darkness beyond the stage, mingled with the lights emanating from
hundreds of cell phones, and then gently dissolved into the air. After a while,
I missed the mortal feeling of concentrating solely on the song and decided to
block out everything superfluous. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the
music.

And then there was no sound.
No music. No heartbeats. There was nothing at all. I opened my eyes. The band
seemed frozen. Julietta, LaLa, the audience, even Mom and Dad. Nobody moved.

“Mom?” I reached toward her,
but she seemed frozen. My voice sounded as if I were in a weird echo chamber.
“Dad?” Same response.
Cici!
I listened. Nothing.

What was going on? Why was I
the only one capable of moving or, apparently, thinking? Then it occurred to
me. I did this. Dad said it took a year for abilities to solidify, and here was
an ability I didn't even know I possessed.

Somehow, in my desire to
fully connect with the music, I had
un-connected
everybody from the flow
of time.

T
he entire audience, and everyone I loved,
was frozen in time and I wasn't sure how I did it. Even worse, I didn’t know
how to get things back to normal.

Mom, Dad, and Cici, frozen
along with everyone else, weren't able to help me out of this one. How could I
undo something I didn't even know how I did in the first place?

“If you get any higher off
the stage, you'll be flying.” The Lady, immune to what was happening, calmly
surveyed the scene. “This is your doing,” she continued. “You possess power you
are not even aware of.” She laughed then. Hysterically. As if she were sitting
front row at a comedy club.

I wanted to tell her to stop
laughing and shut up, but my sense of self-preservation kept my own mouth
closed. I didn't even know
what
she was. All I knew was she had no
heartbeat, yet somehow lived. She was now an individual, separate from me and
immune to my influence, and seemingly immune to my family’s powers. “How do I
know you're not responsible for this?”

“It's all you, Angel.”

“What are you?”

“A part of you.”

She smiled again. I wanted to
punch her teeth down her throat.

“You've got a terrible
temper. You're very close to sending this place up in flames.” She glanced
suggestively at my family.

“Leave them alone.” My hands
clenched painfully as I stared at her with hot, angry eyes.

“When the Council finds out
about this interesting power you have, it'll get downright dangerous for you.
They might want to kill you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“To put it in a cliché human
way, that's a fact.” It didn't escape my attention that she implied she was not
human. Turning her face away from me slowly, she pointed to three individuals
scattered about the room. They, too, were frozen. Were they Council members?
The Lady nodded as if she heard my thought. “A newborn onstage before all these
mortals. Of course they came to see firsthand. I think I will help them figure
it out.”

She reached her hands out to
the three Council members, and in the blink of an eye, performed a movement
that unfroze them and them alone. In a flash, she returned to her seat in the
audience and sat completely still before any of them saw her. I gasped at her audacity.

Like gophers in a strange
landscape, the Council members scrutinized the Garden, then each other and
then, finally, me. I recognized one of them; Charleston, the black-eyed man
from Mom’s office. I could only guess what they were thinking. They gawked at
Mom and then back at me in astonishment. I had to get things back to normal. I
didn't know how to, but I had to figure out how to fix it. Fast.

I supposed the first move was
to calm down. I took a few deep breaths and, afterward, noticed air particles
starting to move, but still not enough to get things back to normal. I
concentrated on the air particles, willed them back into circulation.
Concentrating on the fourteen thousand plus people in the room, mortal and
immortal, I willed them to move, to breathe, to become animated once more. And
they did. As if they'd never stopped. They didn't even know what had happened.
I picked up the exact note that emanated from my mouth the moment before
everything went screwy.

The Council Members looked
around in amazement. I shut my mind down. I'd tell Cici later, but for now I
had to keep this to myself until I understood what happened. And, I would have
to tell Mom. For her to hear it from the Council first would be disastrous. Her
commitment to the Council was an ancient bond that seemed to surpass even her
commitment to me. How could she defend me when I didn't even know what I was
capable of doing?

As we performed the closing
chorus, I heard the roar of the crowd, but I couldn't enjoy the appreciation.
The Lady flashed that eerie smile and clapped her hands with an exaggerated
cadence. I realized she'd set me up. My vocal tones of love quickly turned to
tones of outrage. I extended the vengeful notes into an impromptu solo. The
dark beyond the footlights turned bloody red black, and the roar of the crowd
turned to frenzied screams. Scuffles and yelling broke out in various areas
around the Garden. Angry exchanges mixed with the dull sounds of fists pounding
on flesh. I sensed Jules and LaLa’s confusion. The band desperately tried to
cover this unrehearsed extension of the song even as their playing grew more
aggressive and driving.

The Garden and our music had
quickly descended to the brink of chaos in response to the angry notes coming
from my mouth. And, in the midst of it all, the Lady sat. She glanced pointedly
at Mom who stared at me with an eerie gaze. Her face seemed carved from stone,
and her eyes were unreadable. A chill went up my spine.

Cici confirmed what I’d
suspected.
Mom’s considering shutting you down by taking molecules out of
your brain. The way she did Tunde.

I refused to let the Lady
succeed in destroying my family. I willed myself to feel the calming energy
emanating from Cici and Dad as they worked to bring my anger level down. I
allowed myself to relax back into the loving space Mr. C. instilled in me and
ended the song on a note of bliss. The applause was deafening and continued
long after we'd left the stage.