Super: Underground: Book 2 in the Super: Series (26 page)

Riss shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me at all,” she responded. “People just like to hear you sing.”

“Hey,” Lex said as she fixed Riss with a glare, “it’s all of us out there making the music. I’m just one part of it. Well, I guess two, if you count the keyboards.”

Nodding, Riss conceded the point as she turned her head, smiling, and continued working on the laptop.

The group headed south first in an attempt to appreciate the warmth there in the spring before the summer rolled around. They played at a few of the same venues as the previous tour, but due to the number of their original places that had been overcrowded or sold out, Casey had decided to book a few bigger places this time around. Lex felt it when they all arrived, nervous as they seemed at first, but somehow she managed to walk in, turn around, and smile at all of her friends.

“The sound is going to be really great in here tonight,” she said, and she could almost feel it as everyone relaxed and started to smile or laugh in return. It had been a great show that night.

As the tour progressed, on nights when they were staying in cheaper motels Kate and Jack had started getting a room together. No one said anything about it, but Lex began feeling bored since she’d been hanging out with Kate when they got back from shows and talking for a while until they could get to sleep. Riss and Victor both always had things they were working on, so what Lex often did on nights while she was alone was see if she could get into the pool, if the place they were staying had one, and then stop by to see if Rachel and Sarah wanted to go for a swim with her. About half the time they would, and the three of them would float, looking up at the moon and chatting, until they felt tired enough to attempt to sleep.

Everything just seemed to go more smoothly, and Lex began to feel she wasn’t only connecting with the audience. It seemed that now when the four members of Alexander’s Army got up onto the stage to play, they worked almost like one person. The music just seemed to flow, and the crowds seemed to love it. They had to order more CDs in the middle of the tour because they’d been selling so many, and the venues they played at continued being pretty packed and sold out fairly often.

They had actually even started to get some press attention, mostly from the local papers in some of the towns they’d pass through. Lex couldn’t help but laugh as she read some of the articles and saw their new names.

“Robert Louis Stevenson, huh?” she asked late one morning as she sat across from Lou and read the latest article that had been written about them.

He smiled quietly in response. “Treasure Island was my favorite book as a kid. So, how about you, Jane Mansfield?”

Lex rolled her eyes. “Obviously, I should have researched the name further before I chose it. I guess I have the white hair down, though. Wasn’t she supposed to have been a platinum blonde?”

She laughed then and continued reading the story, briefly admiring the photo that they’d taken of the four of them under some flowering trees. It had been windy that day, and at the moment the picture had been snapped they were being showered with countless tiny flower petals.

One place flowed into the next as all of them enjoyed the tour and continued to work hard to give good performances. The change started to slide in gradually, almost unnoticed. As they began heading north and got past San Francisco, Lex had a longer dream about being sought by the reddish eyes. She did her best to forget about it the next morning, telling herself that it was probably nothing, that she should just continue enjoying the tour.

It felt easy to do, at first. Every new town that they came to seemed to have its own charm, its interesting people and areas. The group had also made sure that they had a few days off now and again during all of their performances so that they didn’t get too burned out. It seemed to be working, because the members of all three bands still agreed that they were giving some of the best performances of their lives.

Their days off allowed them to explore some of the places they came to stay. They all loved the rugged coastlines they encountered as they went farther north, and Casey especially loved the mountains. Lex admired that her friend never seemed to get tired of looking at the hills they would pass while on the road and always managed to arrange a hiking expedition to a local park for anyone interested whenever they had a couple of days off.

They’d been in Oregon a few days when Casey called one of her trips together. They hadn’t had any luck enticing any of the members of the other bands to go with them, so it was just the six of them. After following a short trail to an overlook, they stopped for a picnic lunch and gradually fell into talk about the future.

“Lou and I have been discussing it,” Casey said as she looked at the assembled group, “and we both agree that we like it here, everywhere from San Francisco north. It’s beautiful and the people here seem like folks I wouldn’t mind living around.”

Lou nodded to back her up as he finished his mouthful of sandwich, and then Kate spoke up. “I really like it up here, too. I want to see the rest of Oregon and Washington, though. I’ve heard really good things about both, and I want to see what the towns and cities are like.”

Victor nodded as well. “I’d like to see what the rest of the North holds for us, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. I think if we went any farther south it would just be too hot.”

Riss shot a curious look at Lex before she said anything. “I think you’ve all got good points, and I have to admit I like it here better than Phoenix because it’s too dry for me there. What do you think, Lex?”

Lex couldn’t manage to look at any of them because her dream started to loom large in her mind. “It’s so beautiful here that it would be hard not to love. How about if everyone thinks about it as we finish the tour and makes mental notes on all their favorite places? Then, once we get back home we can start voting and making some plans?”

Everyone seemed to agree and went back to eating lunch. Lex noticed Riss frowning out of the corner of her eye and sighed. At one point when the group was heading back down the trail and Riss and Lex fell slightly behind the others, Riss confronted Lex.

“That was your chance to speak up, you know,” she said, shooting a hard look at her friend.

Lex could feel her shoulders droop. “I know, Riss, I know. It’s just…hell, what would I say? I’ve had some bad dreams? I have more the farther north we come? It probably doesn’t mean anything,” Lex finished, shaking her head as if trying to drive the idea away.

Riss shook her head in return. “You don’t know it’s nothing,” she responded with a dark look.

Miserably, Lex nodded in response, unable to say anything more. Riss was the only one awake when she had her nightmares, and was often the one to calm her down enough to sleep again. Lex felt as if she would be throwing an alarm out to the group for nothing, though, if her fears proved to be only that, so she kept silent.

That evening, however, the nature of the dream changed yet again.

The group of them walked down a quiet city street to their van. Lex could see everyone dressed in the clothes they usually wore on stage, and they all talked with animation about something. Suddenly, a chill ran through Lex and she looked around, but nothing was there except them. They reached the mouth of an alley a moment later, however, and Lex drew back in horror as she saw the reddish-brown eyes hanging in the darkness of the alley. When she turned, seemingly in slow motion, back to the rest of the group to warn them, she woke up.

Lex sat bolt upright in bed, trying to catch her breath. She shut her eyes once to try to blink away the final vision, and then spotted Riss in a chair nearby in the room they shared, laptop open. In the small circle of light that the tiny lamp shed, Lex could clearly read Riss’ watchful, knowing expression.

She opted for changing the subject. “Why is it that you’re always awake late?” Lex murmured as she got out of bed and pulled a chair over to sit next to her friend.

Riss shrugged. “This is my favorite time of day. I always feel more alive when it’s dark; I feel tired when the sun comes up.” She paused for a moment to bring her attention from her computer screen to Lex. “So, same nightmare again?”

Lex rubbed her eyes and shook her head in agreement, figuring there was no reason not to tell her friend. “No, it changed. I dreamed that we’d left a show, and walking to the van I got a bad feeling. A minute later we walked by this alley and there those weird eyes were. I tried to warn everyone, but then the dream ended.”

Shaking her head, Riss sighed. “Are you really sure you don’t want to tell anyone else about this? We don’t know all of the effects the drugs might have had on you. Maybe the dreams mean something.”

Lex snorted a laugh, but in the back of her mind she was thinking about seeing herself through a curtain of water the way she appeared now. “It’s probably nothing, just worry because everything’s going so well.”

“You’re really stubborn, you know that?” Riss asked as she shook her head again and went back to typing. “I know it probably won’t make you feel any better, because the team who’s after us is in the general area, but I’m still showing that they don’t seem to have any active leads on us.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Lex said, leaning her head back in the chair and resting it on the back. She awoke some time later, hearing Riss getting ready for bed, and she crawled back under the covers, dreamless for the rest of the night.

The farther north they got, however, the more frequent the dreams became. By the time they’d reached the Seattle area and only had a few tour dates left, Lex had been having the dream at least once a night. She tried to be quiet and not wake anyone else, but she had enough disturbed sleep that she’d become irritable. Lex tried to bite her tongue a lot because of it and fade into the background, but she knew the others had noticed.

Casey had put it down to Lex being tired of the tour. “Don’t worry,” the taller woman had said to her friend at one point, “not too much longer now and we’ll be headed home.”

Lex had nodded and smiled quietly, still reluctant to tell Casey the real problem. She kept her fingers crossed that they’d just finish the tour in the next few days and return home with everything exactly the same. Unfortunately, on the first date they were supposed to play in Seattle proper, Lex woke after little sleep to find Kate in the next bed, a t-shirt over her head. Victor stood nearby watching her, a look of concern on his face.

“She said that she had a headache and was having trouble focusing her eye,” he told Lex when she asked.

Lex returned his look of concern as she watched her friend for a few minutes, then gestured Victor over to the little kitchen area where Lex poured some coffee for him and started tea for herself. “Let’s let her sleep a while longer,” Lex said in a low tone. “Hopefully she’ll feel better when she wakes up.”

Kate did awake a while later, but she seemed out of sorts even when she emerged after her shower. “Do you need any headache medicine?” Lex asked, then produced it from her purse when Kate nodded.

The group made it to the venue on time and everything went smoothly once they arrived. The club seemed sizable, like it would hold a couple hundred people on the main and balcony levels. People had already started to arrive as the bands did, and when Jacob’s Hammer went on an hour later, the place seemed packed.

Lex thought the three members of the band sounded great that night, despite the air of slight irritability that had been hanging over the larger group due to Kate and Lex’s moods. Lex felt everyone start to relax as they watched from backstage, Kate paying special attention to the bass player and part-time singer. Lex found herself watching her friend as the band started up one of the songs that she knew Jack sang on.

Changing tides under endless waves

I was watching the mindless days roll by

Ever fine, ever blue

The lightening air around always brings me thoughts of you

Wavering in the fire of ages

Singing sounds are born in timid sky

In time, in mind

The morning trains will ever bring me sight of your face

Lex smiled as she saw Kate seem to completely relax for the first time that day, and she tried to follow suit, smirking as she caught Riss shooting her a knowing look over the top of her computer screen.

The crowd cheered Jacob’s Hammer’s performance for a while once they’d finished their last song, and Lou helped them clear their gear off the stage, then started carrying Alexander’s Army’s gear onstage. Once they set everything up and Victor had walked them through the sound check, the band jumped right into the performance. They started with a song off their first CD and then one off the new CD. Lex found the crowd active that evening and thought that they seemed to have grown since the time Jacob’s Hammer had been on stage. The cheering continued through the beginning of the third song, but as the song played, Lex could tell something felt off. Lex didn’t think it would be something anyone outside of the band could detect, but Kate’s playing seemed a little out of time.

When they broke after the third song, Lex smiled at the crowd for a moment and bowed, then quickly went over to the guitar player. “What’s up?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

Kate held the heel of her hand up to her new eye. “Fuck, Lex, my new eye is acting really funny. I had trouble focusing earlier today, like I said, but I thought it was gone until I got onstage. Now all I can see in that eye is this pair of eyes, brown with red. It’s really weird, but I get the feeling they’re looking for us.”

Lex could feel her mouth hanging open, and a shudder ran down her spine. As soon as she could get some words together, she asked Kate, “Can you get a sense of how close they are?”

Closing her eyes for a moment, Kate seemed to concentrate, then opened them again. “I don’t know exactly, but they seem close by.”

Lex sighed and glanced out at the crowd as their applause started to die away. “Three more songs and we’ll call it quits. I’ll let Lou and Riss know at the next break,” Lex said, glancing at Kate, who looked grateful.