I wouldn’t have found a place to stand if Yoni hadn’t warned the club manager to save me a spot at a table down front. But of course she had. She thought of everything.
I’m in charge.
She certainly was.
The club filled up. Then it filled up some more. The crowd in back squished into the tables in front, and eventually the management gave up and some of the security guys wiggled through and started removing the tables, hand-over-hand over everyone’s heads. Beer bottles clanked around our ankles. Nobody could breathe. Somebody lit a joint near me and got it taken out of his hand after his first toke. I sneaked a toke, myself, before I passed it along. I could have inhaled two bongs and never relaxed. I was keyed up.
They did the first half of the show. Yoni handled that dinky club like a chef on a food truck. She touched everything and everybody within her reach. Nobody was beyond eye contact. Nobody left the room at the break—the street outside, they said, was packed too. The cops were having no luck with it. When she came back onstage the whole room breathed in. I smelled cigarette smoke from the street being pulled inside and through the room.
Her mood that night wasn’t as, I dunno, not as certain somehow. As if she had some tension that wouldn’t let go. Even the hear-me-roar type songs came across a little wistful. It occurred to me I might be rocking her confidence somehow.
If that was true, it sucked.
It occurred to me also, eventually, that she was holding back on the oomph. All that practice at the hotel, holding the mana in, keeping it from trashing the joint, was doing some good.
Yet the audience was hungry. They wanted it. I wanted it, and I had a lot of practice at not wanting stuff.
Eventually I realized that Yoni herself wanted something and she hadn’t got it.
That had to be my fault. Hell, I only had my sex demon powers to pride myself on these days, and if I’d left her wanting . . . .
She could command anything she wanted from me and get it.
But she held it in. She seemed determined not to set off some kind of magical chain-reaction nuclear poppity-pow.
This would be the room to do it in. This mob was wound tight.
Before I knew it, she was calling for a spot on the front rows of the audience. Light blinded me. “—Special guest tonight, just for this song. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ashurbanipal of the Mesopotamians!”
The mob let out a yell. It was kind of questioning, like, Who? What?
On automatic, blinded by the spot, I pivoted in place, holding up a hand, and then clambered up onstage. Her regular bass man handed me my instrument. I found my mic. We backed into position.
Long before the yelling had stopped, she gathered our eyes, then gave the cue. Thank God. I was fucking terrified.
We did the song, and it went as well as it had in the studio. Yoni began to unwind, and I relaxed, too. By the time she stepped back and let me jam, she looked happy. I noodled and riffed and growled into the mic and yanked on my awesomeness as if the last eighteen years of bongs and beers had never happened. The house howled. We picked up the duet portion, the band picked up tempo, and off we went.
I could feel the mana in the air. If she wasn’t making it, then the audience must have been making it, because I felt as tall as a house.
The band guys were all pros. They didn’t blink when she called for an early end to the song. We cut it off before it became a stomp. I tried to fade back, but she put her foot on mine and met my eye, so I stayed.
She faked the close. The crowd roared for more. She did three short encores, flirty ballad versions of some of her older hits.
Then we did the new number again, our number. This time she made eye contact with me, and we held it, and the mana began to pour out of her.
Maybe she’d forgotten about being a good girl.
I didn’t question it. It was terrific.
I was so very, very grateful to be okay with her that I let myself go, too.
This time we ran extra choruses. We let the stomp come. The audience tried to dance, but the room was packed too tight. Security kept them off the stage, but they were squishing out the doors. The walls creaked, the street outside clamored, the floor shook, and the ceiling tiles trembled and shivered dust over our heads.
When she called for the finish, there was still no silence.
They roared. In the roar I heard my name. Ashur, Ashur! They took it up as a two-stomp. Ashur, Ashur! I looked out over a sea of humanity, packed too close to move, yet their fists punched the air, Ashur, Ashur! Sunlight blinded me, the heat stifled me, the smell of blood filled my throat, and all those severed heads lurched at me on the ends of their spears, Ashur, Ashur! Ashur, Ashur!
Ashur, Ashur!
Ashur, Ashur!