I look over at him, brow raised.
“She would look so much better in black, don’t you think?” he continues. “Also, Benny mentioned you haven’t eaten in a while.”
I swallow and look away from him. “Benny and I have arrangements for tonight. I’ll be fine.”
My eyes follow the girl with the white ribbon as her boyfriend swings his arm around her waist, resting his hand in her back pocket. Her back is to me, but he looks over her at me, smirking, and whispers something into her ear. She pushes away from him, but he just grabs her more firmly, resting his other hand onher ass and giving it a squeeze. She looks around as if checking to see if anyone is looking and steps up on her tiptoes, brushing a kiss against his lips. She tries to pull away quickly, but he grabs her and forces his tongue down her throat. I almost take a step forward—but to do what?
They’re obviously together. She pushes away from him again and this time he releases her. She laughs lightly but something tells me it’s forced. A few more of their friends turn up and I force myself to look away.
The irony of it doesn’t evade me. Being around Benny, I know a vampire when I see one. So while her boyfriend might be dangerous in a way, I am much deadlier. And who am I to save her when I’ve never been successful in the past?
Evan gives me a quizzical look and angles his head towards the dressing rooms. “We should start getting into character, mate.”
I nod and follow him into the room, where Shaun and Benny are already dressed and applying black paint to their hands and necks, the only part of their skin that’ll be exposed.
I pick up my mask from inside my bag and run my fingers along the cool hard metal, tracing the mother-of-pearl skeleton fingers. Benny spent months on this mask, and with a little help from Evan’s elemental abilities, they crafted it to mold to my face perfectly.
I change into black pants and black boots, and take out my nipple piercings. I can’t have a single identifiable marking. Benny helps me paint my torso and the lower half of my face that the mask doesn’t cover. He takes a brush, spreading a potion across parts of my skin, concentrating it towards my lower torso and fading it upwards. Where the potion meets skin, shiny black scales erupt, magically glued onto my skin. They’re thick and hard, each one about the size of my thumbnail.
For the second to last final touch, I add the cologne Evan made for us. It masks our scents enough that fae with superior senses of smell can’t figure out what type of fae we are. It helps us keep our identities a secret, even if Evan forgets to use his all the damn time.
I slip my mask on, followed by my black lace shroud.
I pull the hood up over my head and settle it low on my forehead, putting some of my mask in shadow, and step out of the room.
By the second to last song of our set, I know I’m fading. I push through the slight strain I can feel in my throat. To an untrained ear I sound fine, but any vocalist or musician worth their salt would hear the slight raggedness, the pull of lyrics being dragged out. I’m physically exhausted as well. I stumble as I pace around the stage during the instrumental parts, but it just looks like it’s part of the act.
I hold out until the very end of the last song, where my power has run so low during the show that I can’t breathe anymore. My knees buckle and I gasp out the last verse, my body falling to the stage floor and the mic rolling out of my hand. As Evan and Shaun finish off the song, cheers go around the crowd. Thankfully, our theatrics are well known enough that everyone just thinks this is part of the show.
I’m able to gasp in a lungful of air and I push myself to my knees, bowing to the crowd, the wave of exhaustion and dizziness holding off long enough for me to amble off the stage. Once I’m shielded from the crowd, hidden away in a little nook, Ican’t help but allow tears to fall down my face, my weariness too high to continue fighting.
It’s like this sometimes after a show. All the emotions of myself and the crowd mixing together sometimes leave me feeling entirely too much that I can’t process. The only way to gain back my energy is to feed.
Benny finds me, pulling me up, and I drape myself around him, my height enveloping his smaller frame, but he steadies me with his supernatural strength and speeds off with me, getting us quickly into the tour bus, with no witnesses. It’s how we evade fans so easily, even the ones who try to position themselves so that they can catch a glimpse of us coming out of the venue.
I push myself out of his arms onto the large bed at the back of the bus. He sits on the edge of the bed, looking at me, his eyes always full of kindness and compassion that I don’t deserve. I sob into the mattress for what feels like hours as he waits, his hand on my ankle, holding firmly, grounding me.
Evan and Shaun poke their heads in to check on us but leave Benny to handle me.
My emotions always tend to get the better of me. When I’m angry, it’s Evan who allows me to let it out the best. When I’m introspective, Shaun is the one that can read my mind and help me make sense of what I’m experiencing. But when I’m in anguish, Benny is the one that grounds me. I would be dead without them.
Eventually Benny pulls me up into a sitting position. He pushes my hair out of my face and I wipe at the dried tears on my cheeks.
“It’s time,” Benny says gently to me, tugging off his shirt. He offers me up his arm.
I want to ignore the burning, suffocating feeling of fae hunger in my chest, but I can’t. Instead, my siren teeth—filing into points—descend from my gums around my human teeth, my jawstretching wide as I lower myself to bite into the flesh of his upper arm. I tear into it, careful not to go too deep. I move up his shoulder and down his torso, gnawing at his body until I’m fully satiated.
He lets out a low whimper as I fall away from him down onto the mattress beside him. My teeth and jaw return to normal and I turn to the side, tears falling once again as I take in the damage. “Are you okay?” I whisper, tugging at his good arm.
“It hurts, but I’m okay.”
His skin begins to knit itself back together, turning pink and then fading to his normal skin tone within a few minutes. He looks at me with a grin.
“A kiss would make it feel even better,” he teases me, and I let out a low chuckle. But I do prop myself up on my elbows, maneuvering myself in between his legs and lowering myself down to his torso, pressing kisses onto his skin. I quickly graze my lips against his.
“Thank you,” I whisper. I push off from the bed and toss his shirt to him.
“Anytime,” he replies, stretching out his arms.
