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Claudia picks up my acoustic guitar from where it leans against the wall. She gave the strings an experimental strum. “You brought this with you?”
“Don’t get excited. Note the layer of dust on the fretboard. I haven’t touched it since I got here.” In her hands, the instrument doesn’t seem real. It takes on the appearance of a weapon. Something she can use to bludgeon me with until I stop feeling sorry for myself and become the man she believes me to be. I love the way danger rolls off Claudia’s skin. I just want to fuck my gangster girl all the time.
She holds the guitar out to me. “Play me something.”
I shake my head. “I’d rather smoke.”
She holds the joint out of reach and jiggles the instrument. “Go on. I’ve spent so many years alone with your recordings. I think your voice is baked into the walls. I know you’re not writing songs, and I won’t push you, even though you still owe me a Christmas present. But you can still play, can’t you?”
She tosses the guitar at me. My heart clatters as I grab it from the air. It feels alive in my fingers, charged with starlight. A bead of sweat collects above my eye. I shake my head to flick it away.
I close my eyes.
I strum.
The note fills the room, low and humble. It feels significant, and yet I know it’s nothing. It doesn’t say any of the things I want to say to this remarkable woman.
My eyes flutter open. I lock my gaze with Claudia, and I launch into ‘The Black Witch,’ one of our most popular songs – the song I wrote with Dylan when we first left Blackwich Castle. It’s about giving up all the bullshit of my family legacy to live life on my own terms.
Even though I haven’t touched an instrument in months, the words and melody fall effortlessly from my fingers. I draw the emotion to the surface, pouring everything about the way I feel for Claudia into my voice. Claudia’s eyes remain locked on mine, and a tear rolls down her cheek.
My throat rasps as I struggle through the chorus. This is intense. I’ve played this song, but I’ve never felt as raw and open about it before. Not until the Ice Queen made it real.
As I sing the final line of the chorus, my fingers do a strange thing. They move. And before I know it, I’m playing a riff.
It’s not a riff from any Octavia’s Ruin song.
It’s something new.
I play the riff, over and over again, letting it be of this moment, letting it say all the things I’m not able to say. And I open my mouth, and I sing.
I don’t have words yet. Only a melody.
Only a single word.
Guilty.
It’s not much. It’s the hint of a melody. But it’s the most I’ve written since Dylan killed himself. And I plucked it from that single tear.
Claudia’s lips fall open. Her eyes flutter closed, and I see her as I’ve never seen before, open and laid bare and vulnerable. I see her as she’s been all these years, trapped in her own private hell with only my voice to carry her through. The sheer joy of who I am to her lifts a weight from me I didn’t realize I’ve been carrying.
She says I sing the stars. I thought it was an expression, but until this moment I didn’t realize it was true.
I know who I am.
I’m Gabriel Fallen, and I sing the stars and the rain. I sing the lust and the blood and the slaughter and the pain.
I’ll sing the entire fucking universe for Claudia August.
Claudia
I’m in my office with Eli, George, and Yara, going over possible options to get Casper and the other animals out of Nero’s basement stronghold, when Noah barges in. “Turn on the news.”
“Which station?”
“Fucking all of them.”
I pick up the remote and point it at the large screen set into Howard Malloy’s mahogany bookshelves. The screen flickers to life, showing a breaking news story.
