I peered at his camera bag and noted the tag that was sewn into it said the name “Jacob.” He must have borrowed it from him or something.
“So that’s it?” I asked, looking at him squarely. “You just accept what I said, no questions, no telling me that I’m crazy?”
“Do you think you’re crazy, little lamb?”
“I’ll go crazy if you keep calling me that.” I exhaled loudly and put my head in my hands, suddenly exhausted, my hair creating a red waterfall in front of my face. “And yes. Sometimes I do think I’m crazy, Max. But it happened. Jacob can back me up. Sage can back me up. I’m sure poor Noelle, if she ever gets better, could back me up. This shit happened. And…I think…I think it’s happening again.”
I felt Max stiffen beside me. “What do you mean, ‘it’s happening again’?”
I mumbled into my hands, “It’s probably nothing. But Sage had a few occurrences with a crazy maid at the hotel and thinks I may have made a deal with the Devil. I know. It just adds to how insane this all is.”
“And did you?”
The question of the hour. I felt sick just thinking about it. It couldn’t have happened, it couldn’t have happened.
“No. I don’t recall ever doing such a thing.” But even as I said the words, despite that I knew their truth, I didn’t feel any better, any safer.
A great pause hung over us, pressing down with all the questions. I turned my head and eyed him through a rusty wall of hair.
“You do think I’m crazy, don’t you? You think it’s all bunk.”
He seemed to consider that, his eyes watching the cars go past. “Would you think I was crazy if I believed you?”
“Kinda.”
“Let’s just say I’m more open-minded than most people, if you catch my drift.”
“I really need to speak to Jacob,” I said, sitting up. The more I sat there, the more I thought I was being useless. As much as I appreciated how open-minded Max was, I needed to talk to Jacob, someone who would know something, who would maybe even be able to do something. “Do you know where he is?”
He shook his head and brought out a cigarette. He offered me one from his tin, but I waved it away. He shrugged. “Thought maybe you needed one. Even non-smokers gotta smoke sometimes.”
“That’s an interesting philosophy,” I noted, standing up. “How do I hail a cab here, just flag them down? I think I’m going to go back to the hotel and get some rest before tonight. Maybe Jacob’s there.”
He stood up, too. “I’ll go with you,” he said quickly, flinging his spent matchstick onto the road. “We caught enough of soundcheck anyway, and the show doesn’t start until eight tonight.”
“So you really are my chaperone.”
“I like to look out for the ladies,” he said with a grin as he thrust out his arm, instantly stopping the nearest cab. After everything that Sage and I had discussed, I couldn’t argue with that. Especially when I was going back to the hotel where the supposed crazy maid was.
Once back at the hotel, I couldn’t find Jacob, so I ended up taking a much-needed nap. Even with the door locked and Max telling me to call or come to his room at any time, I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep. But I passed out right away and awoke to Max’s wake-up call, which consisted of him bleating like a sheep. Thank God it was still early enough for the sun to be in the sky, setting low on the horizon. I couldn’t have handled another disorienting wake-up experience in the darkness. Even so, when I got up, I made a point to turn on every single light in the bedroom and look everywhere for flies. There were none. I felt a trace of guilt for having been in Paris for twenty-four hours and not having seen any of the sights, but in the end I had to think of the big picture. And my job.
I got ready for the show, putting my hair up into a ponytail and pulling on boots, a denim skirt, and a thin tank top with Janice Joplin’s face sketched on it that I didn’t have to wear a bra with. For May, it was still quite chilly in Paris, but I knew the venue would be warm. That was one of the things I both loved and hated about concerts—that heat that only hundreds of sweaty, drunk, and adrenaline-fueled bodies can cause. It was just as intoxicating as the vibe.
Once again, I had missed Jacob, but I figured he was knee-deep in managing the band before they went on and making sure everything was going perfectly. With sharp bitterness, I imagined that Angeline was also there doing her job, and I tried to switch off my brain before I thought about Sage doing her. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to get past that. It was one thing to know he’d screwed lots of groupies and chicks over the last eight months; it was another to know what one of them looked like, to know she made her mark on his skin, that I’d have to see her in the flesh. It made everything so terrifyingly real.
I was heading down the stairs to meet Max in the lobby when I caught a peculiar odor on the fourth floor. I looked down the hall, thinking someone had left a bag of rancid garbage outside their door when all the lights on the floor started flickering. At the end of the hallway, a tall figure came around the corner and then stopped.
I stared at the figure, my hand covering my nose to block the stench, feeling like there was something terribly wrong here. The figure came forward, a black coat trailing behind, and I realized it was a man. He came halfway up the hall and then stopped again, in between the lights so he was hidden in shadow. I don’t know why I didn’t keep walking down the stairs, why I was so drawn to this person coming down the hall like a regular hotel guest.
Maybe because in my heart I knew he wasn’t a regular hotel guest.
“Dawn,” I heard a faint voice whisper, coming from his direction. “Dawn before the darkness.” The voice was ethereal yet menacing, and I started to smell the metallic tang of blood. I took my hand away from my nose and saw blood smeared on my fingers. A nosebleed.