Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

  Jonas Rees, the band manager, stood against the wall over by the door, letting the band pretend to be in charge. His dark blue suit looked like a deep trench in the inscrutable sea, and he was as quiet as a puppeteer back there, watching them dance with those pale green eyes of his, while he assessed and would later confer with Xan, then go manage.

  With a few words from Jonas, once he had deemed that Killer Valentine was ready, they jumped from bottle-thrower clubs to big nightclubs, then with another phone call, to the arena circuit. Magazines had begun calling them for in-depth articles, and the internet stations played their singles. Jonas had come up with the strategy to skip old-media radios and go straight to internet stations and online MP3 sales, and now the recording companies were sniffing around, wanting a piece of the action.

  The considerable action.

  Tryp wasn’t sure whose side Jonas was really on. He had built the business of the band, but the record companies were going to buy him out with a huge payday plus residuals, if the band signed on the dotted line.

  Plus, he had made it very clear that he was mentally moving on to the next big thing, which was their back-up singer, Rhiannon.

  Xan was saying something about the set list, something about trying for a longer let-down at the end of the second set to keep the crowds off the stage.

  The last time they’d had a swarm, Tryp’s drums had taken damage. His hi-hat still didn’t sound right no matter how he fiddled with the nut, and he should probably replace it, but going out to a music store to find another cymbal required waking up before he absolutely had to be someplace, and Tryp would rather sleep it off. He wondered if Zildjian could ship one to a hotel somewhere if he called them, if he could figure out where he was going to be next week.

  South? Were they going down South for the next leg of the tour? He couldn’t remember. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was now.

  The weak sun shining in the window looked like they were in the far northern latitudes, but he couldn’t be sure. The same tour bus had driven them to the hotel today as last week, so they must not have started the Asian or European legs of the tour yet.

  Rade and Grayson, Tryp’s cohorts in awesome partying crime and players of keyboards and bass guitar, respectively, sprawled in armchairs and pretended to be awake by grunting occasionally. Rade’s weird-white hair webbed his face like he was dead and spiders had nested on him, though the purple tips on his shag threw off the analogy. Those guys must have been really wasted last night because the dark circles under their eyes looked worse than normal this afternoon, or else Rade had two black eyes from some stripper sitting on his face and smashing him, which was possible. Grayson coughed wetly and kept pressing his hands to his pasty face like he was feverish.

  When they hit the stage, those zombies would freakishly return to being alive. Tryp had seen it happen every night for almost two years now. Tryp was an amateur stoner, but those guys had impressive powers of drug resilience.

  Xan said to the band, “And it’s a relatively small venue tonight, only a few thousand seats because we’re in Berkeley,—”

  Oh, yeah. Berkeley. Elfie had said something about Berkeley last night, and it explained the wan sunlight trickling in the window and the solar panels glittering everywhere.

  “—so we’ll need to make up for that. This summer, however, we’ve had some managers approach us to play a few festivals.”

  Tryp nodded, trying to look like he believed they would all survive until the summer.

  Sheds, good God. Xan wanted them to play the sheds this summer. Or Jonas did, to increase their fan base and eventual contract with a recording company.

  The outdoor festival concert venues were now constructed of better materials than back in the days before Tryp was born, back when they had corrugated metal roofs that sounded like aluminum sheds when rain drummed on them. Those festivals where many, many tens of thousands of people crowded and moshed were riots begging to happen, especially for a high-energy band like Killer Valentine. Xan was Genghis Khan out there, whipping the crowd into a frenzied horde. Tryp couldn’t imagine fifty or seventy thousand roiling people, all controlled by Xan’s insane charisma.

  Maybe Tryp should wait to order that hi-hat until after the riot destroyed his whole kit. No use giving the mob new stuff to break. He rolled the drumstick over his knuckles and flipped it back between his fingers.

  Xan stood, tall and European slim in his black slacks and shirt. Even still buffed out from the photo shoot, he looked carelessly sophisticated. Tryp kept watching him, trying to figure out how he did that, if it was Xan’s model’s posture or his expression of amused ennui, and Tryp felt like a hick again in his jeans and tee shirt with his tatts showing through the rips.

  Tryp had been through hell with this band, and yet they might as well live on different planets. Sometimes, he felt so far away when people talked that he could hear an echo, like he stood on the edge of a canyon, buffeted by a sinister wind.

  Xan said, “Even though it’s a smaller venue tonight, don’t leave anything in the box. Leave it all on the stage tonight. Play every show like it’s your last day on Earth.”

  Babysitting Is For Girls

  “I am not a fucking babysitter, Rock.” Elfie shook a socket wrench at him that was massive enough to crush his thick skull. The steel rod weighed heavily in her hand, but she set it down to finish tightening the last couple of bolts on the gerb, a metal tube filled with explosives, with her strong fingers. Her legs swung over the edge of the stage, and Rock fidgeted down below where the security guys stood to keep the rioting crowd from rushing the stage. She said, “Babysitting is for girls.”

  Rock stroked his long, gray beard and pondered. He had grown the beard when he had been on the road with The Grateful Dead, smoking hash with Jerry Garcia until they were both baked, and then Jerry went back to his hotel room to sleep while Rock slung his potbelly into gear and tore down the set. “He was coherent for the radio interview this afternoon.”

  Another man stepped up. Jonas, the suit-and-spit-polish manager for Killer Valentine, had been hanging back, waiting to see how things went before adding his opinion, just like always. “Tryp didn’t sound like a raving lunatic. We need him at least lucid. Sober would be great, if you could swing that.”

  Elfie tightened down the pack in the gerb. “Fuck, no. I did my turn, just like everybody else. I am not a fucking babysitter, and you guys cannot hang this on me because I’m the only girl. I like doing the pyrotechnic effects, and I’m good at it.”

  She was a little bit of a pyromaniac, truth be told, but Rock already knew that and Jonas didn’t need to.

  Rock told Jonas, “She’s right. If you want your band to stay alive, you’ll leave her on the pyro effects.”

  Both men nodded. Elfie’s pyros shot off perfectly, sprays of sparks and fireworks that got the crowd rocking, and no one ever got hurt. Her aim was dead on, in that no one was ever dead afterward. Other techs just weren’t as good, and people could get hurt.

  Jonas loosened his tie. “I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

  “It’s not the money.” Well, it was, but there were other considerations. “When would I sleep? The band sleeps on the tour bus after the show while we’re tearing down, and then they party until someone pours their sorry asses into bed, and then they sleep until interviews and sound check. That’s when we set up the stage. That’s when I do my job. If I babysat Tryppy, literally, absolutely literally, I would never have time to sleep.”

  The men looked at each other. Rock said, “She doesn’t want to, and I don’t want to lose my pyro engineer. You’ll have to find someone else.”

  Jonas mashed his lips into a flat line. “You don’t need her for tear-down, right?”

  “They’re her pyros,” Rock said.

  “They’re my pyros,” Elfie echoed. “No one else touches my bombs.”

  They weren’t really bombs, though it sounded appropriately badass to call them that. Civilians didn’t know
that those sparks that fountained out of the gerbs weren’t really dangerous. Elfie had demonstrated gerbs for fire marshals all over the country, holding her hand a few feet above the base, parting the fiery fountain with her palm, which lightly warmed on her fingers.

  Jonas said, “If someone else tore down the pyros and cleaned it all, she could ride the tour bus or take the runner or whatever. She could stay with him the whole time. How long does it take you to set these things up?”

  “All damn day,” she said. Like hell she was going to minimize her job.

  Rock said, “You’d trust me to tear down your pots, wouldn’t you, Elfie?”

  “Yeah, but you’re the pit boss.” Elfie scooted over to the next pot and gingerly removed a fresh flash pack from the cardboard box beside her. They were set off by an electronic pulse, but abusing things that can explode is never a good idea.

  Rock told Jonas, “It would be cutting it close, but she could set up the pyros during the sound check. You’ll have to make sure that the band is cool with that, though. I won’t have Valentine going all snotty on her while she’s setting up explosives.”

  “I’ll handle Xan Valentine. We’ll just tell him that it’s more efficient or the more modern way to do things, to set the pyros last. If she can get Tryp a little more lucid, maybe the rest of us can concentrate on keeping Rade and Grayson from O.D.ing and dying.”

  “I don’t want to babysit Tryppy,” she said, putting some muscle into tightening the gerb’s support tube to the stage. She crouched and angled the tube upright so the gerbs would form a ten-foot wall of sparks when they detonated. “I’m not a fucking babysitter.”

  Rock waved Jonas off and walked around to the steps to climb up on the stage. He sat down beside her and dangled his swollen legs off the edge, too, even though she knew that it would hurt his knees to stand up again.

  “Don’t start,” she said.

  “You’ve gotta treat these musos like babies,” Rock said, using the slang mew-zos for musicians, “because they are babies. No one has said no to them for years. They’re all emotional cripples. Jonas is carrying a bag of zombie dust for Rade and Grayson in his briefcase so they won’t have to skulk around bad neighborhoods to get it and rationing it out so they won’t kill themselves. It’s up to us, the adults, to make sure that the show goes on.”

  “I’m a good pyro tech, Rock.” She secured the edges of the gerb support to the stage with strong, thick gaff tape on its flanges.

  “That you are, but the show needs you to look after Tryp. Jonas was freaking out at how sane he sounded on the radio today. What did you do?”

  “Woke him up half an hour early and made him eat oatmeal.”

  “Rade and Grayson are influencing him way too much. He’s so young.”

  Elfie did some mental math, calculating how old she should be. “He’s a year older than I am.”

  “Girls mature faster. Some of the twenty-year-old techs are the worst ones with the groupies.”

  Elfie rolled her eyes. “It’s their own faults.”

  “Again, very young women, very young men, bad decisions. I would take it as a personal favor if you would try babysitting Tryppy for two weeks, and then we’ll see how it goes. If there isn’t an enormous improvement, if it was just a one-time thing, I’ll tell Jonas that we can’t manage without you. And I’m sure that Jonas will pay you more. That’ll get you closer to college, faster.”

  She had already been working for over two years, and she only had about half the money that she needed. “I hate the idea.”

  “Have you applied for next fall?”

  “No. There’s no way I could save enough for next fall.”

  “If you did this, I could make sure that Jonas pays you enough that you could leave the show in August. This is no life, Elfie. It’s like being a whaler back in the eighteen hundreds, out to sea for nine months, back home and raising hell for three, then leaving again just so your wife won’t divorce you. I didn’t see my kids grow up.”

  “I’m doing fine. It’ll just take a little longer.”

  “And then it’ll take a little longer than that, and then just one more year, and then you’re in your fifties and don’t know how to do anything else. What kind of engineering degree did you want?”

  “Chemical,” she said, staring down at the explosives in her hands. She had gotten A’s in every chemistry class she had ever taken, even the ones at the community college her senior year of high school, right up until she had dropped out and run. “I like things that blow up.”

  “Apply now. Tonight. If you do this, I’ll make sure you can go.”

  “He’s going to want to go to nightclubs and stuff, Rock.” She gestured to her legs, clad in worn jeans that frayed long strings at the hems.

  “We’ll get you an allowance for that. Here.” He pulled out his wallet and held out a wad of bills. “Buy some clothes. Make sure you have a hundred left over in case you need a cab somewhere, with or without Tryppy. Don’t put yourself in any situations you don’t like. If anything is weird, walk away and leave his muso butt. I’ll square it with Jonas.”

  “I don’t know, Rock. It’s babysitting.”

  “Personal favor. Please.”

  Rock had stuck up for her when some of the asshole techs had tried to get her fired, telling people that they had to correct her pyros, mainly because she was a girl and they didn’t want women around to see their depravities with the groupies who would do anything, anything, to get back stage to meet the band. Rock had hired her, too, even though she suspected that he had known her I.D. was fake and she was desperately trying to hop the first train out of Texas.

  She sighed. “Fine. Two weeks, and then we’ll evaluate whether it’s worth it.”

  He smiled through his gray beard and patted her knee.

  Babysitting Tryp

  “Hey Tryp!” Elfie called. “Wait up!” She jogged through the hotel lobby after him, her ski jacket flapping in her arm.

  “What?” he asked, looking back at her. The glass doors slid closed behind him, and the starry lights in the ceiling far above glinted blue on his black hair. He wore a different black tee shirt and jeans, and blazes of ink covered almost all the skin on his forearms. Tryp squinted. “Elfie?”

  “Wait up! Can I go with?” Her new high heeled pumps dragged on the carpet, but she recovered with a little skip, stretching the fabric of her body-hugging red dress. Her thick, blond braid slapped her back, muscular from lifting heavy stage equipment and trying to keep the show on schedule.

  “You, um, you look different.” Tryp took a long look down her short body as she trotted toward him.

  “Yeah, I took a shower.”

  “You sure did.” Tryp glanced through the glass doors, out into the darkness at the red tail lights, waiting for him. “You want to go out with me?”

  “Not like that, Tryppy.” He rolled his eyes when she used his nickname. “I’m just bored out of my gourd tonight because the trucks aren’t here yet, and the musicians always know the best bars.”

  He leaned down and whispered near her shoulder, “But you’re nineteen.”

  The thin straps of her red dress clung to her bare shoulders, and his warm breath brushed her neck. Elfie stepped backwards. “I got into that bar last night to drag your drunk ass home. I have a good fake I.D.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” he said, his dark eyes a little serious, “but I was thinking about bringing someone back to the hotel with me.”

  Oh, great. He was scamming to get some ass tonight. Well, if he wanted to screw some chick, he couldn’t get too, too, too hammered, right? Elfie had heard that guys couldn’t get it hard, or whatever, if they got too wasted. “I won’t get in the way. I’ve held your hair back when you’ve ralphed too many times to ever be anything more than just friends. I could even help.”

  He brightened. “Like a wing woman.”

  “Yep. I’ll be your wing woman.” That sounded safe.

  “Awesome. Let’s go get that car.”
He led the way to the black sedan sitting in the hotel’s round driveway.

  Tryp opened the door for her, like this was a date or something, and she slid across the slick leather of the sedan’s back seat to make room for him.

  Tryp stepped into the car, folding his long legs into the cramped space. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the back of the front seat. “Hey, buddy. Change of plans. You know of a good dance club around here with a VIP section?”

  The driver looked up and glanced at Elfie through the rear view mirror. His gray mustache twitched. “I’m not the correct clientele for dance clubs, but I have heard that the Club Tropicana is good.”

  “That’s cool.” Tryp leaned back and thumbed his cell phone. “Jonas?”

  So he was talking to the band’s manager. This was all very weird.

  “We’ve had a change of plans for tonight. Would you mind making arrangements at Club Tropicana instead?” He paused. “Thanks, buddy. I owe you one.”

  “You changed your plans?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Tryp shrugged and smirked. “Dance clubs are the place to go with a wing woman. That way, we’ll both have some fun.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” She watched the city speed backward as the car raced onto the freeway and over the downtown area.

  Tryp leaned forward, snagged a small bottle out of a console on the back of the front seat, and downed the contents in one swig. “Don’t thank me yet. The evening is young. Hopefully, at the end of the night, I’ll be thanking you.”

  Elfie smiled and wondered what the hell he was talking about.

  The show had finished a few hours ago and the drive after the runner had only taken just two hours, so it was barely midnight in San Francisco.

  Plenty of time to Tryp to raise all kinds of hell.

  Club Tropicana

  The limo driver drove Elfie and Tryp through the packed parking lot of the Club Tropicana around to a back entrance, where a man in ripped jeans and tank top opened the car door for them. Tryp clambered out first and waited for her under an awning that evidently protected them from the blazing moonlight. Inside the door, their guide led them up a steel spiral staircase that rattled under her pumps. Music from the dance floor, a college-alternative dance remix, thundered through the air, vibrating the round handrail in her fingers as she climbed.