Ravage (Book 1)

by Naomi West

  “I didn’t know that,” I say. It’s a lie, I’m sure. He has that look in his eyes men sometimes get: the look of ownership, the look of psyching himself up to do something, like a kid trying to get enough courage to ask a girl out but with much less innocence.

  “Oh, yeah.” He moves forward again, this time less than a foot from me. “It’s true.” I smell him. I can’t not smell him. He reeks of whisky and cigarettes and old stale sweat. “That’s what you need. Someone in your corner. I’ve seen you coming and going from this place. You never have a man with you, or a friend, or anybody. Not even a band. Just Cora Ash, all alone.” He shrugs. “It makes me quite worried, you know? Call me old-fashioned but—”

  “I need to leave. It’ll be my slot soon.”

  I move around him, being as tactful as I can when all I want to do is head-butt him so hard his nose becomes a pancake.

  He steps into my path. “You’ve got a minute,” he says, voice rising. He looks way more excited than he needs to be. “Don’t you have a minute? What’s your problem? Why are you such a loner?”

  Because I changed my name a while back, and in doing so I severed every connection with casual acquaintances and half-friends. I moved from LA to this quaint seaside town an hour’s drive out of LA. That’s why.

  “Some people just like being alone,” I say, taking a step back. It’s either that or feel his bulging sweaty belly against me, which is not an option.

  “Look.” He pauses, eyes squinting, and then blurts, “I could make life easier for you. A regular gig. Well-paid. All you’d need to do is give me a chance. Come by my place. I’d treat you right.”

  I close my eyes, hoping that when I open them he’s disappeared. He hasn’t, so I place my hands on my hips and look at him like he’s the lowliest slug I’ve ever encountered, a look designed to wither. It works. He shrinks under my gaze.

  “You want me to fuck you so I can keep playing in this shithole? That’s your grand plan?”

  The drummer winds down. A final guitar note rings through the building. The singer clears his throat.

  “Move,” I say. I bow my head sarcastically. “Please.”

  He looks like he might hit me. He wants to. He’s scanning me for weakness, any sign that I’m prey and he can became a predator. I spent my teenage years reading about Nordic men, about blood feuds and hammer-wielding gods and giants. This man is a joke.

  When he doesn’t find any weakness, he steps aside.

  I push past him quickly, shaken, though I won’t show it, and wrench the green room door open. Walking down the hallway, I fight my trembling lips, my clenched fists. I’ll have to put the rage into my performance.

  Chapter Three

  Logan

  The bar is called The Devil, with a faded picture of a demon on the wooden banner, neon letters proclaiming T e D il to the Californian twilight. Metal music plays from inside and if I look down the street I can see the ocean, just about, a tiny blue pinprick nestled in between two buildings. I used to love the sea when I was a kid, when the Demon Riders were based on the land-side of LA and Mom’d bring me and her friends’ kids down here, and we’d splash around like we were children and not outlaws-in-waiting. It’s probably bad for me to reminisce about a time when I didn’t have any responsibility, when pretty soon I’m going to have all the responsibility, so I go inside.

  I nod to the bouncer, a man I recognize from a bar on the other side of town, and who probably recognizes me as a bastard who gets shitfaced when he’s tired of dealing with his problems. I’ve got my leather folded up in my hand. I don’t want to be a Demon Rider right now, just a man in a T-shirt. I walk across the dance floor, where around fifty or so people mosh and rage to the band, a guy with dyed green hair trying to scream over the drummer. It sounds like shit, but it’s better than listening to my own thoughts. That’s one of the reasons I come to clubs like these. The music is bad but that can be a good thing, because bad music means I don’t have to live in my head.

  I go to the bar and take a corner seat where I can see the TV and the stage. The TV is playing football, which I’ve never cared much about, so I idly watch the stage instead. I order a bottle of whisky and a glass and drink slowly and with determination. I’m getting drunk. That’s my mission.

  I’m three drinks deep when some punk woman spots me across the bar. Women are always drawn to me, have been ever since I was a teenager. My nickname was Pretty Boy for a while in high school (which Mom made me finish because she said I wouldn’t be a grunter like the rest of the MC). Maybe it’s my longish sand-blond hair or my blue eyes, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never tried too hard with women. They seem to like that.

  She’s okay-looking, with pink hair and dark-rimmed eyes, but she has that slightly desperate look about her that is turning me off more and more lately. I haven’t been with a club girl in months because of that look. It’s a look that says they’ll do anything for you, do any damn thing you please, but it will mean nothing to them. They’ll do it because they’ve always done it, because they don’t know how else to make a man like them. Maybe I’m getting too sensitive. Maybe a man who’s killed and beaten and robbed and fought shouldn’t care about shit like this. But I can’t help it. Even men like me have feelings. That’s the truth we can never admit.

  I sip my drink as she comes over, walking unsteadily and nervously, looking at me shyly under her pink fringe. It’s a look meant to entice me in, and it would have once upon a time. It was right around the time Dad got really sick that I stopped being enticed by these women. I don’t know what that says about me. The screamer on stage finishes up, thanking the crowd, and the band starts to get ready for the next performer.

  The woman leans against the bar directly next to me, waiting for me to initiate something. It would be so easy to get this woman into bed. It’d be the easiest, cheapest thing in the world. And then, the morning after, both of us’d feel dirty and pointless, two pieces of flesh slapping against each other. That’s it, I reckon; looking at her, I can’t distinguish her from any of the other dozen punky women I’ve fucked in my life. When I don’t say anything, she turns her head.

  “Hey,” she says.

  I sip my whisky.

  “I said hey.”

  “Hi.” I take another sip.

  “So ...” She trails off, waiting for me to fill the gap. I don’t.

  “Are you having a good night?” she asks.

  “It’s pretty good.”

  “Isn’t this music just so lame?”

  “It’s pretty lame,” I agree.

  She spreads her arms as if saying, “I’m standing right here, ready to be fucked, and you won’t even talk to me?”

  I see it in her eyes: the need to exert some kind of influence over me. It’s her identity. That’s the sick part, the fucked-up part I usually ignore. They get something out of it, too. They get plenty of pleasure. I always treat my women right. But after Dad, and all this talk of family, and everything ... I don’t know what’s going on inside of me. I have to admit that. What I know for sure, though, is that I don’t want this woman.

  “Um.” She hesitates. “Did you have a good day?”

  I smile, a smile of derision I quickly kill unless she misinterprets it. It’s clear she’s never had to initiate things before.

  I look past her at the stage as the next act walks on. I feel like the barstool drops out from underneath me. The whisky sits on my tongue before I remember to swallow. The chatter of the woman and the general chatter around us dies down to a whisper, and this woman’s footsteps become louder, the loudest sound of all. She’s hot, with her neck tattoo I can’t quite make out from here and a smudge on her hand I can only assume is a tattoo, her leather jacket and her black skinny jeans. But it’s not just that she’s hot. It’s the way she carries herself, confident but not aggressive, self-assured but not arrogant.

  She leans into the microphone, and her voice is like heaven: raspy, mid-pitched, not girlish but not mannis
h. She sounds like a real goddamn lady. “My name is Cora Ash, and this is ‘Sayings of the Low One’.”

  She turns to the band, nods, says something to the drummer—don’t be so loud, I’m guessing—and then launches into the song. She sings about how a person has to be strong but must also bridle their strength, how a person must remember that the end of the world is always around the corner, how a person must be brave and never show fear. I watch, captivated, feeling like something truly new is happening inside of me.

  Then the punk woman pokes her head up. “Hello?” she snaps. “I said, did you like the band?”

  The contrast of the woman on stage—Cora Ash—with this hungry-for-attention punk is so drastic, it’s difficult to believe that they’re the same species. She moves around the stage as she sings, but not madly or frantically, though her singing is metal through and through. She moves around the stage like a water snake, fluid movement after fluid movement, drawing my eyes to her legs and her arms and her ass when she turns just right. I’ve never been so enthralled by a woman in all my life; I never dreamed it was possible, even.

  “Have I done something to offend you?” the punk asks, her voice full of outrage.

  “What?” I say, barely aware of her. Cora Ash launches into the chorus, her rasp the buffer against the sweetness of her voice, the two combining into a firm, elongated note.

  “Why won’t you look at me?”

  “I don’t know you, sweetheart,” I say. “And I’m enjoying the show.”

  “You’re dribbling all over that skinny bitch? Look at her. She’s a freak. She moves around like a freak.”

  She moves like something unearthly, I want to say. But I don’t. Outlaws and bikers don’t say things like that.

  The song enters its second half, Cora Ash spinning around the stage, her jagged brown hair whipping around her, singing of people whose names I don’t recognize. They sound like old names, the kind I’d hear in history and forget by math. The crowd doesn’t seem as stunned as me, just moshing and headbanging when they should be standing in awe, dumbstruck.

  “You’ve blown it with me,” the punk says. “I just want you to know that. You’ve really blown it!”

  I don’t take my eyes off Cora as the song comes to an end. She moves to the edge of the stage with the grace of a ballerina and the ferocity of a tigress. I’ve never seen those two aspects brought together. She looks fierce and delicate at the same time, somebody I want to protect and run from. She bangs her head, screaming the last part of the song so that her rasping voice echoes around the room. When the song ends, she leaps back and punches the air, making a war-like whooping sound. It’s the same kind of sound I’ve heard from outlaws after some killing, but it isn’t manly at all.

  She launches into another song and all I think is: I need to speak to this woman. If it kills me, I need to speak with her. I take a sip of whisky and then turn when I notice a pink blob moving up and down. It’s the punk. She’s still there, ranting.

  I tune into her. “... what you’re missing. You really don’t. I’m a bad bitch and you want that—who even is she?”

  “Look,” I say. “I don’t mean any offense, but I don’t want you, and I reckon you’ve had too much to drink, otherwise you wouldn’t be embarrassing yourself like this. Walk away, please.”

  “Wow!” she barks. “You don’t have to be so rude! You’ve just proved how rude you are!”

  I nod, offer a smile, and then turn back to Cora Ash as the punk retreats. I was planning on getting shitfaced and passing out, but I have different plans now. I watch Cora, and I order a glass of water, and then another. I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, but whatever it is I want to be sober for it.

  Usually I have to force my mind away from Dad. He’s always there, right at the back of my mind, niggling. But right now, staring at Cora as she sings about a dragon called Fafnir, I don’t have to try. She steals my attention and holds it captive. She has me like nobody ever has.

  Then she looks up, and I’m sure her eyes settle on me for a moment. Right across the room, everything freezing, just me and her staring at each other, me thinking about what it’d be like to see those eyes go wide with lust, to watch an orgasm ripple through that graceful, strong body.

  Chapter Four

  Cora

  It’s always difficult to know if I’m slaying or making a fool of myself. I lose track of myself in the music, becoming something else. When I first started thinking like that, I detested myself for it; I thought I was being pretentious and was taking myself too seriously. But then I realized that the only way for me to come up here and give it my all without being disheartened by the numb faces of the crowd is to lose myself. I have to be like the famed berserkers in the Norse sagas when they lost themselves in the frenzy of battle, turning so wild that they had the strength of ten men. Well, I have to go so wild that it’s as though I’m performing to ten thousand people, not fifty.

  I wipe the sweat from my eye as “Sayings of the Low One” finishes, and then launch into “Loki’s Peril.” I’m rocking out as best I can, my body full of that cool, aching feeling as I jump around the stage, my voice sounding good, as far as I can tell. The crowd moshes, head-bangs, but nobody watches me. It’s a narcissistic thought, to expect people to stand there and gaze up at me in a dive bar like this. I push it away and focus on the performance.

  Then I look up and see him. The place is full, especially the bar area, men crowded around watching the game, women dancing just to the side of the dancefloor. There are more people at the bar and dining area than on the dancefloor, and yet I spot him right away. He’s handsome, even from here. There’s no denying that. His hair falls to his shoulders in curls, his jaw is square and tough-looking, and his body is muscular, so muscular that his bicep muscles tighten when he brings his water to his lips. But it’s his eyes I notice most of all, even from up here on the stage. They are a blue so stark and brilliant, they seem to pierce me: the blue of melting glaciers, ice-topped mountains, the blue of my dreams of snowy wastelands, a blue which is almost white.

  I draw my eyes away from him, focusing on my performance, but thoughts have been triggered which won’t settle. I promised myself when I became Cora Ash that I wouldn’t be with a man. I haven’t fucked a man in over a year, and I certainly haven’t been in a relationship with one. There are too many risks involved. The last thing I need when I’m trying to lie low is to have someone prying into the most secret places of me. I repeat that to myself as I sing, and I can hear my performance suffering for it. I grit my teeth in between the second and the third song, struggling to force the man out of my mind. But he just keeps watching me, and as he watches me my body responds, despite my mind commanding it not to. My nipples tingle and my inner thighs ache with longing.

  I launch into the fourth song, committed to focusing on Odin and his battle with the Fenris Wolf, but the man intrudes on the scene. I sing about a great battle at Ragnarok and then the man is there, blue-eyed and staring, muscles bulging, sliding between me and Odin and reaching out with his hand. In my mind, it happens, and in my mind his hand brushes against my crotch. I gasp, both in real life and in my mind. Then I shake my head and sing all the louder and more passionately, to pretend that it didn’t happen.

  I remember standing before the mirror, eyes locked on myself. “You will be invisible,” I told myself. “No one will know who you really are. You’re Cora Ash. Cora Ash is a lone wolf. Cora Ash needs nobody except for her vibrator and her microphone. Cora Ash doesn’t need a man. There will be time for men later.”

  But as much as I would like to, I don’t have complete control over my mind. Before I have a chance to prepare myself, my imagination has taken flight. Usually when my imagination flies it ends up in a made-up future where I’m a star rocking out in a stadium, the same fantasy I had when I was a little girl and would sing with my hairbrush in the mirror. Or it goes into the world of the Viking gods, and I live there for a while. But now it fixates on
this man. I see myself tearing his T-shirt off, literally, with my teeth, and then running my fingernails down his bulging pectorals and his ribbed belly, feeling each mound of muscle.

  I’m glad when my set is over.

  “Thank you and goodnight!” I scream.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the man rise from his stool at the same time I step off the stage. I walk quickly toward the backstage entrance. The man is almost on me, pushing through the crowd with determination, but then Charles the manager steps into his path. I pause, listening and watching without seeming to watch. At least, I’m trying to be as sneaky as I can as I lean casually against the wall.

  “You can’t go back here, buddy,” Charles says.

  I almost laugh when I see this six-foot-two muscular Thor standing opposite a puffed-up sack like Charles, and double laugh when I think of what he said to me before my set, but the man takes a small step back. There’s something deadly in his eyes, something that says he could turn this place red if he wanted to. It scares me. It excites me, too, even if I know it shouldn’t.

  He holds his hands up. “Fair enough, old man,” he says.

  “Old man!” Charles whines. “Who are you calling old man? I’m not even forty!”

  I laugh, and the man laughs. He looks over Charles’ shoulder and we share a moment of enjoyment, eyes locked, and then I duck my head and flee. I can’t become entangled with a man, no matter how badly my body aches for him, not matter how swiftly my head fills with the steamy scenes we could share together.

  I return to the green room and drop onto the couch, stretching my legs out and clicking my neck from side to side. I should leave now, considering what happened with Charles, but part of me wants to linger and see if anything happens with the man in black. It’s like there’s a little war being fought within me, a war of two parts which are both really opposite sides of the same coin. “Like the Vanir and the Aesir,” I whisper, and then smile to myself. “I brought glory to Thor, Frey, Ullr, and Odin tonight.”