I slammed the master fader to zero.
Silence.
Violent, sudden vacuum.
"Blackout," I barked into the comms.
The house lights didn't come up. The stage went pitch dark. The roar started, the demand for an encore, the confused screaming, but we were already moving.
I abandoned the rig. My pedals, my custom loops, the patch cables I’d obsessively labeled, I left them live and hot. The local crew would have to deal with the hum. I was over the barrier before the first feedback squeal hit the monitors.
Kit vaulted his drum riser. Alfie was already at the stage left stairs, chest heaving, blindly grabbing for a towel that wasn't there. He looked wrecked.
We hit the corridor running. The air here was colder, smelling of damp concrete, stale beer, and electrical ozone, but underneath it, my nose picked up a phantom trace of grapefruit.It wasn't real. It couldn't be. The bus was parked three hundred meters away through brick walls. But my brain insisted the signal was active.
Rowan stepped into our path near the loading dock. She didn't have her clipboard. She had three bottles of water and a look that could strip paint.
"Direct route," she said, her voice cutting through the adrenaline haze. "No fan meet. No press. Cal has the engine running. Security is holding the alley."
"Did she hear it?" Alfie asked, breathless, wiping greasepaint and sweat from his eyes. His pupils were still fully dilated, swallowing the gold. "Euan, did the feed hold?"
"The feed held," I confirmed, checking the packet loss stats on my phone as we walked, because checking data was easier than checking my own racing pulse. "Zero latency. She heard every word."
"Good," Kit growled, waiting for a security guard to open the heavy steel exit door. He didn't look like the friendly, golden-retriever drummer now. He looked like an animal who’d smelled home. "Because I'm not playing that song again until she’s in the room."
We burst out into the Glasgow rain. The cold hit us like a slap, steam instantly rising off our skin. And there it was. The bus. A black monolith in the wet alley. The engine was idling, a low rumble that matched the vibration in my chest.
Option B.
We weren't rockstars anymore. We were just men responding to a distress signal we’d been waiting our whole lives to hear.
The bus sat there. A black monolith in the rain.
And even from twenty meters away, through the rain and the diesel fumes, it hit me.
The scent.
It wasn't the faint leak we'd smelled in the venue. It wasn't the suppressed, medicated signal of the last few weeks.
It was a supernova.
Neon citrus, bright enough to blind you. Ozone, sharp enough to taste like licking a battery. And underneath it, the unmistakable, heavy, slick sweetness of an Omega in peak heat, calling for her pack.
Alfie skidded to a halt near the trailer hitch, gripping the metal to stop himself from falling. He let out a sound that was half-whimper, half-growl.
"She's..." He choked on the air. "God."
"Full bloom," Kit rumbled, his voice dropping an octave into sheer vibration. "Blockers are gone. System override."
I stopped next to them. My analytical mind tried to catalogue the PPM of pheromones in the air, but the data stream corrupted instantly. All I knew was that the air scrubbers I had so painstakingly installed were failing spectacularly. Or perhaps they were working perfectly, and she was just more powerful than the machine.
"She's alone," I said. The logic was the only thing tethering me to the earth. "She unlocked the door. She requested Option B."
"Option B," Alfie repeated, shaking his head like a dog shaking off water. "She actually did it."
I pulled my phone out. My fingers felt thick, clumsy. I needed to follow the protocol. Even in chaos, there must be order.
To: Rowan Q.
