Jet Black Heart

track 002: young and menace

track 002: young and menace

LAST NIGHT.

          He'd forgotten what it was like.

Without this, there was nothing. With a violent strum, Jonathan let his guitar go and spread his arms out as if to deliver a sermon, and the strobing stage lights splashed a red hue over him. His blood hadn't run in years, but at the sight of the heaving crowd, beneath the hot stage lights, there was a vicious inferno beating in the core of his chest, calling for the life pounding in all those untapped veins in the faceless crowd, calling for the song threatening to break out of his bones. The song, which had ebbed into the bridge, the rasping whisper in the hollow silence, begging to be heard. Begging and begging and begging, always on its bruised knees, always forced to wander the desert with its palms turned face-up like a supplicant for some elusive Jerusalem. But there will be no salvation.

Not for him.

His black leather jacket gleamed, his white-blond hair soaked up the vermillion, and as he gazed into the open maw of his loyal crowd, their silhouetted faces basked in rapture, he saw himself standing behind Lucifer's infernal pulpit. The mic rested against his bottom lip as he whispered fervently into the darkness, each line spat out like a broken tooth, feverish and bloodied. He couldn't hear himself well, the lyrics pouring from him like a haemorrhaging wound, drawing the moment out on a tense string, his voice washing over the crowd and touching a thumb to their foreheads to mark them.

In the manic night, the stadium glowing like a furnace in the pits of Hell, Jonathan felt unglued, felt everything. From the murmuration of heartbeats pounding against flesh, the rush of blood rising to the surface of skin, the screams of tens of thousands in the stands, and he clung onto every single one of them, their voices lashed around his wrists, each thread tight in his fist. As the song built and built and built, Jonathan felt on the verge of bursting, the opposite of anaemic, the music swirling and swirling and swirling like a dark storm within him, demanding to be let out. Without this, there was nothing.

Then the dam broke. And the band lurched into motion. And the song roared through the stadium with a vengeance. It was ecstasy. It was rage. It was pain. All of that, layered together, the instrumentals battling and entwined, blistering the air. Jonathan slashed and slashed and slashed at the strings of his white Strat until he felt his fingers tear, the skin splitting, black, congealed blood dripping from the broken calluses. He shut his eyes and tipped his head back, letting the song snarl and snare around his ribs, wringing a final cry from his lungs.

Then he stepped away from the mic to watch his bandmates. His gutter rats. His divine and devoured.

Clem, blonde hair whipping a ferocious storm around her face as she grappled with her bass strings, fighting the notes every step of the way, beating them into submission. Her knees, bleeding as his fingers were, slammed to the stage floor over and over.

Seth with his eyes shut, spinning his drumsticks methodically and with deft fingers, tearing through the metal as though he could shred it all to pieces between his teeth. A force of nature pounding and pounding and pounding away, the floor thundering beneath them.

And Adrian—blessed and damned in the same breath—shredding through his guitar strings with frightening vehemence. He'd torn his shirt off, cast it into the crowd, and the dark ink swirling over his pale skin writhed beneath the stage lights. When he glanced over at Jonathan across the stage where he'd collected a sizable mound of bras flung on-stage similar to the pile at Jonathan's feet, his gleaming teeth were bared in a devious grin.