Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (top ebook reader .TXT) 📕

rain check on the beer and give short shrift to the shower, because I had to call Dawn back.

I toweled my hair dry, slid into a clean pair of jeans, a tattered Sex Pistols t-shirt, and put on my purple Chuck Taylors on before I picked up the phone. Yup, six messages, all increasing in the level of frantic.

Sorry, I typed. Load out took longer than expected.

“You have got to get a better crew,” Dawn said as she walked into the dressing room I shared, in theory, with Lily and Carrie. Carrie was already asleep on the bus, and Lily was somewhere with someone, but Dawn couldn’t have known that.

“Don’t you ever knock?” I asked. I knew the answer was “no,” but I wanted her to admit it.

“You’re alone, and even if you weren’t, I’ve seen it all before.”

“You haven’t seen my all before, and I’d like to keep it that way,” I snapped.

“No worries, Red,” she said with a predatory grin. “You’re not my type. I don’t date good girls. Now get your bag. We’ve got a problem.”

I grabbed my duffel from the corner and followed Dawn as she turned and strode out of the room. “I’m not a good girl,” I protested. “How can I be a good girl? I tour with a frickin’ rock and roll band!”

“You’re a good girl, Kels,” Dawn said over her shoulder. “You know how I know?”

“How?”

“Bad girls don’t say ‘frickin’. Now come on, we’ve got a succubus to find.”

Crap on a cracker. A succubus. They’re smart, and mean if you get between them and their food. And their food is usually an unsuspecting man who they’re trying to have sex with, so they get a little testy about being interrupted, even when you try to explain what’s going on. I started humming to warm up my vocal chords as Dawn led me down the hall behind the stage and out to her waiting car. I yelled at Peter that I had a date and I’d catch up with them before they rolled out in the morning. He gave me a big thumbs up as I went through my mental catalog of songs to think what would help me weave the best spell to destroy a soul-sucking sex demon.

Oh yeah, that’s my other gig. When I’m not the lighting director for The Spectacular Fantastics, I’m also Kelsey Winter, Songmage.

“Where are we going?” I asked Dawn as I slid into the passenger seat of her rental. I assumed it was a rental, because I’d never seen it before, but for all I knew, she had a fleet of cars, motorcycles, and SUVs that she rotated through whenever she felt like it. Tonight’s ride was a black Escalade with seats soft as butter and loads of that new car smell. I pushed buttons on the big display in the middle of the dash until I found a classic rock station on satellite radio and settled in, clicking my seat belt around me.

I noticed Dawn’s sly grin as I nestled the strap between my breasts and glared at her. “Kiss my ass, Dawn. I am not a good girl.”

“Sure, sunshine, keep telling yourself that.”

“I just don’t want to listen to the beep if I don’t wear the belt.”

“Uh-huh.” She didn’t say anything else, just put the Escalade into drive and pulled out onto the deserted streets. I looked over at her as she drove, waiting for her to give me some details on the target. Dawn wasn’t so good with the details, preferring to keep all the important information hidden behind her sparkling green eyes.

“You going to tell me where we’re going, at least? It’s after two. Where the hell are we going to find a succubus that’s still hunting at this hour? I would think any monster worth her salt would be bedded down with a nice snack by now.”

She turned to give me a grin, her perfect teeth gleaming in the light of the dash. “Well, there are only a few places left open at this hour. Where do you think a succubus would hang out in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t know, Dawn, I’m not a sex demon. Since you seem to be the expert on the subject, why don’t you fill me in?”

“I’ll give you a hint. You won’t need to provide your own songs, but you might be limited to things with a grinding backbeat.”

I thought for a second, then groaned. “Oh, come on. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“I hate those places.”

“I know. I also don’t care. It’s where the succubus is.”

“How do you know?”

“I stole a police report. There have been three mysterious deaths in the parking lot within the last month. All men, all seemingly in good health for their age, all succumbed to heart attacks.”

I didn’t ask how she got the police report. Dawn wouldn’t tell me anyway. “I stole it” was as good as it was going to get regardless of how much I pushed. “You know heart disease is the number one leading cause of death in the U.S.” I really, really didn’t want to go to the strip club.

Dawn really, really didn’t give a single shit. She never did, she just pointed me in the direction of something that needed killing, then swooped in after all the bleeding was done to clean up most of the mess. I owed her, though, so I just played along like a good little guided missile. Even when she guided me into the garish neon-fronted doublewide that made up Ezmerelda’s, apparently the one topless joint in Fayetteville, Arkansas, that stayed open past three in the morning.

I’ve been to some seedy clubs before. You don’t tour with a cover band without playing some dumps. And it’s not like this was going to be my first strip club, either. There had been more than one bachelor party for a drummer, or bass player, or sound guy during my time on the road. But never in my life