“Yup.” Sober as a judge after my blast in the face from the tap, I was fucking fine. “Where’s everyone at?”
Decoy would know. He always knew. “Orla’s with Rubi and River at the metal stage.”
Of course.
Nash snorted, echoing my thoughts.
“Folk, Viktor, and Ranger are on the boundary fence,” Decoy continued. “Embry and Axel are with Juana and the kids. Can’t say I’ve seen Saint and Alexei since yesterday.”
When the festival had started and hordes of outsiders had flooded our space. To be honest, I hadn’t seen much of them either, save a power nap I’d grabbed with Saint overnight. And the three of us hadn’t been together since we’d left our woodland bolthole on Thursday morning.
I wasn’t too worried about it. It was getting late, all the stages and tents approaching their headline slots, and I knew which act would draw all three of us to the same place.
First, though. I made eye contact with Decoy. “You need us for anything?”
Decoy shook his head, already halfway back to the bar. “You’ll be the first to know.”
Doubted it, but I’d learned to live with being way down the list. I’d learned to livewell, because my brothers loved me as much as I loved them.
I grabbed Nash and hustled him away, ignoring the to-do list he rattled off, grabbing fresh beers as we went.
He didn’t protest all that much, and though death rock wasn’t his favourite jam, he grinned like a motherfucker when he figured out where I was towing him. “I told Orls I wouldn’t make this set.”
“We’ve missed half of it, so you ain’t lied.”
The increasing noise swallowed his shouted reply. I just dragged him faster through a crowd who didn’t immediately recognise us in a sea of tattooed metal heads, searching for Rubi’s flash of pink, like I had been since we were fifteen and jumped the fence at Download.
Back then, I’d found him pilling off his box in a Billy Idol mosh pit. These days, it was just beer and weed, but the dancing was the same, even in a crowd this thick, while he made a valiant attempt to keep an eye on my siblings.
We reached them. I caught River mid-jump and propelled him higher. He laughed—my kid brother fuckinglaughed, shaking his long hair out as he landed, bouncing straight into Rubi’s arms, sending Orla staggering into Nash in the shoulder-to-shoulder throng.
Nash looked kinda scared, but for us OGs, it was like coming home. The crush of bodies, air thick with beer and smoke, adrenaline thrumming as the band thundered from one banger to the next.
I dragged Rubi into the pit, hurling him into the savage dance of sweat and chaos. Violent catharsis without the fucking death. We’d loved it back then. These days we were probably too old for it, but we made it work, howling with laughter with every wild riff, the bass shaking our bones.
We lost time in that pit.
River jumped on my back.
I tossed him again.
Someone crashed into me, and the impact was better than any fucking therapy.
Sometime later, we stumbled away, Rubi still hooting with laughter, struggling to put one foot in front of the other, his crushed wedding hat somehow still on his head.
I’d lost my shirt, eighty pints of sweat, and half my hearing. Enough remained for me to catch the amusement in Alexei’s voice as he muttered something Russian down the radio I’d jammed back in my ear on the way out.
“You gonna translate that?”
Alexei didn’t answer, but I knew he was close. Felt it in my fuzzy head and vibrating bones as my sister slipped her arm through mine. “I feel ten years younger.”
“Lucky you.”
“I love you, big brother. You know that, don’t you?”
I stopped walking, aware of Nash fading to stand a few steps back, while Rubi and River kept going.
My sister had cut her hair shorter since she’d had the twins, but it was still long enough to tumble over her bare shoulders, hiding most of her tattooed neck.