Four Alpha Brothers Hunted the Ghostwriter, Now He Sleeps in Their Bed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Mask Night
The library door locks on Emile in his bird mask, four Alpha brothers close in, and when he chooses to stay one of them finds the lyric in his pocket that only the ghostwriter Marais could know.
The lock turned behind Emile with a click he felt in his teeth.
He had walked into the library to get away from the music.
Now the door was shut and a man was leaning on it.
The party roared on the other side of the wood.
Three hundred people in sequins and feathers were singing his chorus back at the stage.
Not one of them knew he had written it.
"Evening, chou," the man at the door said.
He was tall and tattooed to the wrists, with a gold hoop in one ear.
A gold half-mask was pushed up into his dark curls.
"You've been staring at that stage for an hour," he said. "Staring is rude."
"So is a waiter standing in my library with a bird on his face."
Emile touched the mask.
It was a cheap black bird with a long beak, bought for six dollars on Canal Street that afternoon.
His borrowed waiter's jacket was a size too big.
He was holding a tray of empty glasses he didn't remember picking up.
"I got lost," he said.
"You got a map in your head and a stage on your mind." The man came off the door and circled him slowly. "I'm Thibault."
"I know who you are."
Everybody did.
Thibault Theriot was the drummer of the biggest swamp-rock band in the South.
His bare chest had sold a hundred thousand posters.
"Then you know the rest of us," Thibault said.
Three more men stood up out of the leather chairs by the cold fireplace.
They had been sitting there so still that Emile had taken them for coats.
The oldest was the tallest, grey in his black hair, with a scar through his lower lip.
He did not smile.
The golden one, whose voice every woman in America sang along to, set down a glass of whiskey and tilted his head.
The youngest was red-haired and freckled.
He was already walking toward Emile with his jaw set and his nostrils flared.
"He smells like it," the youngest said.
"Like what?" Emile said.
"Like the song."
Thibault laughed, low. "Easy, Sylvain."
"He does. Rain on a tin roof, fried onions, something sweet burned on a stove."
Sylvain stopped a foot away, and for one second his eyes were gold.
"Take the mask off," he said.
Emile put the tray down on a table and kept his hands where they could see them.
His heart was going hard, and not only from fear.
Four men were crowding him, and all four were big and handsome.
All four were looking at him as though he were the only warm thing in a cold house.
"I'm leaving," Emile said.
"Door's locked," the oldest said.
His voice was low and level, the voice of a man who had never repeated himself.
He took out a phone, dialed without looking at it, and spoke into it.
"Yes. Tonight. A ghost is only a man who hasn't been paid to stay. I buy ghosts."
He hung up.
"That wasn't about you," he told Emile. "Take off the mask, or I'll do it."
Emile should have been afraid.
Instead he felt the old dish-pit anger that had carried him through four years of burns and double shifts.
He felt it for the hundred and fifty dollars a month he owed on his mother's pills.
"You want it off?" he said. "Then you ask me."
The oldest stopped moving.
Thibault whistled softly.
The golden one smiled for the first time, slow and interested.
"Please," the oldest said, and it sounded like it hurt him.
Emile reached up and pulled the bird off his face.
Nobody spoke.
He was twenty-one, with dark curls stuck to his forehead and a chipped front tooth.
A fryer had spat a burn scar across his cheekbone when he was eighteen.
"Hell," Thibault said softly. "Look at him."
The golden one, Fabien, crossed the room and put two fingers under Emile's chin.
The touch ran straight down Emile's spine.
"You're shaking," Fabien said.
"I'm furious," Emile said.
"You're hard," Fabien said, very softly. "All four of us can smell it."
Emile's face went hot.
He did not step back.
Any sane man would have.
He pushed his chin harder into the hand and said, "Then do something about it, or open the damn door."
The oldest brother rumbled low in his throat.
"Gaston," Thibault said, delighted. "He's got a mouth on him."
Sylvain had slipped around behind.
Emile felt a hand slide into the pocket of the borrowed jacket and come out holding a crumpled square of paper.
It was a receipt from the crawfish house in Breaux Bridge, with a line of pencil on the back.
Sylvain read it, and the color left his freckled face.
"Gaston. Look."
The oldest took the paper and read the line once, then again.
His hand began to shake.
"Where did you get this?" he said.
"Give it back."
"This verse isn't on any record. It's the last verse of a song nobody has ever heard."
"Then you shouldn't be able to finish it," Fabien said quietly, "unless you wrote it."
Emile's mouth opened before he could stop it.
He sang the next line out loud, in the voice he used alone in the dish pit at two in the morning.
The room went silent.
Gaston looked up, and his eyes were gold from rim to rim.
"Marais," he said. "Four years we have been looking for you."
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